TRIGGERnometry - Michael Shermer: "Regulation Is Not the Answer to Big Tech Censorship"

Episode Date: June 7, 2020

Michael Shermer is a science writer, founder of The Skeptics Society and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic.  Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And a fascinating guest we have for you today. He's a science writer, historian of science. He's the founder of the skeptic society, the editor-in-chief of the skeptic magazine. He's very skeptical, basically, is what I'm saying. Michael Sherman, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me, and I'll try not to get triggered for this hour. Well, the idea is that you trigger people with our help, so that's what we're trying to work towards. Well, apparently, I do sometimes trigger people on the far left and far right, which means I'm doing my job.

That's exactly what we do on the show. Those are two groups of people we have triggered a lot recently, and I'm sure we'll do more of that together. But before we get into it, just for anyone who doesn't know who you are, most people will do, but for anyone who doesn't, just tell everybody, who are you, what is your journey through life? How do you happen to be sitting here talking to us? Well, the main trigger, as it were, is my new book, Giving the Devil Is Due, my latest book, my 13th book, actually. My life's work, really. It involves trying to understand what truth is. That is, how do we get to the truth? We want to know what's true, not just what I want to be true, but what's actually true, empirically true, using empirical science and reason and rationality and critical thinking. And that's the core of skepticism is you start off assuming that the claim is not true

until proven otherwise, because most of us, most of the time, get things wrong. And so my argument for free speech in giving the devil is due is that the devil is whoever disagrees with you or that you disagree with or you don't like or you consider to be uttering hate speech or whatever. And the reason they should be given their due is because you would want that for yourself when you're in the position pushing back against the mainstream or challenging the accepted dogma. and you get silenced because you've signed off on silencing and others, that's dangerous. So, you know, and again, the core problem is that we're wrong much of the time. And the only way to find out if you're wrong is to talk to other people. So with Skeptic magazine, we're not afraid to talk to anybody. You know, we've done issues on Holocaust denial and Croatianism and climate denial and vaccine aisle.

and, you know, I'll talk to anybody and ask them, you know, what is it you believe and why? And just lay it out for me. And we'll publish those. We'll publish your very words. And then, you know, then we'll address them. Now, I'm not afraid to debunk them as well. But I still think they should be given their due in a sense that none of us can get it right all the time. So we have to listen to, you know, dissenting voices just in case.

Well, I guess one of the most difficult issues that's been brought up, and you've spent a lot of time in the book talking about free speech. It's the first and most probably one of the more significant portions of it. But one of the difficulties that the pandemic has brought up, I don't know if you've followed this case in the UK where we had a well-known conspiracy theorist David Ike, who gave an interview about how the 5G masks are causing the coronavirus. And soon afterwards, there was a spate of arson attacks against 5G masks. right and YouTube banned that video then he went and did another interview on a private platform blah blah blah blah blah and I think that's one of probably the most difficult cases where you

think well is this person's speech causing destruction of property etc what where do you stand on something like that because I don't know if I've still worked out what my position on that is yeah so I know that case I watched that interview and then I was on Brian Rose's London Real show to talk about it and I I think think even someone as kind of far out there or nutty or or fringy as as as david i should be given his boo now when i when i say that i don't mean we're obligated to put him on every show so he has his voice it's up to him to to find a platform for his his conspiracy theories and if somebody takes them up on him fine don't you don't censor that uh and you know he's not again he's not

completely crazy you know if you listen to him he's obviously fairly smart, articulate man, you know, but his chain of reasoning leads him down, you know, some, you know, off the rails down some crazy pathways where he ends up with the lizard aliens running the world or, you know, the 5G towers. Now, are his words responsible for somebody firebombing a tower? I would say that's a bit of a reach.

That is to say, people that would do something like that, if you point out to them where David Ike was wrong, they're not likely to be changing their mind anyway. The analogy I use is with the, you know, the famous story about the conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton running pedophile ring out of a pizzeria, you know, before the 2016 election. I mean, this is as crazy as it gets. And some guy showed up to this pizzeria with a gun, you know,

and hopefully no one was hurt, but, you know, people acting on like that, and people that believe that, my correcting them on, you know, Hillary's, not running a pedophil ring out of a bitzeria. They're not going to change their mind about Hillary on this, and they're likely to do something crazy anyway, because that particular conspiracy theory is not why they're agitated, why they're not, not why they're out there doing their things like that.

In any case, the moment you set up a gatekeeper that says, like apparently Google slash YouTube is doing, either algorithms or actual people sitting there watching videos, and making the decision, are we going to allow this or not, then you're down the pathway of expanding that category, include more and more things that are kind of moderate, you know, kind of within the kind of the Overton window, as it's called, of discussable subjects, that category gets bigger,

and then censorship expands, and then more and more of us are self-censoring or we're afraid to say what we think because we might be canceled or censored or kicked off YouTube or, Twitter or Instagram or whatever. And that's a dangerous path to go. So that's why on page one of the book, I talk about the 1919 decisions over a century ago now

of Schenck versus the United States. Charles Schenck was the head of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia, and he was distributing pamphlets, flyers, to draft age men to protest the draft. He said it was unconstitutional. You know, the 13th, 14th Amendments protect you from slavery and guarantee your bodily autonomy. And the draft is basically saying the government can take my body and send me off to war to die if it wants.

And that's a kind of a form of slavery. Now, that's a debatable point, but that's not the point that I'm making, is that just saying that was a criminal act, an act of treason at the time. And that's when Oliver Wendell Holmes made his famous decision in which he included that phrase, a clear and present danger that was the equivalent of shouting fire in a theater. Falling, shouting fire in a theater. Well, you know, decades, more and more things put into that bin of clear and present danger, such to the point where anybody uttering any criticism of the government could be considered a clear and present danger. So we got to shut this guy up.

And that's where you end up with, you know, about the 70s, you end up with the language police and political correctness. And, you know, every utterance could be considered. a clear and present danger to somebody somewhere. And then, you know, by the 90s and early 2000s, you end up with, well, to paraphrase the title of your podcast, you know, people that are triggered by the tiniest little things, like the paroxysm at Yale over Halloween costumes, you know, where Nicholas Christakis and his wife sent that email out saying, you know, we're not going to tell you what kind of costumes

to wear on Halloween. You're adults, you know, and for this, they were, you know, totally, you know, totally just shattered. Like, no, you're like our parents. You have to tell us what to do. This is a complete reversal the way things used to be. Right. Well, it's quite a journey. Before Francis jump in, let me just follow up, because just to stick with the David Ike thing just for a moment. I'm just trying to work it through in my head. Like I said, I don't know what I think. And I'm trying to work it out, which is, I think, the spirit in which you engage with it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So if David Ike is right, now I don't think he is. But if he's right, that 5G masts are responsible.

for at this point of time of recording 350,000 deaths around the world. Would I not be reasonable in going out and burning down a 5G mast? I mean, would that not be the right response? And therefore, is his making that argument not causing me to think potentially I should do this? Well, it's already illegal to do that, to commit violence against other people to destroy property, to burgl and band. Those are already crimes. So anybody doing that for whatever reason, it's still wrong.

It's illegal and immoral, period. I mean, if you really believed it, then the way to do it would be to address the government to look into the matter or curtail the activities of telecommunications companies, regulate the telecommunications companies. I mean, the government already does this a lot. I mean, we don't have to nudge the government to be more regulatory. The regulatory state is massive, right? So there's already an apparatus in place to address those kinds of problems if there was evidence for it.

And clearly there isn't because if there was, the government would be all over it. This is what government regulators love to do. They love to nose around in private companies and regulate them. So it's not like that, you know, that isn't in place already. So I'm really not worried about that. But let's do say why it's wrong. I mean, 5G is just an extension of 4G, extension of 3G and so on, all the way back to the 90s and the Motorola flip phone that you held up to your ear and the fears back then that this was causing brain tumors, right? And these were just cancer clusters.

You know, you throw a bunch of pennies up in the air and they land on the ground. They're not perfectly spaced out. They're clustered. And this is true of everything in life, including cancer cases. They're clustered. So you're going to get clustering of people that use a lot of cell phones and people that. have brain tumors just randomly and that's all it was and uh and so those kinds of conspiracies have always been around as well as you know by the way bill gates you know bill gates has been trying to

conquer the world since the 90s and of course he wasn't trying to conquer the world in software but that's a different thing than with the conspiracy thing you know and i'm now predicting that uh bezos will replace bill gates as as as Volda board as the evil Darth Vader um because you know he's now poised to become the first trillionaire and history so he will be a target you know and that tells us what's really going on here these are you know fear of the unknown fear of the invisible you know the virus is invisible the you know the electromagnetic radiation coming from the 5g cell towers is invisible nuclear power is invisible people fear things that have effects that are powerful that they can't see smell taste touch

and the virus is essentially invisible without a high-powered microscope you know we we had never seen a virus. So, you know, that tells us something about human psychology. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing, and most people have no idea what's actually in it. Avercar, green mattress is different. Their mattresses are certified organic, built from natural materials,

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slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. What is your argument, Michael, to the people who, to those people who say, look, these companies, we're in a state of national emergency. The world hasn't seen this type of thing for at least 100 years. Companies and in particular organizations need to be responsible in these very very fractious times. And putting out an interview like the David Ike one is quite frankly

irresponsible and could lead to some very serious consequences. And in times like this, we need greater restriction. Yeah, I would say to that, because I think you're referring to Brian Rose, who did that, had David Ike on. I would not have David Ike on my podcast because I would feel that I'm giving him a platform. Perhaps he doesn't deserve. I would discuss him. I would maybe write articles about him or address his claims, which I just did. But that's, you know, that's just me. You know, Brian Rose is his own man. He can do what he wants.

And, of course, Google is a private company and it can censor him, which it did. You know, I mean, YouTube, in this case, Alphabet is the parent company of Google that owns YouTube. Okay, fine. That's different from the government censoring people, which is a separate issue. But even that, I would still tell, say, to Google slash alphabet, you know, you should be careful about going down that pathway of censorship. You know, you start with something reasonable, like we don't want to let ISIS groups have a YouTube page so that they can produce recruitment videos. Okay, that seems pretty simple. But then you get someone like David Ike, you know, who's just kind of a fringe goofball with crazy ideas, much like when Joe Rogan had Alex Jones on.

You know, people made the same thing. Now, he did not get, that did not get censored by YouTube. This was before YouTube started down that path a few months ago. But nevertheless, I find it very entertaining. It was enjoyable to listen to Alex Jones, get hammered, drinking whiskey and smoking a pot with Joe Rogan and going off on his, you know, multi-dimensional alien beings. In this case, they live in Silicon Valley. And all they're, you know, I mean, does anybody really take him seriously?

Some people do, yes, but hardly anybody. You know, there's always going to be, you know. You haven't met many comedians, Michael. Believe me. There's plenty of weed smoking comedians to take them very seriously. Really? Okay. Well, but I don't think they're likely to blow up towers or whatever.

Oh, they're nowhere near organized enough, believe you mean, no. Yeah. So again, I mean, I get the temptation it's there. You know, let's shut these people down. And I will admit, I kind of felt that same way when Alex Jones's followers started showing up at the parents of Sandy Hook. shooting victims. You know, that's really bad when they do that. But again, you know, there's some element of moral culpability on the people that do it, not on Alex Jones's crazy ideas. You know, people do act on their ideas, but it's the people acting that should be held

accountable and responsible, not the person that utter the speech, in my opinion. And where do you stand, Michael, on the, you know, we've got these big tech companies. I mean, they're not big. That's the wrong word. They are. are essentially monopolies and they get to choose what goes on their platform, what doesn't, what gets broadcast to hundreds of millions of people. Do you think they're too big, too powerful? Or do you think they're private companies? They can put on whatever they want.

It's not really an issue. Yeah, really the latter because here of monopolies has always been around since corporations are invented and regulate them or break them up and they have in some case with antitrust laws in the United States. But we does them in is competition. That is to say, we just need more platforms. And there are people developing more alternative platforms, you know, and I think the same thing will happen with search engines,

with the equivalent of YouTube, you know, other platforms to post videos. You know, as we've seen now already quickly in the last few months, just the competition for streaming services for movies. you know, Hulu and Netflix and Amazon Prime and Disney Plus and now ABC, NBC, CBS are all launching their own streaming platforms. So this is the solution to monopolies is to break them up by competition, not by Fiat from the government. In my opinion, that's the better way to deal with. And I wrote about this in my book, The Mind of the Market, about the lawsuit against Microsoft for bundling Netscape and sort of forcing people to use Netscape. Well, by the time that lawsuit went to.

Internet Explorer. Yeah, Internet Explorer. Yeah. It was so long ago since anyone used either of them, Michael, that it's fair. I know. That's it. But by the time that lawsuit went through the courts on appeal and year, I don't know, it was. years and years at drug on. No one was using those technologies anymore. And that's the solution.

Just keep, you know, more innovation, you know, more inventions, more competition between people. You know, it is a concern, although we see this in politics. We essentially have a duopoly in the United States. The Democrats and Republicans capture 99% of everything, all the money, all the votes, and so on. And it would be better if we were more like European countries that had, you know, four or five viable parties, that would be good competition. But the political term is rigged by it's designed here in the United States, end up with the duopoly left. But the very lead would be good to have, you know,

some tech billionaire like a Peter Thiel launch a new platform to compete with YouTube. You know, and I think he sits on the board of Google or something like that, so maybe he can do that. But, you know, somebody like that, you know, or a Jeff Bezos, you know, maybe launching something like a YouTube for, with next to Amazon Prime video, something like that. I think that's a solution. Well, that's an interesting point. And you bring up the political side of all this.

And here's what some people might say to the argument you've just made, which is that even when you have, you know, different platforms, they're all based in Silicon Valley. They're all run by woke liberals, right? Or people that are perceived as being woke liberals, they don't necessarily act particularly woke anti-capitalist in terms of their business practices. No. But in terms of their policies on, you know, restrictions, in terms of their pushing of diversity in the way that it's now defined in all of those respects, Facebook, Google, Instagram,

owned by Facebook, you know, YouTube owned by Google, the powers consolidated into the hands of five or six people who all think the same, who, when they make a decision, you know, about, let's say, banning somebody off their platform, there's no question that they collude with each other because those people get banned simultaneously across the different platforms. So even if you have another search engine, it's likely to be based in California, it's likely to be run by the same types of people. And then the political, the political shenanigans that you then get as a result of that kind of mindset being the only one that's involved is that you end up in a position where even if you have three different YouTube-like

alternatives, they still all ban David Ike. Yeah, that's right. That's possibility. But we saw this, you know, when the rise of television in the 60s and 70s, there were just the three, here in the United States, just the three major networks. And PBS, you know, the government run, you know, competition, as it were, is a little more independent. But now, you know, we have, you know, 500 channels and just endless content. available in endless news sources and so on. You know, there was sort of a consolidation of news media with just a handful of newspapers,

Wall Street Journal, New York Times here, and the CBS, NBC, ABC on television. But now, you know, there's, you know, 10,000 sources of news. And, of course, we worry about that. It's like, well, wait a minute. You want to get rid of a lot of those because they're so fringy and they pass around fake news. But before you,

were complaint there were only three sources so what's the number you know is it 16 is it 27 is it 245 what's the right number of sources and the answer is just let the market decide that let people choose give people some some um accountability for making their own choices and you know let's let's address it that way you know watch out for being in a in a bubble in which you're only reading people that agree with you oh you know try reading somebody else else that disagrees with you. But you can't force people to do that because they're not likely to accept the content you're forcing them, forcing upon them. So you have to make it a free choice. And I just think more competition and more availability of sources is better.

Michael, what is your position on the fact? So, for instance, I'm more to the left than you are and I'm less libertarian. And I have a more, can I, shall I say, distrust of the markets. And I'm like, well, if we just leave it to the markets to decide, then what you're going to get is a Google that just is so big, it's so powerful, it just swallows up all its competitors, and that's going to be our only option. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's what they said about GM and IBM. And I remember an interview with Bill Gates in, I think it was 1996 or 97, where they asked him, what do you fear the most? And he said, I mean, they said, are you worried about IBM or this? He says, I fear that there's a couple of guys in a garage somewhere coming up with something I can't think of. And then,

you know, two years later, Google is launched by, you know, a couple of guys in a garage. And that's always the possibility. And to me, the answer to the fear of the monopolistic power of a single corporation. Somebody like a Jeff Bezos can stand up to a Google. I mean, he has the capability and the resources to do that. By the way, now Amazon is a target. Everybody's afraid that Amazon is going to destroy all retail. And there'll be no more retail stores and so on.

That's the talk right now. Well, first of all, you know, the service he's provided is pretty valuable in a pandemic. I mean, he's hired several hundred thousand new people. so that's good for jobs. And he's delivering products right to your doorstep so you don't have to go out with your mask or possibly contaminating people. So that's good for society in the pandemic. And he's making money doing it.

But it's only in the last couple of years that Amazon started making money. You know, for 20 years, they were kind of hovering on bankruptcy, you know, constantly borrowing money and so on. And Elon is still in the same position with Tesla. You know, they could still go belly up. He's always, you know, scrambling for more investments, monies. And, you know, I don't know how these billionaires move digits around on the computer screen. And, you know, to me, it's a, you know, it's a whole other world that I'm not familiar with.

But I see what they're doing. But they're the ones taking the risk to do that. And also, it's good to remember, you know, when we pick targets like Google, Amazon, you know, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, we're subject there to the availability heuristic and the survival bias. The survival bias is the people that made it. What about all the people that, you know, that risked all of their investments, all their savings, they borrowed money from their family, from banks, from venture capitalists, and they went belly up.

They went bankrupt. That's what happens to most entrepreneurial efforts. They mostly fail. I have a venture capitalist friend who gives me sort of a back in the office. calculation. For every hundred pitches they hear, they fund one. For every hundred companies they fund, one makes it to an IPO where the head guy is a billionaire. In other words, one out of 100 and one out of 100. What happened to the other 99.9%. They all went, either went bankrupt or they're just barely struggling along. It's like you walk into those business bookstalls at the airport,

and it's all these books about the successful people in business. What about all the ones that went bankrupt and they went out of business? No one writes biographies of them. It's not quite such a good read, Michael, is it? It's not a good read. You know, when the Steve Jobs biography came out, it was a great read. And he's a fascinating character. But it was, okay, let's scroll through this thing and see what the secret sauce is.

Okay. So you go to an elite college, you drop out, you move back to parents' house, You start a company in your garage. You act like a complete asshole. You treat your employees like shit. And then you get to be a super successful person. No, no, that's not the formula. It happened to work for him, but this is the survival bias.

We only noticing that particular instance. So, you know, for every Jeff Bezos, there's, you know, a hundred like him that we never heard of because they never succeeded. They failed. And so we have to allow the possibility of super success by one kind of. company one person because we're not supporting. We're not going to back the people that failed and bail them out because that's just the risk that they take and we're willing to allow that. And I suppose, again, coming from a question from the left, what would you say of these companies,

you know, like your Jeff Bezos, you know, your Amazon's, like your apples, you know, when it comes to things like workers' rights, when it comes to that, and the fact that you've got these large companies effectively not treating employees like they should. Surely if there was greater competition for people to go and work in different companies, they wouldn't be allowed to get away with it. Well, to that I would say, compared to what? You know, the workers' rights revolution has been around for a century. And workers' rights has expanded throughout the 20th century, giving them more and more rights. And, you know, unions is one solution to that. I'm not a big fan of unions, but, you know, they are an effective tool against management. And they did earn a lot of workers' rights.

And in any case, as I mentioned before, you know, the government regulatory state is pretty powerful. You know, there's a lot of things Bezos can't do to his employees. And they can complain. And they have been. And government, local government, state governments have been going in to investigate like okay what's the deal here how are you treating these people they don't get breaks they have to work you know 12 hours instead of eight hours what's going on here and there's already laws about that so it's really just a matter of enforcement of the laws that are already on the books which are pretty extensive and there's a bevy of lawyers looking for work to do companies like that that have deep pockets when they violate workers right so all that's

already in place and taking place. So I'm not terribly worried about that. All right, Michael. Well, let's change the subject a little bit. You've spent your whole life debunking myths and inaccuracies, pseudoscientific claims. And now, I think we've never lived in an era where the term fake news has been used quite as ubiquitously as it has been. And frankly, when fake news hasn't been as ubiquitous as it now, at least I would suggest that's the case. What do you make of the political landscape? Obviously, in America, you've probably got the election still coming up despite the lockdown. We had this similar election very recently here in the UK, where now it's almost like par for the course that whichever side loses claims that it only

happened because of fake news or because of, in our case, there was some message on a bus that was inaccurate and that's why everyone voted for Brexit and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, So are we descending into this kind of political conversation, which is no longer conversation? It's just people throwing out fake stuff and then the other side going. Everything, the other side is fake? Is that the direction we're going in? By the way, let me ask you, if you happen to know this, is it true that the number one search after Brexit was, what is Brexit by people in England? What is the European Union?

Yeah. Right. So that's pretty crazy if it's true. Well, okay, there's some research. Michael, just on that point, actually, let me say, because it's an issue we've explored quite a bit, and I think our viewers would want me to interject that in some ways, Brexit was not so much about leaving the European Union. And it's a long and complicated conversation, but to a lot of people, it was about

a loss of national identity, it was about controlling immigration. So people felt rightly or wrongly, by the way, but they felt that leaving the EU was about that and also about, as we say, in the UK, sticking two fingers up to the establishment, which was really a rejection of business as usual. Let's just carry on. In some ways, Donald Trump was very similar, but please, go ahead. No, I agree with that. I think that's right. The rise of populism, nationalism, kind of authoritarian-leaning governments. I mean, there are still authoritarian regimes, but the UK and the United States are not that far. But, you know, stick it to the mayor. kind of pushback, I agree that that's probably what it's about. So again, people don't have to know

anything about what Brexit really means or what the trade deals are going to be and how the pricing is going to work for bananas. Wasn't there something about the EU regulating the culture of bananas or something like that? And the UK people are going, fuck off. We'll eat whatever bananas we want. You're rehashing some of the most painful moments of the campaign there, Michael. Listen, I like my bananas in the way they fucked in all, right? Yeah. But I will recount some research by Hugo Messier, a cognitive scientist, Brennan, and a few other political scientists since the 2016 election.

And their conclusion is that the fake news business, the so-called Russian hacking, the internet bubbles, Facebook bubbles, and so on, had very little effect on the election. That is to say, back to my Hillary and the pizzeria petapha pedophilia ring, you know, people that believe that are not going to suddenly vote for Hillary when I show them that that conspiracy theory is fake. They already hate Hillary, right?

So most people are not nudged one way or the other by some particular story on some fringe Internet website. Instead, we're pretty predictably tribal and going to vote one direction or the other. Hugo Mersey, he actually thinks political advertising is almost a complete waste of money in time, that it has next to no effect. And if so, that would be interesting because of the billions of dollars spent in advertising before an election probably has very little effect. And I think there's pretty good evidence for that.

So whether these sites are allowed or not, I think is probably irrelevant based on the research we have that fake news has always been around. I mean, it's just more prevalent now because, A, we're talking about it and B, there's more real-time, almost instant sources for news. So it feels like it's more pervasive, but it looks like it's far less influential than we initially thought. in 2016, 2017. And by the way, with the Russian, so-called Russian hacking, again, it probably had little effect on the election. And in any case, let's not forget, we've done that kind of thing before.

You know, there's, you know, stories about the CIA messing around in elections in South American countries in which we were supporting fascist dictatorships over communist dictatorships, because at least the fascists are more supportive of, you know, American business interests because they can gain on it better. Whereas opposed to the communists are going to nationalize these corporations, and that's no good for American business.

So, you know, we were providing money and weapons and so on to, you know, the dictatorship was called, you know, he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. Right, right. So that kind of thing has always gone on. And, you know, Trump is terrible with the media. But let's not forget, I'm old enough to remember Nixon. Nixon hated the media. And, you know, in those private conversations he recorded that came out in the 90s after he was dead about, you know, what he said about Jews running the media and stuff.

It was like, holy crap, this guy's a real Anna's semi. You know, so, you know, Trump is bad. Nixon was probably just as bad, but we didn't, you know, we didn't have access, you know, like Nixon wasn't tweeting every 20 minutes. So it doesn't seem, it didn't seem as bad at the time. That's really interesting. I mean, as a Russian, first of all, I have to say, take deep offense. the suggestion that we were not competent in what we were doing. But I'm joking, of course.

And actually, of course, I was someone who initially thought that Russia had hacked the election, blah, blah, blah, but the evidence just isn't there. But it's interesting that you talk about political advertising. Wait a minute. Evidence isn't there. I mean, we know they were. They tried, but they didn't really succeed. And there was no collusion with Donald Trump and so on.

Oh, right, right. That part, yeah. Oh, there's no question that almost probably every single government in the world tries to influence the American elections because it's what determines their future in every single way, right? So that's unquestionable. The Chinese probably did more of it than the Russians. We know that China funds a lot of congressional races and all of that.

But anyway, let's not get stuck too much into that. You mentioned political advertising. I would put it to you that the function of political advertising at this point is not about changing hearts and minds. It's about antagonizing your own base to go out into the world and vote. Get the vote out. Yeah. get the vote out, number one. But also, if it's true, then isn't what we're doing here

completely pointless, Michael, which is having a conversation across, you know, Francis is on the left, I'm in the center, you are, you know, pretty libertarian from what I know, right? So, what's the point? I mean, if we're not convincing anyone, if we're just, is this kind of mental masturbation just for us, or is there actually any point to what we're doing? There's probably a joke a comedian could come up with that, but yes, well, again, the point of free speech is to have conversations so that people can listen and reason themselves to particular decision. Now, which way you vote is maybe a separate issue from a hundred other things we might think about and talk about, you know, abortion, immigration, gun control, you know, the, you know,

vaccines versus the anti-vaxxers, you know, the Holocaust and creationism. And there's, a thousand topics we could talk about and most of them most people haven't thought that carefully through so uh you know we're in other words there's sort of after the unsighted voter and maybe not in a political parties in life in general and you know there's this meme that was going around years ago that you can't reason somebody out of a belief that they they didn't reason their way to in the first place but that's not true um i know from just personal experience emails I get every day. People I changed my mind about this or that after I read your book or you read your article or you made me think or whatnot. It is true that facts can matter.

Again, back to the cognitive research on this cognitive science research that if you present data in a way, in a particular way, people are more receptive to it. If it's visual, you know, pie graphs and bar graphs and so on, people can grasp it instantly. If you just put up a chart of, you know, numbers, you know, it's just the mind, just the eyes just glaze over. And, and, and, but, but more importantly, you have to present it in a way that doesn't force people to have to give up some particularly deep core belief that they hold. So, for example, the analogy I use of, you know, back in my debating creation is, you give people choice between Darwin and Jesus. You know, they're not picking Darwin, right? A Christian accepts Jesus as his savior. That's the most

important thing in his life, right? So what does he care about this Darwin guy? But if you, if you present it like, you know, evolution may be the way God created life and the diversity of life, this was God's method. Then it takes that off the table. Like, okay, so what's this theory all about? Same thing with climate denial. Unfortunately or fortunately, you know, Al Gore's success with his film and inconvenient truth affiliated climate science with the left. That's a liberal cause. therefore I as a conservative have to be against that.

And that put it, you know, took it off the scientific table and put it into the political arena, which polarized it. So I just basically take that off the table by saying something like, you know, it's not a liberal cause. It's just, it's either true or not. And by the way, you can make a ton of money in green technology and capitalism can save the day of global warming. People like Elon Musk creating electric cars or something. Now, you know, conservatives, they like to hear that.

So then they're like, oh, okay, so what's this climate science thing anyway? Because, you know, the studies since in the last maybe five years or so show that knowledge about climate science is not a predictor of whether you accept it or not. And unfortunately, just the way it is, you know, people that accept climate science don't seem to know any more about it than people that deny climate science. So having scientific knowledge by itself is not a predictor of whether. you accept it or not. So when people are commenting, say, on social media about their position on climate science, they're actually just virtue signaling to their fellow tribal members. I'm a conservative, so I doubt it, or I'm a liberal and I accept it. So you have to go around that to convince people and then present the data in a pretty accessible way.

And it's very interesting that you say that because it's quite depressing that everything has now become these binary terms, like you know, like you just said, and it's all political and all the rest of it. I think a lot of this, and you've said so in your book, comes from campus, it comes from the culture wars which have started on campus. Do you think that the coronavirus is going to be almost a bomb to that? Because people are going to realize, you know what? We're all in this together. It doesn't matter if you're left or you're right. It's a virus. It can affect anyone, and it may help us to kind of come together and listen to each other more? Or am I been smoking too much of the golden herb?

I thought exactly that until maybe just two weeks ago when the sort of bitter fighting return to normal here, at least in the United States. And, you know, it would be nice to think, you know, like the old sci-fi scenario, you know, if the Earth got invaded by aliens, you know, we'd all, you know, become united as one species against this common enemy.

and in essence, that's what the COVID-19 is, is a enemy. And it looked like it was going to do that. I think there's still some signs that most people are pretty good about this. But we're kind of starting to return to our old tribal ways of not just disagreeing with other people, but hating them. They're not just wrong. They're immoral. They're bad. They're evil.

There's a lot of that. Unfortunately, our president here is kind of fuels that. He fuels his base. He has, you know, 80 million followers on Twitter and, you know, boy, it's, I am worried about that. I wish we would be more commonly united, although that could still happen. We'll see. It's too soon to tell. You know, you mentioned the academy.

I'm a professor at Chapman University. They're, you know, they're really worried. If, you know, if students don't return in the fall, they're not going to pay 50,000 bucks a year to hear me yammering away at this particular garage. You know, they pay that kind of money to go to a brick and mortar school where there's professors and sororities and fraternities and a social life and gyms. And, you know, it's a whole package. So this could change the academy. It's hard to say what direction. I think the simple transfer of knowledge from one skull to another, that can be done remotely, simply, cheaply. You know, the, if you look at the economics of the rising cost of colleges over the last, say, 50 years,

compared to any other basket of goods that have also gone up, you know, a quart of milk or a gallon of gas, loaf of bread, whatever, you know, they've all gone up. Of course, you adjust for inflation and whatnot, but college tuition is just skyrocketed up. And yet the ratio of professors to students is roughly about the same. What's changed is the administrative, um, structure is just expanded wildly. I mean, there's, you know, way more employees at universities that don't teach at all. What are they doing? Okay, well, it may be that universities and colleges will have to look into that more and say,

maybe we don't need this dean of diversity here. Because, you know, how is that? Students don't pay for that. Students, parents. You know, parents might start asking questions about that. I don't know, but with this generation of students, I think that would be the number one priority, Michael, to be honest. So it seems.

And obviously one of the things we've talked to a lot of people about in the past, but with the rise in tuition fees, there's also a rise in student expectation in terms of their power and influence and their ability to say, well, this is how things should be at my university. This is, you know,

I am demanding that this person who I don't like does not speak on my campus or I'm demanding this, I'm demanding that. So do you think that we might start to see a cultural shift simply as a result of the fact the universities are going to have to rethink their model a little bit? You always want the best for your family, and that means only Egglands Best Eggs in your kitchen.

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Better taste, better nutrition, better eggs. Yeah, I think that's entirely possible. You know, my friend and colleague, Jonathan Haidt, and Greg Lukianoff wrote that book, The Coddling of the American Mind. It's a great book. Great book. Yeah. So they, you know, their hypothesis is twofold that kind of culture of safetyism that arose in the 80s

and kind of solidified in the 90s. that today's college kids, that's when they were born, 96 and after, the so-called Igeners or the Gen Z. They started coming into college in around 2014 or so, and that's when we saw the rise of kind of demanding culture of the colleges to be more like parents, to protect them. Your job is to provide a safe home for us here at this college. And, you know, no, that is not their job. That hasn't been their job in 50 years.

In fact, the whole point of the 60s revolution was to overthrow that idea of in local parentis, you know, that parents sent their kids off to college. The college administrators and professors treated them like they were their children. And the 60s was, you know, in a way, a revolution was to say, we're adults. We're going to, you know, smoke pot. We're going to, you know, drugs and rock and roll. baby, so leave us alone. So this is kind of a weird reversal of what, you know,

took place with the sexual reaction and the 60s and all that. Now we're kind of going back to the 50s. Like, you know, it's your job to protect this. What? And, you know, and that gets wrapped up into this, you know, back to my book, that this is sort of a weird thing. I have to write this defense of free speech, you know, because on that, I'm very liberal, you know,

probably far left on free speech, or at least what used to be. liberal. You're far right now. Far right. That's where you are if you believe in free speech, as we all know. That's right. I mean, conservatives, you know, when I see people like Sean Hannity on Fox News defending free speech, I'm like, oh my God, this guy? You know, and you see these liberals that, you know, he's, he's hammering, you know, defending censorship. It's like, this is a complete backwards. Remember when conservatives were up in arms about rock lyrics, you know and Frank Zappa was defending free speech and you know Madonna is defending free speech

and they're trying to censor her videos and you know and all that what happened to that you know that's kind of that's what I'm writing about maybe I'm a conservative I'm in favor of censoring Madonna songs but anyway okay no mate that makes you a Russian you're in favor of censoring women um now wouldn't you say the case so, Michael, is look, we can blind the kids all we want, but as a former teacher and your university professor, the parents have got to take the buck for this, surely. They've raised these kids, so they need to take responsibility that they've raised these mollycoddle children. Yeah, I agree. But, you know, when you're an adult, you still have some responsibility and

moral culpability. I do believe in free will, at least a form of free will in which you have some accountability for your action. So I put some. some of it on the students, but yeah, the parents. But when you put it a little deeper, it's like, you know, the crime wave that started in the 60s and peaked and started going back down in 1993, you know, the parents of kids then were, you know, super cops and careful and worried and scared. I remember the milk carton kids, you know,

the picture of the little kid on the side of a milk carton, you know, who was kidnapped, you know, and it wasn't till later that, you know, the criminologists and statisticians pointing out that, you know, 99% of kidnappings are by one of the parents in a divorce dispute, in a custody dispute. So, you know, letting your little Johnny or Mary, you know,

walk down the block to the playground, they're not going to get kidnapped unless you're going through a custody dispute with your spouse. Right. So that culture of safetyism was probably overblown. You know, I now have a four-year-old. I have a 29-year-old and a four-year-old.

my four-year-old now, taking him to playgrounds, these playgrounds are designed by lawyers. I mean, they're just like super padded and extra careful and nothing can go wrong. It's like, wow, what happened? And it's that culture of safetyism, you know, that we can't allow anybody to hurt. According to Jonathan Hyatt, Greg Likianov, anyway, in their book, that's one explanation. The other hypothesis, by the way, screen time. not just television, but more focused social media screen time. It seems to affect kids more, girls, more the ways, maybe double the rate of anxiety,

depression. You know, the cancel culture is very destructive. And, I mean, I kind of get a glimpse of that. I'm an okay boomer. You know, I'm 65. So I don't worry. I don't do a lot of social media. But I can feel it like, you know, I have a book come out and get, you know, positive review,

reviews, super positive comments, and then one pops up that, you know, that's super negative. And I'm like, oh my God. And I can't, that's all I can focus on is this guy, this fucking asshole said this about me. I'm going to get, just like, calm down, Chermer. Now, multiply that by, you know, a hundred every day, every hour, these kids, you know, reading social media. You know, the negativity bias, you know, where losses are twice as much as gains feel good. you know, negative comments are twice as potent as positive comments are rewarding. So it's like, oh, boy.

Now, so, you know, some are calling for not regulation so much as recommendations to parents. You know, maybe you should allow your kid on a screen two hours a day or three hours a day. That has yet to be worked out because the data is still coming in on what's the right number. But surely there's some balance between your kid run out, go outside and around with, other kids at playgrounds and get some sunshine and vitamin D is supposed to be good for COVID-19. So versus sitting in the back room on a screen, there's some balance there. Yeah, for sure. Well, Michael, listen, it's a great book, and we recommend everybody gets it and reads it,

given the devil who's due. Tell everybody, is it out already, or did we get an advanced copy? Yeah, it's out. Yeah, it's published by Cambridge University Press. It was out in England first, and then in the United States. state so and it's available everywhere. Unfortunately all book, most bookstores have been closed when my book came out. So that was unfortunate, but, um, but where's Amazon? Back to Amazon. And Amazon's not the only one that will deliver books. You can also go to skeptic.com and order a signed

copy because I, I went back to my office to sign hundreds of copies. So we have them available. Well, if you want a signed copy with Michael's personal coronavirus on it, make sure you go to the website and get that. give Jeff Bezos your money. Make sure you get the sign. You just lick and you. Yeah, exactly. That's why you won.

But Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. Before we let you go. Oh, thanks for having me. You guys are a lot of fun. And it's good to be pushed a little bit. I appreciate it. Well, there is more for you on that front

because we've got one more question for you. Okay. And the question that we always end our shows with, Michael, is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Yeah, well, I would say it's talking about talking. that we should be talking about letting other people talk, especially people you don't like,

because they may be right, partially right, completely right. You might be partially wrong, completely wrong. In any case, it's good to have your position challenge because if nothing else, it strengthens your own position. I hear what you're saying, but I'm not going to stop interrupting Francis. But on that, no, Michael, thank you so much, and thank you guys for watching. We'll see you all very soon.

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