The Joe Rogan Experience - #770 - Michael Shermer

Episode Date: March 7, 2016

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

And we're live. Mr. Shermer, welcome. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here, man. I appreciate it. I have been paying attention to your work for a long time. Oh, you're the one. Yeah, thanks. Yes, I'm one of those guys. I'm sure you've got a lot. But I've got a bunch of your books here. Thanks for bringing those in. I really appreciate that. Sure. Got some stuff to read now. How did you get involved in skepticism? I know you started off as a cyclist, right?

Yeah, well, I was a bike racer from 1980 to about 1990, about 10 years in between when I was first in college. I went to Pepperdine and then Cal State Fullerton. And then I just was burnt out. I had a master's degree, and I just decided I didn't want to do another six straight years of Ph.D. work, so I quit. And I went over to the placement office at Cal State Fullerton and said, well, I need a job. They said, well, can you do it? I said, nothing. I have no skills.

I'm a college student, but I like to write. So I got a job at a bike magazine, my first job out of college. And it was a trade magazine for the bike industry. But I got right into cycling right away, bought a bike the first week. So you weren't a bike rider before this job? Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah. And I went to a big event at Griffith Park where they had a Yoplait Yogurt 50-kilometer bike race,

and Jonathan Boyer was the big star. He had the first American to do the Tour de France, and I saw him. I was like, wow, this is a cool sport. So I just got into it. I just started, you know, riding and racing. And then I did, we started Race Across America in 1992, in 1982. And so I quit my job and just did that for a decade. I had corporate sponsors and we had ABC Wide World of Sports contract with them to film it. And, you know, we turned it into a little, little mini culture business and, you know, ultra, but the ultra endurance sports were just taking off. The Ironman became famous in the early eighties. John Howard, who won it, was one of the first to do the race across America with me and two other guys. And I did a rod dog sled race.

And then soon after that were all those sort of long-distance mixed sport type things where you run and hike and swim. And anyway, so that was just part of that culture. And, you know, I was young and single and didn't have a house or mortgage, you know, that stuff. So you can do those kinds of things. That's a fascinating thing to get into, too, because, I mean, that's a real rabbit hole you get into, too, when you start into cycling and endurance racing and you understand the culture and you get into those people. They're a bizarre group of people.

They are, yes. Actually, the subculture of ultra-endurance athletes has a number of weirdos, but so does the sort of skeptical movement. Oh, yeah. I've decided that all kind of social subcultures have a handful of real weirdos. The people that show up at your door are like, can I stay here this weekend? What? No.

You have skeptics because they're also skeptics. They want to stay at your house. There's some oddballs there for sure. That's always going to be the case. I think you're absolutely right about that, about groups. You're always going to have like outliers or strange. That's right. But endurance racing in and of itself, like the idea of pushing your body to the limits,

is a really fascinating sport because pretty much everyone can ride a bike. It's not like you're doing something like ballet where I couldn't imagine doing. I watch some people do flips and gymnastics and stuff. Although I know the human body can do that, I'm like, ugh. I can't see myself doing it.

Yeah. But I can get on a bike. That's right. The key is to find something you like to do and that you're good at. You know, my wife's a beautiful dancer. You know, I've tried. We took dancing lessons with her. I just can't do it.

You know, I just got two left feet. I can't do it. What I meant is, though, that, like, it's one of those things where a normal person can do it. But to do it the way a Lance Armstrong can do it or the way a Greg LeM person can do it. So to, but to do it the way a Lance Armstrong can do it or the way a Greg Lamont can do it, you get into that weird area where you're just tweaking every single aspect of your body, the way you eat, the way you sleep, what you do, your mental attitude, your, you know, your motivation. And did you get down that rabbit hole?

Absolutely. It's all I did, you was a 40-hour a week, but really more like a 60-hour a week job where you're training. But there's a lot of preparation before you go out on a ride, when you come back from a ride, and then you add weights or stretching, yoga, whatever. It ends up being an all-day process. How long did it take before you got into all those people that are into EPO and blood doping? Well, when I was racing in the 80s, there was no EPO. Blood doping was legal, and it was done by people I knew in the 84 Olympics. On the 84 Olympic team, I know some of the people that did it. They used their own blood or a relative's blood.

They just stored it and packed it in. It wasn't even banned until after the 84 Olympics when it was found out the American team did it. And then the UCI, the, the, whoever, not the UCI, the Olympic committee said, okay, no, no blood doping, but it works. I didn't try it. Uh, you know, I would race across America is kind of a different sort of competition. It's more of you against yourself and the, and the clock, you know, you hardly ever see the other people out there on the road. So, um, and I wasn't into, you know, the idea of taking your blood out and packing it back in sort of creeped me out. And there were no drugs that you could take. I mean,

things like steroids, that's not going to do it for a cyclist. The miracle of EPO is that it packs in more red blood cells much faster than, say, training at high altitude. And you don't have to do the creepy thing with storing bags of blood. And then the blood cells die or the blood gets infected. I mean, I got hep C when I was in college and I had a back surgery. I had a tumor on my spine and I had to have it taken out. And I had been taking a lot of aspirin for pain. I was in pain for years. And so they had to do this blood transfusion.

This was 1976. And there was no test for this so i got hep c and so after that i thought oh blood you know blood doping packing that just sort of creeped me out yeah i can only imagine and there were people that were getting sick from blood doping you know you take the blood you put in a bag you store it maybe it's stored properly maybe it's not and then you get blood infections and that's not that's that's dangerous. Is hep C the disease that was recently in the news because there was that young guy who owns some pharmaceutical company and they charged a ridiculous amount of money for... Yes, correct. Because you can get the... I've been

cured. I'm a Kaiser patient and I did it 10 years ago and wiped it out within a month. And I did the six-month treatment and I've been clear ever since. But the drugs aren't that expensive if you do it through an HMO. It's just built in. It should be part of any health care system. And so, yeah, somebody was doctoring this or cheating the system or something like that. Yeah, there was – Jamie, you know the story behind it, right? It was that young –

Martin Shurkelly. Yeah. Is that Hep C? I think it was Hep C or HIV. I think maybe some different medications. He's got a company that works for a lot of pharmaceuticals, so it could be both. And the accusation was he was price gouging

and charging ridiculous amount of money. Yeah. So it took you six months to get over it? Well, my first blood test after a month of taking the antiviral and the interferon was the combination they used 10 years ago. And within the first blood test, it was gone, undetectable. They said, yeah, but you got to do the whole six-month treatment. That's our program. All right. So I did it. I was one of the fortunate ones that didn't get sick from the drugs. Some people just are laid out. They can't do exercise or function, but I didn't have any problems. So you tested negative, but they still made you continue the medication.

Yep. Is it because just because you're in a sort of a trials and it's like, this is what we do. You got to do the six months of, all right. Oh, okay. But it didn't mess with you physically. No, I was all right. Yep. So, you know, back then, um, that was the only thing you could do with, with, with blood doping when EPO was introduced in the early back then, that was the only thing you could do was blood doping. When EPO was introduced in the early 90s, that really made a big difference. And as you know, Greg first discovered this when his teammates came to him and said, you know, we found out these other guys are doing this stuff. We got to get on the program. And he didn't want to do it.

And so by the time Lance got into the sport, you know, he didn't invent doping. I mean, it was already rampant and and it was full on coal, full coal. The only thing Lance did was like, well, if everybody's doing it, we're going to do it. We might as well do it at a really professional level. And that's where he sort of took it to another level, and who knows if it's still going on. Yeah, I had him on the podcast. I know, I watched it. Yeah, it was very enlightening.

I like him a lot. You know, he's an extreme winner. And extreme winners are, they are the type of people that they just push everything to the outmost edge. And that guy, I firmly believe that if everybody was 100% natural, the same results probably would have happened. Probably, yeah. Probably would have been different numbers as far as the times achieved, but I think he still probably would have won. Probably, yeah. Probably would have been different numbers as far as the times achieved, but I think he still probably would have won.

Probably, yes. Probably. Probably. That probably is a big word, right? Well, and this is why it's still an immoral act, because there are people that don't do it or they don't want to do it and will never know how they would have done compared to the people that are doping. But again, probably we know that all the other people that were on the podium with Lance for those seven years,

they all have been busted for doping or admitted that they doped. So how far down do you go to give the jersey to 127th place guy or something? Because we know so many of them were doing it. It's just so fascinating to me from a perspective of these guys are essentially experimenting with their bodies, trying to find the right levels, trying to find out what's the best method to do so. And along the entire, you know, the career that Lance had, you see all these adjustments that these people are making and everyone trying to... Well, one of the early books out before all this came out about Lance was called Breaking the Chain by Willie Voigt, who was a soigneur or, you know, one of the people who give massage therapies to – or no, I think it was one of the mechanics.

Anyway, with the Festina team that got busted in 98. And he said basically these guys were just experimenting randomly. No one knew what to do. What's the dosage? How many days? every other day? How do I incorporate the other things I'm doing? What about food training? It was just, you know, Katie barred the door.

Let's just try anything. That's so crazy. So, again, one of the things Lance did was hire the best doctor, this Michele Ferrari, in the business. The guy that knew the most about how to do it properly and adjust it for each body because everybody's body is different. Okay, so we're going to try it. And you do this for months before the big race, and you figure it out. And other people weren't doing that. And then by the time they scrambled to catch up, Tyler talks about this in his book, you know, after he left the postal team and got his own team.

And then, of course, Ferrari wasn't available, so he hired this other guy Fuentes who screwed up and mixed the bags of blood and gave him the wrong drug and so he got he got popped he said uh for uh well he was doping but he got popped for somebody else's dope oh because someone else's blood was in his system correct oh right I think that's what it was and Willie Vogt talks about this and breaking the chain too about one of the too. One of the early guys that got busted, he used his mechanic's urine for the urine test, which he stored in a little condom that's held underneath this little fake penis called the whizzer. Oh, I've seen those. Because in the drug test, you have to look and watch the guy pee just to make sure.

So you do it in a way. But the problem was the mechanic had stayed up all night working on the bikes and took some stimulants. Oh, God. So the stimulants are in the urine. So this poor guy gets busted for something he didn't take. Of course, he was taking something else. Oh, God. Yeah, there's horror stories about this.

You know, guys putting bags of blood on the hook in the hotel room on the wall where the painting is so it drips down. on the hook in the hotel room on the wall where the painting is so that it drips down. It's like this is really a barbaric system in the early days when they were experimenting. So again, what Lance did was just take it to another level. Since it's going on anyway, we might as well do it professionally. Okay. And he would have gotten away with it because had he stayed retired. But back to where you started, when you're at that level and you push your body every day and you get all the endorphins and the testosterone

and the camaraderie with the guys, it's great. It is so fun. I still ride four or five days a week with the guys that I used to race with and friends in the area here. And, you know, if I miss three or four days or week traveling i'm just crawling out of my skin i just got to get back on wow that's interesting yeah and i'm 62 years old so imagine you're lance and you have you know the highest competitive edge probably you know anybody and and you're a super athlete and super gifted and then you push push push and then you got those

seven straight and then you retire and then what Yeah. It doesn't have the same intensity. And so I completely understand why so many of these guys come back. Remember Brett Favre came back a couple of times. And, you know, it's just hard to break that habit. Yeah, I see it all the time with fighters, unfortunately. The consequences are much graver. You know, when you're older and your body doesn't respond the same way and you've already taken a lot of damage, but yet you still have this jonesing for the spotlight and see them come back

i mean they all have done it yeah sugar ray leonard ali down the line and a lot of mma fighters have done it as well it's just it's so and it's the life you know you know you get okay monday morning i'm gonna do this workout and eat this and it's just a great pattern to be in it feels great you're working toward this goal in six months where this is gonna happen. And then when that goal is gone It's like well, why why am I getting up at 6 in the morning to this? I mean, I like doing that but I gotta have a reason. Yeah, I mean at Lance stayed retired probably governor of Texas by now probably right so Yeah, but and he was so beloved when he was doing a Livestrong

I mean, he was so beloved when he was doing the Livestrong Foundation and the whole deal of trying to help people with cancer and his own struggle overcoming cancer. It's just such a crazy story. Well, and really the meltdown was part of that Omerta rule. It works if everyone has something to lose. The problem was Floyd Landis. He got popped for his victory in the 2006 Tour de France for doping, which he was. And so he served his two years after a long struggle of denial and so forth. And then he wanted to come back, and he couldn't get hired. And then he went to Lance and said, well, can I be on the Radio Shack team?

And apparently Lance said no. And so there he is standing there with nothing to lose. So that's when he went to the press and said, you know, I know where the bodies are buried. And, you know, that's where it got bad. Remember when that happened and Lance held that press conference? You know, we like our story better than his story. It's like, wait, stories? He's got a story?

Just what happened? And, you know, so, and same thing with Tyler, you know, he had nothing left to lose. So he wrote that book, The Secret of Race. Here's what we did. And that blew it all open. Yeah. So how do you get into skepticism from there? Well, I was still teaching college at night while I was doing the bike racing stuff. And then I got burnout, you know, just the training and all that and decide, okay, I can't do this forever. So I went back and got my PhD in the history of science. And, and then I started, I was teaching at Occidental College. And I was like, okay, I'm a college professor. That's a great gig. It's a good life. But,

but then we started in my garage, Skeptic Magazine and the lecture series at Caltech on science and pseudoscience and cults and science and religion and alternative medicine and quackery and all this stuff. And I thought that's an interesting niche to have. And so that just got bigger and bigger in my first book, Why People Believe Where Things Came Out in 97. White People Believe Where Things Came Out in 97. And about that time, Occidental College was going through a financial crisis, and they were letting go their adjuncts, which at the time, I was not on a tenure track. I was a full-time adjunct. And I could see the writing on the wall, okay, this may not end up being a tenure track job. And the skeptic thing was getting big. And I got a big contract through my agent for my second book. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to go for it. I'm going to be a full-time writer. And, you know, it's a little risky, but I had already

done the risky thing of, you know, just dropping everything and doing the Race Across America stuff. So I thought, okay, I can do it. And this then became really my job. I still teach one class a semester at Chapman, but my main job is writing books and running the society, publishing the magazine, Skeptic. And it's kind of a niche market of it's like my column in Scientific American. I cover the topics in there that aren't covered in the rest of the magazine, you know, like cancer quackery or like I'm working on one now on Charlie Sheen's quack cancer doctor, his AIDS doctor. I mean, he's got a quack cancer. Well, he's cancer AIDS. It's AIDS., I mean. He's got a quack cancer doctor? Is he cancer or AIDS? It's AIDS, sorry.

He, you know, his tiger blood and all that, you know. Well, he doesn't have tiger, there is no tiger blood, okay. And he got HIV. And so he immediately went on the drug cocktail, which works. You know, this is a miracle of modern medicine that kind of just sort of slipped by without anybody making a big fuss about it. You know, huge teams of medical researchers, and they figured out the right cocktail,

and then you adjust it for each person. And you can't get rid of the HIV virus, but you knock it down so much that it can't, it doesn't cause the AIDS symptoms. You get pneumonia or whatever. And so he did that. But then, much to my amazement, Bill Maher on his show a couple weeks ago had this guy on, this guy from Mexico who has this cure for AIDS. And if you take this, the blood of an arthritic goat, so a goat that has arthritis. How this is determined, I'm not sure.

So a goat that has arthritis. How this is determined, I'm not sure. And so allegedly, Charlie went to Mexico and did the arthritic goat blood treatment, and it cured his AIDS. Well, none of this is true. He stopped the drug cocktail. He went down there and stopped the normal drug cocktail for AIDS, HIV. And it came roaring back, of course. If you don't keep taking the drugs, the virus starts multiplying and it roars back in your body. The goat blood didn't work, and then he came home and went back on the drug cocktail, and he's fine now.

So he went down there to actually do this? Yeah, he went down there to do this. Well, because he was probably scared. I don't know. That's what I understand. If there's already a drug cocktail that absolutely works, why would you want to stick it to blood? Well, it works just to prevent the AIDS symptoms from coming on, from you getting the diseases. You still have the HIV virus.

But doesn't it knock it down to an undetectable? Almost undetectable level, yeah. Yeah. That's correct. And that should be good enough. Well, that's what Magic Johnson said. That's right. It doesn't even show up in his tests.

That's right. Right. Like, if he gets tested right now, he's HIV positive, or negative, Magic Johnson said. That's right. It doesn't even show up in his tests. That's right. Right. Like if he gets tested right now, he's HIV positive or negative, right? Right. That's right. Yeah. Even though they don't guarantee it, just in case it's hiding in the nooks and crannies of your nervous system or wherever.

So, yeah. So that's, you know, that's the kind of thing that Scientific American wouldn't normally cover, but we would cover. Right. Or conspiracy theories like the 9-11 truthers, you know, what about the free fall of the buildings and the puffs of smoke and this and that? You know, some of these are empirical questions we can get at, you know, that normal science journals wouldn't cover, that we cover.

So skeptic is kind of a niche market for, you know, fringe claims, borderlands claims. Right. You know, like Scientific American deals a lot with global climate change, but they don't deal with the global warming deniers. Right. Who are these people? What are their arguments? So we would take on that and go, okay, here's their 10 arguments, the best arguments they have, and then here's the answers of how we know global warming is real. How do you know it's human caused?

How do we know these things? Right. Okay. Normal science journals don't have to deal with that. They're already down the path and like, okay, what are we going to do about it? And that sort of thing. So that's kind of our specialty. Well, it's an important resource because whether it's global warming or 9-11 truth or anything,

there's so much confusion out there when it comes to trying to figure out what's real and what's not real. Someone sends you a link. You're like, what is this? And it's a YouTube video. You go to the YouTube. You are being lied to. You watch it. You're like, what the hell? And it's a YouTube video. You go to the YouTube. You are being lied to. You watch it.

You're like, what the hell's going on? You don't know what's going on. And then you watch it. Like, global warming is just one of the many ones that confuses shit out of people. And then you find out that there's companies that actually have a vested interest in confusing people. Like, have you ever seen that documentary, Merchants of Doubt? I'm in it. Oh, that's right.

Yes, I'm in it. Why am I asking you that? I've seen too many documentaries, officially. I forget who's in it. The beauty of that film made by Robbie Kenner, who's now a friend of mine, was very clever because he tracked down the same scientists who were hired by the tobacco companies. Not just the same arguments, you know, planting a seed of doubt. Sometimes the same scientists who were hired by the tobacco companies. Not just the same arguments, planting a seed of doubt.

Some of the times the same people paid by these front groups. And they know how to do it too. It's so theatrical the way they present their arguments. It's one of the reasons why I've always hated those television shows where you have a host and then you have the split window and one person talking over them on this side, and one person's on the left, one person's on the right, literally and figuratively. They're yelling at each other, and you never get anything done.

You never figure out anything. But the person who's better at expressing that opinion in a real quick three- or four-minute soundbite of an interview, they get their argument across, and that's what these merchants of doubt guys were doing. That's right. Yep, they got the soundbites. The science is not all in. You know, the jury is still out. What jury? Where? You know, it's almost like there's a science czar that calls all the shots. And if we can just find out what's going on there, we're going to put us, you know, we're

going to blow this. That isn't how it works. There's 10,000 climate scientists working in all these labs and their findings converge to the same conclusion. So for there to be a conspiracy, they'd all have to be meeting on the weekends going, okay, I'm going to say that the parts per million of this particular gas is this. What are you going to say? This is not how it works. It's a very competitive enterprise. If you want to make a name for yourself and you're a young scientist,

just debunking one of these arguments about tree ring data or the ice core data would be huge. And they try. You know, it's like the people saying, you know, Einstein was wrong. You know, okay, there's been 100 years of scientists testing Einstein. If he was wrong, we would know by now. Oh, no, they all, you know, they're all conspiring to cover the truth. No, that isn't how it works. Isn't there, there's also this appeal or this, for some reason,

people are drawn to this idea of being a no-nonsense person. You know, the no-nonsense person is like, you believe in Al Gore, you believe that if you're seeing an inconvenient truth. But I find that when I talk to these people that really dismiss global climate change or dismiss a lot of people's concerns about those things, they haven't really researched it that much. They're so definitive on their ideas, but they haven't really researched it that much, but they don't want to be a fool.

Right. And that seems to be a lot of the appeal to them to take this hard stance. It's like they don't want to be one of those fools. What are you, a hippie? You buy into that nonsense? Right, right. You know? Yeah.

Yeah, it's partly that. Like, so one of the appeals of conspiracy theories is, you know, we're going to blow the lid off the thing, and I'm not being fooled by the government. I know the Bush administration lied and does, yeah, and we're going to, yeah. So, I mean, that's one of the appeals of the 9-11 truth movement is that, you know, we know what really happened. And, you know, Bush lied. Okay, well, maybe he lied about this little thing or maybe it was misdirection or bad information. But the idea of orchestrating an entire event like 9-11 and coordinating the flying of the planes into the buildings and, you know, what did they do with the passengers?

coordinating the flying of the planes into the buildings and, you know, what do they do with the passengers and how do they get the people into the World Trade Center buildings to break open the drywall and plant the explosive devices without anybody noticing how many thousands of people would have to be involved. You think the federal government could pull off something like that when they couldn't even do Watergate? I mean, it's just a hotel break-in. I forgot to bring in a book for you. Damn it. I have a doctor. He's sort of a doctor. He's really a weed doctor. He's a doctor that prescribes my medical marijuana.

I get headaches. Oh, I'm getting one right now. Anyway, he gave me this book when I went to visit him. And it was a book about Tesla technology that was used to take down the Twin Towers. Oh, I don't know this one. I was sitting in the weed doctor's office. Oh, boy. He's fucking telling me about this technology that,

what have you ever seen that turns concrete into dust? Oh, yes. Well, you know, concrete, it starts out as powder. You're talking about millions of tons of building that's compressed and falling down. Yeah, I would imagine it would be a bunch of dust. For a while, thermite was the big thing. Yes. Thermite will melt it.

Okay, so then there were tests done on the thermite, and it doesn't burn hot enough to get through a whole huge beam. Okay, well, they have— But they can cut through an engine block with that stuff, though, right? Yeah, but these beams are like the size of this tail, and they're huge. Right, but if they had a lot of thermite— Well, so then they said, well, it's super thermite. Well, it's like, well, where is this super thermite?

I never heard of it. Well, it's secret. Super secret super thermite. Well, part of the problem was some of the pieces of evidence they were using, like the cuts, the angular cuts on the beams, well, that was actually done after the buildings had collapsed. Oh, right, right. They were trying to clean it up.

They had to cut some of them down. And so they were using these photos. So there was a lot of confusion. Okay. But the thing is, you don't need to know anything about thermite or Tesla technology. We know that the planes hit the buildings. You can see it on video. You can see which floors they were at, the angle of the wings and so forth.

For that to have happened and explosive devices planted at the exact floors where they knew ahead of time what floors and what angle the plane Okay, right there. Stop. Full stop. That can't be. Well, it's very, very, very unlikely. Super unlikely. Not to mention

as G. Gordon Lindy once told me about Watergate, the incompetency problem and the people can't keep their mouth shut problem the more people you have involved the more they're going to screw up or chicken out or change their mind

or then tell their friends and lovers and so forth I know the guy that did it and pretty soon they're on your show telling about what they saw how come no one's come out to say I was sitting there in my office and I saw these guys breaking through the drywall and putting these things inside. I mean, someone like Jesse Ventura thinks, oh, it was all done under the cover of fixing the elevators in the World Trade Center. Fixing the elevators. I mean, this would have had to gone for weeks and weeks.

I don't know if Jesse Ventura really believes that. He says this stuff. I think he's selling conspiracy now. There's a bunch of people that conspiracy becomes a business. Like Alex Jones? Yeah. He's a friend of mine, and he's out of his fucking mind. Does he believe this stuff, or does he just say stuff just to see what comes out?

He believes a lot, but he gets a lot of things right. That's what's unfortunate. The unfortunate thing about conspiracies is that it's not all cut and dry. There was things like Operation Northwoods where the government really did plan on orchestrating these artificial attacks, arming Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay. They were going to blow up a jetliner and blame it on Cuba. They were going to blow up a jetliner and blame it on Cuba. There were real, actual conspiracies that we can prove. This is the problem with the 9-11 truthers or the extreme conspiracy theorists.

They're missing where the real action is. All those third world dictators we were supporting in the 70s under Kissinger's and Nixon's. All real. We were supporting in the 70s under Kissinger's, Nixon's. All real. Yeah. This stuff happened. And that's, it's not as sexy as, you know, taking over the world or running the world economy. Right.

But it's real and it's effective. Well, Oliver North. I mean, remember that? Yeah. When that was going on with the. That's a conspiracy. That's a real conspiracy. There's real ones, you know.

And then there was a real one that was apparently being planned by Dick Cheney on the way out. You know, they were planning on doing something with Iran. They were planning on some sort of a false flag. Right. But when people look at Operation Northwoods and they look at that where it would have cost American lives, they had a real conspiracy that President Kennedy vetoed that was actually signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That gets people. Well, the Bay of Pigs, that was a conspiracy. Yeah.

So there have been real conspiracies. Right. So they look at 9-11, they go, this is the grand one. This is the big one. So how can we tell the difference between the real ones? How can we? Well, so there's certain criteria. Again, the grander the theory is, the less likely it is a real conspiracy. Like global domination, running the world's economy, these sorts of things. Well, how about the big Alex Jones one? They want to cut the population down to like 500 million people worldwide. Yeah.

Well, that could happen naturally if we just educated women, made them economically empowered, and had access to birth control. That's the solution to the overpopulation problem. Do you really think that would work? People still want babies. Well, they do. Yes, of course. But the replacement level, there are a number of countries below the replacement level, and we know what the factors are, the things I just said. You know, just being a prosperous democracy in which women have the franchise and they're economically empowered and educated and they have access to birth control, the family planning happens naturally.

You don't have to do the China one-child rule. You don't have to do that. It happens naturally. So if you're pro-life, so called pro-life, and you're against abortion, and you want to reduce the amount of abortions, just educate women, give them power, and give them choice and access to birth control, and it happens naturally. Yeah, that's a weird statistic, isn't it? That the more prosperous cities become, the more the civilization becomes advanced as far as like education and technology, you get less birth rate. That's right. So it's anti-Malthusian. Malthus was wrong.

And Paul Ehrlich with the population bomb, wrong. And there's still modern neo-Malthusians that are claiming this today. You know, the Club of Rome, the limits of growth and all this stuff. No, no, no. If you want to get a population lower, just make the people super prosperous, especially the women, and it just happens naturally.

And the reason is because one reason people have so many babies in poor countries is because they're not likely to survive. Babies die, and so you've got to have lots of them to get your genes out there, so to speak. So it's a sort of a biological impulse. And then also to take care of you when you're old.

You better have six or 10 just to make sure there's a couple left when you're old to support you. You don't need to do any of that when you have a prosperous economy. The effect, though, is so scary as far as the overpopulation effect. When we look at the raw numbers from like 1970 versus 2016 worldwide, it's not that long ago in our lifetime while I was alive, the population is, you know, more than doubled. And in the United States, just in the United States, and forget about poor countries, forget about China, forget about India, you know. Yes, correct. So as the population pig works its way through the python, demographic python, it's going to take a while to catch up.

So already there's a number of countries that are below replacement level. What countries are below? Well, Japan, Sweden, Russia. I don't know. There's at least a dozen in mostly northern European countries. And that means that... But their populations are still growing by the momentum of past decades. But the current generation will have, you know, 1.9 children on average. 2.1 is the replacement level.

And I forget how many countries, 20-something countries are below 2.1 replacement level. But it'll take till about 2050 before we see the topping off of the population growth and then start to go back down. It's one reason you almost never see the curves after 2050. Because if you're a pro-environmentalist or pro-anti-population organization, you don't want to show the good news from 2050 to 2100. But the UN, two of the three UN projections, they have like a conservative middle and then more radical projections. And that by 2100, the modest middle one shows us back down to around probably six or seven billion. We'll hit a peak of nine or 10 billion in 2050, back down to where we are now in 2100. And then by 2200, maybe one or two billion.

What? Down to one or two billion. What? Yeah. Down to one or two billion? Yeah, this could happen just by if. I mean, there's so many variables, it's hard to predict. But that could happen if everybody is prosperous, particularly Africa. So one of the things the Gates Foundation is trying to do is just solve certain basic, simple problems. And the UN is trying to get rid of these corrupt governments. That's what's holding them back. There's enough food to feed 7 billion people. It's the distribution that's

the problem. The Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, we have the technology to do it. GMOs are good for feeding poor people. But it's the corrupt dictatorships that prevent the distribution of the food and resources and keeps the population from being prosperous so they have more children. So that, in my opinion, that's the long-term solution. So there's two things there. One, there's the conspiracy by the elites to hide the fact that we're going to get down to 2 billion people by 2100. We got that. Well, it's the environmentalists.

Yeah, okay. They're hiding it. They're conspiring to hide the data. We don't know for sure this is going to happen. These got that. Well, it's the environmentalists. Yeah, okay. Okay, yeah. They're hiding it. They're conspiring to hide the data. I mean, we don't know for sure this is going to happen. These are projections. I'm joking, obviously. But then there's also the food distribution conversation, which is a very fascinating one. I had these guys on from the documentary Cowspiracy, which is well-intended, but apparently got a bunch of stuff wrong about how many acres it takes to have a cow graze.

What are the requirements and what you can do with veganism versus what... It was essentially they were really heavily biased in promoting a vegan lifestyle, which is their choice. They can do that. But that's the big argument today. It's like, do we have enough land? Do we have enough resources to feed all the people my conversation has always been like okay? Are we doing it right now? Yes? We're all eating right especially the United States. Okay? Well, you know we are running out of land

We are running out of food. We are running out of this the sky is falling Yeah, but are okay are we doing it right now are we or feeding ourselves right now? We are right yeah yeah really easily in fact yeah okay we are surplus yes plenty of food not not to say that a lot of the methods we're using aren't disgusting like factory farming farming is terrible horrible and then a lot of laws to protect them are disgusting to like the ag-gag laws those are vile right yeah but why can't we keep doing it and then then the argument kind of falls apart well Well, we're going to run out of stuff.

Well, okay. So in the long run, we want to get off factory farming. It is a pretty disgusting habit. And the poly farms, you know, I call them the happy farms, you know, where every cow has a name and there's the happy chicken running around. Until he gets killed. Yeah. He has a great life until that last day. and running around.

Until he gets killed. Yeah, he has a great life until that last day. So those kinds of farms cannot support 7 billion people. So in the long run, we have to get the numbers down somewhat, and also the technology of synthetic meat, which is getting there. I think we're not five years away. I think we're maybe a couple decades away. You don't think it's possible to get a significant number of the people in this country to go vegan? No, I don't think that's going to happen.

In the Moral Archive, I have a chapter on animal rights in which I show that the numbers are still in single digits. Even with all the environmental movement and all the vegetarian, pro-vegetarian, it's still less than 10%. It's more like 6% or 7% of the population in the United States. I like the reducitarian movement. It's a new word, reducitarian. Let's just, you know, meatless Mondays. Just cut it down. And try to, you know, if you shop at Whole Foods, get the

Happy Farm meat, you know, that sort of thing. Well, obviously, if you can afford Whole Foods. I know, it's tricky. Okay, so in the long run, markets will drive down prices of, obviously, if you can afford whole foods. I know. It's tricky. Okay. So in the long run, markets will drive down prices of, say, synthetic meat. Right now, a little patty made out of stem cells is $1,000. A quarter of a million dollars. Yeah.

But, of course, that's what computers were in the 40s. Right. And so now look. And this will happen, but not in five years or 10 years. And so the idea of like, well, in the meantime, let's get everybody to go vegan. This also isn't going to happen. Why don't you think it's going to happen? I think, first of all, we have a habit of eating meat.

It tastes great. Most people like it. You can get your protein from other sources. I don't think that's a viable argument anymore. But most people, they just like it, and it culturally still has a lot of momentum. I think it's one thing to get people to care about global warming or, yeah, let's drive electric cars, whatever. You don't have to give up something that you really, really like. But food, people really like their meat.

And I would be okay if everybody went that way, but I'm not quite there yet myself. I still have meat now and then, but I've reduced it considerably compared to before. Well, the ethical considerations are the reason why people think that it's a good way to go, not necessarily protein-wise. I mean, there's a bunch of people that argue that it's very difficult to get the same amount of protein, but then there's also people that argue that you really don't need the amount of protein that most people consume anyway. Right. Well, you can try to change behavior. Yeah.

Okay. You nudge people with incentives. But why not also go the path of the technological solutions? Synthetic meat. You know, people are working on this. There are companies doing it, you know, funded by, you know, venture capitalists. You know, one of the Google X projects is to do this. Again, I think maybe it's like self-driving cars. It's going to take a few decades before everybody is there. But I'm optimistic because we're at least moving in that direction.

Yeah, I think there's a real possibility of headless animals that we've engineered in labs, and that's where we get our food from. But will it be as good for you? Will it taste as good? Well, in principle, that should just be a scientific question. Right. We know what's in meat, okay? So just put it in there in your synthetic meat.

Just design it with your designer genes. Yeah, I guess. I mean, but there's a big difference between cows that eat certain diets versus cows that eat, you know, grass-fed cows versus even health-wise as far as the – there was a study that was released recently showing the benefits of grass-fed beef versus corn-fed beef just health-wise. Yep. Yep. So, you know, I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. Because I'm curious.

I mean, if they do create synthetic meat, will it have the same properties? I would imagine you could even build in marbling, just put fat cells in there to make it juicier or something. And maybe that won't be as healthy, but maybe you think, well, I don't care. Yeah. But I would be, you know, I mean, there's a difference between the way it tastes. Like a marble, like a fat from a grass-fed cow versus a fat from a corn-fed cow versus a fat from a lab-built cow. It's going to be...

Yeah. It's also just a habit of what you're used to. I love red meat, but I almost never eat it anymore. I really don't miss it. You just kind of get into the pattern of changing your diet, and I think we could get there. I just don't think that that's the only avenue to solving the factory farming problem. I think lowering the population, synthetic meat, changing behavior, just come at it from a bunch of different angles.

That's kind of the case with every problem, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So I call it, in the moral arc, I call that protopian solutions. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine, used this term, protopia, small changes, tiny little bit of progress. It's like last year's nav system and this year's nav system in your car. This one's slightly better. It has this little feature and this little feature.

And over many years and decades, all of a sudden, you've got a super smart car versus the jalopies of the 50s. Not a flying car. You don't go from the jalopy to the flying car in one year. You go, you know, to what we have now incrementally. And that's true in all technologies. You know, it's like the Mac just keeps, you know, I've been buying Macs for, you know, 25 years, whether it's the late 80s and it's a 30. And it's the same, I pay the same price.

You know, you got 2,400 bucks. You get pretty much the same, double the computer for the same price every three years. Yeah. And that's what most technologies go through. Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the cool things about following it. One of the things that's so fascinating to me about following technology is like, ooh, Samsung has the new Galaxy S9 and it's waterproof and you can show the moon. These things are so interesting to see where this innovation is going. And when the innovation is, you know, when it's just things like,

essentially I've made the argument that if you leave cell phones alone, if everyone that's making cell phones right now said, let's just make the same cell phone forever, we're good. You know, you have an iPhone 6S, leave it there. We don't need any more innovation. Let's use that for other things. I mean, we'd probably be pretty happy. We'd be all right.

But, you know, that's not how companies work. No. But we're fascinated by innovation. Actually, I'm a little mad at Apple right now because the new OS system, I lost half my music. I don't know where it went, and I haven't taken the time to figure out how to get it back. What do you mean? Oh, it's not on your phone? No.

It's in the cloud. They're encouraging use of the cloud. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you could... So sometimes I feel the same way. Like, guys, the OS whatever was great. Just, okay, but that doesn't work. Yeah, there is a lot of nonsense that they do

when they update things, but that's also because they're trying to build in new features and they're planning several steps ahead for the future. They want everything to be in the cloud, which is kind of weird. Another thing, electric cars. I think, you know, you go to the Peterson Car Museum here

and you see electric cars from the 1920s. What happened? Another conspiracy, kind of. Sort of, yeah. Oil companies, tire companies. Did you ever see the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? Yeah, absolutely.

It's like, we should be there now. We should have been there decades ago. How about the fact that Henry Ford's first car, the fenders were made out of hemp? Is that right? And you could hit it with a hammer. I didn't know that. You've never seen it? No.

I want to show you a video then because it's really fascinating. Pull up Henry Ford, first car, hemp. They used hemp fibers to, by the way, it was legal back then. It wasn't illegal until they came up with a thing called a decorticator which allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber. That's when

William Randolph Hearst started his propaganda against hemp. Oh, is that right? Yeah, that's how marijuana became illegal. It had nothing to do with the drug,

the psychoactive aspect of it. It had to do with the textiles and using it as paper and using it as a commodity. That's when it became illegal. And it was all Hearst. William Randolph Hearst was a motherfucker.

Really? Yeah. So this car is actually made out of hemp. Oh, my God. The fenders. And Lotus did one recently where they had an exposed hood. But what's interesting about this, when you see it, Henry Ford, I don't know if it's this video, but he hit it with a hammer.

Oh, wow. I mean, incredibly durable. Hemp is an amazing, amazing plant. I don't know if you've ever picked up a hemp stalk, but it's incredibly hard, but really light. Like very, very different than any other wood. Like it's hard like a walnut, but it's light like a balsa wood. It's very, very strange. It's a very unusual car. Pull up the Lotus because it was real recent, like last year. I mean, I would not do that to my car. Exactly.

It would bend like crazy. It's lighter and stronger than steel, which is insane. Right. Well, you know, the whole thing with how do drugs become illegal, that's a kind of a conspiracy, you know, sort of a conspiracy stuff going on. Well, hemp is a real conspiracy because hemp is non-psychoactive. The fact that it's still illegal. I mean, they're just now starting to grow it in America. We sell hemp. My company Onnit sells hemp protein, which is legal, non-psychoactive, doesn't have any THC in it. We had to buy it from Canada.

Really? Yeah. See this right here? This is the new Lotus that is the entire roof. If they show it, see if you can find a picture where they show the actual car itself, Jamie. But all these panels are made out of hemp. Oh, my gosh. And look how, like, it's insanely light. Yeah, but if you show the actual car itself, Jamie, you can see, maybe go to the front, the beginning of the video, you can see the actual hood of the car, it's exposed.

Okay. So they essentially made a giant percentage of the car out of hemp, including the seats. That looks lighter than carbon fiber. Yes. Hey, I wonder if anyone's made a hemp bicycle. That's a good question. Because that's the whole thing about carbon fiber. It's so lightweight but strong.

Yeah. So if what you're saying about hemp is true, there should be hemp bikes. Yeah. And a lot of other light things, like bows and things along those lines. I think that that's a real conspiracy. That's a conspiracy back... I mean, there's a reason why Orson Welles made that movie, Citizen Kane, about William Randolph Hearst, who's an insanely, insanely powerful and influential man who didn't really use that influence in the best way for society. He had paper mills and he didn't want to convert his paper into hemp paper. Hemp

paper was far superior, but it would have cost him millions of dollars because he had forests. And so Popular Science Magazine back then, see if you could find this color, it was hemp, the new billion dollar crop. A bicycle from hemp. There you go. Hey, oh wow, it's already been done. That's a good looking bike. Okay. Yeah, there you go. I have a carbon looking bike. Okay. Yeah, there you go. I have a carbon fiber bike. Maybe I'll have to start looking at that. Yeah, I don't know where you could buy one of those.

Why is there no THC in the hemp? It's only in the leaves? Because it's only in the female plants, in the flower. It's in the flower, in the buds. That's the female is the one you get high off of. The male is, but what you want is the stalk of it. You're not looking for the flowers. Right.

So when you're using it to make things. Right. But the seeds. But hemp. Oh, there we go. It's on the cover of Popular Science. Oh, wow. From like way back then.

That looks like about 1930s or 40s. Yeah. Well, I believe it was, I want to say 30, it was 33 or something like that, or 35 when it was made illegal. And they made it illegal and they were calling it marijuana, which is really interesting, which is a slang for a Mexican wild tobacco. It's not even cannabis. So when they were making marijuana illegal, they didn't even know that they were making hemp illegal. It was very tricky the way they did it They made these articles they printed all these articles about Mexicans and blacks raping white women because they were high on this new drug, right?

That's also what funded reefer madness. I'm sure you've seen of course all those those are real conspiracy Yes, absolutely and that's people that had a vested financial interest in making something illegal a commodity. It's so crazy because the fact that marijuana or the cannabis plant is so versatile, it does so many different things. They figured out a way to attack one aspect of it and demonize the entire plant and then eliminate competition. Because it makes a far superior paper, far superior cloth. It's incredibly durable.

The paper, if you ever had hemp paper in front of you, it feels like a regular piece of paper, but it's really hard to tear. It's really interesting stuff. They should make money out of that. Exactly. Well, what do they make money out of now? Well, it's a cotton fiber. Yeah.

So, well, and there was a documentary on about the public transportation system here in LA that was quite extensive in the 30s with the electric trolleys and all this stuff. And they all got ripped out and torn down and the cars were burned and so on just because the automobile industry and the oil industry wanted it. It's like L.A. should be a car. The entire country should be a car culture rather than a public transportation culture. My wife's from Cologne, Germany. Public transportation in Europe is fantastic.

You really don't need a car except for rare occasions. Here, when she moved here to be with me, it's like, oh, got to have a car. You can't get anywhere. Yeah. And again, that's kind of a conspiracy. Yeah. And those are the kinds of things we should be focusing on and talking about. Right.

I think. The war on drugs. I mean, I don't know if you'd call that a conspiracy, but it's over. It's been over for decades. Well, it's also so blatant that it's only the war on some drugs. Yes. It's not like we're trying to keep everyone sober. We're just going to sell sanctioned drugs that have tax codes.

And that's really what the war is on, the drugs that you can't control and tax. It's so blatant and obvious. Right. Why not treat it like an industry, like any alcohol industry? Sure, sure, absolutely. Like alcohol. I mean, alcohol is an unbelievably devastating drug and readily available almost everywhere.

We've got enough in that back room to kill you. If you want to kill yourself, you can drink right now. While this show is going on, in the next hour, you'll be dead. Isn't that amazing? That's amazing. And that's legal. And no one cares. Everybody will go, wow, Michael Shermer drank himself to death. Oh, poor guy.

You know what I mean? It's not like, oh man, he did drugs and he had an OD. Wow, that's so tragic. Drugs are awful. They're everywhere. Every street you go down, you pass by liquor stores and restaurants that sell alcohol. It's all awful. They're everywhere. Every street you go down, you pass by liquor stores and restaurants that sell alcohol. It's all just molecules in your brain, in your body. So what's the difference?

Well, there's absolutely real, legitimate conspiracies, and I do agree with you that those are the ones to focus on, but they're not sexy. The sexy ones are UFOs, Bigfoot, that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Global domination. Yes. I did this show for the Sci-Fi Channel called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. Oh, right. I remember that. Yes. Yeah. I went around and I talked to experts, believers, non-believers, scientists, all these different

people about a bunch of different subjects. And boy, my desire to do that show before I started doing it was very high and my desire to completely avoid any any of that nonsense towards the end of the show was it was almost like I couldn't do it anymore really cuz I already recognized what was going on and in so many of these cases that was like this is just a bunch of people that want to believe right they have these ideas in their head and they want to chase these ideas down, whether it's Bigfoot or whether it's UFOs,

and they're not being objective even remotely. The vast majority of the people that are a part of the movement or the community, they're like researchers, ghosts, or researchers, Bigfoot, or researchers, nice people, but the way they're looking at it is the same. It's the same whether it's Bigfoot or chemtrails or UFOs. They're not being objective. They're going, well, maybe this. What about that?

Well, have we considered this? Nope. They're just going, we know the evidence is out there. The government has been hiding extraterrestrial life in this country. Like where? Where's the government? Where's the government doing this? Where's the evidence? We know from government doing this? Where's the evidence?

We know from surveys that if you tick the box that you believe in aliens or whatever, you'll tick all the other boxes, too. Ghosts, psychics. Exactly, the whole thing. So there's a certain personality that gravitates toward those kinds of beliefs and then buys the whole thing,

even when they contradict each other. Like, people that believe that Princess Di was murdered also are more inclined to say she faked her death and is still alive somewhere. She's hanging out with Tupac. Yeah. They can't both be true. But again, there's, so with this, there's some cognitive dissonance that we want to balance between the size of the event and the size of the cause. I think, you know, the Holocaust, one of the worst things that's ever happened, worst genocide ever, conducted by one of the worst political regimes in human history. So there's kind of a balance there.

But if you have like JFK, the leader of the free world, powerful, articulate, handsome, and so on, and he's brought down by who? Lee Harvey Oswald, some lone nut, this loser. So you've got to pile on the mafia and the CIA. Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? Yeah, I do. Absolutely. Absolutely, no question about it. Why do you think that?

Well, first of all, there's a ton of evidence that he did do it. And most of the JFA conspiracy people also agree he was involved, that he was one of the shooters. See, that's one that I'm... They think there's more than one shooter. So we have lots of evidence that he did it. We have his rifle. We have his rifle. We have the paper trail of when he bought the rifle. His fingerprints are on the rifle that was found in the hit zone. Right, but weren't the fingerprints found several days after they found the rifle?

No, no, no. It was right—they had it right away. Did they? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of stuff with that conspiracy, though, that's really slippery. Well, okay, so here's one of the things that happens. The moment something takes on great significance, our mind focuses on little anomalies.

Like, why was there that guy in Dealey Plaza with the umbrella? You know, it's a sunny day. It's not going to rain. Okay, so he was out there protesting. Decades later, they've tracked this guy down. He was called the Umbrella Man. It's like the cigarette-smoking man on X-Files. Like, ooh, who is the Umbrella Man? And that the umbrella must have been a gun and so forth.

And he said, no, this is a thing left over from World War II. Chamberlain and his umbrella, and he sold out to Hitler. And so the umbrella became a protest against government, whatever. And so he was protesting Kennedy with his umbrella. So that's a typical thing. Who cares if somebody has an umbrella or not, sunny day, whatever. Yeah, that seems like a silly thing to concentrate on. But the moment something big happens, okay, what is the meaning of that? Well, I've never even heard of that umbrella guy. But I've researched, did you ever read

David Lifton's book, Best Evidence? Yeah, yeah. That's a pretty fascinating book. But Vincent Bugliosi, he addressed all of those claims. One of his last books was— Case Closed. No, that was Gerald Posner. Okay.

Also a good book. Yeah. What was Bugliosi's book? It was like Restoring History or something like that. It's a big, massive thing. He did a shorter version. But he lined up all those claims. Like one of them was, how did Oswald get a job at the Book Depository building that was right on the parade route?

He's got a turn right in front of it. There's Kennedy. He must have known he was planted there by operatives that knew this was going to – no. So I think it was Posner who tracked down when the White House determined that Kennedy was even going to go to Dallas. And then months later, the parade route is determined just before he went. And Oswald had that job there months before. It was just pure chance, randomness. So much of human history turns on random events. It's like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that triggered the First World War. This was a conspiracy. There were seven operatives of the Black Hand,

which was this Serbian nationalist organization, and they wanted to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Okay, so, and we know what, you know, they went to this house to get the weapon and that house to get the grenade and the rifle, and they, you know, you stand on this corner, I'm going to be over there. And this is typically how it goes. A couple of them chickened out. Somebody did, they went to the house.

The person wasn't there to give them their weapon. So there's like three of them left, and then one of them threw the hand grenade and bounced off the car and went under another car and damaged that car, but not the Archduke's car. And so the whole thing was bungled. And off he went, and he gave a speech. And then he decided to go back to the hospital to visit the people that were hurt in the trailing car. And they took the parade route backwards on the course. And there's this guy, Princeps, sitting there on the curb, despondent, like, well, that was a screw-up. And here comes the Archduke. Bam!

Well, it was a little more complicated than that. In fact, the car stalled out because the cars back then were really bad at going in reverse. Right. So he was trying to put the car in reverse. The driver of the car was putting it in reverse. It was a convertible, right? Yeah. He was putting it in reverse.

The car stalled out. And at that moment, a guy was coming out of a store or a restaurant where he had a sandwich. Right. Because they had something to eat after it was over. Right. And he literally walked out. He was right there and shot him and shot his wife. So that's typically how conspiracies go.

That definitely can happen. So that's typically how conspiracies go. That definitely can happen. And obviously if Oswald had that job long in advance, it shows before they ever planned that out, it showed that there's a lot of randomness involved. Lincoln assassination, that was a conspiracy. They were going to assassinate the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of war. And they had all the guys going to do this. And they all screwed up. And the only one that succeeded was Booth. but we knew that there was a conspiracy within hours and then

within days they got the whole thing where are the people that did this to kennedy or 9-11 who where are the other operatives who is it who did it well wasn't there uh some deathbed confessions from what was his name hunt was that the industrialist that that guy, the photos of him, that he was arrested at the scene of the crime? You remember the hobos that were arrested that were behind the grassy knoll? I mean, there were so many people that called that said that they had heard shots from the grassy knoll.

There was more than one. Well, that's possible because there was an echoing effect. Right. If you go to Dealey Plaza, it's surprisingly small. And our imagination is huge. It's weird when you go see it, yeah. And there's a museum now on the sixth floor of the book. You can look right out the window and you can see the X on the street, first shot, second

shot, and it's close. Yeah, there it is. Howard Hunt. Oh, yeah, Howard Hunt. Yeah, Confessions of Howard Hunt. And that he had said that on his deathbed, he was a CIA spy, and on his deathbed, and he obviously convicted Watergate conspirator. Right.

And he said that he was involved in the assassination. He said that on his deathbed he talked about how he's an active participant. Yes, okay, well then I don't know. I don't know this particular one. But why would you be so quick to think that

more people weren't involved in killing Kennedy? I was open to the possibility. I mean, we did this issue of Skeptic, you know, 50 years later. Right. And what closed it for you? Well, what closed it was that bookcase closed. Just one book? Well, and then Bolognese's book.

I started reading, you know, just here's the claim, here's the explanation, here's the—hundreds of them. Did they cover Hunt? I don't remember. Probably. How do they cover the fact that the magic bullet theory was concocted because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb under the overpass? You know that, right? Yeah, but Nova did a whole two-hour special on the magic bullet. Yeah, I saw that.

And the seats were not lined up. They're like this, so it didn't have to make a right turn, left turn kind of thing. Yeah, that's – I mean, look, I hunt and I shoot guns and bullets do weird things when they hit things. They ricochet off stuff and they go left and they go right. They go all over the place. The idea that you're going to accurately determine when someone shoots someone and hits bone where that bullet's going to go next is crazy. They do weird things. They come out of people's heads.

Sometimes you shoot someone in the front and it'll come out the top of their head. It doesn't make any sense. But what doesn't make sense more than that is the pristine condition of that bullet after shattering bone. Well, it wasn't that pristine. It was squished. Compared to a bullet that's hit bone, there's like— Yeah, but they've shot—I'm pretty sure it was the Nova one that shot through the gel and then also a pig bone or something like that. Yeah, but when they shot, I'm pretty sure it was the Nova one, that shot through the gel and then also a pig bone. Yeah, but when they shot bone, it was shattered. They've never been able to recreate

the, get a bullet to look like that after a shattered bone. Never. When the bullet hit Connolly, it broke more than one bone in his body. It broke three different bones, I believe. And dislodged, or broke his wrist. Like, there's the bullet. Look at it. That's not that damaged, man.

Yeah, but if you look at it on edge, it's bulging. We have a picture of it here. By the way, if you shoot... See, there it is. There it is. So it is compressed. That's nothing, man. But if you shoot a bullet in the water, it looks like that.

Have you ever shot a bullet in the water? No, I haven't done that yet. They don't... Look, when the bullet is coming out and it's, you know, there's the gunpowder goes off and it's flying out right you're gonna have some distortion and when a bullet shoots into a pillow or it shoots into anything you're gonna have some distortion because there's just a sheer force and velocity of that bullet but when you shatter bone when they all get bent up and distorted they don't get like that

that's not something that hit anything, in my opinion. I think that if that, not only that, the way they found it on the gurney, on Connolly's gurney when he was in the hospital, oh, look, we found the bullet. Here it is. It's ridiculous. That smacks of conspiracy, that bullet more than anything. I'm not saying that I know what happened, but I know that the reason why they came up with the fact that one bullet did the damage, not just in Kennedy, but also in Connolly, was because they had an account for that bullet that hit the underpass. It hit the underpass. It ricocheted. It hit some guy. And that guy went to the hospital.

They found the bullet hole in the granite of the curbstone. So they had to account for that. And that's why they came up with it. Also, it was Arlen Specter was one of the guys who came up with that theory it was a notorious scumbag who's on the Watergate Commission right you know right there's a lot of funkiness is what I'm saying and I'm not but I have been in the past inclined to gravitate towards some pretty ridiculous conspiracies but that bullet is anybody that knows anything about hunting or guns or any any person that I know that

I've talked to like, is this shot anything? Everyone says no. Everyone says it hasn't hit bone. Right. One thing to remember is that in all investigations or fields of inquiry, there's always a residue of unexplained anomalies. That any physics theory, evolution, whatever, you know, there's always, yeah, but how do you explain this one little weird thing here that doesn't really get accounted for by your explanation over here? And the answer is, I don't know.

No theory explains everything. But if you have an alternative theory, you have to explain all the stuff over here that the mainstream theory explains and the anomalies, if you want to be taken seriously. And usually the focus on the anomalies is to the exclusion of all the other stuff that is nicely explained by the mainstream theory. So, again, Lone Assassin explains a lot, not everything. So what do you do with the anomalies? Nothing. You don't have to do anything with them.

I mean, it's okay to say, okay, that's weird. Let's keep investigating. But to then make the leap, well, we know there was a second shooter. No, we just know there's anomalies. We definitely don't know there was a second shooter. There's no evidence whatsoever that we can say, look, here we know for a fact there was a second shooter. We don't. There's nothing, right?

But we also don't know that one bullet did all that damage. And the only reason why we believe that one bullet did all that damage is because that was what was presented. And that they had this one bullet that they said that they found in connelly's gurney that caused all this damage that seems rather unlikely yeah very very unlikely in fact the other thing we uh let's see we had the the number of people that heard three shots four shots i don't whenever you say the number of people like god man yeah i just don't buy eyewitness testimony in a murder like that. It sounds so crazy. That's good. Well, that's right,

because it's not reliable. Well, not only that, there's so much chaos. When you're there and the president gets shot, bang, bang, everybody's adrenaline's flying. They're running around. I heard a hundred shots. You're going to get outliers. You're going to get people that are caught. You're going to get some people that have served maybe in the military and are used to, like, chaotic events that can recall it clearly and soberly. You're going to get a few of those. But good luck sifting through all that shit. Right. Eyewitness evidence.

That's one of the things that drives me crazy about 9-11. When people are really into the 9-11 story, they say, people heard explosions in the buildings. This guy said that he saw this and he saw it they don't know what the fuck they saw these giant buildings are falling down everybody's freaking out yeah I saw I tell the story once I saw a squirrel in the woods once and I thought it was a wolf for like two seconds like I was in Canada and I saw what's fucking squirrel what's wrong with me you know like I was in Canada, and I said, what's a fucking squirrel? What's wrong with me? You know, like, I was worried about wolves. So I thought I saw, for like, I mean, like, legit solid two seconds, I thought this fucking squirrel was a wolf.

So I don't buy the eyewitness stuff. But I also don't buy these people that are trying to, like, neatly, like, case closed. Not really. No. No. There's a lot of weird shit with that Kennedy assassination thing. There's also a lot of people that were mad at him. There's absolutely...

Every president has enemies who would like to see him get killed. He had a lot. I mean, Kennedy was a very volatile human being. More than Obama today? Yes. Oh yeah, I think so. Really? What Kennedy was trying to do as far as close the Federal Reserve. He wanted to get rid of the CIA. He wanted to do a lot. He was opposed to secret service or

secret societies. I mean, that massive speech that he did about secret societies. He was a very fascinating guy in a lot of ways and flawed in many as well. And I'm sure if he was a president today, he would be involved in probably, he would be like one of the most scandalous presidents of all time. Yes. But I'm not buying this. I mean, I definitely don't think that Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent guy. It seems pretty obvious that he was involved in a lot of shady shit. Totally.

And remember, he had tried to assassinate General Walker just in April before that and failed. I just don't think that he was by himself. I just don't. I don't think, I just really don't think that he was by himself. I just don't. I just really don't think that he was the only one involved in that. And also, the way a lone assassin could operate, that is the likeliest scenario. In a free society, you can disappear into the nooks and crannies of big cities and no one will ever notice you.

It's like the 9-11 pilots that were training to take off but not ever learn to land. Why didn't we notice that? Well, we weren't looking for that. Yeah, there's too many things going on. I mean, after the fact, it's so easy to be an armchair quarterback and go, you know, I'll tell you what, they would have known. They should have known. Well, after Pearl Harbor, there were conspiracy theories that Roosevelt either knew, either

orchestrated or knew it would happen, let it happen, to squelch the American Firsters Movement, which was supported by Lindbergh, and he had promised Churchill support, but he could only do so much, the destroyers and all that. You know, we need to have... And then something happens. Okay, so it looks like, oh, he must have been involved because he is then able to act and get America into the Second World War. Yeah.

But usually politicians act in response to something. Now's my opportunity to take advantage of this thing that happened to get my way. Well, all politicians do that. It doesn't mean they're conspiring to make the thing happen to get their way. Well, I don't think the argument was that he was conspiring. The argument was that he knew and then pulled out some of the more major warships so that they invited the attack. It's like the August 9th, 2001 memo

from Condoleezza Rice, Osama bin Laden, to attack U.S. soil. Right. Okay, what about that? Clearly, Bush must have known. Okay, what we're forgetting is the tens of thousands of pieces of intel that come in every day right this could happen this could and after the fact you go

back and go oh look there's the one right we should have known yeah same thing with pearl harbor you know japanese might attack in hawaii yeah but they might attack in the philippines they might attack alaska they may attack you know and so on and so on which is the right one that we're supposed to then focus our resources on? You don't know until it happens. And then you go back and go, you're fired because you should have acted on that memo. Well, but that's the problem. Well, I think you would have to be an expert in code as well. You'd have to be an expert to be able to understand what they had, what they had intercepted,

what codes it intercepted and what information they actually had back then. It's, it's again, one of those things that after the fact, it's very easy to draw conclusions saying this had to be a conspiracy. I mean, I think even the History Channel had something where they were saying that they knew that the attack was going to happen. They let it happen so that they could get into World War II. Right. Well, that was a conspiracy theory at the time.

And there was a congressional investigation, so the equivalent of the Warren Report, about that and concluded, no, that there was no conspiracy on the part of the U.S. government or any administration that should be held responsible. I mean, a few people, I think, were fired for not having the planes in the right place or something like that. But again, that's just... And then the other thing we had, the other psychological effect is that we tend to, when you're on the outside, you tend to see big organizations as more powerful than they really are.

Big corporations, CEOs, big government agencies, and the administrators that run them. From the outside, it looks like I know they have a lot of power and they can do a lot of things. But when you get the job, then you find out, oh, there's a lot of things I can't do. And here's another one of these conspiracy theories that might be true. When you get elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, okay, here's what's actually going on at Gitmo. Here's what's actually going on in Iraq. No one knows, but you can't pull the troops out. You can't close the base. You can't, oh, well, I said I was going to do that. Yeah, don't worry about it. They all say that,

that you can't do it. Oh, all right. I think there's a lot of that that goes on that you don't find out, that we just right. I think there's a lot of that that goes on that you don't find out, that we just don't know. We couldn't. Maybe later. It's all speculation. But I think when you're dealing with something like these massive global events after they occur, people are always trying to do some sort of investigative reporting. They're trying to figure it out. They're trying to go back over the pieces and connect things that make sense. And the problem is you get confirmation bias on both sides. You get confirmation bias where people are trying to show very clearly

that there was no conspiracy whatsoever. And then you get people that are trying to see conspiracy in everything. And I think with a lot of these stories, a lot of these like major events, like whether it's JFK's assassination or, you know, many other ones, there's, there's a lot of weirdness to them that make it real hard to wrap up nice and tight. And when people can't wrap them up nice and tight, they get very uneasy. Yep. And it's okay to just say, I don't know, it could be a conspiracy. Maybe not. Let's just keep an open mind. I mean, you don't have to construct a whole another worldview of operatives and agents and plots. You could just say, that's a weird thing.

Exactly. And I think it's also very important that we recognize that there have been conspiracies before. Like 9-11 by itself is a conspiracy. That's right. 19 members of Al-Qaeda plotting to fly planes into buildings. That's a conspiracy. They conspired. And that's one group that we don't know. We also

know about, like we said, Operation Northwoods and there's been some false flag events that happened. I mean, the Gulf of Tonkin. That'ss, and there's been some false flag events that happened. I mean, the Gulf of Tonkin, that's another one. There's been some lies. You know, we know that. So it makes the whole thing, like, really weird.

But this is, I mean, we're talking about actual real events as opposed to, like, psychics or tarot card readers. You know, my wife's friend went to a fucking psychic the other day and i had to listen to this nonsense they were talking to me about the psychic thing and oh you know we went and she knew everything and she it was so amazing and she was asking me about my aunt and how could she have known like oh fucking christ i first i wish i was there yeah i wish i was there to see what kind of questions she asked and how you answered yeah because usually they they tell the psychics yes they get fed back later well they they have these leading questions and then you give them partial answers and then they fish for more and

then before you know it they're you know you're all you're filling in the blanks together and they want to believe you know yeah and a lot of times just like some weird social aspect to it like a hand holding or something like that which which is like this, an intimacy thing where you don't, you don't want to be confrontational with this person. And so you sort of kind of help them. You're both in each other's space cause you're only like two feet away from each other. It's odd. There's a lot of oddness and a lot of, it's a real psychodrama. Yeah. I had a friend who worked the psychic friends network line back in the nineties line back in the 90s when Dionne Warwick owned that company. And he was a magician that couldn't quite make a decent living doing magic stuff, so he did this on the side.

And it became fairly lucrative. So he told me he operated from home, and you just have another phone line, and they send you the calls. I think he got $0.60 on the minute, and the company was $ it was $3.95 a minute and he got 60 cents on the minute, but they rewarded you. The longer you keep them on the subjects on the line, the more higher percentage you get of each minute. And so he would do this by, you know, working through different categories. And mostly people call it night and weekends. They're lonely, need somebody to talk to, you know, love, health, money, career, especially love, relationships, you know, jobs, your boss, you know, so people would just yak, yak, yak, yak. And then he got pretty good, sort of like the analogy I make is

like with Dr. Laura's call-in talk show. You know, she has a rich database of problems that people have, why they call her. And, you know, every, so every call she knows within 10 seconds, oh, it's problem number 7. It's number 16. You're the one with the guy. And you just hone right in on it. So these psychics, they have a deep database of human psychology. I like how you

connected Dr. Laura to it. Well, she was, you know, I used to listen to that show. Do you find similarities? Absolutely. Not that she's running a psychic scam. Not at all. But that the psychology, there's only so many variations of human psychology and human nature. What do people care the most about?

Relationships, you know, love, health, money, career. So you just work your way through those four. And then people just open up and pour stuff out, take a few notes. And then like 45 minutes later, well, let's talk about your Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob, how could he have known about Uncle Bob? Well, you told him half an hour ago. So people forget that. Right.

So if you record them, you videotape them or tape record them, it's very enlightening. I did a show with John Stossel when he was with ABC 2020 on James Van Praagh. And they didn't tell Van Praagh I was involved, but they taped him all day, bringing people in to do readings and cameras and set up and stuff like this. And when you sit there with a counter, like how many times has he asked this question

or say these things? And it's just hundreds. And so his hit rate was maybe less than 10%, but they only remembered the handful of the 10% and forgot the hundreds of names he would throw out and comments he would make. And so there's a confirmation bias. There's a high data rate. You're just pouring stuff out. And then people pick out the ones that they remember.

And then we'd catch him cheating once in a while. Like, you know, well, let's take a break, everybody. Break. Then you leave the camera rolling. And then he starts chatting with people. You know, so, who are you here for? Oh, my aunt. She passed over. Oh, okay. Yeah. And then like half an hour later, I'd like to come to this woman here.

Now, don't tell me who you're here for, but I'm getting them. I see a woman over your left shoulder. I don't want to say sister. Is it an aunt? Oh, my God. And it looks, you know, so it's edited and shoulder I don't want to say sister I'm mother is it an ant oh my god yeah and you know and it looks you know it's edited and the way it looks you know like they're really getting something but when you when you really see it in operation you can see the whole thing unfolds completely as a psychodrama we

had this guy on the sci-fi show his name is banish aq he's a I know bandage yeah I know he's great and it's banachek he's oh i know banachek yeah i know he's great he's fantastic because he's a magician and he does those psychic reading things but he'll tell you right away this is a trick i am really good at it i am not a psychic i have no psychic ability whatsoever but i can't tell you how i'm doing this but i know how to do this right and he was bending spoons doing all this craziness and you know did card, all kinds of crazy stuff where you go, this is insane. How is this possible? But he was really adamant about letting you know, these people that are psychics that are telling you about your future, your past, they're all con people. They're doing terrible things.

They're trying to pretend that your dead relatives are communicating with you from the great beyond. They're giving you the sense of hope, but they're all scammers. And, you know, having a guy like that, who's very skilled at that style of, you know, I think he calls it he's a mentalist, right. It's amazing to watch, though. It is. God, he's so good at it. Banachek's one of the best, yeah. But he's also one of the leaders of the skeptical movement, which is ethical magic. Yes. Well, he's an entertainer. And he's not doing anything horrible. He's not ripping anybody off, and he's really adamant about it. So I love him. I love what he's doing.

Yep. I was on a cruise with him once, one of these cruise ship things with other skeptics. And so he did some of these mentalism stuff, and he told with him once, one of these cruise ship things with other skeptics. And so he did some of these mentalism stuff and he told me how he did one of them. He's pretty good about not telling the truth. But I really pressed him on this particular thing where he would touch somebody like on the shoulder here and then you're blindfolded. And then and then you would say, I felt like you touched me on the same, you know, the left shoulder or the right. And he had a whole sequence of these things where the other person was picking up on the cue of where he was being touched.

Anyway, I was just stunned by this. It's like, how is he doing this? I know he's not really psychic. And then he told me how he did it. I'm like, oh, oh, that is so good. And it's so simple. But you can't tell us. No, I can't.

But you can't tell us. No, I can't. And that's really probably the best reason why you don't want to know how the magicians do it, because it's almost always super simple and like, oh, I should have seen that. Well, Penn and Teller was Penn Jillette. Teller really doesn't talk that much. But there was an old show that was on television in Australia or radio. I think it was on radio or television. I don't remember. But there was this trick that they did. Um, and it was the way that Penn like, God damn it. I'm trying to, I'm struggling to remember how exactly it worked, but it was this woman who could, uh,

she, she could tell the future or she could, she could some sort of psychic ability. And Penn explained it. And the way he explained it, he didn't want to explain it. They did it on the radio. It's for Radiolab, the Radiolab podcast. And they explained it on their web. I'm doing a terrible job explaining this. But when you hear the explanation, I won't give it out because I don't want to ruin it for anybody who hasn't heard it before.

But when you hear the explanation, you go, oh, God. Yeah. That's it. Of course. Yeah, that's right. Oh, you fuckers. You fuckers. But having that, the ability to sneaky trick people like that,

boy, you can make a lot of money if you're an unethical person. Yeah, that's right. You can fool a lot of people. But like one of the examples I use, Penn and Teller do the cups and balls, but they use clear plastic cups. So you can see where the ball is and how it's being done. But you still get fooled. Yes.

Because the power of the sort of following his gaze or following the movement of the hand and this and that, it's done so well that you still miss it. Even though with the clear plastic. So this is a good example where even knowing the trick, you might still be fooled. What is it about people that want to find, is it something about the search for human knowledge? Like the thing that's always inside of people where they're trying to find out where is the food? Where's the enemy coming from? What's going to happen in the future? Where's the enemy coming from?

What's going to happen in the future? It seems to be like some search for human knowledge that is a part of people's desire to uncover mystery. You know, there's almost like a genetic calling to find. Absolutely, yeah. You know? Well, what it is is just learning and survival. So, you know, I call this patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. And my thought experiment is imagine you're a hominid on the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago, small brain, australopithecine, your name is Lucy. And you hear a rustle in the

grass. Is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind? So if you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, that's a type one error, false positive. You thought A was connected to B, but no harm. You just become skittish and cautious or whatever. But if you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch. You've just been given a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early before reproducing. So in other words, it's better to just assume that all things you think are connected, all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind, just in case. And there's not a big cost to pay for making a type 1 error a false positive.

There's a higher cost for making a type 2 error a false negative. So we assume that this is the basis of superstition and magical thinking. We just assume that this is connected to that. You pull the slot, you do this, you pull the slot machine, you win or whatever. And this is what Skinner showed back in the 50s, where you just randomly give reinforcements to rats and pigeons and whatever they were doing just before they got rewarded, they'll just repeat that behavior, even if it's like twirling counterclockwise twice. And that's the basis of superstition. There's nothing wrong with their brains. They're just trying to find causal connections between events and the environment. And that's the basis of superstition. There's nothing wrong with their brains. They're just trying to find causal

connections between events and the environment. And that's the basis of survival. So all of us are subject to making those connections. Some are more gullible than others, say, or more skeptical. But for the most part, all of us can easily be fooled if it's done right. That's the beauty of good cons, good scams, is that anybody could fall for them, even smart people. And if anything, smart people are more likely to believe weird things in this sense, that once they believe it, they think they've drawn a connection. They're better at rationalizing the reasons why they believe than, say, less educated or less intelligent people. And so as people like Banaszczyk will tell you, there's nothing better than an audience of scientists at MIT.

Oh, boy. I can really fool them because they think they're so smart. I can't be fooled. Wow. Okay, he must be doing something really, really super psychic because, you know, I'm super smart. Well, no, because all of our sensory apparatus works the same, and magicians know how to manipulate your gaze, your attention, whatever, and how to fool you.

It's just so weird how people are drawn to trying to uncover mysteries. So, you know, whether it's ghosts or whether it's like how many goddamn ghost shows do they have to have where no one ever sees a ghost before they stop having ghost shows? I know. Those things drive me crazy. I know. We don't do very many issues like on astrology, is it real? It's like, you know, we took care of this, you know, decades ago. There's nothing new.

Okay, astrology as far as like, you know, hey, you're a Leo, so you're inclined to be a leader, like that kind of bullshit. But is there anything to those really complex astrological readings where they look for the time of day you were born and Mercury's and retrograde and all that? Have you looked into that? Yes. I know nothing about it. Nothing to it? Nothing at all.

Nope. Absolutely nothing. It's all in the psychology of the reading. So if you mix up somebody's reading for, you know, you're a Leo, but, you know, we give you the Virgo reading or whatever for that day, almost everybody will go, yep, boy, that's a perfect— So it's all total hustle. Yeah, all of it. But what about Nancy Reagan? She believed.

I don't understand what you're saying. Yes, God rest her soul. God rest her soul. Didn't she use a psychic to, like, make— She did, yeah. No, she consulted a little bit. I mean, this got played up quite a bit for Ronnie's travel schedule a little bit. I don't think we can say that state decisions were being based on astrological readings.

And it could have also been like, you know, you always know someone who has a wacky husband or a wacky wife that believe in any shit. And then the person sort of like, oh, dear. Yes. What did you say? Okay, I'll listen. Somehow I don't think President Reagan was paying much attention to astrology. He wasn't paying much attention to anything towards the end. No.

You know? Yeah. But this desire to uncover hidden mysteries has always been really confusing to me because myself, personally, I felt the pull, especially aliens and UFOs. I went deep, deep, deep into when I was really young. I got into the Roswell thing, and there's a lot of different connections with the Roswell conspiracy about this crashed UFO in New Mexico in 1947 and all the eyewitness reports. And, boy, you go down the rabbit hole of that thing and you could waste years of your life.

You know, there was a study done in, I think it was a UFO report done in the late 50s. I think it was 59. The 500 most important UFO cases of the last 20 years. Roswell wasn't even on the list. What? How is it not on the list? Roswell didn't become Roswell until 1980 when there was a made-for-TV movie and then a best-selling book.

That's probably when I jumped in. Yeah. Charles Berlitz, the language book publisher, he got into- They got me, those fucks. Those books. After Van Donnigan, the Chariots of the Gods is a bestseller. Then books started pouring out about aliens and UFOs and TV shows. And then there was the movie. Remember when Chariots of the Gods was a filmseller. Then books started pouring out about aliens and UFOs and TV shows. And then there was the movie.

Remember when Chariots of the Gods was a film that was released in the theaters? I remember Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of. Oh, yeah, man. Conjecture. In Search Of was great. Yeah, it was a great show. I loved that. I used to watch that show.

But that's- That got me in a big foot. But that's an example of how the popular media drives a lot of these things. Sure. What do we really know back then? Nothing. I mean, it was just a couple little anomalous things. And here's an example, conspiracy.

Okay, so the government lied when they said it was a weather balloon. Yes, they did. You're surprised that governments lie? Really? Right. Because, of course, it was a high-altitude surveillance balloon listening for the acoustic signatures of a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere by the Soviets. So, of course, when this debris came down in the farmer's field there outside of Roswell, Mexico, of course they're not going to come out and hold a press conference and go,

well, see, actually what we were doing is launching this project to listen to Soviet. It was a weather balloon. It's always suspicious, too, when something becomes not just a story, but it also becomes business. And Roswell became a giant business. But much, much later. Again, there were a bunch of sightings in the 40s and 50s. Of course.

But that's around the time that there was a lot of experimental aircraft. Of course. And so whenever anybody says, well, I saw this triangular-shaped black thing. Are you near an Air Force base? Have you looked at pictures of the B-2 bomber, the stealth bomber? It's sort of a delta-shaped, wing-shaped. And it flies right over the Rose Parade

every January 1st, comes right over my house in Altadena, circles around. When it comes at you, it's silent. And it's this weird black because they painted that black paint that doesn't reflect. And, you know, if you didn't know about it, and you're out in the desert, and it's dusk, and, you know, it's like a bit kind of spooky. Like, what is that?

Well, I saw one when I was filming Fear Factor in 2002. So it was right after September 11, not long afterwards. And we were filming out there in way out in the desert area. Palmdale, I guess it was. Okay, yeah. And it's real close to the Air Force Base out there. Yeah, Edwards Air Force Base. And we saw a stealth bomber flying over, and it looks like an alien spaceship. Yeah.

It's amazing. Yeah. When you see one, you're like, whoa. Yeah. If you didn't know, and you had never heard of one of those before, and you looked up in the sky, you'd be sure that that came from another planet. I mean, it looks like it's right out of Star Wars. In the 1890s, there were UFO sightings in America, and the UFOs looked strangely like blimps. That's weird.

Yep. So that's the kind of thing. People see weird things. And again, the propensity is not to just say, I saw an anomaly. Wow, I don't know that's weird and leave it at that our mind immediately goes back to your we love the mystery let's concoct this whole thing you know martians are coming and it's the aliens yeah and there's a whole nother world view um and you know it's like this um there's this anomalous star kic

with a bunch of numbers that dims about 20 20% every period of time, whatever that is. It's about 1,400 light years away. So, and the astronomers studying this decide, okay, it's not planets, it's not comets coming around in front of us that dims the light. So immediately people go to, it's a Dyson sphere. It's a gigantic solar collecting array that circles around the planet that collects energy from the sun. Oh, this is a recent story, right? This is a recent story, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So, but, you know, and I did some radio shows locally about this. And immediately the hosts go to, well, what are they like? What is who like? The aliens? Like, no, no, no. All this we have is just an anomaly in the light signature of this star. That's all we have. We don't know.

The problem also with social media is it becomes clickbait. It becomes someone writes a blog or someone has a thing and there's a video that's linked to it. And then everybody starts sending that out to their friends. And before you know it, that becomes the narrative, right? Yep, that's right. They found some sort of a gigantic satellite that's orbiting. It's like a Death Star that's orbiting this planet. It dims it because it comes between us and it.

Yeah. Yeah, that kind of stuff is very confusing to a lot of people because you don't have enough time to really research it. Right. Now that's why something like what you do, like Skeptic Magazine or the entire Skeptic community is a great resource. And Snopes. Snopes.com is also good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Snopes is fantastic. Where it breaks it down and goes, okay, here's what we absolutely know for a fact. So look at that. It's okay to just say, I don't know. Yeah, but I've just always been. And it's hard to remember that. I've always been so confused as to what it is about what, I mean, I've known grown adults

that have spent years and years of their life like fascinated with bigfoot you know fascinated with ufos fascinated with these mysteries and you when you look at the amount of resources that they they actually expend chasing after these things say well if you put that into like something positive yes something constructive my god you know you'd you would you would do so well like i often see that thing about like certain scammers you know i'm like my god if these people just started a business with the same amount of enthusiasm how good would they be doing right i mean those guys running the the uh internet scams and stuff well if they just did a legitimate company they'd probably make more money what is it about mysteries that's one of the real important things that I wanted to talk to you

about. Well, I think one of the appeals of the UFO alien thing is it's kind of a secular religion because they're often portrayed as godlike figures. And if you don't believe in the traditional god, then that is kind of, they're out there. They're very powerful, they know about us, they're coming to rescue us, save us. So much of science fiction is, you know, has these kinds of themes to it. Like The Day the Earth Stood Still, that classic 1951 film, Michael Rennie as Klaatu and the ship comes to Washington, D.C. It's a Christ allegory. You know, he's come to talk to the authorities. Humans are sinning.

We have to stop this. In this case, it was nuclear war. In the remake with Keanu Reeves, it was global warming. And the authorities won't see him, so he mingles among the common people like Jesus did. And then he takes up with the Patricia Neal character, who's the single mom in the town. And then he's killed by the authorities, and he's put in the morgue. He's put in this morgue, which is sort of like the tomb.

And then in the famous scene where Patricia Neal goes to Gort the robot, he's standing there, and the visor comes up, and he's going to zap her, and she gives him the famous message, you know, Gort, Klaatu, Barada, Nikto, which basically says, go get Klaatu. He's in the tomb. So he marches over to the tomb and burns a hole in it, which basically says, go get Klaatu. He's in the tomb. So he marches over to the tomb and burns a hole in it, takes the body, returns it to the ship, and resurrects him right there in the ship. Yeah, it's Jesus. It's like it's a Jesus.

His name in the movie was Mr. Carpenter, his earthly name, Mr. Carpenter. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And in the original script, in the film, she says, wow, that's incredible. You mean this is the power of science and technology in the future? In the original script, he says, yeah, this is where it's gone. But the Breen Censorship Board in 1951 said, you can't say that. Americans will be offended by this.

So they changed the line, and now he says something like, no, no one has the power over life and death. Only the great spirit can determine. It's just some baloney line. But so much of the way we talk about aliens is that they are like, I call them deities or atheists. They're like gods, the chariots of the gods. I mean, that's kind of that thesis. But it's not so far-fetched in the sense that, not that they've come here. They probably haven't come here, but if they're out there, and they probably are, there's good reasons to think there's extraterrestrials.

And if we encounter them, they're not going to be behind us technologically because we wouldn't encounter them otherwise. So if we do find a signal or whatever, it's going to be from an advance. How far advanced? Well, the chances of them being in parallel with us on an evolutionary time scale, virtually zero. And if they're out of sync by just a little bit from when they started on their planet evolving, it would be millions of years in advance. And look what we've been able to accomplish just in, say, 100 years of technology, 50 years of computer technology. Well, why would it have to be millions of years in advance? Could it just be 100?

I mean, if there are 100 years in advance of us, if we're thinking about colonizing Mars for the next few decades, you get some sort of an advanced civilization that has less conflict than us and more cooperation. Because of how long it takes to get from bacterial-grade life to intelligent, communicating life. Right. Probably three and a half billion years is how long it took here. Right. So whenever your planet starts, the chances of it going to be in perfect synchrony of

every step along the way from bacterial grade life to big brains, if anything, it's probably going to be millions of years of difference in time scale. Just on the biology. So just randomly, even to get to where we are, it could be a million plus or minus just to reach this level. Correct. Like where we've reached, whatever billion years it was, didn't have to be that number. It could have been much longer.

It could have been shorter. Or just started later. Right. Or started earlier. Well, also we have to deal with the impact that killed the dinosaurs. It could be- All the random events that happened. Yeah, they could be on a planet that doesn't have any random events like that.

And it'd be way ahead of us. Yeah, or they could be on one that has a lot of them. The answer to the Fermi paradox that where is everybody because this should have happened already is probably the universe is teeming with bacterial-grade life. But the number of steps to get from there all the way to a communicating technological society is enormous. And so that winnows down the number of possibilities out there. You could get all the way to Neanderthals,

like here on Earth. You know, their big brain, 1500 cc's, about the size of our brain, maybe a little bit larger. And, you know, they had fire, they had tools. Disco? Yeah, they had fire. They had tools. Disco. Yeah, everything but disco.

And they had Europe to themselves for about 300,000 years. And there's no advancement in their toolkits. They're all pretty much the same. They never had cave paintings. It didn't look like they had symbolic art like Homo sapiens did. We believe their brains were larger, though, to deal with their larger bodies, right? Their bodies were built differently. Even when you correct for body size, their brains are slightly larger, but only slightly. The brain size may not make any

difference. It may be brain modularity. Maybe they didn't have language, or if they did, they didn't have symbolic language. We don't know why they went extinct, but when humans, Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe, within a few tens of thousands of years, there was no more Neanderthals. Gone. They went extinct. And it's a big debate, paleoanthropology circles, why? But my point

is that you could have three and a half billion years of evolution on a planet and get all the way to Neanderthals who have stone tools, and it just stops. For whatever reason, they never develop symbolic communication. They have opposable thumbs so they can make stuff, they can make tools, but they never make the next step. Now, some people disagree with that.

They think that had Homo sapiens not dominated Europe when they came in, Neanderthals might have gotten there within a few centuries more, maybe. But we don't know that. Well, there's also the thought that even though the universe is infinite, right, it had some sort of a beginning, whether you buy that or don't buy that. There's actually been some arguments. Wasn't there some arguments recently that perhaps the universe didn't have a beginning or an end, but that it's been eternal?

Well, it could be eternally cycling. Right. There could be multiple Big Bangs. So there was never, yeah. So the idea could possibly be that if that is the case, right? So if you have an event and from that event, things become more and more complex, start getting single cell life, multicellular life like we have here on earth. There has to be a first like us, a first. Somebody has to be first and maybe we're first.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. But we're multi-generational. Our stars. And so there's been many, many generations of stars older than ours. Right. So this is the Fermi problem. Where is everybody? Right.

I mean, there should have been somebody who made it. But when you think about how complex life is on Earth and how many different varieties of it and there's only one human. There's only one technologically communicating species, and we're it. So is it possible? That's right. You could have a planet teeming with life, with dolphins and chimpanzees, big brains. Puppies. And lots of puppies.

And they never build it. No laptops. Nothing. Yeah. So it is possible that we, since we exist, it is possible that we're the only ones that exist. It's possible. It's totally possible, right? It's totally possible.

We just don't know. That's terrifying to people, I think. The SETI argument, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Scientists, these aren't the UFO people. Their counterargument to that is, but there are so many planets now that we know about. Virtually every star in a galaxy of 100 billion stars has planets. So we're talking hundreds and hundreds of billions of planets. The chances that it never happened anywhere, you know, okay. Pretty small.

It's pretty small. So they're probably out there somewhere, but it's, you know, it's a vast, empty, you know, cosmos. There's a lot that we know that doesn't have intelligent life. There's a lot of planets. That's right. We have one planet that we know of that has intelligent life out of all the planets we've ever discovered. And obviously there's some that we've discovered that are so far out there we only get glimpses of what their atmosphere contains. Well, the next generation, they'll be able to get the atmospheres.

The Webb Space Telescope, I'm told. They're just getting it from a light spectrum now, right? generation, they'll be able to get the atmospheres. The Webb Space Telescope will, I'm told. They're just getting it from a light spectrum now, right? Yeah, that's right. In the spectrum, you could see if there's oxygen, for example, and methane, so they must have cows that are farting. It's methane, not methane? Methane. Well, the British say methane. Do they? To sound intelligent, I try

to use something. Try to be like British? Do you spell tires with a Y? T-Y-R-E-S. You know how they do that? See, one of the, you know, Hitchens and Dawkins, he's got, you know, it's that British accent. It sounds so much better if you're selling things on late night TV. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Yep, it works. So, yeah, anyway, the mystery. You talked to us about the mystery. Well, you know, there's not quite sure why our brains go toward that. Well, you know, there's not quite sure why our brains go toward that. I mean, I'm sure my dog has a good life, but I don't think he contemplates the cosmos. Mine does. Your dog's a loser.

Especially when it's time for food. But what I was trying to get at, though, is that there's a thing that we do where it's not just, I mean, there's the longing for extraterrestrial life, the search for the technological daddy, the advanced alien daddy that's out there that's going to show us the error of our ways. There's that pole. But then there's also this weird pole where we want to believe that these intelligent beings from other planets can recognize who our elected leaders are and be in cahoots with them, as if they give a shit about obama or anything i mean if you like descended upon an ant colony would you have a deal with

the queen like look i know you're the one who is in charge of this so i'm going to talk to you i'm going to be super secretive and since you are so moral and ethical you know and you don't lie to your people at all i'm only going to communicate with you. And in exchange for technological secrets, I would like some DNA. Like, it's so preposterous. It's such a stupid idea that they would come down and they would talk to the military leaders, especially military leaders from the 1940s. Yes, right. Who knew almost nothing about technology. Or this idea that at Roswell, we capture one of their spacecraft

and back-engineer their technology, and that's where silicon chips and computers came from. Do you know about the American Computer Company? Did you ever hear about these people? There was a company called the American Computer Company, and this was back during the Art Bell days of coast-to-coast with Art Bell, which I loved. I'd be coming home.

I've been on that show many times. I love that show. I've been on it once, too. It was one of the highlights of my life. It was recently when he came back on the radio or internet. So I was driving home from the comedy store one night and they were talking about this American computer company and there's this guy that ran this American computer company

that was out of his fucking mind. that ran this American computer company that was out of his fucking mind. And apparently he had this theory and this whole website dedicated. I don't know if it's up anymore. They might have taken it down. But it was dedicated to showing the timeline of the creation of the transistor and all this came out of Bell Labs, which is where they had the Air Force Base outside of Bell Labs to protect it from alien invasion.

Oh, my God. And that this is where all of our technology came from. So we're supposed to believe that the aliens were only about five to ten years more advanced than us, from vacuum tubes to the silicon transistors. I mean, really? That's it? Fiber optics, right? They managed to traverse the vast instances of interstellar space with technology just barely better than vacuum tubes?

Well, did you ever pay attention to that Robert Lazar guy? He's one of the most bizarre ones. He's a bizarre one because he sounds so good. I think there are some people that just make stuff up. He's so good at it, though. But he's also smart, which is fucking really scary because this guy came up with a hydrogen powered engine

For his Corvette Which people have done They're doing it now People are developing hydrogen power plants for cars But he had this like decades ago So he's obviously a very smart guy Being smart doesn't protect you From believing in weird things

Isn't that bizarre? Not just believing in weird things. Isn't that bizarre? Not just believing in weird things, but bullshitting people, right? Yeah. Well, then somebody who's smart and educated is going to be better at bullshitting people. Well, he bullshitted people about his education, too, though. That was part of the problem. I think some people went back and looked through his education and said,

well, there's no evidence that you ever went to these schools. And so that threw some monkey wrenches into it. But he was one of the Area 51 guys. We said he worked at Area 51. Well, Area 51 is a top secret military base. So you and I aren't going to be able to drive there and go, well, we're doing a show. We want to blow the lid off these crazy.

No, you're still not coming in here. Oh, okay. So what are you hiding? Well, of course, it would be interesting to know now that we know about the B-2 stealth bomber, what are they doing now that we won't find out for 20 more years that people are seeing out in the desert in the middle of the night? I saw this spooky weird thing. Oh yeah, definitely. And that's how it works. Yeah. You know, we find out eventually. In the meantime, just say, I don't know, I saw a weird thing. Well, the oddest part about it is this belief that they're in conspiracy with our elected leaders.

That one to me has been so strange that they will land somewhere and they have these meetings and these elected leaders make deals with the UFOs. Right. How amazing would that be though if that was true? The reptilians are running the country from New Mexico. Yeah. People love this idea of blowing the lid off of it. Yeah. You know, that's something that people love.

They love investigating. They love the investigative journalism aspect of blowing the lid off this global conspiracy. Well, I think that's what drives some of the kind of anti-medical establishment, anti-big pharma, anti-vaccination. Those guys, they're behind closed doors, the big powerful people, corporations and government agents, the CDC and this company and the CEO and the politician, and they want to make money. And first, they think they're more powerful than they really are. And second, that's not how the world works. I mean, these people are not trying to keep us poisoned or keep us sick so they can make money.

You know, the real conspiracies are, you know, how come we can't get our drugs cheaper? Right. You know, what sort of behind-the-door deals are being done that prevent health care from being cheaper? That's where the real action is. That's the real conspiracy. I had a conversation with someone who was trying to tell me they already have a cure for cancer. They just don't want you to have the cure

because then the money's in the treatment. I go, why do you think the same person has the cure as the same people that are selling the treatment? Do you really think they're the same person? Do you know how many people work in the field of creating new medicine? I mean, that's so ridiculous that it would be the same thing. And that one person of the tens of thousands of employees at Amgen or wherever is going to leave and go, oh, I found something out. And I'm coming on your show to tell you all.

I took pictures. Here's the thing. Not one. Well, it just doesn't make any sense that it would be the same person. The odds of it being the same person or the same company. there's so many different people that work in the pharmaceutical industry, so many different people that are trying to do research on new medications, and there's so much money involved in it. The idea that this one company would come up with a cure and they would keep it under wraps because they are in cahoots with the other company that's got the treatment.

Right. And so, I mean, if that's true, then all the people that were sick from polio and all the businesses and companies that were making money from polio patients, how come they didn't stop the polio vaccine? Right. Or, you know, just pick any particular industry like that where we have made real progress. But then there are some things where you go, okay, there's definitely too many people that are getting prescribed pain pills. Like, what is going on and what is the conspiracy? I've had conversations with people that went to doctors.

You know, they had, like, something wrong with them. The doctor wants to prescribe them. I had a fucking nose operation. I had a deviated septum repaired. And my doctor gave me not one but two different opiates to take. I didn't take anything. I wasn't in pain. And he was like, you're going to be in pain.

I'm like, I'm telling you, man, it's barely uncomfortable. Well, so again, we know how some of this works. You know, the drug companies take the doctors out on their golfing trips. They give them free samples and this and that. Well, my wife's mom was a nurse. And they used to take them out to dinner. And these pharmaceutical reps would talk to them and they want they and it wasn't like they said hey we want you to tell these people to take our

drugs it's they became friendly and they did nice things to them and it was almost understood that in exchange you would talk well about their drugs of course the principle of reciprocity i did something for you now you owe me you don't even have to say it. They wanted those trips. You don't have to say it. That's where it's interesting. You don't have to say it. And so, they're making money. And that's reality. I mean, the sheer volume

of pain pills that they've sold in this country since the 1980s. It's stunning. But also, I saw this when my stepdad was ill for probably 10 years of just going through in his 80s, just melting down one thing after another. And I was the one taking him around all the different docs. And I could sort of see how it works. The docs go, look, Dick, I don't know what the problem is. Well, can you give me something? I'm in pain.

Right. There's definitely not. I don't know. Well, doc well doc come on i just drove down here all right here take this right you know so they kind of feel like well i gotta do something i don't know what it is i don't know what to do but okay he's asking me all right i'll give him some painkillers i'll give him this or that makes it feel better and my dad would take it go yeah this is great there's some there's certainly that there's also certainly incompetent doctors there's doctors that are really willing to prescribe SSRIs and antidepressants with alarming consistency. So there you have the medicalization of what are really probably just social behavioral issues.

Yes. So when we were kids in school and a little Johnny was super active and had high energy, whatever. And now he's a great athlete or he's doing this or that. And now he's like, well, what's wrong with him? Oh, well, he has this medical problem. Oh, he's ADHD. Oh, that's a thing? Yeah, it's a medical issue.

It's like a disease. Well, what can we give him for it? Well, we'll give him these drugs here. Okay, so all of a sudden, the hyperactive little kid who's just kind of fun and maybe a little disruptive is now medicalized. And it's the same thing with the, you know, the autism spectrum. You know, people say, well, you know, increase in vaccinations, there's been an increase in autism. Not really. The category got larger and it became medicalized, you know, so there's no increase in autism cases. It's the increase in the diagnoses of them.

A, more people paying attention to it, and B, the category is much bigger than it used to be. So that's why it's called a spectrum. So when people make the correlation between that and the increase in the amount of vaccinations that children get. Right, it's a false correlation. It's not true that autism rates have gone up. It's not true that autism rates have gone up. It's that in the 90s, it suddenly started becoming a thing, autism, the spectrum, talking about it. And so somebody that was like so-called Asperger-y, they're a little socially awkward.

Is that a word? Asperger-y? Yeah, well. I use it too. No, we all use that term. I'm pretty sure I've heard that. Dude's a little Asperger-y. When someone's like really smart but socially odd, I'm like, he's a little ass-burger-y. Yeah.

Go to Caltech or MIT. You know, the Big Bang Theory is not so far off on the nerdy factors. Yes. But again, what's wrong with being just kind of- So it's a false correlation. What's wrong with being a little nerdy? Well, now you're on the autism spectrum. Yeah.

You're on the spectrum, they always say. I'm autistic? Yeah. You have a disease and we have drugs for this. And before you know it, the category is bigger, and there's more people in the box. So it looks like it got bigger, but it didn't. If you're easily distracted, all of a sudden you have ADD. Yeah.

Ah, you have a disease. You have ADD, sir. Or they call it ADOS. Attention Deficit O'Shiny. Yeah, right. There's that. But there have been, there's also the very real problem with human beings in that there's so much biological diversity that medication that affects one person is going to affect another person a totally different way. So if they give you a medication, your body has no problem with that medication whatsoever.

If they give that same medication to another person, there's going to be some issues. And when people say, well, you know, my child got vaccinated and there was some adverse reaction to the vaccination, there's people that want to immediately dismiss that and say, oh, that's malarkey, that's junk science. But there is a very real situation that happens with human beings where they take medication where it does not agree with some of them sort of how like some people have allergies to things that are completely innocuous to you or i you give a you know certain type of nut to jamie and he might die you know there's there's a reality to that and when you look at the this is what i've tried to explain to people that talk about vaccinations being dangerous and you know we don't need vaccinations and they're

you know they're horrible to people vaccinations and they're, you know, they're horrible to people and all the, all the people that have like, think about how many people you're talking about. You're talking about 300 million in this country alone. How many cases have, are people that have vaccinations where things go wrong? Is it a thousand a year? Well, if it is a thousand a year, do you know how low that is? Yeah. I know that's not low. If it's,000 a year? Well, if it is 1,000 a year,

do you know how low that is? I know that's not low if it's your child. It's awful. I know it's not low if it's 10 a year if it's your child. It's awful. But there's a lot of fucking people that are being vaccinated. If there really was this global epidemic

of you give kids vaccinations and they turn into this decrepit, mentally disabled child, boy, it would be a lot bigger. It would be a lot bigger than it is because so many people are getting vaccinated. Exactly the right way to think about it. A million to one odds happen 300 times a day in America. Yeah, think of that.

That's a lot of people. Yeah, it's a lot of people. This is what I try to explain to people when we talk about just the raw numbers of stupidity right i think that it's really conservative and really kind to say that one out of a hundred people are fucking idiots and it's not a damn thing you can do that's really yeah that's open-minded that's like really looking at the bright side of things that's a glass half full perspective right that means there's three million morons in this country. And we know where they are. There's a lot of them.

That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. It's the sheer numbers that we deal with whenever people started throwing these theories around and they use this as their evidence. I always try to just try to put it into that perspective. Just stop and think about the numbers. If you could see it on a board, if you could see 7 billion human beings just as little dots on a board, and then, you know, then let's find the morons. Right, right. You know, then let's look at the problems.

Let's look at the, oh, this is what we're dealing with. What we're dealing with is almost just insurmountable numbers. Be like a cancer cluster, except it would be a stupidity cluster, because they're going to cluster in various places, usually cities, probably. Yeah, well, and they'll find each other. And then there's the confirmation bias that comes from the groups getting together and only sharing information that correlates to their beliefs, whether it's Bigfoot or UFOs or psychics or... That's why it seems like, you know, any of these groups, the UFO people

or the Bigfoot people or whatever, it seems like, well, there's a lot of people. Yeah, well, you know, there's maybe 100 in that club or something like that, but it's a small number of people compared to the whole population. Well, they get so mad. They get so mad when you bring this up.

If you bring up these facts or these thoughts, these ideas, and you tell these people that you don't believe in UFOs or you don't believe that we have ever been visited, they get emotionally mad. They are connected. They're, they're personality. Yeah. They're connected. They're, they're, they're connected. Like who they are is connected to these beliefs.

And the more psychologically invested you are in a belief, the harder it is to change your mind. He's connected to these beliefs. And the more psychologically invested you are in a belief, the harder it is to change your mind. So this is, again, an example of cognitive dissonance, which was discovered by Leon Festinger in December of 1954. On the 21st, he went to the top of a hill with a UFO cult who was waiting for the mothership to come. And he wanted to see, well, presumably the mothership's not going to come. The world won't come to an end. What will they do afterwards? So he thought, well, I mean, will they just change their mind? Will they go home? Whatever. So he recorded this and wrote a book about it called When Prophecy Fails. And the answer is they doubled down on their belief.

Not only did they say, well, this was a dumb idea, let's go home. You know, they went home and started recruiting more people. And well, we miscalculated. It was Eastern Standard Time. It was tomorrow night or it's next year. We got to carry the one when we did our end-of-the-world calculations and so on. And so they recruit more people to join the group. So he called this cognitive dissonance that, you know, when you have a belief that conflicts with the facts, what gives? Well, the facts have to give because the belief is right. So we're going to spin doctor the facts.

We know. We know. And so their rationalizations are just, well, we prayed and therefore God saved us. Or this was a test of our faith and God allowed us to live. Or my favorite, the world did end and this is the new – it was a spiritual ending, and we're in the new spiritual age now. Oh, that's the loophole that the December 21st, 2012 people use. Yeah, that's right. That one was one of my favorites.

It did end. Yeah. It's a spiritual ending. There's a new beginning. Yeah. There's a new beginning. Yeah. I had a guy that I had a conversation with who really was absolutely adamant that the world was going to change December 21st, 2012.

He's like, it is undeniable. It's going to happen. I'm like, how can you say that? How can anybody say that it's definitely going to happen? Well, it did change. The days started getting longer on December 22nd. Oh, okay. But it's also that the people that came up with this idea, their culture doesn't even

exist anymore. I mean, you're talking about the Mayan civilization. A wonderful, spectacular, advanced civilization that did all this amazing architecture, and they had these really cool statues that they had built and really interesting language that was sort of like hieroglyphic. What is it called? Like it's a...

What is the type of language that they use but like where each each symbol symbol like a like a symbol simpler but each symbol has a certain sound that's attached to it so you can have those symbols connected in in different ways it's it's really interesting when uh there was a um uh believe it was a National Geographic documentary on trying to decode I think it was called Decoding the Mayan. Yeah. And these guys where they were trying to figure out exactly

what these people were writing and how they wrote it. Amazing, amazing stuff. Actually, one of my cycling training partners, Nick Coe, his father, Michael Coe, at Yale University was the guy that first cracked the Mayan code. So I blame his dad for all this Mayan end of the world stuff. Basically, it was a cyclical time cycle instead of a time zero. That is, these ages repeat themselves in these long form cycles.

And that December 21st, 2012 was, to whatever extent it was coming to an end, was just a period of time. Almost like our year comes to an end and a new year starts. All it is is the calendar's rolling over to the next phase. It was the end of the long count. The long count, yeah. And what happens to those people? Nothing. They just quit talking about it.

I mean, almost no one ever says, you know what, I was wrong. People just sort of drop it and go, well, I'm not into that anymore. Well, it was an industry. That December 21st thing was an industry for a while. And I thought it was awesome. I loved it. I thought it was cool. I even had a license plate that said December 2012.

I had a license plate. You did? Yeah, because I thought it was hilarious. It is hilarious. But it's also cool. It's kind of fun to think that it's really going to happen. People have these ideas, like that's when the aliens are going to return. That's when we're going to become self-aware.

I think Terrence McKenna believed that's when people were going to come up with a time machine. There was a bunch of really fascinating ideas of what the hell was going to go down. But there seems to be this longing that people have for an event that we're building towards an event. Well, the idea is there's two dueling ideas. There's the idea of progress in history and decline in history. And so when people write about it, it's usually, we're in a period of decline. It's like Republicans right now. America is the greatest nation ever, except it's in a shithole.

It's the worst it's ever been now because of this guy. But before, we're going to return back to the way it used to be great. So every generation has this. Ours is the special generation. Either ours is, you know, culminating in this great thing that's going to happen, or things are terrible, but if we can get through that, then we're the ones that are going to come out the other side, the born again, you know, the left behinders, you know, the Christian

apocalypse. You know, there's plenty of secular versions of this. You know, Marx has had this idea that, you know, the end of capitalism and the beginning of socialism and communism, this is a big stage thing. You know, a lot of science fiction is like this. It makes a drama better when there's a beginning point, an end point. Right. We're at this crisis moment, and things are going to be great again, or they're going to come to an end, and then they'll be

great. But there's always that tension between decline and progress. But there's also this realization that there will be an end for you. We are finite beings. We have a beginning, we're born, we have an end, we die, and it's going to happen. So when is it happening? I don't know when it's going to happen. I'm fucking scared. Is something coming? Oh, it's coming. We die. And it's going to happen. So when is it happening? I don't know when it's going to happen. I'm fucking scared. Is something coming? Oh, it's coming. The apocalypse. Oh, Jesus. Here it is.

And then we find this thing. And if you're really inclined to be gullible, you know, you get sucked into like the Heaven's Gate folks who think, well, the way it's going to happen is there's a UFO behind this meteor. And what we got to do is when the comet is near, we got to kill ourselves and wear purple Nikes and then we'll live forever. You know, Art Bell has a little bit of culpability in that because he was promoting the Hale-Bopp comet UFO theory for quite a while on his show. And they used to listen to that show. And that's when they bought – they went down and bought a telescope to see if they could see it.

So, I mean, I'm not blaming Art Bell at all. That's when they got into it? They got into it by listening to that theory promoted on Art Bell. So then when Marshall Applewhite said, you know, I think this is it. It's all going to come with the comet and Comet Hale. There's very little competition when it comes to cult leaders. It seems like once a cult leader has, like, that position that position, they very rarely get forced out of the board. No one says, you know what, Marshall's out of his fucking mind.

I'm not cutting my dick off. Because they were doing that. They were castrating themselves. And he was obviously so nutty. He was like, did you not have one person in that group that you might have thought, well, maybe Mike's got some better ideas than Marshall. We should listen to Mike for a little bit. It doesn't work that way. No, there's no competition.

And usually those ones get purged. Like in the fundamentalist Mormons, they just purge anybody that wants to challenge the prophet. Yes. So there's a critical point in every cult when the leader dies. Okay, what happens? Usually the cults just die with him. Right.

But in the case of Scientology... Wait a minute, what are you saying? Scientology is a cult? Yeah, sorry. Whoa, dude. Do you know we're in Hollywood? I do. What the fuck are you saying, man? Why don't you watch your mouth? You know, when Joseph Smith was killed, that could have been

the end of the Mormon church, but Brigham Young took over the reign. So if there's another charismatic leader... David Miscavige. David Miscavige took over from L. Ron, and he was charismatic, and people turned their... They acknowledged him as the new leader.

One of my favorite moments in all of comedy is when Miscavige and Tom Cruise are on stage, and they salute L. Ron Hubbard to LRH! And they salute him. Ron Hubbard to LRH. And they salute him. There was a lot of testosterone right there on that stage. Like, oh boy, oh manly man. Not only that, he's got a big gigantic medal on.

It's amazing. Oh, it's not embarrassing at all. It's wonderful. To me, the human folly of it all, the belief system of anybody that's an intelligent person. By the way, massively successful, especially financially, both of them financially. But Tom Cruise, culturally, massively, massively successful, wearing a big gold plate on his neck and saluting one of the worst science fiction authors of all time. I mean, it is amazing. That's an amazing moment.

When he died, he was packed up with antidepressants and other drugs that he was allegedly against. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, not only that, how about the fact that he lived for a long time on a boat off the shore because he owed so much taxes he couldn't land. Right. So that's where all the C-Core and all that crazy shit came from.

He wrote more books than anyone who's ever lived. You know, he wrote more fiction than anyone ever. Amazing. Bad fiction. Horrible fiction. Harlan Ellison, who I know is a science fiction writer, says he was there at the meeting when Elrond well, the meme is

that he said, if you really want to make money writing science fiction, you can start at your own religion. What actually was, according to Harlan Ellison, is there was a group of them just sort of sitting around complaining about the fees that people paid writers, like all of us writers complain about. We don't make enough money. And so that's when somebody said, well, you know, if we started a religion, and then L. Ron kind of jumped in and said, yeah, yeah, let's start a religion. And then he actually went out and did it, whereas the rest of them, you know, they just kept writing science fiction. Have you read Going Clear?

Yeah, oh, yeah, I've read Going Clear. I saw the film. I mean, the film's good, but the book is bananas. Because they have time to go into depth about his past and all the stuff that, like, transpired before he created Scientology. That was Gibney's film, right? Gibney's film and Lawrence Wright's book. Book, that's right.

Yeah, Lawrence Wright's a great journalist. Now, that's real investigative journalism when you sink your teeth into those things in bold, right? Yeah, and it's amazing he got away with it because there were people trying to do that back in the 80s. There was a guy from Time Magazine that did the cover story with the volcano erupting on it. And he was harassed and threatened and people put stuff in his mailbox and people parked outside. It's a different world now, though. First of all, their numbers have drastically declined. Scientology's numbers have declined.

And on top of that, the Internet has exposed it for what it really is. Before, we didn't know. Like, I went to one of these things in San Diego just a few years ago. I think it was like, I'd say like seven, seven years ago. They had one of these things where you had like the e-meter and you sat down, they were giving you free personality tests. And I sat down and talked to the guys and they seemed kind of like bored and disinterested and weird, but you don and disinterested and weird.

But you don't see those at all anymore. Right. You don't see those. I don't think they even do that anymore. Well, they do. There's one on Hollywood Boulevard right down there. In the building. No, I've seen E-Meters.

On the street? On the street, yep. They still do it? Jammies? Right in front of the Chinese Theater. After the going clear has been out there? Yeah, I asked the guy about that. Have you seen this movie?

No, I didn't see that movie. It's all propaganda. Yeah, that's right. I ordered a book, Late Night TV in like 1994, Dianetics. I was into Anthony Robbins, self-help stuff, just trying to get ahead in this life, you know? Yeah. Young man. And I ordered that Dianetics book.

Those people never stopped sending me shit. Never stopped sending me invites and pamphlets. See, this is where they get the numbers, though. We have millions of followers, because anybody that ever- I got some followers. You're on the list. That's right. Yeah.

I was. Well- They don't have my new address. You can still go clear if you- Woo! I would like to. I'd like to be clear. I had a neighbor.

Horrible story. Poor guy. Nice guy. But his, I think he still lives down the street. But anyway, there was a plot of land that he wanted to buy, and we were talking about it. And he's like, well, we can't do it right now because Nancy's about to go clear.

I was like, what? What does that mean? I didn't know what it meant. Oh, you didn't know what it meant. Okay. Because I only knew, this was probably 98. I only knew a little bit about Scientology. what what does that mean i didn't know what it meant oh you know what it meant okay i i only knew this you know it's probably 98 i only knew a little bit about scientology i was like what do you mean going clear like well we're scientologists i go going clear how much that cost fifty thousand

dollars fifty thousand dollars for like some ceremony and i go what does it involve well she's no longer affected by external influence. So once she goes clear, nothing will bother her. Like you can say anything to her, you can insult her, and nothing will get in. And she will. Right. But that's what everybody wants, right? Everybody wants the ability to be autonomous, to be just completely free of any bullshit in this life.

This distress and the worry and the negativity. But also they sell you on that. Yes. Like, these are the things you need to get rid of. Oh, I didn't even know. I mean, part of the e-meter thing, you know, it's just measuring the voltage between your hands, skin conductance. But, you know, think about your mother. Okay, I'm thinking about my, ooh, it spiked because I squeezed this hand slightly more.

All right, let's talk about your mother. Well, everybody has issues with parents, with ex-lovers and spouses and bosses. And, you know, you can find something. It's like, would you like to get rid of that bad? Well, you know, if you go meditate, you know, you go to a Buddhist center, they'll tell you the same thing. You're focusing on the negative of your past. We're going to clear that out by meditating. So they're all various forms of the same kind of thing like everybody has like the psychic

hotlines everybody has problems love health money career everybody's got some issue and we're going to help you for you know a fee well what's fascinating about el ron is it seems like el ron was nuts i shouldn't use the word nuts i think he probably had some mental problems definitely had some mental problems and it seems. Definitely had some mental problems. And it seems like part of what Scientology was was his attempt at self-help. And that was one of the things that Lawrence Wright went into, that it seems pretty clear that this guy used all these available psychological techniques at the time to try to cure himself. It was like a self-diagnosis and self-help thing. Yeah.

To try to cure himself. Yep. It was like a self-diagnosis and self-help thing. Yep. I think a lot of people go into psychotherapy because they themselves. Oh, yeah. You know, have issues that they're dealing with. Well, when I was in college, that was the only thing that was interesting to me. It was psychology was interesting to me because I was trying to figure out my own brain.

I was like, God, I've got to get this fucking thing under wraps. I've got to get this thing handled. So that was the, you know, that was the one thing. So people like Tony Robbins, you know, they kind of, they have a tracking the line between being a con artist, he's not, but selling something that could maybe help people, maybe, but. But if you follow his direction, I think he's more positive than negative. I agree. I agree. I mean, some of this stuff is pretty basic, you know, set goals and write them down and don't get distracted from these things. Stay focused. You know, this is pretty basic stuff that actually is true. It works if you work it. sham, the self-help and actualization movement. And this guy, he used to work for Rodale Press, which is one of the big publishers of self-help books. And the marketing department said that the number one predictor of anybody who would buy one of these self-help books is somebody who had

already bought a self-help book. Well, if they work, why do you need to keep buying the tapes and the books and all that stuff? And the answer is that they only work temporarily. Like if you bring Tony Robbins into your corporation, he is for sure going to get your sales force really motivated. Man, I'm going to make some – I'm going to make 50 calls a day rather than 30 calls a day, and I'm going to really do this. And they see a spike for a while, and then people go back to their baseline where they were. And they see a spike for a while, and then people go back to their baseline where they were. And that's why you've got to keep listening to the tapes and listening to the music and the books and all that stuff to kind of keep it up. So it only works to a certain extent and for a limited period of time.

Well, it's very difficult for people to change behavior patterns. You have this pattern. They're very comfortable. It's very hard to change. Right. patterns you have this pattern they're very comfortable it's very hard to change to right don't they say it's like 90 days of doing something all the time for it becomes a habit it's like you can kind of ingrain a new path probably longer than that's why diets are so difficult to work you know you have a lifetime of you have this fat level and you have this kind of food your body's

used to and to shift it it's not gonna happen in weeks or months you really it's a lifestyle change forever, really. Yeah, if you turn into a diet, like you can commit to a diet for a long period of time, but a lot of people when they're committing to it, like I'm on a diet right now for 60 days, Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint. It's sort of a ketogenic diet. Okay. What do you eat?

It's fat-based. Mostly, I eat a lot of fucking avocados, dude. I love avocados. Avocados, MCT oil, a lot of coconut oil, almond butter, a lot of healthy fats. What did you have for breakfast this morning? I had five eggs and an avocado. Five eggs? You did? Yeah.

So you don't worry about cholesterol? No. No. You're my pussy. Come on, bro. What about the Clinton diet? You know, Clinton lost all that weight. Got rid of his cardiovascular on a plant diet.

Yeah, he went vegan. And Penn did. You know, Penn lost. What did he do? He's vegan. Penn went vegan as well? He eats all plants. He eats basically huge salads twice a day, I guess.

That's just great for you, period. That is great for you. If you can eat more plants, the more the better. But you're adding more than plants, for you if you can eat more plants more the better yeah but um but you're adding more than plants though if you're coconut butter and no well the idea sisson's idea is and sisson was a big ultra endurance guy as well it's the idea is that your body functions more efficiently on high fat content than it does on high carbohydrate content. So it's very low carbohydrate, no added sugar, no grains whatsoever, no pastas. Here's what's interesting about it.

The mental clarity aspect of it is really interesting. Oh, you notice a difference? Yeah. And I had a few friends that had tried the same diet, and that was one of the things they pointed out. And I think there's a certain amount of brain fog that comes from heavy carbohydrate meals that you avoid. Oh, totally. Of course.

You avoid. And then once your body becomes into a state of ketosis, which I think takes like 20-something days, or there's a bunch of different supplements. Like see this stuff right here? This is a ketogenic cream product that you can add to coffee. There's a bunch of different. Oh, that's what you're putting in your coffee. Yeah, in your ketones. No, that is actually just stevia because this stuff is coffee with MCT oil and grass fed butter. Have you ever had that stuff before? I don't know. Is that what's in this?

Yeah. It's, um, it's, uh, from, um, a Rob Wolf invention. He figured out how to add grass fed butter, MCT oil, which is a mediumchain triglycerides, essentially the healthiest aspects of coconut oil. My headache's gone. Hey, you feel better. But it's just healthy fats mixed in with coffee. Okay. And no meat? No, I eat meat.

Yeah, I eat meat. All right. But mostly— Okay, here's my theory on diets. Okay. That they work because you're doing something. You're actively involved in keeping track of how many calories are going in. You start cutting out the bad foods. Definitely.

Junk foods, sugars, grains, stuff like that. And they work. It doesn't matter if it's this particular one here or this one here. It's the doing something about a problem that is what really works it. Well, I didn't even have a problem. I did it, just try it. I did it just because I wanted to feel what it would be like to try this diet because I had read about Sisson and he's a really interesting guy. And then I'd also listened to a Tim Ferriss podcast. Tim Ferriss had this great podcast with this Dr. D'Augustino, I believe his name is, who is heavily into ketosis,

heavily into ketogenic diets, and the science behind it. He's a really, really brilliant guy and fascinating podcast. We have to listen to it like 10 times in a row and take notes. But one of the things that they brought up, which is really interesting, is the mental benefits of it and the fact that it helps children with epilepsy. When they put them on a ketogenic diet, it stops epilepsy in its tracks. I don't know about that one. I've researched it. It's really fascinating. It's one of the main things they do to children that have child's epilepsy. The other thing that people do when they get on diets, they also start exercising, which has other benefits, tons of benefits. Good point. But I did that already too.

For me, it was just wanting to try it. Yeah. Wanting to try it for the athletic benefit. Wanting to try it for the physical benefit. Yeah. But I lost a lot of body fat. You did? Yeah.

And I wasn't fat, but I definitely could have lost a little bit of weight. But I mean, not compared to like, I still had a six pack. Like you could see my abs before I did it. But I lost 10 pounds now. I'm down to one, I think it was 193 this morning and I was somewhere around 204 before. Okay. It's kind of, kind of fascinating. And what will you have for lunch? Um, it's depends, but no grains. That's the big one. The big one is no grains, no pasta, no, no, you know, just very low carbs. Like I'm getting my protein from mostly wild game, mostly elk and deer and things along those lines.

You go hunting out here? Yeah. Shoot your... Well, I don't necessarily do it all here. It's hard. Santa Monica Mountains. Canoga Park. It's not really a lot of meat to be had out here.

A lot of elk walking around. But I do. But when you shoot an elk, you get hundreds of pounds of meat. I have two commercial freezers in the back. You do? Yeah, you live nearby. I'll give you some. Okay. It's delicious. It's great for you, too. Alright. You know, it's organic. Yeah. 100% free of any antibiotics or any bullshit.

I like buffalo and ostrich. Ostrich meat is good. Very, very, very good for you. Very lean and healthy, and it's a rich, dark red meat. Yeah. It's filled with iron and nutrients but um the idea behind it is that you get your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrate because that's primarily with human that's why it's not to be confused like the the problem with the whole concept of paleo you know the paleo diet well this the term can be debunked pretty easily because

they say well in the paleolithic period, people ate a lot of bread. They ate a lot of grains. They ate whatever they could find. Yes, yes. And most hunter-gatherers, most of their calories come from the gathering part, not the hunting part. It's hard to hunt animals. They don't want to be killed. Yeah.

Especially back then. They had shitty bows and arrows and they didn't have guns. Yeah. Especially back then. They had shitty bows and arrows and they didn't have guns. It was very difficult. Unless you stumbled upon a herd of blind buffalo and you could throw a spear good luck. It's a lot of effort. Right. And if you want to actually find really healthy meat other than grass-fed beef, their options are pretty severely limited. What about alcohol? Do you drink? Very little. A little bit every now and then, but there's sugar in that. Yeah.

Yeah. It converts to sugar. Well, the idea is that you just— So no cookies and ice cream because that's got sugar, right? Gone. So the dairy's okay. Milk? Yeah, you can have milk, but I'm not really a milk drinker.

I like milk with cookies, but since I'm not eating cookies, no milk. I'm not like a milk guy. I don't mind raw milk. Raw milk I like. I felt like homogenized and pasteurized milk. Once you do that, I mean, it's great as far as you could store it in a store and it lasts for a long time, but you're cooking out all the enzymes. It's just not the best thing for your body. The problem also is if you don't do that, then it's only good for a couple of days. So

that's, and you can get sick. Eggs. Good. I'm glad to hear that. I like eggs. Eggs are good for you, man. Eggs aren Eggs aren't bad. A certain amount of cholesterol is actually important for your body. Yeah, that's right. To produce testosterone. It's actually for cellular growth. Yeah. Right. And eggs, the ones I get are from my chickens.

I have chickens. You do? Yeah. That's great. Yeah. That's good. Good for you. I have 22 chickens.

Yeah. What about supplements? Yeah, I take supplements. You do? Fish oil. Multivitamins. Omega-3. Vitamin D. That's good. Good for you. 22 chickens. Yeah. What about supplements? Yeah, I take supplements. Fish oil. Multivitamins. Omega-3. Vitamin D. Omega-6.

Omega-3s. Yeah, I take a lot of that. See, something that can go too far. Something like Ray Kurzweil takes 200 supplements a day. Well, he's just trying to stay alive until the machines take over. I know. I know. I interviewed him.

He was amazing. Another example. He's kind of a guru. He's almost like a secular guru. A little bit. Because he's constructed this, you know, the second coming is coming. I interviewed him. He was amazing. Another example. He's kind of a guru. He's almost like a secular guru. A little bit. Because he's constructed this. The second coming is coming, the singularity. It's 2030, 2040.

2042. If you can make it till the end. 2047 or 2042? I went to a conference. It was for the same show, for Joe Rogan Questions Everything. We went to New York, and they had this big conference. I interviewed him in San Francisco. Oh, the Singularity Summit?

Yeah. Well, I don't remember. I think it was 2040 something, whatever the fuck it is. 2040. They just pick a day when they think that it's all going to happen. But they had this Russian billionaire character

who had developed some artificial, some thing that he was going to unveil that was like a robot of him it's going to be an artificial intelligence but it wasn't ready you know see even if that that will come eventually i think but even if that they did accomplish that would it be you right or just a copy of you right see like when you go to sleep and you wake up you're a little groggy but there's a continuity it's still your memories and your like when you go to sleep and you wake up, you're a little groggy, but there's a continuity. It's still your memories and your personality. When you go under general anesthesia, you're groggy after you wake up, but it's still, there's a continuity. Yeah.

But if they shut off your brain and turned it back on inside a computer, would you wake up and go, oh, okay, this is like waking up? Or would it just be, you're gone and it's just a copy? And this copy is just functioning completely on its own and it has no idea what it's doing because it's not connected to biology. It's not connected to all those things. Maybe there's like a leap of faith they have to make before they hit the switch. I'm not sure that...

I think the problem of identity is a serious one for the AI people. It's a real problem. In terms of immortality. Well, not only that, how about the fact that if I can make one Michael Shermer, if I can copy you, why don't I just spam you? Why don't I spam you all over Europe? I'll have a million Michael Shermers all throughout India.

I mean, that's a real problem, right? I mean, if you can make a copy, if you want to be immortal and you want a copy, what's to stop someone from making multiple copies? What's to stop Donald Trump? Right? Well, so far, nobody. But if he wants to make a bunch of Donald Trumps, some egomaniac. And of course, the moment you turn on the new copy, they start having different memories because they're in a different environment, in a different body, and they're having different interactions. And so if it's a biological system, then there's new neural connections growing that are different than yours, than the Joe Rogan copy.

Yeah. So that's no longer you. You might have the same past memories, but you're now going to have different, just like twins. Yes. Nobody thinks twins are identical in personhood. Right. And legally, they're treated as separate entities. And of course, that is right.

So I think that's really what copies, AI copies will be, is just like twins. That's a good point. That's a good point. Also, the good point is from here on out, you're going to have different life experiences. So if you made an exact duplicate of yourself at this day, but one went to New York and the other one moved to Miami, you have totally different lives, totally different experiences, totally different... One's going to be liberal, one's going to be conservative. Well, you're going to make different conclusions based on your life experiences. And that's just a reality of being a person is that we're constantly accumulating data and processing it.

And then also it's the environment that you surround yourself with as far as the unique individuals that you choose to associate with. They flavor who you are so much. Right. It's almost inseparable. It's so difficult to look at a person as an individual because every individual is profoundly influenced by all the other people around them. Right.

So you take this individual, you move them to Montreal, and you surround them with a bunch of people that are totally different from them. They learn French. They start speaking with the Quebecois, and next thing you know, that's a totally different human being. You become different because of the people that you're around. Exactly.

You know, you don't exist in a vacuum. Right. So in terms of like trying to achieve immortality, like the Singulitarians or the Transhumanists or the Extropians, they're against entropy. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. What's their theory? It's a little bit like the transhumanists, that we're going to slowly replace our body parts, and not just new joints, but, you know, if you replace your nerve cells, but you still have to have the continuity.

It's still you as a person in there. Just uploading it to another platform is, I don't think it's going to do it. I think it's not you anymore. The Johnny Depp inside the computer, turn it on, transcendence, there he is. I don't think that can happen. Right. Now, I may be wrong. There are people that do think this can happen.

But does it have to be you? Can it be like something different that's kind of you? But you personally want that. Right. You want it. It's like Woody Allen said, I don't want to live on through my work. I want to live on in my apartment. Is that what he said?

It's one of his many lines about immortality. Yes. You inside the computer, the copy of you, a copy of you is just the extension of your work. You know, it's like this is a little bit of a copy of me, my books and so on. But it's not me. Right. And after I'm gone, the books are still around. But it's not really me.

I don't feel like I'm still going. Also, isn't there a problem with if you believe in evolution, which I assume you do, and you assume that people are going to continue to change shape, we're going to continue. I mean, if we used to be multi-celled organisms that are coming out of the muck, the primordial ooze, and now we're people, what are we going to be a million years from now? Are we going to stifle that and just lock ourselves into this form? This is not a perfect form. No. We're not done. So one of the arguments is that we should take over evolution, and we are. So genetic engineering, for example. Now everybody's afraid of, oh, they're going to make Aryans or whatever. Okay, let's just allow it to happen to solve Alzheimer's, cure cancer, things like that.

Then we can worry about uploading more intelligence into our cortex, say, for example. But what if we do to people what we've done to tomatoes? Make them boring and flavorless? Flavorless, right. But they last longer. That could happen. That's actually a good point. What if we did to people what we did to tomatoes?

We fucked up tomatoes, but they last forever. Well, in a way, with international travel and the internet, you know, the poorest borders in centuries or so, you know, everyone will look like Tiger Woods or something like this. You think so? I think the racial barriers will eventually dissolve. Well, then we'll find some new way to hate each other. Oh, absolutely. Humans are super good at that.

But if we colonize another planet, say we start a colony on Mars, in a way that's a founder population that can then begin to diverge away from the earthly population. Right. And in a million years, you'd have two different species, say. Yes. They could maybe, well, they'd probably still be able to interbreed because there's still connections. You'd also have a problem in that you've got a whole civilization of people so fucking crazy they decided to move to Mars. It's a self-selecting group. They're probably not typical.

Definitely not. I mean, and they're also going to have to do some crazy geoengineering, and we're going to have to hope that that keeps working. A fun scenario would be what kind of government would they set up? What kind of economic system? And assuming none of them were religious, if you came back a thousand years from now, would they have a shrine to a god and a religion and all this? It happened again! Right. But we'd have the history of it.

So it's an archetype. But we'd have the history of it. So it's an archetype. It's one of the interesting things about Scientology and the Mormon Church is that we have a clear recent history and a paper trail to see what happened. Videos. That's the most bizarre thing. What we don't have for Christianity is that. It's old enough that it's lost in the murkiness of time, so you can kind of fill in the blanks of miracles and things like that. Here we know Joseph Smith was killed and then Brigham Young moved to Utah to get away from

the authorities. And, you know, we know exactly how it all unfolded. And so you can diagram how to start a religion. Well, you know the whole Mitt Romney story, too, about his family in Mexico, right? Oh, right. That's right. Yes, I forgot about that. Yeah.

They all moved to Mexico when they couldn't have a hundred wives. Right. Like, fuck this. We're out of America. They all swore his dad couldn't be president. You know, Brigham Young was originally against polygamy. Really? Yeah, until he tried it.

And then he's like, oh, well. One of my favorite books is John Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. He's a great writer. But he kind of reconstructs the moment when Joseph Smith tells his wife Emma that he got this revelation from God about polygamy. Celestial marriage, he called it. And basically, he's already having an affair with this woman down the street. So basically, he goes, well, honey, you know, I was talking to God, and he told me that

I'm supposed to, you know, have sex with so-and-so. What? I know. I couldn't believe it either. But my friends, they were all there. They heard it, too. They're telling their wives right now. So Emma says something like, well, in that case, I'm going to have extra husbands. He said, no, you know, God was really clear about this. It's just for the guys.

And this gets sold as a viable declaration of revelations, and it's written down. So if you look at the first page of the Book of Mormon, it's an affidavit. We are the people, we saw the gold tablets and so on. Same thing with the revelation about polygamy. All the way until 1894 when the state of Utah wanted to become a state and the federal government said not with polygamy.

And suddenly they got a new revelation from God. Changed my mind about the polygamy thing. Back to monogamy. Okay, you could be a state. Not Mitt Romney's parents.gamy thing. Back to monogamy. Okay. Okay. You could be a state. Not Mitt Romney's parents. They're like, we're out of here. So you go to the fringes. Well, Colorado City, that was in the news yesterday. Apparently the whole police force, the courts, everybody that lives in this town is fundamentalist Mormon. They're the polygamist. Where's Colorado City? Is that in Utah? That's right on the border of Utah and Arizona.

Colorado City, Arizona, I think, or maybe it's in Utah. It's right on that road that goes to Kayab. And we've been there. Race Across America used to go through on a route to get to New York. We'd go through northern Arizona and southern Colorado or Utah. Do they believe in polygamy? And it's a weird community. You drive through there and people are looking at you.

And it's like being in a Twilight Zone or X-Files episode, you know, where they drive somewhere and it's like everybody's a little weird. And you can see the dress, clothing. It's like everything is off a little bit. Even like at the gas station, at the Denny's, it's like there's something not quite right here. That's awesome. I want to go. Oh, it's really. I want to go right now.

It's really odd. I don't go. Oh, it's really... I want to go right now. It's really... I don't think that polygamy should be illegal. I really don't. Because it's not illegal to live with 20 women. If you just... You Hefner it, and you decide to have, like, 20 women live with you, you're a king. Yeah. But if you sign paperwork with them, then all of a sudden it's a problem?

Well, the way they do it is they marry one of them legally, and then the rest are so-called sister wives. Oh. And they're not actually married to them, so legally, and then the rest are so-called sister wives. And they're not actually married to them, so they're not breaking the law. Okay. And there's no law against having, you know, living with a bunch of women. It's okay. Well, the law only exists in terms of all the other people outside of their community or their neighborhood or their family recognizing it.

It's just you're writing something down. If you have a law that says this, but everybody in the town, including the police, captain, the courts, well, the judge. They're all in on it. They're all in on it. How bizarre. Now, I have conflicting feelings about it. Polygamy? My libertarian tendencies, we go, well, adult people should do whatever they want. Why is the government in the marriage business in the first place?

I agree. But the problem is when you study the polygamous Mormons, these are young girls. This Warren Jeffs guy, he was marrying 12-year-olds. He was having sex with 11-year-olds. Okay, there is a problem with that. That's absolutely a problem. Yeah. Well, that is a problem, period, with someone who's a grown adult who's having sex with

a young kid. Right. Obviously. That goes without saying. But as long as the person is 21 or whatever i mean i really think you should probably be 21 before you're even allowed to get married i would i probably would have got married if i was 18 my girlfriend when i was 18 at the time said marry me i'm breaking up with you i'd be like fuck let's do it yeah i was you

know i was lost yeah you're too young you don't have enough information i would have definitely been allowed to do anything till they're 30. Probably not even. Might be 40. But the idea that you could tell some adult that they can't sign a piece of paper with another adult. Yes. Right. I mean, it's just as preposterous to say the same-sex marriage should be illegal. Right.

Why not? Yeah. Who cares? As long as they're not brainwashed when they're little that they should. You know. Yes. Because then maybe they're little. Right. Yes. Because then maybe you're 21. Are you really making a rational choice about your future?

That becomes a problem with cults. And that's also the problem. I mean, and then it becomes, okay, where's the line get gray? Okay, if a Mormon can't do it, if you can't take someone when they're really young, raise them as a Mormon, and then once they become of age and they become an adult, tell them, you know, well, now you can get married and you can be involved in this polygamous marriage. And, well, they grew up in this religion. Are they brainwashed? Right. Even though they're a grown adult.

Well, if that's the case. Yep. Catholicism or whatever. There you go. Yeah. So the government can't be in the business of judging that. Right. So it's a fine line there.

It's tough. I mean, you put your hand on the Bible when you swear in to be a fucking president. Right. Which is hilarious. Lincoln's Bible. Yeah. Is it still Lincoln's Bible? Well, that's what Obama used was Lincoln's Bible, yeah.

How old is that Bible? Am I misremembering that? Was it Martin Luther King's Bible? No, I think it was MLK's Bible. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. But yeah, that's very talismanic, isn't it? It's hilarious.

We're touching the past. So dumb. As if, you know, the Old Testament is a font of moral wisdom. Is it the Old Testament they use? Well, the whole thing. But is it the New Testament or the Old Testament that he puts his hand on? Oh, it's both. It's the Bible that includes both.

Oh, okay. Yeah. But polygamy was, you know, all the great patriarchs. There was a study by Helen Fisher. No, it was a different anthropologist on the relationship between power and sex in the Old Testament. And basically, the more power you had, the more women and wives and girlfriends and concubines and children you had.

How unusual. And Solomon was the, you know, he was going for Will Chamberlain's record there. He had 700 wives, 300 concubines, and thousands of kids, I guess. Wow. Allegedly. Allegedly, yes. But I mean, wasn't Noah 600 years old? So it's hard.

Right. I mean, most of this stuff probably didn't actually happen in the Old Testament. Probably Moses never existed. But the point is that that is the way men treated women. That was the patriarchal society at the time. Slavery was legal. Polygamy was legal. The more power you had, the more wealth you had, the more women you had, the more children you had.

You know, that was the world of the Old Testament. You know, and that's not the world we live in now. So why are we still using this book? Yeah, exactly. I mean's nobody would embrace no christian today i would embrace most of the stuff that's in the bible they just wouldn't so when they say i get my morals from the bible it's like no no you don't and that's a good thing you're getting your morals from the same place we non-believers get it uh and you know we're inculcating it from culture, from the Enlightenment, secular values. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because that was an article that I'd read that you had written about Islam

and that Islam was the only religion that had not gone through the Enlightenment. Yeah, right. I think that was a really, really interesting article and a very important point. You know, I mean, Christianity, they used to behead Jews and witches, burned them at the stake. You know, I mean, the kinds of stuff ISIS does today, Christians used to do that centuries ago. It was very common. And they stopped. Why?

Well, the law changed. The culture changed. And the Enlightenment ushered in secular values that all people should be treated equal under the law, that people are born with equal rights, and so forth. And that all changed. Everything. And everybody is incorporated. Just think about, remember when the former owner of the Clippers, Donald Sterling,

made these remarks, you know. But most old guys thought like that just 50 years ago and weren't particularly quiet about it. His remarks are pretty innocuous. What he has said, he had a girlfriend. This thing has been blown out of proportion so badly. Totally out of proportion, yeah. He had a girlfriend and he asked her not to take pictures with

these guys, these black guys. He said, in the same sentence, you can fuck them. I don't care if you fuck them. Just don't take pictures with them. Oh, is that what he said? Yeah. They didn't print any of that. And everybody was talking about don't take pictures with black guys. He said, what he said? Yeah. I didn't see it in here, that part. They didn't print any of that. Right. And everybody was talking about the don't take pictures of the black guys. Right.

He said, what he was saying was that you're sticking it in my face that you're fucking all these guys. I don't care if you fuck them. Just don't take pictures of them. I don't want to see it. Right. He's saying this to his girlfriend in the privacy of his house. He didn't use any racial slurs.

Right. He didn't say anything terrible. All he said was don't take pictures with these guys. Because she was a slut. Allegedly. She was banging a bunch of dudes. And he didn't care because he's like 80 years old. He's buying her condos and rolls Royces and shit. He just wants to keep

banging her because she's hot. So he's like, I don't care. I didn't think she was that hot. For him. Look, you still have higher standards. That guy's, he looks like Jabba the Hutt. He's like, his face is falling off his bones, right? So for that poor guy, I mean, that lost him his team, which is insane. That shows you how far we've come.

Again, most old guys in the 50s would have thought nothing about saying that stuff publicly. Yeah, but apparently he was pretty racist. And what they caught him with was just a small little slice of what he had done. This is obviously allegedly blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But apparently he wasn't a nice guy, which is why this was so reinforced and why people went after him so hard.

They're like, look, we got him. Let's just run with this. And obviously it's a PR nightmare. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, people evolve. And I think now in today's day and age, that kind of thinking, like racist thinking, justifiably so, is gross.

It's frowned upon. Absolutely. We're learning. Yep. We are learning. Yep. So, I mean, the moral arc, that's what that's about, tracking how much moral progress we've made over the centuries, particularly just the last 50 years since the civil rights movement.

It's one reason why I think all these campus protests have gotten so out of hand. They're so disproportionate because the students have a moral module. They're still passionate about making the world a better place. But all the big stuff's been taken. It's all done. They're down to Halloween costumes, Taco Tuesdays. He wore a sombrero. Cultural appropriate.

You know, they're all fired up about what for you and I is just like safe spaces. It's where ideas go to die. I mean, come on. It's safe spaces. It's such a stupid argument. Any argument that's worth, it has to stand on its own merits. You have to be able to discuss things. Like having a university where you can't discuss ideas.

Even bad ideas. even bad ideas like bad ideas should be debated you know the idea that they won't let these conservatives perform or have speeches at the universities and they try to shut them down they scream at people they they hit fire alarms i mean it's madness it's it's everything that you're not supposed to do when you're defending and exploring ideas i think the think the deepest cause of this is the asymmetry between left and right in the academy. Yes. In some of these departments, it's 20 to 1, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. Only in the economics department, the social sciences, do you get something like a balance.

Everywhere else, it's super slanted. And so you're getting this attitude, well, we know what the truth is. Well, maybe you don't know what the truth is, and you need to listen to the other side, because that's what has driven science and reason and the Enlightenment is open debate, because I might not be right. And so the only way to find out is if I ask you your opinion. And so I tell my students, you know, you got to read the Wall Street Journal in addition to the New York Times. You got to listen to, you know, conservative talk radio in addition to NPR. You got to hear, you know, listen to Rush Limbaugh. Oh, I know he's a knuckle-dragging mouth breather. But somebody

on that side, just to see what... Listen to Larry Elder. I like Larry Elder. Yeah, he's a conservative, but he's a little bit more rational. A lot more. A little more libertarian too. But again, those arguments are interesting. And the only way to know what the other side really thinks, because you think, well, why do they believe that? Well, you have to listen to their arguments

to at least be able to articulate why they're wrong. If you can't do that, then you really don't know why they're wrong. Exactly. can't do that, then you really don't know why they're wrong. Exactly. Yeah, and try to balance, look at things through their perspective. Even if you don't agree with their perspective, just relax yourself. Relax yourself and allow yourself to explore the way they think. You know, I follow a bunch of wackadoos on Twitter just so I can listen to their arguments and read their stuff.

I follow this one guy. He's a young earth Christian who every day will talk about how horrible Obama is and Obama's the death of this country. And I'll follow this guy and follow people who retweet him and go to their links and go to their blogs and read their blogs. What the fuck? Just because I'm just trying to explore how their mind works, trying to try to piece together how much of it is just a blanket hatred of liberals. How much of it is racism? How much of it is this? How much of it is that? And just trying to objectively assess where their mindset is and what the root of their thinking is.

That's what I did back in the 90s when the Holocaust denial movement started taking off. And these guys were appearing on Montel Williams and Donahue. And it's like, OK, what is this about? Turns out their office is in Costa Mesa. So I drove down there and I just sat down with, you know, they have a little journal of historical review. And it's like, all right, who are these guys? So we had beer and pizza. I just sort of get them to open up, what is your story

here? Right. That's the only way to find out what's really behind their arguments. Okay, they have these arguments. Okay, here's why they're wrong. Okay, but why are they making these arguments? Right. The only way to find out is actually talk to them.

And why were they making their arguments? Oh, some of it's pure anti-Semitism, but also there's some conspiratorial thinking, you know, the Jews are doing this, but not justial thinking, you know, the Jews are doing this, but not just the Jews, you know, the media, the this and that. Is it one of those exposing the mystery thing? Yes, it's a little bit of that, you know, the government, you know, they don't want us to know, they, wait, who's

the they? Because that's us, right? Well, no, they, you know, they have this superpower and, you know, so there's a lot of that behind there. And then also there's some, you know, basically I can get attention by saying this wacko, the wackadoodle kind of stuff. And then people pay attention to me and that feels good. And so I'll run with it. You know, David Irving was their big intellectual and he was self-trained historian, but also a pretty smart guy, good writer. And he wrote some, his early stuff on Goebbels and and some of the stuff on the

second world war was was was quite good but then he found he wasn't in the academy he's you know self-taught and just published his own books and kind of made a living doing that and he found that when he started migrating toward this you know maybe hitler didn't know about the holocaust and it was really goebbels and himmler and they're the ones that did it and hitler didn't know about the Holocaust, and it was really Goebbels and Himmler, and they're the ones that did it, and Hitler didn't know. All of a sudden, he gets all this attention, and then he concocts this idea of, I'll give $1,000 to anybody that can show me the order from Hitler to orchestrate the Holocaust. I hereby command we exterminate the Jews. Okay, there is no such order.

There's no single point. It's a whole conglomerate of little steps along the way from sterilization of the feebly-minded in the early 30s all the way up to gassing them. There's like 100 steps in between. So there is no single order. But that got him all this attention, and all of a sudden he's a big star at these conferences where these people meet. So I went to some of these, and it's like, whoa, okay, he is being worshipped as this great scholar. And you could sort of see how it fed the ego, get a lot of attention. So I think that we can't discount just the pure psychology of getting some attention for your views as pushing people further than they would normally go. Yeah, I think that's a very,

very good point because there's a massive attraction to that. People are massively attracted to anything that can get them a lot of attention, even for a ridiculously controversial idea. Have you paid attention lately, and this is one of the most confusing things that's been going on, there's a gang of people that believe the earth is flat. Oh, yes. Right. You're paying attention to this? I saw that, yes. I can't believe that in 2016 this is really a thing. Yeah.

There is a movement that believes that all the ISSS pictures, those are all faked. Yeah. And that all of the pictures from satellite images. I was just getting attention and nothing more. You think they really believe? I've watched some videos. These fucking people believe. I have a friend who believes.

It was a loosely based friend. Max Eberle, you're out there, you fuck. He's a fantastic pool player, but he's out of his fucking mind. He posts things about it on Facebook. I'm like, Max, last time I saw him, I had to have a conversation with him. Here's a good example of why we need free speech. These people should not be censored. Let them say what they want to say.

Yes. And let's show how we do know the Earth is round. Can you articulate five reasons why the Earth is round? Okay, why don't you tell Max Eberle why the Earth is round? Okay, Max, here's the deal. All right, so first of all, when there's an eclipse, you can see the shadow of the Earth on the moon. You know, lunar eclipse, there it is.

It's curved. That's the Earth on the moon. You know, lunar eclipse, there it is. It's curved. That's the government with a projector. But you can go out in your own backyard with no... Okay, now what they'll say is, yeah, it's round like a pizza. Right. Flat, round. Exactly, that's what I've been thinking. But of course, if that were true, then why are all the continents,

you know, why aren't all the continents located on the one side of the pizza? And if they're on the flip side, how do you get from one continent to another when you do a transcontinental flight? Because you're curving around it. You're not all of a sudden hitting an edge and then flipping around to the backside of the pizza. And so there's a second reason. If you're high up and you look out, you can see the mass of a ship sailing away.

The hull goes first, and then you see the mass last because it's curved. Right. Anyway, so there's all these. If you put a stick here and 500 miles away, make it, I don't know, Tucumcari, New Mexico, that's 1,000 miles from L.A. You put a stick there at noon at the same time, they'll have different shadows because the Earth is curved. So at 12 noon, it's actually 1 o'clock in New so they're at 12 noon it's actually one o'clock in new mexico when it's 12 noon in la and that's why we have time zones because it's curved okay and so and when you when you want to watch a rocket a spacex rocket or nasa rocket launch

from florida it arcs it's arcing because it's going into orbit and the earth is curved so you have to arc out. Otherwise, it would just go straight up, and it doesn't do that. Anyway, those are five different quick reasons. Pretty good, but you sound like a shill for this round bullshit government. There was the guy that co-discovered natural selection with Darwin, a guy named Alfred Russell Wallace. Oh, he was nuts. He was way out there.

I wrote my biography on him. He came up with a dream that connected Darwin's theories together. Darwin's theories and his theories came together. Darwin had a problem, right, with natural selection. He was trying to figure out how to piece it all together. His ideas— Well, not quite. There is a conspiracy theory about

that that that darwin cribbed from uh from wallace i don't think that's the case what it is not that he cribbed from but that they sort of combine it's more of a simultaneous thing and they were in correspondence wallace actually incorporated some of darwin's work darwin was older than him and had already done quite a bit more work than wallace had and in any case wallace was super open-minded so here's an example of being too in any case, Wallace was super open-minded. So here's an example of being too open-minded. Darwin was open-minded, and he came up with new ideas, but he was also very skeptical of the whole spiritualism seance movement

that was getting big in England. And Wallace was into that. And Wallace, he would go to these seances and hold the hands, and the table would levitate, and Darwin— Well, that's why people don't hear about it, right? See, Darwin was just like, I'm not going to a seance. Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, this is insane and thomas henry huxley the other great scientist said you know but you know pay pay five shillings to talk twaddle to the dead i

mean come on uh but wallace oh no i'm going this is this might be true and uh so he was in it and then he made the mistake of answering an ad in in magazine of one of these flat earthers who said, I give 5,000 pounds to any, or 500 pounds, I guess it was, anybody who can prove the earth is round. What year was this? This was the 1880s. And so Wallace said, okay, I can do it. So they went to the old Bedford Canal, which is like 20 miles straight yeah you know without a bend so you could set up two little um telescopes you know those the little uh surveyor telescopes

and they put a mark on a bridge okay so you know and and so when i'm looking so there's one two three marks if it's straight then it should be all lined up if it's curved than the one here that's exactly three feet above the ground, like this one here that's five miles down the road, down the canal, it should be lined up, or if it's not, it's dropped a little bit. And in five miles, you can actually measure a little bit of the Earth's curve by, I don't know, it's like a centimeter, half a centimeter or something. Right. There it is right there.

There it is. There's the old Bedford Canal. So Wallace did that, and they had a neutral judge who looked through the telescope and said, yep, it's curved. It's dropped. And this guy, the flat earther, refused to look through the – I'm not going to look through there. I know you're wrong. That's voodoo. And Wallace – so he had to sue this guy to collect the prize money. This is why you shouldn't get involved with the wackadoodle people too far, because he spent 15 years dealing with this guy.

And this guy was sending crazy letters to his wife and to the National Geographical. I actually found some of these letters at the National Geographical Society. This guy threatening, you know, you've got this crazy man, Wallace, working for you and so on. Holy shit. You know, some of these people are, they're a little mentally, as you know, deranged. That's fascinating. But Wallace, his ideas converged with Darwin's ideas and it kind of helped Darwin's theory.

But Darwin had to disown him eventually. No, no. What really happened was it accelerated Darwin to get his work done, to get the book done. He was just sort of lollygagging around, doing his research. One reason for that is um in 1844 there was a book on evolution published called the vestiges of creation it was published anonymously and it was trashed by the scientific community so so darwin got back from the galapagos in 1836 throughout the 1840s he was

just taking notes uh composing his ideas, running experiments. He got married and had 10 kids, and he had a lot of money invested in the railroad. So he was a pretty active independent scholar. And so just sort of taking his sweet time about developing his theory. And also, he didn't want to be embarrassed and come out with a book that wasn't very solid, and then he would be criticized so he was just compiling anyway one day he gets this letter from wallace from the other side of the world is in the malay archipelago saying i came up with a few ideas he had like a feverish nightmare from yeah from malaria and he hatches a natural selection some species compete with others

the populations increase in a Malthusian way. And so not all of them can survive. Some will survive. Differential reproductive success. Natural selection. Boom. So he outlines this to Darwin, and Darwin is reading this going, oh, crap. This is my idea.

I mean, he sort of outlined, like, my book. So then he rushed into print. It's like, I got to get this done. So they weren't necessarily collaborating. They weren't exactly collaborating, although they had communicated. And also Darwin, not only was Wallace not upset about this, he was thrilled. He wrote his mom and said, oh my God, the great Charles Darwin wrote me back. This is so cool. And then Darwin went to Charles Lyell and some of the other big scientists at the time and said, I got this letter from this guy on the other side,

and you know I've been working on this. This is really similar, and what do I do? So they said, all right, we'll publish both of them simultaneously. And they did on July 1, 1858 at the Linnaean Society. They presented both papers, some of Darwin's notes and essays he had written and Wallace's letter to Darwin with a little handwritten paper. And they entered them both into the record the same day, July 1st, 1858.

Boom, simultaneous discovery. Darwin then spent the next basically nine months just, you know, the pen moves mighty fast when you're afraid you're going to get scooped. Right, right. And he got his book done, boom, November 1859, Origin Species, the rest is history. And Wallace, he wrote, again, he's, oh my God, this is so exciting. You know, I'm part of this great movement. And then only later, much, much later, did other people start to think, you know, he ripped you off. And he's like, no, no.

And Wallace wrote his own great book in the 1880s called Darwinism. So he recognized it. Yeah. Well, it's really fascinating that he came up with that theory based on a dream from being in a fever state. Yeah. How amazing is that? Well, but that often, you know, the spark of scientific genius or creativity in any

field, I was taking a shower and boom, the idea came to me. I was on a walk. So there's some theories about this that if you think too hard and focused on a specific problem, you have to sort of relax your brain, whatever that means, by doing something else that's non-focused. Meditation, taking a shower, going for a walk, going for a bike ride in my case, anything that's just sort of not thinking about the problem. And then we't know what happens maybe some neurons just start to start firing and interacting different neural networks this memory of that this memory of that this book you read this thing you saw on the internet boom boom boom they come together boom yeah we don't know how that happens a lot of

writers like to do that they like to write and then they go for a walk right and then after they're you know they're done writing they go walk and they try not to think about anything and then the ideas just pop into their head or a correction in the idea or a new revelation in the idea. Yeah. It's just always been amazing to me, ideas that come out of dreams,

like the origins of creativity. Like where are these thoughts emanating from? Right. Like Descartes, Like the idea of science. Right. Came from a dream. Einstein's dream of, you know, being in an elevator. You know, if you're in an elevator and the elevator drops at, you know, just the speed

of gravity and you let go of your pen or your coffee mug, it's just going to hover there like you're hovering inside the elevator as it drops. So the acceleration of the elevator at the speed of gravity means there's no gravity. And that's where he came up with this idea of relativity. The elevator is the frame of reference that you and the cup are in. And so this is what weightlessness is. When you do the vomit comet, basically all you do is you go up high enough to drop. And so the plane is plunging down for about a minute or two, I guess. I've never done it. And you and this camera and whatever else is in there is just

floating because the whole frame is dropping. And so to do this in the space shuttle, for example, it has to go, what, 17,500 miles an hour to maintain the same speed at which accelerating at which it would also drop so you're going straight forward and straight down the halfway in between is 17,500 miles an hour for our planet that's that's basically that creates zero gravity so if you want to go to mars and and have some gravity you just spin the spaceship so that yet so that the floor is the outside wall that's why in uh and that's how you get your gravity that's how you get to gravity like in in 2000 what 2001 or one of them yeah space they had the thing spinning the space station was spinning so by spinning it creates a false

sense of gravity uh oh i know what it was in 2001 where he was running along that curved interior so it's it's it's spinning like this so it presses you against the floor right it's like those old carnival um uh things where you go and then you stand and the floor drops out as it spins and you spin on the outside that's right so that that's the same principle there yeah so it's just amazing that ideas can come out of nowhere the origin of ideas. That's a fascinating thing to me, like creativity. How does one person come up with a great idea for a movie?

How does someone come up with an amazing idea for an invention? Where are these ideas emanating from? Well, first of all, you have to have some knowledge of what it is you're trying to create. Did Wallace have a knowledge of evolution? He did, yes. He read quite a bit. Yeah, he was totally into this for years, as was Darwin. So the dream state. Even Mozart, you know, he was composing since the age of four.

And his father was a composer. So it's not like this comes out of the vacuum. There's not a muse that pops into your head. You know, you and I aren't going to come up with an Einstein-type dream because we're not Einstein and we're not physicists. So the balance seems to be being ensconced in a field to know what the problems are to be solved and what the details are and what's already been done. They tried this, they tried this, this didn't work, and so on. But not be so entrenched in it that you can't see outside the box.

Right. And no one knows what that is. We don't know. It's just, it's so interesting. Creativity in and of itself is so interesting because boom, an idea, you know, like where's, how does that take place? Like what is, what's the birth of the idea? Like what are the mechanisms that are going on inside the mind that allow the imagination to give birth to this idea?

That's so, it's so poorly understood. And part of the problem of trying to understand it is the, what I call the biography bias. We only know about the successful people. Right. You know, so Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Okay, so the thing is you go to college, you drop out, you move into your parents' house, you start a company in your garage and boom. Right.

Okay, how many people did this back in the 70s and we don't even know who they are because they failed. Right. Okay. How many people did this back in the seventies? And we don't even know who they are because they failed. Right. All those venture capital startup companies that went out of business, you know, all these great ideas, you know. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, we don't know what the formula is. Well, not only that, what made you who you are right now at 1207, what's today, March 7th or whatever the hell it is. What made you, you, you, you're 60 plus years of life experiences, you know, being awake for, you know, 18 hours plus a day doing this, doing that. Like what, what chain of events, what foods did you eat? How much sleep did you get? What led these ideas to cross each other and bink, and a little fire gets lit,

and then you write it down on a napkin, and your life changes. No one knows. Too many variables. So fascinating, though. So fascinating. It's just that the mind and the way the mind works, it's such a mystery, and yet there's so much information about it at the same time. Well, it is the hardest problem, I think all of science consciousness the brain how does it work i mean not we know how it works how the neural neurons communicate with each other neurochemically and how say that your visual cortex is you know see stuff but but what is it that you and i are doing now just just we're experiencing this process how does that happen and yeah that no one knows

we don't have a cogent theory of consciousness which is why then people step in with you know quantum consciousness or you know whatever they have all these theories well we because we don't know those people get they get me baffled i've had a few of those people on and have a conversation with people about quantum consciousness and they're like well i don't even know what you're like, well, I don't even know what you're saying. I don't even know if you know what you're saying. That's exactly right. So quantum physics is difficult and spooky and consciousness is difficult and spooky. Yeah.

But that doesn't mean they're related. Maybe they're related, but maybe they're not related. Well, I'm glad someone's out there exploring and I check in on them every now and then. Absolutely. How you doing over there? Absolutely. The theory doing over there? Absolutely. The theory is evolving. What?

I'm not sure. I'm not sure about any of it. But listen, man, we're basically out of time. We just did three hours. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That was crazy. I really appreciate your time.

Oh, you're welcome. I appreciate you doing this. You're good, man. I appreciate all your work over the years. You're welcome. It's really been wonderful to read and have you on here. Thank you for saying so. And is this your most recent?

Yep, that's it. The Moral Arc. So you can take that with you on your vacation. I will. Thank you very, very much. The Moral Arc. Yeah, I'm going. I'm going.

And if people want to get a hold of you on Twitter, it's Michael Shermer. Yeah. On Twitter, website? Skeptic.com or MichaelShermer.com. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it very much. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

All right, folks. See you. See you. That was a fast three hours. You were.