Bill Maher: A boozy, stoned, liberal take on classic anti-vax tropes
Bill Maher is an American comedian, political commentator, and television host from the tail end of the baby-boomer generation. He's principally a centrist liberal in terms of his political leanings, being well known for his anti-religious and pro-animal rights positions, as well as a supporter of things like cannabis legalisation. On the other hand, he's something of a contrarian and styles himself as anti-political correctness and anti-woke, identifying as a disenchanted liberal, like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.Now, all of that is well and good, let a hundred flowers bloom! But... on the less-salubrious side, he's also a contrarian when it comes to his extreme scepticism of conventional medicine, and vaccines in particular. And as we'll see in the two interviews we cover, with Sam Harris ^ and Richard Dawkins, it never seems to take him very long before the conversation is steered back to vaccines. So, will Maher make the gurometer go 'DING'? Let's face it, probably not. But if not, why not? It is worth checking to tune up the old instrument. And it is indeed something to behold as a boozy, stoned Maher tries (and manifestly fails) to coax Richard Dawkins out of his prim and proper shell.Also features discussions of Chris' run-ins with the rationalists, a new 'Whinge of the Week' segment, and the rhetorical technique of 'pouncing'.LinksRichard Dawkins on Club Random with Bill MaherSam Harris on Club Random with Bill MaherAstral Codex Ten- Contra Kavanagh On FideismMedium Article by Chris - Am I a Fideist?Astral Codex Ten - Trying Again on FideismMaking Sense with Sam Harris - Did SARS-COV-2 escape from a lab?Konstantin Kisin - Reflections on Dealing With Bad Faith CriticismUpcoming discussion with John Vervaeke & Chris Mastropietro at The Stoa
Welcome to Dakota the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown.
With me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
He's there in his hoodie.
He's looking alert, attentive and caffeinated.
Hit me with your rhythm stick, Chris.
What's going on with you?
I didn't get enough sleep yesterday, so I'm surprised I look a little...
I probably look a bit...
I've probably actually spaced out.
But look, Matt, you can see in the video that no one else can see.
What kind of mug is this?
Do you recognize that image?
This works very well on an audio forecast.
It looks like...
Oh, it's a Kerserk Sakt.
Yeah, it was a trap to get you to say that, but it is.
I like them so much, I bought a mug from their website.
You've said it before, it's worth saying again.
All of these people out there digging into the evidence, doing their own research, they'd be better off just watching a casergus act.
I'd pronounce it Kurzgesagt, but, you know, I've probably done that wrong now that I took the hack right there.
But yes, and actually, Matt, the theme of doing your own research is quite relevant because while you were off gallivanting around the Australian outback, wrestling crocodiles and spearfishing sharks, as you do in the outback, I was getting into various online tussles with people over.
This issue about doing your own research, and I had a run-in with Scott Alexander, famed rationalist, over his summary pieces on ivermectin.
Yes, yes.
I won't relitigate the endless back and forth there, but the basic story is I wrote a critical response because Scott wrote a new piece about the ivermectin controversy, and he was referencing...
Various things that Alexandros Marinos had reused as objections.
And Scott's conclusion, you know, was pretty much in line with the expert consensus regarding the evidence for Ivermectin and whatnot.
But I've said some fairly critical comments about his apparent indulgence for the more conspiracy prone and his contempt for the scientific authorities or the people that are critical of conspiracy fears.
And he responded by writing a kind of a critical takedown of my position, as he saw it, on fideism, I think he called it.
I didn't know what that word meant.
But basically saying, I'm a blue church, trust the science guy, telling people, don't you dare look at our secret science textbook.
Don't even dare.
While I was writing my rebuttal, which of course I had to do, I made some comments in the space underneath and then Scott found them positive and kind of conciliatory.
So he wrote another blog post before I'd written my response.
That was like raising other points or whatever.
So then I published my response on Medium, which addressed his first blog post that highlighted the differences between us.
I saw some other rationalists posting blog posts, you know, responding to Scott's blog post about me.
And I was like, oh yeah, I remember this era of the internet blog posts and whatnot.
So if anybody wants to read them, they are there.
And I think one interesting aspect of it was like Scott and me both came across Graham Hancock in our youth, right?
Our teenage years, I think.
Graham Hancock is a...
Alternative historian, you know, the kind who argues that there were ancient civilizations that we have evidence for, Atlantis-type stuff, right?
And I read his book, Fingerprints of the Gods, and was initially like, oh my god, historians are lying about the evidence for ancient advanced civilizations.
But I did, after what I would regard as relatively...
Cursory level of research locate a lot of critical material debunking Graham Hancock, including a BBC documentary that he responds to in the book, you know, chastising it.
And I remember going around early internet forums and whatnot and, you know, locating breakdowns.
And so I came away from that experience with an appreciation that the alternative history genre was really appealing superficially.
When you looked at expert rebuttals and whatnot, you kind of found out, oh no, it's misrepresenting things.
And actually, the actual history from people who have spent their whole careers on that is less dramatic, but it's actually more complex and interesting.
So that was my takeaway.
But Scott, on the other hand, he basically described that he didn't find any good quality rebuttals.
He just found sneering and contempt.
From skeptics and people accusing people of being racist, which I genuinely didn't see much of at the time.
That seems like a later response.
But in any case, he ended up scuba diving in ruins to investigate himself, teaching himself geology or aspects of geology to investigate the science.
And eventually it came down that it also...
The evidence wasn't that strong for it.
But he was very upset that he'd spent five years and that skeptics could have helped him, skeptics and experts, if they hadn't been so dismissive.
So he came away with a different takeaway that people need to be nicer to avoid wild goose chases, which is what he described it as.
Whereas I came away with a very different thing.
So it's interesting.
Similar experiences, but different lessons.
Yeah, very different lessons.
And he had to go to a lot more effort to actually go scuba diving to check whether Atlantis was there.
That's a lot of work.
But you do have to factor in, like, he went scuba diving in ancient ruins, right?
Like, that's, you know, what did I do?
I sat in Northern Ireland and read some more.
I did realize, you know, because he posted some picture of him in the ruins scuba diving, and I was like, I do regard this as a waste of effort, but it's not the worst waste of effort that you can engage in.
Look, it gets you outside scuba diving.
I endorse that.
It's a great thing to be doing.
So he had some fun.
That was the main thing.
But it is interesting.
It is reminiscent, his approach.
And, you know, Scott Alexander, he's not too bad.
He's definitely a clever cookie.
But it is reminiscent of the approach of, say, flat earthers who basically refuse to believe anything that they cannot.
You said that.
I didn't say that.
I don't think he would appreciate the comparison.
But I would expect that amongst the sort of initial people that might find that kind of Flat Earth theory interesting, at least, worth investigating, I would say that there would be a small but measurable number who are just like Scott Alexander, who it actually motivated them to do some basic...
physics experiments by themselves and investigate the issue.
And along the way, they probably learned a lot of good stuff about astronomy and so on.
I think that happens, and I think that's a minority.
Yes, that was going to be my point.
The unfortunate thing is not everyone is as dedicated as Scott Alexander.
In fact, most of them, when they do their own experiments to see whether the Earth is flat, Don't come to the right conclusion, sadly.
There was a funny line in Scott's original piece which accused me of basing my career on ivermectin and related subjects.
I think, you know, he was just zinging off and it would have landed better if he had a focus on the Weinstein's or that kind of thing.
And he did take a shot at that as well.
But I just was like, it's interesting to imagine the alternative.
Chris Kavner, who is an ivermectin researcher who's just really upset that people are focused on my drug of choice for the wrong reasons.
I think the other good takeaway from your shared experience with these lost cities of Atlantis or whatever the hell the ancient civilizations things was about is how intuitively, emotionally and also cognitively appealing.
Like, the theory style.
And, you know, like you, as a young person, found it super-duper appealing.
Because it is, right?
It's fascinating stuff.
And there's a whole bunch of details and, you know, huge if true type conclusions.
There's a map which seems like it could only have been written with knowledge gained from, like, an aerial point of view and so on and so forth.
And who of us hasn't seen something like Wikipedia and done some little dive and going...
Wow, what's the deal with that?
That scientists are baffled.
Yeah, scientists are baffled type thing.
So we've all been there.
When I was 15 or 16, my friend and I sent away for a set of ancient Nordic runes.
It had an instruction manual and stuff like that.
And it was basically tarot cards with a Nordic flavor.
And we loved it.
It was fascinating.
I forget what they did.
The usual thing, I think.
Cast the runes?
Yes, that's right.
You cast the runes and then you can interpret them, right?
And we sort of treated it as a bit of fun, but we wanted to...
Playing with dark forces, Matt.
Playing with forces behind your can.
And it was fun.
It was fun.
And we wanted to believe, but inevitably we had to ask ourselves the question.
Who amongst us has not performed a ritual to the Dark Lord?
At the stroke of midnight on the eve of the new year.
You know, these are childhood ribaldies that we've all done, Matt.
Yeah.
But when you ask yourself the hard question, do I really believe this?
And when the answer's no, unfortunately, it's not fun anymore.
But, you know, it's good to just have that self-awareness about one's own motivations.
One, to believe something is true, because it would be really, really super-duper interesting and fun if it was true.
Yeah, and actually, there's another connection that I noticed from...
It reminded me that Graham Hancock, in that book, The Fingerprints of the Gods edition that I read, it had an addendum, which was dealing with this BBC documentary, the Horizon documentary.
It was basically explaining...
How that documentary was so terrible and they misrepresented them and they lied about the evidence, right?
And that was probably my first encounter, one of my early encounters, at a guru-type person responding to criticism and calling it a bad faith hit job.
And it's notable because, like, Constantine Kissin, former guest on the show and person whose speech we decoded, also a week ago or so...
Released a short little episode on Substack where he alleges, you know, that we are bad faith takedown merchants wanting to increase our clout by, you know, riding on the coattails of him and incorrectly representing his very reasonable speech at the Oxford Union.
He's also meditated on other critical coverage that he's got, and he has blocked, like you and I both now, me in the case for sharing a new Statesman article that was unflattering to him, and he didn't appreciate.
And you, I don't know, why were you blocked?
No, he hasn't blocked me.
Oh, sorry.
Well, not yet.
Not yet.
Look at that.
But Chris, I...
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Well, I know he hasn't blocked me because somebody was tagging me about him, and it reminded me of something you mentioned, which was at the end of that appearance on Decoding the Guru's concert in Kiss, and quite graciously, I thought, in a conciliatory kind of way,
you mentioned something about...
Promoting or platforming the World Economic Forum, trying to make us all eat bugs, those sorts of conspiracies.
And it's probably a good idea not to do that.
And he said, yeah, I'm going to try to do better with that kind of thing because that's obviously silly.
That's not something we do.
We haven't hosted people talking about that.
And I don't endorse the extreme conspiracies about that, right?
Yes, you did say that.
I would tend to want to push back when somebody like a Majid Nawaz or a Jim Sanzi introduces this notion of like a grand
I know that you are concerned about the far left and its blasé nature to the threats of the far left.
I wasn't sure if you found those conspiracies like the focus on the WEF and Klaus Schwab to be equally concerning or if you agreed with them.
I just wasn't clear.
I don't agree with them.
I don't agree with them, as you can probably tell from the conversations we've had on trigonometry.
Have you ever heard anyone...
I'm invited on to talk endlessly about the WF.
I think one guest mentioned it in the last question we always ask, which is a complete free hit.
And generally, we don't tend to debate that one.
It's just sort of left there as a free hit for them.
Yeah, and so it was just pretty funny to me that in the short time since that interview...
There's like two tweets from him.
One of them is a trigonometry episode.
Are we headed for a one-world government?
Will insects really replace meat?
Join us for part two of our disturbing interview where he, with Michael Schellenberger on the New World Order, he argues is being advanced by the mysterious elites of the World Economic Forum.
And he's also tweeting stuff like a little jokey thing about aliens.
Can we land yet?
No, it's too early.
At the moment, they're trying to change the weather by eating bugs.
So I thought that was a low bar to sort of not be doing the World Economic Forum bug-eating conspiracies, but he failed to clear it with flying colors, Chris.
Yeah, it's not hugely surprising, but it is quite a marked contrast, I suspect, from the way that he stated things at the end of the interview.
But if you listen to Konstantin's presentation, his view is that we are just salty because he took us apart with such precision.
We're during the interview with him.
So, you know, each person has their own perspective on these issues.
I encourage anybody interested to go listen to it.
It's an interesting perspective that Constantine offers on these things.
So, yeah.
So, Matt, we were talking about introducing the concept of...
Whinge of the week.
And I feel that there will always be hot competition for who has achieved the master whinge this week.
Well, Chris, I feel like every recording we have multiple whinges, but I think it's good that we're formalizing it and putting them in it and recognizing in its own category.
You mean our whinges?
No, I'm not talking about that.
That's just taken for granted.
We are talking about the whinges that are out there that we don't produce.
We can't grant ourselves the whinge of the week champions every week.
We have to award it to the others out there in claiming persecution or being targeted or whatnot.
So I could be a candidate.
That's very funny because when we talked about this segment...
And I thought it was a good idea.
I genuinely thought it was going to be basically giving you a permission slip to just whinge about something.
Oh, no, no.
This was Helen Lewis's suggestion because she correctly noted that, you know, Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, whoever, it happened to Eric Weinstein, there will always be a persecution narrative.
And at the time that we were talking about this, it was in relation to Brett and Heller responding.
To Being Called Gurus by Helen on Barry Weiss's podcast, which they did not tick well.
But that's, you know, that's in the past, Matt.
And I'm...
Do you have a candidate?
Does Constantine win?
Just for recency bias or the reference to us?
Is this...
Should we award it to Constantine this week or me?
Me for my...
Extended back and forth with Scott Alexander.
Maybe both of us, collectively, can win Whinger the Week.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
No, I think I'm going to have to go with Constantine because he is a good whinger.
He's got a lot of complaints about bad faith and misrepresentation and all of those things.
He's a good whinger.
I'm going to give it to him this week.
Yeah.
He also...
I'll allow it.
I'll allow that.
He also...
An episode just released with him and Jordan Peterson talking about his Oxford speech, because of course, of course it did.
And the interesting thing, I haven't finished it, but is Jordan Peterson harangues him for quite a long time about that he's actually religious.
Now, Constantine is not non-religious.
He's agnostic, right?
And he's open.
To religion being a positive force in people's lives and all that kind of thing.
But he basically does not agree with the notion that, you know, Jordan Peterson's redefining of worlds whereby everything is religious or everything is God.
So really, everybody who believes in everything, anybody who thinks science is real, are religious, right?
And there's a very extended part.
Where Jordan is trying to trap Constantine into admitting that he believes in God.
Constantine will not do it.
But it's clear that he wants to get out of that conversation.
But, you know, Jordan is on one of his things.
Because Jordan is writing a book, Matt, as he explains on that.
His next book is called We Who Wrestle With God.
Great corona wrestling.
What kind of wrestling?
Well, yeah.
And this is the last announcement before we get to our episode proper, but there's a thematic connection here because next month we are going to do an event at the Stoa channel, Peter Lindbergh's channel, which is a little bit sense-making-y,
a little bit.
Leans woo at time, woo adjacent, but they also arranged debates and whatnot, and they have asked.
I would say Vravaki and Christopher Mastropietro, but they are in the vein of having Jordan's extended definitions of what...
Is religious or God or that kind of thing?
And so we'll be, I suspect, dealing with those kind of arguments directly in a matter of weeks.
Yes.
And people listening to that title, I forget what it is, something about wisdom and also the importance of being critical.
You could probably guess...
You know, the topic is like a negotiation between the two parties and you can probably guess which component of that was coming from the Vavacki side and which side was coming from Chris's and my side.
So it's a bit of an odd, it's an unusual pairing of concepts, the importance of wisdom and being critical, but it should be interesting.
Yeah, no, according to these people, everything is God.
If you believe in anything, it has to be God.
And even according to Jordan Peterson, the very concept of truth.
It's based on the Logos, and there's no way to even have any concept of things that are true or not true with that reference to good old Jesus Christ.
So, yeah, definitely we come from different worlds.
Yeah, so it's going to be on March 13th or 14th, depending on where you are, and it's John Vervaki and Christopher Mastropietro, and the title is...
What's the importance of wisdom and public criticism?
That's the kind of framing device.
So, yeah.
So, anybody interested could look.
But in preparation for that, Matt, I've been reviewing various content by people discussing God in the sense-making sphere.
And it made me think, Matt.
I just want to put something out there and get your reaction to it.
You know, just think about it.
Don't dismiss it out of hand, right?
So, religion.
Isn't it the case that going on the school bus is a religion?
Now, I know what you're thinking.
What?
No, that's just a form of transport.
But wait, Matt.
Let's take a second.
Because think about a school bus conceptually.
What does it do?
It takes you somewhere.
You go from one location to another.
And you're on a journey to a place of learning.
To a place where...
There's an instilled higher belief in a set of values that minds can be improved, that people can learn.
Young men, young women, they can become adults through their learning experiences.
And there are people in those schools who have mastered various disciplines and information that will share it, much like a priesthood, you know, in certain respects.
They have holy texts, sometimes referred to as textbooks, and also the school bus specifically.
Yes, it's a...
Form of transportation on a very reductionist level.
But inside that, Matt, there are people.
People you share emotional connections with.
People that you may have spent years together with.
That you have a psychic connection with.
You're dressed the same, often in uniforms.
You're orientated towards learning this higher value.
And in a sense, you're worshipping in the very core meaning of the word.
You're worshipping about the idea of learning and education.
And if that itself is not a religion, is not something focused towards transcendence, I'm not sure what actually counts.
So in a very real way, school buses are, by definition, a religion or a religious experience, if you want to try to put it into that conceptual framework.
So, you know, I just wonder what you think about that.
Wow, that's amazing because I had you pegged.
It does make you think.
It's amazing you should say that because I had you pegged as this bullet-headed materialist.
But you've made me think about the layers of symbolism that are there with the school bus.
These kids out there yearning to find truth, looking to transcend to a higher level, like actualize themselves as full-blown adults.
And yeah, the school bus is how you get from A to B. The teachers are the priests.
The school bus is the church.
The pews, Matt.
The pews, the seats are lined up.
Maybe you're not kneeling in physicality, but in mentality.
Aren't you kneeling?
Isn't the driver there to tell you where to sit and what to do?
And you're, in a way, being instilled into the very bonds of society that we all must learn.
To find our place, to find your seat, to find your place in society.
Stop.
Stop.
That's enough.
Stop now, Chris.
I feel like this is some sort of desensitization trading where you are trying to prepare me for this discussion with Vivaki et al.
I wasn't referencing them.
It's just something that I was thinking about school buses.
I just want you to put that in.
So many people have ridden on school buses, Matt.
They may say they're not religious, but...
But we've all been on a school bus.
So I'm just saying.
Just saying.
Anyway.
I honestly don't know what I'm going to say when I talk to these people.
I guess it's going to be shades of...
Who was the sense maker we spoke to not so long ago?
What's his name?
Jamie Whale.
Jamie Whale.
I suspect it'll be shades of Jamie Whale where when people say things like that to me, I don't know what to say except no.
No.
Huh?
What?
You mean it's a stretched metaphor that's redefining things and just relying on symbolic extension of concepts?
Like runaway allegories strapped to a freight train plummeting into the Pacific Ocean.
Anyway, it's funny how people think.
People think in different ways.
They do.
All the colors of the rainbow, they're there.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Indeed.
And speaking of flowers, the guru that we have for this week.
So, we were advertised to cover Bill Maher and Dave Rubin in a crossover extravaganza where we deal with two somewhat annoying figures simultaneously.
But in preparing for that, ended up listening to more Bill Maher content and more Dave Rubin
I think it's fair to flag up initially that they're more, you know, political pundits in the conventional sense rather than the kind of secular guru types that we might normally deal with.
But that's the whole point of this podcast, Matt, is that we put different kinds of people into The garometer or into our analytical crosshairs.
And we see, do they fit the concept?
What ways do they or do they not?
And so forth.
So we decided for various reasons that it would be better to take each of them separately.
And we'll deal with the crossover episode in the next episode where we focus on Dave Rubin.
But in this case, we're mainly going to focus on two conversations that Bill Maher had with Sam Harris a little bit, just a couple of clips from that and more specifically with Richard Dawkins because there was such a dramatic clash of personalities and perspectives in that interview that it's interesting and I think Bill Maher is interesting because he kind of
represents something which is a little bit rarer now which is a liberal Who's still remains, you know, relatively liberal, is not queuing on, pilling all that, but is pretty anti-vaccine.
And this is, you know, a significant part of how they see the world.
So I think it's interesting for that reason to look at him in isolation.
Yeah.
So let me ask you this, Chris.
Apart from his anti-vax views, are you aware of it?
And he is known for being anti-woke in a similar vein to, I don't know, Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris, I suppose.
Apart from that kind of thing, does he have any other notable right-wing, absolutely right-wing views, conservative views?
I don't know him well enough to say.
I think he's just generally regarded as a kind of centrist liberal who is very critical of progressives and who occasionally will both sides various issues and whatnot.
But yeah, I think mainly his lean towards...
More Republican kind of talking points.
It tends to orbit vaccine stuff or medical stuff.
And yeah, I think he's maybe more, a bit more closer to, you know, kind of Sam Harris.
And that would, people would point out, you know, like a kind of, maybe a little bit of a naivety to people like Douglas Murray.
He called Milo.
Yeah, Yiannopoulos, you know, the potential next Christopher Hitchens, and so on.
So, like, there's that aspect to it.
But I think that's, like, contrarian, centrist liberal is, like, a fairly accurate description of him.
Yeah, yeah.
I think you could cite a bunch of little specific things and go, oh, that's not orthodox liberal slash left.
But you have to sort of factor in the fact that he is a bit scattergun.
He's anti-woke, and that leads him to some of the, what you would call it, the susceptibilities of that area, where they can be legitimately critical of various woke excesses,
but rather credulous when it comes to James Lindsay or Chris Rufo.
But I think people are getting a bit more canny about that.
Okay, well there you have it.
That gives you a bit of a sense of where he...
Where he lies.
As you say, he's more of a political pundit than anything else.
Most people know his name.
I knew his name even though I don't often see him on TV, whatever, partly because I'm not an American.
Jesse Clips on occasion when his guest says something.
And he had a movie called Religious.
He's like a noticed atheist.
And I think the other, like probably Bill Maher is politically relatively close to where you and I. Fall on the political spectrum, you know, in terms of being,
like, center-left and not, like, super in favor of progressivism.
So I would just say that there are various times where I've seen Bill Maher and be like, yeah, I agree with that, right?
But he would be somebody who, I think, rightfully is described as having boomer.
Energy.
Which is a damning indictment of us.
All right.
All right.
Well, that's enough introductorizing.
Let's start getting through the material.
I'm coming to it pretty fresh because I was mainly preparing for our other guest before the last minute switch through.
But I have listened to more than half of it, especially the Dawkins thing, but some of it will be new to me.
So hit me with...
Yeah, so here's a little clip from the start of it where it's Dawkins and Maher talking, and I think it highlights the differences between them a little bit.
Especially in this setting, because we've had dinner, we've been out, we've done shows, but if I really want to talk to somebody...
I want to talk to them right here, smoking pot, drinking, breaking down whatever barriers.
So I'm going to try to get you very fucked up.
I know you taught at Berkeley in the 60s, so you must have...
I never did.
Weed?
No, never.
Even in the Berkeley in the 60s?
I was never even offered it, actually.
Well, you know what?
There's no time like the present.
No, I'm not going to...
Not in public, not in...
I see.
Well, you won't mind if I do.
Of course not.
And what about a drink?
No, thanks.
I've got water now.
You don't drink either?
I do drink, but only with food.
Oh, but doesn't that...
Yeah, that's a good one to start with.
I had the strong impression that...
Bill Maher was drunk and stoned during this interview.
And so he's pretty, you can tell by the thickness of his voice, I suppose.
He's pretty loose.
So it's a fun contrast with Dawkins.
You know, there's, so the club random that this is from is supposed to be, you know, this kind of like informal, we're not really doing this for, you know, an audience.
It's more like an informal chat.
Bill Maher obviously wants this to be, you know, loose and relaxed, but that's not Dawkins' persona.
I think in private or in public.
So he's much more buttoned up and kind of like, oh, but you know, you'll have a drink.
And like, no, I really won't.
I enjoyed that contrast.
And I think it also reflects a little bit the difference in the way that they think about things.
Like, you know, the extent to which...
They are basing their opinions on vibes versus reflections.
Dawkins isn't perfect on this, but I think he's a lot better than Maher.
Yeah, definitely a huge gulf in personality.
It's kind of interesting that Bill Maher didn't know Dawkins well enough to think Dawkins would be into that.
He's never given the image that he's a freaking party man.
He's on Twitter complaining about his honeypots, you know, being taken at the airport and whatnot.
So, yeah, that was interesting that he didn't have the kind of fury of mind to model Dawkins.
Yeah, no, not modeling Dawkins well at all.
And it also, it's a good illustration of Dawkins' personality too, where he is not like a warm...
Matey kind of guy.
I have another clip that speaks to that.
So here's Dawkins being kind of perplexed by the format.
I can watch him.
Sometimes he looks up and sees me.
It does not freak him out at all.
He's not scared.
He doesn't move faster.
He just sniffs around and then goes back up.
Is this by day or night?
Night.
Night, yes.
Night, always at night.
Have we started, by the way?
What?
Have we started?
Oh, yes.
Okay, fine.
I'm sorry.
I know.
I should explain.
This is a different kind of...
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's the whole point.
It's like, have we?
What universe are we really in?
But, no, we've started.
So, he was talking about a possum, by the way, at this time, Jessica.
I thought you'd mention that.
Yeah, Dawkins doesn't.
He doesn't do that interpersonal banter.
No, Bill should know that.
It is funny.
The clash of styles is...
If you like kind of cringe comedy, I think this is an enjoyable full episode for people to listen to because it happens throughout.
So Bill Moore is someone also...
And maybe you can sympathize with this, Matt.
He has a very...
Positive impression towards, like, the importance of, you know, being relaxed and getting drunk and how this allows people, you know, to reveal sides of themselves that they wouldn't otherwise and that kind of thing.
And I have over there on my bookshelf a book by Edward Slingerland, Ted Slingerland, called Drunk, how we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization, which is similarly arguing that, like, intoxication is, you know, a very important thing for our species.
Yeah, they like to write popular books about that.
I remember seeing some thesis where they thought it was caffeine.
So, you know, before the coffee houses and so on of the 18th century, you know, people would just get drunk in places like London, right?
That's the only drink there was.
And this thesis was that it was the advent of tea and then coffee that kind of, like instead of getting drunk, the intellectuals and the...
These places were actually getting caffeinated and this was responsible for the industrial revolution and science and all that stuff.
So you can argue it either way, is what I'm saying.
Stacks up the meat.
Who knows?
Maybe it's a different drink that's responsible.
Maybe it's like a thick shake.
Maybe a thick shake is the foundation of modern civilization.
Smoothies.
Smoothies.
I guess that could be it.
But they're hard to make with the machine.
So anyway, well, let's hear him outline that perspective a little bit.
Well, that certainly was a banner day in human history because it changed a lot, really.
Yeah, it did, yes.
I mean, not all bad.
No.
Right?
No.
I mean, Romans certainly had bacchanalias and really worshipped being drunk.
Yes.
You know, I think they understood that It was something that was more important than just having fun.
There's some sort of release there.
I don't know if everyone needs it.
You don't.
Plainly, I do.
Well, I enjoy it with food, as I say.
Right.
But I'm talking about people who get fucking blitzed.
There's something about people who are always trying to not be themselves.
What is acting?
They're trying to escape reality.
Do you try to not be yourself?
No, but I'm not typical in many ways.
I also never got married, never had kids.
I'm not sure I'd do a lot of things that would be considered normal, but we all have masks, don't you think?
Yes, that's right.
Some of them are more profound.
But I think everybody has...
Come on, Bill.
I'm sorry, but there isn't much to say about that except for just the reaction of Dawkins to the various things, especially that part where he's like, do you need to be someone else?
I do think Dawkins is like...
He is what it says on the tin.
He is the little puttering professor with very stringent opinions on what's going on and a devotion to science.
Whereas Bill Maher is more like, but you know, man, what does it all mean?
I know, I know.
It's such a contrast.
It's so funny.
Dawkins is like the very definition of nonplussed for most of the episode.
He's just like, Well, okay.
Yeah, like the idea of Richard Dawkins, like wanting to escape from himself and just like sort of, you know, like...
Yeah, blitzed out of his mind.
Like escape from reality and just unpot an alcohol.
Bill, come on.
Research your guess.
There's a little follow-up on this, Matt, which is also good.
So here's how that segment kind of ends.
Yeah.
No, that's kind of fascinating, isn't it?
I'm pretty comfortable being who I am, I think.
I don't think I'd try to...
Yes, you and me, we're comfortable, but I'm talking about others.
Yes, yes.
You know, there's a lot of that.
I mean, you're, what, 81?
Yes.
Wow, you look great.
Thank you.
Yeah.
That's, yeah, again, read the room.
Poor Bill.
Bill's trying so hard to get that kind of loose kind of thing happening.
Didn't he know that was never going to happen with Richard Dawkins?
He's the ultimate button-down, ultra-precise, prim, icy Oxford professor.
That's right.
He should be in the dictionary.
The thing that I like about this in some way is And maybe people have heard it in episodes that we've released previously, that you can say a lot with the tone of your yes response, right?
And there's just that reaction to various wild idea of things where he's like, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that is one.
It's very much the same tone that he used when responding to Brett Weinstein's extravagant.
And Jordan Peterson.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, that too.
And that is one thing I do like about Richard Dawkins is that he doesn't stroke people.
You know, he doesn't do the social thing where you act like you're on board just to kind of ease the social situation.
And he's not very argumentative.
He'll just leave things alone or respond and say it's very silly.
But in a polite way, but what he doesn't do is just go along with stuff, which most of us do.
Like, I think I do.
You know, there's plenty of stuff that we could play from the interview, which is kind of this, which is, you know, like, it's that dynamic.
Maybe not as awkward as that exchange is because Bill does...
Start to modulate as the interview goes over.
Eventually.
Yeah.
But that dynamic goes on about they talk a whole lot and they talk about, you know, the problems with the modern left and woke culture and so on.
But the part that I want to focus on and why more is often controversial.
In liberal spaces, at least, is to do with vaccine stuff, right?
And here's an introduction to that point, because it does come up in the other content that I've looked at more with Sam Harris and Dave Rubin.
In all of them, the topics of vaccines come up, right?
So it isn't like this.
It's a kind of Rogan thing where he's known.
To have some outlier views, and he tries to get ahead of it here.
Exactly, which is why I have this point of view.
Yeah.
I don't know if you know exactly what my point of view is, or maybe you're just going by things other people...
No, I think I kind of.
I kind of do.
Okay.
Well, I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
Okay.
I believe vaccines are a medical intervention, like every other drug, which has some drawbacks, benefits.
I don't believe...
That everybody has the same health profile.
So every medical intervention, just like any other drug, isn't appropriate for everybody.
Yes, that's true.
So that's not anti-science.
There is something about vaccination, though, which makes it different, which is that it's not just for you, it's for the society.
Well, that's not right with COVID.
Sorry?
That's not right with COVID, because we found out the vaccine does not prevent transmission.
Or getting it.
So that argument is, at best, out of date.
Well, it's certainly right for measles, mumps, and rubella.
Well, I already had measles, mumps, and rubella.
So, we don't want to talk about anti-vax stuff too much.
It's more of this noting...
No, no.
You've got to be talking about anti-vax stuff, Matt, because it's going to come up a lot.
But it's...
One of the things there is like...
I just wish people would notice that when somebody says I'm not an anti-vaxxer, right?
It's almost guaranteed to be followed by an anti-vax talking point, right?
Or the most unhinged, like, jaunt into anti-vax world.
And it is surprising how well it works that people are like, well, they said they're not.
Anti-vaccine, right?
And like Bill Maher is doing here, what a lot of anti-vax or vaccine hesitant people do, which is to suggest it's only these specific vaccines that he's concerned about,
which isn't true, by the way, because he's read various statements on vaccines before this current set.
But portraying it, as you know, Well, look, it's just concerned with these specific ones.
And we found out that the vaccines don't do anything for transmission.
They barely, you know, stop you.
They don't stop you getting it and so on.
And Dawkins tries to talk about the issue of, well, but if you have, you know, vaccines actually are about the general population.
And Maher completely, like, attempts to dismiss that as valid.
And he's wrong.
He is indeed wrong.
It's a very common talking point now, especially with COVID, that there is no transmission benefits whatsoever with the vaccines.
I mean, what's true, I guess, is that they were maybe hoping that there would be an even stronger kind of prevention of transmission.
Those effects were less than what we might have hoped for.
But correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, but I think it does help reduce transmission because it reduces the symptomatology.
Yeah, so you can just think...
Of the logic about it.
Debunk the Funk has a good, we'll put it in the show notes on this topic, that the studies actually do show, you know, overall reduced transmission.
But even if you just think the logic through, that the symptoms are less severe, right?
Very few people argue against that.
And symptoms include things like getting sick and being, you know, sick for longer with, you know, Yeah.
prone to spreading, right?
So if you are less severely ill and you are, you know, the symptoms are not as bad, you're not coughing as much, you don't have as much problems with your lungs, you're obviously, if the whole population has that reaction
obviously there's less for the chance for the virus to spread.
So it's,
It's wrong in logic and it's wrong when you actually look at the evidence as well.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, it's wrong in both ways.
And the other part about it that's wrong is he says it doesn't prevent you from, like, actually getting it, right?
Which is a vague kind of word because, of course, you have to get...
I'm doing scare quotes here.
You have to get...
Any kind of virus for antibodies to operate on it and dispatch it, right?
So how all vaccines work, of course, is that they prime the immune system.
So you are technically infected by whatever it is you're vaccinated against.
It's not like you've got some sort of force field that prevents them from entering your body.
It's just that your immune response is so much more effective in dispatching it quickly so that you may not even be aware that...
It has impinged your body, right?
So it's just a kind of a meaningless statement to say vaccines don't stop you from getting it.
Vaccines do the important thing, which is stop you from getting sick.
Well, yeah, so people, like, this is one of the things where, you know, recently there's been a paper out which is comparing what people term natural immunity, but they just mean, you know, immunity derived from catching COVID without having a vaccine versus...
And we'll see that Bill Maher does this as well.
And they want to contrast that as the effects being more natural and therefore better rather than this synthetic thing.
But the way vaccines are working is that they are introducing your body to the virus so that you can produce the antibodies to fight it, right?
And nobody is saying if you get infected and recover from an illness that it doesn't.
It won't help you.
In the same way, your body will produce antibodies and so on.
But you have to go through the infection first.
And without the vaccines, it's likely to be more severe.
The logic is burning the village in order to save it, right?
The whole point is to not get sick.
So if you catch measles, for instance, you recover from measles.
My recollection is that you've got very, very good immunity against measles after that.
But the obvious downside is that you've already had measles.
The whole point is to avoid getting measles and suffering the effects of it.
That's what vaccines are for.
And you obviously don't know the dosage and stuff, right?
You don't know how severe your infection was.
It could differ between the viral load.
Whereas when you're getting a vaccine...
Getting, like, controlled amounts and sad amounts and so on.
Yeah, so it's entirely academic whether, I don't know the literature, but I suspect that in some cases, for some viruses, natural-derived immunity from getting it is better from, in some cases...
Last longer or something like that.
Yeah, it's probably at the margins, right?
In some cases, maybe vaccines are better, but it doesn't really matter.
It's academic.
The whole point is to avoid...
Getting sick from the illness in the first place significantly.
So, yeah, I mean, the reason I suppose we went into those details is just to point out that Bill Maher is kind of mindlessly repeating very well-known and old anti-vax talking points while claiming to be not an anti-vaxxer.
Yeah, and we can see a bit more of this when he references the Great Barrington Declaration.
So, let's listen to him kind of explain his reasoning.
Well, you know, I'm not an anti-measles vaccine crusader.
I mean, do your thing.
But the issue now is COVID, and that is an outdated argument.
It's only for you.
And there's 16,000 doctors and scientists signed something called the Barrington Letter.
Did you hear about this?
Okay, well, see, stuff doesn't get in other people's silos.
But that's an awful lot.
And that's just the ones who are...
Brave enough to sign it, because any time you go against the prevailing pharmaceutical medical view, you're intimidated, as many doctors are.
So the fact that 16,000 doctors would sign this letter, it was a dissent about how we were dealing with COVID and some basic things like thinking natural immunity is superior to pharmaceutical immunity.
It wasn't anti-vax.
It was just...
Why are those doctors quacks or wrong?
And the CDC and the Western medicine who said the vaccine, "No, look, the vaccine obviously saved a lot of lives, but they were wrong about the transmission.
They were wrong about getting it." Why are those 16,000 doctors...
I don't know about those 16,000 doctors.
So Chris, I don't know.
You have guests like Richard Dawkins who turns up.
And the conversation could be about anything, and you can find yourself talking about anti-vax stuff without necessarily having all of the information at hand to rebut the points that are coming across.
You also noticed Matt slipped in Western medicine there, right?
He said the CDC and the Western medicine who said the vaccine, right?
That's a slip of the tongue kind of indication of it.
Bill Maher's approach to these topics.
Yeah, yeah.
So, he's like an anti-vax from way back, back when it was kind of much more oriented towards, I guess, hippie, natural health, alternative culture, and being against artificial things and Western medicine and inter-holistic stuff,
crystals and that.
I mean, as the guys on Conspirituality have shown, that is actually...
Dovetailed with right-wing conspiracism a lot more than I had realized.
So you tell me about the Great Barrington Declaration, if you can.
Well, so hold on.
This is kind of a useful exercise in a way.
I know a bit more than you about this declaration.
So Bill Maher, just from what he framed, he mentioned 16,000 doctors signing a letter, which apparently had an alternative take.
And the take, by the way, was basically to push for...
Naturally acquired herd immunity.
Just stop lockdowns, let the virus run through the populations, and we'll get immunity.
And we can take the higher-risk people out, try to quarantine them more, so older people or that kind of thing.
But at least let the young and relatively healthy people get back to their lives quicker.
This was the argument, right?
So he said 16,000 doctors signed this letter.
Without knowing anything about the Great Barrington Declaration, do you have any prayers about what this letter will involve and who might have signed it?
Yeah, so without knowing too much, first of all, I'm sceptical that the letter is saying what maybe Bill Maher is implying it does, which is that don't get vaccinated.
The vaccines are a bad idea.
The vaccines didn't exist when it was published.
Oh, okay, right.
So that's a separate thing then.
Well, I'd be very surprised if those 16,000, if there are 16,000, whether they were qualified experts in the area or whether it involved, you know, random people, nurses, pediatricians, all kinds of people that have some tangential association with healthcare.
That would be my guess.
Yes, so I should say, actually, that the COVID vaccines did...
Exist at the time, I think, but they were not available to the general public.
So this was in October 2020, early in the pandemic.
So it was an open letter that could be signed, right?
And there are figures on it who are doctors with verifiable credentials.
Jay Bhattacharya is the one that is being referenced in the Twitter files and so on.
However, there was no...
Actual verification of the people that signed.
You just had to tick a box to say you're a scientist.
And people noted that people who signed it included Mr. Bananarama, Harold Shipman, Professor Kominick Dummings, and so on, right?
So, like, there's no quality control.
It's just an open online thing that anybody can sign.
And you will get contrarian doctors that sign it, but you will also get just...
You know, absolutely random people signed by 800,000 members of the public as well in total.
And this is something that Robert Malone, who we covered in Joe Rogan, also a vaccine skeptic person, he claims to head an alliance of doctors.
16,000, I think, is the figure that he cites, who, you know, support his views on ivermectin and the dangers of the vaccine.
So, like...
Collecting these signatures, it's the exact same thing as creationists or intelligent design, people collecting thousands of scientists who question evolution.
You might be able to collect those signatures, but it doesn't indicate anything except for that there are people with fringe opinions and also that if you have bad quality control, you can amass more signatures than with more stringent.
Well, if the threshold is merely ticking a box on an anonymous web form, then it is absolutely meaningless, of course.
I note that the topic of it is just about the advisability of lockdowns, right?
There's a spectrum of opinion about lockdowns, but even...
I think you could make an argument at the time for less lockdowns and so on, depending on what your calculus was about the...
About the relative impacts economically and socially, etc.
I think that's an arguable discussion, whereas straight up anti-vaxxery, which is absolutely denying the evidence about the efficacy of the vaccines and pretending that they don't work or that they're killing people indiscriminately, that's in the Looney Tunes.
But I think there's a lot of overlap because when you see, like, for example, Jay Bar the Charrier at events with Steve Kirsch where Steve Kirsch presented the vaccines as this killer thing and he's on stage with him, not at all kind of pushing back against that narrative.
So I think it depends on the audience and it depends on how the individual concerned that the people that are on the Great Barrington Declaration are at least leaning towards Being very tolerant of the anti-vaccine community.
And it's not just about the COVID lockdowns could be stopped.
It's basically that they said, you know, the burden of letting the virus run rampant throughout the society would be manageable by the health authorities.
And pretty much all mainstream health authorities said no.
And that would lead to mass unnecessary...
So you're right that it's within the realm.
You can debate about the stricter nature of lockdowns and whether there should have been more leniency towards populations that were less vulnerable, which is the kind of generous framing of it.
But I think if you do a more critical assessment of the people associated with the Great Barrington Declaration, you get very quickly into COVID.
Hardcore contrarian and anti-vax stuff.
Oh, no doubt.
There's a massive correlation between the people that were and are anti-public health measures in general, whether it's masks or restrictions on restaurants opening and so on, and anti-vaxery, right?
Massive correlation between those two opinions.
I was just pointing out that the way Bill Maher uses it as a support for his idea that basically you shouldn't get vaccinated.
Which is just not quite what it was about.
Yeah, so let's play another clip.
And this is Bill Maher talking to Sam Harris.
So this is a different interview.
I don't think Sam Harris comes up much in this clip.
So it's not Dawkins that he's responding to.
But see if you can notice any through lines.
I'm just making the point that humans always have to break down into two groups.
There is always an A and a B. I don't know.
But I don't think that's true of the two of us.
No, but I'm just saying on this issue, it bugs me because I do, you know, love your mind.
I don't think you understand my situation.
So, like, I don't know.
I haven't gotten the bivalent booster because I've had three shots and I've had COVID.
Yeah, I wouldn't get the booster.
I'm not in a rush to get the booster, right?
But the CDC is telling me to get the booster.
But I see the CDC just rankly politicized and inflexible.
Now you're speaking my language.
So you can see what kind of gets Bill a bit more happy, right, when you start...
Saying, you know, public health authorities are wrong, aren't they?
And, you know, like, I didn't get the boosters when they told me to.
And, all right, yeah, you know, we can work on this.
Yeah, that's right.
We've got some point of common ground.
I think, I mean, I don't know, I'm guessing Sam's mind here, but obviously...
I think a lot of people are confused by this.
There's obviously a law of decreasing returns when it comes to boosters.
You sort of asymptotically approach the maximum benefit.
And, you know, counterbalanced against that is the fact that the effects wear off.
So regular boosters are often necessary.
Many vaccines.
And also, the viruses mutate.
So just like with the seasonal flu vaccine, you need a completely new one each year if you want to take it.
And look, and it's often the case, like with the seasonal flu vaccine, There can sometimes be a marginal cost-benefit analysis where the benefits, it's just arguable, you know what I mean, in terms of even the minimal amount of hassle and expense involved in getting it.
So Sam is just mentioning there that he had three doses and has had COVID.
And the benefits to him are clearly of getting an additional booster are in the marginal category.
But Bill Maher obviously is hopeful that that is an indication that that's a leverage point to jump into anti-vax opinions.
Yeah, and Matt, related to that, so this is actually back to Dawkins, but you know you made the point about the fact that you sometimes need to get boosters or you need to get annual vaccines for certain illnesses where we don't have long-lasting immunity like the flu,
for example.
Now, listen to the way Bill Maher...
And this is very reminiscent of Brett Weinstein.
It was a heroic scientific moment when they came up with the vaccine so quickly, faster than they thought.
And it's a...
It is a different technology than the old vaccines.
It is a completely different way to do a vaccine.
We're calling it a vaccine because it's a shot, but it's a very different way to do it.
Okay.
So I think it's a superior way to do it.
Yeah, I do too.
I'm glad they came up with that technology because there could be something around the corner that may be making it in a lab in Boston right now because they've been fucking with that, making a worse version of COVID, where, again, I would be first online.
You know, I just didn't think this one merited that for me, and I think I was right.
So, just the only point I wanted to make there was, you know, we call these vaccines, but they're not really vaccines, right?
And that, again, Bill Maher then goes on to say, you know, and I think they're good, which is not the standard anti-vax thing, but he's consumed that point, which is, yeah, these...
People are talking about these as vaccines, but they're actually a kind of experimental new thing.
It's not like the old vaccines, which were okay.
Of course, they weren't okay.
These are all very familiar points.
You can start off with that kind of thing.
I'm just concerned about unknown possible side effects with this new technology to these vaccines of restructuring your DNA or something.
So yeah, there's lots of giveaways there.
Bill Maher is actually quite good at delivering, I guess, more anti-vax talking points because, like you said, he has the openings where he says, oh, this is a fantastic technology.
It was an amazing triumph for science that they came up with this so quickly.
Yeah.
There's little wordings as well, like faster than they even thought they could do, which, you know, it's fine.
That's accurate.
But you can hear the implication of like, you know, did they create it too fast?
Were there safety measures taken?
And we'll see that like more explicitly stated.
But just before we move on, Matt, there's a little bit more in the Great Barrington Declaration.
You can't get away from it, I'm afraid.
Cool.
Let's go.
And again, 16,000 doctors signed this thing.
You could see so many doctors, you see their videos, who are very much dissenting.
They're not crazy people.
Most of them, all of them, believe that we should have the vaccine and are thankful for it and their vaccine.
They're not anti-vaxxers.
But they are much more on where I've been on this kind of stuff.
So, like, you know, if it's like, like, I don't do likes, but if I did, it's like, yes, I'd be the...
And there's thousands of them.
Why are these doctors more...
And they're doctors, okay.
We won't even pretend.
I think you don't have to be an MD to know as much.
People can learn that.
People have other...
But okay, let's just pretend that's not true and it's just MDs who have the secret information of medicine.
Why are this large group of MDs...
Not as worthy as your group of MDs.
That's all I'm saying.
Right.
Is that we should just have...
There's too many doctors, serious doctors.
They went to medical school and they're not on your page.
They're more on my page.
So let's just...
Well, I'm not sure you know what my page is.
Let's just demonize them and say that's...
Just because maybe you have, you know, it's 60, 40 or so.
Many of them, many doctors don't speak out because they're intimidated because...
Yeah.
And that's not a good place for science to be, right?
Yes.
It's the same talking points, but Bill Maher is kind of like an old-school hippie and an anti-factor from way back then.
He's not a new convert, like a new MAGA QAnon type convert.
No, and the interesting thing is, you know, our friend Aaron Rabinowitz from Embrace the Void likes to talk, as many do, about people hiding their power levels, you know, where they're kind of making their opinions seem more palatable depending on the audience.
I definitely think this applies in this case because I've got two clips which highlight where Bill Maher is actually coming from, but I think this is a good one.
So let's see where this goes.
And this is him kind of complaining that, you know, medical science is arrogant and they haven't cured cancer yet.
So, you know, but let's hear his rationale here.
And then maybe a city will grow back, but like...
First, and, you know, see, this is, again, my thing with vaccines.
Like, I don't think vaccines are evil.
I just, until they figure out basic things like what causes cancer, and there are so many influences inside my body going on, and we don't know how they mix together, and they don't ask, they don't study how many, what kind of metals are in your body.
These things really affect your health.
I know you can't quantify them usually on a chart at a regular doctor's office.
They don't even ask you what you eat.
What are you putting in your body?
Do you live near a lot of electromagnetic energy?
There's lots of stuff that isn't crazy.
It's scientific.
And we don't, again, we don't know what is causing cancer.
Like, I'd like to keep it as natural as I can unless it's an emergency.
I have the same basic philosophy about vaccines as I do about antibiotics.
Am I glad they exist?
Yes.
Would I like to avoid them, if at all possible?
Yes, because I know I'd rather handle it naturally.
That's not unscientific.
Wow, yeah, magnets, electromagnetism, that too.
Yeah, electromagnetic sensitivity or, you know, that's a callback from ye olden days.
And also metals, Matt.
Metals in your body can't be detected, put on the chart, but, you know.
Yeah, like there's so much we don't, until we understand what causes cancer, how do we know that it's not vaccines maybe that could cause cancer?
It's an interesting argument there.
You can see the themes there.
Purity, avoiding contamination, naturalness.
Yeah, these are some of the underlying psychological motivations that lead people both towards complementary and alternative medicines and avoiding Western medicines and so on.
And also, vaccines are almost like a perfect storm when it comes to that kind of thinking.
So yeah, that's Bill Maher.
Yeah, and you know, it reminded me, Matt, you probably put it out of your mind, but remember when we did Michaela Peterson?
Sorry, it was Gwyneth Paltrow, and she was talking about the doctor who does all these bespoke tests on blood and the body that shows your...
Chemicals are imbalanced and they can detect parasites that aren't showing up on normal tests and stuff like that.
And she was also talking about environmental toxins and poisoning, which normal doctors overlook.
And it's very much this notion that the one-size-fits-all model of medicine is not okay for someone like Bill Maher because he feels that that's not...
Right.
Like, you know, he's a special person.
He eats different things than other people.
So why should he be given the same treatment as everyone else?
Yeah, exactly.
In fact, my PhD student, Gabriel Brighton, and I identified that theme in vaccine hesitancy some years ago, well before COVID came along, which is that it seems like a motivation for it is that dislike of that one size fits all.
The idea that you're not being treated in the holistic, special, unique person that you want a bespoke kind of therapy.
And complementary alternative medicine is very good at giving that impression to people, that what you're getting is the product of a deep...
Consultation, which is figuring out the wonderful special snowflake that is you.
And that's very appealing and it explains why vaccine hesitancy is actually surprisingly high amongst the more well-to-do people with higher levels of education, higher levels of socioeconomic status, because these are the people that tend to...
Yeah, I guess take a greater interest in their health, even to the extent that it can involve endorsing a fair bit of woo.
And it's a callback to what Bill Maher said earlier on in a previous clip, which is that...
You know, he's not against vaccines, but, you know, he doesn't like the idea that there's just one vaccine for everybody.
You know, it can't be that.
It's got to be that there might be some special circumstances where somebody needs the vaccine, just like you need, I don't know, extract of lotus oil or something.
But, you know, the idea of everyone just getting that, I don't like that.
No.
And so one thing that Bill Maher was criticized for was he cast out on germ theory.
A number of years ago.
And he clarified that he does believe in germs.
But if you read his original sentiment, it's quite clear that it's not so obvious that that's the case.
And there was this reference, Matt, that if you heard it, you would just get it in passing.
And this is in the Sam Harris interview.
But I have to call it out because it is actually a very extreme thing.
So listen to this and let's see if you pick it up.
Although, you know, not to get back on this, but again, the point of humans always dividing into two groups, Republicans and Democrats, whatever it was.
Terrain theory.
You know, Louis Pasteur in his deathbed recanted and said, yes, Beauchamp was right.
It's the terrain.
In other words, we're always being invaded by pathogens.
It's the terrain they find.
The analogy being the mosquito in the swamp.
If there's not a swamp, it can't breed.
But let's not get back on it.
Yeah, I'm looking at that quote here, Chris.
And yeah, it's very clear that there's that skepticism of germ theory.
And this is, again, related to the holistic woo health, basically.
It might seem like you're being infected by...
A virus and the virus is to blame, but really it's that your body is out of balance, your chakras are not aligned or whatever, or you've been made more vulnerable because you're being poisoned by your environment.
There's toxicity everywhere.
There's another quote from him here where he says, why is there mucus?
It's because your body is toxic and it's trying to create a river to get rid of those toxins.
So this obsession with this fictional concept of toxins.
At least in the complementary and alternative health sphere.
Our research found again and again and again that the best way to understand people that are susceptible to anti-vax views is really via understanding a more general endorsement of this natural woo health.
Terrain theory is an alternative to germ theory.
What he's presenting there and that story about Louis Pasteur recanting on this deathbed, it's just the same as you see in creationist intelligent design about evolutionary theorists recanting that they were wrong about evolution on their deathbed.
And if you look into it, you'll see that there's very big question marks around any sourcing of that story and tracing back to somebody in the 1950s or so on and so forth.
But in any case, It is Bill Maher implying that it's, you know, germ theory, sure, but actually it's the environment and toxins that we need to be concerned with.
And this is him talking with Sam Harris just, you know, in the last couple of months.
So he hasn't changed and he is someone which questions germ theory.
But he, you know, this is the kind of thing where if he was more...
Direct, I think, in a way that, like, Sam Harris could understand what he's saying.
He probably would pull him on it, but, like, you know, Sam Harris doesn't know what Therian theory is or, you know, what Louis Pasteur said on his deathbed, so it just, you know, they move on.
Yeah, and I got the same vibe from Richard Dawkins, where Richard Dawkins is aware that he's got anti-vax beliefs, doesn't agree with him, but perhaps...
Doesn't have a strong, comprehensive understanding of really quite how delusional Bill Ma is about that.
I guess they've got positive relationships with him, like they're friends, buddies from way back, and it's something we see a lot in these spheres, which is that personal relationships go an awfully long way.
Yeah, so at the start you mentioned that Dawkins is a little bit less susceptible to that than...
Some other people, right, because of just his demeanor.
But there is a clip that kind of highlights that because this is at the end of the conversation after Marr has said all these quite clear anti-vax klaxon calls and Dawkins invites him to take part in an event.
Well, we enjoyed having you that year very much and would like to get you involved in our setup again.
You mean it's an event out here like it was that year?
Every year.
Every year?
Yes.
So what do you want me to do?
Like 10 minutes?
You want me to do some God material?
We'll write to you.
You know, that is so funny about you.
People, when they hear the name Richard Dawkins, like I'm sure when...
You know, just the man in the street who knows that name.
The thing that comes to their mind, first, atheist.
Yeah.
So, you know, just inviting Bill to some event which they're going to hold for the Dawkins Center for Reason or for whatever it is.
And, oh, maybe I could do a comedic set.
But, you know, he's expressed fairly anti-scientific
in the conversation, but it's kind of overlooked because, well, you know, you're a
funny guy, you, you can tell, should I do some of my anti-garde material?
You know?
No, it's a bad call, isn't it?
I mean, no doubt he's a nice guy.
No doubt he's fun to be around.
He's a celebrity.
He's a celebrity.
I'm sure agree on a lot of things like making fun of religion and so on.
But when someone is that...
Anti-scientific.
Then it's not really a good idea to have them as a speaker or a guest at your Centre for Science and Reason type thing, right?
It does undermine it.
It does undermine it.
I think it gives people the wrong impression.
And so another example of this, Matt, which is Dawkins indicating that he might rely a little bit, I think, too much on...
Personal connections to inform him about topics.
So listen to this.
Well, I mean, it's this, you know, gain of function.
Is that what they call it?
Where they think that that's maybe how COVID started in the lab in Wuhan to begin with, is that there was this gain of function.
I think that's the term.
I haven't heard that phrase.
I've heard the theory, which my friend Matt Ridley is keen on that.
Have you ever had Matt Ridley on your show?
No, should I?
Oh, you should.
Well, anybody you recommend.
He's a great science writer.
He's at the present pushing, he's written a book together with a woman, pushing the idea, which is an unfashionable idea, but he's pushing it, that it did indeed leak from a lab in China.
Yeah.
So Chris, what do you think about Matt Ridley and his book about the lab leak?
Yeah, so Sam Harris just had on Matt Ridley and Alina Chan on this very issue.
And they are outlier lab leak enthusiasts is perhaps the best way to describe it.
They like to present themselves as people who are just objectively looking at the facts and coming to the conclusion that lab leak was indeed likely.
If you look at Matt Ridley's history, he's bad on scientific topics.
Yes, he got a PhD from Oxford, haven't we all?
But he also published a series of articles suggesting that HIV AIDS came from vaccines, an alternative origin story, long after that theory had been roundly criticized.
And he tries to prevent it as just asking questions, but if you look at it...
It was clearly advocating for it.
He was also long-term skeptic of climate change, now, you know, climate contrarian kind of perspectives.
The interesting thing is, like, climate scientists know very well what Matt Ridley's relationship with scientific evidence is.
And so if you see comments about them, they correctly peg him.
But Richard Dawkins, I think, on the other hand, enjoyed a book.
As did other science writers that he read about evolutionary theory.
And I think because they get on, right?
You know, it's kind of like, oh, he's written this fantastic book.
But Dawkins hasn't looked into the topic quite clearly.
He's just heard through him.
And Bill Maher doesn't even know who that is.
So, you know, he's like, gain a function.
Yeah.
Oh, has he written a book about it?
And, you know, the amount of research Both of them look to put into contextualizing what's the consensus opinion of experts seems to be very low.
And I think that's because Richard Dawkins probably isn't paying attention to this.
Like he says, he doesn't even know what gain-of-function means.
And he's in his 80s, so that's okay.
If you follow his Twitter feed, he is just kind of bumping along to things that tickle his interest.
But both of them are very reliant on...
Dawkins has a friend who thinks it's a lab leak, and he recommends to Bill Maher that he has him on.
And Sam Harris has just had those people on.
I wonder if there's any connection to, you know, the other people recommending Matt Ridley and so on.
Because just to be clear, Matt Ridley is not a virologist.
Alina Chan is not a virologist.
She at least has some scientific credentials, but they're very much not.
They were not people that were studying or talking about viruses prior to the pandemic.
And, you know, you could look at any number of experts.
So it is interesting.
And I think Sam has done, like, the exact opposite of what he said people should do about, you know, if you're going to cover a scientific topic, make sure you're not just canvassing outlier opinions and presenting it as forbidden knowledge,
which is what he just did.
Yeah, it is a bit sad to see that the current landscape of people that are meant to be carrying the flag for scientific and a sceptical approach to things do in fact rely on, oh, he wrote a good book about something that I enjoyed and he's clearly a clever person and a friend of mine,
so it must be good.
This is the epistemic heuristics you see so often out there.
Which is, oh, that person, they might have a PhD, they might have gone to Cambridge, they sound very smart, I enjoyed a book they wrote, so they're probably fine.
Couldn't be completely wrong.
It's like, we were talking about this before, but if you look at a topic, like my heuristic is, if you take something like this lab leak thing, and you get some opinions from people that are specialists in virology, that have been publishing on it for decades often,
before COVID, I would trust them to have probably a pretty well-informed opinion.
But if you take someone like these two people, Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, then these are people that are parachuted into this topic.
And certainly in the case of Matt Ridley, he's a science journalist-type person and a contrarian.
Like he's not going to be able to write a book about, oh, about zoonosis, about, oh, it's all very boring.
COVID probably came from, you know, nature spillover like a hundred other viruses have before.
You can't write a book about that.
You can write a popular science book about the lab leak thing.
So there's incentives at play, but they don't seem to apply good heuristics about who they should be taking seriously and when they should be being skeptical.
Yeah, and there are times when they do, when at least Dawkins shows awareness of certain issues with like bad evidential heuristics.
So in the conversation, there's this bit where Bill Maher is providing various anecdotes and Dawkins is calling them out.
The head of the CDC just got like her fourth shot, I think, and then got COVID three weeks later.
Well, that's an anecdote.
It's not an anecdote, but it's an anecdote that is very typical.
I remember when I got, I was fine for 14 months without it.
I got the vaccine.
Then, like a month later, I got COVID.
It's an anecdote.
What?
It's just an anecdote.
Okay, but I'm just, I'm getting to a point.
When it happened, people said, oh, wow, that's weird.
That's a breakthrough case.
And then it became, the story changed.
The news changed.
The facts changed.
And the facts changed to, that's actually very typical.
When it happened to me, people were surprised.
In six months, they weren't surprised because that was a more typical...
I'm not...
Again, yes, you're right.
Can I just say, you can hear Dawkins give up in some points, but also, this speaks really to the limitations of Bill Maher and people like him, right?
Because he's probably right that when he got sick, or initially, when people were vaccinated and there were breakthrough cases, that...
There were people that were surprised, right?
But if you listen to the experts, they were saying, no, this happens in the case with all vaccines.
We knew this was going to happen.
It's never clear exactly how much it will be.
But if you listen to what the experts were saying, they were saying that.
And the public are the people that are surprised.
And then over time, they do hear more and realize, oh, so this is actually more common.
But what they often take in that is, Oh, all the scientific authorities were wrong and lied.
Not, I didn't understand the issue or I'm now hearing experts explaining this thing which is happening.
It's like Bill Maher thinks the science completely changed and they lied about what they said before.
And it isn't like that.
There might be various journalists or even some handful of experts who didn't state things exactly perfect in the way that they presented it.
But you don't rely on journalists to be the people who represent science very particularly exactly.
And you don't expect that experts in every single occasion will always speak perfectly.
But if you read the literature, if you look at the long form interviews, it's very clear.
They understand the limitations and what will happen.
But it's just Bill Maher's like kind of it's a very egocentric thing where people
Yeah.
I mean, someone who's as invested and interested in the issue of COVID vaccines as much as Bill Maher should have no excuse for not looking at the data.
On the degree to which the COVID vaccines reduce death and mortality and morbidity from contracting COVID.
Yes, there's going to be some breakthrough.
Many people are going to be vaccinated and then they're still going to feel a bit sick after contracting COVID.
Some people, it'll sort of bounce off them and they won't even notice that they've contracted it and it'll seem like it's worked perfectly.
But all those anecdotes don't mean anything.
Because we have the data.
We have just reams of data.
And it's unambiguous.
Absolutely unambiguous.
So for Bill Maher to be relying on those sorts of personal anecdotes and coming to the conclusion that, oh, you know, they lied to us.
They don't really work.
No.
They do work.
They did work.
The data is there.
So if Bill Maher is so interested in this issue, what's the explanation for why does he not believe the data?
Is it all a trick?
Or does he not understand how to read data?
I thought he was meant to be a science and reason guy.
Maybe I can help you, Matt.
This might explain that.
I think the real reason is because he listens to idiots like Brett Weinstein.
But in any case, let's hear him talk about some of the limitations about science.
Now, did you read recently that they discovered for the first time a bacteria that is visible to the naked eye?
I'm not totally surprised.
Really?
They said it would be like finding a human the size of Mount Everest.
Yes, yes, that's right, yes.
Okay, go ahead.
No, you tell me.
Well, when I hear something like that, again, it just says to me, all the people who are saying, the science, you know, we have the science.
You don't know shit.
We know a lot more than we used to.
We just...
Don't know very much, like how to cure cancer, and that there could be a bacteria the size of Mount Everest.
They just found out all that they were doing therapy-wise with serotonin, thinking that that was causing depression.
Wrong.
There was one paper in 2006.
It had wrong information.
They knew it at the time.
They didn't care.
What else?
Metabolism, they found out, does not slow in age like they thought it did.
It's like a god of the gaps.
Medicine, right?
Yeah.
It's that, you know, that kind of approach that because science is updating, that that means it's completely unreliable.
And because a hundred years ago we didn't know X, Y, and Z, that that means that now we're in the same state, you know, just really we should be much more humble about knowledge because, you know, they just find this bacteria.
Bill Murray isn't contextualizing there.
It is not the case that there are lots of massively prevalent bacterias that are visible to the human eye that we didn't notice beforehand.
There are specific cases of outlier things, and there is things that science keeps learning.
It's obviously not done, but he's adopting the very much alternative medicine view that is allowed to just undermine.
Any claim by saying, well, last week they said red wine causes cancer, and this week it cures it.
And they very much are reacting to headline and media sensationalist presentations, rather than the scientific literature, which is much more like a slow, steady progression of information, with the exception that various people claim hyperbolic.
Statements sometimes in papers, but like overall, a steady accumulation of knowledge.
Yeah, now this is something we've commented on before with respect to, especially like the lab leak stuff.
And you have people talking about how, oh, the experts are telling us this.
And then now it's like a revolution.
Now we've discovered it's definitely come from the lab.
And then it's this.
And the impression that they're getting is that it's flip-flopping.
But actually what they're doing is they're paying attention to like...
Journalists' articles that happen to be coming into their newsfeed and or the discourse sort of swirling around it.
And they're thinking that that's kind of, in capital letters, the science.
It's like, no, what you're doing is lazily attending to particular articles and things that pop up in the discourse.
And the frustration I've got is that when, and I see this with a lot of people who are, I guess, IDW adjacent or sort of centristy type institution skeptical people is when they talk about all the mistakes that supposedly the experts or the scientists have made,
what they're really referring to is the discourse.
Right?
They've read stuff in the discourse.
It could be in some newspaper or some online publication.
And it could have been over the top in whatever direction.
And then they've read another one debunking that.
And then the back and forth and so-and-so said that, oh, we all have to wear masks forever and ever now, whatever.
And that's ridiculous.
Like, what they're complaining about, the discourse that they are enmeshed in, they're not referring to the scientific literature at all.
No.
And you can hear...
A little bit of pushback from Dawkins, like trying to make this point about, you know, the way that science progresses.
But you can then also hear how Maher reframes it.
Metabolism, they found out, does not slow in age like they thought it did.
We just don't know.
Science progresses from ignorance.
Right.
And so it's important to recognize what we don't know.
Thank you.
Also what we do know.
Yes.
And there are things we do know.
And way more than we used to.
I mean, can you imagine Being somebody in the Middle Ages or even, you know, only really up until 100 years ago, and the things that doctors did to you made it so much worse.
Bleeding you and...
Well, putting dirt like in wood.
That presentation there, the thing that I took from it is kind of the Bill Maher wants to draw a through line between medieval...
Medicine, bleeding and rubbing salt in the open wounds or whatever the case might be.
And modern medicine.
But obviously, there's a difference, right?
Once we had clinical trials, once modern medicine began, we did start to improve life expectancy and deaths and childbirth and surviving infectious diseases and whatnot.
So it isn't like we are still...
Rubbing dirt in wounds or that the scientific method leads you there.
In fact, it's the opposite.
Science leads you out of those treatments.
And it's not perfect.
There's plenty of errors that have been made in the modern era of medicine.
Treatments that were unnecessary, lax standards in clinical trials that led to, you know, evidence being presented in the way, phalidomide, famous cases.
So it is not that modern medicine is, Beyond criticism.
But it isn't what Bill Maher presents, which is just like a slight evolution from medieval medicine.
Yeah, I guess Bill Maher's point of view would be that, look, science was obviously very imperfect in the past.
Medicine was very imperfect in the past.
We can see that clearly now.
In the future, we may well look back on today and shake our heads in wonder that...
People were injecting COVID vaccines or MMR vaccines into our bodies or whatever.
I get lots of different versions of this argument from time to time, but I think what they miss is that when they are skeptical of whatever the current consensus in science and medicine is, it may well not be perfect.
We don't have 100% confidence that whatever that consensus is saying is right.
But what they're doing is they're substituting their own alternative contrarian Take guess at what the truth is based on their hunches and what their friends said or some article they read in something and they're letting it slosh all around their head and they're taking their own shot,
right?
They're taking their own guess about what the truth is based on that, which is different from...
Now, how is that better?
Now, like you, I perfectly will accept that whatever the medical and scientific consensus advice is...
It may well be wrong.
It's an imperfect science, as they say.
But they're substituting it with something worse.
It's inevitable that you have to substitute with something worse.
Unless you think that you, spending a Sunday doing your own research on this topic and feeling out your friends and reading a couple of articles, unless you think you're some kind of astounding genius, you're not going to do better.
Why would anyone think that they're going to be doing better?
Bill knows his body better than those pencil necks, Matt.
That's the thing.
It's all vibe-based.
Yeah, so look, I don't have more clips that relate to the anti-vaccine stuff.
We will hear more of it whenever he's speaking with Ruben on the next one.
But it's another one of these cases, Matt.
I do feel a little bit like there are some things that we always come back to, which is people who are un...
Self-aware of, you know, how far they are promoting a particular perspective, right?
And Bill Maher's view is clearly that, well, he's not a vaccine skeptic.
He's just, and he's pro-science, right?
And he's skeptical of everything, as he should be.
But, like, no, like, listen to his comments.
He's a guy that is skeptical of germ theory.
And he's, you know, weighed by...
Well, 16,000 people signed a document.
And, you know, why are they not better than your experts?
And it's just his heuristics are broken.
And he is, indeed, very strongly skeptical of vaccines.
And he was before COVID.
And, yeah, I wish there was a more, you know, a self-awareness of, like, where you actually are.
But nobody wants to say they're anti-vax.
Well, none of us know what we don't know, right?
We all can't, by definition, can't have self-awareness about the ways in which we're confused.
But it would be like me saying, well, you know, Matt, you're a supporter of Manchester United.
And you're going, well, no, you know, it's not really fair.
You know, I don't classify myself as a supporter.
I don't think I've really even mentioned that.
And then doing a podcast later where you're like...
Manchester United are the greatest team.
All other teams feel in comparison.
And then someone said, oh, so, you know, you're a supporter.
And like, well, I don't know where you got that idea from.
It's like that because he says, I don't doubt germ theory.
Then he references terrain theory.
And then he said, oh, science doesn't know all these things.
And it's very clear what he's getting at.
But it's not like terrain theory is something you accidentally...
You have to be deep into your freaking rabbit hole to even know that word.
Yeah, I think Bill Maher is, to use Aaron's phrase, hiding his power level in those little giveaways.
He has gone deep down some rabbit holes and yet he presents himself as someone who's casually interested in these topics.
The nicest thing I can say about him is that he's not a grifter in this sense.
He genuinely...
He generally is an anti-vaxxer, right?
He's generally not good.
His heuristics are not good.
He's not good at processing the information available to him and weighing it appropriately.
He's generally confused that people that he likes and admires, like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, aren't seeing what he's seeing.
And he's obviously not the only one.
So many people are in this situation.
And I share your frustration.
It doesn't...
Doesn't seem to me to be that hard.
There's just a few basic heuristics that you could practice.
You don't need to be a science-y person.
You don't need to have specialized knowledge of spike proteins and things like that.
You just need to apply social heuristics, like normal everyday street sense, in understanding who you should be lending credence to and understand people's incentives.
In speaking out or writing on a topic and figuring out who are good people to trust.
Like, it's not really that hard.
But my goal is even low.
I have an even lower bar than that because all I want is for people to recognize, yeah, I'm sort of sympathetic to anti-vaccine perspectives because of X, Y, and Z. You know, just that.
Just that self-awareness that actually you are.
You're repeating the things that all our anti-vaxxers say, you know, that you're skeptical of mainstream medicine and so on.
That's all I want.
I think Bill Ma does know that he's an anti-vaxxer in that sense, but I think he's, like all anti-vaxxers, he's aware that it is a stigmatizing term, it's a pejorative, and it's very similar to people.
Look, it's a bit like the people that say, look, I'm not a racist, but I just think it's better if we strictly control immigration and people of other races are not as hardworking or as smart as us and blah, blah, blah, right?
Because in their mind, they don't want to be associated with these hateful skinheads who are punching people and stuff like that because they'd never do that, right?
And so I understand the social psychological motivations for not wanting to identify with those labels.
But I think in their...
Heart of hearts, they know what they are.
So you should be happy, Chris.
Okay, fine.
I'll accept that.
So there's two little clips to end on that aren't entirely related, but I think they're nice.
We used to end, I don't know if you forgot, we used to try to find positive things to end on.
So I do have a positive clip.
It's really Dawkins.
There was one clip that's on a slightly different topic that I...
I had to include Mike because I just wanted to rant a little bit.
So please indulge me.
So like the kids who are like playing Twitch, do you know what Twitch is?
No.
Oh, now you put me on the spot.
I have to fucking explain it to you.
But it's a game.
You know what?
It's not a game.
It's people watching people play a game.
Yeah, that's what it basically is.
That's like a sport to them.
Watching other people play a video game.
Can you believe that?
I cannot.
So, how do you get someone away from Twitch to read a book?
That's my question.
I feel like we are devolving into a completely brain-rewired society because of the phone.
The phone is the portal to evil.
I really believe that.
Yeah, well, strong Boomer energy, as you said before.
So strong.
I want to draw a line between us and them there.
I'm not that bad.
Give it 20 years, Chris.
We'll get there.
Have you seen the kids playing the Twitch?
They're playing the Twitch.
Is it a game?
With the hip-hop and the gym jam.
Have you seen the size of the pants the kids are wearing these days, Chris?
It's ridiculous.
Like, they do a bit of this, you know, they do various other parts of this in the interview.
And that's, you know, I kind of, older men grouching about the youth of today, bang.
You know, it will, as it has always been, this will happen again.
But I just, the thing that annoyed me about that is, you know, I think I had a similar reaction the first time I heard about Twitch, like a long time ago.
But he mentions it's like a sport to them.
Watching other people play games.
And I was like, come on.
So you don't see a parallel there.
It's like a sport.
Do you enjoy watching football?
Are you playing the football?
Like, no, you're watching it.
And in the same way, as many people have noted, people like to watch their friends play video games, right?
That was an experience that people had.
And that is kind of what Twitch is.
But it's also, this is a podcast.
Bill Maher is a talk show host.
People watch him having conversations with other people.
They're not having the conversation.
They're just listening.
Come on!
If you exercise just a tiny little bit of empathy, you might be able to understand why kids might be watching other kids.
Play computer games, right?
It doesn't take much to grasp why.
Yeah, that's what annoys me.
It's like, they're so close.
I mean, Dawkins isn't.
Dawkins is just like, what's this twitchy game?
Yeah, well, I...
I will give Dawkins a pass with the boomerism because he's 83. Yeah, he shouldn't be on Twitch.
No.
Anyway, he'd probably be pretty popular.
I'm going to say it now, Chris.
If I'm still giving my opinions about popular culture when I'm 83, could you promise here and now to stage an intervention?
Just stop me.
Take the microphone.
Take my phone.
Away from me.
It's not doing me any good.
Whatever reputation I've built up during my life, I'm ruining it.
Just put me in a home.
Did you hear what the kids are today doing with the Sleevel Slabels?
They're flipping them around.
It's unbelievable.
My day, we had VR.
I fully intend to be that old guy, saying that kind of thing, but it's better if I'm just saying it to my bored grandchildren than to...
Hundreds of thousands of people.
No, you'll be on decoding the AI gurus by that point.
It'll just be AI Matt and Chris talking about what happened to me versions of us.
But that wasn't Matt.
Although I quite enjoyed that clip, actually.
But this is the final positive clip to end on a nice note.
I was lamenting people for lacking self-awareness.
This is a rare moment on this show of pure self-awareness.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, colleges are...
What was your experience in academia?
Did you find it too, you know, ethereal, a little too pie in the sky, where people were in their ivory towers, they weren't realistic enough?
That's the reputation.
Yes, probably true.
I like ivory towers.
Of course you do.
I like...
I'm fascinated by things that are...
For the whole universe and for all time.
I mean, I'm not interested in parochial little frivolous things that concern humanity.
No, you're probably...
John McWhorter always says, you know, I'll do your interview, I love doing your show, but I just know I'd always really rather be sitting in my chair reading a book.
Yeah, that's cute.
That's cute.
I like that.
Richard Dawkins does.
I like ivory towers.
I like ivory towers too.
I like that.
I'll tell you just a little anecdote that I thought was quite nice.
I went to a conference once.
It's probably one of the best conferences I went to because it was at the top of this ancient monastery at the top of a mountain in Orice in this Italian town.
The academics were staying at the monastery.
I can't remember the guy's name, but the person who set up the institute or whatever, he's dead now, but he had a room at the top of a tower and you could wander around, right?
And when you went up this winding staircase up to the top of the tower at night, there was a big telescope kind of looking out into the sky.
And there was also an old-fashioned record player with Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Just imagining this academic guy, Blowing his pipe and, you know, riding his equations while he listened to Pink Floyd on the gramophone and stared at his telescope.
So, yeah, I like that.
That was a nice ivory tower.
That's nice.
Well, in Australia, at least in my neck of the woods, our ivory towers are built out of Bessel blocks, so they don't really have the same magic about them.
But what's our takeaways from this?
I think for me, the little takeaway is that, look, you might like Bill Maher's Comedy.
You might have great opinions about atheism or other scientific topics that don't have anything to do with health, medicine or vaccines.
But you should be able to recognize that someone who you might generally like for other reasons can be absolutely shockingly terrible on specific topics that they have monomania about.
Also, people that have done great things, and I think Richard Dawkins' early books on biology and evolution were great.
I'm a big fan of them.
You know, they can also sort of be lazy or just a bit at sea and are not necessarily...
Basically, you shouldn't be putting anybody on a pedestal.
So, there's no end of American TV celebrities that have Wu Health anti-vax beliefs and have promoted pretty stupid stuff, whether it's...
Oprah Winfrey or Jim Carrey or whoever.
And even people that associate themselves with being skeptics and atheists and agnostics or whatever, they can totally lose the plot when it comes to some political ideological thing or something that causes them existential angst or something like vaccines.
So don't...
Rely on your friend networks or because they sound smart or because they've got a PhD from Cambridge or whatever.
You've got to use different heuristics for figuring out who's a reliable source on an issue.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, we are stacking the deck in a certain respect by focusing on this topic, which Mar is bad at, right?
And like you say, he covers a wide range.
He kind of wants to just, you know, roam around in this Club Random stuff.
You know, it's not even super political.
He more just wants to waffle and drink.
But it doesn't matter because he can't switch off the way that he approaches information and stuff.
I think there's lots of ways that he probably doesn't fit neatly into the secular.
Guru mold.
He's much more like a pundit, right?
A traditional entertainer, comedian, talk show host, pundit.
And I think the extent to which he endorses conspiracy narratives and all that, they're all secondary to that identity as an entertainer.
So he's a bit of an ill fit, but I do think it's important, and we were talking about this, about doing some figures who are prominent left-wing.
People in various different sectors of the left.
And I think Bill Maher's position is one that is interesting because he does represent a kind of approach, especially around vaccines and stuff.
This is the traditional anti-vaccine, skeptical, alternative health side of the liberal left.
And it's just interesting to see it.
Yeah, no, I think it's valuable too, partly because as you said at the beginning, at a broader level or in general, you know, Bill Maher isn't that far away politically from where you and I are, which is just sort of centre lefty but not hyper-progressive,
a bit sceptical of some left-wing stuff, but still, you know, basically liberal and so on.
And he could still be really...
Very terrible on certain issues.
It's not the preserve of the right wing to be stupid and conspiratorial about things.
It's something that can happen across the political spectrum.
And I'll also just agree with you.
I guess we'll dig into it when we record the Garometer episode on Bill Maher, but I don't think he'll ding many of the...
Because it is, as you say, secondary.
He's just a genuine anti-vaxxer.
He's an entertainer who happens to have some stupid opinions and beliefs rather than someone who's going about it in a much more strategic way.
Yeah, he's not RFK Jr.
He just probably has a lot of sympathy for what RFK Jr. says.
So yeah, that's important to keep in mind.
But just remind people, part of the whole point is that we take various figures that may or may not be secular gurus.
So if you want to hear our more detailed breakdown as to how well he fits with our template, you can listen to the bonus episode if you join the Patreon.
Yes, so that will be forthcoming.
Now, Matt, now that we're done with the coding for this week and we know that Dave Rubin is coming shortly after, maybe relatively more shortly since we have everything prepared, I've got some feedback.
And it's a review of sorts.
You know, we have the review of review segment, The Wisdom of Makila.
Which is complete now.
We're exhausted.
Her wisdom.
But this is a bit of an unorthodox review, Matt.
It's a subreddit post.
And it's by Anki Steve, who is an individual on Twitter that we both know.
And there's a wise chap.
But he wrote a, what is it?
A Reddit thread.
And the title was, I think it's worth reading in full.
It's a little bit long, but I'll try to make it a dramatic reading for you and see what you think, okay?
So it's a review of Constantine's riposte to us.
If I'm going to be completely honest, I didn't want to like what Constantine Kisson said about decoding the gurus in his recent response to their takedown of his recent Oxford speech on wokeness and climate change.
When I saw Chris Kavanagh's tweet today, I wanted to hear how ridiculous Kissim was to claim that Chris and Matt had low IQs and were arguing in bad faith.
So I clicked through and gave it a listen.
At first, I was underwhelmed.
He spent the first 10 minutes or so of his reflection explaining how he reasoned his way through all the bad faith arguments he's had to endure and the outright lies made about him since becoming a public figure.
Anyone who follows the modern-day gurus of our time knows this spiel well.
But I muscled through and I'm glad I did.
It was right about the 12-minute mark he dropped an absolute bomb on Chris and Matt for their bold-faced misrepresentation of his speech.
Constantine never said poor people don't care about the environment, like Chris and Matt claimed.
He said they don't care about climate change.
I didn't want to believe that Cody and the Gurus would get something so wrong and misrepresent Kissing that dishonestly.
So I went back and listened to his Oxford speech just to check to make sure he wasn't representing what Chris and Matt said.
Actually, Kissing got things kind of wrong himself.
Kissing didn't say that poor don't care about climate change.
Neither did he say the word care.
What he actually said was poor people don't give a shit about saving the planet.
He said this twice, in fact.
At any rate, let's not quibble over Kissin's word choice.
However, there is an absolute world of difference between don't give a shit about saving the planet and don't care about the environment.
The first phrase is eight words, while the second phrase is just five words.
That's almost half as many words as what he actually said.
And Kissin didn't even mention the blatant censorship of don't give a shit to the more politically correct don't care.
If you don't see the magnitude of the distortions here by Chris and Matt, Consider you may, in fact, be caught in an ideological bubble.
Kissen has opened my eyes to make sure I look at Chris and Matt more skeptically.
I have to give him credit, if begrudgingly, for pointing out an important distinction that somehow slipped my notice.
I think Chris and Matt should swallow their pride.
And apologize for this gross distortion of his words with an eye towards helping us all argue in good faith so we can find common ground.
Yeah, that was very good.
There's nothing we can say.
Caught red-handed.
He nailed us.
Hoistbar and petard.
We talk a big game about good faith criticism, being accurate and stuff, but really, are we any different?
Are we not?
Really just like the gurus ourselves, Chris?
I mean, five versus eight, Matt.
It speaks for itself.
It speaks for itself.
That's a world of difference.
And the political correctness on this show has run rampant indeed.
Taking out the word shit, you know.
No.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Well, in case anybody missed that, that was satire.
But it was good satire.
Very good.
Because this is very much what...
Constantine Kissin and many of his ilk do, isn't it, Chris, with the so-called rebuttals, which is they will exception hunt, find some niggling little discrepancy, sort through whatever is said, and find a way to make out that they have been misrepresented,
they've been straw-manned, and it's completely in bad faith and can be totally disregarded.
It's a simple trick, but it's a trick that seems to work pretty well.
Yeah, stealing again from our subreddit, a user called Strict Athlete discussed this in a lengthy post and described it as like pointing on incidental details that maybe are wrong or like an overstatement,
but are completely irrelevant to your argument.
It happened to you when you talked about Elon Musk and we made a large array of criticisms.
And then somebody was like, well, Matt claimed that, you know, the cost of the rocket, that this wasn't a big leap forward and reusable, what Space Tech or SpaceX had said.
And that isn't exactly what you said either, but that is almost completely irrelevant to the $900 points that were made.
So, yeah, it happens quite a lot.
And with Lex Friedman, he mentioned people commenting on his diet, That is superficial and he doesn't care.
But that's the kind of thing that he mentions, rather than the criticisms of him encouraging Joe Rogan to interview Trump with Alex Jones present.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a good rhetorical move because you pull out a criticism that is very small and tangential, but it is easily rebutted.
And focus on that to the exclusion of everything else does work well.
So I like that idea.
Of pouncing.
And, you know, it's kind of like a different variation of what the conspiratorial do-your-own-research people like Alexander Marinos do with research articles, right?
They'll take an article and they will pore through it and they'll find some really tiny little thing and whatever.
I don't know.
Their pre-registration didn't.
Mentioned specifically this and they did this other little thing.
It may well be a point, but it's a tiny, tiny little point and they will blow it out of all proportion as if so they are able to dismiss the entire study, right?
Yeah.
There are cases where what you just described could be a very valid...
Critique of a study.
I know.
My open science alarm is going off.
Because I mentioned pre-registration, so that's going to trigger you.
Sometimes a detail can be super important, right?
Like if you accidentally treat all the minus signs as plus signs or something, it's a small detail, but it has a big impact.
But that's not what I'm referring to now.
I knew that.
I knew that.
I've just been pedantic.
And yeah, so like, see, in the recent kerfuffle with Scott Alexander, I recommended a paper that we covered about conspiracy cognition because he was saying that there's no difference in the way that conspiracy theorists think about things in normal people.
And I was saying, oh, that's generally true.
But there actually are some of the ways that they approach evidence which seem to be different and also not good at detecting actual conspiracies.
And then the response from some of the people in his community were to hunt immediately for that academics Twitter timeline for any statements that were, you know, kind of negative of Trump.
And then declare him like he wrote some critical stuff about an episode of Question Time he was watching.
And they were like, so what?
We can trust this partisan ideologue.
And there was also citations of studies that didn't really read the studies.
And that's exactly what you're saying, right?
Like it looks like
At first superficial glance, it can look like the people are digging into that person in detail.
But really, they're just immediately looking for something to discredit the source of information that they don't like.
So they just immediately go, and the first thing they hit upon is like, okay, just ignore that.
And it could even be the case that he is a rank partisan.
The academic guy cited that he's an idiot in his analysis of question time.
But he wrote a good paper.
About conspiracy cognition.
The two things could be independent, but they don't decouple that shit, Matt.
They're not high decouplers when it comes to wanting to dismiss someone that says something they don't like.
Selective decoupling.
We can't have that.
But I like those terms.
We've got to remember that.
Pouncing.
And the other one is just us being bad for your dickheads.
Yeah, that's fine.
That's alright.
So thank you for that, Steve, and the strict athlete, which is the username of the pouncing person.
So last thing for today is to thank Patreon members, the people that support us, that put up with our distortions of guru positions and our rampant mainstream institution bias.
Defense or just love for the blue church.
Yeah.
Or maybe they love the blue church too.
They probably do.
They're NPC drones, so that's the kind of thing they would do.
Okay.
It's quite right.
So enough insulting of them.
But we have conspiracy hypothesizers, Anne Shield, no user DM34, Ian Cerro, John Ross, just a Brazilian, AJ Bantley, Thank you,
everybody.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That you will.
A couple of revolutionary geniuses, not so many on this.
Particular page that I've landed on.
But we've got Ropes, Jack Hogan, Andrew Demos, and Eliza Millican.
And Robert T. Weltsian Jr.
Okay.
Just a few.
The few.
The brave.
Well, one more.
Enchant-O-Matic, if you want as well.
Oh, one more.
One more.
Well, it's just like the Battle of Britain.
Never before was so much given.
So few by a relatively small number.
Ali Shaughnessy, the Cian Weinstein, and the Meggie as well.
Oh, you snuck in some more.
I just had them in.
Samuel Brooks.
Another one?
Well, okay, there's more of you than I thought.
They're getting in on the line.
Daniel Bingham, Eleanor Curry, come on!
Just William Morsh and Andy Seton as well.
Wow.
Okay, thank you.
What can we do?
Thank you all.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess.
And it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
This is so good.
That guy, who was the sensemaker guy at the beginning?
Jordan Hall.
Jordan Hall.
I came across a clip on Twitter that was Jordan Hall at his absolute finest.
I wish I thought to find it and you could play it, Chris, because it's only short and it's just champagne Jordan Hall.
It's so perfect.
We'll try to locate it for the Dave Rubin episode.
That can be our little hunt.
So forget it.
That'd be a fun thing for the intro.
Yeah, I'll try to find it.
If anyone knows my Twitter handle or whatever and you know what I'm talking about, flick it to me because I tried to find it before I couldn't find it.
Galaxy Brain Gurus, Matt.
The most intellectually impressive figures in our Patreon supporters.
The ones who really understand what true value is.
They know that religion is a school bus.
Financially impressive.
It's the most impressive way to be impressive.
Correct.
So I hear.
So we have Hustletron9000 J77 Jack Olesley Jack W Janet Nuder Jason Truck Jedi Mishap Jennifer Nelson And Jester.
And you might have noticed a theme in those names.
Yeah, I'm in the J's.
I'm in the J's section.
So those are all Galaxy Brain Gurus.
I'm so curious how you manage that database.
Like, it's alphabetical, but there must be new people coming in and people going away.
How do you stay up to date?
How do you keep it organized?
It's a freaking nightmare.
It's so badly.
It sounds like eight overlapping things.
Anyway, these people, Matt, this is going to get thanked.
It's a lottery.
It's a lottery system.
So there you go.
Thank you to them, one and all.
Thank you.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Ah, there we have it.
There we have it.
Got a great note to end on every week.
Well, thanks, Chris.
This was fun.
Bill Maas seems like an open and shut case, but still had to be done.
Got to catch them all.
That's right.
That's right.
Into the Pokédex he goes, or the Guru Dex, I guess.
Another week.
And we probably won't be so long with the next episode because Ruben is just sitting there.
He's ready to be dissected.
So it will appear soon.
And for patrons, there will be a Decoding Academia release soon on pseudo-profound bullshit, a variation of that related to workplace bullshit, like corporate bullshit, I believe.
So there you go.
Yep.
Yep, more recording for us.
Thanks, everyone.
Good to see you, Chris.
Don't be an anti-vaxxer.
No.
Just be normal.
I'll try.
I'll do my best.
And yeah, yeah.
Watch out for the desk, not the gen. Accord it.
Get it institutional narrative, don't you know?
Okay.
Will do.
Ciao.
Respect.
And the twitchy pops.
Keep an eye on the kids.
What the turn with the twitch and the turn with the chicken.
