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

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everybody. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Tom. I am here to talk to the King skeptic himself, Michael Schurmer. Michael, welcome to the show. King skeptic. Okay, that's a new one. I like that. Now, man, I love it. And so your recent book, Giving the Devil His Due, 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. 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. In debates, formal debates, 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 taught us the last century or so 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 the University Press, so they sent it out for review, and I got two long reports back from blind reviewers that, you know, they, I don't know who they are, so they're free to say whatever they want. And, 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 it hurts the ego. You know, like, oh, man, I should have been smarter or whatever. But the fact is, nobody is omniscient. 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.

are collective thinking, which I find super admirable, but how did you get to the point where somebody could sort of kick you in the face? You've just written a book, which I'm sure took an inhuman amount of time and energy, and how do you sort of self-soothe and then go, this is actually useful?

So 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. I mean, I'm 66 years old, but I can imagine if I was 16 years old, I'd be falling apart 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 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

You know, 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 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. It 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, if 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 that people can't believe it. You know, and they're called flip floppers or traders.

And well, what if somebody got new information and they changed their mind and 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 so, and that, I'm afraid, has gotten worse in politics. The amount of dissent one is allowed to have, breaking ranks on one of 12 different items, say, if you're a conservative or a liberal, 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. Yeah. 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. By temperament, I'm fairly independent thinker. I don't like working for other people and I don't like just going along with the herd. 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. I'm pro-choice. Well, that's a liberal thing.

And 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.

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 and spoonbenders like Uri Geller and psychics and astrologers and tarot card readers and

curly in 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, you know, trickle down economics. Does it work or doesn't it work?

Well, on the 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, 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 going to suggest that 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, that's the value of democracy. Well, we just have an election, or 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 then you run it for a while and see how it goes. And so if you think of gun control measures, there's 50 different states, 50 different kind of configurations of gun control measures, carrying conceal and 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 per person in the state and what are their laws and so on, then what is their gun violence rate? Now it's not perfect, but this is what social scientists do. They try to control for variables and then look at the one they're interested in to see if it matters. Anyway, that's a kind of way to think about a social political issue that's not so different from other scientific issues.

Now, if you had to explain to somebody why the truth matters, and I'll sort of give you my breakdown of why, I think it matters. And I'd love to hear how you'd answer that. So for me, the truth is 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 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 and 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 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.

How do you look at truth? And it's important. Yeah, I think that's right. That's kind of a practical, pragmatic approach to defining truth, which is fine, because that works. But just pull back in general, just organisms that learn.

They connect the dots, A is connected to B, something like a rat in a Skinner box pressing a bar and it gets reinforced for doing so and it presses it more. Or the dog that salivates when it sees food and the person rings the bell with the food.

So now the bell becomes the condition 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 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 or is it just the wind? Well, if you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the 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 the wind, it turns out it's a dangerous predator.

You know, you're lunch, right? That's a Type 2, a false negative. That is, you fail to recognize the true cause of the rustle and the grass, and that costs you. So my argument is that we tend to err on the side of making more Type 1 errors than Type 2 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, 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 people believe we're things because they're dumb, uneducated, ignorant, unsophistic, and none of that. We're all.

susceptible to these kinds of things. Everybody is. You know, you've seen people lose their minds over masks. You know, 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, and 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 decision-making about truth is made under uncertainty.

So we use these what are called cognitive heuristics, these shortcuts. Dan Kahneman calls this type one or system one thinking. It's rapid. It's rapid cognition. It's intuitive. I just have a feeling here. I'm walking into this house and I don't have a good feeling about this. I don't know what it is. This person I just met. I just have a bad vibe about this guy. I don't 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 the wind or a predator? Because predators don't wait around for you to gather more information. They're camouflage, 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.

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at netsuite.com slash theory. The guide is free, just go to netsuite.com slash theory to get your copy. Again, that's netsuite.com slash theory. 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, 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 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.

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 in 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 gonna silence all dissenting voices. Do you think we're living through something unique right now, or is this just...

Yeah, I agree with you. It's more pronounced now. We're more polarized, you know, and a number of factors that work, you know, the media has been driven by the economic model of competing against online new 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 of the internet and so forth. 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, defend your client.

And, 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 to 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.

to respond. 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 as a goal the truth, whatever it is. Now, of course, scientists are humans. And the more committed or devoted they are to a particular hypothesis or theory, the more likely they are to engage in motivated reasoning, the confirmation bias, try to find evidence that fits it. They're not paparian falsification philosophers. Paparian?

Poparian, Karl Popper, who never heard that before. He's the philosopher of science that first articulated that the idea that science mainly progresses through falsification, that is, trying to falsify theories. You can't prove theories in science. Maybe in math, you can through axioms. But in science, no, you can't prove anything. 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 kind of a simplified version of Popper's theory. And in reality, it's a carrot and stick thing. You try to falsify other people's theories, of course. That's how you advance in science. But the scientists that hold the theories, they're not just trying to falsify their theories. They're trying to confirm them.

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 anthropogenic global warming. You know, so like in the 70s and 80s, it wasn't clear 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. It's not that anyone had not falsified the theory. It's that a lot of evidence had supported it and it kind of confirmed it. And what really did it for me, because I study these things, is that the scientists were independent of one another.

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, because those conservatives, 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. First of all, scientists are not like that, but even if they were, these are different scientists. Here's one person that studies glaciers and somebody else that studies sea level rise and somebody else studies

CO2 gases and somebody else studies Win 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, you know, what is true about the climate is my point. Yeah, the idea of using scientific reasoning for everyday life is something I become really obsessed with in business. So irony of ironies, I was 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 and what i think is going to work. I try to identify the impediment stands between where i am in 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 in my team was like oh that's a scientific method.

And I was like, ah, I see. That's right. When you boil things down to the basic physics of the way things work, and 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 of 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. Now you stated it perfectly. That's a fabulous example. 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, Lewis Leidenberg. But he writes about how trackers are kind of intuitive scientists. They're gathering data about the footprints of the animal and then they're forming hypotheses. Let's say these trackers, like these are essentially hunter-gatherers, they're trying to track the animal to kill it and eat it. This is how they survive, right?

So it's important to them. So they see like, there's like an indentation in the dirt underneath this bush and then 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, well, what time of day is it? What's the temperature and what's in that direction? Well, there's a, there's some water over there.

So, you know, I intuit that as the sun came up and it 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, you know, and so they're, you know, and then they go and check to see if it's there. And, you know, they're testing the hypotheses in a way. So that's kind of a, you know, and 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 AB 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 even something like in love, right? One of my favorite jokes from the singer-songwriter Tim Minchin is, you know, what you call stocking, sorry, you know what you call love without evidence, stocking. Sorry, I gave away the plan. Stocking, 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, okay, 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.

In a way, all human relations are like that. Yeah, it'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'm obsessed with this idea that 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 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 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, load bearing, that kind of stuff, then 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. I mean, it's really extraordinary. The aqueducts of Rome, right? Like you can actually build things that

have this extraordinary utility, but the price is that you have to want the truth even when it makes you feel stupid, even when it stings or hurts your feelings. 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 effects going on, which is almost always the case with human behavior. So take something like QAnon,

You know, and how anyone could possibly believe this. So when a republic is something the last poll I saw was something like 30% of Republicans say they think there's something to the QAnon conspiracy. That is to say that there is a secret satanic cabal of pedophiles sacrificing children and drinking their blood in a Washington DC pizzeria led by Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks. Okay, no one in the 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, if who's involved. Okay, so this is about as goofy a conspiracy theory as you could find. There's variations on it. Some of it is not quite that crazy. Some of it gets overlaps with the rigged election slash deep state conspiracy theory that was popular during Trump's administration.

But if you sat down, one of these people said, no, do you actually believe this and state it the way I just did? I would hope they would say, well, no, one guy did. The guy that went to the comic ping pong pizzeria with his gun to break up the pedophile ring. Well, he served time in jail for this. Fortunately, no one was killed. 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.

of this pizzeria. But he totally believed it. And I suspect most people that say they believe it, they're doing something else. They're signaling maybe a social signal like virtue signaling. You know, I'm so devoted to being a Republican, I'm willing to publicly state I believe this insane idea.

There's a lot of virtue signaling in politics where you're trying to get the attention of your fellow politicians or tribe members to show your devotion. I think much of religious ceremonies is involved in social signaling.

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. So there's some of that. Of course, in that particular case of QAnon and Trump, he still wields power in the Republican Party.

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 I better go along with it just in case. And so on or else I won't get reelected. I mean, that's what happened. We just saw what happened 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 has been replaced. Why? Because she refused to go along with the tribe. So it's a real effect. 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 enough that it silences people. Again, back to my book while I'm concerned about the 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 that's the problem with that. And so there's an effect called pluralistic ignorance, or the spiral of silence, where everybody thinks everybody else believes something, when in fact most of them don't believe it. So like the classic study on this is with binge drinking on college campuses.

If you ask students individually, privately, in an anonymous survey, 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 want to stand out and be the only one. That'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.

Hitler came to power as a minority party. Then he shut down the press so that there was no coverage of what people were saying. What did they do with dissenters? They sent them to the concentration camps. Most people don't know this. Most people are familiar with the famous death camps like Auschwitz.

and Maidanik and so forth. But there is thousands, literally thousands of camps throughout Germany and the European countries they conquered. And so what did they do with those? They filled them up with people that descended from national socialism. And so if you want to speak out because you don't believe this ideology and you see your neighbor hauled off and you never see him again, it's like, I'm keeping my mouth shut.

And 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. Maybe they agree with some of it, but not all of it, but they're afraid to say anything.

because they could get fired. And this has happened. So that's stifling because, again, whether there's some good ideas or not in these current movements, we'll never know if we can't talk about it. If the only answer could be, I'm 100% behind it, or else I'm not going to say anything, well, that's not good for society.

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I've got a personal invite for you guys to join me, Tom Build You Live, on my Twitch stream, where I play the video game that I'm building, Project Kaizen, and Talk Mindset. So when you join the stream, you are getting more than just gameplay, you're getting practical insights into how to shape your mind if you want to achieve something extraordinary in life.

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I am live almost every day from 6.30 a.m. to 8.30 a.m. Pacific time. So make sure you turn on that notification bell. You can find me at twitch.tv forward slash Tom Diliu. That's T-O-M-B-I-L-Y-E-U. All right, guys, I'll see you live in stream in the mornings, bright, nearly 6.30 a.m. Pacific time. Did you see HBO's Chernobyl?

Yes, I did. Yeah, that was quite the series. 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, it's interesting growing up as a child of the 80s.

It was such a moment where sort of individualism was celebrated, being the iconic class 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 seeing what's going on now, I'm like, okay,

I, it feels like sort of the, 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. But in what way, because you've 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 the lone voice, 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 we disagree with or that are so-called dangerous. They have dangerous ideas.

Well, that's a very subjective evaluation. What do you mean by dangerous? 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 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 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. Okay, well, whether that is or not is a separate issue. But he got arrested for this, that this is sedition. It's undermining the nation's ability to conduct war, for example.

And so that case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where the Supreme Court Justice issued that here. I'll just read you the line because it's so 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. What is this clear and present danger? Well, these are leaflets. He was just making an argument that 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 that 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. It could lead people to riot. It could lead to violence against minorities and so on.

Now, first of all, this almost never happens. There'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 bull horn on his soapbox. You know, that then people go and riot. Now, maybe the Trump case on January 6 is an exception, maybe that, but although that's very debatable,

about whether he was the cause of the storming of 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.

That's why we have to have those protections. The history of free speech goes back thousands of years. Historically, states always want to control people. They never want to give up power. They always want to silence anybody that descends. It's a constant struggle.

And it's must 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, 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.

idea spreads 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, 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 and 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 was 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. Okay.

And, you know, it imbues so much power, almost talismatic, magical power, to a word. And this is, I don't, I mean, I'm not going to use this word, I won't, I 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 the time we're going through now, that's probably gonna take a while. I've always liked, I mentioned 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 an N and E and an R. And 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, sort of like fire truck and tampon and matchstick and, you know, all these kind of, well, if you're a redhead, you know, and you're 10 years old, these are hurtful things, right?

And so, but his point was that, you know, let's just make fun of the whole thing and make light of it instead of being afraid of it. And, you know, again, language, we have to use words because, you know, we just have our thoughts that are in our skulls and to get them out of there and to your skull, I got to use words, okay? So words matter. But, you know, I'm always afraid of imbuing them with so much power that we're afraid to save them.

You know, we just had an article on skeptic on Tom, sorry, you know, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. And no, Huckleberry Finn, where he uses the N word. Well, he's, 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 and it's a bat. He was clearly he was making the point It's a bad thing yet in today's woke 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, but you've lost the point of the why you use the word Yeah, it is it is a very fascinating time that we're living through and

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.

I won't lie, like I've 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 through 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 that 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 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.

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 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. And I think that's a good one.

The other thing that made me think of before social media and the point scoring for catching people up on things is gossip. Social media is new, but gossip, it's a form of gossip. What is gossip? Gossip is mostly information about other people. Gossip is always about other people and it's usually negative. There's a kind of a 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, you know, 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 that studies these things and

It's theory about gossip, not just his, but the gossip is a way 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 should trust? Well, I'll ask this person, who knows this person, who knows him.

In a way, gossip is like, yes, you can trust that person or no, I wouldn't trust that person. It's information. 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 an economic modeling, losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good.

Let me just say that again, losses 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. Oh, who is this asshole that put that negative?

I'm going to, and then I'm obsessed about it. I'm like, calm down, Shurmur. Almost everybody loved your tweet. You know, how can I possibly be so influenced at this point in my life? Well, it's just normal, right? We noticed the negative thing. So, yeah, and then there's the principle of the counter of 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.

Instead of attributing the worst possible motive to their words or their actions, maybe you just don't know the context. Maybe they were having a bad day. 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, look, I don't know why this person used the N word or whatever it is they did that you're upset about. Maybe I don't know the full story. So let's just assume it was done accidentally or it didn't mean any harm by it, something like that. My favorite example of this late I've been thinking about 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 Hemings, 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? 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 slave. 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, okay. So maybe, you know, let's, so before you judge somebody, you know, you don't know what it'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. I don't always practice it, but it's a virtue. I think we should all promote the principle, charitable tolerance. Yeah, I think that's really smart, but what's super interesting to me is that as you were saying that, I felt like we're juggling razor blades right now. One of us is about to get cut. Even that, as you were describing it, I was like, God, this sounds terrible.

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 uncomplatable. 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 that 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 destroyer life offense it may be a hey even saying that out loud like is really uh... upsetting for people and so don't like who 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. But if you came to me and said, look, this person is something happened in their past and they're very sensitive to XYZ. 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 trying to mess with me and they're revving their engine or something like that, one, I wouldn't have asked that 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, I didn't know. So it's like you simultaneously wanna be generous to whoever's asking, but you don't, 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, whoo. I am not saying that that is the same as an offensive word. No, I got it. 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. So I'm fond of asking, I have a whole discussion of Milgram's shock experiments and I show videotapes 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 frying this guy in the other room. He's not actually getting shocked, of course. And then I asked him, how many of you would have gone all the way or participated? You know, they all say, oh, no, I definitely would not have done that. No, no, I'm just not that kind of person.

It's like, yeah, 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 and psychiatrists and others, you know, what percentage of people do you think will participate and go all the way? And it was like one, maybe 2% at most.

So people were shocked that 65% went all the way. Or you could ask, if you lived in 1850s America, say in the South, would you have been an abolitionist? 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 mouth shut because it was legal. Everybody was doing it. And, you know, there was a controversial thing to be against it. So, you know, it's easy to sit here in 2021 and judge people, you know, like in the 1960s, you see these interviews with these old guys like John Wayne or

or Sean Connery, and they make these disparaging remarks about women or Jews or blacks, and just like, oh, it's just cringe-worthy. 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, cringe-worthy or offensive. But, you know, 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.

Yeah, 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 and frank in the

addict, assume that you get sucked up into the, you know, the Nazi machinery because survival, you know, literally watching people killed in front of you for having the wrong view. It's like pretty quickly you go, whoa, like I, 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, you know, at the height of slavery. You should want to be the person hiding somebody in your addict during Nazi Germany.

And you should be very worried that you wouldn't and that's like 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 like you have to sort of get ready and this is why your sort of

in the face of all the hurt 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 wanna know, do you have a process? What is the process for, I think this, but I wanna make sure that I stay skeptical?

Oh boy, well first, um, I'm not that brave on these things. I was just thinking of Navalny, the guy that stood up is standing up to a Putin. You know, they tried to kill him, you know, poison him with this, you know, this radioactive stuff. And is that the guy who like it 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. But he went back to Russia where he was promptly arrested. Then he went on a hunger strike. He's in jail. He just ended his hunger strike last week.

But he's not, he's not giving up. He's standing up to Putin and Putin's crown. He's in 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, you know, in Germany. And then they're like, okay, let's get on the plane. We're going back to Russia. I'm just thinking, are you out of your mind? They hate you there. They're going to kill you or lock you up for life. And he's like, did he take us whole family?

Yeah, they're in Russia. Yeah, they're fine. Putin's leaving them alone. But he's in jail. He's probably never, well, he may get out. But who knows? Anyway, my point is that I would not do that. I would just say, the hell with it, I'm going to stay in it. I'm going to some other country. And I think most people are probably like me. But in terms 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, you know, 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, rationality, you can apply. Like, what exactly are we talking about here? You know, well, you know, 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, it's like, yes, of course, I would love to think there's extraterrestrials or there is technology able to fly 7,000 miles an hour and make a sharp left turn without killing the pilot, whatever. 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 that thinks, 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 don't think it's true because there's not enough evidence for it.

So for me, I just try to think, okay, whatever it is I'm reading about or addressing, I have to try to separate what I want to be true from what is actually true. In most cases, if I don't have a dog in the fight, if I'm not committed to it, like gun control, 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 if you can do that, then it's a lot less upsetting 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 here. Let's see. I have the New York Times. I have the local Santa Barbara newspaper. I get the. Michael, you are definitely showing your age right now. This is madness. Who reads the newspapers anymore? I get 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. The opinion editorial section of a newspaper, 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. They can 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. Okay, Fox News is not news. It's entertainment. You know, their own, their own defense case when they got sued. I think it was Tucker Carlson got sued for somebody. Oh, it was the defense of one of the Capitol building, uh, uh, stormers, one of the people that stormed the Capitol in 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 a previous case, was nobody should seriously believe what we say.

It's like wow That's an admission, 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 a charter for network because there's hundreds and hundreds of channels to choose from, or you can just turn the TV off and go online. And then there's 10,000 sources of information you can get or entertainment. So that's the problem.

Is there a wellspring anywhere of people that are harkening 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, LA 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 come from. Well, this was the source. What page? OK, here's, I got to go look it up. Here's the page. OK. So I'm encouraged by that. And when 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. 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 you know, content. And I have a couple of my back checkers or my proofers are actual, you know, retired scholars. You know, they just volunteered because, you know, they like helping out. But they actually read it for content and they look stuff up and they always catch things. So, you know, it's a good norm that developed in the early 20th century in journalism.

And although it seems like it's disappeared it hasn't you know 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, okay Those aren't news sites and so they don't have fact whether they affect checkers or not I you know it doesn't matter because that's not the point of it

it's interesting I heard somebody talking about their people need to realize that in an era where there's limited newspaper space that one of the things that

make 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

Um, you know, the sort of tripping things like our negativity bias and all of that, um, to make sure that you get the, just the volume of humans that you need to that. Um, and sort of speaking to our base or instincts. Now I didn't look into sort of how true that 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 with 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 claims by psychics or astrologers or whatever. But then now they're pretty political. They fact check things that politicians say, speeches that politicians give, memes that are popular online about Biden did this or Trump did that. They look it up. They look at this photo of Biden and 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 it, 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 checking sites that I use all the time because most quotes that are kind of catchy, you know, oh by Mark Twain or 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,

Quotes tend to gravitate up to the most famous person who ever said it or might have said it or could have said it or said something like that. And so if you Google any quote, the same dozen or so sites will come up in the first couple pages on Google of just repeating the quote without 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 to their credit, that's a lot of work to do that. Let me dig out historically where these things come from. And so I'm grateful that there are people that do that and that they do and that they're useful in somehow making a living doing it. I guess people do care.

Yeah, yeah. I want to believe that the majority care, I am cognizant of perverse incentives that can be created by things like social media where the different metrics are time on site and using sort of the 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 route driving things. And I'm curious if you have like a set of foundational beliefs, and 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 curious to note, 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, Heaven's 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.

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 tubie and cosmetics 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. The universe is basically running down. The world doesn't care about you. And there's just so many more ways to die. Anyway, Steve Pinker has a nice discussion of this in enlightenment now. And 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 thin air. But, you know, so that's one way to think of it. And so I also think of it in the 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 these 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 four billion years, the sun's going to expand, there'll be no earth. So what's the point?

All right, so I call this Alvey's error. Alvey is Alvey Singer, Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall where he has a flashback to childhood where he freezes to do his homework and his mother takes him as a psychiatrist and he says, why don't you do your homework, Alvey? Because the universe is expanding.

Because what? Because 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.

This was in my essay in Scientific American about this. This philosopher was debating William Lane Craig, who's a famous theologian, and he was making this argument. Without a God, without an afterlife, there's no point at all. It doesn't matter what people did to the Jews in World War II, it doesn't matter.

And so the philosopher, his name is escaping me right to it, Shelley. Kagan, Shelley 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 could 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, you know, what's the purpose? This is it. You know, of course we should have goals and work toward the goals and so forth.

But 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 out on sort of against this idea that science and rationality can lead to objective moral values and the people they're riding against are myself, Sam Harris, Deep Pinker, and a few others like Jonathan Heit and a few moral philosophers with the scientific

grounding. Again, that's not original to us. This is utilitarian philosophy. This goes back to Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the first Enlightenment thinkers that tried 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, Plato refuted this with the Euthafros dilemma that 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.

Then you have Bentham and Mills, 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.

Richard Pore, you know, the law should be fair. This idea of, you know, this kind of viewpoint from nowhere. I think Thomas Nagle called it kind of a universal perspective, Spinoza 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 we can go even better than that. We can use science. Not always, but we can measure what people prefer, what do they want, the social psychology, the cognitive psychology of right and wrong, good and evil. Because 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's, you know, 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.

Yeah, there may be people would look at us like we look at slaveholders raping their sleigh, you know, it's like, whoa, that is just, you know, again, you know, we it's hard to get out of our culture and see what, you know, what we're really doing in that perspective. 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. This goes back to Descartes saying, well, animals like dogs, they're just mechanical robots. They don't actually feel anything. Well, what happens when you kick it and it squeals? Oh, that's just an automated sound that comes out of the tubes when it compresses the blood or whatever he thought was going on. This is bullshit.

I mean, here's my solution to the other mind's problem. The other mind problem is how do I know you're sentient and conscious and you feel and think and so on. Maybe you're a philosophical zombie as it's called. 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 hardware programs of neurotransmitter substances, those little synaptic gaps and the neural networks and the modules, blah, 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.

That's a reasonable assumption, and it's just a small step to animals. You see 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 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 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 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, we can't kill animals. 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? What do you do at that point? Because this is really interesting to me. 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 thinking back to early hunter-gatherers who had this sense of respect for what they had hunted and what they killed and

this almost sense of gratitude for that thing having given itself to them so that they could sustain themselves. I mean, it's interesting. 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 for giving your planet. That wouldn't help me a lot, but I don't know what to do with that one.

Well, I don't either, but 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 thinking about these things. Practically speaking, let's just take it one step at a time. Let's just do what we've been doing. That is we have laws to protect abuse of animals.

And they are applied every week or two. There's some story in the news of some guy at 50 dogs in his house, and they arrested him for abusing these animals. And good, that's good. So those are on the books. And then the protecting animals that are used in science and labs.

You know, 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, I can't use chimps anymore for research, medical research, for example, or psych research. That's good, you know, and so these chimps are being retired to these

happy chimp farms and where they can lead a good life, that's nice. The way the animals were treated in the 60s was by today's standards just awful. So that's my approach. Before we grant sentience to lobsters and don't eat them anymore, let's just start with the big ones, the great apes.

guerrillas, chimps, or rangs, gibbons, and us. And by the way, let's expand the moral sphere to all humans. We're still not quite there yet, beginning there. And then the cetaceans, the dolphins, whales, and porpoises, and sea lions, and so on. Just all the maybe marine mammals will be the next one.

And just take it one step at a time. A lot of animal rights activists don't like this because their analogy is that that would be like telling the slaveholder, the people in 1850s, America, take your time, no rush, one small step at a time. Thanks a lot, says the slaves. Well, 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 its stead will be better.

It's like I actually really get emotionally. I understand that argument. And it is where you see an injustice. It 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, what do we want? Slow, incremental, peaceful change. When do we want it? Eventually, no one's going to 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 a deeper political philosophy that is we have liberals and conservatives for a reason. No matter how many political parties there are in a country, we're a duopoly and probably always will be. 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 clustered toward the left or toward the right.

And the reason for that is, you know, 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, the war kind of developed over many years and not that many people died comparatively speaking. But look what happened with the French Revolution. It was just burn it all down and let's just start over. Well, what was the end result of that was the guillotine was brought out.

And you just got this massacre of anybody and everybody that, for whatever reason, not just political, just revenge and whatnot. So his argument is that we need conservatives to prevent liberals from going too far too fast. Because if you do that, those structures that were built up over centuries

these social institutions that provide stability for society that people count on and trust. If you just tear them all down and you replace them with whatever, it's very unlikely to work. And so I, one thing I'm worried about now is that, you know, historically the, you know, most of politics has been played between the 240 yard lines, right? It's just kind of nudged this way, nudged that way.

And now Trump and those people are pulling the center further and further to the right and then the woke progressives are pulling the center further and further to the left. And so what used to be a pretty stable system is kind of fracturing a bit.

And now you see this last week, again, mentioned Liz Cheney. She's kind of old-school GOP. She's right there at maybe the 45-yard line. And Biden is kind of old-school liberal. He's like at the other 45-yard line. And this idea, Biden's a socialist or communist. This is crazy. It's not even remotely true.

But I can see why people use that because they're trying to pull the, you know, the ends further, further out. That's dangerous. Either on either side, it's dangerous. And because of that leading to instability, and that's what leads to violence. And that's what leads to deaths and property damage and all that's just no good for democracy.

Yeah, and that brings us back to giving the devil is due. How do you get this idea across? How do you encourage people to want to hear from the people who think differently than them?

Well, of course you could just say it, but I turned it on tables on the other person. How would you feel if you're the one that's speaking out against the mob? You know, let's say, like, for example, I talk about Holocaust deniers. Well, what if I'm skeptical of how many Native Americans died

with European colonization of North America. The figure is not 90 million, it's more like 10 million. Am I a denier? Because am I going to be silenced for that? Creationists always want their side taught in public schools. What if you set this up that whatever the dominant religion is in a country,

That's your principle for what gets taught in public schools. Well, what if Christianity is no longer the dominant religion? What if Islam is the dominant religion? Islam has its own creationist ideology, hesitate to call it science. They think it is.

You still want that on the books that, well, whoever's in the Dominic group, they get to have their creation story taught in public schools. Of course, Christians go, no, no, I don't want that, right? So just flip it on its head. Just put yourself in the position of you're the lone voice. And do you or do you not want to be heard? Of course, people want to be heard.

So free speech is for those with whom we disagree. That's who it's for. The people we don't like. The people whose opinions we find abhorrent. That's what the free speech principles are for. I love that man.

I think that's a great place to wrap. Thank you for being the, I don't want to say the devil in so many different arguments, but to be a dissenting voice. I think that's incredibly useful. You're a very sound thinker. I think it's very telling that getting Jordan Peterson to blurb a book in which you have an entire chapter dedicated to why he's wrong.

And that he did it because he thinks that you rationalize your way through things in a very sound way, I think is a great testament. Where can people find you? Where can they engage with your unique way of thinking? Oh, well, skeptic.com is the main web page for my magazine and at MichaelShermer.com for my personal web page. And my books are all on Amazon and so forth. And Michael Shermer show, my podcast, it's at skeptic.com as well.

I love that. Dude, thank you so much for coming on and being such a foundational thinker. I really appreciate it. It was wonderful. And guys, speaking of things that are so foundational, you can't miss it. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.

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