The Joe Rogan Experience - #1888 - Michael Shermer

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Dr. Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, host of the podcast "The Michael Shermer Show," and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is "Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational." https://michaelshermer.com/

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! That's Peter Spears, Michael Sherman. I come bearing signed gifts for you, sir. Thank you very much. Why the rational believe the irrational. Right.

Why is that? Is it simple? It wouldn't be this big of a book if it was simple. Yeah, it's not that simple. Well, first of all, my argument is that it's not irrational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true that it pays to err on the side of assuming more of them are true than actually are, then missing real conspiracy theories, and then that's a costlier error to make. That's a rational perspective. The term conspiracy theory got thrown about. There was the first introduction of it into the zeitgeist was during the Kennedy assassination, correct?

Yeah. Well, around that time, right, before that, before World War II, really, conspiracy theories were kind of common knowledge. Everybody knew that things were going on behind closed doors, and it was just kind of commonly known, and we just kind of tried to figure it out. It didn't become really fringy until right after the JFK thing. It kind of got as a meme that you're crazy to think these conspiracy theories are true. It became pathologized. Richard Hofstadter's, you know, the paranoid style in American politics kind of put that on the map. It's conspiracy theories are something delusional. It's a pathology in your brain.

Whereas before that, it wasn't. It was just, I mean, even the Declaration of Independence. It's a conspiracy theory. It's saying, look, the British are doing this whole train of abuses and usurpations. And here's what we think they're up to. And here's what we think they want to do. And we're against that. Printed right there in the Declaration. So it's not fringy, right? It was kind of commonly known that these things happen. The term as a pejorative, though, it was introduced into like sort of the American culture around the Kennedy assassination. Yeah, that's an interesting story because I'm convinced Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Really? Yes, I am. What makes you convinced of that? Oh, well, I have a whole chapter on it and we can get into that in a second. But

the twist about it where it seems like there was something up was that President Johnson was worried that if it looks like there's a conspiracy afoot with the Cubans or the Russians, that that could lead to a nuclear exchange. So we don't want the American people to think that this is some kind of vast conspiracy of the Russians. Have you gone back and forth on that at all? Or is it just something you've always believed? No, no. Well, before the Oliver Stone film, I hadn't really given it that much thought. Well, the Warren report seems pretty thorough, but who knows? What do I know? And then the Oliver Stone film, which floats every conspiracy theory there was in one package, and I thought, well, if 10% of this is true, it seems like there was something else going on. But then, you know, there were webpages posted of like, here are all the mistakes in the film, and here are all the counter arguments. And then I read Gerald Posner's book,

Case Closed, about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and why all the evidence points to him. And then Vincent Bugliosi's book, Reclaiming History, which is like 1500 pages long, and it dissects every one of the hundreds of conspiracy theories. There are something on the order of 140 people have been accused, and a couple hundred organizations have been affiliated with the JFK assassination. The problem is that there's no convergence of evidence to any other one than Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and all the evidence points to him. So it's not impossible.

All the evidence points to him. Massive amounts of evidence, right. So now we're supposed to get a new tranche of documents. But they're not. They won't release them. They keep stopping the release of these documents. This worries me because that makes people suspicious, as it should. documents. This worries me because that makes people suspicious, as it should.

But wait a minute, it worries you because it makes people suspicious or it worries you because it points to their withholding information because that information looks bad? I would love to see the information and I would change my mind in a heartbeat. What are your thoughts on the magic bullet? Okay, the magic bullet is not a magic bullet. It's a single bullet theory. That is, what it's usually rendered as is Kennedy and Connolly are sitting like this. Oh, I'm aware of all of it. Yeah, right. So the bullet doesn't have to go left, right, and so forth. Kennedy was elevated. Yes, right. So if you draw a line straight back to the sixth floor window of the book depository building, the bullet goes straight through his back, out his neck, into Connolly, through his arm, into his leg, and so forth in a straight line.

Well, you know the only reason why they had to come up with the theory that that one bullet did all that damage. You know that, right? Well, you mean— Do you know why? Well, I don't know. Go ahead and give me your— Because someone was hit by a ricochet in the underpass. And so they had to attribute all that damage to one bullet.

Right. That's right. Yeah. But there's more in Connolly's body. There was more pieces of bullet than were missing from the actual bullet itself. Did you ever look at the actual bullet itself? Have you studied it? Yeah.

I have a picture of it in there. Yeah. I know a lot about bullets. And one of the problems about bullets is there's never been a bullet that's gone through bone and shattered bone and gone through two different bodies and came out looking like that. That looks like a bullet that was shot into water. It is deformed, though. Yeah, it's slightly deformed. But every bullet that leaves a gun is slightly deformed.

That indicates even more so that it didn't hit anything. When bullets hit things, they deform. That's the whole purpose of making bullets like that. These bullets are designed to shatter things and expand upon impact and it creates more damage. Well, hollow point bullets are. Sure, but all bullets are. Yeah. Hollow points even more specifically.

Right. But all bullets are designed to expand upon impact. Right. Even rifle bullets that are copper, because in California you can't use lead bullets anymore because condors and a lot of other birds of prey, they eat the lead bullets and they get lead poisoning. Because if there's an animal that gets shot and the hunter doesn't recover it and then the condor or something else eats that, some sort of a raptor eats that, then they get lead poisoning.

But bullets expand and they break up. They don't look like that. That bullet was found in Connolly's gurney, which is, like, so ridiculous. The idea that, oh, look, we found the bullet here. It just managed to magically fall out of his body and look pristine. Okay, 80% of the earwitnesses heard three shots. Yeah, but you know witnesses. And the first shot witnesses heard three shots. Yeah, but you know, and the first shot missed. But witnesses. Yeah, but okay. So that's just asking people what happened. If you talk to witnesses after 9-11, they said they heard explosions. Yes, right. Yeah,

right. Exactly. So again, it's a probability argument. It's not black or white. But that, the probability of that having gone through bodies is very low. Well, I don't know if you've seen those tests where they shoot the bullet through the foam stuff that mimics a human body and so

forth, and it does get deformed like that. That's ballistic gel. Ballistic gel is not bone. But they have shot it through pigs with the bone and tendons and ligaments and muscles and all that. Never looks like that. Well, anyway, there's good shows on this. No, no, no, no, no. It never looks like that.

There's no evidence of bullets hitting bone where they come out looking like that. I don't know, Joe. Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure it was either NOVA or National Geographic that did this and replicated it, shot it right through a body. No, I saw that. They looked deformed. The bullets looked deformed. They were bent up. Yeah. Okay. So what is your counter then? I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved. I certainly think he was involved. And I think the possibility of a conspiracy is high.

I do not know whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was most certainly a part of it. But when Lee Harvey Oswald was captured, when they were talking to him, he said, I'm a patsy. I'm inclined to believe he was a patsy. But I'm also inclined to believe that he had knowledge of it. He was there for probably a very specific reason. And they were probably setting him up. I think there was probably a very specific reason, and they were probably setting him up. I think there was probably multiple people involved. Yeah. Who's the they? Who is the they? That's the question. Is it the CIA? Was it the mafia? Were they upset because

he turned on them after they got him elected? Because there was a conspiracy to help him get elected. The mob was involved in getting JFK elected. Was it the people that were upset because of the Bay of Pigs incident? Was it the CIA because he wanted to disband them? Who knows? I think there was a lot of people that John F. Kennedy upset. Well, that's true for every president, though. But the ones that don't get shot, then no one pays attention to that. How many people hated Trump or Nixon, especially? Right. But we're talking about an actual murder. You're not saying – to say it's true of every president is fine,

but we're talking about a president that was murdered. And you look at the people that may have had some sort of a vested interest in getting rid of him. Okay, so here's one argument I'm making. It's the argument from proportionality that the effect should have a matching size cause. So let me just back up here for a second. If you take a little pebble and throw it, it doesn't take a lot of effort to do it. A fist-sized stone takes more effort, a big boulder, massive effort. So our folk physics, we feel like cause and effect should match, right?

So interesting experiment if you take subjects and give them two dice and say, okay, now try to roll a low number. They'll kind of just gently toss it like that. Now try to roll a high number like an 11 or 12. They'll give it a good heave like that. Well, that's dumb people. Well, but that's our intuition. But that's people that don't know about dice.

We're not talking about trained assassins. Okay, but let me finish. Let me finish. So, you know, our sense is that big events, JFK assassination, Princess Di dies, 9-11, COVID-19. Counterfactually, if Oswald had missed Kennedy or just wounded him and he didn't die, would there be massive conspiracy theories about who he was? OK, so this has actually happened. Well, hold on a minute. That's a straw man, because you're saying that Oswald did act alone if he had missed. Yeah, if he had missed. Nobody would make a good deal about it. But we're talking about after the murder. The reason why there's a conspiracy is because he

was murdered. Right. So why are there no conspiracy theories about John Hinckley shooting Reagan? Because John Hinckley has a real trail of mental illness. He wrote letters to Jodie Foster. He was a very specific human being who was obsessed with killing Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. It's all really documented. He's out now, too. It's not like they got rid of him like they got rid of Jack Ruby. Or Squeaky Fromm tried to shoot Gerald Ford.

But she was also in the Manson family. There's a big conspiracy about that, about the Manson family and the fact that Charles Manson was a part of NK Ultra. Oh, yes, right. Yes, right, right. Did you ever read Chaos by Tom O'Neill? No, I haven't read that one. It's a fantastic book. It's all about why Manson kept getting released. You know, Manson was in jail, right? And during the time he was in jail, he was visited by Jolly West, who was the head of the CIA's MKUltra LSD experiments. They most certainly did something to Manson while he was in jail. And they also supplied him, there's anecdotal evidence that shows that they supplied him with LSD when he got out of jail.

Every time he got arrested for violating parole, these cops and these local sheriffs that had caught him were told that it was above their pay grade and they had to release him. Manson got out for multiple offenses after he was on parole, things that should have kept him locked up. There's some real good evidence that, you know, about MKUltra was a real thing. And that's an interesting conspiracy, right? Because it's a real one, documented. Our own government was doing this. Well, there's Operation Midnight Climax that they were involved with. Do you know about that one?

That's where they were dosing up Johns when they would go to visit prostitutes and they would film them through two-way mirrors. You know, Jolly West was a part of that and he also was a part in some way shape or form of that Manson family Okay, but my point is that if it let's say was the mayor of Dallas that was shot that day Would there be vast conspiracy industry of books and films and who knows but it wasn't the mayor It was the president of the United States. That makes it a far bigger issue. Right. That's my point. We want something big. It doesn't seem right that a lone nut like Lee Harvey Oswald could have pulled this off or that 19 guys with

box cutters could have taken down the World Trade Center buildings. It just doesn't feel right. So we add elements. This is my theory. We add elements of causality to match it. You know, princes die, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt. But it doesn't feel right that a princess, famous, and so forth, would die the same way. Yeah, but you're adding a bunch of different conspiracies to one that's very specific. You're adding a bunch that are much more easily disprovable than one that's very specific. This is my problem with all conspiracy theories. And one of the things that you said at the beginning, some of them are real. Yeah, that's right.

All right. So let's distinguish conspiracy theories from conspiracies. Conspiracies, by definition, are two or more people plotting in secret to gain an unfair, illegal, or immoral advantage over somebody else. That happens all the time, right? Sure. So how do we know? So it's a signal detection problem. How do you know which conspiracy theories are correct?

They tag an actual conspiracy, right? So I draw this two-by-two grid. So up here you have real conspiracy theories that are real, and you associate them with that correctly. You say, yeah, that's what I agree. That's a hit. So conspiracy theories that are real, and you go, no, I don't believe it. I don't think there's a real conspiracy. That's a miss. So that's a big miss, right? That's a type two error. You don't want to miss those because those are real. That could harm you. Down here,

you have conspiracy theories that are not true and you think they are. So that's a false positive, a type one error. That's a low cost error to make. It doesn't cost a lot. It's not risky to assume a conspiracy theory is real when it's not. And so this is my argument, is that we've evolved this cognition to be very suspicious and paranoid about other people and what they're doing because historically and evolutionarily wise, in these small bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers, anthropologists tell us there's a lot of conniving and cabals and so on. This goes on. So I call this constructive conspiracism. It pays to be a little paranoid

because sometimes they really are out to get you. But it also pays to be rational and recognize which ones are conspiracies and which ones are probably people just in the moment of chaos like 9-11 adding a bunch of stuff to what they've experienced and just the chaos of the incident. I've heard explosions. I saw this. I saw that. And you know that in times like that of great

distress, people and eyewitness testimonies are some of the most unreliable because people are so blown away by the extreme moment that they can't really recall things correctly. Okay. Let's just do another counterfactual. What would be true if this really was a conspiracy? Well, there should be some documentation somewhere. There is, and that's why they won't release it. Well, okay. So this is the problem. Release it. Damn it. Yeah. Well, why do you think, but what possible reason? I thought Trump was going to release it. I was quite surprised.

I don't think they want to let anybody release that stuff. If I had to guess, it would be something like what the CIA was up to even more than what we know about, you know, overthrowing, rigging elections in South American countries, assassinating communist dictators. Real conspiracies. These are real conspiracies. These things happen. We found out about this in the 90s. So why are you so convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? Okay, so let's just pull back for a second.

Okay. All right? I'm not God. You're not either. I'm not omniscient. We don't know for sure what happened. Nobody does. I like to get you in a room with Oliver Stone because Oliver Stone is so compelling.

I mean, that guy will talk for days and days about that. I know. I watched his four-hour documentary. I watched him on here. What did you think about it? Well, okay. So, again, here's my problem is that it's not just a black and white thing. What's most likely to be true? Okay. Well, the evidence is massive against Lee Harvey Oswald. Okay. For sure, he was at least involved.

Yeah. All right. Who else would have been involved? Okay. So, Stone, CIA, Allen Dulles, something. If you had Allen Dulles here, could you get a grand jury to agree we have enough evidence to put him on trial? I don't think so. There's nobody, in fact, that you could point to that a grand jury would say. Well, we're talking about something that happened over 50 years ago. Well, I mean, just rewind the tape to 10 years after or something.

Okay, so we got somebody. Here he is. Well, this actually happened, right? Jim Garrison put on trial Clay Shaw and pointed all the evidence he could find, and the jury acquitted him in under an hour. The jury also acquitted O.J. Simpson. Yes, okay. You know, I don't know if that's real good evidence. Juries are, you know, they're not the most informed people. people? Well, there was a made-for-television BBC trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in absentia, in which Jerry Spence was his defense attorney in absentia. And what's his name? It was the

prosecutor, the reclaiming history, the Manson guy, the guy who put Manson away. I just mentioned his name. I'm sorry. I'm spacing out on it. Biliosi. Vincent Biliosi. Again, the jury, again, it's not a real jury. It's a made-for-TV series. But, you know, they presented all the evidence and they acquitted. I mean, they convicted Oswald based on the evidence as the lone assassin because there was just nothing pointing to anybody else. So here's how I think about it. There could be somebody else involved, but we need some evidence, at least some paper trail. Why in the Pentagon Papers,

they released all these top secret documents that Nixon tried to cover up and prevent from being published. There's nothing in there about, you know, the conspiracy to assassinate the CIA. Right, but they've stopped release of all of the documents about the Kennedy assassination. They keep postponing it decades and decades. My guess is probably the CIA was up to even more no good back in the 60s and 70s. You know, you mentioned MKUltra. Don't forget. That's a good guess. But another good guess is that they were involved in the assassination in some way.

Okay. Then, okay, I'm a good Bayesian. I'm willing to update my priors, change my credence, and change my mind completely and go, yes. I'm just very suspicious of multiple parts of that assassination, including the fact that, you know, do you know that Jolly West visited Jack Ruby while he was in jail? And Jack Ruby, something happened to him. He went fucking completely insane

after visiting with Jolly West. And the assumption is that Jolly West gave Jack Ruby LSD while he was in jail. Maybe. But why would Jolly West go to visit the guy that killed Lee Harvey Oswald when he was the head of a mind control experiment for the CIA?

Again, this is what's called anomaly hunting. Like any big event, we go searching for any little thing that's this is what's called anomaly hunting. Like any big event, we go searching for any little thing that's weird. That's a giant anomaly. Like the umbrella guy, the umbrella man, Louis Witt on the- Well, there's a lot of that silly shit. But that points to be to this thing where people always try to look for connections. And I do agree with you that a lot of conspiracy theories are ridiculous. But a lot of conspiracies, as you said, are real. I don't know if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but I have a feeling that there were other people involved based on the evidence,

based on a lot of it. And like Stone's thesis that the CIA military industrial complex and so on were involved because Kennedy wanted to get us out of Vietnam. Nixon got us out of Vietnam. How come no one assassinated him from the military industrial complex? Well, that's only one piece that, I mean, his assumption that it was because of them trying to get out of Vietnam was only one of the assumptions that they made. His other assumptions were the mob. It was the CIA. It was, I mean, he wanted to get rid of a lot of the intelligence agencies. I mean, he had a real problem with secret societies and secrecy and secrecy in government. He made that famous speech about secret societies.

Right. Well, and again, it's complicated by the fact that we did try to invade Cuba using Cuban nationalists in the Bay of Pigs. That was a disaster. Also Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods. That's one of the creepiest ones. Oh, totally. The fact that that was a real conspiracy, that they were really planning on blowing up a drone jetliner and blaming it on the Cubans. They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo

Bay, all to get us to go to war with Cuba. It's pretty wild that that was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by Kennedy. And McNamara, he didn't go for it either. But this is an example, again, of constructive conspiracism. It's not irrational to think that a lot of conspiracy theories might be true because enough of them have been, you know, or a COINTELPRO where the FBI was sending in agents to act as social justice activists in American Indian movement, feminist groups, the Black Panthers and so on, and, you know, including blackmailing Martin Luther King Jr., recording his sexcapades in hotel rooms. I mean, our government was doing this?

What? Yeah. The guy who assassinated Martin Luther King. Ray. Ray. Jesus Christ. It escapes me. What is his name?

James Earl Ray. James Earl Ray. Yeah. James Earl. I always forget that. Yeah. James Earl Ray. I always forget that guy's name for some reason. But I talked to Mike Baker, who was formerly with the CIA. I use air quotes formally. He had investigated that for his television show.

And he said that is one of the weirdest ones because that guy was funded in some strange way. Like he was kind of a loser. And then all of a sudden he had money and, you know, there was someone he believes was involved in aiding that guy to assassinate Martin Luther King. Again, so like we have the WikiLeaks, OK, millions and millions of top secret documents. Why is there no mention of 9-11 as an inside job? Some documentation of somebody inside. But maybe 9-11 wasn't an inside job. Maybe that's why. And why is there nothing about JFK or the fake moon landing? Nothing like that. So we would expect, if X was true, that the following should happen.

Yeah, but WikiLeaks didn't get all of the documents that the government has ever hidden. That's a weird way to connect the dots there, Mr. Shermer. I'm disconnecting the dots. Are you working for the governor or the government? What's going on with you? I'm an agent of disinformation. I've been accused of that, actually. Have you been?

I think I have been, too. It's okay. Yeah. But, I mean, again, how do these systems really work? So this is my kind of conspiracy detection kit. The grander the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is to be true. Like, say, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe. That's a very specific conspiracy theory.

It turned out to be true. They really did do that. And for obvious reasons, profit motive, right? But if you scale up from that, oh, they're trying to control the entire European economy or something like, well, no, that's too big. They're just trying to make money. They're just trying to make money, right? So, you know, the more people that have to be involved, the more elements that have to come, people are incompetent, people can't keep their mouth shut. For the most part. For the most part, yes. Now, to be fair to the other side,

For the most part. For the most part, yes. Now, to be fair to the other side, you know, if you read about the development of the U-2 spy plane and the AR-71 Blackbird, you know, this was done in Burbank, near where you used to live. And that's right in the heart of LA. How did they do this for all those years? And nobody knew about it, right? Well, they were acting on the interests of the government. They were trying to be patriots. They kept their mouth shut because they were trying to win a war against the evil others. before it was declassified, there were commercial pilots going, oh my God, there's something going 3,000 miles an hour,

50,000 feet above me at 30,000 feet. This is impossible. We don't have anything like that. Well, actually, we did have something like that. So I suspect that some of these UAPs, I think in a decade or two, we're going to find out, oh, we had these incredible drones that could fly at these speeds. I tend to lean towards that as well sometimes.

I go back and forth with it. I had Ryan Graves on recently. Yeah, I saw that. It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things with no visible means of propulsion, no technology that we currently know is available could act in the way those things are acting. I wonder if that is what it is, if they have some sort of very advanced drones and the fact that they seem to be transmedium, they seem to be able to enter into the ocean and then leave the ocean. I wonder, I wonder if that's something that we have because these things, they're, you know, one of the ones that he described is like a translucent circle

with a black sphere inside of it. And that when they updated their radar systems in 2014, they started seeing them all over the place on their systems. And that these people spotted them visually and that they were behaving in a way like at, you know, 130 mile an hour winds or completely stationary. I wonder if those are super advanced drones. Yeah, a lot of, another problem with these videos is that they're very grainy, blurry. You can't quite make out what's going on. Like the one that looks like it goes in the ocean comes back out. It's not clear that it goes in the ocean because the horizon in the ocean is so blurry,

right? So I'm a member of this Galileo project at Harvard run by Avi Loeb, the head of the astronomy department. I had Avi on. Yep. I know. And, uh, you know, we're, we're, he's raising money to put cameras, high resolution cameras all over the world, particularly in the places where people like Graves say they, I mean, when Graves told you, I, we saw these things every day. It's like every day there, there surely must be high resolution photos. But those, those jets are not designed to take high resolution video. They're designed to fight against enemy jets. Right. That's what they're designed for. They're designed to take high resolution video. They're designed to fight against enemy jets. That's what they're designed for. They're designed to recognize these enemy combatants and engage with them in the most effective way possible. That's not with high resolution digital video.

Right. Well, that would be the solution. We just need better data. Well, I wonder if they want better data. Now, let's assume. Well, we do. But listen, the federal government, imagine they are running top secret programs using advanced drones and a technology that we're not currently aware of. Right. And the United States government has these. They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things. Why would they?

Right. But everyone has one of these in their pocket. Yeah, but you can't get digital video of something that's seven miles away, moving at, you know, the speed of sound. You're not going to get digital video. That's what we want to do with the Galileo project. And according to Christopher Mellon, a guy who, you know, did work for the Defense Department, he said there are top secret videos and photographs that he's seen or that he's aware of that are pretty spectacular that they don't understand. Right. I've heard him say that. It's like, OK, then let's see them. Yeah, but why would they release that? This is the question is like if they just like the Blackbird, just like the stealth bomber, many of the other projects that they have that were top secret before they became public, why would they release all that information?

Probably wouldn't. Right. Yeah. Right. I wonder what that stuff is. And the fact that it happens so often in that very specific area, who knows? Another thing I was thinking about with the UAPs is in the history of technology, no nation gets very far ahead of any other nation. Right.

They either back-engineer it or copy it or steal the secrets and so on. It's not likely we would have anything that the Russians and Chinese wouldn't be pretty close to having also. Just think of just the development of jets. Or the development of the nuclear bomb. The nuclear bomb. I mean, the Russians had – so 1945 was Hiroshima. And 1949, the Russians – they stole our secrets, right? So this idea that, you know, these are super advanced drones that we have and the Russians and Chinese don't have,

it's not likely they would not know the technology that we know, the physics, the aerodynamics and the engineering and all that, because they read the same journals. They do the same research we do. So what do you think it is? Well, I think it's probably multiple things. I think some of them might be drones that just really high-tech drones. Some of them are just blurry videos that are – I think the one of the sphere inside the cube or – The cube inside the sphere.

The sphere is probably a balloon. A balloon? Yes. A balloon that stands stationary at 130 mile an hour winds? It appears to stand stationary. It appears with the most sophisticated tracking devices that these military jets have. I know. These are anomalies.

Yeah. So we just need better data. But why would you think it's a balloon? Well, what else would it be? Okay. It might be a drone. It's certainly probably not an alien spacecraft and so on. Certainly, probably not. Why do you say that? Well, because, well, this

kind of gets into the argument of the SETI program. There's so many, there's so much empty space out there. The chances of them finding us are pretty slim. Really? But we find planets all the time. Yeah, but telescopes, not visitors. Right, telescopes and satellites and all sorts of things that we send into space. But we find planets all the time that are in the Goldilocks zone. And we have a relatively unsophisticated in terms of what we'd expect from something that's capable of intergalactic travel. Relatively simple technology in comparison to what we would think. If you took what we have today and you increased our capabilities, you know, a thousand years from now,

you could imagine that it would be quite easy for someone to at least send a drone from another planet to visit Earth and observe. This is the Fermi paradox. Yes. That you know of. And where are they? Well, of course, most scientists like him don't think that they're here. So I separate two questions. Most scientists?

Most scientists. Michio Kaku thinks they're here. He's been a little fuzzy about that. He's not totally committed to that. He's totally committed. He was here. He was here and he talked about it on the podcast. He said for the longest time he was a skeptic.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Okay, he has kind of come down on that side a little bit. But why would you be firm on that? When you think about the fact that there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe. Yes, yes, yes. Let's separate two questions. Are they out there? Have they come here?

Are they out there? Almost certainly. Right. I would say 99.9% they're out there. I would agree with you. 100 billion stars in our galaxy, 100 billion to a trillion galaxies. Just do the numbers. Right. I would say 99.9% they're out there. I would agree with you. 100 billion stars in our galaxy, 100 billion to a trillion galaxies. Just do the numbers. Yeah.

No matter how improbable it is you get from bacteria to big brains and civilization, it's going to happen. Right. But have they come here? Okay. So how good is the evidence for that? Not very. It's pretty thin, right? How good?

It's anecdotal. It's human eyewitnesses. It's blurry videos, grainy photos. If they were here, damn it. Pick up the widget on the dashboard and bring it back here. But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the data that they've acquired, when they're looking at something like Commander David Fravor, who, when they were off the coast with the Nimitz, when they tracked that thing that went from above 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second. What's that?

I don't know. Yeah. What is that thing that they have visual contact by multiple sources and they tracked it and they have video of this thing moving off at insane rates of speed? What's that? Yeah. I don't know. This is the problem with anomalies. No theory explains everything.

But if there was any evidence that pointed to something that operated in a way that we can't comprehend any of the known technologies being able to reproduce. That's one of them. But no technologies come out of a vacuum like that. They always build on previous technologies. Right, but if you're talking about something from another planet or something from another civilization that we're not aware of that's on Earth, maybe that lives in the water, we don't know. We don't know. And when you're seeing these things,

when you're talking about people that are the best fighter pilots that we have available, that are operating with the most sophisticated fighter jets, with tracking systems that are constantly being updated, and then when they update them, they start picking up these things, like Ryan Graves discussed on the podcast, why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else? It depends on how you want to pose the problem. So here's how I think about it. So I take Leslie Keen's book on UFOs and pilots in general go on the record and so on. In that book, she says 90 to 95% of all sightings have perfectly normal explanations. I would probably agree that's true. So the question is, what do we do with that

other 5% of anomalies? No theory explains everything. There's always going to be anomalies in every scientific theory. What do you do with it? Nothing. You assign it to a graduate student, figure it out, or that's you know. Rather than going to, you know, a grand theory of visitation by aliens or the Russians or Chinese have these super advanced technologies that we don't have or we have them and they don't have. I mean, again, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something pretty close to that. There's nothing from the videos in Ukraine of any Russian drones that act anything like these UAPs, surely they would use this technology if they had it? Well, we're assuming that those UAPs are military in nature and not something that they use to observe things.

Could be. I mean, why would we assume that these things, if they're capable of behaving in this way and they're just some sort of a device that can travel at insane rates of speed, why would we assume that those things can launch missiles or act in a military capacity? Right. And you know, there are UAP sightings over Ukraine. Yeah, but okay, so Avi did a nice paper on that showing that these were artillery shells, and not what the other people said they thought it was, that it was like a drone or a plane or something weird like that.

He showed that if it was what they thought it was, it would have had a much bigger impact going through the atmosphere at that speed and burning up. But it didn't, so these are artillery shells. Anyway, he did a nice paper on that. Interesting. But what about these things that supposedly move far faster than the speed of sound without the sonic boom? Yeah. How is that possible?

How is that possible? That's right. It's not. That's where it gets weird. That's where it gets weird. Right. But that's where the question is. Is it ours?

Is it really moving at that speed? Or is it a misperception of the video, a miscalculation? Scientists make miscalculations of these sorts of things all the time. Yeah. That was one of the things that was posed to David Fravor. And he said, they have multiple sources of data. It's not just like one system that's monitoring these things. It's multiple systems. Yeah. And I follow these guys. I agree. They are incredibly credible, right? And they have

good arguments. What do you do with the anomaly? I think you're an anti-conspiracy theorist. That's what I think. No, I'm a skeptic, Joe. I know you are. I'm just a skeptic. You literally are the editor. What's your position in Skeptic Magazine? I'm the editor-in-chief, publisher of Skeptic Magazine. You're literally a skeptic.

That is my day job. But it isn't that I don't believe things. I mean, I believe the theory of evolution. I think the Big Bang Theory happened when people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and my quantum physics friends tell me quantum physics is true. This is how we know it. To me, it's weird, spooky. I don't really understand it. But, okay. You know, we have tons of evidence. Have you seen some of the new discussions based on the observations from the James Webb telescope that maybe the Big Bang theory needs to be revisited? Yes, vaguely.

It was the expansion rate changing, right, from the new— Well, they're getting new data, right? They're constantly getting new data and we we would assume that with more and more sophisticated ways of viewing the known universe that we could possibly get some new data that would change our ideas of what the theory of the Big Bang Theory or the theory of the the universe itself would be and that's one of the things that they're discussing right now what was that there was a recent article what was it in which scientific publication that they were discussing whether or not

the big bang theory needs to be revisited it was based on the james webb yeah i did see that yeah i mean it would be astonishing if that didn't happen right right because you know no theory in science is permanent especially like right it's not like right now we have all the information about we have the entire universe mapped out every every planet, everything. We know exactly what it is. We know exactly how old everything is. And we know for sure. We just have a limited ability to look, right? That's it. It's the limitations of our technology. So in the late 90s is when they discovered the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Well, how can that be? Because in an explosion, the initial explosion, the inflation in cosmology is really rapid, then it slows and slows and slows. And so it was supposed to slow

down in another 10 billion years or something and maybe collapse back on itself. And then they discover, oh my God, no, these type two supernova, whatever it was, indicate that the expansion is accelerating. So there's this weird force, dark energy, that pushes it away. And dark matter is this proffered thing that explains why galaxies are held together, because they don't have enough mass to hold them together in the structures that they are, as I understand it, and rotate it the way they're rotating. So there's something else we can't see. Right.

Now, so when astronomers talk about dark energy and dark matter to explain these two anomalies, like how could this be? That's not an explanation. It's just a linguistic placeholder until we figure out what it is. So surely there is going to be some discoveries of some kind of new energy or some kind of matter

that we don't know a century from now. It's like, oh, of course if you came back after being chronically frozen oh, that's what it was! So what would it take for you to look, I mean, what kind of discovery would it take in terms of UAPs for you to revisit your position and say, it's highly likely that this is either something that we don't understand that we are observing that's come from somewhere else, or something that we don't understand because it's technology that hasn't been released. The actual specimen, the actual equivalent of the SR-71 Blackbird. I can go to the museum.

I can see it, touch it, walk on it. So do you hold it like you have like a placeholder, like perhaps? Yeah, I do. I do. I do. Nothing's 100 percent right now. Why is it so fun, though, to think that it's from somewhere else? It's so much more fun to think that we're being visited than to think that our government has some super sophisticated, you know, gravity propelling drones that somehow or another violate our laws of space time.

Why is it so much more exciting to think that? I think it's a religious impulse i think it's an idea that it feels like we're not alone and when you think about the narratives from different religions that there's something an agent a person a being yeah of something not just matter not just the laws of nature you know space daddy yeah like when einstein says well like spinoza's god it's just the laws of nature are God. It's like, that's not particularly comforting. It's like, well, they don't even know I'm here. Right. But the idea that they're out there, they're super advanced,

and they know we're here, maybe they're even coming. It's like The Day the Earth Stood Still, right? That was a kind of a film that was a Christ allegory. Remember his earthly name was Mr. Carpenter in that film, in the first one, the 1951 film. Oh, right. Klaatu. Klaatu. But his earthly name was Mr. Klaatu Baratu Niktu.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. And that was really a reflection of, and by the way, in the climax scene where the authorities kill him and they put him in the tomb, it's like the crucifixion of Jesus and they put him in the tomb and three days later he's resurrected.

Well, and then she goes to the robot and says, what you just said, Gort, Klaatu, Barada, Nikto. And he goes there, burns a hole into the morgue, takes the body, takes it back to the spaceship, lays it on that slab, does some stuff with the lights, and he comes back to life. Now, in the original script, she, the Mary Magdalene character woman, says, Patricia Neal, you mean this is the power that extraterrestrials have? And in the original one, he goes,

yeah, we have the power of life and death. And that Breen Censorship Board in 1950 said, no, no, no, you can't say that to the American public. Really? Yeah. The censorship boards? Yeah, there was a Breen Censorship Board that censored films that said, you know, you can't defend religious people is one of their criteria.

Offend. Yeah. I think you said defend. Yeah, offend. Yeah. So they changed the script. Now he says something like, oh, no, no, we don't have that power. Only the great spirit in the sky or something has that power.

I didn't know that there was a censorship board that would monitor films and say, you can't say these things. Well, it's the same way we have it for ratings, PG ratings. Yeah, but it's science fiction. They had censorship boards for science fiction, but they didn't for vampires. Well, I mean, even Star Trek, the original series, I mean, Roddenberry had to sneak in a lot of anti-Vietnam War commentary through these characters and had to be careful of how they were, you know, kind of presented because censorship boards are like that. You know, Captain Kirk, you know, he always got the woman, but, you know, you never saw anything, right? Right. But that's just how things were back then.

But I didn't know that they would have a censorship board that would say you can't offend religious people by saying that aliens have the power to bring things back from the dead. Right, because there it kind of secularizes God. So in this scenario, I call this Schirmer's Last Law. It's one of my Scientific American columns. Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be indistinguishable from God. Right. Because as you went through the scenario earlier, a thousand years more advanced than us,

a million years more advanced than us. Look how far we've come in a hundred years. Extrapolate that out, they'd be able to engineer life forms, probably even engineer entire planetary systems to create Dyson spheres to capture all these fantastic scenarios. That would all be possible if you had sufficient time and intelligence. How would that be any different from what religions think God is? Well, hasn't there been, wasn't there some sort of a recent experiment where they created an artificial life form that had, what was that thing? Do you know, we discussed this. It was, they had developed some sort of an artificial embryo. You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah. Yeah. Some sort of an artificially created embryo. I think it even had a heartbeat. Yes, that's right. And before that, an artificial genome. Yes. I mean, it's coming, Joe.

It's coming. Scientists grow synthetic embryo with brain and beating heart without eggs or sperm. Right. Yeah. I mean, and now extrapolate, go from here to 100,000 years of technology as long as we don't blow ourselves up or have a super volcano kill us all. Scientists from the University of Cambridge

have created model embryos from mouse stem cells that form a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations of all other organs of the body. Pretty wild shit. Well, it's just a molecular machine, you know, life. And once you know the blueprint, you just print it out. So we're getting there. It's a hard problem, but, you know, it's coming.

And it may not happen in our lifetime. You know, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is coming 2030, 2040. Just take it out two centuries, right? It's coming. Something like that is coming. And how would it be any different from what our religions describe God as an omniscient, omnipotent being? Right, especially if you go a million years from now, a million years of evolution, we conceivably would have the power of gods. Yeah, it's coming.

Yeah. Assuming we live our lives long enough. So if you think of a life form that exists out there, you know, millions of light years away that has achieved this sort of advanced technology, do you think that they would want to be visiting us and be interested in us with our nuclear power and all of our chaos and our territorial behavior and the fact that we have these thermonuclear weapons, we're pointing them at each other, and I think they'd be pretty interested. Or in the plot of many of these, like the Day of the Earth fits, they're warning us. Yeah. Stop doing this or else.

Or intervening. Yeah. There's been discussions about them hovering over nuclear facilities. Yes, I know about that. But that may be a selection bias of where the cameras are located or where the monitoring of that. Of course, we have more monitoring around our nuclear sites, missile sites. So that could just be an artifact of measurement. But nevertheless, your larger point. Yes, maybe. Yes, maybe. Yes, maybe.

Got to be skeptical. Well, not in principle just because you're a cynic or, you know, a nihilist. Not for that reason. The question is, you know, what should we believe? You know, justified true belief. What should I believe is true? Some things are true. Some things are not. I want to believe the correct things. How do I know? Right? So this is what, you know, science has kind of developed, science and rationality of over the centuries. Okay, so we know we're biased. We know we have to be careful about the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and so on. So we have to set up some kind of system where it's not just me claiming it.

You can look at it too. You can run the experiment. Here's how I did it. You do it. Right? And when that's not done, we have all kinds of problems like the replication crisis in psychology and medical science over the last decade or so. You know, some significant two-digit percentage of these experiments can't be replicated. Even though they went through peer-reviewed professional journals and they were done by professional scientists at real universities and so on.

And so this is a – it's hard to know what to believe. Well, there's also a problem of basing science on falsified studies like the Alzheimer's issue that they're dealing with now. The whole amyloid plaque thing where they found out that a lot of like what is the I don't want to butcher this because obviously I'm not a scientist. But this there's a series of Alzheimer's drugs that were based on research that was falsified. And they're finding this out now. And this is a terrible thing for people that have invested their health in these medications, people that have promoted these medications, that this was all based on falsified data. Or how about the-

Find that, because that's pretty fascinating. Because that, here it is, this is a legitimate conspiracy. Neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication and scores of Alzheimer's articles threatening a reigning theory of the disease. That's terrifying to find out that the people that are responsible for doing these experiments falsified. Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University, got a call that would plunge him into a maelstrom of possible scientific misconduct. A colleague wanted to connect him with an attorney investigating an experimental

drug for Alzheimer's disease called Simifilam. The drug's developer, Casava Sciences, claimed an improved cognition, partly by repairing a protein that can block sticky brain deposits of the protein amyloid beta, a hallmark of Alzheimer's. The attorney's clients, two prominent neuroscientists who are also short sellers, who profit if the company's stock falls, believe some research related to Simofilam may have been fraudulent according to a petition later filed on the behalf of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. So this is a huge scandal in medical science.

Right. And this one appears to be more fraud than just error. Right. Or bias. Right. That's horrible, right? Yeah. This is what whistleblowers are for.

Often these things are exposed through insiders. I mean, almost always. Rare that a journalist from the outside discovers that it's usually a grad student or something that's suspicious of what the mentor professor is doing. So, yeah, that's a problem, right? So that's why you have to disclose any financial connections you have to companies that might be affiliated with a drug that could treat the thing you're studying, that sort of thing. So there's more pressure to do that. There was another big meta-analysis on SSRIs, the antidepressants, showing a big massive meta-analysis.

50 years we've been prescribing these SSRIs for depression, and they do no better than nothing or just chance or just talking to friends or whatever. Well, also that this idea that it's a chemical imbalance of the brain is not based on science. Yeah, well, it's based on something, but it's probably incorrect science or— Yeah, or fraudulent. I don't know if it's fraudulent. You know, that's a pretty hefty charge to heave on a scientist. That's the end of their career. It's the end of their lives. If they get convicted of actual fraud, they'll never work again. That's different than making errors.

Well, this Alzheimer's thing is certainly based on fraud. It looks like it. And it looks like it was successful for decades, which is terrifying. Yeah. Well, and you know, there's dozens of examples like this from say the last 50 years. Sure. But it's still rare and usually scientists that figure it out and then call them out. Yeah. Ultimately. I like to think of it that it works reasonably well, right? I mean, we find out about the errors, the mistakes. I mean, creationists always used to point out the errors that evolutionary biologists made. Therefore, God did it, right? The theory is not sound, right?

But it was always scientists that disclosed that the error was made by other scientists. Different scientists do have – there is an incentive to uncover these things. Right, right, right. So now there's a movement afoot to kind of have scientists say ahead of time, post on these websites, this is the experiment I'm going to do. Here's exactly what I'm going to do. I will report all of the data. So then you avoid the file drawer problem where you only publish the successful ones, the rest go in the file drawer that are not successful. You know, so this, I mean, a lot of major journals will not publish replication experiments.

They're not interested in that. They want cutting edge new research. Well, this is a problem because, like, again, you know, if you have this theory and no one can replicate it, but no one wants to publish the non-replication because it's not interesting, then you can go down this rabbit hole of, you know, of an error perpetrating for decades. How can they mitigate these problems? Well, that would be one way, you know, just transparency. Right. But how could they mitigate the issue of a lack of transparency? Is it funding?

Is it promotion of these? Okay. So some of the publisher parish pressure leads. There are studies on why scientists commit fraud. And it's, again, like conspiracies. It's not a big grand thing. It's just like he wants to get tenure. Right, right, right, right. Just keep his job.

I remember one of the most interesting podcasts you had with Edward Snowden. And you guys were talking about conspiracies. And he starts talking about, let me tell you how it really works. Behind closed doors, it's just bureaucrats trying to keep their job. Right? So they're ramping up the threat of terrorism because if we don't have a threat, then we're going to lose our funding, right? So very narrow. I just want to keep our funding for our department.

And a lot of science works that way. Without, let's say, external private money, you know, there's massive competition for public government money for research. And that leads to these. I'll just report the positive ones. I'll kind of throw out these data points because they're too extreme, and that'll bring my p-value level to where I need it. That's called p-hacking. And the p-value is the probability of it being chance rather than a real effect. And it's set at 0.05 or 0.01. And maybe

you're at 0.06. You go, well, I got this outlier data point here. So I'm just going to not count that. Then all of a sudden now your p-value is at 0.04. Oh, I'm in. Now I can publish it. This used to happen a lot. Now there's pressure like, no p-hacking, right? P-hacking. So it's kind of the shift in norms. Like in journalism is kind of going through this now. You know, where's the fact checkers and the editors of the editors? And, you know, the editor's editor shouldn't have editors. Right, right, right. And, you know, because too much gets published.

Right, who's managing the managers? Yeah. Or, you know, like just think about like the Kyle Rittenhouse story. And there's a bunch like that, that it fit a certain narrative. So it got published as a certain way. And then it's like, oh, weeks later, months later, when they dig into it, it's like, OK, well, that was misinterpreted. Why did that happen? Or the kitty litter boxes in schools from last week.

That got spread around as a meme because it kind of fit the conservative view of liberals and their confusion about gender and sex. But the kitty litter boxes is a weird one. It is weird. It's more like an urban legend. I fed into that. And let me – I should probably clarify that a little bit. I have a friend and my friend's wife is a school teacher. And she told him that there was discussions in the school that a mother wanted to put a litter box in one of the bathrooms.

And he told me this. And I talked about it on here. And then people were saying, that's not true. It's an Internet rumor. So I contacted him again. And I said, tell me exactly what she said and contact her and find out. She no longer works for that school. She works for another school.

She contacted the other school. She didn't get a response. I don't think they actually did it. I think there was discussions about doing it because there was one particularly wacky mother, but it doesn't seem that there's any proof that they put a litter box in there. The reason why I was interested

in it and willing to entertain it was there was about 10 years or so ago we went to there was a UFC in Pittsburgh and when we went there as we landed where we're driving from the airport to the hotel we see all these people with mascot outfits on we're like what is going on and we talked to this guy and he said there's a furry convention in in town. And I said, wow, this is crazy. So they all decided to get together. So they were at bars and on the streets.

And it was like a get together. They used to do it in San Diego. But at the time, San Diego was a little bit more conservative and they were having a hard time doing it. So they moved it to Pittsburgh. And this was the year they moved it to Pittsburgh. This is according to him. So we check into the hotel. The hotel, the guy who was working the front desk was

saying how crazy it was that these folks were asking for their food to be delivered in bowls on the ground so they could eat it like animals. And I'm like, that is crazy. And then he said, they asked for a litter box in the lobby. Now, they didn't put a litter box into the lobby, but someone, according to this man man asked him for a litter box I'm like that is crazy. So I went and did a deep dive online I went to forums where furries go because I was trying to find like is this a thing do they like to use litter boxes? Out of all of my searching I could only find one, one guy who said he had used a litter box. So this one person who was saying that he thought it was kinky and he liked to use it, he, they, it, them, whatever, liked to use a litter box.

So that was all I could find. So is that something that people do or is it something that people talk about doing because it's fun? I don't know. But one of the things that I found about these furries is like it's sexual in some sort of weird way. They like to get together and have sex with their furry outfits on. And they don't want people to know who they are or what they want to keep the outfits on. So it's a cosplay kind of thing. Yeah. It's like a cosplay kink thing that some people engage in. How that got connected to

gender, I do not understand because it seems to be a completely different sort of kink. But what I think people have concern with is that it's nonsense and that it's crazy. And if this nonsense starts getting into schools because there are jamie what was the thing that you were telling me there's someone was telling you about one kid thinks they're a wolf and they honestly don't know if i i still need to i think it's a i think they're trolling i think there's something maybe but you know in uh right i got out of hand in um in that film what is a Oh, there was that one person that said that they're a wolf. Yeah.

I mean, you can always find somebody. There is a report from ABC, though, where they went and talked to a bunch of younger kids and parents that were having a meeting. And they're like, our kids like to dress up and talk this way. But you should see how different they are when they do it. Right. They went from being very reserved to outgoing. Right. Because it allows them to, when they pretend that they're a wolf they can

just be freer so maybe they're like very shy you know introverted kids and this allows them like some form of escapism yeah like you said like a cosplay type thing yeah but so what happens then is so there's an element of truth to the this true with conspiracy theories always a little element of truth and then it gets blown up into something else. And then if it gets politicized, oh, that's just the sort of thing those libtards would do in these schools. They're trying to groom our children. Right. Then you get a moral panic.

It's like the satanic panic of the 1980s. It started with that McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach. Yes. We'll talk about that because that's pretty crazy. Totally crazy. So this was kind of in the time in psychology where Freudianism, sort of unconscious memories of things and so on were becoming popular. And there was this idea that there's a lot of molestation and secret satanic cults all over America. And there's a lot of these kind of preschools. So the McMartin Preschool case was based on children telling these fantastic stories

about the stuff that was going on at the day school. Now, you have kids. I have kids. It's like, this is impossible for parents not to know this. Oh, they have tunnels, underground tunnels where they have horses. They take them out to Catalina, and they do these satanic things to them. And what, the parents, no one noticed this? And they were kind of coaching the kids when they were asking the kids these questions.

Like, what did they do? Did they do this? And the kids are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember the anatomical dolls, anatomically correct dolls? Now, show me where he touched you. And worse, you know, they separate the kids from their parents. Mom's outside, and the little kid's scared to death in this room. Yeah.

And then he's like, okay, he touched me there. Can I go back to my mommy now? Right. And then this ruined people's lives and careers. And these people were accused of these horrible things that it turns out they did not do. They didn't do. Before the OJ trial, this was the longest and most expensive trial in California history, that McMartin preschool case. But it launched this kind of satanic panic around America.

There's one of these cults in every city. And finally, the FBI got involved and said, all right, we better look into this. And they found nothing. OK, you can always find some weirdo who's a Satanist, right? Right. And maybe they do some weird things with a cat or something. Or a cat gets mutilated by a dog. And then you got the Satanist, he's over there.

And then the mutilated cat was found over there. There must be some connection. And before you know it, you get this spiraling moral panic. Right. And it was similar to the recovered memory movement in the 90s. When we started in 92, we started covering this because it was the same kind of thing where these were adult, mostly women, going into therapy for various issues, sleep problems, depression, weight issues, whatever.

And the therapists who had bought in all this Freudian stuff that you suppress, you suppress your memories, and we can get them out as if memory is like a video recording, and you can watch it on the little Cartesian theater of your mind as if there's a little homunculus in there looking at the screen. Okay, play back for me what your father did. They don't start off like that. They're just, okay, so what are your issues? And the client says what the issues are. Well, you know, some people that have those symptoms were molested when they were children.

Well, no, that didn't happen to me. Well, I know you don't think it happened to you. But, in fact, we know about repressed memories that you repress the memory of that trauma because it's so traumatic. Really? Yeah. How do I know? Okay. Have you ever had a dream or ever had fleeting thoughts about this, this and this? Yeah, I think I might have. So six months later, now the person thinks, I think this actually happened to me. And then there's this big moment of confrontation with the father, grandfather, uncle, whoever it is. And, you know, of course they're just in a state of shock, like this, this is horrible. And then it got worse where they were actually tried, put on trial for,

and some of these guys were convicted based on nothing other than one of these recovered memories. Yeah. That's an, that's a real issue with hypnotic regression, right? That you can introduce thoughts into people's minds. You know, that was an issue with John Mack's work. Are you aware of John Mack? John Mack, who was a psychologist out of Harvard, he wrote a book called, it was called Abduction, I believe it was? Abducted. Abducted. And it was all about UFO abductees. And it was a similar situation where they were using hypnotic regression. And the problem was the way the questions were formulated and the way these hypnotic regression sessions were conducted, a lot of people thought was extremely unscientific and, in fact, could have introduced these ideas.

Because one of the things was like, oh, this is a uniform tale that everyone keeps telling. Okay, well, do you have the same person asking these people these questions? And how are they doing this? And do they have a vested interest? Like, perhaps maybe they're publishing a book? They have a vested interest in trying to make this a narrative. And it turns out, yeah, that seems to be the case, that they were asking these people these very leading questions and taking them through these hypnotic regression sessions, and they were all convinced that they were abducted by aliens. Yeah, the pioneering researcher on this, Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist, studies memory. She made famous these studies of where you show people like a video of a car accident, and you ask one group, how fast would you estimate the cars were traveling when they collided?

Second group, how fast would you estimate the cars were traveling when they collided? Second group, how fast would you estimate the cars were traveling when they smashed into each other? The latter one gets a higher estimated speed. Or you show subjects a little 30-second video clip of somebody sitting on a park bench, and some guy walks up and grabs her purse and runs off. All right, what color was his hat? Oh, it was a blue hat. It was a baseball hat. It was a baseball hat. It was a knit cap. And so on. The guy wasn't wearing a hat at all. Right. So just asking the question,

plants and now the memory is corrupted. Now the person thinks the person had a hat. That's the new memory, right? Right. Her most famous research was on the lost in a mall. So these are adult subjects who had been screened and they know that when they were children, they were never lost in a mall, right? But they introduced, amongst many things that they were talking about, do you remember the time when you were five, because your parents told us about this, when you were lost in the mall? Oh, yes. Oh, my God. It was terrible. I was so scared.

And then I remember hearing the voice of my mom. And then this guy helped me, and he was wearing this flannel shirt. And he took me to my mommy and so on. And so they just make up this complete—it never happened. She just made that up on the spot. So we have this little internal storyteller to try to make sense of this chaotic world. And so the moment you get new information, you've got to try to fit it somewhere in there. What's the narrative?

How does this fit with my life? Well, this goes back to what we were talking about with chaotic events and eyewitness testimony. Yeah. It's always screwed up. Not reliable. Not reliable at all. No. No.

And so what do we do about it? Because in the criminal justice system, back to our signal detection problem, right? The guy sitting there, is he guilty? If he's really guilty and you find him guilty, then that's good. That's a hit, right? But if he's really innocent and you find him guilty, then that's good. That's a hit, right? But if he's really innocent and you find him guilty, that's really bad, right? So we have this kind of what's called the Blackstone ratio of 10 to 1. Better 10 guilty people go free than that one innocent person be found guilty.

And so the criminal justice system has the same problem. Before DNA and some of that forensic evidence, it was all eyewitness, and it's terrible. So the Innocence Project has, as you know, exonerated, I don't know, 300 and something people, many of them on death row for crimes they never committed. And that's the problem. Even like forensic stuff you see on CSI, you know, the bite marks or the hair analysis or the fabric, even that's not very well tested and replicated. No. In fact, Josh Dubin, who worked with the Innocent Project, talked about that. He has a podcast on junk science and particularly discuss bite marks about how you can tell people that it was a bite mark from a specific individual and they'll go with it. And then you can show them that that absolutely is not the case. And, you know, this is not, this is not like, it's not like DNA evidence.

It's not like something that is absolutely 100% true. Even the polygraph, there's a reason it's not allowed in. Oh, the polygraph's horseshit. Total horseshit. Yeah, that's horseshit. When, you know, someone tells you they passed a lie detector test, like, congratulations, you're a sociopath. That's right. It doesn't fucking mean anything. If you believe it, you're not going to give up the case. Also, you have to have a very specific response to this question.

And everyone's response to stimuli and stress, they vary. Some people are going to react in a certain way. But that's not indicative of evidence. You can absolutely prove also like you there was a a woman who was convicted i believe in in india of from fmri data of a murder because she had knowledge of the crime scene and so like i discussed this with a neuroscientist in amer and she was like, that is absolutely not evidence that that person committed the crime. But if you are in a trial and you have knowledge of the crime scene because they've told you this is the case, this is what they're saying happened. And then they use this fMRI data to show that you have knowledge of the crime.

Well, of course you have knowledge of the crime. You're about to go to fucking jail for something you didn't do, and they're telling you it was Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick. Like, oh, look, through MRI data, we can show she knows about Colonel Mustard. So I believe this woman was actually convicted. There are people, neuroscientists, trying to figure out how to use MRIs to see if you can see if somebody's lying. I think we're a long ways from that.

Long ways. And I did a TV show once, I don't know, 20 years ago for Fox Family, Exploring the Unknown. We did an episode on the polygraph. So we found this guy, Doug Smith, who was now working. He was a former cop in Dallas, and he was working with defense attorneys showing why the polygraph is bullshit. So he had the funniest story where he said the first day on the job, he got the training on how to do the polygraph. So his first day, his boss says, okay, we got the accused in there. We think he's the perpetrator. Go in there and do the polygraph test. So he does the thing. He comes

back. Well, boss, I think he's lying. And he goes, yeah, we know he's lying. They're all lying. Get in there and get the confession. He's like, what? Yeah. Tell him we know he's lying. And he goes, yeah, we know he's lying. They're all lying. Get in there and get the confession. He's like, what? Yeah. Tell him we know he's lying and tell him we got his fingerprints too. You mean you just, yeah. It's like, oh my God. Jesus Christ.

Yeah. So he gave up because he thought, oh, you mean this is like planting evidence in a way. It is in a way, right? This is my type specimen for what I call proxy conspiracists, that is, conspiracies, that is, they're a stand-in for something else. The OJ case. OJ was acquitted based on a conspiracy theory that the LAPD planted the bloody glove and the blood splatter and so forth, and the jury accepted it. Now, you know, the evidence is pretty overwhelming. He killed his wife and her friend, and there was no police tampering. There was the one guy, Furman, who was probably a racist,

but it wasn't clear that he did anything. But my explanation is that in a way the jury, you know, said, yeah, maybe not this time, but the LAPD have done these sorts of things. Right. And there's this great ESPN documentary series called OJ in America. And it's like six hours long, and it tracks the history of the African-American community post World War II coming to Southern California, and how bad the relationships were between the LAPD and the African-American community, particularly right in downtown LA. And they did plant evidence. They did do things like that, right? So there's an element of truth, back to conspiracism.

I think there's some evidence that Furman did plant some evidence. Or if it wasn't for Furman, that there was some evidence that something was planted, whether it was blood splatter or something. And they use this excuse that they know he's guilty. And so since they know he's guilty, it sort of justifies falsification. That was the argument in the 50s and 60s. Well, I don't know if this guy did it. He's done something. And if he gets off, he's going to commit another crime. So we're doing the justice thing here by planning it. So enough of that has happened that it's reasonable for African

Americans to be suspicious. Same thing with their higher rates of vaccine hesitancy now, recently anyway, because of the Tuskegee experiments. Our government did do these things, right? The syphilis patients that were not treated when they could have been without their consent, without their knowledge. I mean, it's Nazi-like experiments. Let's see what happens if we don't treat them. And it went on for decades. It went on for decades. It's terrifying stuff.

Most of them died. Their spouses got syphilis. Their children, some of them got. It's terrible. And it's the kind of thing that Nazi doctors were doing. And you know about Operation Paperclip, right? Because you had Annie Jacobson on the show. She's really good on these things.

Her books are just first-class good journalism on that, where she tracked down. If you put a paperclip on the file, it means we're going to adopt this guy as one of our scientists before the Russians. These are German scientists, before the Russians get them, right? Right. And a lot of these guys were doing chemical warfare experiments,

biological warfare experiments, and, of course, Wernher von Braun with the V2 rockets, the most famous of the paperclip experiments. So enough of that goes on. It's like, wait a minute. On the one hand, we're trying these guys at the Nuremberg trials and executing them for war crimes. And then we have these other guys that did pretty much the same thing, but now they work for us. So there's enough of that. You go, you know what? That was a crazy one because they were just justifying it based on, listen, we're in the middle of a Cold War with Russia. And if we don't get these people, the Russians are going to get them.

And, yes, they are Nazis, but they're also very advanced scientists. And they have research that could benefit us and our rocket programs and a lot of our other scientific experiments. It's pretty wild shit when you find out that it's true. The guy who invented sarin gas, the German chemist, and he lived in- Fritz Haber. Yeah. No, not Fritz Haber. No, Fritz Haber was the other gas. The other guy. Yeah, the other gas. Mustard gas. Yeah, he invented that and he also invented the Haber method of extracting nitrogen. Right. So they wanted him for crimes against humanity while he was also up for the Nobel Prize for extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere. Same thing with Linus Pauling.

He was one of the great scientists of all time. He won two Nobel Prizes, one for peace, one for chemistry. And he was spied on by the FBI, and he was not allowed to go. Well, he was allowed to go collect his one Nobel Prize, but he couldn't go to some conferences because they thought he might be a communist and all this stuff because he was anti-nuclear war. That was during the Red Scare. Yeah. Yeah, during the 50s, right?

So, again, you think, wait a minute, our government was doing this? Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe I should be suspicious about current stuff, right? Well, that's also the MKUltra experiments. You know, there's so many people that were involved in that that, like, one of them was Ted Kaczynski. He was involved in the Harvard LSD experiments. Right, right.

And wound up being, you know, a horrible murderer. Right. And who knows what they did to his fucking brain while they were dosing him up with LSD and running these abusive studies on him. Has that been confirmed by his brother? Yeah. They not only did that, well, he had a horrible background. I thought he was schizophrenic. That too, yeah. Well, when he was a child, he had some sort of an ailment where they took him from his parents

and they put him in an orphanage or some sort of a children's hospital where, when he was a baby, he had no contact with human beings. He would just cry in his crib. They would feed him, and that's it. And this went on for months, and they think that just that development really fucked up his brain. And then on top of that, he goes to Harvard, and he's involved in the LSD experiments, and apparently those experiments were very abusive because they were studying, like, what would happen if you give these people LSD and you emotionally and psychologically abuse them.

And, you know, he had, according to his brother, all sorts of real problems with relationships and other human beings, like a real just a really damaged human being overall. Did you see Earl Morris's film Wormormwood, about the Frank Olson case? No, I didn't. I heard about it, but I didn't see it. It's quite good. It's a little long. Netflix is cranking out these really long documentary series. They know how to drag you in and keep you there. I'm two hours in and I still have no idea what's going on. Come on, get to the point. Yeah. So this was, Frank Olson's one of the chemists that worked in the MKUltra program, but they dosed him. He's just at some bar and some club with the other CIA guys, and they said, hey, let's put some LSD.

And then like 10 days later, he jumps out of a New York City high-rise window, or did he? And there was evidence that there was a couple of CIA guys that were there. Maybe they pushed him and then his son eric olson who's been kind of keeping this story alive this happened in the 50s uh you know had the body exhumed and the um and it there was evidence of like a blow to the head like a crack in the skull like they hit him first and then shoved him out the window oh wow but you know But maybe he hit his head. And Seymour Hersh was the journalist that kind of tried to track this down. And they couldn't quite get the CIA to admit.

The CIA paid him off. They gave him, I think, $750,000. But they said, but no guilt. We're not going to say we did anything. This is the problem with conspiracies, right? That some of them are real. Right, right. Yeah.

And so when you have someone like Alex Jones, when he was on your show, and I show a clip of this to my class actually last night, you know, where he's ranting on about NASA has this headquarters in San Francisco where they're dosing people to talk to the aliens. You know, he goes off on something, right? But that the CIA was dosing people with, you know, hallucinogenic drugs, that's true. Yeah. Right? And so this is the problem with conspiracy theories is they start off with some element of truth. Yeah, there's some facts there. Okay.

And I was talking to Megyn Kelly about this because she went to, she came here to Austin, met with Alex, did a whole show when she was with NBC on Alex Jones. Remember that? And then she got a lot of heat for talking to him and letting him speak, as you did. But she said she has a team of fact-checkers at NBC. They go, okay, let's just fact-check everything he said. And it's like, you know what? Pretty much everything he said starts off with some little thing.

Well, that's actually true, right? And then he spins it off into something else, and this is the problem with conspiracism. Well, it's also the problem with like, if you're going to find all these different conspiracies, how much time do you have? How much time do you have to investigate all of these in a very thorough manner? There's almost impossible. It's almost impossible to get to the bottom of every single one of those and have an objective analysis of the facts. Like where I was talking about Tom O'Neill, the book Chaos, where he covered Manson. He wrote that book for 20 years, 20 years on one case. He started off, he was hired to do a article.

I forget what magazine it was for, but whatever publication it was for, it was the anniversary of the Manson case. So he was just supposed to do this little thing about the case. And so as he's a really good journalist, and as he goes into this story, he keeps uncovering more and more evidence of fuckery, more and more evidence of just a bunch of weird shit, and becomes obsessed. It takes him 20 years to eventually publish that book, and the book is phenomenal. I can't recommend it enough. Okay.

Because Tom O'Neill is a really good journalist, and the book chaos is riveting. I mean, even this, you know, that's already long enough, right? Right. And I just barely touched the surface. I like how you connect even the word conspiracy. It also has a C-I-A and S-O-R-O-S, Soros.

It's all in there, yeah. Well, when you talk to like schizophrenics and they make those maps of all the connections that people, this person met that person who met that person

who met this person who was in the same airport as that person in 1969. So therefore, they're involved with this, that, and the other thing. It's like – Well, the JFK for that chapter, that took me a long time to write because, again, it's just down the rabbit hole. There's thousands of books. Even Bugliosi's book, I mean, 1,400 pages.

Holy crap, guy. Come on. Yeah. That's a lot. And then remembering it all when you're on page 900. What the fuck did he say on page 100? He's got to go back. The 9-11 truth.

Once you go down there, what do I know about explosive devices and how buildings are demolished? You know, someone had a really good point the other day. They were talking to me about this person who was involved in construction. And they were saying, let me explain to you construction in New York City. When they say that that plane could have never taken down those buildings, he goes, when these people, he goes, and I'm not accusing these people of doing it, but I've seen it with my own eyes. When you're supposed to use half-inch steel, if you use quarter-inch steel, it's a lot less money. And then there's a lot of this and a lot of skimp in here and a lot of skimp. There's a lot of corruption.

Wow, interesting. Right. a lot of skimp in here and a lot of skimp. There's a lot of corruption. He was saying, he goes, you know, they're seeing that in Russia with a lot of the Russian, someone else was explaining this to me, that a lot of these Russian weapons, they're faulty. And one of the reasons why they're faulty is because there's corruption. And the people

that are responsible for making them are skimming. They're taking, you know, you're supposed to spend X amount of money. And so a lot of the shit doesn't even work correctly Because of corruption Because there's a bunch of people that are involved That are, you know Profiting in an absurd way

His point was that the World Trade Center buildings Were maybe not up to code Exactly, that they weren't made the way they were supposed to be made Yeah, well they probably weren't designed To be able to withstand a plane hit from two commercial airliners full of gas. For sure. Yeah.

I remember I was visiting this guy who was a doctor. And this is back when you had to get a medical marijuana license in California. So he was that kind of doctor. I was going to him. And he gives me this book. And he was very loony. And he gives me this book saying that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by Tesla energy. And I'm like, what?

And he was like, he goes, yeah, there's no way to turn concrete into dust in the way these buildings. I go, but what about if when concrete, like, smashes, it's made out of fucking powder that you mix with water. Wouldn't it just become dust? It's made out of fucking powder that you mix with water. Wouldn't it just become dust? And so I'm like breaking down this argument with this guy in the office while I'm trying to get a license for medical marijuana. I'm like, I got to get my life together. Like, what the fuck kind of conversations am I having?

Because this guy like was imploring me to read this book. I'm like, oh, boy. That it was Tesla technology that they use some sort of a – some sort of a thing. Again, a big event like 9-11, we need a big cause. Ooh, Tesla energy. That sounds pretty good. For Skeptic, we did an issue on that, which we commissioned an article from a guy that runs a demolition company. This is what he does. He brings big buildings down.

And he said, let me tell you how it's done. I mean, you've got to go in there, break down all the drywall, get into the support beams, wrap them up. There's no way this could have happened at the World Trade Center building. No one noticed. Right. No one noticed that you're constantly putting these detonators everywhere. Yeah, that was the weird argument about Tower 7 too, right? People were saying, look, Tower 7, it fell like a controlled demolition.

And it did. It fell like a controlled demolition. And it did. It fell like a controlled demolition. But if you see the full video of how it went down, the inside of it collapsed long before the whole building collapsed. There was evidence that it was falling apart. And it burned all day. Well, yeah, it burned all day. And there was diesel generators in the basement. So there's all this diesel fuel that was on fire.

So you get extraordinary heat that's weakening the entire structure of this building for hours and hours. And there's evidence that it collapsed at the top. So everyone's like, oh, the way it fell, it was uniformly. Yeah, but it already was falling apart. Like the whole thing was on fire. It kind of distracts us from real shenanigans that are probably going on. Like, what was the relationship between the United States government and the Saudi government? Right. Where was that money? Who funded those 9-11 hijackers and so on? Right. Why were the Saudi nationals allowed to leave? Leave the next day.

Yeah. It's like, that was, why are we not talking about that? Right. Right. That's real conspiracies. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing, again, with the JFK paper.

Why aren't they releasing them? I suspect it's because the CIA was up to some other things. We don't want other countries to know that we were doing. I'm sure there's some of that. There's always some of that, right? I mean, that's like, that's the way they operate. And who knows if that's for our own good or if it's for their good. I mean, there's a reason Castro was tagged as maybe one of the assassins, because we tried to kill him.

Multiple times. Multiple times. Multiple times. Tried to use exploding cigars. And the seashell conch with a bomb in it where he scuba dives. I remember when they started the embargo with Cuba, when they wouldn't let you get Cuban goods. Before they did it, Kennedy famously got boxes and boxes of cigars sent to him. I'm like, you motherfucker. Like, you motherfucker. Like, you motherfucker.

Like, I enjoy a cigar as much as the next guy, but Jesus Christ. It's like Governor Newsom. Yeah. You got to stay home. Rules for thee, but not for me. You got to stay home. But I'm going to this nice, fresh restaurant. Yeah.

But don't worry. I'll be outside. That's right. Yeah. Or Boris Johnson. You know, there was a state trooper that took the photo of him. Oh, it was? Yeah. No, I didn't know that. It was a state trooper who was on detail. Yeah. Or Boris Johnson. You know, there was a state trooper that took the photo of him. Oh, it was? Yeah.

No, I didn't know that. It was a state trooper who was on detail. Right. They took the photo of him. And it was like, you motherfucker. Right. Making everybody wear a mask. And you're in there eating at the French Laundry.

Right. Yeah. But that's, you know, but that's always the case with people in power. They, you know, they'll come up with things that look good in terms of optics. And like, these are the measures that we're going to take take and everyone has to abide by them. Except for me. I'm Nancy Pelosi. I want to get my hair done. Here's another. Here's one of my own pet conspiracy theories. When you get elected president, they take you in a back room and they go, OK, here's what's actually going on. Well, but I said I was going to close Gitmo. Yeah, yeah. You're not going to do that. Oh, yeah, I guess I can't do it. I was going to pull the troops out. No, we can't pull the troops out. What do you think really happens? You think they're just lying when they're making their campaign speeches, then they have no intention of doing those things?

I don't think they know, because until you're the nominee, until you're the head nominee and it's close, are you allowed to know what's really going on, right? No, no way. I mean, I think when Obama won, when he actually won the election, I think that's when they gave him the, whatever they call them, the white papers, the debriefing papers, you know, from the National Security Agency and so on. And I'm pretty sure it's like he had all this list of stuff. This is what I'm going to do. Right.

And it's like, I can't actually do those things because, all right, so we close Gitmo, then this happens, then this happens. Right. Remember, you want to do to impose the no first, what was it, in nuclear weapons, no launch on warning, LOW, no launch on warning because it's too risky. And he said, I'm going to do this. And then it never happened. And I think our NATO allies said, no, no, we have to be, we have to, we want the Russians to think we may just strike at any moment, not just defensively, and no first use.

No, that was it. That was the first use. No first use. And he didn't do it. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his stance on nuclear weapons and then didn't do that. Why? And I think because our NATO allies said, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh, this is in the treaty. You've got to do this.

If you don't do that, then the Russians are going to do this and so on, back and forth, back and forth. Yeah, somebody actually should bring that up during presidential debates. Like, you have no idea what's going on until you get in there, sir. Right. So why are you even saying that? Right. And then point to the fact that every single president that's ever said they were going to do all these things, once they get in office and they get the information.

Yeah, so here's where I'm conflicted about. I'm a big free speech guy. Transparency is key. But I'm sure there are national security secrets that it's probably good we don't know, right? Yeah. This is the world we live in. We live in a world. It's complex.

And there are bad people. Yeah. Okay, so my favorite film is A Few Good Men. Jack Nicholson. Yeah. His schooling Tom Cruise on the stand, you know, son, we live in a world with walls, and on those walls are men with guns, and you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. Yeah. You know, and so on. It's like, yeah, he's right. Actually, we- He is right. And that script was written to kind of make

parody the conservative militarist position. But in fact, it is correct, right? It'd be better if we lived in a world without political borders and guns and so on. And bad people. And bad people. That's not the world we live in. Yeah, but you just can't imagine that they don't exist and operate as if they don't, because then you put us all in danger. This is what my question for Elon Musk, when we colonize Mars, what are we going to do there? What kind of government? What kind of an economy? How, what are we going to do there? What kind of

government? What kind of an economy? How many people are you going to have? Do you have to have police? Do you have to have laws? Because his attitude is, oh, just minimize laws. We're all just going to, just as this direct democracy, everybody votes, minimum laws, because that's where things get, yeah, okay, if you have 12 people, that probably works. But if you have 1,200 or 12 million people. Do you think Earth is going to be the new United States? Like the United States was a civilization or was a country rather that was started because people were fed up with the way things were run in Europe. And they said, well, we're going to go over here. We're going to declaration of independence and the Constitution.

And we're going to establish this, you know, this land of the free. And, you know, it worked out pretty well for a long time. And as time goes on, it gets more and more complex and more and more fucked up. Is it inevitable that government bureaucracies just grow? They just can't not grow. And they get more complex, and you need more rules and laws, and then you need guns and jails. It seems like it is.

It's just, I mean, you can have as many checks and balances as you can just to keep the growth in check, not too much. Right. But it seems like if you started with 10 people at Mars and then you had 1,000 and then 10,000 and then 100,000 and then a million, you're going to end up with lawyers and courts and mediators and police. So what's the solution to that? How do you mitigate that completely? You don't, I don't think, because of human nature, right? We're naturally selfish. It's part of our nature.

And we're avarice and, you know, we're greedy and just that's who we are. I wonder if the solution to that is some sort of an integration with technology. with technology. That's what I wonder if things like Neuralink and these new proposed technologies that will increase the bandwidth of the human mind. And I wonder if those, because if those perhaps will come with an ability to read thoughts and minds and communicate telepathically, which is what I think ultimately, you know, we talk about the evolution of the human body and, you know, the human animal from, you know, lower primate to what we are today. You know, we assume that it's going to be a biological evolution from here on out. But it might not be.

It might be symbiotic. We might be connected to some technology, which seems inevitable. There's another argument from the SETI people is that if we encounter aliens, they're probably not going to be biological. Right. But they've moved past that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the fear of artificial intelligence, right?

The fear of artificial intelligence that has become sentient and it has no use for us. Yeah, that's an interesting thing. Let's think about that for a second. Because when you say, well, the AA will want to conquer us or want to control us, wanting is a human emotion. Yes. Why would a computer have wants? Yes, that's a really good point. Like, why would it have desires and needs? And all those are based

on biological needs, like these primate desires that we have to acquire wealth and status and, you know, to have breeding rights and all the things that motivate people, greed and ego, that motivate people to do what they do now. The artificial intelligence, unless we program that into it, won't have that. And if they are sentient, if they're sentient and far more intelligent than us, it seems to me that that would be the thing that they would realize right away as a real problem with the programming. Like, why do we have all this nonsense, ego,

and all these needs to acquire things and control things? Why is that baked in? Why do we even need to communicate with people? If sentient artificial intelligence was really far more intelligent than us, why would it even talk to us? Right. Why wouldn't it just exist? Right. This is my argument for why I don't fear making contact with extraterrestrials.

This is the argument that we shouldn't try to communicate with them or send signals out because look what happened historically when an advanced civilization came in contact with a less advanced civilization. They enslaved them or genocide or so on. But I don't think you could get to the point where you have an interstellar civilization and you have Dyson spheres and you have massive, super advanced technology and so on, and still be, you know, colonial, enslaving people, genocidal maniacs. You just, I don't think you could get there with that kind of attitude.

Yeah, I don't think so either. Do you think that the only thing that separates the biological organism from this advanced creature, the only way to get past that because everything that evolves biologically evolves in a state of competition right i mean there's there's a reason why it advances and and improves its natural selection and there's a lot going on there would that be the only way that we could get past all of these bizarre human emotions and ego and greed and need is to separate ourselves from biological evolution and become... Yeah. In a way, that's what we've been doing, I think, through the last several centuries of moral progress. Just take my previous book, The Moral

Arc, or Steve Binker's books, talking about the shift in norms of what is acceptable behavior has been massive in the long run, right? Right. I mean, they used to burn cats and slavery and the death penalty and torture. This was common. And people just burning witches, burning them as witches. This was common. And now it's not. Why?

What happened? Our nature didn't change. There's no biological evolution. There's no biological evolution. We just kind of learned to channel our inner better angels and kind of suppress our inner demons through not just laws, top-down laws you probably have to have. But we don't really need laws now to prevent slavery from happening. I mean, pretty much nobody in the government is going to say, hey, I got this great idea that's enslaved people. The norms have shifted that pretty much nobody wants to do that, right? And that has driven a lot of human progress without having to do the biological evolution or genetic engineering or reprogramming.

Because you don't want to take out somebody's sense of, I don't know, pride and avarice, and I want to be successful, I want to make money, I want to be creative, I want to have these drives. And there's a dark side to that. Maybe you're also a little bit psychopath and you're kind of mean and nasty in your competitiveness. But if you take all that away then then what's the motive to do anything? Why would you want anything? Right, why would you? I think we're stuck with both, right? So we have to engineer it culturally from the bottom up by changing norms. I think that is happening. And that's one of the reasons why when things happen like

this sort of social progress movement and social justice social justice movement the reason why i think that's a good thing is like maybe it goes too far in some ways but the direction of it the the the thought process behind it is making the world a fairer better place which i think is ultimately good and there's going to be like it's not a perfect thing because humans aren't perfect so it's like there's the waves the ebbs and flows. There's an overreach and then there's a correction. And I think that if you look at Pinker's work and one of the pushbacks on Pinker's work is, you know, Pinker says that the world is safer, it's better in so many ways now that it's ever been before. And people will say, well, how can you say this when there's all this crime and injustice and racism and murder and

rape and thievery and all this shit that's going on? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's not a denial of all the horrors and atrocities that exist currently. But if you look at the grand scale of what the world was like during Genghis Khan's reign versus the world is like today, it's far safer than it's ever been before. This is the best time to be alive ever, even though things are still relatively fucked up in comparison to utopia. Utopia is a terrible goal to have because we're never going to get there. And also, it gives a perverse calculation that we can achieve this perfect society in which everybody is happy forever if it weren't for those people right there. Right. And that's our enemy. We got to get rid of them.

The Jews, the Catholics, the Mormons, whoever. The capitalists. Everybody. Whoever it is. Yeah. Find an enemy. Find an other. Right.

Yeah. So how about just, so this is what Kevin Kelly calls protopia. Not utopia, propopia. Just make tomorrow just a little bit better than today. Just incremental, just a tiny bit. And just go two steps up, one back. Okay. Adjustments.

Boom, boom, boom. And then in a century, you know, things are twice as good as they were. Okay, that's good. We should be happy with that. I think ultimately that is kind of happening. It's slower than most people would like because there's an idea of what we would like society to be like, and it doesn't fit that yet. And so we're angry and frustrated. But I think it's a time management issue too. The human

being is only alive for a hundred years, but during that hundred years, think about how much has changed. I remember when I was a kid, I guess I was 11 years old and we moved to Florida and I moved from San Francisco to Florida. And San Francisco, we lived in a gay neighborhood, and our neighbors were gay. My aunt used to go over there and smoke pot and play bongo drums naked with this gay couple. It was very normal. Because it was during the Vietnam era, and it was just, they were all hippies.

And we went from there to Florida, which was very regressive in that way. And I had this friend, he was Cuban, and his dad was very homophobic. And his dad was really angry because he was reading this story. And I'll never forget it because I was 11. And he's like, oh, these gays want to get married. And he was really mad. He was throwing this newspaper down on the table.

And I remember thinking, why does he give a fuck if these gay people want to get married? Like, what is that? Like, how weird is that that he because there's always going to be some parts of our culture that are still regressive but we but if you compare that then to today you know so this was uh i'm 55 so this is 44 years ago so look back from 44 years ago today. Well, that's normal. No one's going to say... If I went over to someone's house and they're like, these gays

want to get married. You're like, what do you give a fuck? Almost no one gives a fuck now. Right. Exactly. You have to be the hardest right wing Christian fundamentalist to think that gay people shouldn't be allowed to get married now. Think how fast that happened.

Pretty quickly. 2011, Hillary and Obama both said they were against same-sex marriage. Yes. They had to politically. They had to politically. They probably didn't think that. Yeah. Yeah.

And now nobody, it's not even a discussion. And remember when interracial marriage was a thing. Well, me neither, because that was when I was a young child. But 1967 was the Supreme Court loving decision. It was illegal before that. Well, i was a young child but 60 1967 was the supreme court loving decision it was illegal before that well it's a state's rights thing many states had it illegal for interracist for interracial couples to marry astonishing that's that's you know the 60s that's not that long ago right and now no one even pollsters don't even ask anymore it's just like so it's relative to the the fact that we have such a short lifespan.

Like the progress is happening rapidly. If you look at history, like historically, it's rapid. But a human being doesn't live very long. Right. So we're frustrated. We want these changes. We want progress to appear like almost overnight. Right.

Yeah, I was reading a review of this book on witches and just one town in New England and what life was like there. And it's just this miserable life where people are dying and diseases and the Indians are going to get us and the drought and this winter storm. And pretty much life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Yeah. And there's like, we have no explanation for this. It's the witches, right? Do you know the story behind that? What they think the motivation for the witch trials were? Which ones? The Salem? Ergot poisoning.

Oh, ergot poisoning. Yes, I know about that. That is why. Because there's a lot of historical evidence that points to ergot poisoning and mass hallucinations and chaos. Right, right. There's one from, I believe it was, it was at 1950. There was one in France where they had a situation that was similar. There was ergot poisoning where a bunch of people died, in fact, because ergot is also toxic. But in some quantities, it produces

these LSD-like effects and they coincide the Salem witch trials. And this is controversial, but there seems to be some evidence that points to that, that coincides it with a late frost and that this late frost produced this fungus on the wheat and the grains and that these grains were likely infected with ergot. And I think they've found evidence of ergot i have read this i think it's possible as an element nothing in no human behavior is explained by one thing right it doesn't exist in a vacuum so you could have i could see like one uh say teenage girl does this and hallucinates and chattering and voices or whatever and then the other her other friends they start mimicking it sort of a social contagion like it's fun and then it's like oh it's more than fun and then the

adults like oh what's going on here? And then you have like a half a dozen elements going on there. Right. And in the case of the witch, you know, in a way, the witch craze is a kind of conspiracy theory, right? Because one thing conspiracy theories do is they offer a causal explanation for chaos and randomness. Our brains are not well designed by evolution to understand randomness. My examples of this are like the stars in the sky are random, but they look like patterns, right? Or the Apple iPod shuffle feature was introduced in which your songs are fed to you randomly, and Apple got complaints.

It's not random. Certain songs are coming up more than others. That is random. So Apple apparently, I'm told, had to reprogram it and program it so it feels random intuitively, but it's not. It's crazy, right? So much of life is just randomness, right? Shit happens.

The bumper sticker, shit happens. Right. But that's uncomfortable. It's like, no, there must be something behind it. And if you don't have an explanation, no meteorology to explain weather and no germs theory of disease to explain disease and so forth, what have you got? Witches. Well, you talked about the satanic craze of the 80s. So imagine the satanic craze of the 80s and then on top of that, ergot poisoning.

Right. Well, oh my God, now you're drowning witches. Right. And that was the thing. They would drown a lot of witches. And they would say that if they drowned them, if they lived, clearly they were witches. Well, no one fucking lived. So it was a lot of whoops. Well, I guess we killed a fucking innocent. They just kept killing people thinking that they were witches. Right. And there's a lot of research on this also, accusing people who are marginalized,

And there's a lot of research on this also, accusing people who are marginalized, poor people, women, and so on, who didn't have any power. So the magistrates, people that had power and money that could have lawyers, whatever, they escaped. Right, right. And also there was motivation to accuse people of horrific things, and you could use that to take their property. Do you know the story of Elizabeth Bathory? No. Elizabeth Bathory is a woman who lived, God, I want to say it was like the 1200 or something like that. And she was accused of doing these horrible things to other women. Like she was accused of being like one of the greatest mass murderers and serial killers that's

ever existed. And that she would take these beautiful young women and kill them and bathe in their blood and all this. And so we told this story and then someone sent me a link to an article that said there's probably something more to that. And that really what it was, was they were accusing her of these things so that they could imprison her and take her land and that it might have been that. And so they accused her of these horrific atrocities in order to take away her land. Yeah. There's some of that kind of practical thing and revenge against people you don't like.

Sure. And then there's something called preemptive denunciation. You denounce people before you get denounced. Right. And that you denouncing somebody means you must You denounce people before you get denounced. Right. And that you denouncing somebody means you must not be a witch if you're denouncing them. And then you get this kind of competitive denunciation. No, you're a witch. No, you're a witch.

Right, right, right. Much like the communist show trials, right? Right, right. You've got to denounce your neighbors as communists before they denounce you or as non-communists. They denounce you, right? That's the fear during mass hysteria that people are going to turn on each other because they're afraid that someone's going to come after them. So they comeounce you. So that's the fear during mass hysteria, that people are going to turn on each other because they're afraid that someone's going to come after them, so they come after you first. Right. I think we're going through that a little bit with cancel culture.

Sure. For sure. Yeah. I'm going to get somebody on my campus and they said the wrong, they used the wrong pronoun or the wrong adjective, and I'm going to denounce them before I get denounced and make the mistake. Right. I will be the social justice warrior, so you couldn't possibly think that I had done anything wrong. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you get this thing called pluralistic ignorance or the spiral of silence, where everybody thinks everybody else is thinking something when, in fact, nobody's actually thinking that. The classic experiment on this was binge drinking on college campuses. So you ask individual students by themselves, how do you feel about this? I don't really like it, but I know everybody on college campuses. So you ask individual students by themselves, how do you feel about this?

I don't really like it, but I know everybody else likes it. So everybody thinks that everybody else likes binge drinking, but actually individually they really don't like it. But I got to do it because everybody else is doing it, right? So this in part explains the kind of sustaining of the Nazi regime. of the Nazi regime. Everybody, well, initially Hitler was popular because he stopped the Depression and, you know, got the economy going again and so on. And then he starts escalating and everybody thinks, well, I'm not too happy about this policy and the thing with the Jews, I don't know. But everybody else seems to be going along with it.

And then by the time you get to the point where somebody needs to speak up and say, you know, this is wrong, they have concentration camps for those people. And they did it in a way that you could see your neighbor being hauled out and think, oh, I'm keeping my mouth shut. I'm not saying anything. Right. So this is what's called a common knowledge problem. If I know that you know that I know something, then together we can kind of both stand up and say, we're putting a stop to this, right? It's like the Leah Thomas thing with the swimming thing. None of the women competitive swimmers thought this was fair, right?

It's a guy competing against us. It's not right. But any one of them by themselves that speaks out, they may just get kicked off the team or get punished by their peers or whatever. It would really take, how do we reverse this trend we're in? It would take all of them together saying, we're not going to compete, all of us, if that person comes in here. Right.

And that's the only way it would stop. So that's a common knowledge problem. We all have to know that we know about this to put a stop to that. That's an interesting modern example of that, right? Because that is the case when you see someone who's a biological male who competes against biological females and dominates them. When they were, as a biological male, not doing nearly as well, there's clearly something wrong here. And yet these women are called transphobes and they're ostracized and some of them are kicked off teams. And it's a horrible situation. It's very similar to that. Have you seen this video that just came out of a

male to female trans playing competitive volleyball? And she goes up for the spike and just boom! And it hits this girl in the face and she's down and out, you know, concussion. And it's like, okay, I support trans rights. You know, I don't think people should be discriminated against for whoever they want to identify as or whatever, but there's conflicting rights. What about women's rights? Yeah. You know, and, you know, my favorite quote from Thomas Sowell, there are no perfect solutions. There's just compromises. You know, yes, trans rights, but women's rights, you know, women's bathrooms. But the guy wants to go. No, no, you can't. No. You just can't have everything. Right. Right. You can't have everything because also you're going to have

people that take advantage of the current cultural climate that might be sexual predators. There are examples of that. Yes. It's not a hysteric thing that's happening everywhere, but it has happened. Right. But then there are people that are legitimately trans and they probably should be able to use the woman's restroom. So how do you – what is the compromise there? Well, unisex bathrooms, I guess, have choices. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not that worried about the bathroom thing. No, I'm not, but it's a weird one. The sports thing bothers me because I've been an athlete my whole life and it's obvious why we have women's divisions in sports. It couldn't be more clear. You know, we just celebrated Serena Williams' career. She'd had no career if there was no women's tennis division. And it's like that for most sports. Otherwise, I'm always curious why there are women's divisions in chess. For example, I really don't know why that is the case.

You know, that's the case with pool as well. There's a trans woman who has become a world champion in certain billiards games. And people are confused about that. That's a weird one, in my opinion, because it's not a power-based game. But there's something about testosterone and understanding of 3D space, that there's some sort of an advantage. It's very weird. Pool is a weird one because it's a game that I'm obsessed with and I've always wondered. There's only been like a few women who have been very competitive and been able to beat men consistently in competition.

And a lot of them are lesbians. I don't know what that's all about. But there's a— Well, they have more masculine physiology. That's why. So it's an on-average. Think of two overlapping bell curves. Of course, there are some women that can beat some men. Sure.

That's not what we're talking about. But we're talking about the best of the best. Right. Once you get up to the six standard deviations out, you're a 0.01% top performer. Right. You know, 1% is a huge difference at that level. Gigantic. Yeah.

Yeah. It's curious. The chess thing is also very curious. You know, that was what was fascinating about the Queen's Gambit film. You know, the Netflix thing. Right. This woman is just dominating all these men. She has a superior chess mind.

But in reality, that doesn't really exist very often. Right. It's weird. Like, why not? Yeah, yeah. Well, you've always made the point of MMA fight, if it was a trans woman that killed a woman. That'd probably end it.

Probably lawsuits would end it. Yeah, well, I am for people being able to do that if they want to do that. If it's a woman who's a biological woman who chooses to compete against a trans woman. And one of the examples that I've used is there's a woman named Jermaine Durandamy, who's a multiple time world Muay Thai champion. She was a UFC champion. And she actually had a boxing match with a man and knocked him out, a biological man. But she's extraordinary. She is the 1% of 1% in terms of elite female combat sports athletes.

Right. And so I'm in favor of her being able to make that decision to compete against a man. But to force a biological woman to compete against a trans woman in MMA, I think is criminal. I think that is crazy. And to pretend they're the same thing is crazy. That doesn't make any sense to me. If there was enough, you could have their own division. Yes.

That would solve it. That would solve it. And that's really the, that I think is the solution. That to me is the only compromise. And is there enough? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe if you made a division

like that. Look, for the longest time, they thought there weren't enough women to compete in combat sports to justify UFC's women's division. But now the women's division of MMA is some of the most competitive and exciting. Really? Oh my God. Yeah. There's a strawweight division, a flyweight division. There's a featherweight division, a bantamweight division. There's multiple divisions that are filled with elite female combat sports athletes. And some of those fights are fantastic. And, you know, up until Ronda Rousey came into the UFC, which is not that long ago. Was it 10 years ago?

When they first started having women's MMA fights in the UFC, there was only one division. It was 135 pounds. That was it. And you didn't have all these other weight classes. Now, these other weight classes like flyweight in particular and strawweight, some of the most competitive. And they have incredible fights. So I think if you build it, they will come. And if there are that many trans female, you know, trans women MMA competitors out there, maybe if they developed a division and they had that, maybe you would see a lot of competitors that would enter that and it would become an exciting division. Yeah. But to make them compete against biological females or excuse me, to make biological females compete against people who identify as female, I think is just insane. Right. So there, I think we're thinking that fairness and justice trumps rights.

Yes. Yeah, you should have the right, but it should also be fair. Yes. What's interesting in many sports is women are allowed to compete against men. Women are allowed to compete against men. Biological females are allowed to enter into certain wrestling tournaments with biological males. They're allowed to. You can do that. But we never allow biological males to compete against biological females.

We never allow someone who is both biologically male and identifies as male to compete against females in sports. You know, in the 1980s, I got into ultra-distance cycling, you know, race across America. I did that five times. And in the 90s, I was the race director. So we had, in 93, 94, 95, I had two women that were competing, Shauna Hogan and Muffy Ritz, and they were phenomenal athletes, just really tough as could be. Now, this is coast to coast, nonstop. Every competitor has a motorhome behind them and so on. And it's just the clock never stops. And so it's a really ultra distance. And I remember in, I think it was 93 or 94, Shauna led the entire field all the way

into Colorado. And me and my staff were thinking, maybe we don't need a women's men's division. Maybe we are the sport that can, you know, it's all equal. Right. And but by the end of the race, it was like a one day, like 26 hour difference between the top man and Shauna. And it's like, okay, I think we need, and I also talked to the women about it in off season conversations. It's like, do you want a women's division? Yes. Because there's still, even with ultra distance in the, people were making arguments at the time, well, maybe women can endure pain better than men, and over the course of 3,000 miles rather than 100 miles,

all those differences even out, but no. Even there, it just wasn't fair to make them compete against the men. So we had two divisions. And, of course, we have, like most sports, age divisions. You know, I think the first cut is at age 30, 40, 40 plus, 50 plus, 60 plus, and so on. For obvious reasons, biological decay of testosterone and strength, it just goes down. So to me, male to female trans post-puberty is doping. It's like taking testosterone or human growth hormone or EPO or whatever. As you know, in cycling, this is a big issue because it makes a difference.

I mean, I think Lance said it was like a 10% difference. If you do the drug cocktail, you do it right. And you have somebody professional that's coaching you on this. That's a huge difference at the top level. And it would be the same if you're post-puberty. So the NCAA had that rule. You know, if you go one year of testosterone suppression post-puberty, then we're going to count you as a woman. But I don't see the evidence for that at all.

And the International Swimming Organization finally said, no, that's not enough. Because post-puberty, the changes have already happened. Yes. It took till Leah Thomas started dominating that they made that decision, though. Exactly. Right. When somebody, finally, some of these women and the parents were speaking up, like, this is not fair. And like the boy who pointed to the emperor who has no clothes, you know, finally everybody goes, yeah, we all see it. He doesn't have clothes. Finally somebody said something. Everybody could see this is not fair. Everybody knows it's not fair. What is that about human beings, though, that they don't want to speak out and that we're willing to accept something that we know is not fair because culturally that's an accepted thing? no, it's not fair, because culturally that's an accepted thing. Well, part of it is fear of punishment. You punish the outliers, the people who speak out.

But why are we punishing the outliers when that seems so obvious that it's not fair? Okay, yeah, that's an interesting question. So there might be some complex psychology there where I get this preemptive denunciation and also virtue signaling. Like if I stand out as being super virtuous, I'm going to get some points for that. You know, some of that I think is going on, you know, multiple factors. And, you know, we're in the middle of it now, I think probably within five years. I mean, what, five years ago, no one was talking about, was it a Ricky Gervais bit about, you know, the use of the use of the term, a woman without a penis?

Yes. We would have never uttered this sentence five years ago, whatever it was. It was a really funny bit. And probably five years from now, we won't be talking about this either. Well, that's a good example because Ricky Gervais got a lot of death threats because of that. He had to really radically ramp up his security. Right. Yeah. Well, okay.

So he's non-cancelable, right? But what about all the comedians down here that are cancelable? They're going to probably keep their mouth shut. Yeah. But I don't know that. The thing is there's a reward for speaking out and saying the things that everybody thinks, but they're afraid to say, particularly with audiences. When you're anonymous in a crowd and you're having a couple of cocktails and it's dark and someone says it, like, yes, finally!

You see it in comedy clubs that people are taking chances because they're recognizing that it's rewarded to speak out and say these things. Another thing I think back to the kind of moral progress that we might be experiencing now is we've made so much moral progress. Today's young activists that want to do something to make the world a better place, well, slavery, torture, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, done. Yeah. What's next? Oh, trans rights. Okay, I'm going to get out there.

Okay, good. That's good. But as you said, the problem is that it gets in the way of women's rights. Right. Especially when it comes to athletic competition. Right. So conflicting rights. Well, you can't have everything right.

So anyway, I think that's part of it. Like, I want to do something, right? Or, like, just think about the George Floyd protests and the BLM movement. You know, what can I do about police violence against African-Americans? I'm nobody. I'm not the chief of police. I'm not the mayor. I'm just a citizen. Well, there's a march tomorrow and we're going to go down there and we're going to voice our disapproval of the way African-Americans are treated. Yes, I'm going to go down there and do it. So I feel like I'm doing something. Yeah. Right. A little bit like commenting on Twitter, you know. I'm outraged by this.

Like, I feel like I did a little something. Right. Even though it probably doesn't do anything. How do you think this stuff all plays out? Do you think eventually it's one of those things, like as we were talking about before, the ebb and flow of things, you know, there an overcorrection, and then things kind of bounce. I think you said it right. That's right.

It's a pendulum. And I think the pendulum going in this direction, well, that's good. That's good. That's good. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Come back. We went a little crazy. Reel that thing in a little bit.

And then overall, through time, we will get moral progress because of that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are trans. There's intersex people. There are people who identify as the other sex and so on. That's real. Is it really the numbers that we're now seeing? You know, a spike, 2,000% spike in the last two years and these massive increases in the UK. And probably some of that is social contagion. You know, it's sort of this is the thing to do. Some of it may be real. Well, we know social contagion is real.

Yeah. We know that's real. That's a real phenomenon. Right. So to say that that can't be it seems a little disingenuous. Right. And seems like a lot of virtue signaling. Right.

Right. So their counter to that is, well, society is more acceptable now, accepting of people that are different. So that's why these people are coming out. But the counter to that is, yeah, but it's only in a certain cohort, age 13 to 17 or so, where the huge spike is. It's a lot of biological females too. Yeah. And it's way more. Yeah. And that's Abigail Schreier's work, Irreversible Damage. I had a student maybe two years ago that came out as trans. She decided she wanted to be a man. It's like, okay. And everybody was super curious about this. It's a small discussion seminar type class that I teach. And as the course of the weeks went by, it would

come up almost every week. It came up a lot. And I thought, I wonder if she really wants to be a man or she wants to be trans. Because trans was, this was a cool thing to be. And I thought, I wonder if she really wants to be a man or she wants to be trans, because trans was, this was a cool thing to be. And, you know, she got love bombed and everybody's asking her questions. What are you going to do about this? How are you going to dress? What about that? And you could see it was, but if it was just like, I'm just going to be a man, I'm not going to tell anybody, I'm just going to change the way I'm living my life. I think that would not be as interesting or rewarding. There would be no social reinforcement for that. So I think in part, again, multiple things, some of it's real, some of it's social

content. I think some of it is this kind of a trendy thing to be. Andrew Sullivan writes about this, it's not cool to be gay anymore. Where'd the lesbians go? Right? There's no more lesbians. They're all gone. And he makes the point, and since he's a gay guy, he could do this, you know, that when he was a teenager boy, 13, 14, 15, he finds himself attracted to other guys and not women. And what if he was told at that time, you're not gay, you're actually a woman, you're just in the wrong body. And then that's kind of, in a way, he says it's kind of homophobic. Yes. Yeah. My friend Tim says that. He's gay. He has that argument about it, that a lot of it is homophobic.

Whether it's really homophobic in their hearts, I don't know. But it has that taint to it. Yes. That it's, there's, well, you know, I mean, that's also the argument that it's anti-women. You know, that you're, you, that you're changing what it means to be a woman. And that's the film, What is a Woman? When you watch that film and you see the argument. When Matt Walsh has these deadpan questions to these people and lets them just speak their thoughts about it, it's like, whoa, who thought this was where we're at right now? Very strange. Right.

Well, there's a lot of confusion there between gender and sex. What do you mean? How do you define this stuff? I wrote about this, you know, fuzzy sets. It's kind of a family resemblance. You know, what is a game? What is a chair? Well, a chair is, you know, it's got legs, four legs.

Well, this one has five. It's got a back. What about a bar stool? It doesn't have a back. What about a bean a chair? Well, a chair has got legs, four legs. Well, this one has five. It's got a back. What about a bar stool? It doesn't have a back. What about a beanbag chair? That doesn't have legs or a back. Yeah, but I know when I see one, right? So we know what a man is.

We know what a woman is. For the most part, we can identify them. But there's going to be a little fuzzy around the fuzzy edges. Yeah. It's like, okay. Right. But is it really a whole nother category right so from an evolutionary biology perspective if we really had more than two sexes there would be

like a billion you know of the third sex yeah if that was a real thing rather than as an anomaly well that's one of the weirder things about homosexuality in general is that there's not really like an evolutionary like if you thought about like the reproduction of whatever it means to be homosexual well it sort of like eliminates that like how is it that homosexuality has always maintained a certain percentage of our society? It's really interesting just from an objective perspective of looking at what it is like as a in terms of natural selection Like there's a comedian that had a joke about that Otto and George Otto and George was a puppet act from New York Hilarious comedian and the puppet would say crazy, and he would go, what are you saying?

You know, like, that's outrageous. How could you say that? And his thing was like about the gays. He goes, from a bunch of people that can't reproduce, where the fuck are they all coming from? It was very funny. It's funny because it has kind of an element of a true question. Why is there homosexuality in a sexually reproducing species like ours? Yeah.

So evolutionary theorists have debates about this. You know, maybe they're kind of surrogate parents or pseudo parents or faux parents to their siblings' offspring, you know, their uncles and aunts. And that, you know, lets them, gets their genes for homosexuality in the next generation or something, because they're not reproducing directly. Okay, maybe, but it's not clear if it's that or if there's— maybe there's no adaptive purpose to it at all. It's just a byproduct. It's just things happen. There's just kind of randomness in sexual preferences.

Because I've heard, well, there's a spectrum of masculine females and feminine men. The problem with that theory is there's a lot of very masculine gay men. Right. So it's like, well, what is that? Right. That's like a giant monkey wrench into your equation. Right. That doesn't make any sense.

It seems to be just an aspect of human beings. Right. But again, going to moral progress, it is a clear sign of moral progress. The difference between when I was 11, my friend's dad, who was so angry that people were gay and they were getting married, versus today, where it's very accepted, for the most part. Right. A tiny percentage of people, I'm sure, still have a problem with it, like really extreme religious fundamentalists.

Right. But for the most part, society has kind of accepted that. Well, because religion endorsed a marriage initially and then the state got involved, its original purpose was reproduction. Yes. And so that was why there was resistance by the church all the way up until really 2010s against it because you're not making babies. Well, what about older couples or couples that are infertile, that are heterosexual but infertile? And there's always exceptions to this, but that's kind of how it started. The purpose of marriage initially was to increase

the population of either your religion or your government, right? I mean, even today, if you're married, as you know, you get a tax break. I assume you do here in Texas too, but the federal government gives you a tax break. If you're married, if you have kids, you get another tax break. In a way, the government's saying, we want you to be married, as you know, you get a tax break. I assume you do here in Texas, too. But the federal government gives you a tax break. If you're married, if you have kids, you get another tax break. In a way, the government's saying, we want you to be married, and we want you to have kids, and we want you to be a homeowner, by the way. We'll let you deduct your interest on your mortgage. So the government does these sort of things, as religion did. You know, the whole primogeniture and the inheritance of the wealth to the first son and so on. All these rules were based on how can we grow our numbers and compete with the other religions. So fecundity is a proxy

for religious success. You just have a lot of babies. There's only two ways to grow a religion. You have babies or you have converts, and it's hard to convert people. It was one of the things that people were really worried about with the reversal of Roe v. Wade is that gay marriage was going to be next on the chopping block. And there was discussions about that, which is, you know, that's a clear anti-progressive position. It is. I'm worried about that. I'm hoping that this is just a couple of far out GOP candidates that are trying to appeal to their base by saying, you know, we're going to take away gay marriage. And by the way, we're going to get rid of contraception too. We want women to just be in the bedroom making babies. I'm hoping that the GOP in mass says, no, no, that's not what we're about. But it is wild that in 2022, that's still up for discussion.

Unbelievable. That people are literally talking about getting rid of contraception. Yeah, I know. Getting rid of gay marriage, getting rid of contraception. Yeah, I know Getting rid of gay marriage getting rid of contraception like hey, but isn't that the pendulum though? Like what we were talking about? Yeah, like the with moral progress is gonna be an overcorrection Right that some people the you know, the outliers of the religious fundamentalists who don't want any progress They want they basically want things to go back to like a religious fundamentalist version of what a Christian society should be. And there's some people that are out there, and it's not a small number. That's what's spooky.

Christian nationalism is a thing. It's getting big. It's getting bigger. Michael Flynn, you know, the general. There's a new documentary out of CNN film about him in which this is a he's got huge crowds in which he's basically saying we need to return America, make America great again, but make America Christian again is what he's. Well, he's one of those QAnon guys. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Which is if you've watched the documentary Into the Storm, have you seen the HBO?

It's amazing. That's so good. Have you seen the HBO? It's amazing. That's so good. And I had the gentleman on who created that. And just what a fucking wild thing it is to see the actual people that created it. Yeah.

And to see what a scam they pulled off and how weird it is that people just hopped on board. And they really did think that there was some people working behind the scenes that were working for God and country and they were going to expose all these pedophiles and Satanists and the deep state. Oh, my God. It's amazing. Do you think when I talk about this in the book, do you think when people say, I think they tell a poster, yeah, I think there could be something to the QAnon or Pizzagate or whatever. Did they really believe it? I mean, the one guy did, Edgar Welch, he went to that Comet Ping Pong pizzeria with his AR-15 and shot up the place. But most people don't do that. You know, if you really thought there was a pedophile ring, a crime going on and the police wouldn't do anything about it, wouldn't you go there? Wouldn't you want to do something? So I'm thinking, I'm wondering, do these people really believe it or are they just kind of like, well, I don't know. So I'm thinking, I'm wondering, did these people really believe it or are they just kind of like, well, I don't know.

It seems like the kind of thing those Democrats would do. And I don't like them. There's a little bit of that. Tribalism. I think there's also a little bit of like what we were talking about earlier about conspiracy theories. They're exciting. And for you to have secret information that's not available to everybody else that could expose. That's a big thing always. We're going to expose these people. We're going to expose the evil, expose the

Satanists and expose the pedophiles. There's a lot of people that don't have real excitement in their actual life. And through online activities and message boards and social media groups and the like, they find purpose. And one of the purposes is like to take down the evil empire, to take down the deep state. You know, there's a real inclination towards that. It's like the hero's journey, right? The Joseph Campbell, you know, you go out and conquer the beast and come back, and it kind of makes your life meaningful. I worked on this Netflix documentary on brainwashing, and the producers found this woman in Texas who went down the rabbit hole, the QAnon rabbit hole.

And so she was very successful, intelligent, educated, good looking, married with kids, the whole thing. And then she talks about this. During COVID, with the shutdown, my business sort of collapsed. I was bored out of my skull. I'm online all day. The next thing you know, like six months later, her husband's giving her an ultimatum. It's QAnon or me. And she actually had the phone. She goes, here's the message you left me. Wow. And initially she said, this is the most important thing I'll ever do. I am going to expose this crime. I'm changing the world. I am a warrior.

I'm out of here. And then a couple months later, I guess she woke up and went, what the fuck did I do? My husband's leaving me? I'm losing my kids and house? What? How did she get so wrapped up in it? Did she ever talk about it afterwards? Yeah, just, again, the daily kind of feed online,

which you can find websites on anything. Yeah, but that one in particular was, like, particularly engrossing for some people. It became their whole life. And that was documented in that Into the Storm. With those poor people, and some of them that wereama supporters right that just flipped over to now i realize they're the bad ones and we're the good ones and we're patriots and it's crazy well yeah and there's entertainment value these things are really interesting and fun to read about and yeah it's well that goes along

with all the other conspiracy theories like i was went into a, unfortunately, last night, I went down a rabbit hole of Bigfoot. You did? Yes, yes, yes. I went down the Bigfoot rabbit hole last night. Boy, that's an old one. It's an old one. There was a video that showed up in my YouTube feed, and I clicked on it. And then you know how YouTube on the right-hand side, it gives you, maybe you want to watch this.

Oh, yes, of course. And so I forget what the initial video was, but I went three or four videos down the hole, and I got to a professor out of Oregon. Oh, I know that guy. Yes, I know that guy. Yeah, I've actually had him on the podcast before when I was doing that Joe Rogan questions everything thing.

He was a guy that said that he would cut off one of his fingers if he could find out that Bigfoot was real. I'm like, oh, my God, dude. So I went down. I watched him being interviewed. And then, oh, now I remember what it was. When I was in England, I was watching a show on television that was like one of those discovery shows about monsters. show on television that was like one of those discovery shows about monsters and it was like just a clearly bullshit show where they're like you know we're gonna go find him we're gonna use night vision and we're going in the woods and these

people all believe it and so I'm like how many episodes are there of this fucking thing and then I start there's so many but this professor who I think he's a professor of anthropology. Yeah, yeah. He's like a legitimate professor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's University of Oregon. Yeah. Well, this is, again, my argument why the rational believe the irrational.

These are not uneducated, stupid people wearing tinfoil hat. No, they're not. They're smart people. But smart people and educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs they hold for non-smart reasons. Right? better at rationalizing beliefs they hold for non-smart reasons. Yeah. Right?

So do you know Reinhold Messner, the great alpinist that summited Everest, I think, seven times without oxygen, considered the greatest climber of all time, a German alpinist? He wrote a book about Bigfoot, Yeti, because he heard all about Yeti in the Himalayas, and he had told all the Sherpas, okay, look, if you see this thing, just wake me up out of the tent. So one day they're like, boss, boss, it's there, it he's like oh my god oh my god he's so they go they hike and hike around the corner and there's this big bear he's like that's yeti yeah that's yeti it's like oh okay yeah yeah that's certainly a lot of it a lot of his and bears do walk upright all the time yeah especially if they get an injured front paw, they're capable of walking upright. I've seen in the wild

I've seen bears walk upright. Black bears. From very close. From 20 yards away. I've seen them walk multiple steps on their back feet. Now if you were looking at that through the forest, like a deep forest, I don't think it's a coincidence

that the Pacific Northwest is where they sight a lot of them because there's a rainforest out there that are so dense. It's like the way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips, like seeing through the Q-tips you can't possibly see. So if you saw a bear walking on two legs through like a couple of trees and then your mind starts going, oh, my God, did I just see a gorilla or some sort of an ape creature? It's Bigfoot. And then you have it in your head that you saw a Bigfoot because you saw a bear. You know, a bear, a big black bear is a seven-foot animal. It's a big creature.

They're walking upright like that. You would assume that that is a giant Sasquatch that you just saw. And then your mind starts working on it. Your memory sucks anyway, especially with chaotic, extremely novel events like that. And so then you get it in your head that you saw a Sasquatch. Well, this is how illusions work. You know those auditory illusions where they put the words on the top of the screen and they play the voice. You can't quite make out what it is, but when you see the words that –

Yes, yes, yes. And it flips back and forth, back and forth. Yes. So this works because when you can't quite tell what it is, then a cue, a prime, it's called priming, will direct your brain to hear one thing or the other thing or see things. This is how these visual illusions work, right? So it's always degraded information, right? The shadow, I can't quite see. If you squint and use your imagination, I can sort of see the two legs and maybe an arm. But for biologists, it's pretty simple.

Just show me the body and I'll accept it. Yeah. You know who doesn't believe in Bigfoot? The people that are in the woods all the time. Oh, right. All of my friends that are hunters, like the most extreme hardcore guys who backpack and go deep into the mountains

for like weeks at a time. None of them. Zero sightings really right the people that are the sightings of the casuals the people that don't spend any time in the woods well you know cryptozoologists say well we didn't know about the mountain gorilla until 1903 but we know but we would know by now yeah that's not a good example because it's fucking really clear video of the mountain gorilla. Right, right. The thing about the Bigfoot thing that is, you know, there's always an element of something in there. The thing about Bigfoot that's fascinating is the Gigantopithecus.

Is that it did coincide with the human beings of 100,000 years ago. So we know for sure then. So you would imagine that maybe 50,000 years ago there were some of them still. And maybe it's legend and folklore. There's many things that are passed on We know they're real. We know that's a, but it's just an animal that existed just like an orangutan, just like a gorilla, a chimpanzee. There was a, there was a hominid, a large sort of primate creature that was really enormous, but died out. Given our propensity to stereotype things, imagine if Neanderthals had not gone extinct and they were still around, right? And they were somehow different from us or whatever. Would we enslave them?

Would we kill them off? Would we treat them equally? That's probably what the humans, the Homo sapiens did to them, right? There's different theories about that. Well, so 2% of our genome is Neanderthal. I call this the Stephen Stills explanation. You know, Stephen Stills, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. Right.

Well, I'm alone in the cave tonight, and there's no Homo sapiens around, but hey, here's a Neanderthal. Yeah. It makes you wonder, like, was it Homo sapien females that bred with the neanderthal males or was it neanderthal females that homo sapien male like wonder what was the predominant well given human sexual psychology and the differences between men and women and how indiscriminate men are compared to women women are much more risk averse yeah about that they have fewer partners they want fewer partners um probably male to female i'm guessing yeah yeah makes sense but also then you know who know i mean we're talking

about an incredibly aggressive time you know how much of that was rape yes you know like a lot of animal breeding is basically right yeah you know a lot way, like, you ever see koala bears mate? Yeah. The cute little fellows? No, I haven't seen it. It's disturbing. It's pretty violent. They're pretty ruthless and violent.

And cats, you know, when you see cats, it's horrific. You wonder, like, it's also, the human species is so fascinating, too, because they're always finding, like, Denisovans. There's always finding these new branches of humans. Like how many of them

were there? And then there's the hobbit people. Yeah, the hobbits, right? Probably at least a dozen bipedal primates at the same time. The island of Flora

is hobbit people. That is fascinating because I think they boiled that one down to what was it like 15, 20,000 years ago? Right, not that long ago. Crazy. After Neanderthals. Yes, that there was these little three foot tall and they don't really Boiled that one down to, what was it, like 15,000, 20,000 years ago? Right, not that long ago.

Crazy. After Neanderthals. Yes, that there was these little three-foot tall, and they don't really know what they look like other than guesswork, but they think they were hairy. Right. It was a hairy little three-foot tall bipedal people-like things that were a separate branch of the evolutionary chain of primates. I remember when that story broke. It's a pretty dense forested island. It was like, maybe they're still there. Yes.

They're holed up in some cave. Well, there's a belief that there's a thing called an Orang Pendek. You ever heard of that one? Orang Pendek is very similar in stature and description. And I think they believe they're in Vietnam. I think it's maybe Cambodia or Vietnam. See if you can find that. But that is one of those mythological creatures that until they found the Flores people, I think they found them in, I want to say it's the 2000s, the late nineties or the 2000s that they discovered those. And then they started saying,

well, Hey hey maybe there was something to that orang pendek thing too because it's a similar part of the world and a similar shape creature but they were talking about there it is how we found evidence of the elusive or elusive orang pendek hmm interesting describes last month expedition in the jungles of Sumatra. Interesting. So even the age of satellite mapping, global positioning, there remains lost worlds where few humans tread, where species of animals unrecognized by science live. I'll say this name. Karinse Seblot National Park in West Sumatra is one such place. The size of a small country, its dim, steamy interior has never been explored properly, and last month I returned to these jungles for the fourth time to track an elusive and

yet unrecorded species of ape known to the locals as the Orang Pendek, or short man. This year's expedition was the largest of its kind to ever visit the area. It consisted of two teams. The first made up of Adam Davies, expedition leader for the Center for Fortean Zoology, Dave Archer, Andrew Sanderson, and myself, would concentrate on the highland jungles around Lake

Gunung Gunung? Tujuh? I'm just guessing there. The second team consisted consistent of Dr. Okay. What does it say? Before team left, one guide, Sahar, introduced us to an eyewitness called Pak Antis, who claimed to have seen an Orang Pendek in the garden area in April.

He described it as around three feet tall, but with massive shoulders and chest. He pointed to a piece of washing on the line to indicate the color of its hair. A mid-tan, it had an ape-like face, walked upright on two legs while swinging its arms. Huh. Who knows? Well, you need a breeding population. If they last centuries or thousands of years, you can't just have one or two. Right, but if this thing is living in an unexplored area, the size of a small country.

Right. Yeah. That's enough. Yeah. That would be amazing. Could you imagine? I mean, now that we know that it exists, we have plenty of fossil evidence and bone evidence and DNA that points to that. Homofluoresciences. Right. Given how many of these species went extinct, we're the only ones still around. Imagine if it hadn't been, if we had gone extinct and Neanderthals survived, would they be making spaceships and internet and computers? Right. inevitability to it, which brings us back to the SETI question. You could have a planet in which life gets all the way up to the level of Neanderthal complexity with big brains and hands and art and so on. And maybe you never detect them because they never get to a stage where they make radio technology and spaceships and things like that. Is that possible? See,

that's a, I'm just kind of asking rhetorically. It seems like it could be. I don't know. I mean, we probably would have never gotten to where we were if it wasn't for the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Right. Yes, right. So so much of it is kind of chance.

Yeah. And, you know, Neanderthals, it looks like they had language based on the skull size back here and some other things here and their genome. It looks like they had the genes for language maybe maybe something like, not ours totally conceptually, but maybe something like that. Were they held back by us? Because they had Europe to themselves for about 300,000 years.

But their toolkits don't get progressively more complex and their art doesn't get more complex like ours does. When we got to Europe and they went extinct and then you see that kind of progress. So it's an open question that no one knows the answer to, but it touches on the SETI thing because is there kind of a directionality to evolution where you end up with communicating technologically sophisticated civilizations or is it pretty random and you could get pretty far and then we'd never know that they were there? Well, I think if you think about the absolutely enormous numbers of possibilities, you probably have all of them.

You probably have, you know, places where dinosaurs just rule and that's it. And, you know, and shrews stayed shrews. Right, right. The impact never happened on that planet. Or you get to something where you have a completely different sort of an environment and things progress far more rapidly. And they also don't have the concern with asteroidal impacts or natural disasters. It's a much more stable environment on these planets. I mean, you think of the variability would be endless, just the sheer numbers of planets you're dealing with. The question is, like, once we find life somewhere else, then it all becomes open-ended, right? Once we find absolute evidence that there

is a life form on this other spinning body that's circling around a star, we got one. Okay, now we have some moving creatures that exist on this planet. Holy cow. Now we know for sure. I had an interesting discussion with Richard Dawkins one time about to what extent that aliens would look anything like us. Like the alien abduction stories. It's always this bipedal primate with the big eyes and the bulbous head and no ears and so forth. But what are the chances they'd look anything like us?

Evolved on some other planet, right? They could be like octopuses or something. But Richard points out it may not be as random as I'm describing because Simon Conway Morris, who studies convergent evolution, shows that based on physics of water, air, and land, to move around on the land, you got to have something like legs. To move through the water, you have to have kind of a smooth, fusiform body to slide through such a dense medium. If you're in the air, you've got to have something like wings, right? And so you're going to have probably creatures with most of the sensory apparatus

and brains on one end, waste disposal system on the other end, some arms and legs to move around on the land. You could get something like a bipedal primate, maybe it would be a mammal or whatever, it could be a dinosaur that was bipedal. And if you have a big enough brain, they could get something like a bipedal primate, maybe a mammal or whatever, could be a dinosaur that was bipedal. And if you have a big enough brain, they could make tools and so on. So it could be something like that. Could be, but then you also have the intelligent life that we know exists on earth that doesn't have the ability to manipulate its environment, like orcas and dolphins, which is fascinating because orca and dolphin have enormous brains. They have complex languages that we can't decipher.

They have very sophisticated social systems. Right. But they don't possess the ability to manipulate their environment like we do. They never needed it. They can move through 3D space. Right. They're inside the water. The apex predators, particularly orcas, they have no threat.

Right. That is really fascinating. Again, you could have a planet with that and we'd, they have no threat. Right. That is really fascinating. Again, you could have a planet with that and we'd never know they're there unless we go there and see them. Is there any evidence that there were any dinosaurs that had any sort of advanced larger brains? No, not that I know of. Although people like Jack Horner, the paleontologist, he thinks they're much more social and communicating in a social way than we've given them credit for. They weren't dumb. Not big brains like you're thinking of like the cetaceans. Like an orca.

Cetaceans have big brains to their body size. There you would expect more intelligence. But, yeah, well, I don't know. Probably not. You know, they well, I don't know. Probably not. You know, they never had tools, for example. But they don't really need them. But it seems like super intelligent life forms, they're either like us

or they're like a dolphin and an orca on this planet. Like there's, or crows. Yes, crows, right. Sagan was always careful about this, anthropomorphizing what the aliens would be like. You know, just kind of the chauvinism of it. They're going to be like us. Well, how many species on Earth are like us?

Right. None. We can't even talk to an octopus or a dolphin. We don't know what they're saying. And if we can't talk to them, and they grew up, they're mammals. And they're on the same planet. Right. And if we can't talk to them, and they grew up, they're mammals. Right. And they're on the same planet as us. How are we going to communicate with aliens?

This was an interesting group that Sagan was part of, this dolphin. It was with the Society of Dolphins, the Dolphin Society or something. John C. Lilly was this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sure. I forget the name of it. But, you know, because then he started giving dolphins LSD and stuff.

Yeah. Well, he also had that experiment where he had the woman living in the home with a dolphin and she had to masturbate the dolphin to get it to pay attention. And so they killed the study once that came out, which is unfortunate. It was like, but he was also like, he invented the sensory deprivation tank. He was a really out there guy. And he was into ketamine for whatever weird reason. He would take intramuscular ketamine and then get in the sensory deprivation tank. I've heard you talk about this. I just want to ask you directly, you know, when somebody takes LSD or one of the others, and they feel like it's a door opening, doors of perception, into some other reality. Is there really a reality or is it just brain chemistry?

That's a good question. I think you're thinking of dimethyltryptamine. The reason why dimethyltryptamine is so interesting is because it's endogenous. The human brain produces it. It's trackable. You can find it and now through the Cottonwood Research Foundation they've found that the brain it's the thing was the pineal gland but I had dr. Rick Strassman on who conducted the first FDA approved

studies on psychedelics through dimethyl with dimethyltryptamine where they were IV dosing these people with it. And I actually had a conversation with Graham Hancock when I was in London this weekend. And he said that they're doing some at the university of London now too, that are very fascinating, um, where they're doing the same sort of thing where they're using a IV drip so they can prolong the DMT state for very long periods of time and then come back with these very similar descriptions of what's going on. Who fucking knows? Who knows what is happening?

If that is a doorway that opens up in the mind that leads you to another dimension or whether it's the human consciousness, the imagination and the visual cortex interacting with these incredibly powerful psychoactive compounds that give a similar visual hallucination to everyone. You know, I don't think there's a way to know right now. Right. So this is kind of an epistemological problem. You know, what should I believe is true?

I don't know about that. Because what if, so Richard Dawkins and I have this kind of standing invitation to go to this ayahuasca place in Costa Rica. And, you know, Richard had a stroke. He said, I don't think I better do this. And I think I probably won't do it, but I'm curious to know, what if I did it? And I came back. I said, oh, my God, Joe, I've been a skeptic and a materialist, and I've discovered that there's this other reality.

And you go, well, how do you know it's true? I said, because I experienced it. And then you go, well, how can I know it's true? I said, because I experienced it. And then you go, well, how can I know it's true? Here, you try it. And then you go, yeah, I went. I did it. You're right. But how does Jamie know?

Well, he has to try it. How do we get out of the loop that it may just be brain chemistry and nothing more than that, or you're actually going somewhere? Have we hit an epistemological wall we can't know? I don't know what the answer to that is, but I do think that it would benefit you to try it just so that you could experience something that's so profoundly unique that it throws into question what reality is overall. Because we think of reality as only being things that we can measure, things that we can measure, things that we can

touch, things that we could put on a scale. And you as the editor of Skeptic Magazine in particular, you know, you're very skeptical about things, but what you experience with the most potent of hallucinogens, whether it's mushrooms, whether it's psilocybin or whether it's dimethyltryptamine or any of these really, really potent ones, you experience something that seems so much more vivid than reality itself. It's very confusing. It's like, what is happening here? Am I actually interacting with entities, or are there thoughts that I have in my mind that are so potent and profound,

like things like creativity and love and emotions, that if you attach them to this psychedelic compound, they dance for you in a way that seems like they're an actual entity. Who knows? But I would like you to do it. I'd like you to do it just because I respect your opinion and I'd like to see what your thought is when you come back from it. I would imagine I would have a profound experience because most people do, right? I don't think I've talked to anybody that hasn't had a profound experience or at least an interesting one. And I read Oliver Sachs's memoir, his autobiography, where he did this stuff and he decided it was just all brain

chemistry, but it was super profound. Like he's in a restaurant and the people all have these fly like heads. Which one did he do? I think he did LSD or maybe, actually I can't remember now, but he writes about the brain, he's a neurologist and so on, and it's like, okay, so what does this mean? What is he saying? And how would it be different when I,

so I read about people who have near-death experiences, then I read Oliver Sacks' experience, or you talk about in the opening of one of Sam Harris' books, he talks about taking, what was it? What did he take? I think it was LSD. Oliver Sacks' experience. You talk about in the opening of one of Sam Harris' books, he talks about taking, what was it? What did he take? I think it was LSD.

It might have been LSD. It's a super profound sense of love for his friend there and all these really super rich experiences. But he's pretty much a hardcore materialist on this. So I'm curious to try to see where I'd fall. I'd be like, oh, yeah, no, this is just an interesting experience. It's just brain chemistry. Or would I be like maybe Graham? Oh, there's this whole other world out there that I didn't know about.

And here's what I'm worried about, Joe. If we were having this conversation 500 years ago and somebody's telling us about dark energy and dark matter and quantum physics and we'd be going, this is bullshit. And then I don't want to miss. Like, oh my God, there is this other... I don't think there's a danger in you doing it. So I think you should do it. Okay. Because i don't want to miss like oh my god there is this other i don't think there's a danger in you doing it so i think you should do it okay because i don't think you know it's the thing about dimethyltryptamine in particular which is what uh ayahuasca that's the psychoactive

compound is that uh it's it's endogenous to the human body and it's one of the most transient drugs ever observed. It's really, your body brings you back to baseline very quickly, especially with the smoked version of DMT. The oral one is different, the ayahuasca, you know, because you're, orally, it's broken down in the gut by monoamine oxidase. And so with ayahuasca is a combinatory medication where you're taking DMT from one plant and MOA inhibitors from another plant. And that's what allows you to take it orally. So it's a longer acting but less profound version in terms of like the flash of DMT is so much more vibrant apparently. But it doesn't seem to be dangerous. It seems like everybody

who takes it comes back. You've done this. Yes. I've only done DMT, which is the more potent version of it. The ayahuasca version I haven't done yet, but I'm doing it soon. And that is supposed to be the long term. And the thing about the benefit of the long one seems to be that the more you can interact with that state, the more you come back with life lessons. So we'll see. Well, there was something about the ayahuasca where you revisit dark memories and bad things in your life. And I'm not sure I want to go through that again. I don't know if that's inevitable. Some people haven't.

My friend Tom just did, and he said it was all good. There was no bad thoughts and bad memories at all. It was all beautiful. I think you can kind of prime your mind and prepare yourself with meditation and sort of, you know, put yourself in a good state of mind when you enter into that experience. Right. So you do this with somebody, a guide or somebody that can help you. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Generally. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So here this, you know, getting back, what is truth? You know, so if you channel your inner Jordan Peterson, you say, well, it doesn't matter if it affects the person's life, then it's true. Whatever that means, that word. Right?

See, I'm kind of locked in the kind of empiricist scientific view of truth. You know, it's out there. It's an actual physical reality of some kind. It's measurable and so on. Right. But what if it's not that? What if it's truth is just, well, it's out there. It's an actual physical reality of some kind. It's measurable and so on. But what if it's not that? What if it's truth is just, well, it matters for me. Like I believe I have free will.

Maybe you're a determinist, but I don't care. I feel like I'm making free choices. It matters to me. It's my truth. I don't mean this in that kind of postmodern way, but just maybe it is a postmodern way. Not in a postmodern way, but just maybe it is a postmodern way. knowing entity that knows all and sees through you and explains to you that we're all connected in this unseen cosmic way. And if you just address that in your life and treat people that way, you will live a better life. And you have this brief meeting with God and it's very profound.

And then you come back and you have to sort of come to grips with what you've experienced. Well, that you wouldn't be able to measure either. That feeling, that experience, how would you be able to prove to people that you had a conversation with God? You would just have to learn from that experience yourself. from that experience yourself and somehow or another not try not to slip back into the the human folly and all the the bad behavior and thought patterns that we've all existed with well psychedelics in the most profound breakthrough way are like that they are like having a conversation with god and whether or not it's a hallucination or whether or not it's actually meeting and interacting with all knowing entities, the experience is the same.

So whether it's real or whether it's an imagination or a hallucination, the profundity, the profound nature of the experience is the same. So I don't know if it's real or not real. Maybe that's not even the right question. Right. We do have a problem with wanting things to be measurable. Right. Because that's how we've gotten this far. Right. We've gotten this far. It works. If you take 20 Tylenols, you'll be

dead. But if you take one, it'll fix your headache. Right. So we're big on measuring things, which is important. You know how much this is a heavy table. You don't want to put it on your back. It's measurably heavy. Yes, but these things are not measurable,

and that's one of the more interesting things about them, that these psychedelic experiences are not measurable, and they're very personal, and they're very profound. And I don't think it would hurt you at all. I think it would help you. All right, I'll do it. All right, we're in. Where is it?

Right here. We're going to shut the camera off right now. What if that is God? What if somebody had one of these trips way back 5,000, 10,000 years ago and said, I talked to God, and they did in their head. And other people, like that Ricky Gervais movie, The Invention of Lying, where he comes out and they think he talked to God and he knows and it's like, oh, because he can't lie, right?

Maybe it's like that. That's what these scholars out of the University of Jerusalem felt was the source of the burning bush, Moses. They think it's the acacia tree and that the acacia tree is rich in DMT. They think that that's what- What if that triggered the whole thing? Well, you know, that is also John Marco Allegro's thoughts. Oh, right. The sacred mushroom in the cross.

That's right. I forgot about that. Yeah. Right. And he was a scholar who was assigned to be one of the people that are deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. And after 14 years of working on it, it was his belief that the Christian religion was really initially about consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. But, you know, good luck trying to decipher that and find out if it's right.

Yeah. Yeah. So when someone like myself or Richard Dawkins says, you know, did the resurrection actually happen? Did Jesus really come back from the dead? And then you have someone like Jordan say, well, it's metaphorically true or it's mythically true. And, you know, people like Richard and I are like, what? What does that mean? Right, what does that mean?

But to somebody who says, I believe it and it makes my life better, that's my truth. You know, who am I to say, no, but it's not true? You see where I'm going with that? These are kind of conflicting conversations I have with myself. I've changed my stance on religion over the years, and then I think that the real benefit is that it acts as a moral scaffolding for a lot of people. And whether or not those things are true, clearly, whether they're true or not, whether there's an origin was actually the word of God, clearly they've been affected by human beings. Clearly human.

When you read things in the Bible that treat women as second class citizens and condone slavery and talk about murdering people for disobeying, clearly the work of man is involved in there somewhere. Because every – and we know people are full of shit, and we know that they lie in order to prop up their better interests. And there's clearly some of that in religion. But there's also a moral scaffolding involved in religion that seems to be very beneficial to some people, because it allows them to live their life with a structure that they think is for the greater good. And a meaning structure, too. Yes. Yeah.

And that helps them get by in life. Right. Yes. If you think, well, what's the meaning of all, in 14 billion years, there'll be no universe or whatever it is, then what's the point, right? Existential angst. Yeah, that's what people feel. But to me, I call that, what do I call it? Who was the Woody Allen character in Annie Hall where he goes back as a child?

He won't do his homework. So his mom takes him to the psychiatrist. Why won't you do your homework? The universe is expanding. What has that got to do? Well, one day the universe is going to all blow up because it's expanding. There's no point in doing my homework. And she says, what does that got to do with it?

You live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn's not expanding. Yeah. Yeah, that was a great scene. I forgot about that. In other words, it's the wrong level of analysis. You shouldn't think about your meaning of life 14 billion years. It won't have mattered what you do today. But it matters today to the people that you affect.

Yes. It was interesting, too, that you were talking about this earlier. Alvy Singer, that was his character. Oh, there you go. Yeah. You were talking about this earlier that a lot of the, like, even like the woke attitudes that people have and a lot of the progressive dogma that people talk about, it seems to be religious in nature. It seems to be that we almost have like a default way of looking at certain things. And then if we are atheists and we are separated from

this moral scaffolding that is imparted upon us by religion, we'll find it in other things that we have culturally agreed upon. Right. Right. So it's back to that question. Why do we have to punish people who don't accept the dogma? I mean, why would that make a difference? What do you, what do I care what you think? Well, it does matter because we're social.

And, and if you challenge me, that may undermine my worldview. So I need to stomp on that. And I need you to be in agreement with me because it gives me comfort. Right. Right. It's like there's certain people out there that you could get that with... There's people that don't like if you have an Android phone. You should have Apple. I am Apple. You should be Apple. Why don't you switch over to Apple? They'll try to convince you. There's people that'll convince you to go to AT&T. Verizon sucks. Why are you at the Verizon? People want you to be on the same page as them with everything

because it affirms that their choices were good. Right. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Right. So we get, because we get our truths in part socially, like other people guide us in our youth and professors and our teachers and books and experts and we determine what's true in part by what other people believe so you do depend on that yeah because none of us are smart enough to figure out the world on our own so we have to have other people that's why we need communication like that so but the other people sometimes wrong right yeah and so if our tribe believes I call this tribal conspiracy this is what our tribe believes, this is what we do, right? And so to challenge that may make me feel like I'm not part of my tribe anymore.

Where's my moorings? This is my group. And so if you're Catholic, you believe this. If you're Mormon, you believe that. If you're Jewish, you believe this. And, you know, that's like I always point out to Christians who, these theologians that I debate on, you know, the resurrection really happened. Here's the arguments. Here's the six best arguments. You know, the empty tomb and that, you know, Mary was there and then the body was gone and this and that and this finger in the side and whatnot. If these arguments are so good, why don't Jews accept Jesus as the Messiah

who was crucified and resurrected? Well, if they understood the arguments, they would know that it's like, they understand the argument. These are smart rabbis that know a lot. Yeah. All right. It's that, it's that just not, that's not their truth. That's not their religion. That's not it. Yeah. That's the real problem with religion. There's so much variety. Right. So there's no way to, there's no way to like run the experiment, which is the right one. Right.

There's no experiment you can run. If a Martian came here and said, okay, what's the right religion? Yeah. Right, there'd be a world war to claim the proper religion to express to the Martians. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So I do think, again, if you were chronically frozen and came back a thousand years from now, and you found out all this stuff that we're talking about, oh, this was this. That's the explanation. Oh, dang. I thought that was bullshit. So I don't want to do that. But there may be these, you know, mysterian mysteries, you know, about the mysterians. These are the philosophers who think our brains are just not structured or big enough to solve certain problems.

We just can't know, like, where the universe come from ultimately before the Big Bang. You know, why is there something rather than nothing? God's existence or free will. You know, there's just certain things that are conceptually kind of don't make sense for our brains. Like consciousness, you know, this is why it's the hard problem of consciousness. It may be the wrong question. It may just, it just is. Full stop. You know, why is there a universe the hard problem of consciousness. It may be the wrong question. It just is. Full stop.

Why is there a universe? I don't know. It just is. Let's also, if you think about this stage of evolution that we currently exist in, we think of this as the pinnacle. the early hominids and you tried to express any of the thoughts that we have today or looked at the civilization that we've created, the cities, the flying airships and the satellite images and the fucking video flying through your cell phone to someone in New Zealand instantaneously. All of it is witchcraft and voodoo and chaos. If you keep going, if we keep going in whatever capacity, if we evolve to a million years from now,

we're going to look back on this as like, what a bunch of goofs. What a bunch of silly, primitive people that couldn't even read each other's minds. And they're just lying to each other and pretending polygraph tests are real and using hypnotic regression to try to uncover past truths. And God. I know. I don't want to be that guy. No. But I don't want to be a sucker, too, and believe bullshit. Oh, you fell for that one. They're in your book. It's a good way to end this.

So it's available right now. Michael Shermer, Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. Did we come to any conclusions here? I think the conclusion was you have to read the book was you have to read the book. You have to read the book. To get the answer.

Did you do the audio book? I did. I read it. Oh, excellent. I sent you the audio file. But I wanted to make sure that you read it. I like reading. I like it when authors read their own books. I do, too.

I do, too. It's so much better. So much better. Even if they don't have a great voice. I don't like my voice. At least I know it's coming from them. Right. Except when Stephen King reads his books.

You shouldn't do that. Oh, I haven't heard. Other people do that. Yeah, he's terrible at it. Well, for not- He's a great author, but not so good at the- For novels, I think a voice actor would be good. I think so, too.

Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Michael. Appreciate you. Nice to see you again. Bye, everybody. Thank you.