The Truth Behind Conspiracy Theories: Why They Matter More Than Ever | Michael Shermer (Archived Episode)

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here to talk to the King Skeptic himself, Michael Shermer. Michael, welcome to the show. King Skeptic, okay, that's a new one, I like that.

No, I love it. And so your recent book, Giving the Devil His View, A, was a phenomenal reader, really enjoyed it. And it was really interesting for me to try to find sort of the rubric with which to view you and your views. And I think I have it, which is why I call you the King Skeptic.

But understanding what the skepticism lives in service of is what I found so interesting about you. I'll put it in my words, and then you tell me if I'm on the money or not, or if I'm way off. But to me, it seems like sort of a necessary approach if you want to find out what's really true, that we are wrong a lot, and the only way to actually figure out what is true is to be skeptical and to make sure that your opponents, what you're calling the devil in this scenario, have a voice to help you sort of find what is true. How close am I?

Perfectly stated. That's actually, that's it. That's the, well, that's a steel man argument. I mean, this isn't all original to me at all.

I mean, this has been around for a long time that, you know, in debates, formal debates, you know, you really should try to articulate clearly what the other side is arguing, if for nothing else, that you're not talking past each other, that you're not having a debate that neither one of you is actually, positions that people are actually holding. And yes, you know what psychology has thought us the last century or so is that, and the history of science is that we're wrong about so many things, and the only way to find out is to talk to other people, especially those who don't agree with you, and that's why, like in science, we have open peer commentary and peer review, and like, for example, I just finished a book on conspiracy, conspiracies and conspiracy theories, and I wanted to go with a university press, so they sent out a review, and I got two long reports back from blind reviewers that, you know, I don't know who they are, so they're free to say whatever they wanted. You know, they were pretty brutal, actually, and it's like, oh my God, that's a great point. I never thought of that, or like, how did I not know these four books and important papers on conspiracies?

How did I miss that? You know, so that's, you know, it hurts the ego, you know, like, oh man, I should have been smarter or whatever, but the fact is, nobody is on mission, so it's good to have that kind of feedback. All right, so that response to getting critical feedback is sort of my intoxicant, and this is probably the thing that I find most interesting about you and the way that you approach it. So many people now are skeptical to get into a fight, and you really feel like you're skeptical to sort of advance our collective thinking, which I find super admirable, but how did you get to the point where somebody can sort of kick you in the face?

You've just written a book, which I'm sure is like a human amount of time and energy, and how you sort of self-soothe, and then go, this is actually useful. Self-soothe. Mostly, I just go ride my bike. I ride my bike every day anyway for a couple hours, and it's especially useful when I'm obsessing about something somebody said on social media.

You know, I mean, I'm 66 years old, but I can imagine if I was 16 years old, I'd be falling apart, you know, going, oh no, somebody said something on Twitter that I don't like or that doesn't like me or whatever. So yeah, of course, that doesn't feel good, but you know, so what? Yeah, well, I guess, you know, our mission, as it were, is to figure out what's true, as you said. The problem is there's a lot of areas where that takes second place, like in political truths, if you want to call them that, or economic truths or ideologies or religious beliefs.

You know, people already know what they think is true. You know, I'm a conservative, so I hold these five values sacred, and I'm not giving them up, and I don't care what the arguments are. This is how I define myself, or we're liberal, the same way. So, you know, if you approach something like abortion or immigration or gun control, and you're trying to present facts to somebody, and you're going, well, maybe I'll change my mind, maybe I'll go this way, or maybe I'll go that way, just kind of depends on what the research shows.

Almost nobody thinks like that in those areas, because, you know, we sort of define ourselves by these tenets right here, and, you know, it's very rare for people to switch political parties, change religions. I mean, it happens, but not very often, especially if somebody makes their money doing it. You know, this is their job, that they're an actual elected official. In fact, it's so rare that when a congressman changes parties, I mean, it's just like front page news.

It's the top of the news cycle. It's that people can't believe it. You know, they're called flip-floppers or traitors. And, well, what if somebody got new information, and they changed their mind, and then decided, well, this is not my party anymore?

Shouldn't you do that? Isn't that a good thing? That should be a virtue. But instead, in religious and political and economic and ideological beliefs, it's a vice.

And I think it has to do with the social nature of humans, that we want to be liked, we want to be approved, we want status in our group, we want to be part of the group and belong and feel like we belong, and groups can tolerate some dissent, but not that much. And that, I'm afraid, has gotten worse in politics. You know, the amount of dissent one is allowed to have, you know, breaking ranks on one of 12 different items, say, if you're conservative or liberal, you know, then you're ousted. So the cancel culture isn't just in colleges and high schools.

I mean, it happens everywhere, unfortunately. So why do you lean into this stuff, then? Because you have, one would think, certainly incentives to not lean into the hard things. But I actually heard you give an interview at one point where you were talking, somebody said, hey, if you pursue that topic, it's really going to damage your career.

And you said, well, then I'm definitely going to do it. Oh, yes. Is it just your personality, or is there some component to truth itself that is so important and so useful that you pursue it even when it's, quote, unquote, dangerous? Probably both.

You know, by temperament, I'm a fairly independent thinker. I don't like working for other people, and I don't like just going along with the herd. And, you know, politically, I've always been attracted to the kind of libertarian or classical liberal position because it allows me to bounce around and take different positions, both on the left and the right. You know, I'm pro-choice.

Well, that's a liberal thing. And I, you know, but I really favor free markets. I think capitalism is the greatest mechanism of wealth generation to pull people out of poverty ever. And so that makes me a conservative.

Well, but I wouldn't call myself a conservative or a liberal. So that allows me to do that. But, you know, why to lean in? Well, in part, it's my job.

You know, with skeptic, just by way of background, the skeptical movement started, the modern skeptical movement started in the 70s, mainly as a pushback to the New Age movement and spoon benders like Uri Geller and psychics and astrologers and tarot card readers and curling photography and all the, you know, kind of woo-woo stuff, as we call it. But then, you know, in the 90s, when we started, skeptic, I started kind of branching out for what we were doing to take on, like, Holocaust deniers and, you know, creationists and then, you know, political theories or economic theories. Just trickle down economics. Does it work or doesn't it work?

Well, on one hand, you could say, well, that's not a scientific question because it depends on what you mean by work and, therefore, what is your goals as a society and something like that. But on the other hand, you can't operationally define it in a way that's measurable and then say, well, it works or it doesn't work, you know, something like that. So for me, skepticism is the application of science and reason to anything, including moral values. You know, facts and values sometimes overlap.

Not always, but sometimes. So, you know, and I'm not suggesting you go to the paleontologist to find out your moral position on abortion. I just mean the tools of science, empiricism, reason, rationality. And again, sometimes you're going to hit rock bottom of, say, conflicting rights, like the rights of the fetus to live, the rights of the mother to choose, and there's not ever going to be an ultimate resolution.

And there, you know, that's the value of democracy. Well, we just have an election or, you know, we put officials in or we vote in a president that's going to appoint judges that are favorable to our position and you do the same on your position. But even that's a kind of experiment. In a way, an election is like an experiment where you tweak the variables and you run it for a while and see how it goes.

And so if you think of, like, gun control measures, there's 50 different states, 50 different configurations of gun control measures, you know, carrying conceal and, you know, the waiting period to buy a gun and how much ID you need and this and that. And you can kind of try to measure the results of how many guns are, you know, per person in the state and what are their laws and so on and what is their gun violence rate. That's not perfect, but this is what social scientists do. You know, they try to control for variables and then look at the one they're interested in to see if it matters.

Anyway, that's the kind of way to think about a social political issue that's, you know, not so different from other scientific issues. Now, if you had to explain to somebody why the truth matters and also to give you my breakdown of why I think it matters, I'd love to hear how you'd answer that. So for me, the truth, you know, as an abstract concept is sort of irrelevant, but as a day-to-day application in your life, if you're dealing with the world the way you wish it were, you can end up being totally ineffective. You can't make change.

You're, you know, it's like an economist that doesn't acknowledge that humans are predictably irrational. So you expect them to act like a perfectly rational economic being. They don't. So now all your models aren't going to work.

You're going to make poor decisions, right? So the truth matters in as much as recognizing the way the world works then gives you the ability to sort of, this is a bad word, but like bend, bend the society or whatever to your will to get, hopefully you have honorable outcomes that you desire, but you're able to shape society. A much better word. Is that, is how you look at truth and it's important.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right. I mean, that's kind of a practical, pragmatic approach to defining truth, which is fine, because that works. But just pull back in general. I mean, just organisms that learn, you know, they connect the dots.

A is connected to B. It could be something like, you know, a rat in a skinner box pressing a bar and it gets reinforced for doing so and it presses it more. Or the, you know, the dog that, you know, salivates when it sees food and the person rings the bell with the food. And so now the bell becomes the conditioned stimulus.

He associates the bell with the food. A is connected to B. This is about as basic as it gets, association learning. Everybody learns this in, you know, Psych 101.

But, but in a way, what the organism is trying to do in learning is to figure out the cause of things. What causes things to happen? You know, how can I get more food? How can I find a mate?

How can I survive? How can I avoid predators? And so my thought experiment here that I developed in the believing brain was, you know, imagine you're a hominid on the plains of Africa three million years ago and you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator?

Is it just a wind? Well, if you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just a wind, well, that's a type one error, a false positive. You thought the connection was real, but it wasn't. But that's a pretty harmless, low-cost error to make.

On the other hand, if you assume the rustle in the grass is just a wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you know, you're lunch, right? That's a type two, a false negative. That is, you fail to recognize the true cause of the rustle in the grass and that costs you. So my argument is that we tend to err on the side of making more type one errors than type two errors.

That is to say, assume that A is really connected to B, even if it's not just in case. And so to me, you know, superstitions, magical thinking, these are not bugs in our cognition. They're features. They're built right in there.

And so it's not that, you know, people believe where things are because they're dumb, uneducated, ignorant, you know, unsophisticated, none of that. You know, we're all susceptible to these kinds of things. Everybody is. You know, you've seen people lose their minds over masks.

Wear the mask, don't wear the mask. Get the vaccination, don't get the vaccination. Everybody's scrambling to figure out, well, what should I do? What's the cause?

And so behind that is, well, I want to know what's real. You know, I want to know what's true about the world. And in my example, it's obvious, you know, much of decision-making about truth is made under uncertainty. So we use these, what are called cognitive heuristics.

That is, these shortcuts. Dan Kahneman calls this, you know, type one or system one thinking. It's rapid. It's rapid cognition.

It's intuitive. You know, I just have a feeling here. I'm walking into this house and I don't have a good feeling about it. I just feel, I don't know what it is.

This person I just met, I don't care. I just have a bad vibe about this guy. I don't know. You know, well, that's not, there's no psychic power there, right?

You're picking up something. There's cues. There's information coming in. But no one has the time to sit there and gather all the information.

My other thought experiment is, why can't you just sit there in the grass and wait to see whether it's just a wind or a predator? Because predators don't wait around for you to gather more information. You know, they're camouflaged. They stock.

They're stealthy. Because they know you're trying to get rapid information and they don't want to give you enough time to figure it out. You know, so most of life is like this, you know, that, you know, you just make rapid decisions. Let's talk about the worst investment most guys make on repeat, cheap clothes.

You buy them. They look fine. But six months later, they're pilling, shrinking, or just falling apart. So you replace them.

You do it again and again. You're spending more over time and you never actually have anything worth keeping or wearing for that matter. That's the whole model behind Quince. I've got one of their 100% Pima cotton tees and the quality is immediately obvious from the second you pick them up.

They're soft, well-constructed, the kind of thing that holds up over time. And that is the point. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince.com slash impact pod for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

Now available in Canada too. That's quince. Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash impact pod.

Let's talk about money you're leaving on the table. Every time you pay full price for a health product out of pocket, you could be missing out on 30% savings. There are over 40 million HSA accounts in the U.S. holding $159 billion in pre-tax dollars.

That's where TruMed comes in. TruMed helps qualified customers use pre-tax HSA dollars on health products that can qualify as medical expenses under IRS guidelines. You complete a health survey. TruMed handles the documentation and the purchase.

And you can save an average of 30% on products like 8Sleep, Peloton, AG1, and others that studies show can treat or reverse many common chronic conditions. Stop paying full price for products your HSA was billed for. Go to trumed.com slash impact and check out what things you want that may qualify. It takes just a couple of minutes.

TruMed is for qualified customers only. HSA, FSA, tax savings vary. Let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building, compounding. There's a reason that people have talked about this forever.

You put an asset to work, it generates more of itself. Over time, the curve bends way in your favor. Every serious wealth builder knows how compounding works. Most gold owners, though, have completely opted out of it.

Monetary Metals changes that equation. They've built a way for your gold to earn yield paid not in dollars but in more physical gold. Up to 4% per year. More ounces.

Stacking every single month. Compounding in one of the only assets that can't be printed, inflated, or debased. And storage and insurance are included, by the way, so hidden fees don't eat your yield. The average person is passively absorbing inflation.

This is how you compound your way out of it. Click the link in the show notes or visit monetary-metals.com slash impact to learn more. This is a paid advertisement. The thing that freaks me out a little bit and that I am encouraged by somebody like yourself who is writing a book about making sure that your opponents have a voice.

And to be fair to your book, obviously, you're coming at it from a freedom of speech perspective. You want to make sure that people are talking. But as I ask, like, you know, why does freedom of speech matter? And it comes back to this idea of truth, understanding how the world works.

I'm going to be wrong a lot. I need people to come in and sort of adjust my thinking. And, you know, when you start pairing that with other sort of cognitive heuristics that people use, or maybe that's not even the right way to think about it, that we have predilections as a species towards, say, tribalism. And you talked about how people believe, I'll put that in quotes, things based on party affiliation or whatever, because they're really just trying to fit into the in-group.

So it feels like, and maybe this is a cycle that you have awareness on that I don't, but it feels like now, in a way that I am not familiar with, that we're living a world where people are trying to control the facts, the messaging that gets out there, to try to get the herd to move in a certain direction that they think is, I'm not even sure, morally right? I don't know. But to get that done, they're taking a shortcut of silencing the opposition that strikes me as terrifying because it deprioritizes truth and says, I know what we should be doing, and it's this, and I'm going to silence all dissenting voices. Do you think we're living through something?

unique right now or is this um just yeah i agree with you it's it's more pronounced now we're more polarized uh you know and number factors that work you know the media has been driven by the economic model uh of competing against online news sites and trying to capture eyeballs for advertising dollars they've been driven toward more extreme headlines and news stories and covering the most salacious most fantastic most outrageous things they can find so there is that effect that's the result of current events you know of the internet and so forth um but more generally it depends on the context as to what extent you want to be critical of that as an issue let's just say you're two lawyers in court well your job as a lawyer is not to find the truth your job is to win you know defend your client and uh you know if you can bury evidence you're going to bury evidence if you can slant you know the evidence to the jury and the other side doesn't catch on what you're doing good for you you know that's kind of the rules of the game you know if you can get away with it that's what you're supposed to do but of course the system is set up where for example you have to share all your evidence with the other side ahead of time so they're prepared they respond you know and so that's kind of the way the game is played and we're not supposed to do that in science in science we're supposed to have the goal the truth whatever it is now of course scientists are humans and the more committed or devoted they are to particular hypothesis or theory you know the more likely they are to engage in motivated reasoning the confirmation bias try to find evidence that fits it they're not popperian falsification philosophers popperian popperian carl popper uh who he's a he's the philosopher of science that first articulated that uh the idea that science is mainly progresses through falsification that is trying to falsify theories you can't prove theories in science uh maybe in math you can through axioms but in science no you can't prove anything you can just you can disprove it and so what we're left with is the theories that haven't been disproven yet so our confidence is high now that's that's kind of a simplified version of popper's theory and in reality uh it's a carrot and stick thing you do you know you try to falsify other people's theories of course that's how you advance in science and um but the scientists that hold the theories they're not just trying to falsify their theories they're trying to confirm them uh now you can't prove them but if you can pile up lots and lots of evidence your confidence grows that you're probably right so just take something like um anthropogenic global warming you know so like in the 70s and 80s it wasn't clear that that hypothesis was true you know but by the late 90s early 2000s you know there was enough evidence from multiple lines of inquiry that all kind of pointed to the same thing that our confidence grew and it's not that anyone had not falsified the theory it's that a lot of evidence had supported it and confirmed it and what really did it for me because i study these things is that the scientists were independent of one another uh so it's not like they're all meeting on the weekends to get their story straight about what we're going to say about climate change you know because those conservatives you know they're trying to ruin america or vice versa if you're conservative those liberals are trying to ruin america so they're using climate change and excuse you know first of all scientists are not like that but but even if they were these are different scientists here's one person that studies glaciers and somebody else studies sea level rise and somebody else studies co2 gases and somebody else studies uh winds this particular species of flowers blooms in the spring and now it's happening early and earlier because temperatures are going up or the pollination or you know there's like dozens of different fields they publish in different journals they go to different conferences they don't even know each other and yet they still come to the same conclusion so it's like okay this is probably really true it's probably really happening now the political issue what we should do about it that's a separate thing i'm just what is true about the climate is my point yeah the idea of um using scientific reasoning for everyday life is something i've become really obsessed with in business so irony of ironies i was um trying to basically teach a class about what do you have to do to progress in business and so i was like asking myself what is it that i do to grow my companies and my answer was like okay i come up with a hypothesis what i think is going to work um i try to identify the impediment that stands between where i am and the goal and my hypothesis is about what allows me to cross that chasm then i run that test and then i assess the data i just try again and one of the guys on my team was like oh that's the scientific method and i was like ah i see yeah so that's right right when you boil things down to like the sort of basic just physics of the way things work this is why i resonate so much with your idea of getting to the truth once you understand the nature of something now you can leverage it to get wherever you're trying to go so in my case to grow a thriving company but i have to understand how the world works i have to understand how the pursuit of truth works which is hey i have this hypothesis a hypothesis will predict something that's the fascination like hey if this if my understanding here is true it predicts this and then you can go look and see is that actually true yeah yeah that's exactly right no you stated perfectly that's a fabulous example uh and it is it's something we all do we make form hypotheses and then test them in everyday life now my philosopher a science friend of mine who is also a professional tracker animal tracker that's an unusual combination philosopher and animal tracker uh lewis uh leidenberg lindenberg um but he writes about how trackers are kind of intuitive scientists they're uh you know they're gathering data about the footprints of the animal and then they're forming hypotheses so let's say these trackers like these are essentially hunter gatherers they're trying to track the animal to kill and eat it this is how they they survive right so it's important to them so they see like there's a like an indentation in the dirt underneath this bush and uh and then if the tracks leave and they go in that direction now it's you know you can kind of see how windy it is and if the tracks have kind of been covered over or not see how fresh they are and then like what time of day is it what's the temperature and what's in that direction well there's there's some water over there so you know i intuit that as the sun came up and started to get warm the animal got up and went that way to get water so what they're doing is they're forming hypotheses and in a way they're kind of trying to mind read the animal if i was the animal what would i do well i would go that way and uh you know and so they're you know then they go and check to see if it's there and you know they're testing the hypothesis in a way so that's that's kind of a you know in business of course we do this all the time now professionally you know with advertising you can do you know massive data sets online where you do an a-b test between two logos or different colors of the logo or different advertising pitches you know should we use this word or that word you know this is an emotionally negative word this is an emotionally positive word which one should we use and you can measure almost instantly how many hits you get that's an experiment right and uh even something like in love right um one of my favorite jokes from the singer songwriter tim mentioned is you know what you call stalking sorry you know what you call love without evidence stalking sorry i gave away the second uh stalking right so i mean if you're single and let's say you're dating you're attracted to somebody and you make a comment to them or you buy them a little gift or you do something nice and nothing comes back or something negative comes back okay that's evidence evidence that you know this is probably the wrong direction to go or something positive comes back you know there's some kind of reciprocal sharing of information that's personal or a gift or whatever then it's like oh okay well then i put that hypothesis out there i tested it i got some positive evidence i'll do it again and see if i get more positive evidence you know and you know so in a way all human relations are like that that's why i don't understand why people are more interested in fitting into a group than they are about finding out how something really works because so i have i'm obsessed with this idea that um to me in fact the very meaning of life is to find out how much potential that you have can be turned into actual skill set because of the following statement which i i i want to carry more weight than it seems to with people which is that skills have utility meaning if i learn something it actually lets me do something it lets me be um effective in the real world so if i want to build a building i need to learn architecture and if i don't understand you know material science and weight bearing low bearing that kind of stuff and what i build is going to come tumbling down but if i learn it i could build a bridge that literally unites to land masses over water i could build a house that my family can live in and it's really extraordinary aqueducts of rome right like you can actually build things that have this extraordinary utility but the prices that you have to want the truth even when it makes you feel stupid even when it stings or hurt your feelings um but that really seems like a low price have you thought about the psychological mechanism that makes a moment like now possible where people are some people are prepared to give up that quest for the truth for and i'm not even sure if you would say that it is solely about tribalism or if there's something else going on but that seems like an easy one to point to well there may be multiple um effects going which is almost always the case with human behavior so take something like q anon you know how anyone could possibly believe this so when a republican something the last poll i saw was something like 30 percent of republicans say they think there's something to the q anon conspiracy that is to say that there is a secret satanic cabal of pedophiles uh sacrificing children and drinking their blood in a washington dc pizzeria led by hillary clinton and tom hanks okay no one in their right mind could possibly and tom hanks tom hanks yeah yeah and beyonce she's in on it yeah it depends on who you talk to who's involved okay so this is about as goofy a conspiracy theory as you can find there's variations on it some of it's not quite not quite that crazy some of it gets uh overlaps with the rigged election slash deep state conspiracy theory that was popular during trump's administration and so but if you sat down one of these people said now do you actually believe this and stated the way i just did i would hope they would say well no i you know well one guy did the guy that went to the comic ping pong pizzeria with his gun to break up the pedophile ring okay well he served time in jail for this fortunately no one was killed um no one was even hit he shot into the roof but he was so upset when he found out there's no basement because this is where the pedophile ring was supposedly operating out of the basement this pizzeria but he totally believed it and um and i suspect most people that say they believe it they're doing something else they're signaling maybe a social signaling virtue signaling you know i'm so devoted to being a republican i'm willing to publicly state i believe this insane idea you know there's a lot of virtue signaling in politics um you know where you're trying to get the attention of your fellow politicians or tribe members that to show your devotion you know i think much of religious um ceremonies is involved in signaling social signaling like if i see you every week in the pews of the synagogue or church or whatever and i know you're a devoted person i can count on you it's kind of a reputation building mechanism right so there's some of that of course in that particular case of q anon and trump you know there's he still wields power in the republican party so you never know if somebody actually believes any of this stuff or they're just saying it because they think the boss wants them to say it or maybe the boss believes this but but i better go along with it just in case uh and so on or else i won't get reelected and that's what happened we just saw what happened this a couple days ago with liz cheney you know she's out just because she spoke up against trump i mean she's lost her seat and uh and has been replaced why because she refused to go along with the tribe so it's a real effect um and this is why cancel culture can be very stifling let's say go back to college campuses and even though it's probably a minority of people that are at the extremes that are into this cancel culture thing it's it's enough that it silences people again back to my book why i'm concerned about free speech people are afraid to say something if they feel like they're going to get socially ostracized and because that doesn't feel good and uh you know and um and that's the problem with that and so there's an effect called pluralistic ignorance um or the spiral of silence where everybody thinks everybody else believes something when in fact most of them don't believe it you know so like the classic study on this is with binge drinking on college campuses if you ask students individually privately you know an anonymous survey you know almost all of them say no i'm not into binge drinking i don't think it's a good idea but if you ask them well what do your fellow students think oh everybody else is totally into binge drinking and so they all say this so everybody thinks everybody else thinks this is a good idea so when you think that then you're afraid to say something because whoa i don't stand out and be the only one you know it's perfectly normal so this goes a long ways to explaining how corrupt ideas can carry on in a social environment or a nation like national socialism how is it possible that people bought onto this well most of them didn't um you know that hitler came to power as a minority party and uh and then he shut down the press so that there was no coverage of what people were saying and what did they do with dissenters they sent them to the concentration camps you know there were um most people don't know this most people are familiar with the famous um death camps like auschwitz and and uh maidonic and so forth but there was uh you know thousands literally thousands of camps throughout germany and the european countries they conquered uh and so what do they do with those they fill them up with people that dissented from national socialism and so if you if you want to speak out because you don't believe this ideology and you see your neighbor you know hold off and you never see him again it's like i'm keeping my mouth shut and you know back to the college example i know plenty of students and younger professors that don't have tenure who will not speak out against say the extreme far left woke progressive anti-racism movement you know maybe they agree with some of it but not all of it but they're afraid to say anything because you know they could get fired and uh and this has happened you know so that's that's stifling because again whether there's some good ideas or not in this in these current movements we'll never know if we can't talk about it you know if everybody's if the only answer could be i'm 100% behind it uh or else you know i'm not gonna say anything well that's not good for society welcome aboard via rail please sit and enjoy please sit and sip play post taste view and enjoy via rail love the way did you see hbo's chernobyl yes i did yeah that was quite the same man that was so chilling that idea of like yeah but you just don't you don't want to speak up because you don't want to get in trouble within the group man it's interesting growing up as a child of the 80s it was such a moment where sort of individualism was celebrated being the iconoclast was celebrated and at least in youth culture and so i never had a sense of how quickly a horde of people could become terrifyingly dangerous and you know seeing seeing what's going on now i'm like okay like i it feels like sort of the ground is being laid for how this gets really scary really fast in terms of like the orwellian 1984 sense of like hey don't speak up like i want to live in a world where more people are like like the fact that you wrote a letter to the judge of a holocaust denier and said hey this guy should be allowed to say these things even though i vehemently disagree with him um but what in what way because you talked about that being a self-protective act in what way is making sure somebody like that has a voice self-protective yes well that's the devil that should be given his due why so that if i'm the one who is speaking out if i'm a lone voice uh and maybe even maybe i'm wrong but at least i want to have a voice but i've already signed off on the idea that we should silence people that you know we disagree with or they're so-called dangerous they have dangerous ideas um well that's a very subjective uh evaluation what do you mean by dangerous you know so i mean this is right there in legal precedence a clear and present danger that's a very famous phrase now clear and present danger that was um in the 1919 supreme court case of shank versus the united states in which this charles shank a socialist from philadelphia was handing out leaflets to uh draft age men as america was entering the first world war you know arguing that this is a form of slavery it's a violation of your constitutional rights the government cannot own your body and send you off to die that's slavery whether that is or not a separate issue but he got arrested for this that is a sedition it's undermining the um the the nation's ability to conduct war for example and so that case went all the way to the u.s supreme court uh where the supreme court justice uh issued that here i'll just i'll read you the i'll read you the line because it's so it's kind of chilling in a way and he ended up kind of taking it back this is supreme court justice oliver wendell holmes the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. Okay, so what is this clear and present danger? Well, these are leaflets.

You know, he's just making an argument that, you know, forcing people into the army to go die, you know, conscription, that's unconstitutional. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. You know, it's a very debatable thing legally, but you can't even say it. The problem, once you set up that precedence, is that then you can make the case that anything anybody says could be a clear and present danger, could lead people to riot, it could lead to violence against minorities and so on.

Now, first of all, this almost never happens. It's very rare that you'll see a direct line between somebody giving a speech or writing an op-ed or writing a book or, you know, whatever, standing out on the street corner with his bullhorn on a soapbox. You know, then people go and riot. Now, maybe the Trump case on January 6th is an exception, maybe that, although that's very debatable about whether he was the cause of the Capitol, storming the Capitol building.

It now looks like this was in the works for quite a few weeks before this. So maybe he was a secondary cause or whatever. But in most cases, historically, the state has used that kind of power to silence people. It simply doesn't agree with or feels that this is challenging our power.

And that's why we have to have those protections. And, you know, the history of free speech goes back thousands of years. You know, historically, states always want to control people. They never want to give up power.

They always want to silence anybody that dissents. And so it's a constant, constant struggle. And most of what we've been talking about today is not government silencing. It's just groups or religions or classrooms or whatever cancel culture is not the government.

But it has the same chilling effect that then people are afraid to say anything. And if ever we should dissent, it's, you know, if our government is doing something we don't like. That's the whole point of democracy. It is really fascinating to live through these times where I do wonder how much is sort of an echo of the technological revolution and what's happened with our ability to get ideas across so quickly.

You know, meme culture, the ability to have a global audience from anywhere in the world. Ideas spread so rapidly and can catch fire so quickly that now, living in America anyway, I'm more afraid of the mob. The mob of humans, not like the, you know, Italian mafia. But I'm more afraid of mob mentality than I am the government.

Now that could just be foolishness on my part. I'm certainly very open to that. But that, the sort of herd mentality feels like the more clear and present danger to me. And that you know, even if people are prepared to rise up against the government, which is maybe a bit sexier, that standing up against the, just the herd mentality feels like the more sort of necessary thing.

Yeah, well, I mean in this case you're talking about a clear and present danger to you personally or your career, your job, or whatever. Yes, and you should be because there are enough cases where people are losing their jobs. Like Donald, oh shoot, I forget his last name at the New York Times, the science writer, who lost his job. He'd been there like 35 years and had won numerous awards and so on.

Anyway, he used the N-word with some interns on a trip only to tell them, don't use this word. But he didn't say N-word, he said the word itself. Wow, I mean, seriously, he got fired for this. And there's a lot of cases like that where it's obvious the person was not using the word in the derogatory sense.

And so now, you know, no one, I don't think anyone allows you to actually write the word out, except the New York Times did last week when John McWhorter, who's a linguist, and he's black, was talking about, you know, the words you can't use anymore, and that's one of them. And he said, I'm going to just use the word. And, you know, it imbues so much power, almost talismanic, magical power, to a word. And this is, I mean, I'm not going to use this word.

I won't understand why it's offensive and hurtful. I do. But I also don't like giving any word that much power over other people. I'd rather we just move on beyond it, but, you know, the time we're going through now, that's probably going to take a while.

I've always liked to mention Tim Minchin, the singer-songwriter, he wrote a really great song called Prejudice. Anyway, so it starts off with this, you know, there's this word in the English language that's been used to really hurt people. It's a hurtful word. It's just six little letters, you know, a couple of G's, and I, and N, and E, and R, and, you know, he goes on and on about this for a while, and you're thinking, oh, my God.

And then all of a sudden, the tone of the song changes, it becomes kind of a happy tone, and he's like, you know, only a ginger can call another ginger ginger. So the word is ginger instead of the N-word. But then it's kind of playful, because he's a ginger, he's a redhead, you know, and he talks about all the names he was called growing up. You know, what was it, like Fire Truck, and Tampon, and Matchstick, and, you know, all these kind of, well, if you're a redhead, because, you know, we just have our thoughts that are in our skulls, and get them out of there into your skull, you've got to use words, okay?

So words matter. But, you know, I'm always afraid of them viewing them with so much power, then we're afraid to say them. You know, we just had an article on Skeptic on Tom, sorry, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, and no, Huckleberry Finn, where he uses the N-word. Well, you know, Twain used that word purposely, because even a century ago, it was a hurtful word, and he was using it in the context of, this is how people talk about blacks, and, you know, and this is why, this is what it leads to, you know, prejudice and hate.

He clearly was making the point, it's a bad thing. Yet, in today's book culture, there's a lot of schools that are banning the use of that book, or there's even publishers republishing it without the word. It's like, well, you've lost the point of why you use the word. Yeah, it is a very fascinating time that we're living through, in the sense of, you can feel the sort of police mentality of people wanting to catch somebody slipping up, and that there is a sort of point scoring system, and a glory to catching somebody out.

And I won't lie, like, I felt the impulse before, of like, oh, I caught that person doing something they're not supposed to do. And it's a very potent emotion, and at the same time, it feels like icky. Fragile is probably the way I would, it has, it's the emotional equivalent of recognizing you just threw a rock at a glass house, and you live in a glass house, you know what I mean? So it's like this, oh, I'm not so sure I should be checking this rock right now, because I know how easy it would be to take a sort of sideways glance at my life and find a ton of things that, you know, out of context, or whatever somebody has a problem with.

So, like, this, the way that the human mind works is so fascinating. I love it, it's super powerful. There are things we can do, we can love each other, we can bond, we can build societies and come together. I was just having a conversation with a Stanford psychologist, and we were talking about, you know, we've become the most dominant apex predator of all time through empathy.

And yet, tribalism is also this incredibly powerful and equally sort of primordial part of our brain, and that, you know, you look at empathy, and you venerate it, and you celebrate it, and isn't it wonderful? But tribalism is also part of how we've survived long enough, and creating that sense of us and other. And so, once you take this brain and put it in a modern context, whether it's eating until you're obese, or it's not recognizing that tribalism now can be extraordinarily dangerous, or seeing how quickly you can other somebody else, it's really, really interesting. And, you know, seeing it manifest in ways that are worrisome is worrisome, to wrap that thought up.

Yeah, that's right. Well, this was in part Paul Bloom's point in his book Against Empathy. So Paul Bloom is a psychologist at Yale, and his point was the one you just made, is that we are very empathetic with our fellow tribe members. In-group empathy is very strong.

But the problem with it, I'm oversimplifying this theory, but the problem with it is that it makes outsiders, people in other tribes, even more dangerous. You're going to be less empathetic with people that are not part of your group. So there, that's the risk of it, and that was your point there. I think that's a good one.

The other thing that you made me think of before social media and the point scoring for catching people up on things is gossip. You know, social media is new, but gossip, it's a form of gossip. And what is gossip? Gossip is mostly information about other people.

I mean, gossip is always about other people, and it's usually negative. There's a kind of negative valence to it, having to do with deception and lying and cheating and power and who has it, who doesn't. Or, on the positive side, who you can trust and who's trustworthy and a good person. So Robin Dunbar's theory about this, this is the famous Dunbar number of 150, that is about the number of people we know fairly well.

So Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist who studies these things. So his theory about gossip, not just his, but gossip is a way of kind of knowing who you should trust, especially beyond the 150. You have a little social group that you know pretty well. How do I know if that guy over there I should trust?

Well, I'll ask this person. Who knows this person who knows him? And then, in a way, gossip is like, yes, you can trust that person, or no, I wouldn't trust that person. And so it's information.

And so social media is basically taking this natural human propensity to talk about other people and marrying it to the negativity bias, where we notice negative things more than positive things, for example, like in economic modeling. Loss is hurt twice as much as gains feel good. Let me just say that again. Loss is hurt twice as much as gains feel good.

So, for example, I'll get, you know, like 100 positive likes on some tweet, but I don't even notice them if there's one negative one. I'll go, oh, who is this asshole that put that negative? And then I'm obsessive, and I'm like, calm down, Shermer. Almost everybody loved your tweet.

How can I possibly be so influenced at this point in my life? Well, that's just normal, right? We notice the negative thing. So, yeah, and then there's the principle of, the counter to that is that I'm trying to, you know, encourage people to practice the principle of charity that is charitable interpretations of what somebody else is actually like.

You know, instead of attributing the worst possible motive to their words or their actions, you know, maybe you just don't know the context. Maybe they were having a bad day. You know, maybe they didn't really mean it the way you think they meant it. And so why not give them the benefit of the doubt?

Just assume, like, I don't know why this person used the N-word or whatever it is they did that you're upset about. You know, maybe I don't know the full story. So let's just assume it was done accidentally or didn't mean any harm by it, something like that. My favorite example of this, is, you know, there's this kind of cancel culture for anyone who doesn't meet our moral standards in the past, right?

So, like, you know, Thomas Jefferson, you know, was a slaveholder and, you know, and he raped his slave, Sally Hemmings, and they had children and, oh, he's a bad guy, he's a rapist because, you know, slave owners raped their female slaves. Okay. How about a more charitable interpretation of this? You know, he would have been pro-abolition of slavery, but there would have been no United States.

The southern states would not have signed on against Great Britain. They would not have had the 13 colonies united. And then, you know, so he owned slaves. Okay.

But, you know, lots of people did. And then his wife died, right? So maybe he's lonely. And maybe the only woman around in his environment is this woman.

And maybe they fall in love and have children, but it's against the law to get married. You can't marry a white, can't marry a black. That was illegal until 1967. Interracial marriage was illegal until 1967.

The Supreme Court case of the loving case, L-O-V-I-N-G was the last name of this couple, an interracial couple. And then they were, yeah, I know, 1967. So maybe, you know, this, let's, so before you judge somebody, you know, you don't know what's like to be them, what's in their lives, what context it is, either historically or even just socially in their particular lives. That's hard to do.

You know, I don't always practice it, is that as you were saying that, I felt like we're juggling razor blades right now. Like one of us is about to get cut. And it's that, like even that, like as you were describing, I was like, God, that sounds terrible. And the idea of frame of reference is something I think a lot about.

And so you just did a great job of displaying. So one frame of reference is, you know, total asshole that should be forgotten by history. Doesn't matter what he did well. He was a slave owner who raped his slave.

I mean, it sounds so fucking terrible. And then the sort of flip side of, we'll never know if there was love there. There was certainly a very distressing imbalance of power. And so it's like, I don't even know how to talk about this, you know, without seeming like you, at one point it's like so horrifying as to almost be uncontemplatable.

But yet I don't want to live in a world where you can't contemplate and you can't talk about things and you can't sort of get to the messy truth of what it means to be a human. And that's one of the things I worry about now is like, how are we supposed to figure out what's true if the minute somebody starts thinking through something that they're just eviscerated. And I mean eviscerated, like where people are trying to destroy their lives for telling people not to say the N-word, but actually saying it is not a destroy your life offense. It may be a, hey, even saying that out loud like is really upsetting for people.

And so don't like, who wouldn't, like if you came to me and said, because I'm a big believer in prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. And, but if you came to me and said, look, this person is, you know, something happened in their past and they're very sensitive to X, Y, Z. So I'll give you an example from my own life. I was once in a front yard drinking from a hose.

I hear the roar of a car engine and then squeal of tires, smash, car smashes into a tree that I'm about 20 feet from. Guy gets out, just literally covered in blood, falls down on his face, girl gets out screaming. I mean like this whole thing. For two decades after that, if I heard the sound of an engine revving, my heart would like fucking race.

And so if somebody were like trying to mess with me and they're like revving their engine or something like that, one, I wouldn't have asked. Did they not do it? Because whatever, that's how I approach it. But if somebody were like that and they said, hey, if you don't mind not, I'd be like, of course, you know, I didn't know.

So it's like you simultaneously want to be generous to whoever's asking, but you don't like me revving the engine and having somebody come and drag me from the car and try to end my economic opportunities for that. That's where it's like, whew, I am not saying that that is the same as, you know, an offensive word. No, I got it. No, it's a good example.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a fundamental attribution bias in psychology where we tend to attribute motives to somebody's character and personality rather than the environment or the context in which they did whatever they did. You know, so I'm fond of asking, I have a whole discussion of Milgram shock experiments and I show video tapes of it.

I did my own replication of it. We talk about that. And, you know, 65% of subjects went all the way to 450 volts, you know, XXX. You know, basically you're just prying this guy in the other room.

He's not actually getting shocked, of course. And then I ask him, how many of you would have gone all the way or participated? They all say, oh, no, I definitely would not have done that. No, I'm just not that kind of person.

It's like, you're delusional. You know, this is what everybody told Milgram. You know, before he ran the experiment, part of his protocols was to survey psychologists, psychiatrists, and others. You know, what percentage of people do you think will participate and go all the way?

It was like one, maybe 2% at most. You know, so people were shocked that 65%, you know, went all the way. And so, or you could ask, if you lived in 1850s America, say in the South, you know, would you have been an abolitionist? You know, almost everybody today goes, of course, I would have stood up against this evil of slavery.

I doubt it. You know, almost nobody did. Very rare. And even if people were against it or thought it was a bad idea, you know, they kept their mouths shut because it was illegal, everybody was doing it.

or Sean Connery and they make these disparaging remarks about women or Jews or blacks and it's like, oh, it's just cringeworthy. But you've really got to put yourself historically back half a century in which that was not unusual. And of course today we would not do that and it's a sign of how much progress we've made that we find such language cringeworthy or offensive. But they didn't and it's just not really fair to say, well, I wouldn't have done that.

You don't know you wouldn't have done that. Right, so anyway. There's two ideas that I find really interesting. So Jordan Peterson introduced me to the idea of, hey, when you're revisiting Nazi Germany in your mind, don't assume that you're the one that would hide Anne Frank in the attic.

Assume that you get sucked up into the Nazi machinery because survival, literally watching people killed in front of you for having the wrong view, it's like pretty quickly you go, whoa, I would like to think that I would, but given a gun in my face it becomes a totally different idea. And then the follow-up to that which is the Gulag Archipelago where you've got Solzhenitsyn really just recanting what happens when you don't face down the gun and how crazy it gets and how ultimately that machine turns on you. So it's like, you should want to be the person that is the abolitionist in the South at the height of slavery. You should want to be the person hiding somebody in your attic during Nazi Germany and you should be very worried that you wouldn't.

And that gave me the chills. That to me is the idea of understanding the way the world works because once I understand that I'm prone to that weakness like anybody else, I'm prone to being terrified if somebody has a gun in my face. I'm prone to silence when they shoot my neighbor in the face for having the wrong view and you have to get ready and this is why you're in the face of all the hurts in the world that could come at you for having the wrong position. The fact that you keep pursuing truth even if it has personal consequences, that to me is very, very interesting.

And I actually want to know do you have a process? Like what is the process for I think this but I want to make sure that I stay skeptical? Oh boy, well first, I'm not that brave on these things. I was just thinking of Navalny, the guy that stood up standing up to Putin.

You know, they tried to kill him, poison him with this radioactive stuff. Is that the guy who like completely deformed his face or something? No, that was a different guy. They killed many people this way.

Now this is the guy that survived and he went to Germany and they cured him and he went back to Russia where he was promptly arrested and then he went on a hunger strike. He's in jail. He just ended his hunger strike last week. But he's not giving up.

He's standing up to Putin and Putin's cronies and all the corruption in Russia. You know, I admire the guy. I can't say I would do this. I think most people wouldn't.

I mean, he's married with kids. You know, there's pictures of him with his family in Germany and they're like, okay, let's get on the plane. We're going back to Russia. I'm just like, are you out of your mind?

They hate you there. They're going to kill you or lock you up for life. Did he take his whole family? Yeah, they're in Russia.

Yeah, they're fine. I mean, Putin's leaving them alone but he's in jail. He's probably never going to make it out. But who knows?

I mean, anyway, my point is that I would not do that. I would just say, you know, the hell with it. I'm going to some other country. And I think most people are probably like me.

And in terms of, you know, more of what I do and the kind of issues we address which are less political in that sense. You know, again, like this recent 60 Minutes piece Sunday night on UFOs, UAPs and the government said they're real. Well, okay, what do you mean by real? Okay, so here, you know, there's certain principles of thinking and rationality that you can apply.

Like, what exactly are we talking about here? You know, well, that's probably a balloon right there. The balloon is real but when somebody says, the government says they're real, what they mean is that real means extraterrestrial, real means it's a Russian asset or it's a Chinese drone or a spy plane or something like this capable of doing these incredible aerodynamic maneuvers that no machine that we've ever built could possibly do and so on and so forth. And so to me, I just, it's like, yes, of course, I would love to think there's extraterrestrials or there is technology able to fly, you know, 7,000 miles an hour and make a sharp left turn without killing the pilot, whatever.

But, you know, but I don't think it's true that I would like it to be true that there are extraterrestrials out there somewhere and they're even visiting us. That would be cool. You know, I'm not one of these people who think, oh, well, you know, the stock market would crash and people would lose their minds if they discovered aliens. I don't think that would happen at all.

I just, I just don't think it's true because there's none of evidence for it. You know, so for me, I just try to think, okay, you know, whatever it is I'm reading about or addressing, you know, I have to try to separate what I want to be true from what is actually true. You know, in most cases, if I don't have a dog in the fight, if I'm not committed to it, like gun control, you know, I did a whole analysis of that. I'm not into guns.

I don't care one way or the other. I just want to know, does gun control measures lower homicide, suicide, and accidental deaths or not? That's all. And, you know, if you can do that, then it's a lot less upsetting, you know, when you engage with other people in conversation about it.

And so what's your process for mining for that data? Because right now, the way that people create these echo chambers, they only look at confirmatory evidence. Do you have any sort of best practices for not believing? Oh, I do.

I do. Yeah, let's see. I have, I have here, let's see, I have the New York Times. I have the local Santa Barbara newspaper.

I get the, uh... Michael, you are definitely showing your age right now. This is madness. Who reads newspapers anymore?

I get the Wall Street. I got the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, I know. I'm old school.

I actually like physical books. Here's my book. I actually like physical books. I have hundreds of them here in my office.

Yeah, so the idea, of course, is multiple sources of information. So op-eds are good for this, you know? It's the opinion editorial section of a newspaper. You know, hopefully they have multiple views.

Well, they don't always do this, so you've got to pick different newspapers. Or toggle back and forth between Fox News and MSNBC. You know, they could be covering the same story, and you can't believe they're talking about the same thing at all. It's like, how can this be?

Well, first of all, you have to know that's not news. Fox News is not news. It's entertainment. You know, their own defense case when they got sued, I think it was Tucker Carlson got sued.

It was somebody, oh, it was the defense of one of the Capitol building stormers, one of the people that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. His defense was, I watched Fox News all day, and I was 100% convinced that Biden stole the election, and they are stealing our democracy right there in that building. I'm going in. And so his defense was, I watched too much Fox News.

And Fox's defense, by the way, in the previous case, was nobody should seriously believe what we say. It's like, wow, that's an omission. You know, that we're just bullshitting people. We're just saying crap because it's a television show.

And it's good to remember on commercial television, there's commercials. And so the content is basically whatever it takes to get people to get from one commercial to the next without clicking away. And that's become much harder for network because there's hundreds and hundreds of channels to choose from, or you just turn the TV off and go online, and there's 10,000 sources of information you can get for entertainment. So that's the problem.

Is there a wellspring anywhere of people that are hearkening back to sort of the old school journalistic practices of making sure that something is double or triple confirmed? Because it feels to me like there's a business model opportunity now that sort of traditional journalism has gone away for somebody to say, we adhere to all those old school principles. When I write for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, L.A. Times and so forth, they do have fact checkers.

I mean, whatever I write, I mean, I'm writing mostly opinion editorials or book reviews. But they do fact check, they want to know exactly where that quote came from. Well, this was the source. What page?

Okay, here's the page. Okay, so I'm encouraged by that. You know, I wrote 214 consecutive monthly columns for Scientific American. They fact checked them all.

And in most cases where they found something, it was good that they found it. You know, I was wrong. I got this number 16. It was supposed to be 19.

I don't know where I got 16. Maybe I flipped the nine. Who knows? But thank you for catching that.

So there are sources that still do this. We fact check at Skeptic Magazine. I have four different proofers. We call them proofers.

But they read every article carefully and not just for typos and spelling errors, but content. A couple of my fact checkers or my proofers are actual retired scholars. They just volunteer because they like helping out. But they actually read it for content and they look stuff up and they always catch things.

It's a good norm that developed in the early 20th century in journalism. Although it seems like it's disappeared, it hasn't. There's still plenty of places that do it. But clearly, again, if you're watching Fox News or maybe even MSNBC, just remember it's not news.

Those aren't news sites. So whether they have fact checkers or not, it doesn't matter because that's not the point of it. It's interesting. I heard somebody talking about people need to realize that in an era where there's limited newspaper space, that one of the things that makes something higher quality is its adherence to the truth.

But once you go to an online source where there's basically infinite canvas, that it sort of degrades the bar that gets set for information to get posted onto. And obviously, the incentives are around clicks and getting people to, you know, just the volume of humans that you need to that and sort of speak about basic instincts. Now, I didn't look into sort of how true the hypothesis was, but that rang true. Well, there are now, especially since the 2016 election, a number of political fact-checking sites like Politifact, for example.

And Snopes has gotten more political. Snopes started off, they started about the time we did, was skeptic in the early 90s. They mostly were fact-checking things like urban legends. And then a little spillover into what we were doing, like acclaims by psychics or astrologers or whatever.

But now they're pretty political. They fact-check things that politicians say, speeches that politicians give, memes that are popular online about, you know, look at this photo of Biden, you know, whatever. Oh, it turns out it was a fake photo, you know, so. There's a half a dozen of these sites that are really good.

And it shows to me, it shows that there's a market for the fact that they're surviving and flourishing in this environment tells me that people actually do care about what's actually true. And there's a couple of fact-quote quote-checking sites that I use all the time because most quotes that are kind of catchy, you know, oh, by Mark Twain or, you know, Yogi Berra, you know, well, Yogi himself wrote a book that said I didn't say half the things I said. And that's what he means, is that, you know, that quotes tend to gravitate up not any reference, no citation. But there's a couple of sites where they'll give you the whole history of the quote and everybody who ever said it.

And, you know, to their credit, that's a lot of work to do that. I mean, you dig out historically where these things come from. And so, you know, I'm grateful that there are people that do that and that they do and that they're useful and somehow making a living doing it. I guess people do care.

Yeah, yeah, sir. I want to believe that the majority care. I am cognizant of perverse incentives that, you know, can be created by things like social media where the different metrics are, you know, time on site and using sort of dopamine secreting techniques that people use. But, yeah, your point is encouraging to be sure.

Now, one thing with you, Michael, as I was reading your book and listening to interviews that you've done is you strike me as a very foundational thinker, somebody that's really trying to get to sort of the root driving things. And I'm curious if you have like a set of foundational beliefs. I'll give you one that you've said many times which may or may not be to you foundational but this idea that the second law of thermodynamics is the first law of life. And I'm curious to know, are there like a few sort of maxims that you consider like I build my thought process or my life on top of these ideas?

Yeah, well, that's one. That's one I developed at the end of this book, Heavens on Earth, where I was trying to kind of come up with a wrap-up chapter like if there's no afterlife and there's no immortality then what's the purpose of life? So I have a discussion of the meaning of life. Okay, well, so that particular way I said that, the second law of thermodynamics is the first law of life is a kind of twist on Tubi and Cosmedes' paper.

There are a couple of evolutionary psychologists here at UC Santa Barbara and their paper was titled The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology. And what they meant by that was from an evolutionary psych perspective, most of our psychology is developed around pushing back against entropy. You know, the universe is basically running down, you know, the world doesn't care about you and, you know, there's just so many more ways to die. So then, you know, Steve Pinker has a nice discussion of this in Enlightenment Now and, you know, he's a good friend so we read each other's works and so on.

And so there I kind of, and this is how all ideas work by the way, we all build in each other. You know, no one comes up with stuff whole cloth out of dinner. And, but, you know, so that's one way to think of it. And so I also think of it in context because, you know, I'm an atheist and I deal a lot with theists and I debate them and so on.

It's not how I define myself but it's part of our mission and what we do. And so one of the kind of means that theists have, not means, it's kind of a central belief is that if there's no God, if there's no afterlife, then there's no point to life at all. You know, what difference does it make what you do now because in 14 billion years the universe is going to be, you know, whatever it is, 40 billion years or whatever. In 4 billion years the sun's going to expand and there'll be no Earth.

So what's the point? All right. So I call this Albie's area. Albie is Albie Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall where he has a flashback to childhood where he pleases to do his homework and his mother takes him to the psychiatrist and he says, why don't you do your homework, Albie?

He goes, the universe is expanding. He goes, what? He goes, I read that the universe is expanding and one day it's going to all just blow up and so there's no point in my doing my homework. And his mother upgrades him and says, what's the universe got to do with it?

We live in Brooklyn and Brooklyn's not expanding. So that's my catchphrase there. We live in the here and now, not in the hereafter. It doesn't matter what happens billions of years from now.

It matters now. And this was in my essay in Scientific American about this. This philosopher was debating William Lane Craig, Shelly Kagan, Shelly Kagan said, it doesn't matter. It matters to the Jews and their families and their suffering right then.

You know, it's like to me, that was a slam. That was a mic drop. I mean, how can you respond? Of course it matters, right?

So that's the point. I think the grounding is that, you know, today, right now, this is what, what's the purpose? This is it. You know, of course we should have goals and work toward the goals and so forth.

But, you know, our lifetime now, our culture, our people, our family, our friends, our politics, our community, everything, this is it. This is why it matters now. And so that's kind of how I live my life. Let's drill into that.

So I don't know, as I was reading you, it seems to me, and I could be wrong, but it seems to me like you fall into a similar vein of Sam Harris where it's like, once you sort of grind it all down, God, irrelevant, doesn't exist, whatever, you come to, okay, what are you optimizing around? And it's the reduction of human suffering and the sort of optimization of human flourishing. I don't know if that's the word that sits well with you, but is that sort of what you? Yeah.

So there's a new book on sort of against this idea that science and rationality can lead to objective moral values and the people they're writing against are myself, Sam Harris, Steve Pinker, and a few others like Jonathan Haidt and a few moral philosophers of the scientific grounding. And so, yeah, so, but again, that's not a really good thing. to us. I mean, this is utilitarian philosophy.

This goes back to, you know, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the first Enlightenment thinkers that try to articulate some secular way of thinking about values and morals and right and wrong and good and evil, whether or not there's a God. And even if there is a God, I mean, you know, Plato refuted this with the Euthyphro's dilemma that, you know, if God is handing down moral values and telling us what's right or wrong, are there any reasons why these things are right or wrong, or is it just because God said so? And if there are good reasons, then what are the reasons? And then let's just skip the middleman and just follow the reasons.

So the idea of, you know, let's reason our way to determining what's right and wrong, that's a fairly new idea, that's an Enlightenment idea. But since then, you know, moral philosophy, this is what it's been all about. You know, you have just a handful, you know, Aristotle's virtue ethics, you have, you know, Kant's deontology or categorical imperative kind of rules-based, and you have Bentham and Mill's utilitarianism and variations on that. You have Rawls as just society, you know, the veil of ignorance.

If you're going to write a law, you should write it in a way that you don't know which group you're going to be in. You don't know if you're white or black, male or female, tall or short, or whatever, rich or poor, you know, the law should be fair. This idea of, you know, this kind of viewpoint from nowhere, I think Thomas Nagel called it, kind of a universal perspective, Spendhal also called it. So there's a handful of these thinkers, and so there's just a few of these theories that have kind of survived over the last, say, 300 years that are not based in religion at all.

And that's our mission, is that, well, we can go even, we can do even better than that. We can use science. Not always, but, you know, that, you know, we can measure what people prefer, what do they want? You know, the social psychology, the cognitive psychology of right and wrong, good and evil, because, you know, what's better, a democracy or an autocracy?

Well, where would you rather live, North Korea or South Korea? Do tell, right? Well, people will tell you, you know, and in many cases, they'll vote with their feet, right? They're leaving these crappy countries that have corrupt governments and poor infrastructure, and they're going to places like America.

Why? Well, there's a good reason why that has to do with human nature, and we can discover that through science. Anyway, that's the point of human flourishing and, you know, reducing suffering. You know, Peter Singer is, again, one of the giants of, you know, the expanding circle.

You know, he applies this principle to animals, and he's probably right. I mean, in maybe a century or two, they'll look back on us as just barbaric. You know, those people in the 21st century, they ate meat. They killed animals.

They killed, like, a billion chickens a year. They killed, like, 500 million cows a year, and they ate them. You know, there may be people who look at us like we look at slaveholders raping their slaves. You know, it's like, whoa, that is just, you know, again, you know, it's hard to get out of our culture and see what, you know, what we're really doing in that perspective.

Yeah, it's interesting. The idea of being a product of your time. I forget who. It was somebody talking about writing, and they said, look, you're going to be a product of your time.

Don't even bother trying to avoid it. And to your point, you know, about animals and all the things that we have yet to discover about, you know, who feels what and what level of sentience do different animals have, it'll be really interesting to see where that goes over time as we have deeper and deeper discoveries. You know, it's people that say that animals can't feel, and then if you've ever had a dog, you certainly know. Like, you can see, like, heartbreak on their face.

I mean, it's crazy. Oh, of course. Of course. Yes.

Yes. Yeah, this is the so-called other mind problem. You know, this goes back to Descartes saying, well, animals like dogs, they're just mechanical robots, so they don't actually feel anything. Well, what happens when you kick it and it squeals?

Oh, that's just an automated, like, sound that comes out of the tubes when it compresses the blood or whatever. This is bullshit. I mean, this is, here's my solution to the other mind problem. The other mind problem is, how do I know you're sentient and conscious and you feel and think and so on?

You know, maybe you're a philosophical zombie, as it's called. You're just, there's no lights on upstairs. You're just walking around making the sounds and motions as if you're sentient, but you're not. I'm the only one who actually feels this way.

Okay. I apply the Copernican principle. I'm not special. The chances that I'm the only one, my brain is just like yours.

It runs on the same, you know, hardware programs of neurotransmitter substances, those little synaptic gaps in the neural networks in the modules and blah, blah, blah. You know, same as yours. So if I'm feeling pain and I have certain facial expressions and I act a certain way and I see the same on your face, I think he's probably feeling what I'm feeling, right? That's a reasonable assumption.

And it's just a small step, you know, to animals. You know, you see the, you know, the dolphins or the whales or whatever. Where the conversation gets truly interesting for me is, and look, I have no idea. This may just be like an early sort of front running piece of data that turns out to be nothing, but the fact that plants will allocate resources, like if they, because they're so connected underground and if they sense that there's like a fungus or something over here eating another plant, they'll actually send chemicals over there to stop that from happening.

If they find one that's malnourished, they'll send chemicals to them to try to help. It's like, what if we find out that there is a level of, I hesitate to say sentience, but like that we just fundamentally do not understand what plant life is. And so I love answering the question when it's as hard as humanly possible. What happens if we go, fuck, like we can't kill animals.

Like they are way more feeling than we think. We can't kill plants because there's a lot more going on there than we thought. Where do we end up? Like, what do you do at that point?

Because this is like really interesting. We end up, we end up hungry, but you end up having to do something, right? And so it really forces people to face this sort of moral conundrum. And, you know, thinking back to like early hunter gatherers who had this sense of respect for what they had hunted and what they killed and like this almost sense of gratitude for that thing having given itself to them so that they can sustain themselves.

It's cold comfort when I think about an alien coming down, you know, and being like, oh, thank you so much for giving your life and forgiving your planet. That would help me a lot, but I don't know what to do with that one. Yeah. Well, I don't either, but I mean, the thought experiments of test cases where you push it to the extreme just to see how strong your theory of ethics is, is useful for, you know, for thinking about these things.

Practically speaking, let's just take it one step at a time. Let's just, you know, do what we've been doing. That is we have laws to protect abuse of animals, you know, and they are applied every week or two. You know, there's some story in the news of some guy had 50 dogs in his house and they arrested him for, you know, abusing these animals.

And good, that's good. You know, so there's those are on the books. And then, you know, the protecting animals that are used in science and labs, and there's tons of laws and rules about those. And now even the, you know, the banning of the use of chimpanzees, that's a good step.

You know, can't use chimps anymore for research, micro research, for example, or psych research. That's good. You know, so these chimps are being retired to these, you know, happy chimp farms where they can lead a good life. That's nice.

You know, it's the way the animals were treated in the 60s was, you know, by today's standards, just awful. And so that's my approach. Like just once, before we grant sentience to lobsters and don't eat them anymore, let's just start with the big ones. You know, the great apes, you know, gorillas, chimps, orangs, gibbons, and us.

And then, and by the way, let's expand the moral sphere to all humans. You know, we're still not quite there yet, beginning there. And then, you know, then the cetaceans, you know, the dolphins, whales, and porpoises, and sea lions, and so on. You know, just all the, maybe marine mammals will be the next one.

And just take it one step at a time. It's, you know, a lot of animal rights activists, they don't like this because their analogy is that that would be like telling the slaveholder, you know, the people in 1850s America, take your time, no rush, you know, one small step at a time. You know, thanks a lot, says the slaves. Well, you know, it's not a perfect analogy, but I understand why people want change instantly, but that's just not how it works.

Yeah, that is a conundrum of how quickly we can make change. You know, when you think about moral progress and moving in the right direction, you need the friction of people saying that this isn't fast enough. You also have to be careful about sort of upending society, the notion of burn it all down, and whatever we build in it said will be better. It's like, I actually really get emotionally, I understand that argument.

And it is where you see an injustice is so tempting to just want to break the back of whatever has created that. But the world is so freakishly unpredictable in terms of you change this here, and it will have unintended consequences. But it is so emotionally unsatisfying to say incremental change. So yeah, it's tough.

I don't know. Is your take on that just like, hey, it is what it is. And the only way sort of safely forward is incremental change? Yeah, I mean, I get your point.

I mean, if you had a rallying call cry, you know, what do we want? Slow, incremental, peaceful change. When do we want it? Eventually.

No one's going to, you know, come down to the park at four o'clock Saturday to meet with me. And let's go on our march chanting this, right? Well, so this gets at, you know, a deeper political philosophy. That is, you know, we have liberals and conservatives for a reason.

You know, no matter how many political parties there are in a country, you know, we're a duopoly and probably always will be. You know, many European countries have half a dozen parties. I think that's great. I wish we had more parties.

So no one side could capture too much power. But even there in European countries, they kind of cluster toward the left or toward the right. And the reason for that is, you know, it gets back to the first conservative intellectual, Edmund Burke, in his book on the French Revolution. And basically he said he supported the American Revolution against England, but not the French Revolution, because the one, the American, was more kind of rational-based, incremental, legal changes, and less violent until the war broke out, of course.

But even there, you know, the war kind of developed over many years, and not that many people died, comparatively speaking. But look what happened with the French Revolution. I mean, they just burn it all down. Let's just start over.