StarTalk Radio - Coronavirus and Conspiracy Theories, with Michael Shermer

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and Michael Shermer, author and Founding Publisher of Skeptic Magazine, investigate the rise of conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/coronavirus-and-conspiracy-theories-with-michael-shermer/ Thanks to our Patrons Sami Succar, Kaleb Saleeby, Paul Dills, Evie Taylor, Cameron Buynack, Mick Swiger, Daniel Brooks, and Jill Chase for supporting us this week. Photo Credit: Storyblocks. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. With me is my comedic co-host Chuck Nice. Chuck. Hey, hey, Neil. How are you? Still tweeting at Chuck Nice comic. Thank you, sir. Yes, I am. Having to remind people that you're a comic. Well, I have to remind myself. I'm not worried about them. It's me that I'm concerned about. So this is going to be another in our multi-part series on different angles into the coronavirus.

And in this particular episode, we'll be addressing coronavirus conspiracy theories. Oh, my goodness. So we're going to be here for a few days. And more broadly, skepticism and science literacy. And how do you invoke that? broadly skepticism and science literacy. And how do you invoke that? Coronavirus is just one example how we can invoke skepticism,

but there's no end in this list. And there's only one person who is the ideal candidate guest for this. And it's the one and only Michael Shermer. Michael, welcome back to StarTalk. That's right. I'm the returning champion. You're founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and a best-selling author.

You've been our guest on StarTalk multiple times. And you have a recent book. You have several books. In fact, if I look carefully on your shelf, what a coincidence! You've got some other books. It's always fun to see what people put on the shelves behind them in this pandemic era. Well, our most recent issue, as you can see right there, is on conspiracies. That was before the pandemic, so it was good timing. I've never seen the spread, like a virus,

of conspiracy theories like this. This is really quite shocking. Crazy. And so in your latest book, like this. This is really quite shocking. Crazy. And so in your latest book, Giving the Devil His Due, Reflections of a Scientific Humanist. Now, you have a book with the word devil in it. Do you expect to sell that book to Christians? Yeah, you see there he is. Yeah. You just cut the sales in half, at least, right there. Well, yeah. So what are your main arguments in there? And why is the devil in the title? Well, the devil is whoever disagrees with you or whoever you disagree with, whose opinions you dislike, anybody whose viewpoint diverges from yours. And the reason those devils should be given their due is so that for your own safety

sake, that is to say, if you sign off on censorship and silencing people for voicing their minority position, what happens when you're in the minority, when you're the lone voice pushing back against the mainstream, when you want to push against the dogma and you've signed off on silencing people who disagree, then they'll come after you. So the title comes from a play called A Man for All Seasons about, this is Robert Bolt's play that was made into a film, about Sir Thomas More and his collision with King Henry VIII over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the church. And, you know, there's a bunch of different threads in there, but one of which is Thomas More arguing with his future son-in-law about tearing down the laws to get

after the devil, metaphorically speaking. And More is arguing that we have to give the devil his due for our own safety sake. That is, the laws are there to protect people, for example, the First Amendment. So if you say, well, we got to make an exception for this one person because he's really, really bad. Okay, well, what about this person? Because they're really bad also. And so you start with something like a conspiracy theorist extremist like Alex Jones,

and you go, okay, well, we have to silence him and cancel him. Well, what about this person over here, David Icke? What about this guy? What about that guy? What about that guy? What about this coronavirus skeptic? Well, wait a minute. Maybe the skeptic of the coronavirus theory,

maybe he has a point. Maybe we can learn something from them. In other words, there's a kind of concept creep where the bin of which we put stuff in that we think is dangerous gets larger and larger. So is this, it seems to me, we've all heard the phrase, the devil's advocate. And if I remember correctly,

this would be in Catholic church trials where someone, you know, you're accused of heresy and someone would be appointed by the church to defend you in the face of the heresy. And of course, you're on the side of the devil. So we need someone to defend the devil and devil's advocate. that was it seems like even though the whole system was rigged against you regardless nice to see that this court isn't biased i'm already on the side of the devil as you are prosecuting me for being on the side of the devil

but but that has an inkling of what you're saying, I think. Yeah, that's right. Actually, the position, the devil's advocate, the advocatus diable was the position by the Catholic Church. Also, to act as a skeptic against miracle claims, that is to say, everybody and their brother had somebody they thought should be canonized, and you have to be, you know, you have to,

I forget, it was like two major miracles and three minor miracles to be canonized. It's a checklist, it's a checklist. Yeah, it's a checklist. And so everybody had a story about weeping statues and bleeding pictures and miracle cures and things like this, so the Catholic Church realized that most of these are bogus,

so they would appoint a skeptic, essentially, someone like yourself or me, to go out there and investigate and find the natural explanation. And then once all those are eliminated, then if there's some left, then they could say, well, that one is a miracle. Now, you and I would not go that far, of course, but they did centuries ago. So the devil's advocate was actually a valuable position, a skeptical position. Yeah. I'm going with the blue oyster cult. I'm living for giving the devil his due. That's where I come in. And I'm burning.

I'm burning. I'm burning for you. Hey, there's a song in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but you need free speech in order to combat conspiracy theories. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, here I kind of articulate. So let's bring this back to coronavirus. So how does this play out? How does this work? So the reason we need free speech is because most of us are wrong much of the time. And so the only way to find out is to listen to what other people have to say.

So the moment you think, well, we have the final truth. No, we don't have the final. We never have the final truths. There are no truths with a the final. We never have the final truths. There are no truths with a capital T in science. And the coronavirus is a perfect example of this. There's so many unknowns. And, you know, although I admire Dr. Fauci very much, he's not omniscient, okay? He's not God.

He may be wrong about some things. And the CDC, same thing and so forth. So it's good to listen to the people that are, you know, kind of pull away from that or they're, you know, they disagree a little bit. Could be this, and so forth. So it's good to listen to the people that are, you know, kind of pull away from that or they're, you know, they disagree a little bit. Could be this, could be that. Is it a bioweapon or is it a, you know, genetically engineered virus or is it a bat virus? Well, we have the answer to that now, but it's okay to talk about that because, you

know, maybe it is this or that. And the things with conspiracy theories, Neil, is that a lot of them, there's enough of them that are true, that it pays to be constructively conspiracy-minded, that is, a little paranoid. And it's not that we think Bill Gates is going to take over the world or 5G is causing the coronavirus. But we do know that pharmaceutical companies have hacked the FDA system of regulations to cheat the standards and make more money. We know Volkswagen hacked the emission standards to make money. We know government agents and politicians lie and insider trading and Wall Street. There's enough of these kinds of things that go on that when someone says, you know, I'm

a little skeptical about what the CDC said or what the Chinese are telling us, that's not a crazy position to take. In other words, enough of it happens that there's kind of a logic to listening to some of it at least. Now, you sort of go from like 10% away from the Fauci mainstream to 20% to David Icke thinks it's the 5G towers and Bill Gates. But the problem of silencing him, let's say, like last week, he got kicked off YouTube because he appeared on this British TV show, a YouTube channel. Wait, who got kicked off?

This guy named David Ike, who's sort of the Alex Jones of England. Okay. Yeah. I mean, he's way out there. He thinks, you know, the lizard aliens are secretly running the world and all this stuff. Okay. I mean, he is way out there. He thinks, you know, the lizard aliens are secretly running the world and all this stuff. I mean, he is way out there.

Chuck thinks that, by the way. Chuck is totally behind that one. They're more amphibians than this. Oh, I mean. Sorry, I got that wrong. Hey, don't lump me in with the crazies. I'm talking frog people. the craziest. I'm talking frog people. You know, there is a funny story about that, that the 9-11 truthers are kind of divided amongst themselves about, you know, whether there

really were planes or not. There's an extreme group of the truthers who think they're called the no-planers, that these were holographic images that people think they saw planes, but it was actually just explosive devices. And the regular 9-11 truthers who just think it was an inside job by the Bush administration, they say, oh, those no-planers, they're crazy. So it's kind of funny that they debunk each other.

And there's splits like that in creationism and the flat earthers are divided about their arguments. So it's kind of fun to watch them go at each other. But that's part of the free speech. Let everybody have their voice. It'll be pretty obvious which ones are crazy and which ones are not. So may I ask this, Michael? With respect to health concerns such as a pandemic. There are consequences to misinformation,

and there are consequences for people who propagate conspiracy theories to the detriment of the greater society. How do you deal with that? So here's a person who says, like, we shouldn't do A, B, and C. I don't care what it is. Let's just say, but A, B, and C actually contributes to the public good by keeping us all safe from one another and mitigating the spread of the disease. What do you do with somebody like that who is posing an imminent threat? Yeah. Well, I agree with you on that. And there's a distinction between that, which is actual action or behavior that people take versus the words that they speak.

Less concerned about the words that they speak, but going out without a mask or mingling amongst other people when you're sick. You know, a lot of Americans have this crazy idea that freedom means I can do anything I want. Like there was that viral video last week of the woman in Target, might have been Costco, purposely coughing into somebody's face. I'm an American and the Constitution says I can do anything I want.

No, ma'am, it does not say that. You are not free to drive on the left side of the road. You give up that freedom for the security of a safer drive. And just go right down the line from there. There's a thousand freedoms you give up every day in the national interest or security or safety of your community, whatever. And, you know, the kind of that libertarian notion

can go too far. I mean, the freedom for you to swing your arm ends at my nose. And the freedom for your kid to cough in my kid's face when he's got, you's got a communicable disease, that ends up my kid's health. So to the anti-vaxxers who say, well, I should be free not to vaccinate my kid.

Well, okay, maybe, but then my kid should be free from your kid. So you can't send your kid to public schools, public libraries, public pools. Don't let them out of the house because that's a risk. and we make those kinds of sacrifices in the interest of health and safety all the time. So the coronavirus has kind of pushed people on this. You see these people very confused about what freedom means. So we're going to take a break in a couple minutes,

but just before we do, my question is, what makes the coronavirus more susceptible to conspiracy theories than some other thing that might be in the news? Is it because we don't have a complete and total handle on it, and so that leaves open room for people's imaginations? Is that the cause and effect of this? Yeah. people's imaginations? Is that the cause and effect of this? Yeah. To quote one of your heroes, Aristotle, you know, nature abhors a vacuum, the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation, and we'll fill it with anything we got. And so we didn't know for a while what was going on with coronavirus. And, you know, the novel coronavirus, that's why it was called that. It was novel. You know, we'd never seen it before. Even though the thing you got there that looks like it, you know,

there's a lot that kind of looked like it, but it was different. The origin was kind of obscure. China wasn't exactly the most honest regime and trustworthy regime. And then the COVID-19 pandemic that comes from the coronavirus, and we weren't sure how fast it was going to spread. that comes from the coronavirus, and we weren't sure how fast it was going to spread. In hindsight, it's like, yeah, we should have closed the economy a few weeks earlier like Germany did, because look, now they're coming out of it sooner than we are, so forth.

But nobody knew that. That's with hindsight, right? We just didn't know. And I was there at that TED conference when Bill Gates gave that famous speech, now seen gone viral on video, I think it was 2015, saying, this is coming. It's the next big thing. And we're all like, yeah, yeah, we've heard this before. You know, the H1N1 and the bird flu and the swine flu and Ebola and on and on. Every couple of years,

there's one of these things. And everybody says, this is it. And then it peters out. Okay. So it was not completely crazy to think this might just peter out, right? But now we go, uh-oh, okay, it didn't. So that kind of opens the door. This is, so you have uncertainty, a threat, a serious threat, a real threat. And then couple that to a couple other things that were going on, the rollout of 5G at the same time, right? So what is 5G? Well, it's an extension of 4G.

It's this invisible force, the electromagnetic radiation. I can't see it, like nuclear energy. I can't see it, like nuclear energy. I can't see it, smell it, taste it, touch it. And it's dangerous. It's potentially threatening. And so the 5G thing. And then you throw in, there's always a fear. Plus, 5G was pioneered

by the Chinese. So that gave a double force operating on the fertility of the discussion. Parenthetically, we should note that the counterfactual, cities that don't have 5G that have been hit by the coronavirus and so forth, that refutes that hypothesis. But nevertheless, also another normal driving force

behind conspiracy theories is power differentials. So conspiracy theories are usually targeted at rich and powerful people, corporations, big government agents and agencies and so forth. And so, you know, here's Bill Gates now involved in public health, vaccinations, things like this and the virus and he's rich and powerful. And, you know, that kind of got lumped in there

with the big companies rolling out 5G. And then big pharma is always in that formula, right? So here they're now being discussed, you know, ooh, they're going to make a vaccine that everybody has to take so they're going to make a fortune on it. And then Bill Gates is going to chip everybody so he can control the world population.

And before you know it, you've gone off the deep end. By the way, Michael, it's not a chip. It's nanites. I was wondering how they're going to fit them inside the needle. Nanobots. That's right, nanobots. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll take your questions that

have been solicited. In the past 24 hours. We were overloaded with skeptics questions about the coronavirus and skepticism in general when we come back on Star Talk. We're back. StarTalk. This is actually a Cosmic Queries edition exploring conspiracy theories in the coronavirus. I got Chuck Nice, as always.

And I don't believe you, Neil. You don't believe me. I don't believe you, Neil. You don't believe me. I don't believe this is an episode about exploring conspiracies. We got Michael Shermer, who is the patron saint of... Can I say that about you, Michael? Patron saint of skeptics.

One more miracle before I'm sainted. So with his new book out, give me the full name, The Devil. Giving the Devil His Due, yep. So exploring free speech and arguments and the skeptics movement and how we can apply that wisely in our current challenges. So Chuck, you got a question for us? Yeah, we have several questions from our Patreon patrons who support us. So they lead off this,

there's not just Patreon for this, but we lead off with it. No, it's just we lead off with our Patreon patrons and we invite you. They bought their way to the front of the list. That's just like the Titanic. Except the Titanic sank, Chuck. God, that's not

a good analogy there, is it? Yeah, okay. All right. Anyway, let's go with Robert Kernel, who says to assist in the death of conspiracy theories, is it better to confront them or ignore them? Has there been any research

on whether confronting these theories makes it more likely people will believe them because of belief reinforcement? Or does confronting them give them credibility and help them spread? Wow, Robert, I'm going to say that's a damn good question. All right, Michael, what do you got? Yeah, it is kind of the question of the day.

Well, they're going to spread anyway, whether you ignore them or not. In the modern age, everybody is their own publisher with their own YouTube channel and so on. So that's not a great strategy. On the other hand, you're not required to respond to everybody. I mean, we ignored the Flat Earthers for a long time because, you know, the head of it died back in 96 or whatever, and that was the end of that. He was the last member. But then it kind of erupted, as you know, Neil, a couple of years ago and kind of spread, went viral. So then we thought, all right, I guess we need to have an issue of skeptic on how we know the earth is not flat.

And how does science work anyway? And we kind of used it as an excuse to talk about that. But if you ask the average person, how do you know the earth is round? How do you know it goes around the sun and so forth? A lot of people can't articulate that. So we thought, well, we'll just use that as an excuse, something like that. We also kind of depends on the influence that the claim has. The conspiracy

theory is, are people talking about it? Do they care about it? Do we need to provide some kind of response to the media and the public? So that also depends. So in terms of free speech, people should be free to say what they want, but I'm not required to enable their speech. So, you know, occasionally creationists or Holocaust deniers have tried to place ads in Skeptic. I don't take them. But that's not a – I'm not censoring them. They're free to publish their own newsletters and magazines and produce their own docs or whatever.

But that's a different kind of thing there. So maybe I hope that answers the question. Well, you are censoring them in your own mouthpiece. Well, that's right. Well, in a way, though, I have to be selective. We can't talk about everything. So I picked the ones I think are most important. Just like college campuses, you know, they invite maybe 12 public speakers to come to

campus. All right. But there's a000 to choose from. So in a way, that's a kind of a censorship, I suppose, that you discriminate. But they're free to do whatever they want. All right, but I don't think you answered the question. Should you directly engage a conspiracy theorist

on the hope or expectation that you will change their mind. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah. So there was this idea a few years ago, so-called backfire effect. That is, by addressing a particular claim and explaining why it's wrong, like climate denial, you'll actually just double, the people will double down on their beliefs. Digging their heels. Yeah, digging their heels.

Now, the studies on that have not been replicated. That is to say, it looks like people can change their mind if you present evidence in a particular way. One, in a very visual way, you know, pie charts, bar graphs, things that are easy to understand, not just piles of numbers in a table, but, you know, something that's visual. And two, you present it in a way that doesn't challenge the person's deepest moral beliefs, right? So the number one predictor of climate skepticism is political position. But climate skeptics who tend to be conservative, they don't know anything more about climate science than the climate believers, say Democrats or liberals. That is to say, knowledge about climate science does not predict who believes in it or accepts it.

So the public expression of your skepticism or belief is more of a signal to your tribe, I'm so conservative, I doubt that climate science business, right? Even if you don't know anything about it. Same thing with evolution. And if you give people, if you give Christians a choice between Darwin

and Jesus, they're not picking Darwin. Darwin is not going to be anybody's savior. So you have to take that off the table. Keep your savior, keep Jesus, keep your Christianity. Evolution was the way God created life or something like this. And then you take that off the table so they don't feel threatened. So those are the two things you can do to get around the backfire effect. So they're tactics. This is tactical. Yeah. Strategies.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Chuck, what else you got? Okay. This one is from, who is this guy? Chuck Nice, co-host of StarTalk Radio. Are you a Patreon member?

Indeed I am. Okay. Has there ever been any studies done on the psychological makeup of people who are prone to believe in conspiracy theories? Yeah, there's a fair amount of research on that now. First of all, the meme we hear of the conspiracy theorist is some overweight guy in his parents' bedroom with a know, with a tinfoil hat and an internet connection. You know, that's not the case. Really, most conspiracy theorists are thoughtful, educated, and so on. It depends on the conspiracy theory, right? So, say politically, those that are in power tend to be less conspiratorially minded than those out of power. So the losing party usually goes conspiracy bonkers

after they lose. Those in power drop the conspiracy theories. Now, the current administration, current president seems to be an exception to that. He's still talking about the conspiracy against him in the election. It's like, dude, you won, shut up. Oh, it was rigged.

It's like, you know you won right so uh but there but there are some things uh you know like what's called global coherence that is the moment you tick the box for believing one conspiracy theory uh that you think princess diana was assassinated you're more likely to believe that jfk was assassinated. You're more likely to believe that JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy or in any number of the other popular, 9-11 was an inside job and so forth, that there's sort of a tendency to think somebody is behind the scenes pulling the strings. And the moment you sort of go down that pathway, you think it happens everywhere. Even within a particular conspiracy theory, that is people that are more likely to check the box

that they think Princess Diana was murdered are also more likely to think she faked her death and is still alive somewhere. Well, they can't both be true. She can't be dead and alive at the same time, right? And also there's a bias that some people are more inclined to that is the size of the cause should match the size of the effect.

So the Holocaust was the worst thing that ever happened to a group of people committed by the Nazis, the worst regime in history. So you sort of get this match. But JFK, leader of the free world and the most powerful man on earth, assassinated by who? Lee Harvey Oswald, some lone nut. You know, it doesn't match. So you got to add the FBI and the CIA and the KGB and the Cubans and the mafia, you know, to kind of make it match.

Same thing with Princess Di, you know, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt. You know, tens of thousands of people die of that every year, but princesses are not supposed to die like that, right? So you got to have the MI5 and the MI6 and the royal family and the Arabs, and we're all in on it. And so 19 members, you know, 19 guys with box cutters,

you know, brought down the World Trade Center building. I mean, come on, that's just, you know, Bush had to be involved in this group and that group. So you get some of that. And some people are more inclined toward that kind of reasoning than others. Is it because deep in our minds we want a full explanation? There's a need that's being served, a psychological need being served

by the flesh that's on a conspiracy theory. Exactly right. And even scarier is the idea that nobody's in charge. The idea that there's a cigarette-smoking man behind the curtain and he's making all these things happen, wars and economic revolutions and so on. But the idea that actually there's nobody that runs the economy. The economy is just this sort of chaotic, unpredictable thing. That's kind of scary in a way. this sort of chaotic, unpredictable thing,

that's kind of scary in a way. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I got a question. Wait, Michael. Okay, isn't God the ultimate conspiracy theorist? I mean, people who believe in God, that's the ultimate conspiracy. God is in charge of all things. So here's the question.

Are religious people, if they're satisfied that God is operating, do they have any more or less susceptibility to other understandings of the world with regard to conspiracy? I haven't seen any data on that, that religiosity is a predictor of conspiracy-mindedness. Or not, or the opposite. Or the opposite, yes.

Religious people are less, correct me if I'm wrong, are less represented among astrologers and other sort of new age. Yes, that may be a good study for our research team at Skeptic. Okay, well, get to it. Get to it. I'm going to do this the moment we hang up here. But let's actually, Neil, you got me thinking there. In a way, I mean, the common line that religious people use is everything happens for a reason.

Reason. Now, it's not just Christians. I mean, there's a lot of like Deepak Chopra following Buddhists, Western Buddhists that think, you know, there's some kind of cosmic force that balances things. And if something bad happens over here, something good happens over there. That's the ultimate conspiracy theory. That is a kind of conspiracy theory. Yeah. I hadn't really thought of it that way.

Yeah. It's interesting. Wow. Chuck, give me some more. All right. Here we go. This is Alan DeMoss. He says, first of all, I love the show.

My question is, where is the healthy line between believing in some grand conspiracy and being a very cautious skeptic? And is it for some, not for you, of course, or Neil, but is it for some perhaps the beginning of the slippery slope? I start off as a skeptic and then before you know it, I don't believe anything. This is all BS. Yeah. Before you know it, I don't believe anything. This is all BS. Yeah.

Yeah, Carl Sagan had a great line that I quoted in my first book, Why People Believe We're Things, on the kind of healthy skepticism, that finding the rub between being open-minded enough to accept radical new ideas but not so open-minded that your brains fall out and you believe every wacky thing that comes down the pike. And it's hard to know where that line is, essentially the line of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, say. And it depends on the particular area. So since we're talking about conspiracy theories, you know, the bigger it is, the grander it is, the less likely the theory is to be true. Again, conspiracies like Volkswagen cheating the emission

standards or pharmaceutical companies cheating the FDA regulations. Those are real conspiracies, but they're very narrow and targeted. We know why they're doing it, to make money in this one little area. But the moment you scale up, world domination. It's like, okay, probably not. No, you need the Cubans and the Chinese and the North Koreans. Just keep adding them in there, right. You got nothing. That's right. And the. Just keep adding him in there, right. You got nothing.

That's right. And the more people that have to be involved, right? Because most people are fairly incompetent. And they bumble and stumble their way through jobs. And, you know, the idea that, you know, you've cracked the perfect team to go out there and pull this off. I mean, Nixon had a pretty good team of, you know, the Watergate burglars, right? I mean, these were G-men. You know, G. Gordon Liddy. I mean, Nixon had a pretty good team of, you know, the Watergate burglars, right? I mean, these were G-men. You know, G. Gordon Liddy.

I mean, come on. And they couldn't even burgle an office without getting caught, right? That's kind of how things normally go. The more elements— Plus, now a billion photos are uplifted to the Internet every day. You'd have pictures of stuff. Even, you know, the stockpiled aliens in Area 51. Somebody's sneaking a photo out

on their Instagram. You know that. That's right. Actually, I use the WikiLeaks as an example of the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That is to say, you know, the ufologists or the 9-11 truthers would always say, well, of course we don't have direct evidence, Shermer. It's a secret. It's classified, you know, And it's like, okay, here we have 10 million documents that are classified, leaked by WikiLeaks. There's nothing in there about Roswell, alien bodies at Area 51,

you know, some memo from Bush telling somebody to plant the explosive devices in the World Trade Center building. Makes sense. What it is. We're going to take another break. And when we come back, our third and final segment conspiracy in the coronavirus

hey it's time to give a patreon shout out to the following patreon patrons sammy sukar and caleb salibi, thank you so much for your support. Without you, we could not make this show. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, go to patreon.com slash StarTalkRadio and support us. We're back. StarTalk. Chuck Nice.

Michael Shermer. Mike, I've known you for a really long time. I'm just pleased to have this friendship that goes back decades. We're kind of fighting for the same causes but differently. I mean, I'm not in your face because I know you don't need me. But I like your face. You got this. I just want you to know that I'm a huge supporter of your work and your life's direction that you've taken it.

So I just want to put that out there. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Operators are standing by to take your donation. I'm just kidding. Chuck, give me some more questions. Well, let me just comment. It takes all of us working on this together, right?

Scientists from all fields pushing back in their areas. All we are is kind of a collective body that says, here's all the different claims and here's the experts in that. So we're all working to the same, really enlightenment idea that there is a truth to be known, truth of the small t, and that science is the best tool we have to get there.

Nice. All right, Chuck, keep it going. All right. Let's go to Maddalena Grupa. And Maddalena says, thank you for sparking joy and curiosity of science. In my 40s,

could you please tell me how to sell the idea of skepticism to people successfully to get them excited about being skeptical? I find it immensely hard not to sound condescending or sarcastic when I try. Well, Matt Delano, maybe it's you.

No, but Michael, you got to admit, there are a lot of skeptics in the community that are just assholes. And it's like, I know more than you. I mean, as an educator, it hurts me to watch that exchange. Yes. Because I care what someone knows and doesn't know. And I find, you know, ways that I can communicate, not just talk down to them. And you know, such folks are in the skeptics community. What do you do about that? Yes. Well, you tell them, don't be a dick.

Yes, well, you tell him, don't be a dick. Don't go making it. But even that. That was the title of a speech given by our friend and colleague, the bad astronomer, Phil Plait. Yeah, that's right. He gave a whole speech, don't be a dick, to skeptics. And I think that was fairly well received, although I know he got some pushback.

But Carl made that point back in the 90s. I think it was a passage maybe from Demon Haunted World where he said something like, it's easy to be condescending to people. I feel the urge myself bubble up, and I have to kind of suppress it. We should all suppress it. And just talk about the positive aspects of what we know. Acknowledge that the other person is intelligent and thoughtful or else they're not going to listen to you.

Be respectful. There's certain kind of basic rules of engagement or conversation. And by the way, that point of view is deeply imbued within Ann Druyan, who was co-writer of all three Cosmoses, so that at every turn we would talk about some crazy idea that people have, the urge to just say, this is just preposterous, that urge is so strong,

but then you know you can't and shouldn't go there, otherwise you just lost your audience. So you've got to find a way that it sort of organically reaches them so that they feel like that you care about who they are and how they think and where they came from and that you're going to take them to a new place. Yeah, that's right. I'm fond of saying no one in the history of the world has ever joined a cult. You know, they join a group that they think is good and they just get sucked

down the rabbit hole and that, you know, only outsiders can kind of assess that. But if you tell people, you know, you're in a cult, you know, that's not what they think is going on. And analogously, I say no one's ever, in the history of the world, there's never been a pseudoscientist who goes down to a pseudolab to collect pseudofacts to test the pseudotheory, right? You know, they think they're doing something. And so you have to address it at that level. Like, you know, why is it you think that that's the case? I know you get these theory, what I call level. Like, you know, why is it you think that that's the case? I know you get these what I call theories of everything. You know, Einstein was wrong and Newton was wrong and Hawking was wrong and I've worked out this new theory of the universe in my garage.

You know, okay, you can't just say, you know what, you're the 20th crazy person this week to send me one of these because, you know, that just hurts their feelings. They don't think that that's what they're doing. So you have to at least listen. I mean, if you're going to engage with them, you know, the just hurts their feelings. They don't think that that's what they're doing. So you have to at least listen. I mean, if you're going to engage with them, you know, the rules of conversation, listen to what somebody has to say. Let them finish their sentence.

See if you can repeat back to them what they just said, you know, the kind of steel manning rather than straw manning. You know, say it in a way that they would go, yeah, yeah, that is what I'm arguing. Or they're more likely to go, no, no, no, that's not quite what I mean. What I mean is, now maybe they did mean that and they realized how nutty it sounds when you say it, so they correct it, but that's also good, right? Conversation is about adjusting our ideas and exchanging ideas and so on.

And I was honored, Michael, that you had invited me onto your podcast for my last book, which was Letters from an Astrophysicist. About a third of them I'm carefully communicating with. Some of them were conspiracy theorists. There's a flat earther in there and a Bigfoot person. And so I was honored that you saw that in me enough to have me as a guest on your podcast. Oh yeah, no, that kind of exchange I think is super fascinating. I love getting those kind of letters because it's interesting to engage with them and just ask them, how did you come to this belief?

Or what makes you think that's true? Or what would it take to change your mind? It's just super interesting to think about the psychology of why people believe what they believe. And that's different from, say, refuting their their arguments or whatever those are kind of two different levels right okay all right chuck what else you got okay uh back to our corona uh our coroniverse that we live in josh v says to mask or not to mask that is the the question. Why did the CDC change their advice about masks halfway through the pandemic? Does this type of flip-flop fuel conspiracy theories or at least increase distrust in authority? Nice one.

Yeah, yeah, it certainly can. I remember when that happened. Part of the reason they were saying no masks was at first they were worried about the supply chain for healthcare workers to have enough masks. And if everybody made a run on masks, there wouldn't be enough for the healthcare workers. I think that was the first reason. As I remember it as well. Yeah. They kind of masked it by saying, well, maybe you don't need it. And then the science changed. I don't think the science ever really changed. I think it was more of a supply chain concern.

And, you know, we're still, again, here we are, the day we're recording, we still don't think the science ever really changed. I think it was more of a supply chain concern. And, you know, we're still, again, here we are. The day we're recording, we still don't know 100% about, you know, how many feet should you be apart from, you know, six feet, where they come up with that number. Maybe it's seven, maybe it's three, who knows? You know, still a lot of that. So we're, you know, there's going to be a lot of hindsight bias in the next, say, decade of, you know, pundits second-guessing everything we did.

I saw some numbers today on Germany. It looks like they timed it just about right of when to shut down the economy, and they're starting to reopen now. But they're all experiments. Different nations trying different things, different states within the United States trying different things.

This is good. Experimentation is how we get to the truth. Yeah, but that's not the fluctuating frontier of what is experimentally true is not something that's taught in school. You think of science as a known thing, and if a scientist says something different tomorrow than today, all of a sudden people feel justified

to discount the entire source of this information. The whole source gets cancelled, right? That's right, yeah. Yeah, the problem with teaching science as just a body of facts is too delimiting. It's really a method. It's just a way of asking questions

about the world and seeing what kind of answers you can get that are reliable. So if we were to perhaps just adjust the perspective behind the way we're teaching science and the way it's received, more importantly, focus more on discovery. Yeah, yeah. See, if it's all about discovery, then it's okay for things to change. We've discovered, like for instance,

we thought it was all about surfaces. We now discovered that it is not, that yeah, you still got to be concerned about surfaces, but we also now must be equally concerned about our exchange with one another when it comes to speaking and being in our presence and distancing. So, but I think what happens is that this definitive and these declarative nature of arguments being made is what causes people to go, well, then you don't

know what the hell you're talking about. I'm not listening. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Chuck for Surgeon General. talking about? Chuck for Surgeon General. I vote for Chuck for Surgeon General. Yeah, that's right. It would be better if we thought of failures as actual successes. We succeeded in finding out the cause of it is not

this, this, this, and this, and this. Those are successes, actually. And this is the famous mantra in space exploration. It's if a rocket explodes on the launch pad and you say it's a failure, no. It is an experiment rich in data for the next experiment. That's funny. I mean, not that the rocket blew up.

That's not funny. No, no, no. The rich in data part is funny. I mean, not that the rocket blew up. That's not funny. No, no, no. The recent data part is funny. Right, right. Chuck, time for like maybe one or two more. What do you have? Okay.

All right. Here we go. All right. This is Jessica Bennett, and she wants to know, who is controlling the massive amount of Twitter bots that are pushing for no mask and pushing to reopen America? That's something I didn't know about. But is that a... We should ask Jack about that, the guy that runs Twitter.

Oh, yeah, Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey, yeah. Yeah, because what do I know? I mean, maybe they're Russian bots or Chinese bots or whatever. I'm encouraged by some recent research by Hugo Mercier, the cognitive scientist, about the influence of those kind of bots on, say, the 2016 election. He thinks that the influence was negligible, if at all,

that people were pretty much already made up their minds. You know, and the funny story is that if you think Hillary is running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria and I correct you on that, you're not likely to vote for Hillary. You're probably inclined to kind of not be a big fan of hers anyway. It's like, oh, she's not selling babies. I'll vote for her now.

Yeah. Exactly. All right. Did we answer that question? What's the next one? What's the next one? Yeah, here's the next one. Sven Bjornberg wants to know this.

We've had his questions before. Yes, we have. Sven Bjorn is back again. So how can you say theories are conspiracies if China is not being transparent? So, you know, and I think this is really emblematic of a big problem. And that is, you have one fact that actually leads and supports a conspiracy. But then that mushrooms into like these thousands of things that are attached to it. Yeah, that's right. So this is the problem with authoritarian regimes not being up front.

They may be transparent and honest now, but how do we know? Because they've lied so many times. It's a little bit like, that's why it's called the Chernobyl of China, you know, because we know the Soviets were, you know, took them like, I don't know, a week and a half until radiation started falling over Sweden and Norway that they've said, well, I guess we, you know, should be more upfront about what actually happened at Chernobyl. That's the problem. So if you lie and then you say, well, this time I'm telling the truth, you know, how do we know? That fuels conspiracism, of course, because that's part

of conspiracy theories is that somebody is behind the scenes doing something wrong. And of course, they're going to lie about it. That's true. So there's a good reason to be skeptical or conspiratorial. So but what it means is in the case of China, then even if like you said, even if they are telling the truth, you don't know even if that is true because there's the room that it could be a lie. Or a false, yeah, it could be a false, you know, disinformation campaign. Disinformation, right.

Well, in the words of Xi Jinping, you can't handle the truth. Was that who said that? I was wondering where that came from. I'm pretty sure it was she. So, Mike, I want to spend the last couple of minutes. Could you give me some of the more outlandish, by your judgment, conspiracy theories regarding the coronavirus?

I mean, like top three. Yeah, top three. Well, 5G, Bill Gates, bioweapon. Bioweapon is not quite as crazy, but we now know from the genetic analysis that it was not engineered. It's a bat virus. Of course, the anti-vaxxers were all over this.

Very predictable. They'd jump on anything like this. We've been tracking them for a quarter century. Every time something like this happens, there's the anti-vaxxers. And so that's not just crazy. It's dangerous because vaccines are one of the best things we've ever invented for saving human lives. And so that's a disturbing one, not just crazy, but dangerous.

What would anti-vaxxers say? but dangerous. What would anti-vaxxers say? Oh, that either the government or the pharmaceutical companies, big pharma, are using the coronavirus pandemic as a scare tactic to force people to vaccinate. And then from there you go to, they're going to chip us all so they can track us

or nanobot us and then track us. Even the tracking and tracing, this idea is part of that kind of new world order conspiracy theory that goes back to the 1980s. And in a way, if you think about it, we are all being tracked. We are already chipped. You have a smartphone in your pocket that has chips in it, and somebody knows where you are and maybe who you're talking to

and where you're shopping and so on and so forth. In a way, this has kind of happened, but we voluntarily did it. And it's not big pharma and it's not big government. It's, you know, big tech. Walked right into it. And then what about the conspiracy that it was, maybe it's not a conspiracy or a cover-up,

that it was a lab leaked? Yeah, so, you know, Nature Medicine Journal published the genome analysis of the novel coronavirus and that it is, you know, like 98.5% similar to a bat coronavirus. Remember, coronaviruses are very common. A third of all common colds are coronaviruses. The others are rhinoviruses and one other. And it makes sense. Bats are mammals. They're very susceptible to respiratory diseases. They live in giant populations. There's this cave in Texas with like 20 million members, like it's the city of Mexico. And, you know, they get these kind of pandemic spreads all the time. So it kind of makes sense, wet market in China, you know, bats.

Wait, wait, wait. So bats don't social distance when they... They don't. They hang upside down right next to each other. That's what makes it kind of spooky. That'd make a cute comic, Bad Social Distancing. Yes. Right. I don't want to get a human virus. That's right, yes. Wash your wings for 20 seconds.

But it is true that Wuhan is the site of an infectious disease research center? That's right. And there are bioweapons labs around the world. And twice during the Cold War, the Russian bioweapons labs had a leak. One was, I think, a fire, and the other one was an accidental leak. And so, again, it's not completely crazy to ask the question or to explore the idea, but I think that one's answered now. So, Chuck, Michael, we are out of time, but this has been highly illuminating.

Michael, it's always great to talk to you. And your new book, I think, just released, just in time for the coronavirus, because you knew you were planning this. In fact, you're the one who caused the coronavirus. I'm behind it. As soon as we hang up, I'm going back into my bioweapons lab. Giving the devil his due. Reflections

of a scientific humanist, which you are. Michael, always good to have you. Don't be a stranger. Chuck, love you, man. Love you too, man. Thank you, gentlemen. Always good to see you again, man. Yeah. All right, guys. Thank you, gentlemen. Always good to see you again.

Excellent. Excellent. All right. This has been StarTalk, Cosmic Queries. This one on conspiracy theories. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.