The Joe Rogan Experience - #1222 - Michael Shermer

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

Michael Shermer is a science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims.

and we're live hello michael schirmer hello joe rogan i'm doing well thank you good to see with your pile of your writing look at you got there you got the moral arc uh heavens on earth look at you skeptic magazine that's the latest issue why is there something rather than nothing we like to tackle the little questions. That's a deep one. You've dealt with this on the show. Yeah, too much. That's one that just, you know, when you're in traffic and you go, what is this? When you have someone like Neil or Sean Carroll or Lawrence Krauss talking about this, it's like, whoa.

I mean, I'm not a physicist. I'm a social scientist. So for me, I come at it like, what do you mean by this word nothing? Because most of us have this idea of what it means. Oh, no, in physics, it means this other thing. Like, okay. Yeah. Well, I think our limited understanding of what they're talking about.

When I see those guys writing down on legal papers with all that scritchety-scratchety, crazy-looking, fake alien language mathematics, like, thank God you guys are out there. Well, I open Heavens on earth with imagine yourself dead and you know most people go well you know i see myself in the casket and my friends and family are around hopefully they're mourning no you wouldn't see anything of course you're dead i mean to imagine anything you have to be conscious and alive so you can't even picture being dead so you can't picture not existing and it would be the same thing imagine there's no universe yeah okay i see blackness no there's no blackness i mean nothing would literally be not just no light but no no perception of darkness nothing not even nothing i was going through instagram the other day and there was this one

person who was talking about the purpose of life and when you die, what's going to happen. And I immediately just started laughing. I'm like, you don't know. How are you saying this? Like, when you die, what happens? And he was like one of them spiritual type characters, just kind of a huckster. There's a lot of spiritual hucksters out there these days.

There are, yes. In the 90s, we debunked all those psychics talking to the dead. That hasn't been too popular in recent years, but that was a big thing. People caught on to that little earpiece thing. Yeah, the earpiece or just the cold reading. I see a father figure. Is this a grandfather, father, uncle, friend of the family? Yeah.

And he's saying something about, you know, it's okay for you to forgive yourself. Oh, okay. How about like, well, where was the will? Yeah. He hid his will somewhere. Where is that? Because that's what we want to know is, you know, that ring he had. Where is that?

If you're just vague enough, I mean, like horoscopes. If you're just vague enough, people are like, oh my God, it's right all the time. It's always right. That's not even a real horoscope. If you really want to pay attention to actual astrology, they have to know the date you were born, the time you were born. It's not just the month of August. It's like they got to nail it down. They want to know morning or evening.

What do you think about all that stuff? It's all bunk. Is it? Yeah, yeah. Why has it been around so long? Well, because the, well, it's called the Barnum effect, where, you know, P.T. Barnum, you just offer something for everybody. So if you make it general enough, you know, I sense you're an intelligent, wise person that people really enjoy your company. And you like going to parties and being with other people.

And yet you like the quiet solitude of a walk on the beach, you know, people going, yep, that is so me. Well, I've pretty much described every scenario you can have. You're alone, you're with people. But it's one of those things where if you talk to someone who is an actual believer in astrology, like they are so convinced. I got a friend of mine who's trying to tell me that he makes all of his decisions based on consulting with his astrologer well reagan well nancy reagan

yeah for his travel after he was shot she got real paranoid about that well so part of the problem is these astrologers and psychics are themselves remembering their hits and forgetting their misses the confirmation body so i knew a psychic or a magician who was working the Psychic Friends Network back in the 90s when it's hard to make a living as a magician doing kids' parties. They all want to have their own Vegas show, but only a few people get that. So you got to do something on the side. So this guy was doing Psychic Friends Network. And he told me all about it.

They gave him a book, The Three Ring Binder. Here's the kinds of things you should say. And people are calling for love, health, money, career questions. So you can spend 20, 30 minutes at $3.95 a minute

just going through there. I sent you in a relationship right now, and one of you is more committed than the other. Tell me about that. Ten minutes later, they're still talking.

And you're thinking about travel. You're not happy with your job. There's some financial stress in your life right now. And then he told me about stuff like, now go get a crystal and then a candle. And I want you to set it up here on your desk. And this would go on and on for hours. And they charge by the hour. And they charge by the hour.

So one of the problems that Psychic Friends Networks had was people were not paying their phone bills because they, you know, come back on $800 800 phone whatever so they would just not pay it so the phone companies cracked down on the psychic friends network company going hey this is getting out of hand that people aren't paying their bills so they had to ratchet it back a little bit oh that's right they would do it through the phone that's interesting yeah they wouldn't get a credit card from you they would just stay on the line with you right so he told me that when he first started, he got like 60 cents on the minute for the $3.95 per minute. But then they bumped it up as he got more experience and kept him on the line longer. They gave him bonuses.

Now you get a dollar per minute or whatever. How is that not illegal? I mean, he's not even a psychic. Shouldn't you have to like – if you want to be a doctor, you have to go and you got to, you know, go to medical school. You got to get a degree. There's an interesting history there because in New York City, for example, it was difficult to outlaw like the three-card Monty guys on the sidewalk with the cardboard because it's just kind of a game. Right. Now, it would be illegal to sell fraudulent stocks or something like that or sell a product that's advertised as a health

product when it's not. But if, say, in that case, it's under food rather than drugs, or say, no, health products, like vitamins are under different standards than, say, medical drugs. A psychic is more like an entertainer. So this is for entertainment purposes only so we can do whatever we want as opposed to a medical doctor that's dispensing advice so i get that i mean maybe doctor's a bad example maybe i should have said engineer but the point is like if you're going to work as a psychic like on a psychic network if you have a business of selling psychics yeah like you should be able to you have to exhibit some sort of psychic something yeah well they can't uh you know under controlled conditions they always fail there's nothing that's ever been done no no what about the one thing that i've read

that uh statistically more people can recognize that people are staring at them yeah like when they're looking at you from behind is that horses horseshit? Well, it's not been consistently replicated. So is it possible that some people with a certain sensitivity can detect a people? Okay, so one explanation, the skeptic's explanation, is that if I'm in, say, a Starbucks or something, and I kind of have a sense that people are talking about me, maybe looking at me, and I look, and that catches somebody's eye, and they turn to me, and I think, oh, that person's looking at me. Or vice versa, I'm looking at them, and then they sense something or whatever. So there could be some element of chance to that.

Now, the guy that does this, Rupert Sheldrake, he believes that it's actually some kind of psychic power through the medium. Like when I'm looking at you, something's coming out of my eyes and tickling your neck, so to speak. That's his morphic resonance. Morphic resonance. Now, Richard Wiseman, a British experimental psychologist, he's tried to replicate that, and he always fails. And then this other woman, Marilyn Schlitz, she also tried to replicate it, and she was able to replicate some of it. So there may be an experiment or bias. It's not clear if it's the skeptics that are biased or the believers that are biased.

But in that case, it's best to just say, you know, we don't know. So the default position, the null hypothesis is that it's not true until you prove otherwise. And that's a difficult one to prove. Now, if I say, well, why is the effect so subtle? Why can't you go to Vegas and become a millionaire gambling or play the stock market? We know traders just need a tiny 0.01% advantage over the other traders or whatever, and they can make a lot of money.

You mean in terms of just psychic ability? Yeah. Psychic ability is a very broad term, right? It's almost like saying drugs because there are certain drugs that put you to sleep and certain drugs that make you hyper. They have very different effects. Certain drugs that put you to sleep and certain drugs that make you hyper, they have very different effects. So saying psychic ability, like maybe you have the ability to see if someone's looking at you, but you don't have the ability to pick the lottery. Right.

So the hard part in testing psychics is to pin down what exactly are you saying you could do. Right. And that's where it gets pretty fuzzy. So these, like, why is it legal for the phone psychics? Because you can't pin them down. If somebody says, look, I'm just giving relationship advice. Why is it legal for the phone psychics? Because you can't pin them down. If somebody says, look, I'm just giving relationship advice. Why is that illegal? If I say, like the Tony Robbins Netflix documentary, I'm Not Your Guru, which is basically I am your guru.

He has that moment in this huge auditorium. There's like 3,000 people there. And he gets this woman up on stage. And she's got relationship problems. He says, do you have your phone? She goes, yeah. Take out your phone and call him right now. And he talks her through dumping this guy on stage, on the phone.

And he's at work or something. He's like, what? And then she hangs up, and everybody's happy that she did this. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I have no idea. That's great for show business. But what if, you know, who the fuck? I mean, that seems crazy. Like, how do you know what kind of relationship they really have?

You'd have to talk to both of them, right? Wouldn't you? Somebody that, I brought this up at an event recently, a party, and somebody said, oh, I know the backstory. His staff had been working the audience and they knew all about her and the relationship and it was about to go sour anyway. So we brought her up. It's like, okay, so this is the thing with, you see the psychics on TV,

there's a lot of stuff you don't see. They work the audience. They know. People fill out, like the faith healers, they fill out prayer cards. They put their name and address and their ailment. And then, you know, the faith healers have a little earbud in there, and they're listening to the person in the back reading. Okay, here's the person.

They have glaucoma or whatever, and you hear him calling this out. So there's a lot of that that we don't see. But Anthony Robbins is not claiming any kind of psychic ability. No, that's right. He's just trying to provide positive paths for improving your life. And if you're in a bad relationship, that would be a positive path. Let's get out of that relationship and just like move forward with it with emotion and power and love and you'd fucking probably throw a karate kick and get everybody pumped up and jump around

this little bobby brown headphones on you know it's like but he's he's a showman too yeah that's right so this but but my point is that the psychic could say the same thing look i'm just dishing out you know i don't know if this is true but he's not i mean it's weird to put him in that category right because he's just trying to get people excited i he i think he does some good i really do because he did me some good when i was uh 21 years old i used to listen to his i think it was called unlimited power i think that was the name of the book and i listened to it on audio cassette by the pool this this shitty apartment that I was living in when I was trying to be a stand-up comedian. And it helped me.

He had some really good advice in terms of setting goals and in terms of the way you approach things and look at things. But- I agree. All of that, any of these self-help books, Jocko's books or Amy Alcon, there's a lot of stuff that's very similar to what Tony Robbins issues. And, okay, that makes sense. Set goals and be motivated and think positive.

Maybe err a little bit on the side of over-optimism so you can push through the failures. But don't be blind because maybe it's certain times that cut and run and change course in your life, something like that. to cut and run and change course in your life, something like that. The hard part is studying that, which, you know, experimentally, which are the best techniques versus others. And there was a guy who wrote a book called SHAM, S-H-A-M, Self-Help Actualization Movement. And he was the head book guy for Rodale Press that publishes these self-help books. And so his takeaway in this book was that the number one predictor of people who will buy self-help books are people who already bought self-help books, and they continue buying

them. So if you say, does it work? Well, it works if you work it sort of consistently. Like, you got to listen to the tapes like every weekend or every low moment. It's not like taking the pill and your cancer's gone. You have to kind of keep practicing it as a lifestyle change for it to work. Yeah, that's – And also, what do you mean by work? So Tony goes into a corporation and they get a bump. This is an example in this book. They get a bump in sales.

So they get the salesmen all motivated. They hit the phones on Monday morning. Within two weeks, their sales are kind of back to where they were. So they got to bring the self-help guy back in every month or so to keep them super motivated. Well, you got to give them some sort of incentive to stay pumped, right? I mean, some financial incentive. It's one of those old school phrases, inspiration is like bathing. It works, but you have to do it regularly in order for it to be effective.

I like that. Yeah. I mean, bathing works, but you're like, hey, two months later, I smell like shit. Yeah. It works. Daily. Yeah, you have to do it all the time. Or it's like saying, why can't the NFL teams play the whole game like the last two minutes because it's so exciting, the two-minute drill, because they can't do it physically.

You can't keep that up. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you could physically keep up that enthusiasm that Anthony Robbins provides, but you have to be – either you have to have some sort of an office environment that is incredibly enthusiastic to the point where you guys have engineered this environment where everybody's pumped up. But that's going to be it. I mean, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for the individual to be themselves.

I feel like that would be terrible to work in a place like that where everywhere you go there's motivational sayings and people are chanting things in the hallway and everybody's just got energy at 10. Let's go you know that's that's what a guy like anthony robbins will provide you for with a short burst yeah we just hope that some of it sticks right well this is you know in amy alcon's book unfuckology it's

great but yeah she calls these small wins or whoever calls them small wins like make your bed in the morning or shave or whatever or like jockoocko's little Twitter post at 4.30 a.m. Yes. Now, I'm never getting up at 4.30, but when I get up at 6.30 – You will occasionally, right? Like this morning for the morning ride that leaves at 7 a.m., I get up at 5.30. So I'm not happy getting up at 5.30, but I think, okay, Jocko has been up an hour. He's already worked out.

He's already done working out. Okay, I can't really complain. Come on, Shermer, get going. That kind of little thing, this jordan's jordan peterson's point you know the of the you know make get your life in order what is he talking about just stand up straight make your bed or clean your room you know what's he talking about he's talking about these little wins like if you can do that then the next thing that's a little harder becomes a little easier and so it's also those things that are in the background if you know that your your is a mess, your car is filled with fast food wrappers, you

know, you've got that thing that you haven't taken care of in the back of your head. That's going to disrupt. It's going to be flowing in your thoughts for the most part. It'll be a distraction. Right. So those little things apparently do matter. There's a theory of crime called the broken windows theory that is favored by criminologists to explain the decline, the crime decline in the 90s. What happened? In New York City,

they started cleaning up the graffiti. They started catching the turnstile jumpers. They started cleaning up the streets. They started, you know, boarding up windows. There's no broken windows or replacing the windows. The theory is that if there's a signal in society that no one's paying attention, there is no law and order here. There are no rules or norms. Do whatever the fuck you want. You're going to get more crime. If you send the signal through little things like we're not going to allow graffiti on this wall anymore and no more turnstile jumpers in the subways and so on. And so when that happened, then there was a trickle down effect and then crime declined. So that's the most popular theory for that.

And I think there's something to that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what they did with New York City is really kind of fantastic. If you go back to when I was a kid and I traveled to New York City the first time and I saw Times Square, I guess I was probably like 18 or 19. I was like, look at this fucking crazy place. This is madness. And, you know, you see it in movies and it's just always this horrific scene. It's always peep shows and hookers and pimps and thugs and drug dealers.

And you go there now and it's like a mall threw up. You know, it's like a giant neon mall of America. Like Times Square. If you took a person, if you grabbed a guy from like 1988 and you put him in a time machine and said, hey, man, I'm going to bring you 30 years in the future and you're going to see New York City the way it looks then. Like, what do you expect? Like, oh, my God, it's gonna be like like blade runner people are gonna be shooting people and selling body parts and now you get there it's like guy fieri's restaurant and huge gigantic lcd screens and there's there's some people that would long for the old days the dirty seediness yeah lenny bruce

talked about you know and he lived there it's like I mean well that has a certain charm I guess you're going into the nightclubs or whatever but the surrounding daytime neighborhood or something you this is it isn't where you want to live rather live in the vomited mall well I'm not crazy about that either but but so there's a reason why cities have certain restrictions on those kinds of stories coming in but but so there's a reason why cities have certain restrictions on those kinds of stories coming in but like in a crappy neighborhood like um you know downtown old town pasadena now is kind of a place to go yeah but in the 70s when i mean i went to the ice house you know back in the day in the 70s uh just as a spectator and but it was terrible down there and was it really oh

yeah it was a dump i mean there was pasadena oh terrible yeah it was terrible down there. Was it really? Oh, yeah. It was a dump. I mean, there was- Pasadena? Oh, terrible. Yeah, it was horrible. The word was, according to my friend Bob Fisher, who owns the Ice House, he said that what it was was in the early days of Hollywood, the producers would all buy homes in Pasadena. They have these beautiful old estates in Pasadena. Yeah, South Pass, yeah. But the stars would all live in the Hollywood Hills. Right.

So they would all be just boozing it up and partying it down in the Hollywood Hills. And the producers were like, let those crazy animals go have at it in the hills. We're going to back out a little bit. And they established that community out there in Pasadena. Right, right. So to turn it around, like one of the key things a mall can do is get what they call an anchor store. Someone like a Saks Fifth Avenue, somebody that's really respectable, big. And then you can call the other guys, go, look, we got Saks Fifth Avenue.

Oh, you got Saks Fifth Avenue. Then I can be next to him. And then it starts going. And then little by little, each of them cleans up their neighborhood a little bit more. And pretty soon you end up with Old Town Pasadena now. cleans up their neighborhood a little bit more and pretty soon you end up with old town pasadena now well i was telling you guys before uh i had an issue today where my credit card got robbed and uh you know whatever credit card fraud someone got a hold of my number which is really that's the one thing that people worry about the most about shopping online right but i guess that could kind of happen everywhere yeah But you got to think that if there's anything that has changed malls more than anything, it's got to be the ability

to just shop online on your phone, like Amazon. The fact that they figured that out. I remember when Amazon came out and it was just a bookstore, I was like, who the fuck is going to buy books online? You could just go to the bookstore. This is ridiculous. What a stupid business. Meanwhile, that guy has more money than any human on the planet. That's right. Yeah. That poor bastard's getting divorced, too. I heard last night that there's a rule in Washington that everything that you make as a couple, you have to split.

So they've been together for over 25 years. Well, California. Split it all. California law is, yes, 50-50. Well, long-term marriage is 10 years or more. It's 50-50. And that includes downstream income. You know, from anything you did that you're still getting paid for, say, 10 years ago, you wrote a book or whatever.

Well, Mrs. Bezos is getting paid. He's worth $100-plus billion. $137, they said. Wow. So she's going to get half of that. They're probably going to, because it's a lot of stock, they said they're going to have to just stay friends. Oh, they better stay friends. She should be super nice to him.

Even if he only gives her a quarter. She's like, I got wrong. I got wrong. They're just the richest people in the world now. But after all these bookstores went out of business, there's some irony that Amazon now wants to start opening physical brick-and-mortar stores. That is kind of ironic. But it does make sense, though, because there are some brick-and-mortar stores, and I think that guy's a conqueror. I think he just wants to take over everything.

Well, why else would he buy Whole Foods? It's like, oh, the supermarket business. I can fuck this up, too. Well, automate it. I don't know. Maybe you could order whole foods delivered to your house i think i don't know if that's available yet but i think it is right yeah i was gonna say now most grocery stores even like all the ralphs have home delivery within two hours to compete

with amazon prime like they have to yeah wow or and if they don't do that you can just order it online and pick it up and they'll bring out yeah i went to pavilions the other day and they had a bunch of delivery trucks parked in the parking lot. I was like, look at this. They got these cool delivery trucks. They have to. Wow. That's great, though.

They have that one store you can walk in, and there's no cashiers. They just trust that everyone's not stealing, and I think they just are comfortable with a certain amount of theft. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's interesting. Well, they probably have cameras everywhere too, you know. But it's the online purchasing, like that has got to put, that must be putting the most, as far as like the most impact on stores,

brick and mortar stores, is like the ability to purchase online. It's got to be devastating for them, right? Totally. And up in Santa Barbara, where I live now, just riding up State Street this morning at the end of the ride, you know, it's like maybe a quarter of the stores are closed out of business. Wow. Empty. And, you know, State Street, Santa Barbara, this was like the happening place to be. And a real estate friend of mine says, oh, well, see that store there? That's, you know, $22,000 a month to lease. Like, whoa, okay. So you have to have a retail

outlet that's really turning over the customers and there's a lot that just can't do that i mean you can't have an antique store that's going to do that or a little knickknack store santa barbara is one of my favorite places and it's it's really interesting because it's uh it's a small area like i don't think there's 150 000 people less than that it's about 90 000 is it monocito included or with monocito included galito galita is like another 30 000 or so and then below that you have carpinteria that's like another 20 000 or so so yeah it's and it's beautiful it's beautiful that's great you get the right spot man but it's also i feel like it needs to be that close to los angeles yeah like

you get a little bit of trickle. I can zip down there 75 miles from my house to your studio here, my office in Altadena for Skeptic Magazine. That's 105 miles. So it's doable. Yeah. Yeah. But it's,

it's, I think that human beings, when they're living in these gigantic communities, whether it's Los Angeles or New York or something like that, there's just a certain amount of people become less valuable. You know, there's just too many of them. And you lose that sort of appreciation for people. And there's like a tension around like, you don't mind if a few people drop off.

It's no big, you know what I mean? Yeah, there's a balance in size. My wife's from Cologne, Germany, which is about 1 million people. And that's about as big as you want to get. It's a big enough city. There's lots of action. You could do all sorts of things. But it's not 6 million or 10 million, which is just like L.A.

It's just too many. Have you ever seen that study that they did where they set up a camera on one end of the street and a camera on the other end of the street, and they timed people walking through. And in the footage of those people walking through, they were able to determine by how fast these people walked, they got an average, which was really accurate, of how many people lived in the city. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, scale.

Yes. in the city. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, scale. Yeah, there's that book that physicist West, Jeff, G-E-O-F-F West, I think is his name, wrote that book. And the bigger the city, the more efficient and faster things become. Yeah, including dialogue, the way people communicate. Talk a little faster, they walk a little faster. And he had a formula showing how many restaurants per 100,000 or gas stations per 100,000 you'll get as you scale up. You don't need as many restaurants and gas stations as populations increase because there's more efficiency in the flow of traffic and people throughout the city, whereas smaller towns are less efficient. That was the theory. But it's just fascinating that human beings adjust because

of all of these other human beings around them they change the way they walk they walk faster they talk faster is this right here yeah scale scale universal laws of life and death in organism cities and companies listening to it right now actually are you really yeah like coincidentally co-winky dinky yeah um that that's, I mean, you feel it. You know, when I lived in Boulder for a short amount of time, one of the things, you know, Boulder's small as well. I think it's 100,000 people. When I came back here, the first thing I realized is how fast everyone's driving. Everyone's just cutting everybody off and zooming ahead, and people are, like, really in a rush everywhere they go.

And that has to be in some way, shape or form. It has to be influenced by all the other people around them and their energy, right? What is that? What do you think that is, though? Well, first of all, it's all unconscious. I think it's just mostly the kind of overall pace you get that pushes everybody along or slows them down. I just started this book called Rule Makers and Rule Breakers. It's by a woman who is a cultural psychologist. Sorry, I forget her name. So Rule Makers, Rule Breakers.

So she talks about tight cultures versus loose cultures. She's fast as a fucking bullet. Yeah, Michelle Gelfand. So she talks about tight versus loose cultures so like again my wife from germany it's a tighter culture the the norm people are more likely to obey norms and rules and there's a little more uncomfortableness in violating them california we're a little loosey-goosey about rules and and so my wife's always giving me a hard time about you know my idea of traffic laws is i'll just do whatever, you know, I feel like pretty much as long as it's safe.

And I kind of know, you know, I'm driving up the 101. If I stay at 79 or below, I'm fine. And she's like, but the speed limit is 65. It's like, yeah, so what? I mean, I know where the cops park. I know everybody else is going. And the left turn into our street street is a is a left arrow so of course my wife she's just like well we gotta wait it's like but it's midnight i'm just gonna

go you can't go it's like yeah this is california i'm going there's no one there there's no one there yeah yeah so that's a tight culture versus loose culture so she i guess she's going to talk about how norms then affect laws and how then people change their behavior you're not even aware you're doing this you're just kind of unconsciously absorbing the cultures but what do you think I mean there but there's a difference between West Coast tight culture like law or large groups rather and East Coast large groups do you think that's influenced by whether it's one of things that I've been thinking about a lot the the aggression of East Coasters is very different than the aggression of West Coasters.

And I always wonder, it's like, how much of that is because they have to deal with shit weather for five months out of the year? It could be. That I don't know. And the influence of immigrants as well. Because my parents, my grandparents were immigrants. They all came over from England and Ireland and Italy, and they were all savages. They were all people that were willing to get on a boat and cross the ocean.

Those are aggressive people. They're like, I'm getting out of here. Fuck you. And then they land in New Jersey. They're higher risk takers. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, so it's not a random population that came to America, nor with Australia.

You send all these convicts there. It's not going to be a typical gene pool there. Yeah, but meanwhile, how good did that work out? Those are the nicest people ever. Well, same thing in Germans, you know, here after World War I and World War II. Oh, these are bellicose people. They're a national character. Now they're the nicest people in the world.

They don't want to fight anybody. Yeah, that is interesting. That's one generation. Right, right. And more than that, I mean, they have massive war guilt and Holocaust guilt. I mean, they are all raised and taking tons of classes in school about what happened, why we're never going to do this again. Here's what we did to the Jews. You know, they're still paying Israel reparations for that. There are these little stumbling stones that are these sort of brass square cubes all over Germany of the name and year that the person was murdered.

These are all Jews in front of the house where they used to live. They're all over the place. Yeah, I have a picture of them in the moral arc here. I'll show you. It's really dramatic. And you literally stumble across them. I mean, they're just there in the street. If you Google stumbling stones, you can see that they're better in four color.

Another interesting thing about Germany is they won't let Scientology in. They're very sensitive about cults and cult behavior. That's right. Well, there's another reason for that, and that is, I can't find the picture now. In Germany, most people don't know this, there's a religious... There it is. Jamie's got it up there. Yeah, there they go.

Oh, so they're actually above ground? Yeah, so you're just walking along and you look down. Oh, some of them, those are not, they're not like that, right? They're not like little bricks on the ground? Yeah, they're like that. You just walk on them. Oh, so they're in the ground. Yeah, they're in the ground.

So it's the person's name. And they're in front of the house where they used to live, the date that they were departed, and the date that they were murdered, and where they were murdered, Auschwitz or Treblinka or Majdanek and so on. Yeah, there you go. So it's pretty moving. And it's kind of a reminder, this is what we did, and we're not going to do this again. Remember? So that's changing norms. How does this happen? Really, you can do it through the law from the top down,

but really it's more culture from the bottom up. You were saying that there's another reason besides the Holocaust that they're sensitive to Scientology? Oh, yeah, because in Germany they have a religious withholding tax. So when you get your first job, they do a withholding for your religion, and they give a percentage of your paycheck to your religion, the religion you were born into, baptized, whatever. It's mostly Catholic and Protestant.

But others want to get in on that because that's cumulative. You can make some money doing this as a religion. The humanists of Germany get a little piece piece of this action it's considered a religion so scientology when they saw that they went oh okay free government money tax money and uh the germans go uh no you're not a real religion and you're not getting in on this and uh yeah so i again when when my uh wife came here before she came here, she quit church. And you literally have to go down to the courthouse, fill out a form, and say, I am leaving the church. Please don't take my money anymore out of my paycheck.

So you have to opt out. You will be giving money to your religion unless you fill out the form and opt out. Wow. And in this case, it was kind of a funny story. They go, okay, so just to make sure you know. Now, if you sign this, you can't get married in the Catholic Church, you can't get buried in the Catholic Church, you can't go to the ceremonies and so on. You're done. And she goes, yep, that's the way I want it. And she went down there with her Four Horsemen t-shirt, said Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens.

And they're like, who's this? Anyway, so they said, oh, but now, okay, the moment you sign, it starts effective today. But there's a three-month lag for us to not take the money out of your paycheck. What? My wife is like, yeah, like, wait a minute. In a business, when a contract ends, it ends for both parties. They go, no. They're just going to steal money for three months?

Three more months, yeah. What a weird thing that you have to opt out like that, that it has to be so definitive that you have to sign papers and go someplace. What a fucking shady law. It is. It's no good. I know. That's got to change. So a lot of us are trying to talk people into opting out, quit church.

Well, it is amazing that in this country – I would like to know what the number is. If the churches in this country had to pay taxes, I mean, clearly, especially when you look at the televangelists that are driving Rolls Royces and flying around in private jets, I mean, there's profit. There's an extreme amount of profit, and it's discretionary income. They can do whatever they want with it. And you're dealing with massive, massive sums of money,

and they don't contribute. So these people are clearly personally benefiting from the contributions of these people, and then they don't pay taxes on it. And in the case of ministers who live in a church-owned home, they don't have to pay property tax. There's a lot of hidden benefits there. It's dirty. Yeah, it is dirty. It's amazing that it's still here. I mean, especially when you deal with something like Scientology, where you know the guy who

wrote it. Right. Like, this is not some ancient text that we're handing down from up on high. Yeah, this is, you know the guy. And the guy was a terrible writer. Yeah. I mean, he was a terrible science fiction author. He just wrote, every fucking thing he wrote was a first draft.

Just boom, gone. I i mean it's just the most nonsensical nonsense writing and yet they don't have to pay taxes because it's considered a legitimate religion harlan harlan ellison the great science fiction writer died this year uh told me the story of what the famous story where l ron hubbard allegedly said you know i'm gonna go start a religion yeah he said it was it's's real. It's a true story. They were – but it was just a bunch of science fiction writers sitting around like this chatting and complaining about how poorly paid they are. They have to crank out by the word, you know, penny a word kind of thing. And somebody said, you know, we should just start a religion and make shit up like that.

And L. Ron Hubbard goes, yeah, you know, that's a good idea. I think I might do that. And then he went out and wrote Dianetics, and that became the founding document of Scientology. Did you watch the HBO series on it, the documentary, rather? Yeah, the Going Clear. Yeah. Unbelievable. That's the best documentary on it.

And, of course, I've seen Aaliyah's show. She's got big guts to go after that. She does. I don't know if she's got good lawyers or a and e has good lawyers or whatever or maybe they've stopped suing people i don't know i think the climate has shifted and i think people are more first of all for the longest time all we thought of when you thought about scientology you thought about positive thinking and john travolta and tom cruise they're all super positive you know and they're getting things done and there's auditing and

they're really taking care of their mind and you know and thinking clearly and eliminating all the negative influences but then once um there's a bunch of factors i think but once the internet opened up these the the doctrines and you got a chance to read it and people got a chance to mock it and then you know south park did that whole series on it where they this is what they actually believe and you see like you see when south park did that everybody was like holy shit wait a minute is that real and then people started googling it and then looking into it and then it started to unravel slowly but surely people started leaving the church lawrence wright wrote the book all these things are happening and now leah is coming in and leah was you know i knew her but i mean i'm friends with Kevin James from the king and queen so I've known Leah for 20 plus years and

when I first met her she was just like this hard-ass beautiful woman who's just like driven and like she's a Scientologist like oh get the fuck out of her way you know it was like that she's just like super active and just getting things done and just being productive i mean that's what you thought about when you thought about scientology but now what you think about it is like nonsense and it's just foolishness and and once going clear aired and you got to see l ron hubbard and listen to him talk and you you see the captain's outfit he had on with the medals that he gave himself. You're like, what?

Who would buy this stuff, right? It's so dumb. It's amazing that it's so effective and so financially successful. Yeah, I think their membership roles are pretty low, but their property holdings, I think, are pretty extensive. Yeah, I mean, they're the second biggest real estate owner in Los Angeleseles is that right yeah oh wow at least they were there's some uh japanese folks that were number one and then it was uh number two was scientology maybe that's not true anymore might be uh oil barons now you know well back in the 90s when the internet first got cranked up we were doing issues articles on scientology is when some of these ex-members started posting the secret doctrines, the Zinu story and the going clear, you know, at level eight or whatever when you find out the inside story.

And they got raided. I mean, the Scientologists went to court, to judges, and said, this is copyrighted material. And it's like, wait, you're a religion. How can you copyright a religious? Well, and they somehow got around that. I mean, this would be like the Catholic Church not telling you about Jesus and the resurrection until level eight after you've paid $100,000 or something like that. It's just insane.

Well, what's amazing is that the IRS caved and turned them into tax exempt. When that happened, I remember when that happened, I thought, oh, my God. I don't want to fuck with these guys. I mean, they beat the IRS. I'm a nobody. How am I going to defend myself? But maybe they've stopped suing people. Maybe they're not going after Leo like that.

LA Real Estate. Here it goes. Portfolio properties reported at $400 million in Hollywood alone, paid for in cash no less. The Church of Scientology is undeniably a formidable player in the real estate game. That's what you got. They have some beautiful properties, too. It's just really amazing. It's amazing.

So, you know, my skeptic friends go, oh, they're going to go out of business anytime soon. It's like, I don't know. I think they could have practically no members and still they have all this real estate. Here's the thing even though it's nonsense just so is most religion let's just be honest i mean if you want to talk about guys coming back from the dead after being buried for three days or adam and eve being the only two people and they have kids and their kids just start having sex with each other and that makes all the people in the world or moses parting Red Sea and Jesus walking on water.

I mean, you're looking at horse shit everywhere. It's just older horse shit. It's, you know, whether or not it's based on some real events or some real people, who knows? Who knows? You know, but it's all nonsense. Have you ever heard Julia Sweeney's monologue, Letting Go of God? No.

Do you know Julia from Saturday Night Live? I know who she is. I do not know her. Yeah. She just moved back to LA, so you should have her on the show. She's terrific. I would love to. So she was born and raised Catholic, loved being a Catholic,

the whole culture and all that was great. And then she started reading Dawkins and me and Harris and so on, and then kind of let all that go, and then she wrote a monologue. It's very moving. So the monologue opens, she's in her house in Hollywood, and the Mormon boys come by. And she invites them in, and they want to tell the story.

And she's thinking, this is like a Hollywood pitch story. You're going to pitch the story, and I'll get back to you later until you know how I like it. No, no, they wanted to actually press to see if she could join right then and there. They're on their two-year mission that they do. So picture these two 18-year-olds with their white start shirts and their bicycles and so julia starts pressing him a little bit so so what's the story here well see um this guy joseph smith he he found these gold plates in his backyard and he translated them from ancient uh hieroglyphics into english and with these magic stones and they're going on and And then Jesus came to America and there was the good Indians and the bad

Indians. And Julie's like, I just want to tell them, okay, don't start with this story. This is a bad pitch story. Even the Scientologists know, don't tell them about Xenu until way down the line.

But then she says, reflecting on it, you know, if I told somebody my Catholic story who never heard of it, it would sound just as wacky. Yes. Because it's virgin and the resurrection. What?

Yeah. All of it's wacky. 100%. I mean, it's like we were talking about earlier. When you die, what's going to happen is you don't know. You don't know. And the reality is, look, maybe there is an afterlife. Maybe when we stop living, something happens and our essential energy goes into

another dimension it's possible but you don't know look being alive is so titanically bizarre just being a human being looking through eyeballs at each other across from this wooden table that was cut down from living organisms that turn into hard surfaces. You sand them and saw them, and then you put it in a building, and it's got electricity rolling through the walls, and if you stuck a fork in there, you'd die. All of it is crazy. The fact that we're on a planet, I mean, the fact that the universe is at least,

as far as we can tell, infinite, all that stuff is crazy. The idea that your essential energy doesn't transfer into some other state, why not? Yeah. The whole thing's crazy, but you don't know. That's right. No one knows. The thing is you don't know. And two, whenever you say something that you're not sure of, and you say, this is what's going

to happen, but you don't really know, you're a huckster. That's right. Yep. Absolutely. No one knows. No one knows. And that's the conclusion of Heavens on Earth. I don't know, and you don't really know. You're a huckster. That's right. Yep. Absolutely. No one knows. No one knows. And that's the conclusion of Heavens on Earth. I don't know, and you don't either. I saw a bumper sticker that said,

Militant Agnostic. I don't know, and you don't either. So, I mean, we have to, okay, so here's my bottom line on this. Yeah, I don't know. No one knows for sure. I'm happy to wake up in some great place, and there's all my friends. It'd be awesome. Unless God was mad mad you didn't follow the rules well that that's right christopher hitchens called the christian

heaven celestial north korea it's like here's this dictator that knows everything you do and controls everything forever that's hilarious celestial north korea but he doesn't tell you anymore i told you already i told you 2000 years ago this dude wrote it down. Pay attention to that. But then it's not even that. It's like one guy might have written it down a long time ago, but then a bunch of other dudes got together and had to revise it.

They had like a new draft, and the new draft they get to decide, people got to decide what goes in and what doesn't go in, and some of the stories are based on accounts from hundreds of years after Jesus' death. The Bible is a wiki. It is like a wiki. Yeah, it's just the people contributed it to over the years and so on.

Hitchens had a great analogy with when he was dying, he wrote a series of essays for Vanity Fair, his column, which you can get as a book now. I think it's called Mortality or something like that. Anyway, one of them was people think dying is like you're at a party and someone taps you on the shoulder and says, you have to leave now. And worse, the party's going to go on without you. It's like, oh, no.

He goes, okay, so let's play this out. You're at the party and you get tapped on the shoulder and said, you can never leave the party. You have to stay here forever with these people. Like one of Julia's funny lines is the Mormon boys were telling her, like, in heaven, it's going to be great. You're made whole again. Like the blind shall see and the deaf shall hear again, and the crippled shall be whole again.

And she said, well, I had uterine cancer and I had my uterus taken out. Do I get my uterus back? And they're like, you can imagine these 18-year-olds going, what's a uterus again? And they're like, yeah, you get your uterus back. She goes, I don't want it back. And then she said, what if you had a nose job and you liked it? Do I have to have my old nose back in heaven? That's a good point.

Yeah. And then they said, and you get to spend the rest of eternity with your family. And she went, oh, no, that would not be good in my case. Maybe they'll be cured, though. They'll realize the errors of their way. So they'll be all enlightened. Well, here's the problem. So this is called the problem of identity.

Who are you? And you know that Theseus' ship, the Greek minotaur slayer Theseus comes back and is a hero. And they preserve his ship in the museum forever. But the wood rots, and they replace the ship, and over the centuries, there's no wood left from the original. But it's still cherished. So I call this Schirmer's Mustang because my first car was a 66 Ford Mustang, a classic, and I had that for 19 years. Love those cars. It was a great car.

But I banged it up so much. I replaced this and that. Pretty much by the time I sold it as a classic and made a nice little chunk of change on it, there was very little of the original left. Right. But it's the pattern, not the material that counts. So this whole debate about when you're resurrected in heaven with Jesus, what's up there? Is it your physical body? Because some Christians say, yeah.

It's like, okay, how old are you when you're in heaven? 30. This is the year they came up with, because that's the age Jesus was when he was crucified. Okay, but if Joe Rogan, I don't know how old, 40-something? 51. You're 51. Okay, so if you're resurrected at 30-year-old Joe Rogan, what happened to the last 21 years of Joe Rogan's body, memories? I don't want to go back to that dude.

That dude was dumber than me. You don't? No. You're happy where you are in your life at this moment? Yeah, well, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, that means you've got a well-lived life. So what's up there with Jesus? I wouldn't mind having that body. 30-year-old body had less problems. Fewer injuries. Left injuries. Yeah. I've been beating on it for 21 years since then.

Right. That's like when I was 30 is when I got hardcore into jiu-jitsu. So that's 20 years of getting choked. But, of course, the Christian would say, well, God makes you whole again. You'll have no injuries. But that's not really part of you. Part of you is your injuries, your muscles. What I was going to say, though, is but all the stuff that I did that hurt me, I also learned from.

That's right. Made you stronger. Well, not just that. I learned the – I think through incremental struggle, whether it's like rigorous exercise or learning something. I think everything that I do that's difficult makes me just a little bit more aware, a little bit better at other things, just a little bit better to talk to, a little bit easier to deal with, a little more friendly. And all those things, I think, I wouldn't give up for anything. I think that's more important than whatever injuries I've got with. I think, you know, I wonder how you're going to feel when you're 80.

I wonder if you'll feel like that. There's got to be a point of diminishing returns. I'd rather be stupid in 40 than to be enlightened and can't get out of bed very well. My older athletic friends tell me it's about mid-80s when things drop off fairly quickly. They can stay pretty fit into their 70s, maybe still racing, bike racing at 80, but 85 or so, things drop off pretty quick. That's where you got to go to hormone replacement therapy.

Or whatever, yeah. Or the ice plunges or the young person's blood or something. Okay, so I deal with, you know, there's no breakthrough miracles yet. But again, I'm not against any of these things happening. You know, when someone like Jeff Bezos puts $100 million into an aging company, I hope he's successful. Does he have $100 million in an aging company? He and Peter Thiel and the Google guys

through Calico and a few others have invested many hundreds of millions of dollars into companies like Calico, for example. These are companies that are trying to, their big goal is to defeat aging through re-engineering cells. And the sort of philosophical goal behind it is we have to defeat aging so people can live for centuries or forever. To which I say, let's not worry about living 500 years. Let's worry about prostate cancer and breast cancer and Alzheimer's and dementia and so on.

Just the little incremental medical problems that people have. Quality of life things. Worry about things that take people out young. Yeah. Right. And so that you can live a longer, higher quality life. But do you imagine Michael Shermer at 300 years old? No, I can't.

If you can keep this body. If you can keep the body that you have now, you're moving around great, everything's well, you look really healthy. How smart would you be? How much more enlightened would you be? Or wise maybe is the way i'm not against that i'm happy to live as long as i possibly can there are people there are people that go well that's not right it's not natural it's like okay what what's natural there's surveys on this people and people's answer is whatever the current average lifespan is so well 80 well, 80 seems about right. Okay, fast forward to the day before your 80th birthday. Tomorrow you're going to go.

You want another week? Yeah, I'll take another week. Okay, fast forward six days. Would you like another month? I'll take another month, thank you. And that would never end. So, of course, if you're healthy and happy and you don't want to off yourself or whatever because you're super depressed or something like that, yes, you're just going to want to keep going.

Nothing wrong with that if we can do that. But what if you die and it's way better? What if you die and you really do? You leave your physical body. There's no need for emotions and all of the entanglements of human existence and you go to this beautiful place of bliss and life and love and it's just pure love without a body, unembodied, unhindered. I don't know. Would that be fun?

I don't know. Is that what we're here for? We're here for fun? We're here for fun. We're doing a shitty job. We should be going crazy right now. We should be in a party van on the way to Vegas. I had a college professor when I was in my Christian days who asked me when I was pitching him the Christian story.

He says, are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven? Because I like physical challenges. I want to get out there and push myself. Right. Like, I don't know. So, I mean, would heaven be no challenges, no working out, no physical tensions? True, right?

Yeah. Maybe you don't need it. So you'd have to remove that part of humanity, that we no longer want challenges and to be pushed to better ourselves. Do they play chess in heaven? That's right. Right? Do you get to win?

Right. Do you get to win in heaven or is everybody a winner? Everybody gets a gold medal and a Nobel Prize and whatever. That is a problem. The things a gold medal and a Nobel Prize and whatever. That is a problem. The things that we're attracted to, the things that we enjoy, accomplishments and achievements and all these things, they exist only inside of civilization,

inside of this realm that we've created. The significance of them is entirely based on our own agreements that it's important when you take the king. It's important when the ball goes into the net. We've agreed. When someone shoots a three-pointer know it's important when you take the king it's you know it's important when the ball goes into the net these we've agreed you know when someone shoots a three-pointer it's really not that big a deal you're just throwing a ball into a hole nothing really

significant happens but because we've attached all this meaning to that then it's something that we really want to see and everybody score the goal went in the puck went in the net yes it becomes this giant thing. Yeah, theists have no good answer for this. When you say, well, what's heaven like? Well, the psychics will tell you it's bliss and love. But what does that mean? It sounds, again, back to Hitch.

It sounds boring. I have to stay at this party forever? That sounds boring. Did you ever see the guy who took a photo of himself in heaven? No. You never saw that one? No. Oh, my God. of himself in heaven no you never saw that one he used a samsung galaxy phone yeah to take uh to take a picture of himself in heaven are there what clouds it's just white it's just him like

smiling it is one of the funniest fucking photos you're ever going to find on the internet just because of the context of it that's funny yeah i believe he is an african gentleman who was uh either he's telling the truth or he's hilariously full of shit. I mean, imagine if he really did go to heaven and he took a picture and we're just mocking him. Really, we should be going to him for advice. That's right. So what is it really? Have you found it?

You see the picture? I'm only finding the mocking, the memes of making fun of him afterwards. Oh, there's no actual picture? I'm trying to find the original. Just Google man takes. I did. That's what they get. Just Google man takes. I did. That's what they get. Everyone wants to make fun of me.

The internet is so overwhelmingly mocking. It's so good. That's got to be playing a large part. You got it? I think this is. Everyone's saying this is this one. No, it was all white. It wasn't like that.

It wasn't that. It was just. It was that picture of him holding his wasn't like that it wasn't that it was just it was that picture of him holding his hand up like that but it was just the background wasn't rainbows and shit like that you could find it man i have faith in you i found it the other day um it's uh you know it's just hilarious that someone would be so confident to put that picture online, knowing full well that the world is going to see that picture and start writing about it. Remember the guy who sold his soul on eBay? Did he?

I forget what he got for it. And then a lot of religious people were offended by this. You can't sell your soul. Why not? You sold your soul to your religion. Did he get a good price? I don't know. I think it was a few hundred bucks or something like that.

Oh, that's nice. I forget he won it. Go to dinner with that. Yeah, that's right. Nice. But my concern about all of this obsession with the afterlife. That's not it. This is from his page.

It says, woke up this morning and saw this. Had to take a picture. Oh, okay. A little stairway to heaven. Yeah, but that's not the actual photo. The photo of him in heaven is what's hilarious. It's that picture with him. Far left. Far left. That's not the actual photo The photo of him in heaven is what's hilarious It's that picture with him Far left, far left, that's it

That's the photo, that is him That is the photo That's it, that's the exact photo he took I don't know who took the photo He's like, hey angel Do me a solid Yeah, it's not a selfie No, his one hand is down So he's not he's not taking it with that

hand the other hand is up that's him in heaven love it the internet is so good for mocking things though it's so good it's one of the best things ever in terms of like there's so many people that are paying attention and so many people that are funny that aren't comedians per se they just might work in an office somewhere and they've got a little bit of free time and they'll make a hilarious meme about something and then everybody runs with it and things just get mocked mercilessly remember the video of the guy he was having an interview and his kid started walking in behind him and he's trying to talk about foreign relations in poland or something and the little kid is back here and then somebody the wife rushes in. Anyway, there's a bunch of funny spoof videos on that where it says that some woman is sitting there

talking about nuclear strategy or whatever, and then the kid comes in, and she's ironing the shirt, and then she defuses a bomb, and then she cleans up the socks or whatever. It's really funny. Yeah, it's just we were always – all of our information was distributed to us through these very controlled networks, whether it's CBS or NBC or ABC. And everything was very cut and dry and very professional in the way people talked, the way information was presented. But now it's just – it's open and – like as soon as I find out about something happened in the world. I google it I go, what is it? What happened? What happened?

I google it and then I'll go to Twitter and then when I go to Twitter It's all pictures and memes and and it's the dude with the question marks You know that guy's like, you know There's like so many memes that people will throw up when anything crazy happens in the world It becomes so interesting to hear the news and hear commentary on the news from this just gigantic mass of humans. And it's what's most funny or most interesting

or most succinct or poignant that rises to the top. Yep. Yeah, there's endless content to entertain. Also, just high-quality content. I mean, I'm a content producer. I write and so on, but I am a huge consumer. Most of the people I follow on Twitter post articles. Most of them I want to read.

So in the course of a couple hours, my little window pop-ups just spread across the top of the screen. I want to read all of these articles, and I plow through as many as I can. They're pretty much like The Atlantic or Vanity Fair, Time, whatever. They're pretty high-quality, well-written articles. The problem is, as a content producer myself, is that the half-life of these articles is so short. Like when I post one of my Scientific American columns, I put a lot of work into it. And then like a couple hours later or maybe a day later, gone. No one's talking about it. Done. Like, well, I put a lot of work into it and then you know like a couple hours later or maybe a day later gone no one's talking about it done like yeah well i put a lot of work into that yeah uh but it's taking me out of the equation like the new york times did that huge new york times

sunday magazine article on trump's business going all the way back to the 70s right right they spent like a year working on this like 10 journalists journalists. This would have been a Pulitzer Prize winning piece. This would have done in anybody else but Trump, right? I mean, they had his old business contracts and lawsuits and all the shady stuff going on. And this got huge media attention for about a day and a half. And by Sunday morning, by Tuesday, no one's talking about this anymore. It's like these guys spent a year working on this. I mean, what did it take to get that lawsuit paperwork

from the courthouse? And they had hundreds of things like that. It's like, gone. Like, whoa. Well, Trump in particular, there's so many scandals that I think we've all become numb. Yeah, there is that too, yeah. There's so many that you just, you get numb to it

and it doesn't affect you. You're just like, oh. He paid off a woman? Whatever. Yeah. Those are the tiny ones. The big ones are the lawsuits, the businesses, the construction businesses where he didn't pay small companies, he didn't pay them.

Sue me. And then these companies went under. There's a lot of those. Right. There's a lot of the unethical business practices practices that's all in that article yeah yeah again anybody else uh would be done in by something like that any politician except him it's just amazing well it's also what he represents to those people it doesn't necessarily have to be what he really is it's what he represents what he represents is like the american flag and eagles. They have this really juvenile sense, some folks do, of what he is and what he represents.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they have him in this category that he's going to drain the swamp and these liberals are just going to cry and he's going to make America better. That's the side that they're on. They're on the make America better side. Yeah, yeah. Don't you think it's also people don't have the time to really look into this stuff? Who could fact check these things? Not just that. It's like if you work eight hours a day and you have children and hobbies and how much

time are you really paying attention to Trump's ethics? Are you really looking into it? No. Are you really considering it before you vote? Are you really taking into consideration what kind of a person he is and what ripple effect it would have, would any of his policies take place? I think you're right. People vote by their team. This is my team.

I'm sticking – okay, so he won the primary. All right, that's our guy. We're sticking with him no matter what. I think there's a huge element of that for sure. Yeah, there's also people love to argue online too. And as soon as they find someone who's opposed to something that they believe in, they stick to their guns and they just hold strong.

Despite all, I mean, it would take so much for people to turn on Trump. The real hardcore Trump believers, it would take so much for them to decide enough is enough. Yeah.

Well, it'd be interesting to see if members of his own party do something in 2020. Probably not. Doesn't it seem like with Fox that Fox is slowly starting to shift their coverage? A little bit. They're criticizing him.

A little bit. They're pushing back a little bit. Shepard Smith is pretty good on that. He's always been that way. Yeah, he's always been great at that. Hannity will probably be last to go. He's never going. He's never going.

He's never going. They had the same fucking lawyer. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the fact that that didn't sink Hannity. Right. that he had michael cohen was his lawyer like whoa yep yeah the only thing we count on in the media is that there's lots of sources and you just have to just cross check as many as you can don't stick on any one channel well i wish there was a really truly objective service like it would be wonderful if there was a really, truly objective service. Like, it would be wonderful if there was people that were dedicated to no editorial slant whatsoever.

Just 100% fact. This is how we know the facts, regardless, left, right, no ideological curve to it at all. Wouldn't that be fantastic? There's got to be a market to that. Yeah. Real news. Of course, they all say that that's what they do. Yeah, but we know better. Politifact is pretty good.

They're the fact-checking organization. I mean, they're not reporting news. They're reporting on the – Politics. On the facts said by politicians and so on. So that's useful. And I think there's a market competition amongst those people to get more hits. Yeah.

Like we're fact-checking more than the other guys are fact-checking. Although there is two different, uh, there was aim, uh, accuracy and media. And then there was another one. I forget the name.

And one was left leaning and one was right leaning. It's like, can I have one without a wing? You know, no, no right wing, no left wing. Yeah.

It, it seems like that. I mean, I'm reading Jonathan hates book. Uh, the, the, the two books that, I've been reading recently.

One of them we discussed on the podcast we did on Monday, but the other one is The Coddling of the American Mind. It's a good book, yeah. I'm into that now, and it's fantastic. And he covers this quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Jonathan's on to something good there with the Heterodox Academy, which I'm a member. I'm a professor at Chapman University, and so I was the first member there.

And our university is pretty centrist. We don't get a lot of these protests and microaggressions and safe space stuff. It's pretty quiet. And Jonathan's point is that it's more of a sort of East Coast, West Coast public university thing, or maybe Harvard, that kind of thing. Middle of the country, you don't see as much of that. But the polarization thing has gotten worse. You can see the polls since like 1990 to 2018.

You ask people, how evil are the Democrats or Republicans? And it used to be tiny little differences, and then they diverge like that now. Where the other side is not just wrong, but they're immoral. They are evil. I do think talk radio and television feeds into that, or now social media in the bubble there. But on the other hand, again, the Heterodox Academy has like 2,000 members now, professors that said, yep, I'm going to stand up against this censorship on college campuses. You were talking to Jonathan about Pete Boghossian. You had Pete on.

I've known Pete for many years before the hoax papers, and I think they've had it in for him long before the hoax papers. Well, let's explain that to people so this could be standalone. Pete Boghossian, James Lindsay, and what is the woman's name? Helen Pluckrose. And she wasn't on the podcast. I didn't get to meet her. But she's in England, I believe. They published a bunch of preposterous papers, like really ridiculous, like on, you know,

what is it, the dog park one? Yeah, dog park. Rape culture and dog park and and the and the re-translation of a chapter from mind comp replacing fem uh it was males with jews yes eliminate the males that kind of yeah so they did one before that actually pete uh and james lindsey did one two years ago on the conceptual penis it was, and that the penis is a concept. It's not a real thing. You know, it's just, anyway, it's a hilarious paper.

And the same month that came out, it was published in a kind of a third-tier feminist studies journal. So they got criticized like, eh, that's not one of the big ones. So you didn't really hoax anything. But the same week that came out, there was another paper published on feminist glaciology and i thought oh someone beat pete to the hoax oh my god this is totally and i read it i thought this is what's utter bullshit glaciology you know the study of glaciers oh god yeah and

that you know glaciers are very hard and and erect and you know it's all masculine and you know anyway so i called the university that was affiliated with the uh lead author and i said this is a hoax right come on just before i say anything i don't want to be embarrassed this is a hoax right no no this is real it's like i can't tell the difference between the conceptual penis paper which i know is a hoax because pete wrote it and the feminist glaciology paper that's's the problem. Well, let's explain what's happening to Pete now, because Pete was brought before Portland State University. What exactly are they charging him with?

With faking data, fraudulent data, fraudulent research, faking data, that he didn't go through the Institutional Research Board, which approves experiments that professors want to run. Like, for example, you could not do Milgram shock experiments, where you hook people up and tell them you're going to give electric shocks to somebody. They wouldn't approve that. Or Phil Zimbardo's fake jail, where you randomly assign students to be prisoners or guards, and they end up beating each other up.

They would never approve that. So since those sort of guerrilla theater experiments of the 60s, the universities have tightened up the kind of research you're allowed to do. Even like the kinds of questions you would ask in a survey, they have to approve all of that. So, of course, Pete and James and Helen didn't do that because, first of all, James was the primary director of this thing. He's not affiliated with the university. He doesn't have to answer to anybody.

Pete was affiliated with it, so they're getting him on that. And that he didn't go through the IRB and get approval. Well, of course, if you're going to tell people, if you're going to fake something, you can't tell them ahead of time that we're going to fake. Of course. Because it's going to get out and then the gig is up. of time that we're going to fake because it's going to get out and then the gig is up. The analogy I made the other day was in 1971, a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan,

a clinical psychologist, sent a bunch of his graduate students into mental hospitals all over the country and said, just tell them you're feeling kind of blue and that you kind of hear this inner voice and that it's just you just kind of don't feel right and you need some help. So they did. They all got themselves checked in. And then from there on out, they acted perfectly normal. And then the goal was, let's see how long it takes you to get out. And so it was a study in how mental hospitals treat people who are completely sane.

So the title of his famous paper is called Being Sane in Insane Places. So first of all, the grad students report it's incredibly boring. So one of them would sit there and write essays and take notes. And so in the psychiatrist's evaluation of this patient is, you know, patient exhibits excessive writing behavior. Patient is, you know, patient exhibits excessive writing behavior. This is clearly an example of his erupting libidinal impulses from his childhood, blah, blah, blah. Another one was a painter, so she's doing paintings, landscapes and so on.

Oh, patient, you can see in the paintings the erupting emotions and the conflicts in her personality. They're just acting normal, right? So the point of this hoax was that there's something wrong with our mental institutions. If they can't tell the difference between a sane and an insane person, what are they doing? So of course, the industry got pretty upset about being hoaxed. So Rosenhan came back and said, okay, in the next year, I'm going to send in some more. Let's see if you can find them. And he didn't send anybody. Oh, wow. So they're like, okay, we think this guy's fake.

Again, they couldn't tell the difference in their own patients, and no one was even faking. So in a way, this is kind of what Pete and James and Helen did. It's like if they're sending these papers out, if you can't tell, then what are you doing in this field? Well, people are, for whatever reason people are some people i should say are drawn to these nonsense ideas and one of the papers the dog park paper got it got lauded for its excellent scholarship i mean it got praised right it's it's one of the weirder ones that they hoaxed i mean because it's so obviously preposterous when you're reading it like what i think it was the fat bodybuilding one that got

that was another one i think it won an award this is the best paper we've ever had oh okay yeah and uh really pete and james and helen they they are like professional scholars in the grieving studies yeah because it's if you those things, it's hard to write like that. I mean, it took them a lot of practice to get the jargon and the style down. Well, what do you think is the – what are the options for someone like Pete? Because if he does get fired from the university, what could he possibly do? I mean, what Jordan has done is pretty extraordinary. He's essentially left teaching at – because of the controversies that he went through.

He became famous. He became famous for doing podcasts and writing things. And then his YouTube videos are – they're so insightful and wonderful that people just got drawn to him. And then they go to see him speak live. They've made him into a monster. Then they go to see him speak live. They've made him into a monster. By censoring him, by attacking him, they've essentially turned him into a global international star.

That's right. One of the best arguments against censorship is it's going to have the opposite effect you want it to. If someone is of the quality of Jordan Peterson, which is pretty rare. It's pretty rare. I've talked to Pete about this as well as Brett Weinstein because he suffered the same thing at Evergreen, and he's out. At least he and his wife, Heather, got a payout, so they have a little cushion. But this model, like Sam on Patreon or Dave Rubin, especially Jordan Peterson, very rare. It's very rare to be able to make a living as a public intellectual on your own. Most public intellectuals that are not in academia, they're with a think tank.

You know, the Cato Institute or Reason Magazine or, you know, any of these. There's left wing, right wing. They're all over the board. You know, it's possible they could get jobs there where you actually have a paycheck. And those groups are usually funded by wealthy supporters that just, we like the cause, and here's a pile of money. Not through Patreon. It's possible that Pete and Brett could do this, but it's a tough road to hoe. I mean, Jordan is very rare.

I've watched this through my whole life. And this idea of making $10,000 a talk, $50,000 a talk, $100,000 a talk, almost nobody gets that kind of money. Right. Maybe Neil, DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins maybe, Carl Sagan back in the day, whatever the equivalent of that would have been in the 80s. But that's pretty much it.

And there's thousands of scientists that would love to do that. Like, yeah, I want to go to that. Well, they're not entertaining. The thing about Jordan is he's very engaging. His words are, it's not just they're wise. It's not just he's very articulate. There's something engaging about the style in which he presents these things.

It's very captivating. He's very charismatic. I agree. People discount that. It's very captivating. He's very charismatic. I agree. People discount that.

Or I know a lot of scientists who are kind of jealous of Neil deGrasse Tyson or, say, Bill Nye. It's like, oh, I could do that. It's like, no, I doubt that you can. I mean, Neil and Bill are really entertaining. They are funny. They are engaging. You can't take your eyes off them. They're so much fun to watch. Well, perfect example.

Most people are not like that. Sean Carroll's brilliant. He's really brilliant. And I'm glad that he's doing a podcast now and but when you listen to him talk and you listen to neil talk neil just has this booming presence right and this sense of drama and energy and entertainment he knows how to be he he knows how to deliver it in a way that just catches you it's fun to listen to. That's a lot. He and I did a public event in Australia in Sydney.

And unfortunately, I went before him. And maybe that's actually good. And I'm a pretty good public speaker. I have a sense of my value as a public speaker. I'm pretty good. And I had never seen him speak. And I did my talk. It's pretty much like my TED Talk you can watch online. I'm pretty good, and I had never seen him speak. And I did my talk. It's pretty much like my TED Talk you can watch online.

It's pretty entertaining. Okay, so I get up, and I'm done. I get a nice applause. I'm feeling pretty good. And then Neil gets up, and he starts. I'm like, oh, crap, this guy is fucking good. You don't want to follow that. I know.

I'm so glad I already went. He's got so much energy. Yeah, but he also has, I don't know, that sort of connection with the audience. Yeah. It captures them. And yeah, I could tell afterwards, you know, throngs of people around him. And yeah, it's there. And not very many people have that.

And I don't think it's something you can just learn. I think it's a temperament. I mean, you can hone it and refine it, but you can't just sort of naturally be funny and engaging. I think it's personality that comes out. I think you can certainly improve, but I think you're right. I think whatever personality you have, like he has that kind of engaging, fun personality, and it translates very well to doing those public speeches. Since I was here a year ago, I saw Jordan's event in Thousand Oaks at the Cavalier Theater there. 2,000 seats sold out, standing room only.

And it was good. He was, like, different than Neil, of course, but just as engaging. Yeah. Wasn't political. A lot of people there, you know, recognized me, and I could see, you know, these aren't, like, right-wing nuts. These aren't young male, angry males. This isn't like this at all. And his message was, you know, pretty straightforward.

Get your life in order. You know, this is the way life is. It's hard. And he kind of went through his thing and it's like, all right, that makes sense. And people loved it. Very almost no politics in it. And Dave Rubin tells me he doesn't really get political on stage, so that's not the motive. And I think life is hard enough for most people that they like,

back to the self-help thing, it's nice to be reminded, here are a few simple things you could do to get your life in order. It's like, yeah, well, yeah, I kind of knew that. I'm going to go back out and do that again. Well, his principles are very effective, too. They're very straightforward, as you said. But for the guy like Pete Boghossian, though, to bring it back to that, what could he do if he does get fired? It's going to be very difficult for him to get a job at another university. He's obviously got roots in Portland.

He lives there now. The thing is, he's pretty liberal. It's not like he's a closeted conservative and they're after him. He's definitely more liberal than me. And I could tell even years ago that they're going to go after him, I can tell, mainly because he puts truth and free speech ahead of political positions. He might say, I'm a liberal and these are my political positions, but more important to me is the truth. Yes. Okay. Well, that's not – as Jonathan points out in his book, universities are now at this divide between are we here for social justice or are we here for truth? And they're having to make a decision and too many of them are going for it. We're here for social justice. Well, then just be honest about it because that's not you can't bury it well not just

that i don't think that's an effective way to pursue social justice if you're ignoring the truth you undermine your message because then it's it's not like it's hidden somewhere it's not like people can't read into it and see exactly what you've said and how you supported certain causes and denied the reality of others. But the Google memo thing. Yeah. The Google memo thing was a gigantic disaster. Yeah. Because ideologically, people jumped on a side and argued.

And I heard the CEO of YouTube talk about how damaging it was to women. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, what are you saying? Like, what did he say? He's just talking about preferences that are described by tests. This has all been peer-reviewed, studied papers on the differences between the preferences of males versus females. It's not like a value assessment at all. And in fact, not only that, he put into his paper a page and a half of recommendations of how to get certain women interested in tech.

And perhaps you could recruit certain women and make it more palatable or exciting to them. It's not a sexist screed at all. No, no, no. Online, there's a really good debate with Steven Pinker and a feminist scholar at Harvard. And Steve has all his slides up there, and he just goes through all the different things that are in that Google memo. This is before the Google memo.

Maybe James Damore got some of that from Pinker's lecture. But it's pretty solid stuff. There's nothing inflammatory about the debate. This is kind of normal scientific debates. You know, here's a study that shows this. Well, but there's this other study. And then they go at it. Okay, end of story.

We're not saying women are better, men are better. That doesn't happen. Unfortunately, if I was Pete's boss, here's what I would do. Because a lot of us have written letters in support of Pete. And you can kind of see what's about to happen. Let's just drop this whole thing. Let him keep his job. Keep our mouths shut. Because this is going to backfire on us big time.

Like it did with Evergreen State University. Yeah, exactly. Or with the Google memo. Yes. That's what I would do. Did it backfire on the Google memo? I mean, we realize that they've got a preposterous ideology over there now. We know that.

Maybe their stock price hasn't gone down. I don't think it affected them very much. And many more people support it. Many more people who... It's one of those things where you hear one version of it, and that version sticks. You know, it's like, you know, this is the version is he's a sexist. You know, the sexist Google memo. And then that's all I need.

The Google memo is very sexist. It's very anti-female. And then that's all I need. The Google memo is very sexist. It's very anti-female. And there's many, many people who support the idea that something that was sexist was removed from Google. They've made it a safer environment for women. Right.

Yep. But did they? I don't know. It doesn't seem like they did. It seems like they made it an environment where you have to be careful about facts. Right. Because, again, it's not a value assessment of women. If women choose to go into the medical fields, more women are physicians, more women. There's many fields that disproportionately attract women.

That's not a negative value assessment. That's just people are different. I don't want to do what certain people do because I'm different than them. I'm not attracted to those fields. It's fascinating to find out why people are attracted. And when you see that there's actual statistics in terms of what fields men are more attracted to or what fields women are more attracted to. Now, on the other hand, if there's a reason why women aren't attracted to those fields because they get harassed when they go into them, well, that should be demonstrated, and that's obviously a bad thing. Absolutely.

And that should be addressed. Yeah, absolutely. Totally. But that's not what he's talking about. No. And James Damore is like a very kind, soft-spoken. I know you had him on. He's great.

He's a nice guy. He's very introverted. He's a kind guy. And's very introverted. He's a kind guy. And he's on the spectrum somewhere. There was no way you'd look at James the more and go, there's the patriarchy. Yeah. He's a nice guy. And they said to him, if you have any input on these things and feel like you can help,

please contribute. And he's like, okay. So that's what he is. He's a fucking software engineer. He sat down and looked at all the data and compiled it. And he's saying, well, actually, it seems like this is the reason why women are more attracted to other jobs. And this is the reason why men are more attracted to these fields. And they're like, sexist.

And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. These are the studies. This is what you're asking me to do. The concern that if the science doesn't come out a certain way then people won't be treated equally is a bad idea because then you're going to force the science to be distorted if it doesn't match your political ideology and that's so whether trans is natural or how whatever percentages or how old you have to be before you get trans surgery and the hormones or whatever all that that's a raging debate right now now. But underlying that debate is like we have to make it come out in a way that trans people

are treated equally. It's like, no, no, they should be treated equally anyway, regardless of what the science says. Right. But that's a problem now. Now, the problem for people like Pete and Brett, like joining a think tank, is almost all these think tanks are politically affiliated left or right. You have to – and therefore, you have to kind of toe the political line. This is our ideology in this think tank, and you're going to write white papers and op-eds and send them out with our kind of slant.

The problem with that is, well, but what if I disagree with this and this and this here? Well, then you can't work here, something like that. So that's the problem with that is, well, but what if I disagree with this and this and this here? Well, then you can't work here, something like that. So that's the problem with those. Right, but is that the only option today? When you see that, I mean, I know he's not Jordan and there's very few people like Jordan, but Sam Harris is also able to do these speeches. He's very compelling as well. He's doing a lot of public speeches and doing these big events. There's more opportunity to do alternative things

now than there have ever been before. And I would hope that that becomes available. Look, I hope Pete just keeps his job. But if he can't keep his job at Portland State, I would hope that some other avenue, some other path is possible. Yeah, it might be. You never know. But you put a date on the calendar and you tell the world, do they come?

Do they pay $10 a ticket, $50 a ticket, $100 a ticket? Not many people can fill a 3,000-seat auditorium or a 500-seat auditorium. One thing he could do is do a lecture series on the grievance studies and have the three of them on stage talk about how silly these things were if they could put that together as a theatrical presentation it would really be funny because there's some hilarious

subjects that they covered all they have to do is just read when James Lindsay and Boghossian were in here and we were talking about these things we were crying laughing it was really really funny stuff that's actually probably the best path for him is to put together some sort of a public show. They should do a book and then have a book, a show, and then maybe even a TV documentary

about it. Well, they have – somebody's making a documentary. That's a good start. That'd be good. When I was in college at Pepperdine, G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary did a stage show. Wow. And they were touring did a stage show. Wow. And they were touring the country doing this. Yeah.

It was at UCLA, so I drove down and saw it, and it was so entertaining. I mean, G. Gordon Liddy, you know, he's the G-man there with his three-piece suit, and he's got his gun. And Timothy Leary comes out in his boat shoes and his flower shirt. But they had it kind of scripted, but it was well scripted in a way that seemed kind of spontaneous, but it was really funny. And educational about how the government works and freedom versus security and rights. And I thought that was brilliant. And I think they did, I don't know, like a 50-city tour of that.

G. Gordon Liddy was on Fear Factor. He was? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. He's an interesting guy. Did he hold his hand above a flame no he didn't but we did hang him by his ankles and slam him into a pool like over and over and over again he was i forget what the stunt was but i was like jesus this guy's old to be doing this but uh he did uh some physical challenges i remember thinking like this guy is more fit and more active than most young people

and he was deep into his 60s at the time yeah when we had him on fear factor the only thing that screwed him up was in the end the final stunt was a driving stunt and it was at night and unfortunately his eyes are not that good and he just couldn't see well without glasses so as he was driving the car he slammed slammed into something or something. You get what it was? What, he got him there? No, it's all right. But I got a chance to talk to him for a few days. You did? Hang out with him. Very interesting guy. Yeah.

Strong mind. Yeah, that's right. He had a talk show back in the 90s I was on when my first book came out, White People Believe Weird Things, and I talk about conspiracies there. So he asked me, well, tell me about conspiracies. I said, well, you tell me about conspiracies. You know more than I do. He knows about real ones. Real ones, yeah.

That is my number one beef with conspiracy theories is that when you – some of them that are so preposterous, like whether it's flat Earth or – what are the really dumb ones? There's a base on the opposite side of the moon and NASA knows about all the really dumb ones. Aliens are living in New Mexico. The lizard people. The problem with those is they undermine actual conspiracies. Right. When you hear about preposterous things and they

get categorized as conspiracy theories. Then when someone says, well, there's a conspiracy about this. Well, it's already a tainted idea because the word conspiracy is connected to nonsense. Right. Because there's so many nonsense conspiracy theories, it's hard to recognize, oh, something like Enron, that really did happen. Yeah.

There is the Northwoods Papers. There's a bunch of legitimate conspiracies. You're like, wow. You find out about the Gulf of Tonkin. You're like, well, they really did that. Yep, that's right. Yeah, I'm writing a paper now on why people believe conspiracies. And so I go through the whole list of all the psychological things.

But I end with the whole second half is because a lot of them are true. And there are reasons we should be suspicious. Just think of the WikiLeaks or the Panama Papers. You know, like the Panama Papers. Here's all these billionaires opening these shell corporations, keeping money they're not paying tech that's a conspiracy you know by definition two or more people meeting in secret to conspire to benefit themselves that harms the public good or other people this happens a lot in the u.s government in corporations yeah there's a reason we should be suspicious there There is. But what is it about people that want to look for a conspiracy in everything, even if it's – they want to see contrails behind jets as evidence of the government spraying things in the sky to control our minds.

Right. So the sort of baloney detection tools are not too finely tuned. The problem is that the tendency is to look for some global, simple explanation for complex systems. So while we all kind of recognize, yes, we know corporations cheat and stock traders trade with inside information, but that's kind of small and mundane. It's not very interesting. Global domination of the world. This is, ooh, ooh, who's doing that? You know, so then it becomes like a Dan Brown novel. It's more compelling as a narrative story about how the world works. It's super simple. There's these 12 guys in London called

the Illuminati, and they're calling the shots, and they're controlling- The Bilderbergers. The Bilderbergers, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Illuminati. The CFR. The New World Order. Oh. Yeah. George Soros is doing it.

He's a part of it. Oh, totally. That's what I hear. He's number 13 in the Illuminati. There's so many different competing theories, too. So a couple of criteria. The more people that have to be involved, the less likely it is to be true. It was Gordon Liddy that told me this, that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead you know people can't keep their

mouth shut and also he would know because he worked in government most people are pretty incompetent so the idea that you could orchestrate a thousand people to and each of them is going to go out and do this one thing at nine o'clock tuesday and it's all going to come together just perfect impossible yeah and he should know i mean they couldn't even break into the watergate hotel uh room to get these papers what's also who is getting into government in the first place are they the geniuses of the world the heads of their field or are they people that just like decided to get into a job you know and this is this is a good percentage of the people that are involved in government if those people know as well

these unexceptional folks that are just like uninspired, they're also there. It's they. That's the they. Air quotes they. Do they really have the kind of wherewithal to control the whole world? Mind control. That's my favorite. Right.

Mind control. Psy ops. I mean, this idea that operatives went into the World Trade Center buildings, both of them, two of the most tightly controlled and secure buildings in the world, and under the pretense of working on the elevators, managed to get into and break through the drywall

to get into the main beams to wrap them up in explosive devices, this thermite stuff. And this would, you know, we know how long it takes to demolish a stadium or a big building. You know, they work there for weeks or months preparing all the explosive devices. Somehow they did this in the World Trade Center building without anyone noticing. Not to mention all the people that worked on this, they never told their spouses or

friends or buddies or, you know, what they were doing or they didn't mention it to anybody. They don't want to go on CNN or 60 Minutes and go, I saw something and here's what happened. Nobody. Well, anytime you have a gigantic catastrophe like that, just a gigantic, horrific event, there's so many emotions, there's so much chaos, there's so much going on that you're going to get a bunch of really wacky eyewitness accounts because people just aren't good at remembering things when they're under extreme duress. It's just a fact. They hear things. They remember explosions.

They see things that aren't necessarily what was really in front of them. The human memory is one of the most flawed ways of gathering information. Right. It's terrible. We have terrible memories. Right. And once something happens, then you back up and look for all the sort of pregnant moments leading up to it that otherwise would have been unnoticeable.

Like with the JFK assassination, there's a famous story about the Umbrella Man. Yes. Okay, so there he is. It's a clear, sunny day. Why does he have an umbrella and for decades there you can go online you can see these uh like uh examples of how the umbrella could have been turned into a rifle and then he shot like that and and anyway somebody finally tracked this guy down decades later and he said i was out there protesting kennedy the umbrella was

a protest uh and that stems back to neville Chamberlain coming back after meeting with Hitler before Hitler annexed, I think it was the Sudetenland, and he came back and said, you know, holding his umbrella, here, Hitler signed this paper and promised he wouldn't do anything more bad. And so the umbrella became a symbol of, you know, sort of caving into evil people or, you know, what's the word for it, appeasement. How convoluted. Do you think people are going to get that?

I don't know. So this is what he said. I had my umbrella because I didn't like what Kennedy was doing with Castro and the Cubans. Okay. So in other words, the umbrella meant nothing in terms of the assassination. Right. And this is true. So like 9-11, oh, there was this little puff of smoke or somebody found this passport over here, this little thing.

All those little things really is just randomness. Well, the other thing is the people that want to think that the windows blowing out are indicative of some sort of controlled demolition. Or the buildings caving in. The floor pancaking. It pushes the air out. Yeah. That's caving in. It's a floor pancake and it pushes the air out. Yeah. That's it. Well, there's never been a controlled demolition that went from the top down either.

Like the way they did it, the plane slammed in. They all go from the bottom up, right? Yeah. The one that looks crazy is Building 7, Tower 7. That one looks crazy. It does, but it burned for like eight hours or something. And yeah, that one's just slightly fuzzier, but explosive experts tell me that it's fully explicable by burning all day.

Well, also when you see the images of it collapsing, what you don't see is the interior structure had collapsed previously. And there's video of that where you watch the interior cave in and that as this fire was burning because apparently there was obviously i don't know what really what happened but there was diesel tanks apparently in the basement and the diesel fuel had burned incredibly hot and the whole inside of it all the structure had been completely weakened and and then as it collapsed it just all gave out it just happened to be a shit design if i was the guy who owned that building i would

sue everybody i mean that's i mean he got his money back i guess because there's some insurance money but that what a terrible design there was some uh issue with the legal insurance payout to the owner of the world trade center buildings whether this was like one event or two events or one building or two, you know, what is it? The difference was between like $8 billion and $16 billion payout or something like that. Oh, wow. How do they get people to get into that new building? I'd be like, fuck you.

I'm not renting an office in this building. This building, they blew it up in 93. They blew it up again in 2001. Right. Get out of here with this shit. I'm not taking a chance of this new ass building what is it the freedom tower or something like that yeah this is a big old bullseye yeah yeah i haven't been in it yet i've been around it but it's not even that big uh well it's i think it's just i think it's taller than the it's not it's not it's not as big as the original towers right i think it is as tall i think yeah i think

i think so yeah i thought it was shorter it's definitely not as big as the original towers, right? I think it is this tall. Is it? Yeah, I think so. I thought it was shorter. It's definitely not as big as the one in Dubai. The Dubai one's like a half a mile, right? Isn't something crazy like that? I don't know. How tall is the tallest building? I just went to the One World Trade Center leasing page.

It says at 1,776 feet, One World Trade Center is the tallest LEED gold-certified building in the Western Hemisphere. That's not good enough. Whatever that is. This is America. We need to be number one. Number one. We need to go straight to the moon. In the solar system.

Yeah, we need to take an elevator right to the fucking moon. Right outside of space. Is that possible? Can they build a building that's so high that it goes into space? Why not? No, I don't think so, because structurally it wouldn't hold. Why not? It's making the shape of a pyramid.

Well, it's like why aren't trees 1,000 feet tall? Because the material would just collapse. I don't think you could have it strong. It would have to be so fat. Oh, that's right. Japan was going to build that space elevator. Oh, look at it. You got jacked with the pop-ups.

Japan takes tiny first steps towards space elevator. Yeah. You could fuck off. I'm not getting in that thing. It would take a few years before I'm willing to climb into that sucker. So the other problem with conspiracy, just to get back to that for a moment, is the problem of anomalies. What do you do with anomalies? This is true in all science.

No theory explains every single thing that's out there that we want to study. There's always going to be some like quirky thing that the main theory here that explains all these things here, it doesn't account for that. Okay, what do we do with that? Well, my joke is you assign it to a grad student. Let them figure it out. But what outsiders mistake is that, well, my theory explains this little anomaly, so therefore it should replace this theory. And so people like Neil and Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku has like two webpages. He has a link on his webpage.

If you have an alternative theory of physics, go to this page. So they go there, and it has, your theory has to explain all of these things over here that our theory currently explains, and your whatever your said anomaly is and of course they can't so it's not that scientists are dogmatically closed-minded to the anomalies it's that we can't explain everything and you don't have to do anything with that just just leave it there maybe eventually they'll pile up and there'll be a new

theory like with Einstein's relativity. Okay, there's enough anomalies here like the orbit of Mercury and a few other things. And so we have to modify Newtonian physics a little bit. Okay, that happens. But for the most part – and so conspiracies are filled with these things. Like the moment something big happens, you go back and, okay, but there's this weird thing here. How do you explain that? I don't know.

We don't have to explain everything. Do you know that there's a growing movement that think that the space is fake? Space is fake? No, this is different than the flat earthers? Google hashtag space is fake. Hashtag space is fake is people that are so fucking stupid the flat earthers kicked them out. Oh, my God. For real. Flat earthers kicked out the space is fake It's people that are so fucking stupid The flat earthers kicked them out Oh my god For real Flat earthers kicked out the space is fake people

Space is fake is Oh my god They're the most skeptical So what would be the upper atmosphere Would be the edge of the universe It's all bullshit It's all fake And it's tied in some weird way to religion

Which is really interesting Because even the flat earth people There's a tremendous amount of them That are extremely religious. And they, they talk about the firmament and the Bible and the Bible and that this is, uh, this is what's really going on is that they're trying to keep us from the

knowledge that God has created. This place is a very special place. Right. And so by pretending that it's round, they somehow or another are controlling us. Right. And thinking that we're not exceptional and we're not lucky.

Space is fake. They're using a video from Ryan Gosling's movie he just made about Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. Yeah. Just be like, look, here's proof. Oh, I see.

This is how they fake everything. This is fake. They're making a movie. They're literally making a movie. Because the way they made the movie, that's evidence that it's fake? Because he's wearing it. I don't know if maybe this person doesn't recognize that as being Ryan Gosling right there.

He's got a NASA suit on. Maybe it's just a troll account. This is how NASA fakes everything. This is the video I was talking about, guys. Now you know it's all a big act. Hat flatter. Hashtag space is fake. Click on space is fake, though.

This is what I'm on. I'm on the whole thread. Yeah, but I mean click on it because there's a bunch of other ones. Yeah, no, I'm on that thread. There's a tremendous amount of people that literally believe that space is not real. Google a video of Buzz Aldrin and how he deals with the no moonies that we never went to the moon. There's a video of Buzz Aldrin punching a guy. Yeah.

Have you seen that? That guy. I had dinner with that guy. You did? The guy he punched. Yeah. I was a That guy. I had dinner with that guy. You did? The guy he punched. Yeah. I was a firm believer that we never went to the moon. You were?

Yeah. This is what happened. I watched that Fox documentary, The Moon Conspiracy Theory, Did We Go? And I was like, holy shit. Because it was on television. And this was 96, 97. I remember I went to work and I told everybody, you got to see this documentary.

It's crazy. We never went to the moon. And I watched that one and I watched this guy's, what is his name? Bart Seibel. Bart Seibel. So I had dinner with him. He absolutely believes that we never went to the moon. 100% believes it.

I don't know if he still believes it. I think he's like a cab driver or something now. He was involved in the news or local television or something like that back where he's from um then he released a documentary called the fun a funny thing happened on the way to the moon and in his documentary one of the things he did have is some really interesting footage of the lunar module where it looks like they're faking a shot of them being really far out but then when they remove this cover the covers from all the windows that were inside the the um the lunar not the lunar module what is the one that the the orbiter um it really looks like they're

in low earth orbit and this is like the the main thing pointing to that like they couldn't get out of low earth orbit then there was also the fact that they lost all of the telemetry data which was the binary you know the ones and zeros that show the position of the lunar module at every stage there was a bunch of different things the fact that no one wanted especially um neil armstrong he became a recluse, never wanted to talk about it. You go and watch the press conference. The press conference, they look very shady. They look like they're completely full of shit.

Yeah, but Buzz Aldrin's not like that. He talks to everybody. He was a drunk for a long time, though. He was very depressed and became an alcoholic after the moon landing. And the idea is that, in conspiracy circles, from talking as them, the idea is that he got over it after a while and needed to make a living, and now he talks about it constantly.

But Neil Armstrong never did. The thing that's compelling is that there were some, there's some faking going on. If you look at Gemini, was it Gemini 15? Michael Collins, there's an image of Michael Collins when they were testing some of the

space walking stuff and some of the things that they would do to walk outside of a spaceship. They had them all strapped up with cables and they're just experimenting with these things. They took that photograph and then blacked out the background, probably some overzealous PR agent. And they blacked out the background. You mean when they're like in the pool in Houston? This is it right here. So what it is is like, so the first one is clearly he's, you know, in a studio and they're

working on things and just trying to understand how all this stuff works. And the second one, they took the exact same photo and just reversed it and blacked out the background. But that doesn't mean that they didn't go to the moon. That just means that someone got a hold of some photographs and faked it. And it's way more likely that there was more of that going on than that people didn't actually go to the moon, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. right yeah yeah yeah the thing about going to the moon that's really interesting is uh if they can go again and they do go again and they find all that stuff there you know then everybody has to just go oh yeah i guess we were wrong this stuff is there i mean there is there's instruments on there that we still monitor that the apollo astronauts left there well not necessarily monitor we shoot a laser up there and it bounces off. But you know a laser will also bounce off the surface of the moon. Yeah, but I don't think like that. Not as precisely.

Right, yeah. But the Russians did that too with the Lunka Hood 1 and 2. I believe they left solar or laser reflectors up there as well with an unmanned mission. Japan has video footage as of like last week of the dark side of the moon. People say that's all fake too. Of course. Well space is fake dude. There's no space. Of course the moon's not even. What is the moon if space is fake? How do they explain that?

The images. What's interesting is the images of the dark side of the moon look exactly like even like the landing and the whole setup looks very similar to the Apollo missions. So they would have to either be in cahoots or have worked together with NASA. Same sound studio. Yeah.

To figure that, use the old stuff. Yeah, look at it. I mean, this is the footage. I mean, goddamn, that looks eerily similar to what you saw when the Apollo astronauts were there. I think it is entirely possible that some of the practice film footage of them on the surface or doing things turned out to be pushed off as actual footage of moon landings. I think there was no television, well, back then there was no internet,

there was no VCRss there was no ability to review things and watch them over again they projected something on television one time and that was it so when they released pressed releases and videos it's entirely possible that some of those videos that got through were actually just tests it's entirely possible that there was just like the michael collins photos that there was some fuckery going on. You're dealing with so many human beings. You're dealing with so many people. See, an estimated 530 million people

watched Armstrong's televised image and heard his voice described. Okay, what does that mean? It was broadcasted live for like six hours that day. Yes, yeah. It was actually broadcasted live on a projection screen. What they did was they didn't get a straight feed. They were filming the footage that was on a projection screen.

That's how they did it. And there's some wonky shit that looks like they fall down and then they get pulled back up by wires when they're on the surface of the moon. But again, I think how much of that is actual footage of them being on the moon and how much of that is just test footage? I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure about that. But I think also I don't know jack shit about space travel. Right.

I don't know anything about astrophysics. I don't know anything about, like, what it takes to land on the moon and come back and whether or not i'm and most of the people that talk about this don't know that the myth but myth busters did a nice episode on you know did we fake going to the moon and they showed a bunch of little things for example on the moon with its gravity when you go something like that into the dust you know the particles come up and they arc back down in a certain way that would be different than if you're on earth so the gravity is different causes the dust to settle right different way there was a bunch of things like that that proves we we were there well it certainly proved that what took place took place in a vacuum

yeah not yeah and a gravitational pull the same as the moon right the only um you've probably seen the feather in the hammer drop yeah but you know you can do that here. Well, yes, in a vacuum, yes, that's right. Yeah, but even a feather in a hammer, even if it's – it depends upon what kind of feather it is. But a feather in a hammer, even if you just held them here and dropped them on the ground, they probably would land at a very similar pace. There's a spoof video about – that we never went to the moon, but a couple of British comedians, that Peel. The Kubrick thing? Is that what the Kubrick one? No, Peel.

What's their name? Key and Peel. Key and Peel, yeah. So the three of them are talking and, you know, okay, we're going to fake this whole thing. And then the troubleshooters, she's like, well, now, you know, people are going to ask, well, how did we go to the moon? And we're going to have to, you know, build a big rocket so we can say well we went in that big rocket and they're like well how much would it cost to build that big rocket well it would be

really expensive i mean we might as well just go to the moon and then they start talking about the expenses well we only have to feed three of them if we go to the moon but if we shoot it as a shoot here in the studio we have to have catering for everybody to be super expensive it kind of goes goes on like that. It's very funny. That is funny. But the conspiracy theorists would say, well, they couldn't send someone to the moon. So they had to fake it. That's why they haven't been back. They went from 1969 to 1973. Is that what it was? Six successful missions, seven attempts, Apollo 13 being the one that didn't make it it's a it's a fun theory and what happened with me is i got way better at spotting bullshit and learning critical thinking skills and then paying attention to all sides i mean the the real issue with something like that

is if someone could prove definitively beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is it impossible that no one ever went to the moon absolutely prove it that would be giant yeah i mean really would be yeah i mean it would be a huge story but can is it even possible to do that you know the other analogy i use like with the wiki leaks is there of all of thousands, hundreds of thousands of memos and papers and letters and government documents, there's not one mention anywhere of 9-11 as an inside job. And we had to allocate these funds to go to this construction company who was then seen working at the World Trade Center. Nothing like that. So in this case, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It didn't happen.

Not an inside job. The 9-11 one. Yeah. And something like that would be true for the moon landing. I mean, all those people that worked on that, not one of them saw anything and wanted to write a book, go on 60 Minutes. The idea would be that it was compartmentalized and that everyone, like say if you're working on the O-rings, you don't have access to the people that are working on the thrusters. If you have access to this, you don't have access to that. And that there was only a very small group of people that controlled everything.

Also, 1969 was a very different environment in terms of what you could get away with and not get away with, what you could say. It's just, it was really fun. It was really fun to believe that they fake going to the moon. I spent an inordinate amount of time looking at it, but I completely dropped it. I completely dropped it after I just, I paid attention to what I actually know. So, but now you can kind of empathize with those who do believe crazy theories. Oh yeah. But you want to hear a dumber one? Yeah. Here's a dumber one. For the longest time, like months, i believed in a thing called rods do

you know about the rods little insects yes yeah well they would it this guy put out this doc that there was these things flying so fast we couldn't see them with the naked eye and that they were like jellyfish like creatures that lived amongst us. And they had all this video footage of the, especially these people that were jumping. They were skydiving into this enormous cave in Mexico. And as they're skydiving into this cave, you see those things flying back and forth. And I was hook, line, and sinker.

I was like, oh my God, these things are around us all the time. I was going outside and looking up, trying to spot them. Like imagine, these beings that are flying so fast that we can't see them. The only way to capture them is on camera. And then a show called Monster Quest cracked the riddle.

They show that it's a video artifact. And then if you have a really high-speed camera, you just see the insect. But if you have low-speed, standard-defin definition video cameras, it creates this artifact. As these things pass by very close to the lens at a high rate of speed, it elongates their video signal. And it makes them look like this jellyfish type thing. But it's really just a video artifact. Yeah, again, it's a good example of anomalies. Here's this weird video anomaly.

What is it? How about just say, I don't know. Well, if you don't know anything about video, it's way easier to say, oh, they captured something. Take a camera, put it outside, you will capture these things. Amazing. Right. Yeah. That's right.

The other aspect with conspiracy theories is cognitive dissonance. That is, we want the size of the event to be matched by a cause that's equally of that size. So the analogy I use is, you know, the Holocaust, the worst genocide in human history caused by the Nazis, the worst regime, political regime in human history. There's a match there. But if you say something like, you know, JFK, the leader of the free world, brought down by who? Lee Harvey Oswald? Just some nobody? You know, there's this mismatch. And JFK, the leader of the free world, brought down by who? Lee Harvey Oswald?

Just some nobody? There's this mismatch. Or 9-11, this huge thing by 19 guys with box cutters. Do you think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? Yeah. Do you really? What makes you think that? All of the evidence.

And none of the evidence against anybody else. And all of the evidence against particularly him. Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed. and then the attorney, what's his name? That was the Manson attorney. Yeah. I forget his name. He has a massive book where he lines up every single one of the arguments by the JFK conspirators. For example, conspirators make a big deal about how Oswald got a job at the book depository building,

which just happened to be where the parade route was going, so he could have a clear shot. So it was Posner that tracked down when the White House determined, even when Kennedy was going to Dallas, let alone what the parade route would be, and Oswald already had the job there. That's just chance. He knew in advance, bro. That's right. He knew the future. Do you think it's possible that oswald was in cahoots no no no why do you think that what about the magic bullet theory

well that's been settled by the fact that the way it's shown in in the videos is that the two seats are like this and that the bullet has to do this well in fact the seats were like that and that connelly was well you're explaining this in audio form. Just what you're saying is it's like stadium seating. Right. One's elevated above the other one. That's right. So the bullet actually, when it passes through the neck, through Kennedy's neck, and then

hits Connolly's shoulder, it is already moving down. I think it hit his wrist. It fractured his wrist. Right. This has been tested and tested and tested well sort of here's here's my issue with it there's a couple issues one uh on the on the pro side uh the idea that bullets will take a straight path is ridiculous i've i've talked to hunters that have shot animals uh in the front and had a bullet come out the same side they shot it

it ricocheted off bones and came out like the front of the animal. Like bullets take weird paths. When they hit things in particular. So do arrows. As a person who's well versed in firearms and shot animals and hunted. Sometimes a bullet goes straight through. And sometimes it hits bones and wacky things happen. Things deflect.

But on the negative side, they always distort. Bullets always distort, particularly when they hit bone. What bothered me was that they found that bullet in Connolly's gurney when they brought him to the hospital. They just conveniently found this bullet. Aha, we have it. This is the bullet. It matches the same rifle. Yeah. But it wasn't pristine it was flattened barely if you look at that bullet that bullet it's nothing like a bullet that's hit bone when bullets hit bone they they mushroom

they balloon they bend they distort wildly they don't come out looking like that they come out looking like that when you shoot them into water or when you shoot them into like feathers they don't come out looking like that under normal circumstances when they shatter the bone of two different people. Well, do you know that for sure? No, I do not know that for sure. But one thing I do know a lot about is I know quite a bit about what bullets look like when they hit things. I've looked into this pretty extensively and I've talked to a lot of people in law enforcement, military, hunters, and none of them believe that that bullet hit bones, shattered bones, and came out looking like that. Is it possible that that bullet was the only bullet ever in the history of the world that did do that? Yeah, it might be.

Okay, so we're getting kind of caught up in the weeds of the anomalies. What about this? Just the bullet. Caught up in the weeds of the anomalies. What about this? Just the bullet. Oswald himself had attempted to assassinate a general named Walker six months before with his rifle and a handgun. And he went over to the house. He took a shot through the guys. When he saw him at the desk, took a shot, missed him.

He told his wife about it. I'm a revolutionary. I'm trying to start something here. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Oswald was innocent. I'm a revolutionary I'm trying to start something here Don't get me wrong I'm not saying that Oswald was innocent I'm not I mean And I think it's very possible

That Oswald did shoot at the president He might have even hit the president It's also very possibly That some other people were involved as well Who? I don't know See this is the problem But wait a minute

Why is it a problem? If you don't know who they are Just because you don't know who they are Doesn't mean they didn't exist Okay but why do we need to postulate Extra people? Because of all the gunshots that happened in a short amount of time. The reason why they came up with the theory of the magic bullet in the first place

because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb underneath the overpass. Do you know that, right? Yeah. Okay, there's – okay. Do you know why they came up with the – yeah, I've been there. Do you know why they came up with the – But it's short. I mean, it's right there.

You can hardly miss. That's not the point. The point. Well, that's sort of true. Yeah, it's not a far shot. And he was a pretty good marksman. Posner tracked down his- We're not talking about that.

We're talking about the reason why they came up with the magic bullet theory in the first place. Do you know why? Well, I thought it was because of the alignment of the seats. No, because they had to attribute three shots. They had to figure out and one of them, they were thinking well, all these wounds came from three bullets. But then they found a bullet that had hit the curb on the underside. The guy

checked into a hospital because he was hit with a ricochet. So there's a curb that they proved was hit with a bullet. There was a bullet hole in the granite or whatever the fuck the curb's made out of. It hit this guy. He went to the hospital. So he was hit with a ricochet.

So they knew that one bullet had not hit the president. And so they had to attribute all of these wounds to one bullet now. They had one bullet that landed into his neck, another bullet that hit him in the head. So how do these three bullets cause a wound on Connolly as well? Then they came up with the matter. There's the bullet. Look at that bullet, bro. But you have to look at the end.

It's flattened if you look at it from the end. No, it's not. Look at this. Under no circumstances do I feel that this bullet could hit a wrist and still not be deformed. We proved that by experiments as a chief consultant in wound ballistics for the U.S. Army who supervised tests for the Warren Commission. Here's the thing.

I don't necessarily think that there was some grand conspiracy, but I do think it's entirely possible that someone took that posthumously, took that rifle and wanted to pin it on Lee Harvey Oswald definitively. Look, there's people that do things when they know someone's guilty, and they plant evidence. Mark Furman did that with O.J. Simpson. They found his glove, and they planted evidence. And that was one of the reasons why O.J. got off, because there was some sort of conspiring to make it look like he was, you know, the evidence was a clear path.

They could have just taken that rifle, and look, it could have been that Oswald did it alone. It's possible. But it also could have been that somewald did it alone it's possible but also could have been that some other people were shooting at him too it could have been that they had decided to have oswald be a part of this and when jack ruby ran in and shot him that doesn't look a little suspicious that some guy with ties to the mob gets right up to this guy who just shot the president and shoots him like why he's never shot anybody before. Do it publicly? Posner talks about Ruby's character and who he was, major Kennedy supporter, running with some bad dudes, some bad hombres there in Texas.

And he was a gun owner. Security wasn't anything like it is now. He really could just walk right in like he did. It's possible. But it's also possible that that guy owed something to the mob, and this is what they told him to do. You're going to get rid of that guy. No one's going to care. They're going to be happy. Fuck that guy. He just shot the president. Who knows?

It seems like people want it to be one way or the other, and they want this case closed option. It doesn't have to be that way. I mean, Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy, and that was evident pretty quickly afterwards. And they rounded him up. You know, World War I was launched by a conspiracy with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian group called the Black Hand, a group of nationalists. Well, we already talked about the Vietnam War, too, the Gulf of Tonkin incident. That's a false flag. So these things do happen. They're all false flags. There are conspiracies to assassinate foreign leaders. You know, Hitch wrote this book on Kissinger as a war criminal that, you know, all the shenanigans we were doing in South America with dictators there. We're backing this dictator because he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch versus this guy. you know, assassinate Castro, all the stuff that came out that Johnson tried to cover up, that came out in the Pentagon Papers about Kennedy plotting to have Castro assassinated.

That's a kind of conspiracy. Yeah. Absolutely, this does happen. The question is, did it happen in that particular case or this one or here? And the evidence, in my opinion, after reading particularly Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, there's a funny internet meme that went around last week of a guy that dies goes to heaven and God says, you've been such a good fellow your whole life. I'll grant you one which you can ask me anything. He said, all right, who killed Kennedy?

And God said, it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone using his own Carcano rifle. And the guy goes, this goes higher up than I thought. That's funny, man. Did you ever read David Lifton's novel or book about it, rather? Yeah. Best Evidence. Best Evidence. I didn't read the whole book.

When I was researching this back in the 90s, after the Oliver Stone film came out. When that came out, I thought, man, if only half of this or 10% of this is true, it's definitely a conspiracy. But then there are websites dedicated to everything he got wrong there. Well, he made people up, like the General, the Donald Sutherland character. That guy doesn't even exist.

He just used him as a theatrical tool. Yeah, a very distorting film. But film is such a powerful medium that it's hard to overcome that. Well, that movie in particular. I mean, you got Kevin Costner, who's the good guy. Everybody's in that. Everybody loves it. Yeah.

I mean, that is a- Jack Lemmon and Walter Mappel. It's a crazy movie. Yeah. And it really has you believing that there's some sort of a conspiracy. Back into the left. Back into the left. People love-

Well, here's the thing about that, though. I've looked at that over and over again. Yes, it is back into the left, but the spray kind of comes out of the front. Yeah, it does, yeah. Yeah, it kind of comes out the front. And one thing that does happen when people or things get shot is you have nerves, and nerves react, and things things do weird you know weird results in your body when if you get hit by something it doesn't mean if you get hit in the chest his

hands come up like that well he's grabbing his neck apparently that was the other thing was there was a difference in the autopsy results from bethesda maryland versus in dallas texas dallas texas they attributed the uh throat wound to a frontal shot. That something hit him in the front. And then the Bethesda, Maryland, they said that it was a trach wound. They opened him up to clear his breathing pathway. And the conspiracy theorists would say, why would you clear the breathing pathway of a guy who doesn't have a brain? His brain was shot out of his head.

There's a lot of shenanigans. I just don't like when people say they know one way or another. We Harvey Oswald act alone. How the fuck could you know? There was a bunch of, there was also bullet fragments in Connolly's wrist that weren't missing from the bullet itself. The bullet itself, whether you think it's pristine or not, it's still, it's not missing a lot of fragments.

And there's fragments in Connolly's body that you could detect on an x-ray. There's x-rays in his wrist. You could see the little pieces of the bullet. I don't know what the explanation for that is. Exactly. That's my point. But the fact that I don't know, I'm not the world's expert on this stuff. People want to clean it up.

That's what I don't like. They want to clean it up or they want to muddy it up. Instead of looking at it 100% objectively, they want one thing or another. I think it's entirely possible that Lee Harvey Oswald, it's either to me they want to say, these are the two narratives, Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, he had nothing to do with the government, set him up, or he acted alone. But why couldn't he have been involved in it? He obviously was involved in some shady characters.

The guy spent a ton of time in Russia, came back over here very easily, even though the Cold War was going on. There's a lot of weird stuff. He might have very well been some sort of a government informant or working in cahoots with the government. If that's the case and he did shoot Kennedy or shoot at Kennedy, who's to say

that he wasn't with other people and they killed him because this guy was going to go to jail and he was going to start talking. When they arrested he said i'm a patsy i'm just a patsy and then blam he's dead oh we got him and that's it wrap it up tight it wasn't until there's a pruder film that people really started to question and i think that was it might have been 10 years later right we've talked about this you know the whole history of the Zapruder film how it was released yeah the Geraldo Rivera show right that crazy right Dick Gregory comedian brought the film footage to the Geraldo Rivera show and showed it on television for the first time magazine bought the rights to the life magazine had the rights and didn't do anything with it they they

kept it for more than a decade and Dick Gregory got a hold of the actual film footage and premiered it on the Geraldo Rivera show. Wow. I want to say it was like 1971 or 72 or something like that. So it was way, way after the assassination that the American, what was it? 75. It was 12 years. Oh, that's crazy. 75.

So all those years later. And then people got a chance to see the footage and they were like, whoa, this is not how it was described to us at all. And it made people skeptical. There's a good Nova show on ballistics and the head and testing the rifle and could you shoot that many times in that many seconds and so on. And to me, it's pretty convincing. The problem with me is I know too much about what happens when bullets hit bones. I don't buy that that was the bullet. I do – look, I think they could have just dropped that bullet off.

It doesn't mean that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't do it. The thing about that bullet, though, is there might be some fuckery involved. And the David Lifton book was – that was the book that got me into conspiracies. That fucking book, goddammit. If I could go back and not read it – I bombed on stage because of that book. You did? Yeah. Well well it's my fault but i've read that book the day uh i was performing and i was freaking out because i was like 24 or something like that i was like oh this is crazy they killed the president you know i was so naive and i was like really bummed out when i went on stage and then i i realized like oh you can – like I didn't know any better.

I'd only been doing comedy for three years. I'm like, oh, you can't go on stage bummed out. You've got to get your head together. You can't just say the jokes and not have some emotional attachment to them. But that book highlights – what it was was Lifton was a bookkeeper or an accountant, I believe. And he was hired to do something with the Warren Commission report and Because he found some contradictions and he went over the entire Warren Commission report Which is an enormous enormous publication and he found all of these problems all of these problems in the Warren Commission report and all these contradictions and it was his

Determination after reading everything and writing his book And it was his determination after reading everything and writing his book, he thought that the conclusion they made, they made before the fact and that they wrote all this stuff to sort of back up their conclusion that it wasn't based entirely on an objective version of the facts and of the event itself. And his take was there was a conspiracy. Well, it's launched a mini industry of books it has man think about all the money that's been made off of the kennedy assassination go down the the rabbit hole with this stuff do you ever see the um jesse ventura version of it he believes every conspiracy he's the best yeah he's the best i was on his conspiracy show yeah he's out there oh yeah he believes it yeah he was like no one could have made that shot they definitely could have made

that shot it's a rifle it's not that far and just because someone gets lucky doesn't mean they can't get lucky like people get lucky all the time people flip a coin and it lands on heads a mile away i mean you know you could throw a coin coin, you could throw a coin out of a helicopter, you know? And you could say, this is going to be heads when it lands. And it can be heads. You can get lucky. It really is possible. Well, this assassination of Franz Ferdinand

that triggered the First World War, this... Yes. Okay. They messed up. I mean, they had like seven of them and they met secret, and they got their weapons that morning and so on. And a couple of them chickened out. Somebody else got lost. There's like three of them there.

Somebody threw a hand grenade, missed, rolled into the car behind Franz Ferdinand, and they got hurt and went to the hospital. And he's like, oh, fuck this. I'm not giving my speech. Let's go to the hospital and visit, see how he's doing. So they double back like half an hour later. they double back and come back down the same route and the guy who had missed he was just sitting there on the curb it's like oh fuck here they are bam yeah pure luck pure luck yeah yeah that does happen yeah yeah i mean i think that history turns more on that kind of thing than on carefully orchestrated, perfectly executed plots.

Sure. It certainly can. But, you know, the idea that, I've always found it offensive, the idea that there's no way Oswald could have hit him. Like, people say that. Like, there's no way. There's no way. Like, you never shot anything.

Right. That's crazy. I can make that shot. 100%. Yeah. Look, if you have a rifle with a scope and a guy is 100 yards away, you tell him you can't shoot him? Right.

That's crazy talk. That's crazy talk. Or the rifle was out of line. That was the other thing they said. The scope wasn't lined up correctly. Here's the thing, folks. If you have a rifle, okay, and this has happened to me before, and you drop the rifle, the scope gets damaged.

It gets moved. It's a very sensitive thing. Like when you're talking about something that goes faster than the speed of sound, a bullet, boom, firing out of a rifle. You have – that is going incredibly fast. And to be able to get that reticle exactly on where you think that bullet's going to hit requires a lot of adjustments. When you go to the range, they set up a lead sled. You put your rifle down on this sled so you're not holding the rifle. And by the way, Oswald wasn't holding it either.

The idea was that he had it rested, which makes it much more steady and much more easier to make an accurate shot. So you set up this rifle on the lead sled, and it's usually 100 yards or 200 yards, however far the distance is to the target. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, boom, the trigger goes off, and you see that the bullet is low and to the left by a couple inches. You make an adjustment on the scope. If you drop that rifle, that scope gets knocked, the adjustment's out the window.

Right. So the idea that there's like a perfect chain of command between Lee Harvey Oswald pulling that trigger, and that scope never got rattled at all. No, but the conspiracy theorists want you to think there's no way he could have made that shot. That scope wasn't even lined up good. How the fuck do you know? How do you know? You don't

know. Like anybody who knows anything about rifles knows there's no way you could know. Because if all you'd have to do is whack it. Here, I'm going to bring you the rifle and just bump it with your elbow funny. Knock it into a wall when you're handing it to someone, and that scope's going to be off. So then you take it to a range. We're going to prove definitively that he could have never made this shot because this scope is off.

Boom. Look. It's six inches to the left. Wow. Case closed. Right. No. There's no way people know whether or not that scope was on when he was pulling that trigger.

There's no way you know. When I went to Dealey Plaza, it's so big in our public imagination. It's not. It's not. You go there, it's like, this is it? It's tiny. It's so small. And then you go up to the museum and you're on the sixth floor deposit, the book depository,

and you look down and they have an X, the two Xs in the street. And you think, that's just right there. Dude, I could shoot that with an arrow. I bet you could i can yeah i guarantee if you give me some time you give me some time if you put a target right where that thing was yeah right where that uh lincoln was yeah and and you put me in that window i guarantee i hit that target with a bow right like the idea that you couldn't i'm holding it not no rest right the idea that you couldn't do that with a with a rifle right you certainly

could lee harvey oswald certainly could have done it he certainly could have shot at kennedy he was a crazy fuck lee harvey oswald was involved in a lot of shady shit it wasn't like he was just some dentist somewhere and he scored the second according to posner he scored the second highest marksmanship there it is right here to here right dude that Dude, that's so small. That is such a short distance. Then the other question I had, when you're coming up Houston Street and going left, I always wondered why he didn't shoot him there when the car's coming right at him. It was in the other window. He was in the window on the left-hand side.

He was over there. No, no. No, no. It's over here. Yeah, it's right there. That's where he shot him from that window there? Yeah, yeah. So I always wondered why he didn't shoot him when the car was coming right at him

because that would have been a cleaner shot, it seems to me. Head on, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we want to shoot him in the back of the head because he's a mean guy. Does it have like a sniper? Maybe panic. It's that upper right, yeah.

Ooh, look at that. It's that one, yeah. Nice. Wow. Yeah, when we drove through it, not last time I was in Dallas, a couple times ago, but when we drove through it, it's the upper end one. Ooh, look at that. 3D. Wow. Yeah, when we drove through it, not last time I was in Dallas, a couple times ago, but when we drove through it, it's eerie. You're like, wow. Yeah.

It all happened right here. I've been twice there, and there's always conspiracy people walking around. They're looking for a tip, so I gave this guy $10. They go, all right, give me the whole story. And, oh, it was very entertaining. Okay, here's the grassy knoll, the pickety fence. Yeah. And he had another one about this man.

He took the manhole cover off. He goes, there was somebody down here in the manhole. Oh, popped up, bam, shot him, went back down in the manhole. My favorite dumb conspiracy is they believe that the driver turned around and shot Kenny. Right, right. That's the best one. Right, yeah. Those are the spaces fake people.

You're always going to get a bunch of really wacky conspiracies whenever anything happens in the news, whatever it is you know anything and everything particularly if it's big and famous again back to this cognitive dissonance like princess die you know a cause of death drunk driving speeding no seat belt you know tens of thousands of people died that was drunk he was drunk yeah the driver of her car was drunk i didn't know that well drunk he was partially drunk he was tipsy Yeah. I didn't know that. Well, drunk. He was partially drunk. He was tipsy drunk. Wow. I didn't know that.

Yeah, that's right. So drunk driving, speeding, and she wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Why wasn't she wearing a seatbelt? So, I mean, that's – but it doesn't feel like someone like Princess Di should die the way tens of thousands of Americans die in automobiles every year. It seems like there should be the MI5 and the royal family and the Arabs and the Palestinians. Everybody was involved. Well, here's an example of an absolute conspiracy that we know was a conspiracy.

Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, right. Yeah, good example. This kind of stuff does happen. This is a real conspiracy. He was murdered. That guy was murdered. He went to the Saudi embassy in Turkey.

They had him set up. They flew in 15 people, including a guy who was a – he was a forensics expert. And he was an expert in forensics evidence. And they think that he was there to make sure that there was nothing left behind. This is the official story. They strangled him, cut him up, and there's even recordings,

apparently, that people have listened to. To the top, Saudi Arabia. What is this, Jamie? That's the last video of seeing him. Oh, the body double video? Yeah, that's him walking in

and then it's the last time he was seen. Yeah. He entered into there and there was 15 different dudes that were waiting for him they killed him chopped him up and there's videos of those guys leaving with suitcases and they say that the suitcases had his body in them yeah chopped up yeah it's um it's real but that's also you know saudi arabia they can get away with some

pretty sketchy shit. And it seems like nothing's going to happen, right? Like a few people got fired. Well, I have to say on this that Michael Moore's film on 9-11, he made the point. It was the first I'd seen make the point that the Saudi Arabia family got out of the United States on 9-12 when all flights were canceled. Yes. And that Bush let them, you know. And now here we see that, you know, Trump doesn't want to condemn the Saudis because they're our allies.

There's so much money. So there's a bunch of shit in there. It goes all the way back to 9-11. And we know the Saudis bankrolled most of the 19 hijackers. Yeah. So that's the kind of conspiracy that we should be paying attention to. Not that Bush was involved and made it happen in the secret. This is the kind of shit that really happens in politics.

Yes. People are banking each other, so we have to be nice to each other and overlook it. Like when Trump said, you know, Putin murders people oh well everybody does that what yeah well we do some terrible things too yeah and and that's true well it is true and and you know i guess he's got a point but the yeah it's it's just so much there's so much money there's so much money involved with saudi arabia in this article i was writing i cited I cited the criminologist Manuel Eisner in a study of 1,500 monarchs in 45 monarchies across Europe between AD 600 and 1800. Found that about 15% of them, 227, were assassinated. Of course, punting to a homicide rate of about 1,000 per 100,000 ruler years, 10 times the background rate.

So in other words, assassinations in history are pretty common. This is how power often changes hands before liberal democracy spread and after 1970s. This was not uncommon. So we shouldn't be surprised that people believe this kind of stuff because there's some truth to that the kashorgi thing is unsettling to folks because what he was killed for they think well there's there's two different versions of it right there's film he was killed for um criticizing the saudi arabian government but he was also there's also that he was criticized because he was aware or he was killed rather because he was aware of some spy software that's being utilized and that if he wrote a story about this spy software being utilized by the Saudi Arabian government

that it would be a huge disaster. Could be. Yeah. I mean, there's probably more. I'm sure there's a lot we don't know. So here's my concession to conspiracy theories. When you get elected president, they take you in the back room the back room they go okay here's what's actually going on right oh shit i can't close gitmo no i can't close gitmo because no one will take those bad dudes okay but

but i was to pull the troops out of afghanistan i can't pull the troops out of afghanistan if we do that here's what happens oh shit but we don't know this we know this and i think that something like that does go on maybe not quite so secretly but just that you know you and i don't need to know these things you need to know basis and and the president does when they're candidates they say oh whatever they say to get elected and then they get in there and go okay i didn't realize that the saudis are doing this and this and this and we need them for these six reasons over here okay they did this bad thing if we condemn them, then they're not going to do these things over here. So I better lay off the condemnation.

That kind of stuff, I suspect, does happen a lot. Yeah, I think you're correct. I suspect the same thing. What's fascinating to me about Trump is that he doesn't seem to care at all about violating protocol or about releasing information that he probably should i mean he's already accidentally released top secret information i would just feel like if he knew for sure some some stuff like he would be the last guy you would want to trust with that right i know but you know this thing about him wanting to pull the troops out of Syria, there's got to be another story behind there. Like, you know, Putin maybe said, look, we got to take care of our business here in Syria. We're going to take care of Americans over here. And you get your Trump Tower in Red Square when I'm gone, whatever, you know, there's some kind of, that kind of stuff is the sort of thing that will come out in an equivalent of a WikiLeaks in 20 years. We'll go, oh, like the Gulf of Tonkin.

Oh, okay. That's what happened. What do you think of conspiracy theory that says that Trump has – there's some video of Trump getting peed on or peeing on people? That would – That would be ridiculous, yeah. Wasn't that – that was published in like some serious newspapers. Yeah. Yeah.

There's so much of this stuff that I just can't keep track of it. Don't you think with him though too, they're like more than willing to put stuff like that out there because they don't like him. So they'll pull that trigger a little bit quicker. Maybe. Yep. But you know during the Bush administration, people hated George W.

Bush. Do you think they hated him as much as they hate Trump? No. I think now they're going, oh, we would love to have George W. Bush back. Yeah, I feel like they just thought he was incompetent. Asked directly, Putin does not deny possessing compromising material on Trump. But what did he actually say? Yeah, I don't know. Yes, this is about the pee tape, says Matthew, was it Iglesias?

Vox. What is it? Oh, it's Vox? Yeah. I don't know. Keep moving. That doesn't mean anything. He probably didn't understand what they were saying. He speaks Russian. I don't know.

Do you find it odd that these conspiracies not only, it seems like it's a part of our mind, the way our brains work, our collective mindset, is that we tend to be attracted to conspiracies and we tend to hope that those are true more than we hope a simple explanation exists. Yeah. Well, it depends.

It depends on who your group is and do they have power or not. So we know from studies that people that are out of power tend to concoct conspiracy theories about those in power. And the moment they get in power, they drop the conspiracy theories and the ones that are out. So you're going to get more conspiracy theories about Republicans when the Democrats are out of power from left-leaning people and vice versa. Blacks are more likely to think that the CIA planted crack cocaine in the inner cities and those sorts of things. Conservatives are more likely to fear big government conspiracies. Liberals are more likely to fear big corporate conspiracies. There may be elements of truth in all of these things, But the ones you latch on to have to do with how much power you perceive the other guy has that you don't have, and therefore they must be doing something to get that that I can't do, I'm on the outside. And so we tend to misperceive how much

control and power people really have in positions of power, CEOs, politicians, and so on. Usually, they don't have as much control and power as we think they do. And people that get in there, they go, oh, I can't – I don't have this kind of control or power. I thought I would when I got here, but obviously I don't. It's too many things that have to – checks and balances that are in place. Also, you can't do these things on your own. You really need a group of people to conspire along with you. So you need to have these frank discussions with some sort of an understanding that you call to start a war and cause inflation or whatever? More likely, it's like in the Cuban Missile Crisis, where you have jockeying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Okay, look, we're going to give you the missiles in Turkey if you take the missiles out of Cuba. And it just ends up being some boring little thing that dissolves the tension that could have been World War III. It's like, wow, just this little thing. So much of history turns on those little, you know, so in a way we got lucky there, but not just luck. I mean, Kennedy and Khrushchev both wanted to untie the knot. You know, Khrushchev sent a memo to Kennedy saying, you know, you have pulled on this rope and I have pulled on this rope,

and I don't know if either of us can untie it, but here's an idea. That's when he floated the, you take the missiles out of Turkey. And I was just watching this Netflix documentary on this and there was a thing about Castro sent a memo to Khrushchev saying, light them up. You know, comrade, we are ready to die for the cause. You can just nuke all of Cuba and nuke America. I don't care. We're ready to die.

And Khrushchev was like, yeah. And Khrushushchev was like, holy fuck, this guy's a madman. We're not going to do that. Wow. Castro is ready to nuke Cuba? Yeah. Jesus. Where's that memo? They talked about this in this Netflix.

No. Yeah. Anyway. This was during the times of Operation Northwood when they were going to blow up a drone jet liner and blame it on the Cubans and arm Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay and use it as a motivation to get us into war. The Castro was a fascinating case because that guy kept that place 90 miles away from Miami.

He kept that place running on his own until he died. That is crazy. Really, it's crazy that he was able to pull that off. Well, he had a lot of support, economic support from Russia. Otherwise, that would not have succeeded. But still, it's so nuts that he was so close. He was running a military dictatorship, essentially a boat ride away. Yeah. I was just in moscow a few months ago for a conference and so i went to visit their world war ii museum what we would call a world war ii museum just massive building and they call it the great patriotic war

museum and the whole thing is kind of a tribute to russia liberated europe from the Nazis. What? Yeah. This is current? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is their, from their perspective, they lost 27 million people. You Americans, you know, 500,000, nothing. Right.

And from their perspective, and you go to Berlin right next to- The Victory Museum. Look at that. Yeah. It's called the Victory Museum. Well, there it is. The Museum of the Great Patriotic War is a history museum located in Moscow. Yeah. And they have this room with these chains hanging down with little crystal balls at the end of them that represent the 27 million people.

And it's very moving. Go back to that right there. It's good. Look how beautiful that place is. Yeah, it's quite stunning. And each of those rooms that you go into, it's like a diorama of some battle that they fought. Wow. I think it's good for us to know this, to recognize from their perspective, they won the war, not the British, American, and French.

We did a little bit from their perspective. But the fact that they lost so many people, 27 million. What's going on with that picture? I don't know. It's like some fucked up looking trees. I don't remember seeing that. What's that supposed to represent? That's a weird picture.

I mean, they have a point in terms of their contribution, in terms of the loss of lives. Yeah. I mean, every country has its perspectives in that regard, which is why it's good to know some history so you know what other people are thinking and what they went through. Well, it's again, though, it's very similar to what we were talking about earlier in terms of the distribution of the news. It would be very nice if there was one absolute news source you can trust with no slant on it whatsoever. When it comes to the distribution of history, it's of course always written in a way that favors the people that are writing it. Yeah. I was just talking to Rachel Kleinfeld. I have a podcast now.

How long have you had it? A few months, about six months now. Oh, congratulations. Science Salon podcast. Yeah. Glad you hopped on. It's sort of an extension of our old Caltech lecture series, but instead of lectures, we're now doing dialogues. What's it called so people can get it?

Science Salon. Science Salon. Yeah. So just skeptic.com. It's on there. So I'm interviewing or dialoguing with Rachel Kleinfeld. She has this new book called A Savage Order. And it's about failed states and what happens to them and why corruption spreads so quickly and then how to basically squelch that. So like after the Soviet Union fell apart, you know, all these mobs basically took over. And it's like the Russian mafia, the Republic of Georgia fell apart fairly quickly. And then, you know, so one of the reasons people apparently like Putin is he kind of came in and squelched all that. And maybe one of his points of popularity is that at least we have one bad guy

who's kind of keeping order instead of all these little mafioso-type gangs. And then I said, so if he actually held an election, he might win. It's hard to say because we don't have a good source of what the Russian people really like. We have the Russian media saying the Russian people love Putin. Okay. Yeah. Right. Do we know that's an accurate survey?

It is pretty astonishing what kind of control he has over that country, though. Yeah. It's powerful. I went to visit – well, I saw Lenin's tomb in the mausoleum there. He's still – he's looking pretty waxy to me. Oh, that's right. You can actually see his body or what's left of it.

You can see his body, yeah. Yeah, what's left of it. Yeah. Another Netflix series I just binge-watched, Trotsky. It's called Trotsky and this is a Russian-made film.

It's a drama and it's really good and it really shows, it's interesting because he, Trotsky was on the outs all the way until just recently because Stalin had him assassinated. And then Stalin had him literally airbrushed out of photographs because for a while it was Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky as the big three.

And then when Lenin had a stroke, it was like, okay, so Stalin and Trotsky, who's going to take over when the boss is gone? And so they kind of showed how that happened. And again, conspiracy. It's all conspiracy. No one knows what's really going on here. You've been in this business, this debunking conspiracies and the flaws in the way they're approaching these things? Hard to say. Confirmation bias?

There's less of that now than before? I like to think we're having an influence. There are some studies that show fewer people believe in these pseudosciences and quackery and paranormal. But the declines are not that dramatic over, say, the last few decades. There are deprogramming, bias deprogramming studies and programs in which you can teach people about the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and so on. The problem with those is they work really well to teach people how to spot the biases in other people they're really good at that but then you say well what about you oh you know fortunately i'm above all that so there's a blind that's called a blind spot bias you can't see your own bias but you can see it in other people um so the reason these studies are done is because like

we have a problem with climate change we have climateiers. How do we get people who don't know anything about it to shift from I'm a skeptic to I'm a believer? And it turns out just piling on facts isn't going to do it. No, people's identity are trapped in their initial statements. If they think that 9-11 was a conspiracy, their identity is somehow inexorably connected to this conspiracy being a fact. Yeah. And then you argue it as if you're arguing your own value. It's a really weird thing that happens when people start talking about ideas. You very rarely find people that are disconnected from their ideas to the point where you could point out that something's incorrect and they go oh thank you i didn't know that like most people aren't

that confident no or aren't they just look at it the wrong it feels like a personal attack on them also if it's a belief or claim or theory or whatever affiliated with a political or moral or religious value yes the people auto-cor correct in their brains when they hear global warming they hear liberalism communism anti-capitalism control of the market big government and i'm against those things so that global warming thing has got to be false yeah that is one of the weirder aspects of tribal thinking right pinker makes the point that uh al gore's film an inconvenient truth was a terrible thing for the environmental movement because it associated global climate change with liberalism the democrats and all that it's like okay i see what's going on it's that al gore left liberal stuff yeah that's right yeah

well in in a sense he's right and then in another sense it was also the amount of profit that al gore made both from that and from some other endeavors that he has. They said that he's one of the first green billionaires. Right. It's like, oh, Jesus. What's his carbon footprint? Flies around with private jet everywhere. He's talking about the world.

Yeah, it's like it's screwy. Yeah. But that's, you know, everything's messy. People are messy. Right. So we messy. Right. So we're very tribal. We commit to political parties and religious beliefs, and we stick by them pretty closely, pretty tightly. Yeah.

And the facts get filtered through those, understandably. What to do about it, you know, that's under debate. It's the same thing with the atheist debating. How do we get people to leave religion? Well, there's a hundred ways. You know, Leah Remini doing her show on Scientology. Anyone watching that would think, okay, I'm not joining this church. And so if you had a thousand of those for bad beliefs, hopefully we would see that shift.

I would love it if there was some sort of a secular option, a community-driven, ethics-driven, morality-driven, friendship-driven thing where people could go and instead worship, maybe just appreciate life and sort of confirm some of the best aspects of community and culture and who we are and do it in a place where it makes you really conscious of it. So, because I think there's some real benefit to people going to church and everyone in the community dresses up nice and you're sort of agreeing, hey, we're committed to being civil and to being kind and to worshiping. And that this belief in a higher power if it empowers people to think this way and it gives people a Motivation to be kind and it would be nice if there was a secular option like that that is decentralized It's not run by one person winds up banging everybody's wife and taking all the money because that's what happens You can set your clock by these guys. It's unbelievable Well Joe the humanist movement is something like that.

What is this? I'm not aware. The secular humanists are just humanists. There's groups all over the world. Do they have churches? Well, they have meeting places. I don't call them churches. More broadly, the kind of universalist Unitarian church is a church, and it's a religion, but

they're pretty secular. They're like secular Jews. They believe in the culture and the ceremony and the rituals. I've been to a number of these humanist and universalist Unitarian churches, ceremonies. They light candles. They sing hymns to Newton. They have testimonials about how I lost my religion. And to me, I didn't really like it that much because I was never crazy about church in the first place but a lot of people clearly get value out of this atheists and humanists that don't believe in god the gathering together once a week and being with fellow like-minded people

that has a lot of psychological value it connects people that's one of the great things about community centers and neighborhoods you know it just connects people. That's one of the great things about community centers and neighborhoods. It just connects people and like, hey, we're all in this together. All right, Bob, see you tomorrow. Bye, Mary. Social capital. Yeah. There's something great about that with church.

I mean, I was having this conversation with Bill Burr about this recently. We were talking about it, and he's like, I don't really want to go to church, but I think there's something to that, to go into a and and putting your faith in you know all the people around you and the the the higher values and morals and ethics that you're all agreeing that's right yep yeah it's back to the self-help thing it's sort of a reminder every week be a good person don't forget to donate to charity here's some local charities here these are our causes be a good you know be good

be nice to your spouse and your children and so on so people kind of leave a little charged up for the week on Sunday back to Monday and that's probably

a big draw of those big Tony Robbins things too right there's a community of us together we're all trying to do better we're all trying to better ourselves

and optimize our lives that's right there's nothing wrong with it same thing back back to Jordan Peterson. That's right. He's given a message. People like to hear that. And okay, so what? Why is that bad? It's not bad. Yeah. Now, of course, people like Richard Dawkins will point out, yeah, but can we decouple all the supernatural nonsense from the social community? Yes, we can. But don't you think that there's less of an acceptance of the supernatural nonsense than there was, say, 50 years ago, 100 years ago?

And it seems to be a trend towards secularism. Those numbers are getting better. The percentage of nuns, people tick the box for no religious affiliation, that used to be in the single digits. It's now 25% of all Americans, 33% of millennials, those born after 1991. And it looks like probably with iGenters, itenters can be closer to 50% people born after 1995. Now, they're not necessarily atheist agnostic skeptics, but they don't affiliate with any religion. And that's good because in the sense that, you know, it's religious behavior that causes some of these social problems that we are encountering now with Islam, for example. You know, so if somebody privately believes in God or whatever and they don't act on it, okay, I guess I don't care in that sense.

It's the acting on your beliefs that causes the problem. Well, when you enforce those beliefs on other people in particular. That's right. So when it spills over into politics, education, science education in particular. Well, that's one of the real problems they're having in Europe when they're dealing with people that are coming over from other countries where they have a different set of values. And they're seeing women in skirts and they're calling them whores. And it's like, oh, bro, you're in England. Right. Different set of rules over here. Come to California. You won't believe it.

Right. And they think that God has dictated these rules. In their eyes, they're seeing some horrible sin. They're seeing the decay of the moral fiber of their environment. These are primitive beliefs having to do with men wanting to control women's reproductive rights. There's evolutionary reasons for this. You had Brett and Heather on here, and they explained that beautifully. But we have to overcome that. Just because it's an evolved tendency for men to want to control women's reproduction doesn't mean we should do

that. In fact, it's the opposite. And so I make the case in one of my Scientific American columns on abortion that if our mutual goal between pro-lifers and pro-choicers is to reduce the amount of abortions, we know the formula. Educate women, empower women. Birth control. Birth control, access to birth control, and so on. It just happens automatically. The pregnancy rates go down, therefore abortion rates are going to go down.

We know how to do this. But still, people, the pro-lifers, you know, just are glom on to it. But it's a moral issue. Okay, take the moral out of it. I understand it's a human life or potential human life, whatever you want to argue about that. I get all that. Take that out. Let's just work to the common goal of reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.

My favorite one that still exists is abstinence. The idea that they're trying to push this on these essentially when you especially be talking about really young people that are just getting horny for the first time yeah i mean they're on drugs they're on the horse to say no what yeah what are you talking about you take the average 17 18 year old kids and you try to they get them together and no one's in the room and they're raging raging with hormones and they're both supposed to keep their clothes on like look man it's not going to happen it's just not going to happen you got to let that go and this idea that you're going to tell them that god wants them to be abstinent like are you sure why did he give us

these goddamn hormones like what's happening here there's studies on how effective abstinence only programs or chastity pledges and these sorts of things how effective not not only are they not effective they're worse because then people go into like a date or something unprepared and then the hormones kick in you know and they they start going at it and then they don't have protection well there's also the thing where catholic schools like when i was a kid we always knew and like this is we're talking about in the 80s everyone knew that girls who went to all girls catholic schools were freaks because they were never around boys because they're all in just a school with girls where they end their everything is suppression suppression suppress, suppress, suppress.

They just can't wait. They get out. They find a boy, and they go crazy. Everybody knew it. I mean, this is not something that I knew as a comedian or as a person who studies culture. This is something I knew as a 14-year-old. Right. Everyone knew that girls who went to all-girl Catholic schools were freaks.

Right. It just has the opposite intended effect. There was a British study I found that found some small – it was like 1.5% or whatever of 10,000 women who said they got pregnant without having sex. Oh, that happens. Oh, how did that happen? It does happen. It's immaculate. It's an immaculate conception. That's right.

It's hilarious. Yeah. Or they do's hilarious yeah or they do everything but or they have anal or whatever and say well we didn't actually have sex you know like clinton you know well what do you mean by sex and right have and sexual relations yeah i did not have sexual relations for that woman there's a landscape yeah sex is intercourse. Penis, vagina, that's it. Everything else is just hanging out. Right. Yep. Well, it's the need for belief systems is it's so, I mean, it helps people to have belief systems if they're positive and they're objective and they're well-reasoned and they're, you know, these are, you know, backed by facts and knowledge, it helps.

But the need for belief systems is so strong that we'll take a belief system that's wonky because we have the desire. Yeah, the brain abhors a vacuum of belief. That's the way I put it. And something's going to be in there. So let's try to put in those brains rational, science-based values. And we have those. I mean, humanist values, the humanist movement is now about almost a century old. just celebrated its 50th anniversary.

You can get diverse people to agree. You don't have to have the correct philosophical arguments to get there, but, you know, just everybody should be treated equally under the law. Can we at least agree on that? Yes, okay. I mean, if you start off with, Pinker makes this point in Enlightenment Now, if you start off with Jesus died for our sins, that's the most important value to me.

You're not going to get agreement in a room full of UN diversity. You've got to start with something super basic in general. Everybody deserves equal rights. Okay, yeah. And then you start to build from there. And we can do that. Do you find – you've been in this for a long time and you've done some really valuable work. It's so nice that there's someone like you that really has dedicated their life to really illuminating truth, exposing all the flaws in people's thinking. Do you feel like the reception of this is – it's easier now or there's momentum behind this kind of thinking?

I do. Yeah, for sure. It's more open. Part of my – I have a distorted view. I'm from California. I grew up in Southern California. We're a pretty liberal society here. So I'm empathetic to people that write me from, like, Oklahoma or Arkansas, and I'm in this little town.

Everybody – the only question is, which Christian church do you go to? You know, the Baptists or the Presbyterians? Right. And, you know, everyone in his family, everyone at work is a believer, and he's an atheist. Okay. So I haven't faced anything like that. And I'm a middle-aged white guy, I do have white privileges, I know. And so I am sympathetic to others, but I do think across the board, things are more tolerant.

We know this from studies on interracial marriage, for example, that's not even an issue anymore. The gay rights thing has changed very rapidly. I mean, that was stunning how quickly social attitudes changed after the Supreme Court. Well, we have to remember, in 2013, Hillary Clinton was still saying that she didn't believe in gay marriage. That's right. Because that was a political position. That's right. Obama in 2011.

Although you never know when a politician says something. Of course. But now, so I predict, you know, like the gay marriage thing, no one will even be talking about it in another year or two. It'll change so quickly. And so across the board, the acceptance now of atheists, humanists, secularists, agnostics, whatever has become much better. In most places there's still some, of course, Islamic countries where not only would they

burn me and you they'd burn catholics because they picked the wrong religion so there's still that but i wonder if there's some improvement there in those countries because the internet with younger people when they're being exposed to these new ideas yeah maybe uh i'm not sure on that data the last time i saw a big poll was on uh how supportive you would be of Sharia law. And these were pretty scary, like a third to a half of Muslims living in Muslim countries said they would support Sharia law. And if you look at Sharia law, as you know, it's pretty scary, very anti-democratic, illiberal attitudes about rights and women and things like that. and things like that. So there, I think the prediction would be, yes, millennials and iGenners, when they get into power, then maybe they, not just political power, but like controlling talk shows, radio

shows, TV shows, scripts, things like that. Most, I think most moral change happens in people's minds from inculcating it from culture, pop culture, of just how you talk about other people. Like if you, Dawkins makes this point that you can tell pretty much down to the decade when a book was written by the way they talk about women, like a novel, talk about women or blacks or whatever, going back, say, a century. You can say, well, that was 1930s, the way they're talking about Jews. And that's the kind of thing that shifts very slowly.

You hardly notice it. But from people like you comedians you tell certain jokes or you say certain things and it becomes more acceptable scripts for television shows and films um and all of us kind of watch it and absorb it and just think yeah you know we shouldn't be saying those kinds of things about women and jews and blacks or whatever stop doing that not consciously You just kind of soak it in. So I think you still need laws. We have to sometimes change the law and just say, okay, it's now illegal to discriminate against Jews or whatever.

You can't do that. Now, people may still want to do that. How do we change their thinking? Well, that's the bottom-up thing that takes a course of decades or maybe a century. And it takes generations sometimes because the new young kids have to see the flaws in the way their parents are thinking and and and have access to this information and form their own opinions on these things hopefully based based on objective reasoning and reality and and all the awesome stuff that's available now my stepdad was in the pacific war

and the way he talked about japanese you know when i was a kid in the 60s like And the way he talked about Japanese, you know, when I was a kid in the 60s, I'm like, oh. And then by the time I became an adult, I'm like, Dad, don't say this stuff. Don't say it out loud. When you think about 1947 to 1960, that's a tiny period of time. It's so short.

Yeah. I mean, it's really like, you know, when we're talking about the early 2000s. Right. Imagine if World War II happened during the early 2000s. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard like, you know, when we're talking about the early 2000s. Right. Imagine if World War II happened during the early 2000s. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It's hard to remember. It's hard to put it into perspective. I think pop culture, the media, social media and so on is going to accelerate moral progress. It'll happen faster. Like it happened faster for women than it did for blacks. It happened faster for gays than it did for women. You know, maybe whatever's next, animal rights or something like this will accelerate even more, maybe trans rights or something like that.

What do you think about the pushback against this idea that we are living in the safest time ever and that there is an absolute trend? Pinker gets criticized about this where people say, no, the world is still not safe for these people, for this group, for that group, and for you saying that the world just shows your white privilege and this white male perspective?

I'm on board with Steve across the board on these things. He's got the data. It depends on the question you're asking. It's like if you say, yeah, but my life is not better. We're not talking about your life. The question is, is society getting better? Of course there's ups and downs, and this group is doing better than that group and yes there's still some racial discrimination and yes there's still clearly anti-semites as we've seen recently

but across the board if we take like the last 200 years which direction are the trend lines going they're all going in the right direction so again it's scale the question is what's the scale we're talking about so it's it's a little unfair to to pinker to say well you're blind to that thing over he's not talking about that one thing there he's talking about just across the board yeah i agree um listen man thanks for everything thanks for everything you do thanks for all your articles and your books and and thanks for coming on here. And please let people know your podcast, once again, is called Skeptic Salon. Yeah, Science Salon. Science Salon. Sorry, Science Salon.

You just go to skeptic.com, and it's posted there. And yeah, so Skeptic is still going. Social media. Michael Shermer is my Twitter feed. You have Instagram as well? I don't do that. How dare you? You don't do Instagram?

That's MichaelShermer1. Do you have an Instagram? I do. I'm going to start posting as of today. We'll take a photo of you. I always click on yours because you always have interesting photographs from wherever you're at. And it is kind of fun. It's fun. It's just take an extra minute or two.

Giant waste of time though. Don't get sucked in. I'm already wasting so much time on Twitter. Well, thank you, Michael. Appreciate. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Bye everybody.