Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Giving the Devil His Due: a conversation with Michael Shermer & Brian Keating (#038)

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

   Brian Keating Interviews Skeptic Magazine publisher and author of “Giving The Devil His Due” Michael Shermer. Get Michael Shermer’s Books here: GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE HEAVENS ON EARTH THE MORAL ARC:  Find Show Notes and Links here Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the Science Salon Podcast, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist. Follow Michael on Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelshermer and Brian Keating here: https://twitter.com/drbriankeating Michael regularly contributes opinion editorials, essays, and reviews to: the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Science, Nature, and other publications. He wrote 214 consecutive monthly columns for Scientific American. He appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Oprah, and Larry King Live (but, proudly, never Jerry Springer!). He has been interviewed in countless documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel. Dr. Shermer was the co-host and co-producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown. His two TED talks, seen by millions, were voted in the top 100. Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He has been a college professor since 1979, also teaching at Occidental College, Glendale College, and Claremont Graduate University, where he taught a transdisciplinary course for Ph.D. students on Evolution, Economics, and the Brain. Watch Michael Shermer discuss Losing the Nobel Prize with Brian Keating on SCIENCE SALON # 70 Topics discussed in this extended interview include: M Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, two, one. The Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination into the Impossible podcast inside of COVID quarantine. I think this is day 26 or something like that for the state of California where Michael is. You're up in Santa Barbara, Michael? Yep. So, yeah, we've been under lockdown. we're trying to do some fun things for the audience out there,

keep everybody entertained while this lasts, hopefully not too much longer. I think this will be renamed the year of the Zoom or something. We'll have to change the way we orchestrate these years. But you've written so many books. Actually, I think, you know, I can't see your hands, but I assume you're writing another book as we're speaking. Because this is what your 16.

How many books have you written? Yeah, 16 books, if you count the essay collections, and edited volumes and so on. I think it's 12 or 13, just solo regular trade books like this. Yeah. Well, I've always wanted to be a writer. I like writing.

I got to the point where if I don't do it, I feel anxious in the same way where, you know, I'm a longtime lifelong cyclist. Yeah. Competitive cyclists, if I don't ride every day or work out every day, pretty much six, seven days a week, I start to feel anxious. And it feels like that for me.

I always like to have writing projects, something such that when I'm consuming content myself, which I like to do like most of us now, particularly in isolation, you know, just grinding through articles and books and so on. And the reason I started my own podcast was because I was reading these books anyway. And but when I, it's nice to, when I'm reading something to put it somewhere like, why do I care about this? Well, this is going to be part of chapter seven in this project I'm working on about moral progress or whatever. You know, for me, I feel better when I can fit it in somewhere. Like, the reason I'm investing all this time and reading all these articles is going

to be part of a chapter and make me feel like I'm using my time more efficiently. Yeah, I actually got that idea from you a long time ago listening to your podcast. You mentioned this is your philosophy that, you know, the one way to stay engaged with other people's ideas to read their books. And you make the point that, you know, books for, there's a law of physics that not too many people know about, but new books have to come out on Tuesdays. And you brought that to my attention. And of course, yeah, all of our books come out on Tuesdays for some reason. And every Tuesday, you run the Science Salon podcast. And you usually, nine times out of ten, have a new author,

a book or some work of note that has just been released. And so I took it upon myself to kind of follow your advice and reached out to a lot of people that have been guests on your podcast. And many of them I've graciously agreed to be on. So in the future, we're going to have folks like Peter Diamandas and Neil Schubin and folks that you know and have had on your show. So it's a great treat to have you. I was on your show last year, Science Salon. That was a great treat for me. We talked for over an hour and a half, I think it was, and really exposed me to you, to the way that you have a unique style of really as an intellectual. I think of you as a public intellectual. You're reputed to be a member of some certain three-letter acronym that I'm not going to mention.

But what I love about you is that you can do it all. You're kind of very parapetetic. You do everything from hard science where you and I have corresponded a lot, down to the political, down to social matters and so forth, psychology, which I have no expertise in other than armchair psychotherapy that is now being conducted over Zoom like most things. But one question, just before we get into the meat of the book, we're going to talk a lot about Michael's fabulous new book,

giving the devil his due and i want to get uh all the juicy details i read more than half of the book uh in one sitting it was just really gripping and i'm a subscriber to skeptic magazine um for a long time but before i do that i just wanted to circle back to this podcast reading um i've heard it said that uh sometimes though reading addiction it can be addictive uh sometimes it can be used as a way to forestall one's own creativity as a writer in other words oh i'll i'll start writing my sequel to losing the Nobel Prize, once I'm done interviewing Michael and Peter and Neil and reading 27 more articles online today. Exactly right. Oh, I do that all the time. It's a great procrastination. I've got to just read one more

article. I'm sure this is important. Yeah, exactly. And so the knowledge base from which to reference in the book just keeps growing unavoidably. Well, and the current age we live in with the internet is so accessible. At any given time, I'll have like a dozen windows open. I know. Just like in the first hour of the morning, it's like, I got to read this, I got to read this, I'm going to come back to this. And, you know, half the time I never get to all of them. Yeah. And at some point, you do have to have some discipline, like, okay, I got to stop reading and start working.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I actually get something. But the thing is, there's a lot of good, there's a lot of high quality content. I mean, a lot of these articles I read, they're great, beautifully written, you know, and well researched and from, you know, a dozen different sources. And it's like, wow, you know, this is a big improvement over, in the amount of diversity of voices we have now. Because the way, you know, before the Internet, you know, there was so many filters. You know, peer review journals have filters and university presses have filters. Even trade houses have filters, if nothing else, economic filters.

You know, they can only publish, you know, a couple dozen books titles a year. So they have to be pretty selective. So most people don't get a voice. Well, that's all changed. Everybody has a voice. Now, there's a lot of crap out there, but there's a lot of really good riders. I'm stunned. Yeah.

As a lifelong writer myself, how good what the quality of so much riding is. Yeah, and also the instruction. I want to get into the kind of art of pedagogy because you are also an instructor. Let me go through your bio while we're starting here because I don't want to miss any of the kind of basic facts on the ground before we get started. So I'm going to say what I have received for. from you and your PR firms and publisher. Dr. Michael Sherman. Yes, that's right.

You've got a crew. You've got a whole Zoom crew. Dr. Michael Shermer is a presidential fellow at Chapman University, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and for 18 years was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He's the author of several New York Times bestselling books, including Heavens on Earth, the moral arc, the believing brain,

and why people believe weird things, as well as 12 other books, 13 other books, plus the one that he's writing secretly while his hands are moving. His two TED talks have been viewed over 9 million times. I got to think that's over 10 million by now. And they were voted in the top 100 of the more than 2,000 TED talks that exist. Dr. Sherman received his BA in Psychology from Pepper 9, his MA and experimental psychology from California State University Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He has a thriving website.

You can connect to him there in Michaelshirmer.com. You can also find him prolifically posting on Twitter, tweeting away on Twitter at Michael Shermer on Facebook at Michael Brandt Shermer. And the thing that they left out is sort of, you know, one of the things we're touching upon are some of the things you do outside of your work. You're a prolific cyclist. You were basically a professional cyclist in some sense. I mean, you competed in a race across America. And one of the first times I ever came across you was in a book called mistakes were made, but not by us. And you're featured extensively in that book.

And it's all about sort of the theory and psychology behind cognitive dissonances and how they are really insidious and how they permeate fields ranging from psychology to detective work by police to scientists in the physical sciences like myself. And in that book, you were talking about an event that really is the intersection. I think it's kind of the ultimate Shermer moment. And I wanted you to maybe relate that really quickly to the audience because you share it with me in person. Oh, the alien abduction experience? Yes. Oh, yeah. So you're one of the few people I've met that has been abducted by aliens.

I saw the mothership. Yeah. No, I actually use that story really to talk about abductees who say, you know, I really believe that this happened to me, and I say, I believe you believe it. In other words, I believe it's a real experience people are having. They are not, for the most part, just making up these crazy stories about UFOs and aliens to sell books. Maybe some do, but I think most of them really believe this is the experience they've had. That book, by the way, mistakes were made, but not by me, is by Carol Tabras. Great book. I use it in my Chapman University course, Skepticism 101,

really effective at sort of explaining how deceptive our beliefs or how misguided our beliefs can become based on these personal experiences that people had. In my case, it was part of this race across America, which is a 3,000 mile nonstop transcontinental bike race from L.A. in New York, different start and finish points now. But in 1982, when we did this, we went L.A. to New York. And I finished third, and I broke the transcontinental record. and in 83, we decided to do it again. We had corporate sponsors and ABC World of Sports was filming it. So it's like, okay, I'm just going to do this for a while. Because there weren't any teaching jobs.

There was sort of a freeze on hiring after Prop 13 passed in California. So, you know, I wasn't going to be a full-time professor. So I thought, I'll just be a full-time bike racer. You know, I'm in my 20s, you know, not married, no kids, no house. You're free to do that sort of thing. So I did. So I decided in 1983 I was going to see if I could run. all the way across the country without sleeping at all.

Because I'd read some research on sleep deprivation and that there was some kid who was like 21 who went 11 days without sleep at UCLA. I thought, okay, 10 days across the country, I can do that. Well, I couldn't. You know, I made it from the Santa Monica pier to into Nebraska. And that was about 83 straight hours.

And I just started hallucinating like crazy. Basically, it was early in the morning. early, 4 a.m., something like this. So I'm kind of wobbling down the side of the road about six miles an hour in my bike. And every cyclist in this race has a support crew that follows behind them, like a minivan, and then a motorhome and a support team.

So you don't have to stop and go into hotels and restaurants and things like that. It's just all on the fly. That's how they can do it so quickly. Anyway, but at that moment, I just had this, apparently had this flashback to a childhood television. show called The Invaders, starring Roy Thinness, where these aliens were invading Earth,

but they were taking over the bodies of humans and looked just like them. So this is kind of a body snatchers kind of theme. But in the show, they could tell that they were aliens because they had a stiff little finger, which is really weird because, you know, if aliens could traverse the vast distances of interstellar space and figure out genetic engineering and clone humans, but it's really their intelligence and size. But they couldn't figure out the tendons and the little things. I mean, anyway, crazy. But that's what I thought on the side of the road, that my support team were these aliens that looked just like the people I know, but I knew that they were actually these body snatcher

aliens. And they're trying to get me into the UFO, which is just my motorhome. And apparently this conversation went on for some time where they're going, come on, Shermer, it's at break time. You've got to take a nap. And I'm like, oh, no. And I'm quizzing them. Like my girlfriend was on the crew, I was quizzing her about personal details of our

relationship and the aliens knew all this. I was really impressed with this. Anyway, so then I took a 90-minute nap and snapped out of it. And there's actually footage. If you type in Michael Shermer comma alien abduction, you'll see Eric Hayden, the Olympic equator who was a color commentator for wide world of sports interviewing me on and I'm crossing the line halterman's crossing when Michael Shermer reached the Mississippi. What Diana and I hadn't known when we spoke of a close race earlier was that Shermer was slowing down. As he told Eric Hayden there on the bridge, he was wasted. Still feel pretty mentally alert?

No. That's not I got to get some sleep. As a Maria Arias is like psychotic type experiences. But yeah. Uh, thinking my crew, just aliens from another planet trying to capture me. Sounds ridiculous, but that's what I thought. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place.

Pluto TV! Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is our sin. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N-EX-Files, may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials,

no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. He was still in second place, but he was flounder. But the point of that story really is that, first of all, personal experiences can be so powerful that they overwhelm, you know, rationality. That is, I meet a lot of people who claim, you know, I'm on board with you about the psychics and ESPN. I know that's all bullshit and all that. I'm a skeptic, too. I love science.

But I had this incredible experience. Let me tell you about it. And they'll tell me about it. And they go, so I just think there might be something to this. This one thing that happened to me. Like, okay, that's the power of experience. Like even Alexander, he wrote that book, Proof of Heaven. Yes.

You know, proof. That's a strong word in science proof. Evidence, right? I mean, social scientists never use that word. Maybe you guys do in the physics, you know, proof. Well, he went there. You know, okay, so when you, you know, you drill down in the story, you know, he had a, you know, a brain virus and they put him in an induced coma because his brain was swelling anyway.

started to bring him out and he had this fantastic hallucination that he thinks, you know, he went to heaven. Now, he knows, you know, he's a neurologist. He knows more about the brain than I do. He knows everything I know about near-death experiences and trauma and this and that, but it happened to him. And that's what made it different. That's very powerful, those experiences that are personal. And actually, there's something to be set for personal experiences. In the end of this book, Giving the Devil is Due, now out by Michael Schumer. there's wonderful recollections of your, and rather unvarnished so, of your personal interactions, your personal experiences with people that have taken on a mythological stance in society,

ranging from Richard Dawkins, to the late great Christopher Hitchens. And I think it's, and Jordan Peterson, of course, who you've interacted with as well. And I think I want to take this opportunity to kind of step back for a second and focus on the book itself. And we'll get to those interesting intellectuals as we proceed. But I first want to start with the title of the book and actually the cover of the book. So I unlike what the common colloquial advice is, I always judge books by the cover. In fact, I almost exclusively will not be interested in a book if I don't like the cover. And on the cover, we have a quote from another than Richard Dawkins.

You may disagree with Michael Shermer, but you better have a good reason. and you'll have your work cut out finding it. Now, this book, I mean, it's interesting that he talks about disagreeing with you. This book is not really a polemic of sorts. It's really sort of a compendium of your greatest hits, sort of updated for, you know, updated and brought to modernity. Some of them take place quite a long time ago. And really, in a cohesive source, it's sort of an autobiography of you in a sense, although I hope you will someday write a proper autobiography, because I think that would be warranted.

I'm going to write an unauthorized autobiography. Yeah, and you could be like Charles Barkley, who reportedly said once that he was taken out of context, and they said it was your autobiography. I haven't heard that one. I was misquoted. It was you who said it. Oh.

The unauthorized autobiography. I can't wait. Yeah. So giving the devil is due. Yeah. So the title really is, you know, it comes from this, this play, a man for all seasons, you know,

and this sort of collision between Thomas Moore and King Henry the eighth over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his divorce from the Catholic Church and before. Anyway, in the play is defending the law and that, you know, we need laws that are fair and just for everybody. And his, you know, opponent is saying, well, we got to cut down the laws to get after the devil, you know, the bad guys. And so he responds to this like, well, but then when the laws are, all cut down and the power turns on you, where are you going to go? You know, you have no

protection. So we have to give the devil is due for our own safety's sake. And in my case, my devils are, who is the devil. It's anyone who you disagree with, who disagrees with you, who thinks differently from you. You know, free speech is for people that we don't like. That's what the First Amendment is for. People that, you know, are saying things we don't want to hear. That's the whole reason for it. It's not to protect people we agree with. So the devil is really, just anybody that's different from you, disagrees with you, and so on. And the reason we have to give them their due, give them their free speech, is ultimately if we pass censorship laws, then those laws could be used against us when we're in the minority, when we're

outside of the window looking and wanting to have a voice. And, you know, that, you know, so I give some brief history of the First Amendment in the introductions, really starting with the Schenck case in 1990, when. And Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote his official position statement in which he said, you know, shouting fire in a crowded theater would be an example of a clear and present danger that Congress has a right to censor because this could lead to harm. Well, what was this clear and present danger at the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater in 1919? Well, it was this guy, Shank who was a socialist in Philadelphia.

who was handing out flyers to young men who were of draft age as America was about to enter the Great War. So, I mean, to our ears, it's like, wait, you're protesting the draft, and this is considered to be, you know, so dangerous we have to censor it. Yeah. And so the moment, this is the problem, the moment you make that argument. And the argument could be made. Yeah, this could lead to this, this, this, and before you know, we don't have an army. So we can't defend ourselves. So in the national interest, we have to, you know, protect people from hearing criticisms of the draft.

Okay. The problem with the head is that, you know, that anybody's speech could be justified as needing to be censored because you could make an argument for almost anything that this is somehow going to harm the nation or some particular group or me in particular or whatever. And, you know, so, as I say, one man's hate speech is another man's free speech. and that in the eve of the Civil War, a lot of pro-slavery proponents argued that abolitionist speech, that is northerners, coming down to southern states or sending their literature, you know, or publishing magazine articles and so on, promoting the abolition of slavery was considered hate speech. Now, they didn't use that phrase hate speech. But the argument that they made was this could lead to slave revolts. Because if the slaves get word of these arguments, they may not like being slaves anymore. And then what's going to happen? They're going to start killing the white people. And then, you know, so we have to protect our citizen from hearing this abolitionist speech.

Wow. And the same thing happened during the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King. The reason he went to the South is because he targeted the most racist cities he could find so that it would get media attention, so that he could get it challenged in the law and ultimately the Supreme Court. And so people then made the argument, you know, this guy is, I mean, he's not as bad as Malcolm X, but this kind of stuff he's saying could lead to riots, inner city riots, and that leads to violence, therefore he should be censored. So our ears, you know, today and in 2020, you know, using the N-word or calling women this or Jews that or whatever, that's hateful and we shouldn't do it.

Well, I agree, you know, don't be a dick. You shouldn't say things like that, right? But the moment you pass a law that says, okay, we are not going to censor the kinds of things that, you know, that challenge gender identity or whatever the popular thing is. Right. You know, in 20 years, 50 years, you know, those laws are still on the books. Yeah. And then they get applied to something else we can't even think of. So as a general principle, I'm pretty much a free speech fundamentalist.

Yeah, you're sort of remarkable because you do, it was one set of by our mutual friend, Sir Roger Penrose, about about, about, Stephen Hawking that, you know, it was, no matter what you believed, you were an agreement with Stephen Hawking, because he would often take opposite sides of the same position. And I see you as sort of, you know, this radical, extreme libertarian, you know, that you are, you don't cleave to either political party. And I actually pride myself in this podcast. I always say, you know, as an astronomer, the reason that people love astronomy is that there's no Republican constellation or Democrat comet over there. And so it's apolitical by nature. You can talk about funding and, yeah, maybe some climate stuff here and there.

But in astronomy per se, it's mostly liberated from that. And that's what I like about it. So I don't want to talk too much about politics except to say that this book, like many of your other books, the title is sort of a double entendre. And I look at the moral arc. And I think about what you were just saying with regard to, you know, the shifting illegal zeitgeist of what constitutes speech and harm and danger. etc. And you make the point in the book, you know, that Jordan Peterson, this famous case in Canada,

well, his, you know, right to free speech isn't as guarded, perhaps, as it is in America. And he's very controversial, of course. But he did, you know, free speech laws when they're enacted, they come with the full backing of a government, which you point out could be physically punishable. I mean, you could actually get punished at the end of a gun for speech and perhaps even for thought. And I wonder you've given so many talks at campuses. You're a professor. You teach on college campuses. Have you seen the declination, or the Klein, rather, of the tolerance and freedom of speech at the places where freedom of speech used to be synonymous with UC Berkeley and other places? Can you comment on that? And that'll be the only political sort of campus politics. I want to talk about tenure with you. It's okay to talk about politics. I mean, in a way, that's where the free speech is most.

applicable because you guys will hash out your differences in some astronomical theory in the journals and conferences and books and debates and so on. And it kind of gets settled in the long run. Because I remember when I started college in 72, the Big Bang Theory had just kind of won out over the steady state theory. And that's when I first noticed. So there is kind of a sense of progress. Like we have these different theories, but at some point it gets settled.

Like that's the right one. In politics, it's so messy and complicated that there may not be a right answer, right? It's like, what's the right tax rate? Well, you know, abortion, very complicated, guns, very complicated. So if any place you need sort of open debate and disputation, everybody gets their position out on the table. So we kind of see where it all stands. And so the problem in Canada, like within France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and a few other countries, Holocaust denial, for example, is illegal. In Canada, it's illegal under the sort of hate speech umbrella.

That is speech that could incite people to commit violence against a particular group. Yes. It's the news. So amazingly, it's actually illegal. You could be arrested for giving a lecturer saying, I don't think six million people died. Now, the analogy I make to that is, let's say I'm a historian of Native American history in the United States. And we want to know how many people, Native Americans died at the hands of Europeans.

since 1492. Okay. Well, this is an actual field of study. You know, how many people were here before, you know, in 1492? Well, we don't know, but you know, 90 million, 70 million, 50 million. It's debatable. And then how many died by disease versus by, you know, guns and steel and guns, and in terms of steel sense of Jared Diamond's book title. And that's disputed. But let's say it's 50 million. But now let's say I publish a journal article or a book in which I say, you know what, I don't think so. I think it was more like 10 million. Am I a, am I a Holocaust denier? Right. To be arrested for giving my argument. Okay. Now, that said, you know, most of the Holocaust deniers I've met,

you know, they're pretty fringy and they probably are mostly anti-Semitic, you know. But that aside, they have arguments. And if you can't counter their arguments, if you're counter to their argument on some specific thing about Auschwitz is, well, you're a Nazi. That's not a counter. That's not a counter argument. And so if anything, under the principle, you know, sunshine is the best disinfectant, you know, I go the opposite direction. Let them have their say. Let's publish it. You know, here in that, we did that in Skagit. Here are the, you know, 15 things that Holocaust revisionists, as they like to be called, this is their arguments. These are their best arguments, and here's why they're wrong.

We did the same thing with creationists, climate deniers, and so on. And ultimately, I like to think anyway, as in your science, it gets kind of settled. At some point, it's debatable, this or that, but then we kind of get a refined argument. And anyone that's not going along with it, they're like the handful of people that still claim the Big Bang didn't happen. I know there's these big Bang skeptic. Right. It's flat or whatever.

It's like, okay, we don't have to worry about them because, you know, they're so fringy. But the way we got there was through examining their claims. And so I apply that to everywhere. And as I wrote in the book, I actually wrote a letter in defense of David Irving to the judge in his trial in Austria, mainly because it was so outrageous. This is not even a speech crime. This was a thought crime. He got arrested at the airport. He flew from London to Vienna.

And as they scanned his passport, it came up. He was flagged as one of these sort of dangerous characters. and he was just going to give a speech about the Second World War. Now, I know his angle, the Second World, you know, Hitler was a pretty good guy and he didn't know about some of the bad stuff. Okay, this is all bullshit. But the fact that he gets arrested for just thinking of thought, because he hadn't given a speech. He was just thinking about giving his speech. So are we talking about an Orwellian thought crime?

Yes, that's what we're talking about. So, you know, Jordan's point there with that Bill C-16 in Canada, it sounds good from a kind of a liberal perspective of the moral arc and all that stuff. Yeah, we should, we should be called people by the names they want to be called. Okay, fine. I tell a little story in the book about when I was in college at Pepperdime. One semester, my roommate was a guy named Dwayne. I know him from high school. He hated his name. So he changed his name to D'Artagnan. You know, the fourth marscatia, eventually shortened it to Dar and I still talk to him and we call him Dahr. And he said, you know, I'd like you to call me this. We're like, what? Really? D'Artagnan? And he got his driver's license changed and the whole

and we're like, okay, we'll do it. But just a friend one-on-one asking you, you know, please call me this is one thing. And, you know, don't be a dick. Just do it. You know, be a nice person. Okay. But then going to the government to say, we want you to force that guy to call you. That's different.

And I supported, you know, Jordan's position on that. To the extent that that's the case, something like a gender pronoun not used by, say, a government agency or a university department or a corporation would end up with some kind a trial or some sort of conviction that I can't speak to. But in principle, he's right. Yeah, and the right, as you say, the devil is someone that you have potential not to agree with on everything or maybe on any one thing, but that person is due, the sort of courtesy that you'd like extended to yourself. So sort of a very into the silver rule, if not the golden rule. Let me just take a break and ask you, what is the meaning, the cover is really cool. It has sort of

this very three-dimensional shape to it. It actually looks three-dimensional in the back. Actually, the covers behind you look even more three-dimensional. So what is the meaning? I can see the pawn. I can see the devil. But what's the symbolism going on there, Michael? Well, we went through a couple of cover choices.

You know how this works. Yeah. And, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, what's that? They decline it. Sorry. Yeah. Actually, let me just turn off my phone where we're talking. So the, um, the symbolism is, is, of course, there's a thing that you

see, you know, the person, and then there's, you know, maybe behind that, they're, they're secretly the devil. And, you know, it's not these people we have to give the, the, you know, the, it's the shadow ones, the, you know, the ones that, that, that, you know, have the horns and so on. At least we think they have the horns. Right. Right. You know, and if you look at the long history of free speech, you know, it's, it's been a battle pretty much for the last several thousand years. And the reason is because governments and autocrats, and theocrats, they don't want to give people the opportunity to dissent because dissenters cause fractions and power structures, this whole point of having a free press, is to allow dissent.

And we now know from studies of the Nazi era that, you know, they never had a majority, of course, when they were elected in 1933. They were elected. They were elected, but it was a minority position. Okay, fine. That happens in a lot of elections, like an Angela Merkel always has to make these coalitions with different parties, because in Germany there's so many different parties. But the question was, I've always pursued, is how do you get, how do you convert an entire

group of people, educated, cultured, you know, the land of Beethoven and Guta, you know, intelligent people to become Nazis? And the answer appears to be, well, they didn't. Most of them didn't go along with the Nazi ideology. Now, there was rampant antisemitism, but there was anti-Semitism throughout most European countries. It wasn't necessarily, worse in Germany than, say, France or Poland, particularly Russia. You know, Hitler's willing executioners, as Daniel Goldhuggan called his book, there was a lot of them around. But the general population, why they may not have liked Jews,

they were not exterminationist in their ideologies and beliefs. So I've gotten to the point where now I'm willing to say no Hitler, no Holocaust, and probably even no Hitler, no World War II, that, you know, the people weren't that bad. And so, but how did they maintain power for so long? Two things. One, pluralistic ignorance, where the spiral of silence, where everybody thinks everybody else thinks something. In fact, they don't.

Well, why don't they know that the others don't? Because the censorship of dissenters who would say, the emperor has no clothes. Did you notice that? He's naked. And if nobody can say that, then, you know, everybody, you know, falls into this spiral of silence. And that's why autocrats want to, you know, jail and censors. jail and prison, whatever, the Gull archipelago and the KL concentration system in Germany and

North Korea now and so on. So, you know, us free speech fundamentalists, we want to push back the moment any government starts to go down that road because they always do, almost like it's a law of nature. Like one of your physical laws that this is what governments do. So, you know, we didn't know about what our own government was doing. Even Democrats like Kennedy and Johnson until the Pentagon Papers. Right. You know, and now with WikiLeaks, you know, a lot of this crazy stuff that started with Bush,

at the Homeland Security and all that, but, but Obama was just as bad as Bush. And so it's almost like, you know, you get in there and they go, okay, here's what's really going on. Oh, well, we got to silence these people. We got to do this. We got to do that. Right. So on the eve of the release of Giving the Devil is due, we're in April, early April of 2020. We're both in California.

And we're under a form of self-isolation. and so-called sheltering in place, not a quarantine per se, and not a true lockdown, but we're demanded to some level, you know, not even to go to the beach and walk on nature trails

and so forth. It's really unprecedented in my lifetime, and I'm sure in your lifetime, too, or not that much different in age. But one of the things, you know, initially I reacted kind of cynically at it when they, it was the governor ordered that this,

and I should speak carefully because he is my boss after all, but Governor Newsom, Love at Wise and Brilliant Governor Newsom, you know, didn't make this edict apply to the press. And I was like, ah, you know, he's just taking care of this fonding press that, you know, we all love and I've got many friends that are in the newspaper business. But then I came to immediately realize that just as you say, this media is so critical to the reportage of truth and to checking on power.

But I want to get your impression. Now we have this sort of micro media, which are these, you know, blogger. and Twitter, you know, people on Twitter and Facebook, et cetera, that can really overwhelm and sort of storms of attrition, wars of attrition through their, you know, voice their opinions. And it could be something I agree with. It could be something I don't agree with. I mean, obviously there are certain really abhorrent viewpoints on Twitter and elsewhere. But there is also this potential now, not for governments to really police speech, but really this so-called cancel culture that you talk about a little bit in the book and how anathema

that is to the free dissemination of information. So I wonder if you can talk about that. And why is it so prevalent on college campuses? Why do you get canceled from invitations or people like our mutual friend Ben Shapiro and other people that you've had on your show and corresponded with like Jordan Peterson? I don't know personally. But why is this more prevalent on campus than say by governments? In the past, it would be some government suppressing Ben Shapiro or, you know, someone else. Right, or even decades ago as conservatives that were more in favor of censorship and liberals that were champions of free speech. I mean, the ACLU has always been considered kind of a liberal left-leaning organization.

And, okay, so there's different ideas, you know, floating around about this. I have a chapter in the book called What Went Wrong. You know, I think there's several things. First, you know, if we trace it back to the civil rights movement, that begins with being sensitive to speech because words matter and words can be hurtful. And I just pick the most obvious one using the N-word. You know, I won't do it. I don't even want to do it in print.

I don't even want to say the word. You know, and I'm an okay baby boomer. I'm 65. And, you know, so we've all been inculcated into this. That language is harmful and we shouldn't do it. And so from there you go, well, what other words? you know, should we not be using besides the N-word? Well, you shouldn't call women the C-word and call Jews, kikes, and on and on. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that, you know, and that starts expanding.

Now, in a good way, we all shift our language in the way we speak to each other informally, you know, television scripts, movie scripts, what the what the characters and movies and films and novels say. That's all changed. You can track when a novel was written or when a movie was done. And just down to the decade, sometimes even the year, based on the kind of words that are used to talk about women, blacks, and Jews, for example. All that is good. But then the moment you introduce like affirmative action laws and anti-discrimination laws and so on, then it's easy to suck into that the words that people use. And pretty soon you're policing language. And then we got to punish the transgressors.

And so this happened over many decades. I saw it happening when I was a college student. And then in the 80s when I started teaching, I saw the speech codes, you know, becoming broader, you know, kind of concept creep. You know, the category gets bigger. Right. Things that, you know, that can't be said or shouldn't be said. And then the enforcement levers, not just like, say, government anti-speech codes, those are harder to get past. but the the kind of norming of silencing leads people to self-censor.

So while, you know, like a Chapman University where I teach, you know, if I ask students, how many of you self-censor on a lot of these sensitive subjects about, you know, race and gender and so on? Every hand goes up. They, you know, they're all afraid to say what they really think. And this is more dangerous than a law that you can pinpoint. Go that, that law is unconstitutional. We need to overturn that law. Let's have a court.

case about it. That you can kind of is more tangible, but this sort of subtle bottom up, you know, no one wants to say anything because they're afraid because the norms have changed. That's what's more dangerous. And so, you know, then there's a few other factors that, again, this totally reasonable, liberal idea of diversity is good. I agree. Diversity is good. And I'd like to see more black faces and more women and more Jews and more Hispanics and so on. This is all good. But then when you start to enforce it and you leave out viewpoint diversity, you know, maybe we need some more conservatives in our department. What?

You know, it's like, okay, so maybe you're not that in favor of all kinds of diversity and so on. So that was another factor leading to that. And I think, you know, the media has kind of gone along with that. The academy's gone along with it. And now all those college students in the 60s and 70s, they're, you know, tenured professors now. their deans, their presidents of universities, they're making policy. And you could see that from that historical trajectory, there was kind of a logic to it. But, you know, it still, I think, just went, went too far.

Yeah. Yeah. And then it is sort of, you know, worrisome to me because I, you know, have come to feel that universities are these real citadels of, you know, truth. And, of course, in the heart sciences, there's a little bit of, you know, of a different sort of standard, as you were talking earlier, is there proof? No, we don't really talk about proof. We mainly talk about disproof,

and maybe some of that carries over the social sciences because you're entitled to your viewpoint, I'm entitled to my viewpoint, you can't prove either one, and maybe I could dispute yours. And of course, the famous quote, you know, that, you know, I may disagree with you, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it. So, you know, in this book, you do take, you know,

I write down, I always write imaginary blurbs, you know, as if you'd ever ask me to write you a blur, blur. Oh, you're next. You're next for the next book. I hope so. But I call you the conductor and the orchestra of cognitive dissonance that really makes the melody shine. So you really have this unique ability to take, to really see with care, you know, once I was talking to a friend about you and your work before I went on your show. And he was, you know, he was saying, you know, Michael just sees everything through these lenses. And I feel like you see that through the lens of exactly, you know, you look at polarization, which is not the kind that I study and the light

from the ancient universe, but you're kind, you know, where we talk about how ideas can be so disjoint. And yet, we should have a sense of compassion. And I feel that you really exemplify that. And I should also point out that you made your lectures for your Chapman course. They're available on YouTube on your channel. And I urge people to look at that to see that compassion, as our mutual friend, Heather McDonald says, you know, teaching is an act of love. And I think you can't convince somebody of a point. You can't teach somebody a point. Not not not not has to be platonic obviously but but you can't convince something of something if you hate them. If you know that you have this displeasure for somebody and what makes uh, what makes communication and

teaching and learning possible is a sense of safety. So in the book you talk about and you kind of bring down your own version of how I like to say you know how you would govern the world almost not not governed planet earth though, govern a different world. world that we experience from a distance. But it's looking more and more attractive. Although I do joke recently on Twitter, I tweeted about how, do you remember back in 2013, there was this company that was selling rides to Mars and it's going to be a one-way trip and the voyage itself and complete isolation would be two years perhaps just based on the limits of space travel. And there were over 10,000 people signed up. My friend Elizabeth Landau did a

did a nice piece on this in CNN for CNN. And she said that 10,000 people paid like 40 or 50 bucks to get on this list. And then the company went out of business. But I'm wondering, you know, how many people nowadays do you think would sign up for that kind of isolation? And what is it about the mind that, you know, you really don't know what you have until it's gone? And I worry about that for, you know, having this discourse. But let's talk about the astronomical. Let's talk about governing Mars.

So there's a famous exchange about two years ago between you and Elon Musk. Yeah. About how one would govern Mars. I'll just say that the title of the chapter is chapter 14, governing Mars, lessons from the red planet from experiments governing the blue planet. Yeah. So, well, he was, you know, tweeting about this as Elon has wanted to do. And I find him such an inspirational figure of our time to even think about doing this. Like, you know what? We're going to do this. We're going to go to Mars. Oh, okay. I mean, that's how big things happen. It starts with an idea. Okay, fine. But in my world, I don't work in the physical sciences, so I don't know how to get there by rockets or whatever. And what kind of structure we need and how to grow food there, potatoes or whatever. But, you know, in terms of a social structure, a moral, you know, a moral system. You know, I've always been curious as a sci-fi scenario, you know, if you sent a bunch of atheists to Mars and came back centuries later, would they all have something like religion and some belief in a God, something like that? and or if you just sent people that knew nothing about politics,

would they end up with something like a democracy, or they knew nothing about economics, would they end up with something like a regulated free market economy, you know, something like that. You know, what I'm after there is, you know, deeper principles of human nature that emerge, no matter what kind of social situation you have? So then I started thinking, well, what kind of government would we set up?

Now, possible Elon will send his social engineers up there, and they'll think of something no one has ever thought of before. And okay, that would be great. Then we could we could transport it back to Earth. Like, hey, you guys should try this here. It works on Mars. It works on Mars with 20 people. Yeah, well, try it with 20 million.

And therein lies the problem is, you know, you can have a direct democracy with, you know, with a couple dozen people maybe in like a university department where everybody votes on something. And you all know each other. But the problem is, you know, the complications multiply, you know, geometrically as the numbers, population numbers go up. And so the potential for conflict and because of human diversity of different interests and needs,

there is no one system. There is no utopia, and it's a dangerous idea to think we can design the perfect society. There is no perfect society. So you have to have an open-ended experimental system. So I'm inspired by science in this sense that Sagan makes this point in his demon-hunted world, but Defferson did too.

It's all experiments from what you can collect data. So let's say you have 50 different states with 50 different constitutions and they have 50 different, say, gun control regulations. Well, those are experiments now. We can look at and try to, you know, control intervening variables and see what the effects of, say, gun control laws are or are not. And now this is complicated and hard and different social scientists have different conclusions from the same data set. And some of it's ideologically driven, others are not. But the point is that these are experiments. So if you started off with a direct democracy on Mars with, say, a dozen astronauts there,

you know, what happens when it gets to, you know, a hundred dozen or, you know, a thousand, a hundred thousand or a million people, you know, then I contend you're going to end up with something like a representative democracy, a constitutional republic like we have. Because we've been running these experiments on Earth for thousands of years, and many experiments have been tried, most fail. You know, the theocracies, autocracies, dictatorships, various command economies, you know, they just don't work. And it's not that our system is perfect, you know, it's just, but it works better than some of these others. Anyway, so the idea there is let's look around to see what has worked here and take it with us to Mars, at least to start.

Now, it turns out when I was researching, there's other people like Charles Kaukele, the chemical biologist, no, he's a physicist, I think. England has written quite a bit about this, you know, and that it could be, you know, having multiple sources of oxygen and water and food, because we have to remember that it's the analog of Europeans coming to North America. It doesn't work because they had air. They had water. They had food on the hoof and in the, in the streams. And, you know, our Martians aren't going to have anything to start with. So the idea that an autocrat could get control of the air production or water production, you know, that's really dangerous. So, you know, Charles' Kakel's solution is that multiple, almost like multiple companies or multiple

agencies or instead of a centralized control and command system, you have many, so no monopolies. No one can have a monopoly. Anyway, I explore some of that in that chapter just because it's a super interesting idea. And then look at other earthly experiments, which I got from Nicholas Christakis' book Blueprint, where I didn't even know there was a data set of people that study shipwreck survivors and how they survived. Now, the ones that shipwrecked and didn't survive, we don't know what happened because they're dead. But the ones that, so it's a fairly narrow data set, you know, the ones that, you know, shipwrecked, survived, and were rescued to tell somebody what happened. There's some bias, selection bias.

Yeah, definitely. But it is a kind of experiment. These are called natural experiments. You know, we can't control marriages. divorces, but we can see what happens with marriages and divorces after the fact and look at what different laws about marriage and divorce affect, you know, in childhood, whatever. These are natural experiments that you couldn't actually run, but they happen anyway. So in the case of the shipwrecks, it turns out more egalitarian or sort of horizontal control structures where everyone has an

equal voice. You know, works better than a hierarchical military type command structure, which is what most of these Navy ships were. Yeah. But when they got, got to the island and they're just trying to survive, then it turns out those kind of command structures didn't work. Those vertical ones didn't work as well. Anyway, it's just kind of a, yeah, maybe a small lesson for, you know, structuring things that are more horizontal, or giving people a voice somewhere, which is what, you know, democracies do better than autocracy. Yeah, yeah. So that, I've come into contact with that, not personally myself, but my research, as you know, in part is conduct at the South Pole Antarctica, where there's isolation, you know,

complete isolation for about nine months of the year. And the National Science Foundation has done psychological research studies on among other things. You know, what's the optimum ratio of men and women when you're down there? And that doesn't rely on, you know, stuff from shipwrecks from, you know, going to ancient Tahiti or something like that. That's modern day human beings. So, yeah, I think there's some interesting parallels that could be drawn. So what, what do they say about that? I believe that the ideal ratio is about two men for every woman, or at least this is, again, Don't hold me to this. But it was it was asymmetric.

And I think there were more men than women. And I think the reason was it was, you know, 100% men. That would be, that would be bad, I think was the decision. Because there'd be too much aggression and frustration. But if it was all women, it would be fine. But they felt like, you know, they wanted to see, what could there be, could there be some men and women together? And then if there's 50-50, then a man might feel, and you're much more qualified to, you know, look at the psychological aspects. But if there's 50-50, then you feel like, well, I should have, you know, a partner or, you know, a female friend down here. And I don't. And so it would lead to some stress or something. Again, nobody hold me to this on the internet. Don't send me emails. But there, the NSF has done social science experiments with the ideal, you know, kind of societies at the South Pole. And, you know, it's, it's also the kind of ideal place to go to if you want to escape from the mafia or, you know, or your credit card company. And I can't always say, which is worse.

But you quote from here from two, I don't know if you knew this, but two very esteemed, you know, people are quoted within inches of one another. Kim Stanley Robinson and David Brin. Both of them are my friends and both of them are UCSD alum. And in fact, we have a rich tradition with the Benford brothers, David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson and others. But you also discuss with him and I'll be speaking with him next week by the time my listeners hear this probably two weeks from now. But I'll be speaking with David about his idea. for possible benefits that come out of the COVID situation, because it may not be all negative. There may be radical transformations, both for good and bad. But he does describe in the book, I think it's pretty interesting the different types of constituencies and how you would do this balloting and how such things could work.

And then also Kim Stanley Robinson, who has the Mars trilogy, very famous, red, Mars, green, Mars, Blue Mars, fascinating science fiction trilogy. He talks about the different types of resources and commodities and companies, and cultures that might pervade in the future. And I wondered, you know, you're not a science fiction writer,

but you kind of, you know, you have some friends that are science fiction writers as I do. What is the value in Arthur C. Clark, obviously, is science fiction as well as, you know, science writer himself. What is it about science fiction that allows us to sort of, you know, play what Einstein used to call it Godankan experiments, you know, thought experiments in the future? Why is it so, do you think, do you feel like,

I don't want to, you know, bias your, your response, but, you know, do you feel it's been successful? Do you feel like, you know, the ways that we thought of things? I mean, Arthur C. Clark is famous in 2001 for, you know, predicting many, many things. But, you know, the same could be said of the Simpsons. You know, they predicted about, have a very good track rate, including an episode about a virus pandemic spread by cats, which they call the perfect, the perfect storm. But anyway, yeah, so what is the value of science fiction since our namesake? Yeah, that's a great question, really. I think, The more foundational answer would begin with what's the value of storytelling at all.

So there is a branch of evolutionary psychology that studies literature. You know, why is it certain themes come up over and over and over in pretty much all great novels and works of fiction? Really related to human nature, you know, power struggles, status, sex, you know, all the gossip that goes around what people are doing and who's sleeping with who and who. you know, who has power, who's honest, who's deceptive, who you can trust, who you can't. So there's quite evolutionary reasons why gossip is, you know, structured around those particular themes, because they really have a lot of consequences for survival of both individuals and group cohesiveness. And stories then are kind of tapping into that, those sort of gossip themes that come up and over and over. Just think of, you know, any of Shake Bears' plays or Jane Austen novels.

You know, they're very much about human relationships and sex and power. And so, but one theory of the origins of storytelling is that it's a way of like a thought experiment in your head of counterfactual reasoning that helps you understand causal relationships in the real world by running them through your head initially to see what you think might happen. before you actually do it, which could have real world bad consequences to take you out of the beam pool. Running the experiments, you know, because if I do this, then she's going to do that. And if I say this, then he'll say that. And so on. One theory about the origin of storytelling is that it's an involved mechanism for social cohesiveness involving human relationships and interactions that are potentially high in conflict.

So, you know, just think of a Jane Austen novel where you get this kind of meta-medic, a structure of, you know, he thought that she was going to think that he might go to the dance with this woman instead of, but he knew that she was thinking that he might do, you know, and that kind of meta reasoning is a kind of, it's a story, but it's also a way of a thought experiment, like, okay, what should I do down the line? Well, I better, like a test player, back it up several moves to see which the consequences will be with the first move. Yeah, and so on. So I think what science fiction writers are doing is pretty much that, but they're doing it forward, you know, into the future based on what we know about science,

which, of course, is why I prefer science fiction to other forms of fiction, just because I love science. And in a way, it's a way of, you know, telling a story about what could happen. And I find science fiction writers to be even more prescient than scientists on a lot of these things, because they have to work it out in a plot, you know, in which you have character development and plot development and a narrative arc that has to go somewhere.

So science fiction writers, I think, run those thought experiments more carefully than scientists do because they have to keep a coherent narrative going that makes sense to them. And therefore, I think people like Arthur C. Clark or David Brennan and others, you know, they're really well worth reading,

both their fiction and their fiction and their nonfiction. Because even when they're writing, like when David writes his nonfiction essays and books, David Bryn, you know, I know he's really insightful in terms of creating these fictional stories so he knows how to think through a thought experiment way down the line.

Right. What the consequences might be. So he's worth listening to. Save now at Whole Foods Market. It's the summer splash event. With great everyday prices on 365 brand ground beef for the grill and ice cream for dessert, They have yellow sales signs on ready to cook beef or chicken kebabs too.

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If you wanted to reduce the carnage of automobile deaths 35,000 a year, reduce the speed limit to 25 miles an hour. Right. Well, no way. We're not doing that. Okay. Well, and then I guess life is not infinitely precious. Right.

Or limit abortion. You know, we make these decisions all the time. And, you know, insurance companies, they know the value of a life because they have to pay out or automobile companies that have to pay off a settlement. You know, what's the life, what's the value of the life of the person that was killed by the car or whatever? You know, judges, juries, insurance companies, they put a price. You know, it's like $1.3 million per life, whatever. So that's already been done. We do that all the time.

And, of course, the thing we're in the middle of right now is, you know, the economic shutdown. down and everyone's, Toby, Toby Young wrote an article about this and got hammered on Twitter yesterday for this, just bringing it up, like, maybe shutting down the economy indefinitely is not a good idea because people could die from other causes having to do with, you know, lack of food or, or, you know, housing, and, you know, without any income at all, you can't pay your bills, and at what point, you can't get food. Suicide. Depression.

Domestic violence, apparently is a little uptick. that in the last week or two. So, you know, it should be okay, back to our free speech. It should be okay to bring that up. I get hammered as being, you know, insensitive to human life. Of course, we would all prefer nobody dies from the coronavirus, just like we would. Nobody dies from the flu. But people do die of the flu. And we're willing to, you know, accept a certain level of that, but because we're used to it. So in terms of, you know, silver, I don't know, I suspect that, greetings will change, you know, we'll all be doing the yoga bow or the Japanese bow instead, or maybe the elbow bump rather than the handshake. You know, that, you know, I don't care.

I can live with that. You know, as for other things, I don't think anybody knows. It's too soon to tell. Yeah, I always point out, you know, I believe that the origin of their handshake with your right hand originates from the fact that people, when they are armed, the dominant armed predominantly in society was the right hand. so you were showing that you weren't armed. So, you know, note what better outcome could there be. Yeah. I want to take a detour to talk about back to book writing and your process. We have a lot of writers.

We host the clarion science fiction workshop every summer at UCSD. I believe this year will be probably virtual, but there might be hope that it could be in person. And that's, you know, a lot of listeners are interested in your craft as a writer. And you got into this a little bit that you write every day, But can you take us through like a normal day? I mean, you're very busy as a professor. You do your family obligation. You have a young son at home as well as a home life with your wife.

But yeah, so what is your craft like? How do you actually maintain productivity? I don't really have a said schedule all that much. I pretty much right in the afternoons. I usually work out in the mornings or take my dog for a hike and go for a bike ride and take care of business elsewhere. And, you know, for a couple hours a day I try to write. It depends on, of course, where I'm at.

Right now, I'm just promoting this book. Yeah. I'm not writing another book. There's no secret typing here. No keyboard here. I'm writing the next book. I'm always thinking about what I should write next. And that depends on what might be the market interest in such a thing.

And I don't just mean marketing as in money. I mean reader interest. What do people care about? And then what am I passionate about? what do I really want to spend the next couple of years, reading about, thinking about, writing about, talking about. And so, but just to kind of take a bigger picture, you know, I was always interested in the big question. So when I became a born and Christian, I was 17 in high school, then I went to Pepperdine to major in theology. I was really interested in, A, being a college professor, because it seemed like a great gig, right?

Oh, yeah. You get paid to speak and write and talk and think big ideas. Do you know what Neil Armstrong did, by the way, after he came back? eventually after he came back from landing on the moon. Yeah, wasn't he a professor? He became a college professor, yeah. Cincinnati, I think, yeah. But yes, that's right.

So that shows you we're in a very esteemed profession, right? I like the life. You know, it's great. But what was it going to say about that? You're talking about when you graduate with Pepper after you're born again? Oh, yeah. So I was always interested in the big questions.

Like, is there a God, you know, what about free will and determinism? moral questions. And it seemed like the theologians were really interested in these things. Well, I'll be a professor of theology, right? And, but at Pepperdine, I found out, you know, that, well, what do you got to do to be a college professor? You have to a PhD. Okay, what do I have to do a PhD in theology? Where you got to master Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin. And I could barely get through Spanish. I thought, oh, boy, I got to switch to something I could do, which, you know, I was pretty good at science, math, statistics, and so I went into social sciences.

But I still like the big ideas. And so when I abandoned religion, for various reasons, I was still interested in, okay, well, what is the origin of the unit? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a God or not? Why is the universe finely tuned? What is the basis of consciousness? Where does our moral sense come from? You know, are we strictly electric meat determined like a machine, like a cockroach, or is there some element of free will in there,

volition or whatever? All of those questions. you know, all the way up to abortion and, and foreign policy and immigration and so on. I always try to bring to it a scientific perspective from a secular perspective because I don't believe anymore. But I'm still want to know, well, you know, what's the answer? Maybe there isn't an answer, but, you know, what's my answer in my head based on what other people think that are smarter than me? There's a lot of them. So my writing is pretty much around that.

You know, white people believe weird things was about, you know, paranormal, the supernatural, control and so on. So I debunk that and then how we believe the second book was, well, what about God? So religious beliefs and so on. And then, well, if there's no God, then what about morality? So the science of good and evil is the third book. So my book kind of build on just topics I think are important that everybody's interested in and that I care about, that I want to know what the answer is, which is why, you know, I was really appreciative of you correcting me on some of the stuff in that chapter on why there's something rather than nothing. I just want to know. I don't have an agenda. I just want to know what was the answer. And if there's no answer, okay, that's okay, too.

Right. Like the afterlife, you know, my previous book, Heavens on Earth, I don't know. Yeah. So I saw that bumper sticker once and said, militant agnostic. I don't know and you don't either. That's right. And I'll, I'll fight you to the death for our media, our media, splitting the difference. I want to talk more about teaching as a professor. So let me first ask you a devilish question. Do you think tenure is necessary? Now, I'm sitting here, thank God, I am a professor of tenure long ago, and I don't take that for granted in the bit. I think it's the greatest, I always say it's the greatest three-hour week job in the world. But no, it's actually a lot more than that, as you know. It's the autonomy that you have. That's right. Yeah, it's the freedom to be

an intellect. And I think that that vignette that you were just mentioning that we corresponded about, you know, misconceptions that you might have had and I might have had, I think a scholar such as yourself is distinguished by the fact that he or she will be open to just learning and to being a good student. And to that end, I want to talk a little bit about teaching and learning. But first, with that provocative question, do you feel that tenure is necessary in today's modern age? Do you think it's a valuable it's the only field that that has permanent, you know, one of my colleagues said, be careful when you hire somebody on a search committee because, you know, it's not like

getting married. You can always get divorced. But with tenure, it's for life, whether you're like it or not. Thank God. I love all my colleagues. I'd never want to divorce a single one of them. But do you think it's necessary in the physical science or in the social science? What's your feeling? Well, I used to think it was not necessary anymore because the original reason to set it up was more because of the fear of right-wing forces suppressing the speech of liberal professors. And that was the case, say, in the 40s and 50s, maybe into the 60s. But then that kind of all loosened up. And I thought, well, there's really not much need for tenure anymore.

I mean, professors are pretty free to speak and say whatever they want. What's the problem? But now we have the opposite, where, you know, professors are censored by, you know, the political, correct, you know, social justice activists and so on. This whole identity politics thing is causing a lot of. professors to have to go into the closet. I don't just mean conservatives, but I mean dissentrists or people that are critical of the far left, they feel like they could be under attack, lose their jobs if they don't have tenure. So maybe we still need tenure. I don't know.

But I mean, that's kind of a broad question. I think a simpler solution would be just instead of it being a social norm that everybody practices, just let universities do whatever they want, much like law firms, you know, that you want to make, you want to make, you want to make, you want to partner, that's kind of the goal, which is a kind of a tenure for lawyers. But it's sort of institutional-wide. And I think they've handled that pretty well, maybe, but doctors don't have the equivalent, medical doctors don't have the equivalent of partnership, except ownership of their practice, something like that.

It's slightly different than tenure. So I would say, you know, leave it up to the universities to decide, you know, what works for them. Of course, with public universities, and it's more of a government decision. But, you know, I mentioned I went to Pepperdine. know, it's a Church of Christ School, religious. They don't require their professors to swear by any faith, as far as I know. You know, and I would love to teach there.

It's in Malibu. You know, it's a beautiful campus. It's much closer than Chapman to me from Santa Barbara, where I live now. But, you know, it would be their right to not hire me. Right. I wouldn't feel like I was being discriminated against not being hired because it's in their mission statement. You know, they're at Christian University. Why the hell would you hire an atheist?

me. Well, maybe they want to, just as a devil's advocate, it's a good way to teach their students how the other side thinks. Affirmative action. Yeah, it's a kind of diversity of affirmative action, I suppose. But I wouldn't feel like I was being cheated out of a job opportunity and being discriminated against because that's their mission statement. But that's a private university. So that's different. If you applied to work at Yeshiva University in New York, you're not a rabbi. It would be very different, although they have people that aren't Jewish that are professors there. So, Right, so belief, but you're right, it's sort of be, you know, it'd be harder to justify in some sense. But I still think it could make sense.

I mean, there are people, I mean, we have a Nazarene school here, Point Loma, Nazarene in San Diego. I've been there to speak, beautiful campus also. These, these, you know, these Christian schools are just so phenomenal. But, yes, I think it's what interests me the most is sort of your teaching style. And one thing that struck me as a professor, and maybe this is obvious to my undergraduates, but I was never taught how to be a professor. It's sort of, you know, oh, you're smart and you did some, you know, abstract, abstruse research. So you must be really good at teaching.

I mean, they're really different skills in the meta skills set. Totally. Totally different. And so I want to know how can you, well, I'm going to get to my big question, which I ask all the thinkers that come on my show later on. But can you teach someone to be a good teacher? So the question I'll ask later on is, you know, can you? you teach someone to be creative and is creativity inborn or is it sort of or is it possible

to acquire? Well, I'll answer that at the end of the show. But for now, what about teaching? What are the necessary ingredients to be a teacher that's... Well, I think like most of us, we just have mentors that we admired that inspired us as teachers. Like, I'd like to be like, like that guy. That guy really changed my life. That's how I felt. Like, I want to be like him. Now, I think there's some temperament to it. I mean, some people are super shy, super introverted. You know, maybe they're going to have a harder time entertaining a, you know, a classroom full of kids.

Right. But that doesn't mean they have to be bad teachers. They may be boring, but you can, you can teach certain skills. Like, you know, there's all sorts of tutorials about how to build a proper PowerPoint keynote presentation, certain do's and don'ts. That's pretty straightforward. But, you know, just sort of the emotionally engaged professor with students, you know, that's hard to quantify.

Right. I mean, some people have it. Some people don't. Yeah. you know, I don't know how you bottle that because that has to do with more of somebody's personality. And we all know there's a huge variation there. We've all had super inspirational professors and others that are incredibly boring. It is a little odd in the academy that, again, you go through all these training programs of how to be a researcher, like in your case,

how to be a professional scientist and published in scholarly journals. And you've had tons of instructions on that as well as modeling. And then you get hired and they go, okay, now go teach. No one's ever told you, well, how do I do that? So you think back, well, I had this great professor. I'm going to do what he did. Something like it's sort of all you can do is model. Well, what I found so interesting is, and I think it's the only place in the entire, you know,

there's a federal register of approved documents. So it includes, you know, like the handbook for working, I don't know, at the IRS, you know, collecting taxes. It's a handbook for this. And there's a handbook because flight instruction, it requires a federal certification. So in the whole hierarchy of government jobs and bean counters to, to, you know, tax collectors to whatever centers for disease control workers, there is a single instance of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it occurs in the flight instructor's handbook from the federal aviation

administration. I'm studying to become a flight instructor. I'm a commercial pilot. I fly a lot, as you know. And one thing I'd love to, you know, kind of pick your brain on is we don't even even get like the remedial sense of this. Now in an airplane cockpit, you know, I've known for, because I had to be a student and to become a flight instructor, you have to be a student, you have to be a pilot, you have to be commercially rated, et cetera, et cetera. It still doesn't guarantee you could be a good teacher. He could be Chuck Yeager. He might not have been a great flight instructor. But nevertheless, there's sort of a basic level of the understanding of needs and purpose. And I'd like to connect that to chapter 10 in your book. Does the universe have a purpose? And its subtitle is

Alvy's error and the meaning of life. So those of you who will remember the wonderful film Annie Hall, there's a character, Alvey Singer, who's Woody Allen's character. And he's another devil, right? I mean, Woody Allen has to be a devil nowadays. But anyway, he complains to his doctor. His mother comes to take him to a psychiatrist and says he complains to the doctor, the universe is expanding.

Well, the universe is expanding, and if it's expanding someday, it'll break apart. And that'll be the end of everything. His exasperated mother upbraids the youth. What is the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn's not expanding. And so you call this Alvi's Err, and that's the er, you know, sort of ascribing teleological meaning and purpose to life.

And you and I have this interesting connection that we're both sort of irritated in a good way by the famous theologian William Lane Craig. In fact, the only reason I was on Ben Shapiro's show is that William Lane Craig was on his show. And I wanted to kind of point out some of the category errors and other, you know, claims that he had made that I found suspect and wanted to sort of correct, namely, you know, this kind of first cause. It's always the same with, with theologians, you know, which I have great respect for, you know, that the universe must have had a beginner. And because it must have had a beginner, you know, that suggests a designer, creator, came into existence, nothing

that exists. The cosmological argument. And then it goes to the, but it always ends up with Jesus and as a practicing Jew, you know, I wanted to kind of take it, take the angle and get into that from a Jewish perspective. So that was my, you know, it was my take on things that I discussed with Ben on his show. And actually, you were one of Ben's first guests back in episode six of his show. And you discussed the multiverse, et cetera. And actually, Ben gave me a shout out during that episode that they would have, you guys should consult to me. And that was, that was really cute to be associated. But I want to talk about this notion of purpose. And, And you talk about Alvi's error.

So can you describe what you mean by Alvi's error? Yeah, well, you mentioned the category error, or you might call it a levels error, that, you know, the theologian is operating at some long time scale, like, you know, like Craig argued, if it, if in a billion years from now, there's no earth, and in 20 billion years, the universe will be gone, whatever, what difference does it make how I treat somebody tomorrow? Right. You know, wrong level, okay?

it matters to the person being affected by you tomorrow. It matters to me how I'm treated. And I don't care if in a billion, I'm not living a billion years from now. You know, I live in Brooklyn. The universe is, Brooklyn's not expanding, right? So,

and that kind of error pervades a lot of just common thinking about what's the purpose of life. I think most people haven't given it that much thought. You know, they just sort of inculcate what they were raised with, usually their religion, because, you know, religion has sort of had a monopoly. on this question, and scientists were supposed to stay out of that.

You know, non-overlapping magisteria, Noma, you know, Gould's famous Noma, you know, that's not a your business scientist, you know, this is what theologians do. Stay in your lane, right? Stay in your lane, right? Well, I think this is crazy. Of course, scientists can have something to say about this. And even if you end up at some epistemological wall, say, between you and William Lane Craig on what you mean by the first moment or what was there

before the Big Bang. At some point, the further back we go, we're just going to hit a wall. There's nothing more to say. We just don't know anymore. Right. Or even some concepts like I struggle with in that chapter on why there's something rather than nothing,

would you virtually correct me on something? But just the idea of nothing, you know, if you keep drilling down to the nothing, you know, not just no stuff in the universe, no stars and planets and people and so on, but no light, no space in time. there's not even darkness because darkness would imply that there's light somewhere, but there can't, there's no lights and there's no darkness. And there's not even nothing to be nothing. I mean, it's just a word we use. And therefore, there's also no platonic categories. There's no logic. There's no mathematics. There's no concepts of beauty or truth that exists separate from beauty and truthful things. And therefore, there can't even be a God. I mean, the moment you say, well, there's this God that lives outside of nothing. No. That's the, that's it. That's, That's not even possible by that particular category.

You're making another category error. You know, well, there was no universe and then there was. Well, where was he Godstanding? Right. And then on the other side, the devil is due, you know, the Lawrence Krause's of the world will say, oh, the laws of physics, well, where do they come from? And where did the quantum vacuum come from? And from whose perspective are we looking at the universe sort of externally from to

populate and create the multiverse, which is sort of a long chain in the anthropic line of argument. But I want to talk a little bit, you know, which relies on that. But let me just say parenthetically that, you know, after my conversations with you, I mean, I really kind of felt I understood in my mind that at some point, we all just have to say, I don't know, nobody knows. And this may be, I don't know if you want to go this far, maybe one of these mysterious mysteries where we'll never have an answer to it. Right. Because you get, there's always some regress, you know, where did the multiverse come from, you know, right, whatever. And that, you know, at some point, you know, we just have a brain this size that uses abstract concepts in a certain way because of the structure of our world that we evolved in.

And we may just not be able to conceive of something that that far beyond our epistemology. And we just have to say, you know what? Nobody knows. I agree completely. Actually, next week is Passover and I've preloaded a tweet, you know, because I take off from work. I desist from work. So I'm not like the ancient Israelites enslaved and always enslaved to my iPhone or my work, my telescopes. So I preloaded four tweets that I'm going to send out in kind of, you actually go off social media?

I do. I do social media. I don't email. And I actually command, you know, such as I can my graduate students. Because, you know, if you work six days, you know, I work with a billionaire, you know, I'm fortunate to be working with a billionaire patron of my experiment, Jim Simons, who's rumored to be the world's smartest billionaire. And, you know, he also doesn't work seven days a week. And I asked him about that once.

And he sort of came down on the same side that I do. which is if, no matter how much money you have, if you could be a slave to many different, you know, we call tithas in Hebrew, you know, just addictions that are, they're not harmful. I mean, they're not like, you know, doing needle drugs or something like that. It's, you know, I'm teaching, advising my students, but to be on all the time.

And part of the meaning of the word Sabbath in Hebrew means a refreshing rest. You know, it's almost like a pause that refreshes, that old soda jingle from the 70s. But it is actually an active rest. In other words, you're actually working to rejuvenate your soul, And I feel like everybody, you know, Ben Shapiro joke recently, like we're all, we're all orthodox now, you know, with COVID lockdown. We can't do the thing. We can't drive.

We can't go anywhere. But getting a taste of it, there are actually green shoots, I think, spending more time with my wife and kids and actually deep, you know, advising of my graduate students that I just don't have time for during the normal times. And I just, you know, I feel like that is, that has been refreshing. And that to me is interesting. But, you know, maybe that's, maybe that's the answer to your question. about the long-term consequences of the pandemic. Maybe we'll all sort of build into our weeks a day of isolation. Yeah.

I mean, we didn't appreciate what we had. One of my friends tweeted out this long list of things for herself or on Facebook, rather, so that a year from now it'll come up in her feed, you know, a year ago, memories from this time. And I'll say, like, you couldn't go to the supermarket without standing on tape markers that were six feet apart. It's just inconceivable that we're... But getting back to what you said, these infinite regresses.

I find them very delicious. And my four questions, you know, the famous four questions on Passover, you know, why is this night different from other nights and the different children that ask these questions? It's meant to stimulate inquiry. And my four questions, and I'm curious, what are your four questions along this line? Mine are, you know, how did the universe emerge? How did something come from nothing?

I think that might be one of these chicken or egg questions. And I realize all of my questions are basically that. In other words, how did life originate from, you know, how did we get from protons and neutrons to croutons, you know, from inanimate things to things at life. And then and then from croutons, you know, from bacharya to bach. And then, you know, and then really into consciousness. And is there an ultimate end? Are we alone?

And all these are chicken or the, and I think that comfort, that level of intellectual facility. I'm not saying I exemplify it, but I think you do. And that's to you're comfortable not saying I know the answer. Like, I don't know. It's okay to say, I don't know. And I think in these times, everybody wants answers. When is this going to be over? When are we going to defeat this?

And it's not like a military battle. You knew when you'd win or lose. Now it's like we have this indefinite sentence against an literal invisible foe. And we don't know when it will end or if it will end, but we know life will be changed forever. I think this will be kind of, I think Ed Young said, you know, this will be Generation C instead of Generation X, Y, or Z. The COVID generation might change things even more. So we're coming to the end. I'm going to be leaving soon.

I know you have some commitments, but I wanted to finish up with a couple of quick points. One thing I've always wanted, you know, you mentioned this a lot. And just as a philosophical, you know, it's rare I get the chance to pick your brain for so much time. And so I want to take advantage of it. Frequently in the book and elsewhere,

you referenced Carl Sagan and this quip, which I didn't know was not his originally, but that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You taught me somebody else actually. Yeah, Martello-Truzi, actually coined something. But it wasn't as artfully put slightly longer, and he wasn't as well-known. So you get two effects.

One, a sharper, shorter quip is more likely to migrate up. And there's that phenomenon of quotes migrate up to the most famous person who ever said him. As Yogi Berra said, I didn't say half the things I said. Yeah, that's right. It's usually Yogi Berra or Mark Twain and, you know, there's a handful of others. Right. George Bernard Shaw. Yeah, exactly.

But, you know, the way Carl put it, I thought it was more succinct. And of course he said it, you know, in Cosmos, you know, that half a billion people saw. So, of course, that has an effect as well. But it was really first articulated by David Hume in his treaties on miracles that a man should proportion to the evidence. Proportion to believe in the evidence. So the principle proportionality, you should, you know, adjust, as we would say, in Bayesian reasoning, adjust your creeds based on the adjustment of the priors. and those are always changing, right?

So, you know, an ordinary claim requires ordinary evidence. You know, if I say, well, I took the one, this is my example, I took the 101 freeway south to the 118 of the 23, and I went down and ended up at Chapman. But by the way, at the junction of the 23 and the 101, I was abducted by aliens, and we went to the Pleiades, and I met the Pleadians who warned me to warn the earthlings about global warming. Okay, which part of that story needs extraordinary evidence?

Okay, right, obviously. you know, and that's, you know, a basic principle of all, you know, critical thinking and reasoning like a scientist is, you know, well, what's the evidence? And the more extraordinary the claim, you know, the resurrection of Jesus from the grave, you know, 100 billion people have lived and died before the 7.5 billion people alive today. Not one of them has come back from the dead, except for maybe one, maybe. Is the evidence that would, that's 100 billion to one miracle, okay? Are the, is the evidence a hundred billion to one stronger for that than other claims about what happened in the Roman Empire about that time? No. And that's what I'm getting at, really. Just the short, you know, little umbrage that I take at it. You know, there's, there's evidence, but it's not like, oh, I'm going to go to my telescope and now I'm going to get some extraordinary evidence. I mean, usually it's, it's, it's in quality or in quantity. In other words, there's either statistical, you know, or systematic sort of uncertainty associated with data. And, you know, so if a hundred million, a million people said the same thing happen, would that make you believe in one specific person? Yeah. So you have to adjust your prior.

to do that. But I think, you know, maybe my broader point is that we do have sort of this culture that now, with the decline of religion and the rise of the nuns, as your former guest, Zuckerman, Phil Zuckerman, I think is. Bill, yeah, that he talks about documented at Pitzer College, you know, that are we substituting science and even scientists as sort of idols? I make the case in my book, losing the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize to a scientist. You almost can't read a book. In fact, your book has, you know, half a dozen mentions of just the words Nobel Prize, and that's fine. But we kind of use it as this imprimatur. And I always point, you know, there's 400, you know, guys in Sweden that decide this every year. And not taking anything away from the winners because they don't choose to win it. That's actually the only stipulation you can't nominate yourself. So I always point out that reduced the challenge by one person out of, you know, seven billion when I had to nominate people.

But the point is, you know, we kind of want people. We need, as you quote, also in this book, you know, it's really so uncanny how you, you know, you came into my dreams and you, and you extracted all these things out of my mind. But one of the things that I always talk about is the scene from a few good men where Jack Nicholson basically comes down, you know, you can't handle the truth, you know, which my father you see. He should have said it literate. It should have been illiterate. It should have said, you can't take the truth. But it'll be that as it may. I think Rainer knew what he was doing, right?

But the point is like, you need me on that wall. You want me on that wall because, you know, who's going to do it you? And I think people in society, the more educated but not scientifically educated, this is more true. They want, you know, these kind of fifth-degree black belt intellects like the Nobel laureates, like the Carl Sagan's, etc. And nowadays we're seeing it with like Dr. Fauci, like anything he said, like they'll cut off Trump during his speech, you know. And then they'll immediately breaking news.

we go to, and Fountry's talking about, like, economics, or he doesn't know anything about that. And we have this halo effect. And I wonder, you know, if that extends. I mean, Carl Sagan was a masterful scientific communicator. And he did great science as well. And it's sort of unique, our friend, Neil deGrasse Tyson, he often says, you know, when somebody asked me to comment on some scientific discovery, I don't comment on it. I refer to a real scientist working in that field. He's, of course, an astrophysicist trained, you know, at, you know, to, you know, to, you know, a PhD. But I think the, you know, you know, the, you know, you know, the, you know, you know, the, you know, you know, the. You know, you know, you know, you know, the. But I think the. You know, you know, you know, you know, the. point is we tend to really want to, you know, line eyes and regard scientists. And I wonder, do you feel like that is a consequence just from your observations of the decline of religion that science and scientists in particular have taken on this sort of outsized role, which, you know, I naively will benefit from, right? This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find

and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream. Yeah, interesting. Maybe. I mean, I think there's several things that could come of the rise of the nuns that really started in the, say, the 60s. One explanation we have for the new agency. movement, the sort of New Age spiritual movement and crystals and astrology and all that psychic stuff was the decline of mainstream religion. It was already starting then, not amongst the general population, but just the decline of power and influence of religion, which is why in the 80s, you know, the moral majority rose up. It's like that was a pushback against what was already

happening. They want to get back in the business of having power and control that churches once had in the Middle Ages and early modern period, but we're losing. So, and, and, And I think one explanation for why people like creationists are so obsessed with, you know, getting into science. Because we live in the age of science. If you want to make an argument for a creator, you've got to use the language of scientists. You know, you've got to talk about the fine-tunedness and the Big Bang and all that stuff, or else you're not in the conversation anymore. So I think scientists really have been elevated just in general as a population.

But like when I remember when Stephen Hawking used to come to Caltech every year and he would give a public talk. And, you know, this is in, you know, Beckman Auditorium, 1100 seats, you know, and it was, you know, standing room only, and they were lined up out all afternoon to get in there. And, you know, he gets a standing ovation for showing up. That's incredible. Yeah. And it is not, and, you know, now Sagan commanded audiences like that. But talking even more, because I think of the disease, it was a sense of like this brain,

this just a pure brain. Yeah. You know, there's no body, just a pure brain of just pure thought. Yeah. And, you know, so I get that, you know, it's a, it's a kind of, you know, deification. Yeah, there is a, there's a Hubble Fellowship at the, that NASA puts out the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowship. There's an Einstein fellowship. And there's a Sagan Fellowship, you know. Oh, there is. I didn't know that. Yeah. So, this is for, you know, astrobiology and stellar astrophysics and all the good things that he worked in.

You know, I wrote a paper on the Sagan effect, which I actually looked at. if there was such a thing as a Sagan effect. The second effect is if you start popularizing science, your real science productivity will go down. Nope, not in the case of Sagan. Nor with Gould, they were both,

I think they both pushed over 500 peer-reviewed published journal articles, although, to be fair, a lot of Sagan's were in, you know, were NASA publications. That is to say NASA produced, so that it was him and 500 other scientists or whatever.

But still, he was, you know, productively active in there, so you can do both. Yeah, I hope so. But I think just to say that because we're recording this Cosmos is airing season three now, the second one of the reboot with Neil. And, you know, there's a, you know, And Drian is definitely written kind of a spirituality

into the whole cosmic story, which is all science. But underlying it, and it's rather poetic writing, you know, most of what Neil says is, you know, And Dreen's words. That's right. And, you know, there's, in a way, I think science is our mythic story about who we are, where we came from, where we're going, what it all means. You know, and everybody knows that, which is why, again, theologians, creationists, everybody, you know, they kind of come to you to say, what are my best arguments for God's existence? I can't just use Anselm's arguments anymore. I need the big bang. Updated. I need, I need, I need, inflationary cosmology. How can I build this into my

And it's funny because I told you on the podcast we recorded for a science salon, you know, on the day that Bicep 2, the experiment that I helped co-create announced that we had discovered evidence, you know, direct evidence for inflation, you know, both the Discovery Institute and Lawrence Krause, you know, took completely diametrically. They both agreed we were going to win Nobel Prizes. But where they disagreed is, you know, one said this is clear evidence for the fine tuning and the existence of God. And the other one said this is the exam. the evidence max tag mark and others you know that we don't need it's krause always calls a supernatural you know shenanigans or whatever but getting to religion and i want to conclude uh first let me conclude actually i'm going to take this around maybe we'll edit it maybe we won't it's kind of fun just to go all around with you uh and and kind of uh just riff and and you talk about uh going on a going on a version of a of a hitchins uh century mile you know ride uh but it was regarding drinking in the book i won't spoil it for the readers but you should you should get the book just for the, just for the, uh,

hit stories, hitch stories, which are, you know, I miss him. He was quite a character. I never met him. I had the chance, you know,

to hear him, but I, I, yeah, it's just take advantage of everybody, take advantage of chances you have to hear of the great minds. Uh, so let me go from,

or we just discussed God and religion. I want to talk about the origin of the name of this podcast is, uh, into the impossible. And that comes from, uh, uh, what are known as Arthur C.

Clark's, uh, three laws. And so he says, Clark's first law is that when distinguished but elderly scientists states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. Nowadays, we'd say he or she. When he or she states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. That's Clark's number one law. Number two is where we get our name for the podcast.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the name of our podcast. And then there is Clark's third law. which connects to Shermer's last law, and that is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I want to just give you the opportunity. Can you explain what is Shermer's last law? Now, you kind of named it after yourself, but it's just a joke. You did so with great humility. I don't think, yeah, you're vanglorious enough to it.

But it actually has some resonance to this. So can you explain what Shermer's last law? Yeah, of course, I was aware of Clark's three laws going all the way back to being in college because he was such a which an icon for so many of us getting started in the sciences. But his third law I always liked because it's a great example of when I say there's no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. It's just what appears to be that because we don't have an explanation for it yet, such that, in the current example I use of this, is that paraplegic guy that, no, he's a quadriplegic

that has a chip in his motor cortex and he can control. the cursor on his computer and he can do emails and play video games and whatnot just by thinking. Now, if you don't know about the chip in the brain, it looks like he has telekinesis. He's moving things with his thoughts, right? So, you know, I can imagine a time, sort of like a Michi Okaku, the future of the brain where, you know, we all have these chips and computers and we're wirelessly connected to the internet. You walk into your house and you just think, Mozart, and Mozart comes on. Much like today we go, Alexa, play Mozart. Yeah.

Mozart comes on. It just set off a thousand Alexas around the world. Yeah, that's really funny. And so something like that. So then I got to thinking about that in the context of SETI and the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence. Now, my connection there professionally is, you know, debunking the ufologists and alien abductees and all that stuff, and debunking explaining. But as you know, real science, you know, are they out there? And have they come here, two separate questions. Are they out there?

Well, as, you know, everybody knows, scientists know, they're not going to be just like us. know, like bipedal primates, you know, speaking English with a weird accent with gnarly stuff on the forehead, like on Star Trek. You know, these are the limitations of Hollywood wardrobes. But neither are they going to be culturally or scientifically anywhere close to us. You know, so these stories you hear about, you know, the alien craft landed in Roswell and we back engineered silicon chips, you know, which were like five years away otherwise. You know, so the aliens were only five years ahead of us. You know, this is impossible. You know, just because on an evolutionary time scale, the chances of a, you know, but alien species evolving lockstep with us, you know, and some other part of the galaxy perfectly within a few years is, you know,

zilch, right? They're going to either be way behind us, in which case we'll never encounter them, because, you know, they're not going to have radio technology or spaceships, unless we go there. Or they're going to be ahead of us. How far ahead of us? You know, 100,000 years, a million years, a billion years, you know. Look what we've accomplished Moore's Law and so on,

just in the last century. extrapolate that out. They will be godlike to us. This idea is not original to me. Science fiction writers have played with this for a long time. But I just codified it, linking it to Clark's third law by calling it Schumer's last law because I'm never going to name a law for myself. It's just a tongue-and-peak thing.

But the point is that, you know, the future of, you know, what we will be, and you can also apply this to far future humans. Yeah. You know, like what will the Internet be like in a century from now? Well, hell, no one predicted the Internet just like in 1950s or 60s, right? I mean, you know, took pretty much everybody by surprise, you know, how it evolved. So we just don't know. And when we don't know, it just seems godlike.

Yeah. And that's the point of that. Interesting. So I want to conclude by talking about, well, one last thing about books, I've done it at a commonality. Just want to get your opinion on. So there's a great deal of popularity on social psychology, on books such as yours, Stephen Pinker's, accountants, et cetera. And there's also a tremendous influence. And I think they're outsized in terms of their proportion of scientists that are actually doing the work between the number of books

written by psychologists or social scientists and also astronomers. And I wonder if that's, and I want to get your take on this, maybe it's total nonsense. I don't be afraid to say so. But I think, you know, psychology and astronomy are both the only two sciences, one soft, one hard, I suppose, that can be done with the tools and experimental equipment that one is born with, namely psychology and astronomy done with your eyeballs, which I always point out, two refracting telescopes and really nothing more. And yeah, I just wonder, you know, there's a surge in popularity of books such as yours and your friend Stephen Pinker. I should read his blurb, which because it's quite voluminous and its praise. And Michael Shermer is our foremost explorer of

alternative crackpot and dangerous ideas. And at the same time, one of our most powerful voices for science, sanity, and humane values. In this engrossing collection, Schumer shows why these missions are consistent. It's a searchlight of reason that best exposes errors and evil. And I think you guys have very common themes in some of your other books. But I think what distinguishes you is that you're kind of a little bit broader that you really go into territory, the physical sciences, and and explore things in a little bit more detail. Although I should point out, both of you guys are really outstanding teachers. And he has a free course or a course that's his Harvard University course on rationality,

which I've been watching along with my kids and my nieces and nephews. And that's called rationality. And I urge people to go out and listen to it because he's got some of the greatest minds and he is one of our greatest minds. And he's also one of these devils, right, that isn't afraid to take a side that's controversial that could get him into trouble, but he goes where reason sort of impels him to go. He's fearless. Steve is fearless, and he's a great writer. You know, great writing still makes a difference. And I love seeing that books like Steve's and Richard Dawkins, for example, Steve Gold is a

great writer. And, you know, it's interesting. You mentioned about, you know, astronomy books or whatever. You know, when I was, say, in high school and college, it seemed like the most popular science books were astronomy books. Yeah. And I don't recall there being, you know, any psych books, maybe B. F. Skinner, perhaps. He did this beyond freedom and dignity and Walden's, yeah, Walden's, no, yeah, Walden's Pond, too. Oh, right. Yeah, he had a second one.

Anyway, but, but I think we're seeing the rise now more of this because people, because it's becoming more recognizable that the methods of science can be applied to these social questions, political questions, and questions of, you know, race and economics and policy and consciousness. I mean, you know, the study of consciousness, that really didn't even begin to the late 90s. Right. You know, when Francis Crick said, it's okay to study the mind. It's like, oh, Francis Crick. Well, he won the Nobel Prize, you know, for his working genetic. So he said it's just okay.

So it must be okay. You know, and then, you know, Christopher Fox was collaborator. And then Dan Dennett writes books on this. And pretty soon, you know, the study of consciousness is no longer a woo-woo thing. it's now a scientific. So I think that's happening everywhere. I'm trying to push it into moral questions, you know, that scientists, science, if it can't determine human values, it can certainly inform them. And that that has to be okay. And that, you know, as I chapter in giving the devil is due, Mr. Hume tear down this wall. You know, this wall separating is

an odd, this so-called naturalistic fallacy, which I think is something of a fallacy. Though technically my philosopher friends, and I'm not a philosopher telling me I did, I still haven't quite done it. But my point is that, you know, just saying, you know, just punting the ball down the field and saying, well, we scientists, we have nothing to say about morals and values and purpose in life. That's for the theologians. Bullshit. Come on. It's okay for scientists to at least have an opinion and make a rational argument and put forth some empirical ideas, data about it. We should be forbidden to do so, right? Yeah. Very good. So I want to, I put out on Twitter and Facebook an invitation to fans of the podcast to submit some questions. We don't have too much

time, but I did get a couple that I wanted to highlight. One was by an anonymous listener who wanted to know what is your perspective of kind of the future of skepticism. Looking at videos, this person feels that you tend to see a lot of white-haired, you know, old white men, the dreaded old white men in the audience. And I'm wondering, where do you see the kind of ability of skepticism to sort of transcend demographic bounds? Yeah, that person is probably referring to the so-called skeptical movement, which sort of officially began in the 70s with Psychop, the Committee for the Scientific

Investigation of Claims of the paranormal, never the best title. Now shortened to CFI Center for Inquiry. you know, James Randy, Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, Martin Gardner, you know, all, you know, basically responding to the New Age movement. And people like Uri Geller bending spoons and psychics and astrology and all that stuff, they were worried about, you know, what this was having an effect on education and policy and whatnot. And so that was definitely for decades, you know, sort of an old white guys movement, as was so many of these kind of movements at the time. now things are thankfully changing. You see a lot more women at these events and a lot more people of color, although it's still pretty heavily slanted.

But I prefer to not really think of it myself as part of the skeptics movement. I'd rather broaden it. It's sort of scientific humanism or enlightenment humanism. And I don't use secular humanism anymore for this reason, because it really began in the 1930s and it was very much a far-left liberal political movement. you know, for good causes, you know, reproductive rights for women and civil rights for minorities and all this, all this good stuff. But then by the 80s and 90s, it became like, well, if you don't tick these 12 boxes of our political beliefs, you're not a humanist. It's like, I only tick like half

those boxes. You know, I'm socially liberal, but I'm kind of fiscally conservative. And it depends. I'm sort of, you know, you know, an issues guy. Tell me the issue. And I'll tell you. No, no, no. This is the whole set. If you don't believe all of them, you're out. And it's like, okay, that's not for me. All right. Thinking. Kind of what happened to the skeptics movement and also the atheist movement after Richard's book 2006, The God Delusion, it kind of was a split between the militant atheists

and sort of moderate atheists or agnostic and skeptics or whatever. And it's like if you're not militant like Hitt or Richard Dawkins, then you're not a true atheist. Like, okay, guys, there's not that many of us. Okay. So, you know, started kicking people out of the club is not the best strategy, right? Right, yeah. And I think this happens with all social movements, you know,

the sort of purification of, you know, who's not towing the line perfectly. I think it's very dangerous. I'd rather go for what I'm calling scientific humanism or enlightenment, humanism in the broadest sense. Everybody should be practice skepticism. That's my course, skepticism one of one. But think like a scientist. Everybody should think like a scientist because we all want to know what's reliable,

valid knowledge that we should embrace and what's not that we should withhold judgment or reject. That question applies to everything. Yeah. I even tell my religious friends and Christians and Muslims and Jews that, you know, if you are, you know, maybe not a scientist, you should not fear science. You should not oppose science because actually science could lead you to a deepening of your understanding, just as steel, sharpened steel. Your arguments, your faith may be strengthened by looking into science.

So certainly there's no need for, you know, even the kind of detente of non-over, overlapping magisteria, but, but even in the case of actively learning about science, not relegating, that's, you know, it's like George Bush was, George Bush Sr. was once asked, you know, like, if you took all the deficit dollars and you stacked them up, how big would they, how long would they travel or something like that? And he was like, oh, don't bother me with, I'm not a math guy. And I would ever say like, oh, don't bother me. I'm not, I'm not a words guy. You know, I don't speak English. You know, I don't understand English or syntax of proper, proper grammar. but there's sort of this discomfort or sometimes a badge of honor i don't understand science you know

that's for those wonky eggheads yeah and so i think you know seeking out uh that diversity of viewpoint is so important and it's one of the things you do extremely well um i want to ask a couple more questions so um one of the uh listeners uh asked me your opinions on on the anti-vaccination crowd are they devils that should be you know listen to in the sense that you know if you don't believe the vaccinations are, if you actually believe the vaccinations are deadly, or cause autism, for example, should you be excluded from the marketplace of ideas? Well, no, not excluded in any legal sense, no censorship for anybody. But, you know, and the voice of people that were skeptical of vaccines was actually heard

in a century ago. You know, there was a great debate in 1890s and early 1900s about the values, a value of vaccinations. and legitimate debates, you know, in the 19th century about, you know, how best to do this, does it really work? Is it really worth the risk and so on? But, you know, as you know, in science, at some point, you know, we kind of reach a consensus, a confilience of inductions, a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry that go, you know what, this is really the best explanation, best theory, the best policy, or whatever, we should go with that. Okay, there's always going to be dissenters. What do you do with them? Well, you don't have to do anything. You just ignore them.

Right. The problem is when they, when they start influencing, the body politic and you get a lot of people that don't vaccinate, then you reach this hurt, you know, you breach the herd immunity and all that, that people are fairly familiar with now. Still, of course, I mean, like this guy who did the autisms linked to vaccinations, his name is escaping me now, but sorry. You know, no, I don't think you should be, you know, censored or jailed or anything like that. But, you know, I think it requires a more stronger voice that we stand up and say, you know, we really need to follow the science.

A Fauci kind of voice, you know, someone that people really trust, which, which I think public intellectuals, such as yourself and Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others, you know, it's important that they speak up and speak truth to power, as they used to say. Right. Because, you know, we live in the age of science and, you know, the fringe voices are, okay, that's good. Let's see what they have to say, but let's put forth their best argument. and then respond and then be done with it.

Okay. Do you feel like that would lead to? I mean, you've written extensively in the moral arc and elsewhere about, you know, the civilizations that are last to adopt, you know, women's rights, gay, lesbian, transgender, right, that those, you know, those are declining. There's very few of those that exist. And do you think that kind of freedom of speech supersedes all of them? In other words, that if you have that, then it would translate into more wider acceptance

in different parts of the world that don't already have. have those freedoms that we now take for granted in the West, at least. Yeah, free speech is, I think, the foundation of all other rights, the right to think and speak what you want, because that's the only way to find out if we're right or wrong about a particular something else having to do with civil rights and civil liberties. And we know this because the first thing that autocrats do is they shut down dissenters. They want to control the press. you know and so by their actions you can tell which is the most important of all the rights

it's the right to speak that's the first one they want to squelch yes and the last question from a friend this is a Bernie Taylor author of a book called before Orion a scholar a naturalist about ancient cave paintings and what he wants to know is is there something deep in the so-called gods of old from really prehistoric times 36,000 years ago, he says, that are projected forward in some sense psychologically. Is there something in the believing brain, as you would say, that compelled the worshippers, you know, my ancient tradition, Judaism and the Judeo-Christian traditions? Is there some embedding of this really paleolithic, you know, in our paleolithic minds that carried forward to the modern or less ancient to the

Bronze Age? Certainly something had to come along with it because they're us. Yeah. Right? The people that made these cape paintings, they're homo sapiens. Their brains are pretty much just like ours with different cultures. So what gets carried forward is probably some foundational structure to cognition that then creates these stories and myths or whatever. You know, I have a chapter in Giving the Devil is due on Graham Hancock, the romance, the romance of the past. And your correspondent there, I think is hinting at that, you know, that's something about the wisdom of the ancient ones. you know, and I think there's something to that in as much as, you know, certain traditions like your own Jewish tradition, you know, they, you know, they experimented with many different things long ago. And so what we find, some of which may have value. Now you have to test each claim to see which has value, but some of them may. I'll give you an example. I just had Brian Green in my podcast with his new book. And, you know, he's an atheist or, doesn't believe in God or whatever.

But, you know, when his father died, he said he really cling to the, you know, sort of Jewish tradition of that Shiva, yeah. Yeah. And that, you know, it's rabbi and, you know, the traditions they went through and all that, that it made him feel like, well, this goes back thousands of years. So it feels deeper to me. Like this is a more meaningful transition for my father and for the rest of us that are still alive, that we have that tradition.

And I joke, you mean like, the Seinfeld Festivist for the rest of us with the metal pole that was invented. George's father, right? That was invented, you know, last Tuesday. That's not going to do it. It doesn't have a sense of gravitas. Yeah. So I do recognize that.

And so in the other chapter in the book about Jordan Peterson, I acknowledge the value of myths and stories that have their own kind of truth. Now, I don't go as far as he does about defining truth that way. But the idea that, you know, novels and ancient religious writings could have, even if they're, whether they're true or not is irrelevant. You know, even whether it's, you know, the Noakian flood and the Ark or Jesus resurrected, none of it could, it's possible, none of it happened, that they're mythic stories that carry some moral homily or some message about, you know, what, bearing your own cross, you know, forgiving people, starting over, you know,

redemption. These are, these are kind of moral truths in a way that I, I think, have value. Yeah, that's stand a test of time, right? Oh, that's, that's interesting. I didn't know that about Brian. I mean, I'll listen to, to, uh, and I'm hoping to get him on the podcast. So if you can reach out to him, that would be great. I will, I will do that because, yeah, he's, he's an interesting guy. So I want to close, uh, with an opportunity I call the, uh, the plug zone. If there are things that you want to plug besides this book. So this is coming out, uh, April 6th, Tuesday, as, as, as all books do. That's Shermer's first law, uh, which is, uh, which is the books always come out on Tuesdays. Actually, interestingly, this one comes out on Thursday, April night, for some weird

reason. Because it's original public, the publishers, Cambridge University Press, and I went through their London office, so they're in England. So for some reason, in England, the Tuesday rule doesn't apply. It's an American rule or something. Okay. So it's not a universal rule. Okay. So, well, you know, it's other than the book. You know, just skeptic.com is the web page of my magazine. Michael hrmer.com is my personal web page and, you know, Amazon. Bookstars are all closed. So, you know, Yeah. Great time to have a nonfiction bookbook. But, of course, Amazon is still delivering.

I read this morning they just hired 80,000 people or something like that. Yeah, that's great. And, of course, the local bookstores, you know, we had hoped to have you here, I should say, for an event. And we will have you here, hopefully in the fall at UCSD. By then, you'll have written three more books, so that'll be nice. Well, we'll all be wearing face masks and gloves. And fist bumping or, you know. Yeah.

Well, I mean, the virus isn't going to go away just because we, all go back to work. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, it'll still be there. Hopefully, we'll have a great breakthrough with my colleagues and their friends around the world working so hard on this. It's really an unprecedented time. So I want to also refer people to the fact that you are, you have courses on the great courses, which can also get through Audible now. They're a sponsor of the Science Salon podcast, which I tune into all the time. The book launch, as we said, and this should air before the book actually launches. And your chat and lectures, And everything. Is there anything else that you want to mention or that I forgot to or maybe something like that.

Yeah, I guess that that that's pretty much it. It's all good. Great. It's so much fun talking to you. I hope you enjoy Santa Barbara weather. Go for a ride. And oh, I've been riding it. I've been riding in isolation. There's no more group rides up here. No group rides anywhere. Somewhere. What do you call that? Peloton. So it's just really. No, no, no way. It's really widely spaced. Oh, those guys, they sweat and spit and, you know, no, you don't want to be anywhere near a Pelot. Well, we'll get you here for a talk in San Diego as soon as we. can. And until then, everyone out there, thank you so much for joining. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to info at imagine.ucsd.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego in the Division of Physical Sciences. Directed by Eric Vary, Brian Keating, and Patrick Coleman, produced by Stuart Volgo.

For more information, go to imagine.ucsd.edu. Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD.