Decoding the Gurus - "Mini" Decoding of Michael Shermer's Advice on Conspiracy Theories

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Michael Shermer, a professional skeptic, recently appeared on the noted apolitical podcast Triggernometry to outline his advice on How to Spot a True Conspiracy Theory. Shermer is someone who has spent decades on the subject and just last year published a new book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, so you might imagine he has some important insights to share.Well... sort of.Join us as we cast a quizzical eye over suggestions that every reasonable person should be a conspiracy theorist, Barack Obama may have been controlled by shadowy masters, the CIA invented the very notion of conspiracy theories, and that what we really need is to return the good old days when anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish conspiracies were commonplace and spoken of freely... yes, really!Back soon enough with a full waffle episode!LinksTriggernometry- Conspiracy Expert: How to Spot a True Conspiracy TheoryShermer explaining his Tweet endorsing Stefan MolyneuxShermer's participation in Dave Rubin's Book Club for Don't Burn This BookShermer's 2021 interview with Bret and Heather with no mention of vaccinesShermer correcting his Tweet about the Nazis being leftwingPositive review at Skeptic for Milo's "Dangerous" BookShermer explaining why he thinks it is good he mixes his Libertarian politics with his science/skepticism

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. As always, I am Matthew Brown. He is Chris Kavanagh. I remain the psychologist. He still is the anthropologist. the psychologist he still is the anthropologist and today chris we are doing a surprise impromptu mini decoding it's coming as a surprise to me to the audience to everyone but you have your ducks all in a row i assume what are we doing here today well it shouldn't come as a surprise because i mentioned that for like a month. But never mind because... You say a lot of things, Chris. I do say many things. I do.

And so this is a mini decoding episode, meaning it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a normal episode. And notably, as with previous mini decodings, you haven't listened to the content yet. So you'll be coming at the clips fresh and haven't had your kind of pre-game analytical session. But I do have clips

and there is a targeted piece of content and we are going to very shortly dive into that content it's just that i've went slightly further afield from that initial topic so slightly less mini it's more a medium size decoding i think yeah i get it i get it like a novella rather than a short story but not it's not a kulski size clip affair that's that's not what we're talking about here but a little bit longer than a nine minute sam harris um coding okay all right cool cool all right so i'm i'm with the audience here this is going to be me along with the audience reacting to you and the stuff you've got to show us and tell us what are we talking about well so we're

talking about michael schirmer the editor of the skeptic magazine in the u.s and the director of the skeptic society basically a professional skeptic and he recently appeared on our favorite podcast trigonometry with constantine and francis love those guys love those guys great work well they're really balanced that's the thing that's why i just they're so good but um so they interviewed him with the topic being conspiracy expert how to spot a true conspiracy theorist and this is from the first of june so it's relatively recent but you know that's that's directly up our alley how to spot a conspiracy theorist and yep yeah we're kindred spirits with those guys we're all interested in spotting conspiracy theories and helping people tell the difference between real ones and fantastical ones. Yeah.

Right. Right. So Shermer's most recent book is called Conspiracy. Why the rational believe the irrational. It's from this year or last year. Anyway, his most recent book is specifically on this topic. is specifically on this topic so you would imagine that he would have a well fleshed out and coherent approach to this topic having just written a book and spent you know decades on the topic but chris um yeah tell us a bit more about michael sherman like you i think are aware of him

know of him from way back in the new atheist days i don't know what you guys were up to on the web 1.3 or whatever version it was i was off living in the real world but what's what's his background what's the story with michael shomer yeah yeah so he's a professional skeptic like the kind of person that you would have seen crop up as an invited speaker at the amazing meeting or various skeptical conferences in the 2000s he He's given TED talks about conspiracy theories and whatnot, like a professional skeptic, a little bit, you know, maybe debunker type. The other aspect of his output, which I've long found rather annoying, is that he's a libertarian and he had a rather unhelpful habit of combining his libertarian political outlook with his skeptical perspective and arguing that the two were sympathical,

when often they were not. You could read the article and the skeptical parts were okay, but the libertarian part was absolutely unrelated or very tangentially connected. And the word did intersect. It tended to lead towards bad heuristics. So he always had that aspect and he always had some other issues. Like he was very late to acknowledge the validity of human-caused climate change. He does now. But for a skeptic and somebody that knows theoretically how to assess scientific research, he didn't do very well on that. very well on that. And more than that, the Skeptic magazine in the US has over time taken something of like a heterodox contrarian turn. The Conceptual Penis by James Lindsay was published there to great fanfare, not the so-called squared hoax, the one where it was published in a pay-to-play journal.

And that issue was not really noted by Schirmer at the time when he was promoting it, right? He saw it as a searing takedown, which is that James Lindsay published a mock article poking fun at postmodern feminist takes on like scholarship by writing a satirical article posing as a real article called the conceptual penis but the satire or illustration of how low the standards are in those fields is kind of deflated by that particular project being

published in the pay-to-play journal which has no standards beyond that you pay so you know soco square they tried to address that in various ways but i'm just saying that that originally appeared in the skeptic magazine schirmer also famously commissioned a positive review of milo's book you know the troll who wrote an absolutely terrible just outright trolly crap book schirmer published a positive review of it you know because against social justice warriors um on twitter he's done things like tweeted out about how hitler was really left wing because you know socialist in the national socialist and when he was corrected or not i'm bearing in mind you know this is not like i i sympathize with people who didn't know obscure historical details but schumer is a man in his 60s who you know was believing that factoid about hitler and the Nazis until like a year or two years ago.

That suggests like a certain credulity. And actually, when he corrected that tweet, I just have it in front of me. He mentioned, correction on my now deleted tweet about Nazism, and this was in 2019. It was not a left-wing movement. It began as the National Socialist German Workers' Party to garner labor support, but Hitler murdered the leftists and moved rightward.

But it was also anti-capitalist and Hitler hated bourgeois elites. Yeah. Okay. Well, the only awareness I have of Michael Schumer is kind of more recent stuff. Like I remember coming across him in like a roundtable that he was having with jordan peterson and eric weinstein i think it was does that ring a bell with you yeah he's been involved in that he was he was a contributor to dave rubin's book club where they each took a chapter of his book and dived into the philosophical insights that it contained so that's a bit of a short obsession yeah that's so schermer you know

he clearly knows how to pick his close allies and friends and famously he was interviewed by stephan molyneux the later white nationalist but at that time far-right apologist and well-documented online cult leader for about a decade. And he tweeted out after his interview, which was to promote Schirmer's book, that he was a force for reason. Like if you're looking for somebody, you know, that's good and logical and a force for reason, Stefan Mullen, use your mind. And when I pointed out to Schirmer that he was promoting a well-known far right apologist, Shermer responded saying he didn't know anything about him. He didn't do any research about him. He just showed up because his publicist said to go and he hadn't done any research when he tweeted

out. So what a lovely stance for the leader of a skeptical organization to demonstrate, right? So just, there's various things. He had some accusations raised about potential offenses doing untoward things to female attendees at conferences. And he disputed those, but I think they served a little bit further radicalizing him towards dislike of woke SJWs and the kind of sympathy towards anybody presenting themselves as cancelled and heterodox. generally aligned with the political valence or the the anti-woke anti-institutional valence of many of the guru figures we cover even though he might not himself rate to be covered by us as a guru himself but in any case yeah just to say he has a very mixed history the way i've put it on a couple occasions is he's good

on ufos and bigfoot generally barred on anything to do with politics or like modern society yeah yeah society anything to do with humans and society but good on cryptides in a way it's a shame that people in the sort of pro he might originally have started out with like an agenda that is sort of pro-science, pro-skepticism, etc. Sort of shift sideways into political and social commentary, which has a particular slant. In Shermer's case, a libertarian, slightly right of center one, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. slightly right of center one, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. So with Shermer, the main thing and the reason I wanted to talk about this content was he raises this point, which I've heard argued elsewhere. And I've heard it argued by a variety of sources. I've heard more reasonable make the point as well, but notable examples include Alex Jones and Brett Weinstein. And I think it is an argument when it comes to conspiracism that has a lot of intuitive appeal. So I'll play a short version of it and then some longer elaborations. So here's it in a nutshell.

elaboration. So here's it in a nutshell. Everybody believes at least one conspiracy theory. And again, back to my constructive conspiracism and my argument is that it's rational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true. It pays to err on the side of caution just in case. As they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Sometimes they are after you, right? Yeah. So you're familiar with that argument i'm familiar with this argument we shouldn't be dissing on conspiracy theories because chris this will shock you but some conspiracies do exist there are actually powerful people acting not totally transparently, that might have some kind of selfish agenda. I mean, this is the world we live in. And yeah, this is an argument that you hear ad nauseum amongst people

who are defending conspiracy theories, that because site X, Y, and Z conspiracy actually happened, then you have to keep an open mind to all conspiratorial claims. Yes. So I've got many things to say here, but I'll let him expand a little bit more on the argument that he's making. So I'm leaning toward you on that. Also, the lab leak hypothesis to me has always been a viable conspiracy theory here here in my book i i try to debunk the idea that a conspiracy theory should be a pejorative it's not conspiracy theories are just theories about what could be a real conspiracy and some of them are

true a lot of them are true so we should just stop treating it in a negative way and and instead think of like the lab leak hypothesis as legitimate just in case because now it looks like at least 50 probability that uh that the sars-cov-2 was leaked out of a lab versus the zoonomic hypothesis zoonotic just saying so i didn't i didn't just pick that because the lab leak, as we hear endlessly in the heterodox fear getting referenced as 50-50, the evidence is leaning now towards 50-50. No, it is not. Please go back to our three-hour episode with the relevant experts should you want to hear

the reasons why that's an inaccurate representation but even setting aside his presentation of the lab like it is more the elaboration that you know conspiracy theories are really just ideas about things that actually happen yeah exploring alternative hypotheses and not taking you know what say the chinese communist party says at face value. That's all it is. No, it is not. It is absolutely not. And the other thing that really annoys me about this furphy that we keep hearing is the implication that nobody in the scientific community

took the lab leak possibility seriously. They did take it seriously. They investigated it. They published papers on it. There were people who thought it was quite likely, and when I say people, I mean actual specialists in this area, who when they investigated, found out that the evidence was lacking. And when the theory persists in the face of all evidence due to essentially paranoia and cognitive biases that's when we call it a conspiracy theory and you know sherman should know this yeah we actually covered on one of our bonus episodes uh a paper by stephenandowski, specifically discussing about conspiratorial thinking and

what distinguishes it from conventional thinking or investigative journalism and that kind of approach. And as you say, Shermer should know this. There's a difference between things like healthy skepticism, critically reviewing evidence, looking rationally at assorted facts and not accepting things. And countenancing alternative explanations for an event. There is a difference between that and what we call conspiracy theories in the academic community. conspiracy theories in the academic community. Yeah, which is much more focused around like over-interpreting patterns, inserting nefarious intent and evil villains, prosodying secretive cabals of people out to do bad in the world. And there's another claim related to it that essentially conspiracy theorists have been proven right repeatedly throughout history. So here's some historical examples that Shermer gives of that. I have a whole chapter on this in Conspiracy on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that started the First World War.

That was a conspiracy. But then there were layers and layers of conspiracy theories, some true, some not on top of that. So that's not new. You know, you can go all the way back to the burning of Rome, uh, you know, with Nero being accused of letting it happen on purpose or making it happen on purpose, you know, so wherever there's power where somebody has a lot of power and money and influence and other people don't then the

people that don't are very suspicious of the people that do have power and for good reason really this is what i call constructive conspiracism a lot of times when people get in power they get corrupt believe it or not yeah so chris i guess this is an elaboration of what he was saying before which is that in the world there are real conspiracies in the sense that there are groups, say political activist groups like the Serbian nationalists, I think it was, who were plotting to kill Franz Ferdinand. The Al-Qaeda plot to fly the planes into the World Trade Center, that was a conspiracy, right? They didn't send an email to the white house to let them know what their plans were they didn't announce it on cnn so there's there's a mundane definition of conspiracy theories which is that there are just people who

do stuff without telling other people right this is the problem that that's not what people i mean i know you know this but he's completing conspiracies with conspiracy theories and with people having ideas about conspiracies with conspiracy theories but conspiracy theories refers to a rather specific thing so he's adding in anybody that does any thinking about there being hidden motivations or hidden actions in the world is a conspiracy theorist and that's not correct especially if you're approaching it from an academic point of view because there's been a lot of work done to distinguish what distinguishes conspiratorial thinking from conventional critical thinking and yeah you are not the same thing so yeah i know he he is

playing upon like a regrettable definitional ambiguity that has been around since the very beginning and it's just between the sort of mundane sense of a conspiracy which is just some some people organizing to do something. Plotting something in secret. Yeah. And even the word plotting, I mean, it could be anything. It could be some business deal or any kind of birthday party. Yes. Surprise birthday party.

That's a conspiracy. Yeah, but why? That's a thing. Why do they never, like, so that would be an example, right? You could say that, oh that oh well people plot surprise parties in secret and sometimes people have suspicions that others are plotting so aren't they just conspiracy theories and people would be like no because it's that that's a reasonable inference and it's it's not what people mean when they're talking about conspiracy theories but

that's yeah and it's not and it's not what academics mean and research psychologists who research this stuff everybody understands that what we're talking about is stuff like the american government has a scheme to hide what they're doing in area 51 or that the illuminati are in control of the world, or all of the powerful people, the WAF and stuff like that, know that climate change is a hoax, and they're just pretending that it's real so they can get everyone to eat bugs, or that they all know that the world is really flat, but they're hiding that fact and pretending it's a globe because that's going to control people some other way.

That's what we mean when we're talking about conspiracy theories it's actually the i guess the cognitive and epistemic mechanisms by which you know bad theories or bad understandings of the world take place so once again i just have to say that it's odd that sherman doesn't know this like he's a skeptic He's been doing this for decades. Like he should have a clearer idea of that distinction. But it almost seems like that conflation is on purpose, right? Yes, yes. So this might be gilding the lily, but this is the last clip where I think he most floridly

presented the kind of constructive conspiracism case. So here's an elaboration of all of those points. So one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is to dispel the myth of that conspiracy theory should be a pejorative. Oh, that's just a crazy conspiracy theory. That's a post-World War II phenomenon. And there's theories about that, that the CIA planted this idea or the FBI after the JFK assassination. Let's make conspiracy theories to sound like a crazy thing so we can cover our tracks of the conspiracy theory that JFK was assassinated by the CIA or whoever. So there's some debates about that. But whatever the cause of that, before World War Two, the idea of conspiracy theories was completely normal.

You know, people like Churchill and Roosevelt, leaders of the free world and so on, all embrace conspiracy theories. Again, the Catholics are doing this, the Jews are doing that, the Mormons are influencing our elections and so on. That was pretty normal part of the regular conversation, not a pejorative at all. So I'm trying to get back to that because, again, if you just go through some of the conspiracies I cover in the book, you know, the CIA MKUltra program of dosing American citizens without their knowledge or consent with psychoactive drugs. What? You know, Chris, we have to rewind to the beginning of that. I know the part that you want to highlight because I got to.

highlighter because I got it too. So yeah, you want to play the part where he talks about what he's trying to bring back, right? So here's that part. Before World War II, the idea of conspiracy theories was completely normal. You know, people like Churchill and Roosevelt, leaders of the free world and so on, all embrace conspiracy theories. Again, the Catholics are doing this, the Jews are doing that, the Mormons are influencing free world and so on all embrace conspiracy theories again that catholics are doing this the jews are doing that the mormons are influencing our elections and so on that was pretty normal part of the regular conversation not a pejorative at all so i'm trying to get back to that because again if you just go through okay so that's that's follow the logic there chris that's that he's trying to get back to yes people people believe lots of conspiracy theories of the olden days the jews were doing this and the catholics are

trying to do that those are the examples he he yeah so this isn't just me like he said that he he wants to make it normal like it used to be to suggest that the jews who were behind everything or the catholics like it's what's the big deal right yeah that was that was normal back then why is it not normal now okay so that's a problem whichever way you cut it that's there's a problem in reasoning there i don't know if he fully understood what he said what he clearly said in in his very weak defense i don't think he fully understood what he was saying there but it just it's such a logical it doesn't make sense right if you take it at face value it's a terrible i'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't. God knows what he meant, but it's a stupid point either way.

And the point before that about, you know, the assassination, and I think what he's getting at there is that the CIA or the FBI, all these people have, in various occasions, planted various stories. They've done nefarious things with groups, and they've used conspiracy theories. They've tried to incept them or they've tried to discredit things present them as conspiracy theories that is definitely true hang on one part of it is absolutely true right that secret intelligence agencies you know domestic ones and foreign ones try to discredit people or groups do heaps of

nefarious things right that's yes that's what they do but he said that the actual idea of conspiracy theories the concept was a product of these um intelligence agencies and that it might have been related to the cia trying to cover up that they assassinated jfk that's yeah now that's now that is itself a conspiracy theory right like that is not a plausible one i'm sorry sorry matt are you being pejorative because we shouldn't you know conspiracy yeah so like he is possibly a conspiracy theory for the origin of negative connotations being attached to conspiracy theories but um well with with skeptics like this on our side chris who needs enemies yeah and the last part matt the last section of it was this if you

just go through some of the conspiracies i cover in the book you know the cia mk ultra program of dosing american citizens without their knowledge or consent with psychoactive drugs. What? You know, or Operation Paperclip, where we're hiring these Nazi scientists to build weapons of mass destruction for us, while some of their colleagues are being put on in the docket at Nuremberg and executed for war crimes, doing the same thing, right? Or the Project COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program by the FBI, to infiltrate civil rights groups like the Black Panthers and the American Indian movement and feminist groups and so on with plants to make them look bad, to do stupid things, to do illegal things so that they could be busted by the FBI, all the way up to the point of

tape recording Martin Luther King Jr.'s sexcapades in hotel rooms and then blackmailing him with a letter. So that's highlighting that point that we're making that, you know, the government, the American government in particular, has been engaged in various programs that were underhand and did real damage to people and should make people skeptical that the government would never engage in anything underhand or harmful to populations. So examples that are often cited, some of which he mentions here, are Iran-Contra, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the NSA PRISM surveillance system, Tuskegee syphilis study, so on. Now, the way that that is often presented and schermer does it here is that

conspiracy theorists broke the case right but actually no it was whistleblowers and investigative journalists you know people who actually had evidence to support it was not the conspiracy theorist communities that broke this by and and large, it's whistleblowers. And it is reported on and becomes a story because the mainstream media reveal and protect the people that are promoting the story. So I'm just saying that those stories are often presented as if it was just cranks in the wilderness. And are some examples of that but the examples which are often cited are not that they're actually the cases of people either being whistleblowers or doing investigative journalism which is not conspiracy theorizing no i mean again i think

this goes back to that previous issue of the conflation of mundane conspiracy theories, that is governments and powerful groups doing nefarious things. I mean, that's the world we live in, right? I'll give you a different example. It doesn't get cited as one of the conspiracies that turned out to be true. You know, it's just one of the normal day-to-day kind of shit that governments do. And so Australia, East Timor, Indonesia, Chris, the normal day-to-day kind of shit that governments do and so australia east timor indonesia chris

i don't know if you're aware of this but there was a thing east timor was occupied part of indonesia for a long time there was an independence movement australia supported their independence movement very very very nice of us all that stuff it eventually sent peacekeepers and things like that so when the newly independent east timor right which is a very small island off the northwest coast of australia and the new government were there negotiating with the australian representatives about who had the rights to the oil and gas fields in the timor gap this will shock you chris but the the naughty naughty australian spy agencies basically planted bugs in the rooms of our

friends, right, that the people were supporting in East Timor to find out what their private discussions were about these negotiations so that they would have an edge in the negotiations. Big scandal. It all came to light. Complete stuff up and pretty underhand behavior. I mean, I'm sorry to break it to people, but this is the kind of underhanded thing that governments or powerful organizations, companies, whatever, do on a regular basis. This is not the same as a conspiracy theory.

Again, it's the conflation of, oh, look, our government, which you think is so great, did experiments on the Tuskegee thing and stuff like that. They actually did some bad things, believe it or not. That shouldn't be so surprising. So surprising. No.

No, and, you know, I'm from Northern Ireland, in case you didn't know, and there was various evidence revealed that the government there colluded with Unionist paramilitaries during the Troubles and allowed them to execute various people that were opposing the British military. Paramilitary people, by and large. But again, they were working with unionist paramilitaries so that's to say that yes government's doing nefarious actions it's not a surprise to me either that that can happen chris by the way i haven't told you this but i'm currently watching a bbc series called once upon a time in northern Ireland. It's like a documentary series about the troubles. It's good.

Very detailed, lots of interviews. Yeah, conspiracies abound. They've made a lot of movies about it. The IRA had conspiracies. They definitely had conspiracies, right? Yeah. They had conspiracies. The English government certainly wasn't telling the BBC everything

they were doing at the time. No. I mean, people separate the mundane, normal shit that goes on in the world, much of which is bad, with a capital B, with, okay, well, anything could be happening. I get to indulge in motivated reasoning and cherry picking evidence and all of the things that we associate with conspiracy theories. Well, let's see. Does Schirmer do that? Is that what he's up to?

He wouldn't be drawing those kind of erroneous conclusions from those kind of examples. It's astonishing the things that our government is doing. CIA assassinations of foreign leaders. This was a thing for decades. You know, the attempts to kill Castro are, you know, famous, right? Dozens of attempts to kill Castro. And Che Guevara, the CIA assassinated him in Bolivia in 1968. That was our government.

So, you know, when we rail about Putin having people assassinated, yeah, that's bad. But our government has done things like that. So when people say, you know what, I don't really trust the U.S. government. I don't trust Fauci. I don't trust the CDC. I don't trust the CIA, the FBI. I say i say i understand there's good reasons why you shouldn't yeah it's interesting isn't it chris that's that's his libertarian philosophy i guess like bleeding in extremely heavily isn't it yeah and it's the notion that

because the government isn't something that you should uncritically accept, you know, everything that they say, ergo, anything goes right. And you've got to be very suspicious, like they've tried to assassinate leaders. So yeah, Fauci probably did lie and cover up the origins of the pandemic and gain-of-function research may well be the source of the virus. And no, no, actually there is relevant evidence that you can assess there. And just relying on the heuristic that governments don't always tell the truth, ergo, every speculation is plausible and shouldn't be looked upon skeptically. No, that's the wrong conclusion. That's a conspiracy theorist conclusion. And it's notable that he's talking about being skeptical of Fauci or the CDC, right?

The examples that he gave always have a particular flavor to them. And it's a very familiar flavor amongst the libertarian heterodox set it's actually very sad to me to see i mean i have little awareness of michael schirmer and no feelings towards him one way or the other but i mean if he did have some genuine track record in skepticism and critical thinking at least on some topics like bigfoot it is it is a genuine shame to see him repeating these very tired tropes like these are the kinds of arguments that oh the government lied to us about the such and such so

probably they did kill kennedy or they are hiding aliens like that's very weak and it's the kind of thing you see from like a real C-grade reply guy on Twitter. Yeah. And on top of that, Matt, I get the feeling that a lot of people, while they're warning everyone else, don't be naive about, you know, accepting government and stuff. When you hear Shremar elaborate, his viewpoint sounds to me like it was naive and that the disappointment leads him to conclusions that are unwarranted. Like, listen to him talk about Obama. It's not just being smart and rational

and educated can protect you from conspiracism. And again, the reason I'm arguing is because it is rational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true that we should be suspicious of powerful groups, rich people. You know, it's like even Obama, you know, Mr. Transparency, very smart, educated, rational. I really liked him. And then, you know, he gets in there and all of a sudden, you know, the NSA program was ramped up. Homeland Security is ramped up. We're surveilling the American public, not just metadata, but actually surveilling people's calls and so on, even tracking Angela Merkel's cell phone call. Our government under Obama, not just Bush, but under Obama,

you know, he's going to close Gitmo. Didn't happen. Like, it just, it sounds disillusioned, right? You know, you had hope for Obama and look, he didn't do all of the things, you know, a lot of things were business as usual for an American president. But like the lesson taken is, is not, don't put your faith too strongly in politicians and their promises when they're campaigning. Even if you like them, a lot of things will be business as usual. The lesson is don't trust anyone. The government is always lying.

I was wrong. And it's reasonable to be a conspiracist because they're always lying to you, right? You're like, no, no, you should be critical. You should have an appropriate amount of skepticism. But what he's doing is essentially saying because of governments not being completely transparent because of intelligence organizations uh surveillance all of the conspiracy theorists are actually being pretty reasonable in how they respond to that situation and it's like no they aren't even with all that shitty stuff, they're still getting things really wrong and drawing extremely unwarranted conclusions. And yeah, his conflation of everything together is what's so annoying, but it gets a bit worse. about the, I want to bring back the conspiracism of the pre-World War I era. I want to make it not

a pejorative. So just listen to this last bit, which follows on some speculation about maybe what happened to Obama when he got into office. So no wonder, you know, that people are suspicious. There's something happens when people get into power. I don't know what it is. It's like, all of a sudden you start thinking differently and you know i think they take you in the back room and they go okay here's what's really going on in the world oh i was gonna pull the troops out yeah yeah no don't you're not doing that yeah no i can't do that so that's that's like a secret puppet masters that actually control the world. Like Obama goes in and then he's told what he actually can do.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting, isn't it? Like it pertains to people's heuristics about how the world works. And that's what Sherma is revealing here. and that's what shirmer is revealing here like you and i we do not have a rose-tinted view about how the world works but i don't i don't think it's conspiratorial i mean we understand that like every president um in the united states is constrained by all kinds of pragmatic things and when they roll up to the podium and they give their inspirational speech, the things that they say are not necessarily reflecting all the political calculations and pragmatic calculations

that are going on behind the scenes. I mean, I think every normal person appreciates that. But my gut feeling is that Sherma has that slightly more childish worldview, which is that it's, I mean, it's conspiratorial. It's a conspiracy theory that there's this secret agenda, that there's this whole hidden world going on down there, that it has no relation to anything you can observe, and that it's all very nefarious and completely working

against our interests. And it dovetails perfectly well with his libertarian political point of view because they frankly are somewhat paranoid about any kind of government they think it is inherently corrupt and that basically you need as little of it as possible yeah and uh so i think that schumer's heuristics aren't good, in part because he lets his politics intrude on the way that he approaches things. But I can give an example of something which I think illustrates bad heuristics, arriving at a conclusion that I agree with, and it's not political, just to highlight that it isn't just about, you know, disagreeing with his political take.

So here's him talking about Epstein's death and, you know, whether it was a suicide or a something more nefarious. Let me give you my take on that. When Epstein died and there were conspiracy theories about that, he was killed. I thought, no, that's probably not the case. And then then they had the CCTV video. Well, the camera went out. I went, OK, that's a little fishy. And then the cctv video well the camera went out i went okay that's a little fishy and then the story came out about the second camera was out i'm like okay that's that sounds pretty iffy you know if you hear a knock on the door you think oh what was that if you hear you're like ah that sounds like a pattern if you heard one two three it'd be somebody's at the door right so that seems suspicious to me i posted on twitter you know yeah i think there's something to the conspiracy theory and then then somebody wrote me, emailed me from that prison and said, I used to work at that prison and nothing works there.

It's a dump. I thought, OK, so this is the conspiracy principle. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or chance. So I'm back to thinking he probably just killed himself because he had nothing left. You know, he just hit the hit the wall. There was nothing more he could do. He's leading a miserable life and he's probably not going to ever be freed the issue there is not i agree with the reasoning about like epstein likely killed themselves and that there are various coincidences and things which pulled out in isolation look bad right but if you actually look at the base rate of how many things in a prison aren't working

at any given time or so on, and what is required for the conspiracy to happen, right, as in somebody has to go into a prison and kill someone and then presumably exit and all of the logistics, it's kind of anomaly hunting, right? But the heuristic I want to highlight here is that Schirmer reacts very much on his sense of intuition, right? He starts off that he's like,

oh, it's a suicide. Then he hears something about the camera and he hears two cameras and he's like, well, you know, what's the odds of that? Then somebody emails him and says, I was at the prison and this is normal. And then he completely flips, right? Like it's, it's like he's operating by a very labile set of standards for what convinces him. And it reminded me of when Brett Weinstein, after he came back from, he was on some trip and he came back onto the internet. and this was when the pandemic had just started and his followers were asking him about the possibility that it's a man-made virus and he basically started out and responded saying no you know i've worked with bats they're reservoirs for

um all sorts of viruses so actually it's quite likely it's just a natural thing and then one of his followers in the comments said, did you know there's a Institute of Virology in Wuhan? And then Brett said, hold on, what? And then immediately started tweeting out, I've been informed by followers and that all shifted. But it's that dramatic swing from just receiving one piece of feedback and it completely shifts your conclusion on things and yeah i think where schumer has landed is correct an accurate

assessment of the evidence but it will just take another feller landing on the other side of the scale and off he'll go yeah yeah i i hear what you're saying about the the reasoning being loose right it's it's yeah it's loose reasoning but i mean in his defense i mean don't we all do that to some degree i mean if he's speaking loosely and saying yeah here's here's where i kind of how i feel about that i mean we all we all kind of do that implicit waiting of of yeah but the difference here and the reason that i think it's deserving of more criticism is schumer is a professional skeptic somebody who for decades has been talking to people about how to assess evidence how to critically respond to things and yet matt as as highlighted with the lab leak, he is very reactive to discourse, like to some new headline finding. And that is what I think this is professional critical thinkers should know that their initial

reaction needs to be kind of contextualized alongside the existing evidence if you want to do it properly. But his seems to be more based on the reaction, right? And what if he had received an email from somebody who worked at the prison that said, oh, you know, my opinion is that this is very unusual. And, you know, you should really rethink this. It sounds like his position would be, so I received an email and it made me think, well, you know, if somebody in the prison said it, then they know what they're talking about, right?

And that's a terrible set of heuristics to operate by as a skeptic. Yep, I take that point, definitely. Yeah, so some other illustrations. The Great Reset, you know, our friend Constantine mentioned that he wasn't interested in focusing on that. And if you want to hear him presenting how, you know, he doesn't swallow these kind of

things uncritically, here's Constantine bringing up the issue of the Great Reset. Michael, one of the things that I think has happened, particularly in recent years, and I do connect it to the pandemic, is I think a lot of people have been persuaded that uh there is an agenda to take more power away from ordinary people and to accumulate it in the hands of a few the wf the great reset uh and all of that and uh someone who likes the occasional spliff i've stayed away from it just because during the pandemic i was tempted to sort of believe all that stuff so i'm, let's not look at it because I might believe it because right now it seems quite credible. But a lot of people are talking about, we were actually going to be talking to Michael Schellenberger, who's written about this. And he's a guy I really respect. I think he's a great

journalist and he's written about it. And he says that there are elements of it, which are true. And there's a book and the website and blah, blah i mean i looked on the website didn't seem uh uber suspicious to me but a lot of people are persuaded by all of this stuff first of all uh what do you make of all this stuff about klaus schwab i mean klaus schwab doesn't help himself the way he speaks and looks it's not he looks like a stereotypical villain um uh what do you make of the wf the great reset and all of that i'm very curious to find out um what he thinks i mean many people are saying chris many people are saying he's not saying it but many people are thinking well there's something to it there's this great reset and the wf yeah you you notice that little way to distance yourself and still present all of the

arguments that other people are saying which you know they sound convincing that they're making points but you know i didn't see agree with everything i looked at the website it's okay but there's a lot that's there isn't it seems i've been avoiding the pot because you know seems pretty convincing but before we talk about that i just gotta say i'm really annoyed by the trigonometry people like sherman to his credit didn't take the bait and jump in with both feet on the schwab and the world economic forum great reset conspiracy theory but why the hell chris were they even inviting him to take that leap i mean that says an awful lot about those people but putting that aside yeah so let's see what schirmer says in response to that so this is him in general talking about like a kind of conspiracy stew mixture of truth and conspiracies which the

great reset might be an example of but in people minds, you kind of throw all that together and you end up with the Pizzagate thing. And then the QAnon drops, cheese pizza, CP with child pornography, and then the thing just takes off. That's a conspiracy theory that's not true, technically. There's no pedophile ring at this pizzeria. But it has elements to it. Oh, and the one other thing of the drinking of the blood, you know, that there was the stories about these tech billionaires who wanted to have the blood transfusions from young children to get that adrenal hormone that supposedly leads to anti aging and things like that. So you throw that in the mix, right? And those tech billionaires tend to be liberals, you know, industrial rich people lean right and tech people rich people lean left so something there you kind of throw all that together and you get a conspiracy theory

that technically isn't true but the little elements of it are true and then that's what happens in people's minds so this is the foundation that we'll get to the great reset but there's just like all of these conspiratorial melange that is around there yeah nobody's nobody's drinking blood or or are they some of them might be but it's tech there are elements that are true um right and of course the tech billionaire is famed for the political liberal position yeah not at all for libertarianism elon musk you know peter teal yep yep yep very left wing people those are you might be missing the the slight skew towards libertarianism there but never mind in any case let's get to the great reset he looks into the great reset i guess is

what i'm getting there uh not really really. Let's talk about that. Give me the... Well, I haven't looked into that much. A lot of people keep talking about it. So what I'd love to do is if you get a chance to have a look at it, let me know what you think about it, because I think a lot of people will be curious. Well, again, if by this you mean this,

we're going to reset the entire economic political system of the world. First of all, that's not going to happen. And second, the people that are open about it, that's not a conspiracy. You know, there are a lot of Marxists and anti-capitalists around, not a majority. And they're probably not going to get elected to do anything about it, but they're out there. And certainly they try to influence people like academics, you know, are very far left leaning and are super critical of capitalism. But that's, that's a little bit different than there's a secret group cabal,

the Illuminati or whoever, you know, the world economic forum and Davos and so on, you know, they, their targets are very specific. This is what we want to do in order to gain some advantage for our group or our tribe, our group or our tribe our nation our corporation whatever yes that happens but i would be skeptical of a conspiracy theory that said you know they're meeting to take over the world or something like that okay what was he saying there chris was he saying that the great research the conspiracy theory or isn't it or what

well one of the impressive things is that he said i don't really know about the great reset could you this is a someone whose job is he wrote a book about conspiracy theories but hasn't really looked into the great reset right i'm just like is this your job is it really your job but yeah he hasn't heard about it because he knows that the audience is sympathetic to it and he doesn't want to dunk on it but he doesn't want to endorse it i mean isn't that the reality i don't know i i genuinely i didn't i didn't read it like that but that could be part of it but i think that the thing that he ends up on is actually good it's a reasonable thing right he's basically saying yeah like, people have agendas, the World

Economic Forum has an agenda, but it's pretty open about it. So is that a conspiracy, just that people are capitalists or environmentalists? And he kind of makes this point about open conspiracies, which I actually think is a rare win by Schumer. This is a good point that he makes related to that. Okay. Well, here, first of all, is that a conspiracy theory? A lot of these people just take a Greta Thunberg type person. You know, there's no secret about what she believes, right? Or the Bernie Sanders of the world, or, you know, socialists or whoever,

they're open about it. Like, yeah, we should end capitalism. You know, it's all the kind of Antifa people. You know, we should destroy the entire system colonialism capitalism white you know all the white way of thinking and so on that's not a conspiracy because they're pretty open about it now are there people that meet in secret to do things yes but the more specific the target the more likely that conspiracy theory is to be true, right? So like control, you know, world domination, taking over the world, you know, that's a pretty hard thing to do. That's a big ask. People meet in secrecy to influence specific things. My example, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards of the EU in order to make more money. Well, we know corporations do things

like that, insider trading and stuff like that. You know, when these Disney executives play golf with politicians, you know, of course they're chatting up in between the holes. That's not bad, right? Yeah, that's fine, I guess. I still, he's still doing his sort of obfuscation between mundane conspiracies of corporate donations having an influence in politics. And like, is there nothing going on at Mar-a-Lago with Trump? They never seem to bring up those examples. It's Greta Thunberg. Is she a socialist?

Is she plotting world communism and so on? I thought she was just an environmental activist. I never picked. world communism and so on i thought she was just an environmental activist i never yeah but well i i took that to be him a little bit just arguing that that like you know people have ideologies and they're pretty upfront about them and he doesn't like anti-capitalist uh or environmentalist activism but he recognizes it's just a you know they're pretty upfront about what they're about and i i i guess i took that as as a win yeah no no yeah no no i agree it's good that he acknowledged that there are people like grudith thornburg who are doing things that he and the trigonometry people don't like and it doesn't necessarily mean they're actors in a conspiracy theory.

Yes, but, you know, look, we had him express that he hadn't really looked into the Great Reset, whether he did that for pragmatic reasons or because he actually hasn't looked into it in any depth. He was asked about Alex Jones. And again, Matt, let's just hear Shurmur talk about Alex Jones and, you know, issues of free speech and whatnot. Look, Matt, let's just hear Shurmur talk about Alex Jones and your issues of

free speech and whatnot. Look, Michael, I agree with you broadly. However, there are more complex cases than the ones that you've just cited. What about Alex Jones, for instance? Doesn't Alex Jones deserve a platform? But he spouts conspiracy theories, as in the case of Sandy Hook, which are very real, very dangerous, and people could have been killed. Yeah, I'm a little conflicted about that. I'm not an Alex Jones fan, to say the least, and I've spent years debunking him. Why is he responsible for what his lunatic wackadoodle followers do? Why aren't they responsible? I only know of one case of a woman who actually went into somebody's house or was on their lawn or something who was convicted for harassing somebody at their home. The other family members were harassed by these people. I guess they were out on the public street. So it's harder to, you know, to file

charges against them for harassment if you're on a public ground, something like that. But it brings up the larger subject of to what extent does somebody's words make somebody do something that they would not otherwise have done yeah that's his libertarian philosophy coming through loud and clear hey you've only got responsibility for what what you do you can say anything you want caveat emptor if other people act on it, that's totally their responsibility, nothing to do with you. I mean, I'd like to ask about, say, the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, where, as was famously known, when all hell broke loose in that country, there were activists on the radios inciting violence, saying that the Tutsis were cockroaches, were snakes and

had to be exterminated. But you know, that's just free speech. If somebody acts on that, then all the responsibility lies with them, right? This is the libertarianism that really freaking annoys me. Well, I mean, it annoys me well i mean it annoys me too but what also annoyed me about that response is that he says you know why why is alex jones responsible for his followers and he says was there like one woman who went somewhere on property and there was i think there was one case sorry michael you obviously haven't paid much attention to the trial of alex jones which detailed hundreds of examples of people being harassed and abused and things like alex jones employing people who went to harass parents

sending people down encouraging them to go giving a platform, going on his show during the trial and talking about the parents, suggesting that they had agreed with him that they were being used as pawns and so on and so forth. Like the thing that gets me, Matt, is this again is a professional skeptic who knows less than a mildly interested person in the Alex Jones case. He clearly hasn't looked into it. And there are lots of things that make Alex culpable for what his followers done. There's so many examples from the trial of Alex and his network being directly responsible for the abuse and harassment of parents in ways that wouldn't have happened or are very unlikely to have happened without his network and the sustained attention that it gave to unhinged conspiracism.

And we're talking about here, Matt, cases where, for example, parents received notes that people were trying to dig up the bodies of their children, had pissed on the graves of their dead children. And Shermer dismissed it. You know, what's the harm? Maybe there was one, like somebody had their property. No, parents of children who were slain had to move house repeatedly because a conspiracy fear is sick. There's followers on them. And I do feel moral outrage at it because all of the heterodox chuckle fucks that comment on that, they don't do any research to it. And at the very least, they have the excuse that they're just lazy. It's not their area of expertise. Schumer doesn't have that

excuse. This is supposed to be his beat. He said, I've been covering Alex Jones for years. How do you know so little about this topic? And why is your immediate reaction to downplay the involvement? He was assigned damages northward of a billion. And there is a reason for that. It wasn't just because people, they just don't like Alex Jones. It's because of the absolute contempt for proceedings and how culpable he was deemed to be at the trials. Yes, it is annoying. I take your point. You're better informed on the Alex Jones thing than me or Michael Shermer.

So, yeah. It's not my job, though, Matt. That's the thing. I know. I'm not a professional fucking scanty. So, yeah, it's just what is so annoying. And, you know, okay, so he follows this up. This is like a little bit more on the Alex Jones point. So that's kind of what you're getting at there.

Should we hold Alex Jones responsible? Maybe. But again, first of all, he does have a platform. Kanye West and the other guy, Nick Fuentes, were just on a show. He still has a massive following. So the government did not go in and shut him down. Private Platform said, we're not going to have you on anymore would i have done that if i owned twitter probably not you know it's like i want to know what this lunatic is is thinking and i tend

to have more faith in in people that they may be unduly confident in people's rationality um i know some people are more influential than others jones is apparently one of them. But how is that different from Rush Limbaugh rambling on about, you know, or Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or any of those rambling on about, you know, the left, the liberals, the libtards, you know, and they go on and on this every day for hours. by that to the extent that they just hate liberals they hate democrats you know they're they're they're satanic evil people you know it's this is not the politics of old why are hannity and carlson and ingram and the rush limbaugh radio people of the world why are they not being censored or kicked off platforms for their undue influence on people that's a reasonably good question i think chris uh i think i mean like, I get it. Don't worry. I know Alex Jones is a little bit special. He actually specifically six his more insane followers on targets like the parents of slain children, which is a little bit special. the parents of slain children, which is a little bit special. But, you know, the broader point, which is that there is an awful lot of absolutely insane political diatribe on all kinds of media platforms.

I mean, he's kind of implying that all of that stuff is insane and that it's not really possible to censor it or filter it out. Yeah. So, you know, I think one of the issues here is that he's pointing to inconsistent standards, right? In Shermer's case, I think he wants to argue, look, lots of people say extreme things and encourage their followers to hate particular groups.

So where do you draw the line? What makes Alex Jones not okay, but Tucker Carlson okay when their rhetoric is similar? And, you know, I think Shermer probably isn't wanting to draw as tight parallels there as it sounds, because I believe he's argued that Tucker's, you know, overall pretty good before. But on that specific issue, I would say, Matt, that the answer is, why was Alex Jones banned? Because he did things that went farther, that made it so that the platforms were receiving more pressure to moderate him because of things like people being targeted or just incitement to violence kind of things. But the point is that the social media platforms, they do make arbitrary decisions about those things.

But if somebody is taking off all of them, it's usually because they've done something quite extreme. And Alex Jones has endlessly done things quite extreme and alex jones has endlessly done things quite extreme so you can make the case that it's inconsistent then there are people like alex jones who don't get it but the answer to his question is you have to basically make enough of a stink that the social media companies feel obligated to remove you when you're a high profile figure if you're small fry they'll remove you for fairly minor infractions sometimes yeah the standards are not consistently enforced unfortunately yeah i guess shiver wasn't making the point that i was hearing from him which is that a lot of

these people like tucker calson are almost as bad in a way as someone like alex jones right um because they are all lying and they are inculcating hatred of an out group etc i mean but there are degrees and when you start getting specific and you start saying these people are lying they're agents of the deep state and they need to be held to account and you start actually inciting violence against them then they do cross the line but you know he is a free speech absolutist right this is where his libertarianism leads him and the reason why he wants to make that equivalence between alex jones and tucker carlson etc is that look all free speech. You know, it might all have downsides to it. You can point things that are bad to it.

But, you know, if you censor Alex Jones, then you have to censor everyone. And, you know, this is the real problem I've got with these free speech absolutists, which is it's the same kind of equivalence he makes about conspiracy theories. Oh, look, some conspiracy theories are real. Well, therefore, we should have an open mind to every insane claim that people make. And it's like, no. And the same goes for free speech.

I mean, I think even people that are fully on board on the free speech side of things acknowledges that there is some kind of speech which is outside of the Overton window. If I represent myself as a medical professional and that I can cure your cancer with my healing hands and you have to pay me half a million dollars for me to do it, then I could get in trouble.

If I represent myself as a financial advisor and I can definitely help you double your money in a couple of months and I take your money to do that and don't give it back, then I think everyone acknowledges that there's a spectrum. And I don't think it's necessarily an easy problem, an easy question of deciding where exactly that Overton window is. But I get annoyed with people like Sherma because what they seem to believe is that, well, you know, anything goes. You know, who can say? And that there is no limit to the Overton window whatsoever.

No consequences for everything. Caveat emptor. It's up to you. You don't have responsibility for anything you say. All the responsibility lies on the other parties to be able to tell the difference between people that are bullshitting you and people that aren't. Well, there's a part that ties this kind of approach to free speech or like the lack of responsibility for what speech might encourage people to do when he discusses January 6th. Like Trump's speech on January 6th that morning. I'm told by

First Amendment attorneys that it's a very high bar to meet, to connect words to actions, your words to somebody else's actions, and that, you know, and that probably you cannot convict Trump for causing the January 6th insurrection directly because of his words. Or just to go back in time, Manson, Charlie Manson, telling his followers followers his cult followers go to the tate labianca homes and murder their those people uh sharon tate and so forth and they did he wasn't even there uh and he got convicted for first degree murder by vincent bulliosi and who famously also got the the women convicted so it's an interesting case of you know free will uh to what extent are

you unduly influenced by somebody else it's a hard psychological problem to solve you know that you made these people do this this is great news for like you know mafia bosses and organized crime because because they don't actually yeah all they have to do is not directly say it or even if they say it like you killed the person so it's yeah yeah it's like it's like hey so and so he needs to take a long rest you know it's like okay boss it's all right you know you didn't do it but at the point that you made about like it's hard to get someone to be culpable for instigating others' actions. But like wasn't Trump indicted by his own party for his role in promoting the January 6th riots?

I think just people just need to apply common sense. Like if I'm on the radio in Rwanda and i say exterminate the cockroaches the time is now go and do it kill them all then if some years later in some truth and reconciliation type of tribunal like could it not be said that i had something to do with it i mean this is just crazy that that you had absolutely no responsibility for for what you say well even in that case in your hypothetical like you know a a radio person giving speeches it's not not hypothetical but yeah well no no if it was you unless you're coming out now as a member of the rwandan radio during the genocide. But the point is you would be a radio host or whatever.

In the case of Trump, he's the leader, right? He's the leader inciting the followers to march to the Capitol. So, like, that case specifically, it's just a very odd one to say. Who can say if there's a strong connection is there any connection between all of these people marching on the capital and the boss telling them to well you know it's a mystery it's a question for the philosophers chris well yeah yeah so you know and if you want to hear just a little bit more mad of the kind of libertarian mindset when it applies to the pandemic this this question was raised about, you know, looking back on the pandemic.

In spring 2020, we had no idea. And at that time, Francis, myself, everybody I knew, frankly, supported the lockdown. But there were other opportunities later when we knew more about the virus, which is where people, I think, are asking legitimate questions. more about the virus, which is where people, I think, are asking legitimate questions. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it was clear maybe, say, mid-2021, summer of 2021, when the lockdowns were probably not necessary. You know, the obsessive masking and social distancing was probably a little over the top. I think that seems clear now in hindsight maybe not at 2021 but i mean it seems clear to some of us i'm not gonna lie yeah so okay fair enough so just you know that kind of masking doesn't work social distancing was useless all of the public health stuff it's just kind of what you would expect but again that's not what the scientific consensus around the issue is that's the discourse consensus in like brett weinstein and heterodox land but

that isn't exactly what the relevant research literature says yeah i can see what it is about this discussion that annoyed you chris that triggered you triggered me yeah yeah which is that it's it's a bit like our objection to a lot of the gurus that use the trappings of science and academic intellectual inquiry to mask what is whatever rank conspiracism rank populism you know rank appeals to emotion etc i mean with these guys it's whatever their political valence is. It's some libertarian, slightly reactionary, anti-woke thing or whatever. But they're using all the language that this is all kind of just about being rational, just about being a critical thinker, just about being able to detect what's a real conspiracy

theory or not. But, you know, that's not really what's going on here. It really is just a political broadcast with these trappings. Yes. And so I just have two clips to finish with. As is tradition, I'll finish on something positive. But before I get to that, just to note, you know, applying the insight that Chambers had about constructive conspiracism and his enlarged categories of conspiracy

theories, it means you reach conclusions like this. That would be a kind of conspiracy, back to my definition of conspiracy, two or more people plotting a secret to do something to a third party or somebody else illegally or immorally. That would be the case. Their lies that we are a politically neutral platform but secretly behind the scenes they're shadow banning people so that would be a conspiracy a conspiracy theory that's that turned out to be true it is a conspiracy that's the twitter files uh they are a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true so yeah another example for you there matt but uh

but look we've said very negative some critical things about shimmers of poor oach to conspiracism i will give him credit for two points that he made that i think are good. I'm one concerned how common conspiracies are for art histories and in general. I think it's fair to say that whatever your view of conspiracy or conspiracy theories or whatever it is, we've never had more of them around. We've never had more of them in our faces. And do you think that's because we've become more conspiratorially minded or we just have way more access to information now? The latter. There's just as many conspiracy theories

a hundred years ago as there are now. It's just that they diffuse through culture much more quickly now because of social media. So if you look at, like, there's data collected about letters to the New York Times in the 1890s to the 1970s and you can see there's plenty of conspiracy theories even you know a century ago about what the mormons are doing or the catholics are doing or the jews of course always um and i don't trust any of them we need to get back to yeah the question though the question was are there more conspiracy theories or yeah and and so the former is that we have more access to information whatever but he said the latter

yeah from the other context he was asking like there appears to be more of them now is that the case and shemar is saying no we've always dealt with conspiracy theories which is accurate I think and then he also talked about this point Matt which I I think you will agree with about conspiracies as like a proxy for other things so here is what I call proxy conspiracism or tribal conspiracy I think when when significant percentages of Republicans say, yeah, they think there might be something to the Pizzagate, the QAnon, the whole pedophile thing. Do they really believe that or are they just kind of ticking off the box to pollsters? Yeah, that's what our tribe believes. Or, yeah, it's a it's a proxy for something else.

I don't like the Clintons. I hate Hillary. I don't I want to own the libtards. I don't like Democrats, you know. And so even if I took you to the common ping pong pizzeria and go, look, there's no there's no there's no basement. There's no pedophile ring here. You know, it's not like you're going to go, oh, in that case, I'll vote for Hillary. You know, you were never going to vote for Hillary. Right. So it's a stand. It's a proxy. I don't like this group over here. People are saying they're doing these things. Yeah, maybe there's something to it. Even if there isn't in that case there there's kind of a more general negative valence to your opinions about them

yeah yeah i agree with that chris i mean to a large degree belief in conspiracy theories is an outcome it's an outcome of your motivated reasoning and your um your desire to to fit the world you know the observable facts or reality to fit your ideology. So, you know, recently I came across someone on Twitter who was talking about the conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama is really a man. Yeah. This rather despicable conspiracy theory. conspiracy theory and you know that's clearly an outcome of their very strong political or broader views rather i don't think they actually are that committed to it and if they had indisputable evidence that michelle obama was in fact a woman it wouldn't really affect any of the um sort of ideological prize that they had yeah i i think

that's like a function of the political dislike of the obamas and the like kind of racism to be honest that that exists in those communities yeah racism sexism you you name it it's all in there it's all in the mix it's a nice mix yeah you know, this content, it is what it is. But I would say that given Schermer's heuristics, perhaps the best way to spot a conspiracy-prone individual would be for him to look in the mirror, because to some extent, he seems to suffer from a lot of the maladies that are typical of conspiracy theorists, including believing that there's a secret cabal that instructs politicians what to do when they get in the office. And let's hope that he doesn't want to bring us back

the Catholic and Mormon conspiracies, that that was just an odd way of putting it. Conspiracies were normal, Chris. They were normal, right? We've always thought that the Jews were interfering with our children. It's only after World War II that they've had this stigma. PC gone mad. Good one, Sharma.

Yeah. And the very last thing I'll just play, it's not Sharma, it's just to remind you, because you might have got confused by some of this content from some of our other coverage about trigonometry and potential slants that they may have. And when they were discussing the Twitter files, the reaction to it, you know, they brought up this point. Michael, you mentioned the social media companies and Twitter in particular is an interesting one because of the Twitter files information drops we've had over the last couple of weeks. And it's interesting

to watch the different sides of the political spectrum. You know, Francis and I are somewhere in the center, so we just sit back and watch it unfold. And I look at the right, so to speak, if there is such a thing, and the right is like, this is a massive conspiracy. And on this particular issue, I actually, I lean towards not so much a conspiracy, but these people were doing things they shouldn't have been doing. They were lying about what they were doing. That's my opinion. And they, while the decisions, as you rightly say, are very difficult, they did not quite live up to the standards that they claimed to be upholding, in my opinion. But that's odd, isn't it? you know constantine and francis are so

centrist but on this particular issue he does things just this one yeah and if there is a right if there is a right matt you know if the right even exists as a concept then they could be right i bet this particular thing just oh it's's surprising. Surprising. Yeah. Just like all the other things. Consent. Yeah. But you're a centrist. Don't worry. You're a centrist.

You're an enlightened centrist. Don't worry. That's it. I'm not going to challenge you. Just wanted to remind you there, in case you were getting confused by some of the clips I've played. But yeah, that's it. And then there's a little follow-up on that,

where Shomer gives some points which don't quite gel because of the response like this. There's a difference. So no one's been gaslighting the public for years claiming Fox News is a left of center publication. Whereas with Twitter, the argument was, oh, no, we're not shadow banning anyone, except they were. Oh, no. banning anyone, except they were. Oh, no, the decision to ban Donald Trump wasn't made because of personal animosity. Yet we find out that Yoel Roth, one of the major executives, had said that Nazis were in the White House three years earlier. So we were being told one thing, and then we find out, actually, yes, I agree with you. I was not surprised to find out that what Twitter had been saying for years was a

lie. However, they were saying it wasn't a lie. And now we know and have evidence that it was a lie. I think that's quite significant, don't you? You know, Constantine, again, in the center. Yeah, no sympathies, no sympathies for the absolutely insanely right Trump administration of the United States. Yeah, it's just funny how the opinions seem to be so well calibrated to that sphere. But anyway, it is what it is. But yes, Matt, that was that. I will say that despite the fact that I think that Sean Rilletts his libertarianism influences various takes quite significantly i don't think he's quite as far gone as like a rogan or someone i think he still retains the ability to occasionally criticize the right and trump like it does come up at a couple

of times in this content so that that's good to see and he does have some points he makes about conspiracism and you know the prevalence of it and aspects of it which i think are pretty spot on but it's just it's just the kind of big things that he gets wrong as a skeptic and specialist in conspiracy theories that he really shouldn't. And the mean one is that thing about because conspiracies exist, ergo conspiracy theorists are right. I hear you. I understand your frustration in the sort of laziness and the poor reasoning.

And I guess the other aspect is the degree to which his whatever, libertarian, shall we say, leanings and his position as one of these independent public intellectuals, which naturally leads him into the orbit of people like Jordan Peterson, all the trigonometry people. And it's like, you could tell by the leading questions, like you almost have to, you almost have to veer in that direction. Otherwise, it just doesn't work. Like the sad thing for me is nothing to do with Shermer particularly,

but just about anyone in that situation. It almost feels like there's this like ineluctable, inevitable, magnetic draw that pulls them towards a particular political place so yeah i mean it makes me feel a bit depressed really because i it feels like a force of nature like anyone out there in the media sphere taking this position is is drawn to these positions and you almost see it with sherman because as you say there are glimmers of him being responsible not willing to take the bait and say i'm gonna yeah i'm on board with the wef type conspiracy theory or whatever and him providing a bit of the alternative point of view but it's in conflict with what he knows

his personal interests are and the dynamics of the conversation so oh it's a sad state of affairs my friend well you know i'll just say on that specific issue schirmer as the head of a skeptical organization at the height of the pandemic interviewed brett and heller weinstein after months of anti-vaccine advocacy they were very you know high profile anti-vaccine people promoting conspiracy theories. Schirmer interviewed them, announced that people were saying, make sure you put them up on it. He asked zero questions to them in that over an hour interview about their anti-vaccine stuff, just helped them promote the book, which in itself is a book full of pseudoscientific

naturalistic fallacy reasoning so i'm just mentioning that to illustrate that yes i i definitely think those kind of considerations apply and he you know you would imagine that a principled skeptic might want to pull even people that are his friends or that are high profile anti- anti-vaxxers, but Schumer did not. Did not. No. Yeah. Not one question.

Not one question. Yeah, I think you're completely right, and I think that illustrates that he knows what side his bread is battered on. And he knows what bread is. Yeah. It's a shame. It's a shame. Okay, now I'm depressed. Thank you for that. Don's a shame. It's a shame. Okay, now I'm depressed.

Thank you for that. Don't mention that. That's it. Thanks. I don't even get to give you the review of reviews and all the nice things that just tick this thing out. So, yeah, that was what it is. It's a bit of a depressing thing, but, you know, what are you going to do?

It's the world we live in. It's the world we live in so where we live in i'm gonna forget about all this i'm gonna log off i'm gonna log off i'm gonna spend some time with my family now chris if that's okay yeah that's all right yeah that's all right and uh you know watch out though matt as schirmer says there's a lot of dodgy going on a lot of agents out there so distributed idea suppression complexes are real and you'd be a group if you weren't looking out for the map all right okay you'll do so all right good night bye Thank you. you