The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 355: Michael Shermer—Hunting for Anomalies

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

The Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, podcaster, and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University talks about why we believe weird things, how our brains seek patterns to stay safe, the state of science and journalism, intellectual humility vs. certainty, the surprising rise of antisemitism, and his book Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.   

Well, it's the way I heard it on Halloween, at least at this moment in time. Episode 3.55 is upon us. It's called Hunting for Anomalies with Michael Shermer. Chuck thought Michael Shermer would be a good guest for Halloween. How come? Well, he's a guy who got on your radar originally because he wrote the book, Why People Believe Weird Things. And I believe you gave me a copy of that book a million years ago. Oh, yeah. And you gave it to a lot of people. Dear friends, many of whom who were believing what I thought were weird things at the time, but we don't have to get into that now. What was I believing at the time that you thought I needed that book? Well, you know what? You and I were having a lot of... Was that my crystal period?

Yes, yes. We were having a lot of conversations about the new age and all of what was possible. And Jonathan Edwards was on TV, making a fortune, taking people's money, claiming to read their minds. And, you know, this was just another sort of version of the prior generation when Yuri Geller was bending spoons and so forth. And so Shermer came across my radar originally as a kind of debunker, you know, a good-natured guy who just wanted people to see the truth of a thing and hopefully not get fleeced. But he has since become a real academic and written a lot of books about the psychology behind.

And, you know, our tendency to fill in the blanks and complete patterns and all sorts of ways to navigate a random universe that, in fact, are just a hunt for anomalies that entertain us to no end. Not just on Halloween, every day. Yeah, he founded Skeptic Magazine. I guess you could say he's a skeptic by nature. He questions everything. It's a great approach, I think. You know, he's got a very open mind. He can be persuaded.

He just wants to see some evidence. And I think that's super healthy. Yeah, I admired his writing. I just like him personally. But I also think, and this comes out in the conversation, I just think we're living in a really extraordinary time where, you know, experts don't agree. And what is the average rational person supposed to do

when he or she is surrounded by so many certain sounding experts? in the fields of medicine and science and politics and journalism. We say it all the time, Chuck, but we've never been longer on certainty and shorter on proof. So this conversation, it's one of my favorites because it's shot through with those things, but also with a measure of humility. I like where we start and I like where we finish. And I bet you guys will too. I'm going to recommend his books now and at the end of this conversation.

But start with why people believe weird things. It's terrific. It's never been more relevant. And his most current one is called... Conspiracy. Conspiracy. Anyway, he's Michael Shermer. You're going to love him.

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slash mic that's net sweet dot com take it away well so it begins Michael Shermer with I think what's probably going to wind up being the title of this episode his first question into the mic was am I centered

and man if there were ever an epithet for our times thank you so much for doing this Michael I can't tell you what a thrill it is to meet you yeah no it's a great honor I saw you speak at Freedom Fest this summer I thought I saw you saw you there. Did you do an interview with my buddies over at

Fire? Yes, I did. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Greg Lukianoff. I just had him on my show with his new book. I have it here somewhere. Yeah, it's great. Yep, cancel culture. Yeah, well, I read the coddling of the American mind and then whatever this latest one is, he sent it to me. The canceling of the American line. Yeah. How important do you think organizations like that are in these crazy times that we find ourselves living in? Oh, well, fire is super important now, especially because the ACLU has kind of dropped the ball on defending free speech. They've gone woke. They are only willing to defend the speech of those who tow the ideological line of, how would you describe it?

Far-left, progressive politics, which is not very liberal. They're pretty illiberal, actually. I've been recently making a distinction between liberalism and leftism. Leftists tend not to be very liberal in the kind of traditional old-school liberalism sense. And, you know, you either have a principle of free speech in which you defend the Nazis themselves, the neo-Nazis to March in Skokie, as ACLU did. But they wouldn't do that now, but fire would. It's really funny, Michael.

I've talked to Greg a lot about this. He's been a guest on here twice. You know, Greg's in a funny spot. I think he's still friends with Nadine Strasser and past heads of the ACLU. He's hesitant to throw them under the bus. I understand why. But the way he put it was it's as if they became as interested in 16 or 17 other topics. And therefore, the whole speech thing became diluted.

Yeah, I think what's happened to a lot of liberals is they want to defend civil rights. rights of all kinds, and the ACLU's primary mission was always just the first one, free speech, that's it. All the others derived from that. And so once you go down the path of saying, I'm going to defend, you know, the rights of gay people, the rights of trans people, the rights of, you know, this group or that group, then inevitably there's going to be clashing rights, conflicting rights. The example I use is women's rights to compete in sports in their own division without men. and trans women who want to compete with them, trans women are men, and they identify as women, but they're still men, and they want to compete against women in women's sports. Well, yeah,

trans rights are human rights, women's rights are human rights, but you can't have everything, right? So something's got to go. And if you defend women's rights, then that means somebody's going to be upset. So I think that's what's happened to the ACLU and a lot of liberal groups. They feel like, well, we won the civil rights battles and the women's rights and the gay rights and animals, rights and workers' rights and children's rights and so on. What's next? Oh, trans rights. That's the next thing. Okay. But again, you can't have everything. You know, this is just the way it goes. Who was it who said, I want to say Thomas Sol, but the idea that there was no real progress, there was only sort of a transference of unintended consequence or something like that.

Yeah, there's no perfect solutions. There's just compromises. That's Thomas Sol's famous line. I love that. And that's right. You know, you just can't have everything. You want this. You're going to have to give up that. and whatever it is. So I think a lot of people are confused about the trans issue too because it feels like it tucks in nicely with gay rights. And, you know, as of 2015, same-sex marriage is the law of the land and so on. And there's very little discrimination against gay people like there used to be. Things are much better.

So what's next? It seems like who you're attracted to homosexuality or heterosexuality is the same as or just pretty close to who you identify as as a man or woman or by or not. neither or whatever. And they're not the same. They're just not the same biologically. And so then you get into the messy business of gender versus sexuality, biological sex versus gender, gender being far more culturally based. So there people get confused and think, well, I should support the trans movement. I support the gay movement. It's like, yeah, but they're not the same. A man cannot become a woman. It's just you can't do it. It's impossible. Biologically, I mean, you can identify as whatever you want.

and most liberals don't care about what people do privately or individually. It's when you, again, conflict with other people's rights. Like, I want to be able to go into women's bathrooms and changing locker rooms and so on. And women are like, no, we don't want you in here. And it's like, but my rights. It's like, but our rights. Okay. You must choose.

Yeah, it's like a terrible game of let's make a deal. And I'm not sure what the prize is, but it just seems like it's, you know, the curtain or the box or the door. and there's always something horrific behind one or the other. But look, I love that you came in hot with all this because I do want to talk about all of it. But the first thing I wanted to really say to you was thanks. You wrote a book, well, you've written a bunch of books, but the one that came across my transom back in,

God, it must have been 1997 or 98, was why people believe weird things. You know, I bought half a dozen copies because... So I had come back. from this trip to Peru that a buddy of mine put together who had read the Celestine prophecy and was just so enamored of vortexes and crystals. And, you know, being, or at least fancying myself as open-minded, I got into that world, somewhat skeptically, but the whole new-agey time

was such an interesting hot mess of commerce and sense. snake oil and possibility. And I just found myself handing your book out to people who I thought could benefit from reading it. It was probably obnoxious of me, but I used it for a long time as a proof to say, look, there's something else going on in our search for truth. I've been interested ever since in the books that you've put out and especially interested in whether or not your thinking has evolved or changed in the last 15 or 20 years, given the state of things. Interesting, yeah. Did you visit Machu Picchu down there?

Oh, sure. Yeah, because that's one of those kind of crystal-like hot spots where the first fortices come together. Yeah, right. There was like Sedona, Machupechu, some weird triangulated spot in some backwater somewhere else. Right. The special hot energy centers are never like in the Blanchevichu. Life, California, out in the middle of the desert that's ugly and boring.

It's always like these great vacation spots, Hawaii. Right. Right. Conversely, it's like the UFOs never come to Kona, right? Or, you know, or Malibu. They're always, you know, in some bog where Earl is there with his instimatic with some suspiciously-grateful. Farmer Bob and Pucker Brush, Kansas. Oh, I put it, yeah.

Yeah, never the White House. Yeah, yeah, that's a problem. Well, so how have things changed since? the late 90s, well, my book came out, white people believe were things the same week as the Heaven's Gate, mass suicide. And so that was rather timely. You know, and those things come and go. There's always cults and fads and movements that fade in and out, depending on

what's popular. In general, it's hard to track, like using polling data from Gallup or Pew, you know, to what extent people still believe or don't believe as much in the paranormal of supernatural, because the specific subjects themselves. change, whether it's like exorcism or ghosts or psychics talking to the dead. It just depends on what's popular on television, in movies, novels, pop culture, things like that. In general, the rates are roughly the same. People are more or less kind of gullible. There's a debate in cognitive psychology circles that I've been tracking. To what extent are humans naturally gullible? Are we naturally pretty

skeptical. So on the gullible side, you can rattle off things like the Heaven's Gate cult or Scientology or, you know, Nexium and, you know, all these groups that people seemingly fall for, the Nigerian spam scam or any of those. And we know fraud is quite common, elderly fraud, and the grandchild has been captured, kidnapped fraud, and those sorts of things you hear about them a lot. But what we don't hear about is how many people went to the Nexium, self-help seminars for women in business. And they never got the branding. They never swallowed the whole nonsense stuff. They never signed on to Keith Renere's, you know, crazy cult stuff. Or how many people have taken the Scientology test down on Sunset Boulevard there by the center? Or did the little cans

and got the reading, the e-meter reading. And they just never gave them any money at all. They just walked away. I think the majority of people probably recognize there's a lot of bullshit there. they're less likely to give their money to the spam scammer who calls them. I've been getting texts recently of just random text. You know, oh, is this Judy? It's like, no. Oh, well, maybe we could be friends. So I've taken to kind of stringing them along by saying, this is Judy.

This is Judy. Yeah, I said, Judy, I told you it's over between us. Go back to your husband. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. I must be mistaken. I get those a lot, those texts. And it's usually a very attractive woman with a picture on it.

Hey, are we meeting up on Saturday? You know, and I'm like, hey, how are you? Yeah. Yeah. You still at the same address? I'm like, yeah, I am. Come on by.

Come on by any time. Or another one I got for some guy, and I told him, I said, I thought we agreed. We weren't going to contact each other until the police dropped the case. And I told you ditch the money and hide the gun, or was it, hide the money and ditch the gun? Take the canoli. You know, I put the head in a bowling ball bag.

Remember where I told you I put it? And they were like, oh, my God. You have to. to, I mean, this is a total sidebar, but do yourself a favor and Google prank call gone too far. Oh, gosh. It's a comedian who tells the story of he answers the phone, and it's the same sort of thing, and he just goes along with it, but it wasn't a prank call or a scam coming to him. It was just a wrong number, and he decided to just keep going with it, and it was a business decision,

and it had to do with transferring money, and it was a business decision, and it had to do with transferring money, and a merger between two companies, and they call him back, and he tapes the whole thing. And it's just hysterical, but isn't it funny the things we do just to stay sane, whether it's messing with a telemarketer or a scammer or just not acknowledging that the number is wrong? I mean, what is with that?

Is it because we're curious? Is it because we're twisted, or is it because we're just kind of lonesome and willing to enjoy any connection, no matter how curious. It's probably a little bit of each. Depends how much free time you have. Sometimes I just ignore them because I'm busy.

But you sort of feel like, well, he's wasting my time. You know, like the Seinfeld bit about, you know, when they call, you ask for their home number. And if you can call them back later, they go, no, I can't give you my home number. Well, thanks a lot. Yeah, you got mine. But anyway, the point of that was that, you know, how many people don't fall for those things? Probably most people don't.

Remember the story about the strip search caller? Guys on a pay phone down the road and he calls them McDonald's. I think that was the first one that came to light. And he gets the manager to strip search the female worker because, you know, this is Sergeant so-and-so down at the police station. And, you know, we know there's been a robbery at your store and so on. And that's the lady who did it. So you got a strip-searcher.

And you just can't believe that people fall for this. But what we don't know is how many McDonald's or whatever did this guy call? And, you know, nothing happened. He just got hung up on. And so we don't know that. Well, you made that point, if I recall, and I think your first TED Talk, which I should also thank you for, because I watched it right before I gave my first and last TED Talk. Yours was better. But the point was we tend not to recall the misses, only the hits. And that's true, I guess, in just about any interaction, you know, whether it's a job interview or a date or whatever it is. Psychic. Yeah, especially a psychic. In fact, I think it was John Edwards, who was alive and well and on the air when that book came out. And one of my first friends, I said, look, dude, read this book next time you watch the Edwards nonsense. But yeah, Mrs. Versus Hits, how come the bias? Because our patternicity, our pattern-seeking brains, connecting the dots, and there's nothing interesting about non-patterns. There's nothing to learn about the world in finding no pattern. So that's what we do.

It's called learning. And most of the time, the patterns are probably real and they're good to know. And you can have false positives, type 1 errors, false positives. You thought there was a pattern there and there really isn't. You know, my example, there's a rustle in the grass. You hear, is it a dangerous predator? Is it just the wind? Well, if you think it's a dangerous predator, it turns out it's just the win, it's a type 1 false positive error, but it's relatively harmless. But if you make the other kind of error, you think it the rustle in the grass is just the win, it turns out it's a dangerous predator, your lunch. You get a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early before reproducing. Oh, darn, I see my camera went out again. I don't know what's going on here. Sorry.

No, that's okay. It actually gave me a chance to admire the books you have behind you. Those ones you've written, ones you've read, or ones you're meaning to read. Those are all yours? Those are my books. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Conspiracy is the latest book. And you can connect the dots. See, there's C-I-A and Soros is in there somewhere. And con? Oh, con. Oh, you're right. Con.

I didn't even notice that. Yes, three. Probably even Neo-Con, if you look real close. Okay, well, look, since you brought that up, I mean, you founded the skeptic society. You've got the skeptic magazine. You've always, to me, embodied that word more than anything else. And I've seen some of your recent conversations about conspiracy theories and why people fall for them in so many cases. And I just wonder, is it in part because they're skeptical of whatever the prevailing conventional wisdom might be?

Let me ask it like this. What in the world do you do in a day and age when the experts don't agree? Okay, yeah, those are two big questions, actually. On the second one, you just wait and gather more information. I mean, just take the bombing of the hospital in the Middle East. You know, the initial stories, you know, Israel did it. and then no, it was Hamas that did it. New York Times had to keep changing its headline. Well, but that's journalism, right? You get one line of story, then you get another one, you get an

update. Usually in these cases, it's better to just wait. And in the case of science, you know, when there's a startling discovery made, and there's only one experiment, it's usually best to wait until it's been corroborated or somebody else has replicated it, like the cold fusion mess back in 1989. Remember that one? He's going to achieve cold fusion in a lab, a couple of chemists, and, you know, this was going to be replicated everywhere, and, you know, energy too cheap to meters, it's going to solve all our problems, energy problems around the world, and so on, and it just flopped. You know, there was no replication. And, you know, in 2010, 2011, we realized that probably half the psychology experiments ever published, the most famous ones,

have never been replicated. And they probably should have never been published in the first place, right? So when you hear one of these, you know, kind of startling discoveries, oh, speaking of TED Talks, There was that one about the power pose. You know, women should have a power pose like men, shoulders back, chin up, you know, and kind of exude that testosterone and competitiveness. Lean in and ask for that raise, you know, that kind of thing. And, you know, that garnered, I don't know, like 40 million views on TED. And that was never replicated.

It probably should have never been published. There's a bunch like that. So it's always best to just kind of wait and see, especially if it's an extraordinary claim. If it seems unlikely, it doesn't fit the way we think things are, probably best to wait. Now, in your first question, the subtitle of the conspiracy book is

why the rational believe the irrational. My argument is that it's usually not irrational to think that there are conspiracies because there are conspiracies. A lot of them. You know, my examples of Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe, that was a conspiracy. You know, Watergate, conspiracy,

assassination of Lincoln, conspiracy, assassination Franz Ferdinand that triggered the First World War. That's a conspiracy. Iran-Contra, that's a conspiracy. the CIA, you know, MK Ultra Mind Control program, that's a conspiracy. There's hundreds of them I discuss in the book, and far more than that. So when you hear somebody going on like RFK Jr. about the conspiracy by the CIA to assassinate my uncle and my father and so on,

to you and I, it sounds like, come on, the CIA killed your father, but it's not totally irrational because we know the CIA has done things like try to rig elections and assassinate foreign leaders like Castro. And okay. So, you know, back to the rustle in the grass. It's a low-cost error to think that there's a conspiracy afoot when there isn't because it doesn't harm most people. But if there really is a conspiracy and you miss it, that could be costly. So it's better to err on the side of assuming more conspiracy theories are true than actually are, or more, you know, whatever weird beliefs are true than actually are just in case they are.

Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Rowe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues. You'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited, talk, text, and data for just 3499 a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind. You can see why I love these guys. If, on the other hand, you have better things to do with your time, then watch my mom and me be impossibly charming together, then allow me to remind you,

here, without all the cleverness and charm, that unlimited talk, text, and data, on a blazing fast network for just 3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain from an American wireless that keeps all their customer service in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the Microwworks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Talk. But how does that square with skepticism?

Well, yeah, so skepticism, the problem with the word is people think it just means you don't believe anything. And that's not the case. All we want to know is, is there evidence for what we believe, justified true belief? Is there justification for you believing it or not? And what's the quality of the evidence? You know, how much evidence? Is there convergence of evidence? Have other people checked the facts?

You know, and so on and so forth, before you commit to believe. in it. That's all skepticism means. Isn't there a certain degree that we believe what we want to believe, that we're more likely to believe the stuff that confirms our original bias? Yeah, certainly. So another line of argumentation in cognitive psychology is that we evolved the capacity to reason, not for veretical perception that is an accurate model of the world, but to defend our tribe, our beliefs, our dogmas as true. We really are good at that. And I think there's some truth to that. So that's the confirmation bias, the my side bias and so forth, that, you know, you just have a fixed belief and then you just gather the evidence to support it and you ignore the evidence that doesn't support it.

Everybody does that. So one of the tools of science is to engage with somebody who doesn't believe what you believe, doesn't support your theory. Or just imagine, you know, before I publish this, somebody's going to try to poke holes into it. Maybe I better do that first, or you have graduate students that do that or colleagues or whatever. or you have an A team and a B team and a red team. We're going to red team this problem. That is, you find some group of people that doesn't know anything about it or they don't agree with it. Now poke holes in it. What's wrong with my argument? And you have to do that because you are less likely to want to do that yourself. You said earlier with regard to the New York Times having to change its headline multiple times.

You said that's journalism. Is it? And now as you're talking about, science and the constant changing based on the proliferation of more and better evidence, right? That's science. It seems to me like between journalism and science, the one thing that they could share would be a sense of humility, but I don't see it anymore. And I'm not pissed off at the New York Times for getting it wrong. I'm angry with them because of how certain they sounded in their original headline. And then their next headline was just as certain. There's just no humility in the headlines,

and there's very little humility that I can find in nature and science magazines. And this, by the way, is coming from a guy, full disclosure. I narrate a show called Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International. But I also narrate how the universe works. I've been living in this world where, from my perspective, certainty rises to the top, and it shouldn't, but it sure seems to. And if you could riff on that, I'd be grateful. Yeah, well, intellectual humility, I.H, that's a whole movement in, also in cognitive

psychology. Can you measure it? Can you teach it to people? What kind of questions are you willing to ask of a particular claim? What kind of words do you use to describe things? People do content analysis of presidential speeches and the kind of adjectives presidents use, you know, how certain are they? You know, 100% sure, this is it, you know. If you're very dogmatic and black and white in your language that you use, you're probably not very intellectually humble. Whereas if you say, you know, words like probably, possibly, maybe, could be, for now, this is what we think. That's one of my criticisms of vouching and the CDC and so on during the early months of the pandemic, they acted like they were so sure this, whatever it was, was the right thing. And it wasn't.

And it's not that they were wrong so much. That's the problem. It's that why didn't they just say, look, we're not sure about the mask thing. We think we should probably wear masks or not, whatever it was, whatever month it was. But, you know, we're recommending that now, but you decide for yourself. And here's why we think this. Here's what we know. And then, you know, every week, it's like, well, we have some new evidence now. There's a study. And here's what we think this week, that could change next week, as if people are too. to not be able to process that. That really bothers me about the media.

You know, there's this whole thing that people don't like charts and graphs and statistics and numbers. They can't process that. They're just not smart enough. That's not true. Look at the sports page. Look at the weather page. I mean, they're just loaded with statistics and probabilities and numbers and charts and

graphs. It's like people are totally into that when they want to be when it's something they're interested in. Gosh, you know, that hubris is the thing that leads. to the sort of thinking that drives someone to conclude, like to bring it back to fire for a minute, we need to shut these bad arguments down because they're bad arguments. And if people hear them, right, they're going to be persuaded and misled. Meanwhile, you heard them. Are you misled? Right. Right. Did it completely upend your worldview? Well, no. No, but I'm not. I'm not

among the great unwashed, right? It's always the little people. Oh, the little people. We have to protect them from their ignorance. But no one thinks they're part of that group. No. No, they don't. Man, that is, I mean, to me, that's about the truest thing to be said today. It wasn't that the New York Times was wrong. It wasn't that Fauci was wrong.

It wasn't that the president was wrong. It's that they were also certain. And they squandered all the goodwill that comes from their good office and that comes from their vocation and their insolition. and their institution. It just seems to me that whether it's journalism, science, politics, all of those institutions overplayed their certainty. And now I'm not sure, I can't wait to read your latest book, but I'm not sure how hard

you can blame somebody today for feeling a bit conspirator and for doubting those very headlines and those very experts who still have. haven't learned their lesson, damn it. They still lecture and scold and shake their finger and sermonize with all the certainty they can muster. Did they not yet get the memo that that is no longer persuasive? Right, exactly. Well, yeah, we do know trust in normal institutions like science, journalism, Congress, and so on, have plummeted in the last few years for good reason, right? And that's just not helpful. Just the last few days I've been conflicted in my own mind about to what extent a lot of Americans are far more anti-Semitic than I realized. Or are these people just

mistaken? They've been lied to. They've been told Israel is this colonial apartheid, oppressive regime holding down the Palestinians. If they really were doing that and you really believe they were doing that, then there is a kind of a rationality to being angry about that. Yeah, why are they doing that? That doesn't seem right. So in fact, they're just mostly lied to. to. This is not what Israel is doing. And this is what Hamas is doing. If we just had the facts straight, then people would be, I think, hopefully less anti-Semitic in that sense where you hear these horrible chants, you know, gas the Jews. I mean, I just could not believe what I was hearing. You know, in a Western country, Sydney, Australia. Oh, my God. Gas the Jews? What?

And either they're just rabidly anti-Semitic and it just hasn't gone away. Or they're just mistaken. They've been lied to. Yes, but you can't get to the point of chanting gas the Jews unless you really believe that that's what should happen. I agree with you. I think that we're being lied to by the media, by Hamas, by Hezbollah. You know, it's a propaganda war that, for whatever reason, Western media eats up and spits out and people believe it. But if you're going to stand there and say that, that's so specific. And so, you know, harkens back to a previous time. To me, that's got to be anti-Semitism. Yeah. No? I think there's definitely an element still there. Here's a theory. I mean, since you brought it up originally, it's hard for me to believe that a rational person, a skeptical person, could look at a champion swimmer wearing a woman's bathing suit with their manhood clearly visible and say, yes, I really truly believe that's a woman.

It's hard for me to believe that, but it's easy to believe that they would say that in order to incite a certain feeling, I guess the word is troll, right, in order to really get our backs up, I wonder if some of the most hard to believe and hard to rationalize things we've heard in the last couple of years are, in fact, being uttered by people who genuinely believe them to be true or who are just trying to get a rise out of us, Mike. Well, there's some of that, yeah. I mean, there's an incentive on social media to peg the meter every time you post something and to get as many clicks as you can. I do think most people are not doing that, the people we hear that proclaim, you know, trans women are women, trans men or men, and so forth. Most of them, I think, actually believe it. They've changed the meaning of the words. They've simply said, a woman is whatever somebody says it is.

This was the beauty of Matt Walsh's film. What is a woman? He didn't have to do much of anything. It was almost like Borat, just walking around the camera crew getting people to say goofy things just by asking them questions. And it was almost as funny as the original Borat film just because, you know, these gender study professors couldn't even answer the question of the subject they're studying. So that's why I think Orwell was right. Language matters. We can't cave in on that and say that words mean whatever anybody says they mean and we have to go along with it.

You just can't do that. We can't have a civil society like that. What is it like for you? I mean, you're still teaching, right? You're a professor in a college? For the last 12 years, I was professor at Chapman University. My contract just expired this last semester, and I'm taking the next year to finish my next book called Truth. What is it? How do we find it? Why it matters? Is that all? That's all. Yeah, just a small little topic. Just truth? Just truth. But I've been on campus, and it's everybody has been as crazy as you've heard. Well, you've actually been, I mean, from what I've

scene of you pretty scrupulous in your, well, and the very first thing I heard you say today, am I centered? Yeah, you argue from the middle. You try not to veer too far, but what has it been like? I mean, if I just make a mental note of the things you've said so far in the last 40 minutes and compare it to what I'm assuming would be a classroom full of liberal-minded students, how's that going for you? If I was in my 30s, as an assistant professor, I didn't have tenure. I probably would censor myself more than I do. But I'm older, I'm mostly self-employed. I own my own magazine. I can't be canceled, really, so I say whatever I want to say. Not just to provoke. I just say what it is, I believe.

When I teach the students, I'm not telling them what they should think. I'm just teach them how to think. Much of what we've been talking about here, like just moving intellectual humility, moving away from absolute certainty. You know, I start off with, you know, the deaf definition of God is this omniscient, omnipotent being. And then I say, but I'm not God, and neither are you. None of us knows with 100% certainty, anything. And then, you know, Bayesian reasoning. You just assign a probability to something being true or not. You don't even have to do the math. You could just say, I don't know 100% anything. Are there aliens out there? Maybe. You know, have they come here? Probably not, but maybe. You know, I have an open mind.

And the moment you move away from the yes or no black and white binary, it's 100% true or faults, then it gives you some natural humility. Like, okay, I will listen to your argument because, you know, I could be wrong. I don't think I am, but, you know, who knows, I could be wrong. And that really opens up the door. Oh, ye of little faith, Michael. Oh, ye of little faith over on this side. And over on this side, we've got, oh, but the science has been settled.

Don't you trust it? What's wrong with you? That's such a crazy idea. I mean, people say that, you know, for things like the theory. evolution, you know, or climate change or whatever, there is consensus in science. You know, it's probably true. It's probably the most we could say about something. But this idea that the settled science, the jury is in, you know, what jury? Where? There's no jury.

It could all be wrong. Who knows? You know, come back 500 years. Oh, Darwin's theory, we found out that was wrong. Okay. My commitment is just to the truth. I just want to know what's true with a small tea, you know, just with some probability to it. Well, mine is to certainty. I want to know why people are certain with a big C. You were a theological major, right? For a time, you were dabbling in theology at Pepperdine. You were a born-again Christian for a time. I would imagine during that time you embraced a certain level of certainty in your faith. I'm wondering how quickly you came to that level of certainty and how long it took you to be. become less certain and whether or not you've ever had that feeling of surety again in your work. Hmm, interesting. Well, I became a born-A-N-Christian in high school. I was 17. My friend, Frank, and my other friend, George, had been pushing me to accept Jesus as my savior. All right, so my buddy, Georgie had a cute sister that I really liked, and they were going to church, and they invited me.

I thought, okay, I'll go, because, you know, this could be my chance. Fish where the fish are. But it was a Presbyterian Church in Glendale, California, Presbyterian Church, and a real dynamic minister-speaker. And he did the call up at the end of the sermon. You know, come on up, except you. All right, so I got up and did it. And my buddy's like, oh, my God, you did it.

You know, and then I went to school the next day. That was my buddy George. And I went to school the next day, and I told my buddy, Frank, hey, I did it. I did it. And he's like, well, where did you do it? The Presbyterian Church. Oh, no, that's the wrong one. I went, what?

Turns out he was a Jehovah Witness. I'm like, oh, the wrong one. How could there be a wrong one? Anyway, that was an eye-opener. And I was relatively certain about it for the most part, I guess, but it was young, didn't know much. When I went to Pepperdine, there in the bubble, everybody believed. So it was, you know, there was no challenges. It wasn't something I gave much thought to.

But when I went to graduate school at Cal State Fullerton, I took some courses in evolutionary biology, anthropology, comparative. I went through my Joseph Campbell mythology stage, you know, watched all those shows. And, you know, I just read those books and the heritage. with a thousand faces and all that. And I thought, boy, all these people around the world believed things very differently than me, what are the chances I got it right and that they're all wrong? And I said, well, I probably got it right, but maybe I didn't. I wasn't a great student in high school in the first a year or two of college. So there was some humility on my part, like I'm really not that's smart. And I met a lot of people that are a lot smarter than me's,

I think maybe I should be humble here just in case because I can see there's people smarter than me. So maybe I should just kind of see how it goes and make some comparisons. And the problem of evil always bothered me. You know, why do bad things happen to good people? If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and I'm benevolent. All good. And I don't mean just like war, homicides. You know, these are human choices.

God gave us free will as the argument. But I mean, just natural disasters, hurricanes and tsunamis that wipe out thousands of children, or even children, like childhood leukemia. What's with that? I mean, why would God allow this to happen? And, you know, there's tomes written about this, but I just, to me, they've never given a satisfactory explanation of that. And at the time I've written about this in the believing brain. My girlfriend at the time was in a car accident, broke her back Maureen, is her name.

And she was paralyzed for life. She's still paralyzed. I've talked to her periodically. And that was back in the 70s. And, you know, I just remember thinking, this sweet woman, why is this, why does God not, do something about this, you know, and I prayed. It wasn't a test of God's power or anything like that. I just felt so bad for her. I thought, you know, if there really is a God, I mean, why he should do something about it? I hear about these miracles. He heals people. Why not heal Maureen? And nothing

happened, of course. And, you know, that was kind of the last straw for me. Like, you know what? I just don't, I just think there's nobody out there. I think it's just us. And just bad things happen because of randomness, just accidents, things like that. So that did it. Do you need faith to be a skeptic? It depends what you mean by faith. I don't think so. Is there anything that you believe in today that you can't empirically prove?

Maybe. I mean, you hear things like love. Isn't love and emotion without evidence? Here I invoke Tim Minchin, the singer-songwriter from Australia. He has a great line. You know what you call love without evidence? Stocking. By the way, only a ginger can call another ginger, ginger.

That's one of the great songs of all time. I swear, I mean, folks, if you don't know what we're talking about, Google, Tim Minchin, and listen to that song. It's called Prejudice. That's right. It's called Prejudice. Since your new book has the letters sort of jumbled up in an odd order, that's what this song is about. take the letters in ginger and rearrange them, you'll come up with a word you're not allowed to say today. Right. Right. Only a ginger can call another ginger. Anyway, well, nobody's ever mentioned. Tim mentioned him before on a podcast. Really? Oh, I love him. He's super smart. He's got a riff on the new age. It's one of those

like eight minute monologues with a glass of red wine and this, I forget the name of the woman he met at this party who was a new ageer and into crystals and all that stuff and he just riffs on how silly it all is. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers.

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Have you heard I think it's the last cut On one of his albums It's one of the sweetest songs It's called Drinking White Wine in the Sun I don't know that one So pretty I'll be there with my dad and my mom drinking white wine and the sun.

It's a Christmas lullaby to his little girl. Oh, how sweet. And an homage to what he has his faith in, which is essentially the family that he hopes to see one more time. So they can sit around down there in Australia where it's 100 degrees on Christmas Day drinking white wine and the sun and being grateful for each other. It's a great too. He's got another one I like the, oh, if I hadn't met you, I think it's called. It's a love song to his wife. If I hadn't met you, these wonderful things wouldn't have happened.

He goes along for a while, then as he does, it shifts tone. He goes, of course, if I hadn't met you, I'd have met somebody else. Maybe they're not as good looking as you, but more athletic, taller, but not as funny. And I'd still feel the same way. So that's the random universe, right? That's it. Yeah, totally, of course, right? And how we make it work.

However it turns out in the hindsight bias, oh, it had to be this way. We were meant to be, whatever. Okay, so back to your question. Even things like evidence or rationality, how do you know rationality is the right way to go? Can you prove scientifically that science is a useful tool? Well, no, but this is what Thomas Nagel calls, one thought too many. You don't need to use rationality to prove rationality. It's just a tool.

It's not a belief. It's just something we use. And it could be flawed, you know, the scientific method and so on. It could lead to erroneous beliefs. it does. What other options do we have? You know, just I have my beliefs and you have your beliefs and we just shout at each other or I declare I'm right and you're wrong and then you declare the same thing. There has to be some method we can both look at and point to and go, okay, that's the experiment we're going to run and figure out if it's true or not. And that's all we have. So,

you know, at some point, again, I'm not omniscient and neither are you. So, you know, we just have to work together to see if we can figure out what the world is really like. And we may be wrong. but that's all we have. I certainly agree with all of that, but I would add at this moment in time, because that's the great fungible thing that makes fools of all of us. You know, a couple days goes by

and the New York Times looks breathtakingly out of step. One day. I mean, that's what's bananas now. It used to be, you know, weeks, months, years go by, science evolves, and somebody can finally conclude, you know what,

lobotomy thing, maybe not the best approach. Draining all the blood out of Washington, maybe not the best approach. But now we're learning the extent of our wrongness almost in real time, it seems. And we've got this weird ecosystem of what Chuck and I called podcastlandia, which has completely changed every single kind of discourse. You were hawking your books 20 years ago and eight six-minute appearances. I mean, how has this form of media impacted skepticism? Oh, I think it's impacted everything. And I think it's mostly for the better, you know,

that you can have long-form discussions on deep subjects without a hard out and, no, commercial breaks. And, yeah, I remember back doing Larry King and the Charlie Rose and Oprah and all those shows, you know, you get five minutes, you know, six minutes. six minutes on Anderson Cooper. Now I can get four hours on Joe Rogan. It's like, why would I not want to do that? Seven times. What's that been like for your, I mean, I hate to reduce it to filthy lucra,

but what's that been like for your business? It's hard to track sales or subscriptions from being on Joe's show. It's more just public recognition. Maybe it's a broader thing. And I've talked to other authors too. They've not seen a huge like sales bump that day that they were on the show. It's not clear that Joe's audience just rushes out and buys books. I don't know, it's hard to say.

You know, most publicists want to get their people on there because it is a huge audience. But the broader question, I think it's allows those big conversations, which is what, you know, I watched the whole three hours with RFK Jr. on there. And he made tons of claims, some of which I could refute, but most of which I'm not a epidemiologist or a vaccine expert, you know, but why wouldn't that Peter Hotez go on there? You know, and Joe offered him 100 grand and other people kick. things like $2 million now? It's close to $3 million now. Unbelievable. Why doesn't he do that? And part of it is that I've done debates with a lot of people. It takes a lot of work in preparation

because you got to anticipate what they're going to come up with because RFK Jr. is a lawyer. And, you know, same thing when I debate, you know, the Holocaust deniers are creationists or whatever. They're going to have some specific thing. If I don't know about that one little thing right there, you know, RFK Jr. comes up with, you know, that study back in 1976 published, in this particular journal, you know, with an N of 75 and they did the vaccines and here's what happened. If you don't know what that study was and what, you know, what it really said, then you look like an idiot. That's the only thing I could think of why Hotez wouldn't want to do that. He might be confronted with something he just doesn't know much about.

That's very charitable of you. I mean, frankly, because, I mean, in a world where we're desperate for truth, right, your next book, we're desperate for it. And the only way we can get to it is through credible arbiters and experts who are willing to make an impassioned defense of their claims. I mean, look, I agree with you, but I'm appalled. I mean, if I were Peter Hotez, I got a charity to run. This guy with the biggest platform in the world offers me $100,000 and a bunch of other. What better indicator is there for the general desperation for the truth than nearly $3 million

dollars being offered to an expert to simply come on and be an expert and have a debate with your nemesis to make a case. Back to the arrogance thing, Michael. It just seems like so many experts are still going, hey, look, look at all the initials after my name. I paid my dues. I'm the expert. You must believe me. And if you don't find me persuasive, that's your problem, you skeptic. It's all backwards. Yeah, you might be right. It could be hubris. The jury, is done now. It's in the science consensus has done. Vaccines are this. Well, nothing is 100%. So why not just say that? People aren't that dumb. They know. You know that, you know, this is what we know. We think you should probably get vaccinated, especially the people that are high risk and so on.

Just give all the caveats and let people decide for themselves. What's wrong with having Malone, Dr. Robert Malone, on Rogan talking about myocarditis? Yeah, what's the story with that? But I didn't find out on Rogan because there was nobody to go on there. I think he's had people on since then. But, you know, I had to go look it up. It's like, oh, I see. Okay, that's what's going on here. If you want an open society, you've got to let people have their say.

This is back to what we were talking about, censorship, but where we began, you know, who's going to decide who should go on Rogan and say what they want to say. Forget it. Just let people have their say. Well, what's better journalism? A guy like Joe who is transparent in his ignorance, who has no journalistic background and makes no claim to be anything other than a curious citizen of the world, or the editorial board of the New York Times, who's the tip of the spear, who is rushing in with all the certainty in the world and having to rewrite their headlines faster than they can cock to them. Who's doing a better job in serving the public interest through the lens of curiosity. and skepticism.

Yeah. I'm even glad to have people like those chanters about gas the Jews and having their say. You know, I want to know what people are thinking because that's good to know. Better to know. Better to know than have him hidden behind a sheet, right? This whole business of, you know, kicking Trump off Twitter when he was president. No, I want to know what he's thinking at three in the morning. When Melania is like, come back to bed.

He's like, no, I got a tweet. I'm really upset about something. It's like, all right, what does he think? That's very good. Always better to know. I was just going to say, Michael, you brought up Joe Rogan before, and I listened to your most recent one, I think, which was last year, when you talked about the JFK conspiracy theory. Oh, yeah. You know, of course, Joe Rogan believes, you know, I don't know what he believes exactly.

I don't know that he knows it exactly, but he certainly believes it was more than just Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. He's open to it. He's definitely open. And you believe that it was Lee Harvey Oswald who acted alone. We've had Clint Hill on this program twice already, and we're going to have them again for the 60th anniversary of the event coming up. But Paul Landis's book and his claims, I wondered if you are familiar with that where he said he actually found the magic bullet, I guess, and put it on the gurney. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, that could be the explanation for how that bullet got there.

That was always one of those weird anomalies. So here's how I think about that. You know, any big event, there's always going to be anomalies, actually with anything, any particular scientific theory. no scientific theory explains everything. There's always a residue of unexplained anomalies. What do you do with them? Well, you don't have to do anything with them, but some people take the anomalies and go,

therefore, my alternative theory is correct. And the bigger the event, the more anomalies you're going to find. We even call this anomaly hunting. You know, so JFK assassination, you know, Princess Diana's death, you know, 9-11. You know, how do you explain that the passport was found from this passenger over there in New York? or the part of the engine was over here,

and what about that puffs of smoke that came out, building seven, you know. And so one of the points I think I made on Rogan was that, you know, if it wasn't JFK assassinated in Dealey Plaza, what if it was the mayor of Dallas? Would anybody care? Would we be writing books, thousands of books in documentary films, and Oliver Stone would be all over this?

You know, the mayor of Dallas? No. Or what if Oswald had missed, you know, just winged him or something. Like, you know, Hinkley shot Reagan, but Reagan didn't die. Nobody thinks, you know, Hinkley was part of this vast conspiracy of the KGB and the FBI and the CIA and the mafia and the Cubans. Nothing like that. Or Squeaky Fromm attempting to shoot Gerald Ford.

You know, she's just a lone nut, just a Manson family member. Well, that's what Oswald was. He's exactly like that. Just a lone nut. But because it's JFK and Camelot and the whole thing, you know, it's just bigger than life. You go to DeLie Plaza, it's not very big. You know, in your imagination, it's this is a huge thing. And you look out the shooter's window, the sniper's nest there on the sixth floor of the book depository building.

And they have the two X's on the road down below, the next shot and the headshot. And you go, oh, it's right there. I mean, I could make that shot. So much goes away, you know, once you put it into perspective like that. Interesting. Climate change. I got to ask you. I'm sorry.

I'm just going to kind of morph into some version of a lightning round. But never mind. I have no question other than those two words, right? Climate change, you want me to riff on that? I want you to talk about it through the lens of the end of the world. I want to understand the deeply held belief that scares the hell out of me that so many Gen Ziers have that we're on a ticking clock in 12, 10, 8 years from now the party's over. Please straighten this out.

I'm skeptical of all that. I think it's good to separate questions apart. you know, is the earth getting warmer? Is the warming human caused? How much warmer is it going to get in the next 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? What are the consequences of the warming going to be? And then what should we do about it? So those are five different questions. The so-called scientific consensus is mostly around those first two questions. You know, is the earth getting warmer? Yes. Is it primarily human caused? Yes. And even someone like Bjorn Lomborg, who I admire very much and I like his work. Everything he says, he says, yes, global warming is real human cause. From there,

how much warmer is it going to get? It depends on the models, on the time frame, the time horizon. Are you talking about in 2050? You're talking about 2100. You're talking about 2,200. And that's going to determine then the answer the fourth question. What are the consequences? How much of a threat could this be? And we just don't know. And I suspect not much or not much we can't do something about. That is, you know, you can move, you can build things, you can change, you know, the landscape and so on to deal with it. And I like the technological solutions, you know, electric cars or, you know, carbon sequestration or, you know, geoengineering, alternative sources of energy, just pour it all in there. You know, I just, why not?

Nuclear? Absolutely. Nuclear has to be in the formula. I'm a huge nuclear fan. Just bring it on. there's some weird issues there. You know, it's the kind of thing because of that movie, the China Syndrome, happened at the same time as Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island, right. And people conflated them and, oh, my God. You know.

By the way, nobody died in Three Mile Island. Some Weizaker said, you know, more people died in the backseat of Senator Ted Kennedy's car, the Chappaquittic that died in three months. I know, it's kind of bad. Too soon? Too soon. Yeah, maybe too soon.

You know, just given humanity's ability, to solve problems. You know, this is what we do really well. And, you know, this is, we have decades, maybe centuries to figure this out. You know, the doomsayers, I've been, I'm old enough to have heard endless doomsayer, religious and secular versions of, you know, X is going to happen any day now. And it just never happens. And it's not that it can't. It's just that it probably won't happen as soon as we think, and it's probably not as bad as we think it will be, and so on. I mean, when I was in college in the 70s, there was, you know, already talked late 70s, early 80s, you know, that by the end of the 80s, the rainforests were all going to be gone, peak oil, we're going to

out of oil. And, you know, all these things, you know, all these species are going to go extinct, you know, and really none of that happened. We're never going to run out of oil. We'll never run out of oil, no. Are you making the economic argument there? Oh, I make always the economic argument for me. I mean, obviously, it's a finite world with a finite resource, but that last barrel of oil is going to be pricey. Exactly. See, people don't get that. I think we need training in high school of like how the world works economically. People don't understand. We'll never run out of oil. Absolutely.

Well, I'm just personally really heartened to hear you say that. I would have liked you either way. But the nuclear thing to me is so important. And back to the arrogance, you know, we got ours. We had our industrial revolution. We used five. fossil fuels to build the country. We have. There are three billion people whose primary source of energy today is what wood and crap. Cow dung. Right? This is crap. I mean, they're literally burning crap and they're pumping, they're doing great harm to the environment. But we got to make them rich, right? We have to make those people prosper if there's going to be any hope of a rational conversation somewhere down the line for the true betterment of the planet. Yeah, absolutely. Who cares about climate? in a thousand years from now when you don't know if you're going to have food tomorrow. So these people, they want to have a prosperous, flourishing life also.

And it's not fair for the West to go, yeah, like, as you said, too bad, we got ours. Now we care about the environment so you can't have yours. Unless you're going to go in there and create nuclear power plants, you know, those smaller portable units, okay, fine, do that. But, you know, we're not there yet. So they have to go through their industrial revolution as quickly as possible and get rich so that they care about the environment. So what can we do? And again, I don't want to put anybody in a box or talk to them like they're foolish because the fear around nuclear is real. The fear is real. But is it justified? And how can a skeptic persuade somebody who has drunk that amount of Kool-Aid to mix my metaphors?

Well, they should go to skeptic.com and order our special issue on energy where we have a whole pro-nuclear article in there. defending it. Basically showing that the nuclear technology was not allowed to go evolve like automobile technology or airplane technology, you know, because the failure rate has to be zero. So you can't experiment. But we have enough alternative technologies now, these smaller nuclear units and so on that could replace the big ones. If the, you know, government would get out of the way and allow the market, it could be regulated and tested and so forth, but just a little more freedom to develop nuclear George Brand has been making this case for decades. You know, he's Mr. Green Technology and environmentalism and the whole Earth catalog.

And, you know, he's totally pro-nuclear. And, you know, listen to people like him, who are pro-environmentalists, still say we need nuclear. Does it make sense to start with some facts? I mean, the fact that nobody died at Three Mile Island is big. The fact that most of the fatalities at Fukushima were caused by the tsunami is relevant. The fact that the exclusion zone around Chernobyl is now a model of biodiversity. It's like a guard. I mean, it's just overrun with animals and life, including a couple of dozen 90-year-olds who are still living there with granted some pituitary issues, but alive.

And drinking milk from animals whose milk was said to be contaminated for the next thousand years. Yeah, the facts matter. All that makes all the difference in the world. Yeah, we've got to follow the facts. Everything you just said is true. Yeah. People don't know that. So just, you know, they've been lied to or they've been mistaken in their beliefs that it's, you know, a existential threat.

In part, maybe because nuclear weapons are an existential threat if they're used. As long as, you know, mutual sure destruction works, so far so good. But I think people conflate those two things, nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. Right now, I'm just struggling back to the language thing and the conflation of a conspiracist. with a skeptic, with a denier. When does it all tip? I mean, one of the books you wrote had to do with Holocaust denying. Yeah, I just wrote my last substack column on the moral equivalency argument that's being made now between Israel and Hamas. You know, they're all, they're pretty much the same. You know, they're good people and bad people on both sides. No, no, they're not the same.

I wrote about that in denying history that, you know, the arguments were made, well, you know, the Allies bombed Hamburg and Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know, and the Nazis did their bet. Everybody's bet. No. The mass bombing of German cities and Japanese cities was done to bring the war to an end, to stop the killing. You know, the point of what the Nazis were doing was to keep the killing going until every last member of this group, mostly Jews, but others, are gone. It's an exterminationist program. The West does not have an exterminationist program. Dennis Brigger makes this point. You know, if the Jews are trying to exterminate Palestinians, they're doing a terrible job of it. It's like the worst job anyone's ever done, because there's more Palestinians than ever

before. The Jews are terrible at genocide. In the argument, David Wolpe, Rabbi David Wolpe makes this point that if you reverse the roles and Israel could do whatever they want and they had all the weapons they needed to eradicate their enemies, and what would they do? They do have that power. They could do that right now. They could have always done that for decades. now. But they don't. And that's the difference. Right? I mean, just, it's hard to see. And if Hamas had those weapons, what would they do? And it seems pretty obvious. They would exterminate Israel. Yeah, from the, what is it from the sea to the, from the river to the sea, the sea, the sea, Palestine will be free. I mean, what that means is, you know, exterminate every last Jew. Get rid of, you know, the Zionism.

We're just talking about Israel, not the Jews. No, this is just coded language. They want to They didn't chant gas the Zionists. That's right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Right. Do you think, as a public service, it would be useful or possibly even required to view the videos that were taken on October 7th? I do with the, you know, appropriate, age-appropriate warnings or whatever. You know, just blur it like Google does.

Yeah. But the point I made at the top of my substact column was Eisenhower, when he got to Buch involved, couldn't believe what he was seeing. And he called in journalists and photographers. to document everything. He said, because someday people are going to say this never happened, and we've got to make sure everybody sees exactly what happened. That's how we know about all that stuff.

It's all been exposed by the allies who made it public for everybody to see. This is what these people did. This is why we fought this war. And I think we need to do that. I think it's a good thing. Yep, show those babies, show all that stuff. All of it. You made a similar, not as graphic, but the same basic point with UFO.

I've felt this way so, so strongly for so long. I need to see the wreckage. I need to see the video. Call me a doubting Thomas, but I don't want to have faith in a thing that I want to believe in anyway. You know, I want to see the proof positive. I think it was you who made the point of the balloon from China.

Yes. Because if you look at that thing as the UFO, that it was, right, in the literal sense of the word, walk me through how we came to the point of knowledge and truth with regard to that unidentified aerial phenomenon. Yeah, it's such a great example because no one talks about the credentials of the pilot who photograph the Chinese spy balloon or shot it down. I mean, who cares? There it is.

We can all see it, right? It's only when no one agrees on what something is that the credentials of the person who said they saw it matter. And so when people say, well, what would it take to convince you that these UAPs represent actual spacecraft? Well, the Chinese spy balloon. Just show me that. And I'll believe it.

You know, I don't have to see it with my own eyes. You know, the president, the secretary of state, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, all go, yep, there it is. And the Navy shoots it down and whatever. Okay, I will then believe. You know, just that's all we need. And, you know, again, we've been tracking this since the early 90s, the whole UFO thing. And I've been hearing about, you know, disclosures coming any day now for 30 years.

Okay. Stop talking and just show us the, oh, we can't because it's top secret. But I know somebody who has a friend who's married to a guy who worked at the place who said they saw the actual debris. Okay. That's nice. These are credible people, too, right? I mean, these are elected officials. These are our friend, Michael Schellenberger, I heard.

Yes, yes, right? I mean, I love Michael. Yes, I do, too. I know, I know. And he tells me he's talked to somebody that saw it. Now, Michael has not seen anything. He just says, I talk to somebody who was high up, who's legitimate, has the credentials, and they saw it. Okay, fine. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure. But if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA, making a real difference. on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never

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USA But that's not enough. I'm sorry. Everybody has to see it. And I have this idea that someone like Marco Rubio gets access, to the warehouse where the debris is or the spacecraft, whatever it is, is there. And he goes in there, and it's the equivalent of the U2 spy plane or the SR7, who are Blackbird or the stealth bomber, the next generation or something.

And he's like, oh, that's what we have? Yeah, that's ours. Well, I can't go tell the public about that. No, of course you can't say that. Oh, I'll just go out there and say, there's nothing to see here, folks. And then everybody's like, no, they're hiding the aliens. Isn't it strange, though, that for decades and decades and decades, it's been, no, no, there's no, we're not doing this, we're not doing that. And now all of a sudden, the government is going, oh, yeah, this is really a big problem.

And some guy testifies before Congress and says, yeah, I've seen it. And it's like, why now? Why now? It's a good question, you know, that there was this kind of shift when the New York Times article came out, Leslie Keene and Ralph Blumenthal, 2017. But note what they said. It wasn't that the aliens are real. It was that the videos are real. So, you know, the story comes out and people ask the Pentagon, are those videos real?

All they meant was they're not fake. They're not CGI. they're actual videos from our jets. But they also say it isn't us. It's not a technology that we possess. It's not a technology that we're aware that someone else possesses. Now they could be lying about that, I'm sure. It could be that they're just saying we don't know what it is.

You know, because, again, the objects themselves are blurry. They're grainy. They move in weird ways. You know, Mick West has done the heavy lifting on doing the calculations of what we're actually looking at and how these cameras work. you know, they're most likely just artifacts of the lenses and the movement of the camera, most likely. But if it's something else, okay, then show it to us.

And if it's just, well, it's classified, okay, then there's nothing more to say, nowhere to go. Then stop, like the conversation's over. It's like that equation with a miracle in it, right? This led to this, then this happened, then this happened. Then there was a miracle. And then it's like, no, wait, that's where the conversation ends. Right.

And so if you can't show me the money, we shouldn't be talking about the cash. And that's where I'm stuck with this. Why is it that for the entire photographic history of UFOs doesn't reflect the change in cameras? Everybody is now armed with a high-definition camera and everything still looks like a hubcap thrown through the backyard and photographed off your instimatic.

Exactly. Yeah, when 60 Minutes did that piece, they had the one guy, the Navy pilot, who said, oh, we see these things every day. Really? because there's, you know, like over a billion cameras, cell phone cameras, high resolution, high definition, there must be millions of photographs. Nope, there aren't.

And so that tells us, again, the counterfactual, what would be true if these things were real? We would have millions of photographs, high resolution, clear video, and photographs, and we don't. So very likely there's nothing there. I'm not 100% sure because I've tried to take a picture of the moon with my camera. camera and it just looks like crap. If I tried to take a picture of a plane that is, you know, 30,000 feet up there zooming in, I don't think the camera on my phone is going to do it. Yeah, but supposedly these things are buzzing airliners. Well, everyone sitting there has their

phone right there. You just point, I take pictures of jets going by all the time or fly it out over Nevada and you see those solar array panels. I can get clear shots of those. And those are quite a ways away. So I don't know. I also think that the degree to which alien life would be beyond our capacity to comprehend would be so exponential, right? I mean, in the same way we look for patterns, we like to assume that this life would somehow resemble us. I think, Mike, you talked once about Moore's Law

with respect to the way technology evolves. And if, I mean, look at how advanced we've become in the last 200 years. And imagine an alien civilization, 50 or 100,000 years. hence, what kind of tech would they have? They would appear to us as gods. Not as like, oh, we found a wrecked. Spacecraft's not going to wreck. Are you kidding?

With that kind of tech? And we pulled out the remains of the poor stupid creature, who somehow had the wherewithal to travel through time to get here, but couldn't negotiate a landing in the marsh. They're always crashing. I know. So what does Rogan say to this? Because he, I mean, he's all in, it seems. Is he open to the idea that he's dead wrong? I think he's open to being wrong. I think he errs on the side of believing

things until proven otherwise, whereas I are on the side of being skeptical until proven otherwise. Again, it's just a matter of, you know, how open you are to change in your mind when there's new evidence, you know, Bigfoot. Show me the body and I'll believe. It could be another petal primate running around the world. There used to be a dozen of them at one point, a couple hundred thousand years ago, could be still now. Okay, just show me. Well, you see, it was dark, and, you know, I got out of my tent and I grabbed the camera, and if you kind of squint and use your imagination, you can sort of see in the, no, sorry, it's not going to, you know, cut it at a biology conference where you announce a new species you discovered. That's all it is. Because what happens when we

squint from a physiological standpoint. What does squinting do and why does everybody squint? You're trying to resolve a blurry object. It's like these optical illusions, you know, the information is the poor information environment. You know, like the dress that was gold and white or blue and black. You know, it's just one of these information conflicting, like the duck and the rabbit, you know, it's one of these flipping images. And therefore, your state of mind or what you're thinking you're seeing will determine what you see. Those kinds of things are interesting because it tells us that, again, our senses are not designed for perceiving a perfectly accurate model of the world.

So we fill in a lot of the gaps. I'm fond of the astronaut and pilot Scott Kelly spoke at this NASA conference on UAPs. And he addressed this issue, you know, aren't you guys specially trained and super-duper observers? He says, no, we're not at all. He goes, I've had co-pilots that wanted me to go down and land at this flight. It turns out it was a buoy in the ocean. And he tells another story about, one of the space shuttle flights where the astronauts are up there,

they're back in the shuttle, they're about to close the bay door. And somebody goes, oh, no, there's, we left a tool in there. Look, there's this tool floating around inside the cargo bay. And they look, and it turns out it's the space station that's 85 miles away that they're looking at. And he's like, we're not any better than any of you at looking at stuff. We're just people. So this idea that, oh, he was a trained pilot, you know, he knows what he saw. No.

Not at all. That's the Virgin Mary in my French toast. There's no doubt about it. Exactly, right. Filling it in. Yeah. Again, it's just, I'm open. Just show us, you know, the chances of aliens having gotten here are pretty slim because

it's a mostly empty space. Even if every star has a dozen planets and so on, there's, you know, billions of civilizations in the cosmos, the chances of them getting here are pretty slim. That's my answer to the Fermi paradox. Where is everybody? They're probably out there somewhere, but they probably have not come here. Because it would take too long, right? Well, the distance and all that.

And also, they probably wouldn't be bipedal primates that look something like us, except they have some gnarly stuff on their forehead and their eyes are more almond-shaped. Come on, how often has that happened on Earth, you know, in the four and a half billion years of our evolution? You know, how many bipedal primates were there? You know, just a few. Chances of this happening on some other planet, you know, pretty slim. But in a world where we fill in the blanks and in a world where we look for patterns and in a world where we're all heavily influenced by our own past, I know you were a Star Trek fan.

I'm a Star Trek fan. Somewhere in the reptilian part of my brain, I got a pretty good idea of what these aliens are supposed to look like. Because you know what? Star Trek got a lot of other stuff right. The communicator, the sliding doors, you go down the list. So maybe Roddenberry was on to something, right? But I'm with Elon Musk on this one. If they're here or if they're out there, they've been very subtle, haven't they?

His words. Yeah, so back to your technology question, if the aliens were here, they're going to be light years ahead of us technologically, hundreds of thousands or millions of years. So maybe they use cloaking devices. They're actually up in the hills up there, and they have a little cloak thing and they're watching us. Okay, maybe.

But here I'm fond of quoting what I call Sagan's Dragon from Demon Haunted World where he tells that little thought experiment. You know, I have a dragon in my garage. Would you like to see it? Oh, yeah. Okay. Here, and you open the garage and the person looks in there and they don't see anything. Some paint cans, a ladder, a bicycle, but there's no dragon. Well, this is an invisible dragon. Oh, an invisible dragon. Well, we'll sprinkle some flour on the floor and then when it walks around, we'll see the footprints. Well, see, this dragon hovers above the ground about a foot. It kind of floats around.

Oh, an invisible floating dragon. Well, we'll get one of those thermometer things they use in COVID, you know, for your forehead. We'll point it around the garage. We'll see the heat signature of the dragon. Well, this is a cold-blooded dragon. It doesn't give off any heat. Well, what about the fire? Oh, it uses special cold fire.

Okay, so second's point is, you know, what's the difference between an invisible hovering, cold-blooded, undetectable dragon and no dragon at all. And at some point, if you can't answer that question, then what are we even talking about? Was your first TED talk, the one where you had like the divining rod? The Godball finder. It was basically looking for marijuana in students' lockers, right? It was like a divining rod.

Right. That's exactly what it was, yeah. In that same speech, you concluded by playing Led Zeppelin backwards. and proving the pattern point in such a great way. But in an audio world, I mean, we fill in the blanks the same way. And you play stairway to heaven backwards. Most people hear the word Satan. But then you put up a whole new set of lyrics, and you can positively sing along with it.

Who introduced you to that? Well, the backward masking thing, when I was in ninth grade in 1969, there was a whole thing about Paul McCartney is dead. He was killed in a car accident. And so we all went in search of the, you know, the clues that were in the albums or on the album covers, you know, the back of Abbey Road, the front of Abbey Road cover. The four of them are walking across the famous crosswalk there on Abbey Road. And, you know, Paul is barefoot and he's dressed like a corpse and, you know, and Ringo is the grave digger. I forget who was what.

John was the preacher. Yeah, John's the preacher. or, you know, on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's, there's two sets of beetles, the older Beatles and the new Beatles, and somebody has a hand up above Paul's head behind him. It's a sign of death or something like that. Anyway, there's hundreds of clues. You can just Google Paul is dead, and there's whole websites devoted to this, including backward masking. So you play Revolution No. 9 backwards, and it says, turn me on dead men. Turn me on dead men.

There's a bunch like that. And, yeah, so Led Zeppelin's one of those. you know, if there's a bustle in my head row, whatever that is, and you play it backwards, you know, and something about Satan and 666 in the tool shed. Satan in the toolshed. Well, I mean, it's laughable until you put the words on the screen. Yeah, then they pop out. And then listen to it.

It's that information poor environment when you can't quite tell what you're looking at or listening to, and then somebody primes you, this is what you should hear. Oh, now I hear it. or see, you know, now I see it, right? That's, so have you ever seen those things where you hear a voice and somebody points this way or that way and the words appear above the screen? And whatever it is, they're pointing to, that little phrase, that's the phrase you hear when you hear the ambiguous, you know, audio phrase. There's a bunch of these on Twitter that go around every once in a while. And they're quite amusing because you really can't tell until you see what it is you're supposed to hear

and then you hear it. But that wouldn't happen for like you and I talking now because it's clear what we're saying. It's only when it's ambiguous and you can't quite make it out. Well, all I know for sure is the great TV comedy, Mr. Ed, the talking horse. If you play that backwards, it's crystal clear. Satan's the source, the source, the source, the Satan's the source. Oh my God, I haven't heard that one. It's awesome.

On the golf ball finder, the mining rod, there's a follow-up. to that. A guy named Jim McCormick in England bought that company, the Quadro Corporation, that had originally made the golf ball finder, and then it was used to find marijuana in students' lockers and so on. He turned it into a bomb detecting device that he sold the security agencies around the world, not for like hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars, but for tens of thousands of dollars. And he sold it to like Iraqi security forces to detect bombs underneath cars and things like that. And no one ever thought to test it. This guy made, I don't know, it was like tens of millions of dollars and he was convicted and he went to prison in England.

I think he's still in prison for fraud. And then we have Elizabeth Holmes, right? All that crazy technic. Look, this is ultimately the right place to land the plane because your work, it doesn't take place in a vacuum. It's got such real world applications and there's so much fraud and so much nonsense going around with so many crazy claims. I mean, I do look forward to reading your new book, but just as a useful survival guide, you're going to have a tough time topping the first one, why people believe weird things, because, man, oh, man.

I appreciate that. But on the Elizabeth Holmes thing, since you brought that up, I don't blame the people that invested in her. I mean, there's a kind of rationality to following somebody in Silicon Valley that makes big promises, because they all do that. fault was where are the checks and balances and the investigations and the due diligence that investors usually do. I think there they drop the ball because of her whole, I'm the next Steve Jobs

person. I think that was probably the problem there. They dropped their normal skepticism because of other factors. Bottom line, there's never been a more prudent time to be skeptical and humble, right? And so thank you, Michael, for being both of those things. People should go to your website, which is? Skeptic.com. People should subscribe to your magazine, which is? There it is, Skeptic. It's an actual print magazine.

We're still in print. We actually are in bookstores, which is rare these days. People should buy your first book, which is why people believe weird things. Here it is. There's the original cover. Look at that. I've got it. I've got that thing around here.

I love it. And your most recent book, which is called, Here it is. Conspiracy. Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. Thanks for the plugs. I appreciate that. Yeah. And a year or two from now, the runaway bestseller that finally gets to the truth of truth. I'll look forward to that. By the way, at that talk you gave at Freedom Fest, I love that story about the castrating of, was it sheep? Was it sheep or cattle? Sheep, yeah. Yeah, because I had a funny line, but I didn't get my hand up in time for the Q&A, which was, I wrote in this in my book, The Moral Arc, the animal rights chapter about our perspective on these things and how this neophyte went to one of these dude ranches and asked the, you know, the rancher, you know, well, how do you castrate the

cattle? He goes, oh, it's easy. You just use two bricks. He goes, oh, my God, doesn't that hurt? He goes, not if you keep your thumbs out of the way. See, that's the kind of crack on dirty jobs that would have triggered a hundred letters, half of which came from PETA and required a sensitivity session. Right. So thank you, Michael Shermer. All right, Talman. Thanks for having me on.

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