"Mini" Decoding of Michael Shermer's Advice on Conspiracy Theories
Michael Shermer, a professional skeptic, recently appeared on the noted apolitical podcast Triggernometry to outline his advice on How to Spot a True Conspiracy Theory. Shermer is someone who has spent decades on the subject and just last year published a new book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, so you might imagine he has some important insights to share.Well... sort of.Join us as we cast a quizzical eye over suggestions that every reasonable person should be a conspiracy theorist, Barack Obama may have been controlled by shadowy masters, the CIA invented the very notion of conspiracy theories, and that what we really need is to return the good old days when anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish conspiracies were commonplace and spoken of freely... yes, really!Back soon enough with a full waffle episode!LinksTriggernometry- Conspiracy Expert: How to Spot a True Conspiracy TheoryShermer explaining his Tweet endorsing Stefan MolyneuxShermer's participation in Dave Rubin's Book Club for Don't Burn This BookShermer's 2021 interview with Bret and Heather with no mention of vaccinesShermer correcting his Tweet about the Nazis being leftwingPositive review at Skeptic for Milo's "Dangerous" BookShermer explaining why he thinks it is good he mixes his Libertarian politics with his science/skepticism
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a 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.
As always, I am Matthew Brown.
He is Chris Kavanagh.
I remain the psychologist.
He still is the anthropologist.
And today, Chris, we are doing a surprise impromptu mini-decoding.
It's coming as a surprise to me, to the audience, to everyone.
But you have your ducks all in a row, I assume.
What are we doing here today?
Well, it shouldn't come as a surprise to you because I mentioned it for like a month.
But never mind, because...
You say a lot of things, Chris.
I do say many things, I do.
So, this is a mini-decoding episode, meaning it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a normal...
And notably, as with previous mini decodings, you haven't listened to the content yet.
So you'll be coming at the clips fresh and haven't had your kind of pre-game analytical session.
But I do have clips and there is a targeted piece of content and we are going to very shortly dive into that content.
It's just that I've went slightly further afield from that initial topic, so slightly less mini.
It's more a medium-sized decoding, I think.
Yeah, I get it.
I get it.
Like a novella rather than a short story, but not really.
It's not a Jukowski-sized clip affair.
That's not what we're talking about here, but a little bit longer than a nine-minute Sam Harris decoding.
Okay, all right, cool, cool.
All right, so I'm with the audience here.
This is going to be me, along with the audience reacting to you and the stuff you've got to show us and tell us.
What are we talking about?
Well, so we're talking about Michael Shermer, the editor of the Skeptic magazine in the U.S. and the director of the Skeptic Society, basically a professional skeptic.
And he recently appeared on our favorite podcast, Trigonometry, with Constantine and Francis.
Love those guys.
Love those guys.
Great work.
They're really, really balanced.
That's the thing.
It's just so good.
So they interviewed him with the topic being conspiracy expert.
How to spot a true conspiracy theorist.
And this is from the 1st of June.
It's relatively recent, but, you know, that's directly up our alley.
I just spot a conspiracy theorist.
Yeah, we're kindred spirits with those guys.
We're all interested in spotting conspiracy theories and helping people tell the difference between real ones and fantastical ones.
Right, right.
So, Shermer's most recent book is called Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.
This is from this year or last year, anyway.
His most recent book, Is specifically on this topic.
So you would imagine that he would have a well-fleshed-out and coherent approach to this topic, having just written a book and spent decades on the topic.
But Chris, tell us a bit more about Michael Schirmer.
You, I think, are aware of him, know of him from way back in the New Atheist days.
I don't know what you guys were up to on the Web 1.3 or whatever version it was.
I was off living in the real world.
But what's his background?
What's the story with Michael Schirmer?
Yeah, so he's a professional skeptic, like the kind of person that you would have seen crop up as an invited speaker at the Amazing Meeting or various skeptical conferences in the 2000s.
He's given TED Talks about conspiracy theories and whatnot.
Like a professional skeptic, a little bit, you know, maybe debunker type.
The other aspect of his output, which I've...
Long found rather annoying, is that he's a libertarian and he had a rather unhelpful habit of combining his libertarian political outlook with his sceptical perspective and arguing that the two were sympathical,
when often they were not.
You could read the article and the sceptical parts were okay.
But the libertarian part was absolutely unrelated or very tangentially connected.
And the word did intersect.
It tended to lead towards bad heuristics.
So he always had that aspect.
And he always had some other issues.
Like he was very late to acknowledge the validity of human-caused climate change.
He does now.
But for a skeptic and somebody that knows theoretically.
How to assess scientific research.
He didn't do very well on that.
And, you know, more than that, the Skeptic magazine in the US has over time taken something of like a heterodox contrarian turn.
The Conceptual Penis by James Lindsay was published there to great fanfare, you know, not the so-called squared hoax.
The one where it was published in a pay-to-play journal, and that issue was not really noted by Schirmer at the time when he was promoting it.
He saw it as a searing takedown, which is that James Lindsay published a mock article poking fun at postmodern feminist takes on scholarship by writing a satirical article.
Posing as a real article called The Conceptual Penis.
But the satire or illustration of how low the standards are in those fields is kind of deflated by that particular project being published in a pay-to-play journal, which has no standards beyond that you pay.
So, you know, SoCoSquare did try to address that in various ways, but I'm just saying that that originally appeared in the Skeptic magazine.
Shermer also famously commissioned a positive review.
Of Milo's book, you know, the troll who wrote an absolutely terrible, just outright trolly crap book.
Shermer published a positive review of it, you know, because against social justice warriors.
On Twitter, he's done things like tweeted out about how Hitler was really left-wing because, you know, socialist in the National Socialist.
Corrected or not.
And bearing in mind, you know, this is not...
Like, I sympathize with people who didn't know obscure historical details.
But Schumer is a man in his 60s who, you know, was believing that factoid about Hitler and the Nazis until, like, a year or two years ago.
That suggests, like, a certain credulity.
And actually, when he corrected that tweet, I just have it in front of me, he mentioned...
Correction on my now-deleted tweet about Nazism, and this was in 2019.
It was not a left-wing movement.
It began as the National Socialist German Workers' Party to garner Labour support, but Hitler murdered the leftists and moved rightward.
But it was also anti-capitalist and Hitler hated bourgeois elites.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, the only awareness I have of Michael Schirmer is kind of more recent stuff.
Like, I remember coming across him in a...
Like a round table that he was having with Jordan Peterson and Eric Weinstein, I think it was.
Does that ring a bell with you?
Yeah, he's been involved in that.
He was a contributor to Dave Rubin's book club, where they each took a chapter of his book and dived into the philosophical insights that it contained.
Must have been a short obsession.
Yeah, so Shermer, you know, he clearly knows how to...
Pick his close allies and friends.
And famously, he was interviewed by Stefan Molyneux, the later white nationalist, but at that time, far-right apologist and well-documented online cult leader for about a decade.
And he tweeted out...
After his interview, which was to promote Shermer's book, that he was a force for a reason.
Like, if you're looking for somebody, you know, that's good and logical and a force for a reason, Stefan Molyneux is your man.
When I pointed out to Shermer that he was promoting a well-known far-right apologist.
Shermer responded saying he didn't know anything about him.
He didn't do any research about him.
He just showed up because his publicist said to go and he hadn't done any research when he tweeted out.
So what a lovely stance for the leader of a skeptical organization to demonstrate, right?
So just there's various things.
He had some accusations raised about potential.
Offences, doing untoward things to female attendees at conferences.
And he disputed those, but I think they served a little bit further radicalizing him towards dislike of woke SJWs and the kind of sympathy towards anybody presenting themselves as cancelled and heterodox.
Okay.
All right.
So that overview sort of gels with my recollections, which is that he's generally aligned with...
The political violence or the anti-woke, anti-institutional violence of many of the guru figures we cover.
Even though he might not himself rate to be covered by us as a guru himself.
But in any case, yeah, just to say he has a very mixed history.
The way I've put it on a couple of occasions is he's good on UFOs and Bigfoot generally, bad on anything to do with politics or...
Society.
Yeah, society.
How do you think that they were humans in society?
But good on kryptoids.
In a way, it's a shame that people in the sort of pro...
He might originally have started out with an agenda that is sort of pro-science, pro-skepticism, etc., sort of shift sideways into political and social commentary, which has a particular slant.
In Schirmer's case, a libertarian, slightly...
Right of center one, perhaps.
Yeah, yeah.
So with Shermer, the main thing and the reason I wanted to talk about this content was he raises this point, which I've heard argued elsewhere.
And I've heard it argued by a variety of sources.
I've heard more reasonable make the point as well.
But notable examples include Alex Jones and Brett Weinstein.
And I think it is an argument when it comes to conspiracism that has a lot of intuitive appeal.
So I'll play a short version of it and then some longer elaborations.
So here's it in a nutshell.
Everybody believes at least one conspiracy theory.
And again, back to my constructive conspiracism and my argument is that it's rational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true.
It pays to err on the side of caution just in case.
As they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.
Sometimes they are after you, right?
Yeah.
So...
You're familiar with that argument?
I'm familiar with this argument.
We shouldn't be dissing on conspiracy theories because...
Chris, this will shock you, but some conspiracies do exist.
There are actually powerful people acting not totally transparently that might have some kind of selfish agenda.
I mean, this is the world we live in.
And, yeah, this is an argument that you hear ad nauseum amongst people who are defending conspiracy theories.
But because site X, Y, and Z conspiracy actually happened, then you have to keep an open mind to all conspiracy theories.
Yes, so I've got many things to say here, but I'll let him expand a little bit more on the argument that he's making.
So I'm leaning toward you on that.
Also, the lab leak hypothesis to me has always been a viable conspiracy theory.
Here in my book, I try to debunk the idea that a conspiracy theory should be a pejorative.
It's not.
Conspiracy theories are just theories about what could be a real conspiracy.
And some of them are true.
A lot of them are true.
So we should just stop treating it in a negative way and instead think of the lab leak hypothesis as legitimate.
Just in case.
Because now it looks like at least 50% probability that the SARS-CoV-2 was leaked out of a lab versus the zoonomic hypothesis.
Zoonotic.
Just saying.
I didn't just pick that because the lab leak as we...
Here, endlessly in the heterodox fear, getting referenced as 50-50.
The evidence is leaning now towards 50-50.
No, it is not.
Please go back to our three-hour episode with the relevant experts should you want to hear the reasons why that's an inaccurate representation.
But even setting aside his presentation of the lab, like it is more the elaboration that, you know, conspiracy theories are really just...
Ideas about things that actually happen.
Yeah, exploring alternative hypotheses and not taking, you know, what, say, the Chinese Communist Party says at face value.
That's all it is.
No, it is not.
It is absolutely not.
And the other thing that really annoys me about this furphy that we keep hearing is the implication that nobody in the scientific community took the lab leak possibility seriously.
They did take it seriously.
They investigated it.
They published papers on it.
There were people who thought it was quite likely, and when I say people, I mean actual specialists in this area, who when they investigated, found out that the evidence was lacking.
And when the theory persists in the face of all evidence due to essentially paranoia and cognitive biases, that's when we call it a conspiracy theory.
And, you know, Sherman should know this.
Yeah, we actually covered on one of our bonus episodes a paper by Stefan Lewandowski specifically discussing about conspiratorial thinking and what distinguishes it from conventional thinking or investigative journalism and that kind of approach.
And as you say, Sherman should know this.
There's a difference between things like healthy skepticism, critically reviewing evidence, looking rationally at assorted facts and not accepting things.
And countenancing alternative explanations for an event.
There is a difference between that and what we call conspiracy theories in the academic community.
Yeah, which is much more focused around over-interpreting patterns.
Inserting nefarious intent and evil villains, prositing secretive cabals of people out to do bad in the world.
And there's another claim related to it that essentially conspiracy theorists have been proven right repeatedly throughout history.
So here's some historical examples that Schirmer gives of that.
I have a whole chapter on this in conspiracy, on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that started the First World War.
That was a conspiracy.
But then there were layers and layers of conspiracy theories, some true, some not on top of that.
So that's not new.
You can go all the way back to the burning of Rome, with Nero being accused of letting it happen on purpose or making it happen on purpose.
So wherever there's power, where somebody has a lot of power and money and influence and other people don't, Yeah,
so Chris, I guess this is an elaboration of what he was saying before, which is that in the world, there are real conspiracies in the sense that there are Groups, say political activist groups like the Serbian nationalists, I think it was,
who were plotting to kill Franz Ferdinand.
The Al-Qaeda plot to fly the planes into the World Trade Center.
That was a conspiracy, right?
They didn't send an email to the White House to let them know what their plans were.
They didn't announce it on CNN.
So there's a mundane definition of conspiracy theories, which is that there are just people.
Who do stuff without telling other people, right?
This is the problem.
That's not what people...
I mean, I know you know this, but he's completing conspiracies with conspiracy theories and with people having ideas about conspiracies with conspiracy theories.
But conspiracy theories refers to a rather specific thing.
So he's adding in anybody that does any thinking about their being hidden.
Motivations or hidden actions in the world is a conspiracy theorist.
And that's not correct, especially if you're approaching it from an academic point of view, because there's been a lot of work done to distinguish what distinguishes conspiratorial thinking from conventional critical thinking and who are not the same thing.
Yeah, I know.
He is playing upon like a regrettable definitional ambiguity that...
It has been around since the very beginning.
And it's just between the sort of mundane sense of a conspiracy, which is just some people organizing to do something.
Plotting something in secret.
Yeah.
And even the word plotting, I mean, it could be anything.
It could be some business deal or any kind of...
Birthday party, yes.
That's right.
Surprise birthday party.
That's a conspiracy.
Yeah, but that's a thing, Matt.
Why do they never, like...
So that would be an example, right?
You could say that, oh, well, people plot surprise parties in secret, and sometimes people have suspicions that others are plotting.
So aren't they just conspiracy theories?
And people would be like, no, because that's a reasonable...
And it's not what people mean when they're talking about conspiracy theories.
Yeah, and it's not what academics mean.
And researchers, psychologists who research this stuff, everybody understands that what we're talking about is stuff like...
The American government has a scheme to hide what they're doing in Area 51 or that the Illuminati are in control of the world or all of the powerful people, the WF and stuff like that, know that climate change is a hoax and they're just pretending that it's real so they can get everyone to eat bugs or that they all know that the world is really flat but they're hiding that fact and pretending it's a globe because that's going to control people some other way.
That's what...
We mean when we're talking about conspiracy theories.
It's actually, I guess, the cognitive and epistemic mechanisms by which bad theories or bad understandings of the world take place.
So, once again, I just have to say that it's odd that Schirmer doesn't know this.
He's a skeptic.
He's been doing this for decades.
He should have a clearer idea of that distinction.
But it almost seems like that conflation is on purpose, right?
Yes.
Yes.
This might be gilding the lily, but this is the last clip where I think he most floridly presented the kind of constructive conspiracism case.
So here's an elaboration of all of those points.
So one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is to dispel the myth of...
That conspiracy theory should be a pejorative.
Oh, that's just a crazy conspiracy theory.
That's a post-World War II phenomenon, and there's theories about that, that the CIA planted this idea, or the FBI, after the JFK assassination.
Let's make conspiracy theories to sound like a crazy thing so we can cover our tracks of the conspiracy theory that JFK was assassinated by the CIA or whoever.
So there's some debates about that, but whatever the cause of that.
Before World War II, the idea of conspiracy theories was completely normal.
You know, people like Churchill and Roosevelt, leaders of the free world and so on, all embraced conspiracy theories.
Again, the Catholics are doing this, the Jews are doing that, the Mormons are influencing our elections and so on.
That was pretty normal, part of the regular conversation, not a pejorative at all.
So I'm trying to get back to that because...
Again, if you just go through some of the conspiracies I cover in the book, you know, the CIA MKUltra program of dosing American citizens without their knowledge or consent with psychoactive drugs.
What?
Chris, we have to rewind to the beginning of that, right?
I know.
The part that you want to highlight, because I got it too.
So, yeah, you want to play the part.
Where he talks about what he's trying to bring back, right?
So here's that part.
Before World War II, the idea of conspiracy theories was completely normal.
You know, people like Churchill and Roosevelt, leaders of the free world and so on, all embraced conspiracy theories.
Again, the Catholics are doing this, the Jews are doing that, the Mormons are influencing our elections and so on.
That was pretty normal, part of the regular conversation, not a pejorative at all.
So I'm trying to get back to that because, again...
Okay, so that's...
Follow the logic there, Chris.
He's trying to get back to, yes, people believe lots of conspiracy theories in the olden days.
The Jews were doing this and the Catholics were all trying to do that.
Yeah, he tells them examples.
Here he is.
Yeah, so this isn't just me.
Like, he said that he wants to make it normal, like it used to be, to suggest that the Jews who were behind everything, or the Catholics, like it's, what's the big deal, right?
Yeah, that was normal back then.
Why is it not normal now?
Okay, so...
That's a problem, whichever way you cut it.
That's a problem in reasoning there.
I don't know if he fully understood what he said, what he clearly said.
In his very weak defense, I don't think he fully understood what he was saying there, but it's such a logical...
It doesn't make sense, right?
If you take it at face value, it's a terrible, terrible idea.
It makes sense.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't...
God knows what he meant.
But it's a stupid point either way.
And the point before that about, you know, the assassination, and I think what he's getting at there is that the CIA or the FBI, all these people, have, in various occasions, planted various stories, they've done nefarious things with groups,
and they've used conspiracy theories.
They've tried to incept them or they've tried to discredit things, present them as conspiracy theories.
That is definitely true.
Hang on.
One part of it is absolutely true, right?
That secret intelligence agencies, you know, domestic ones and foreign ones.
I do discredit people or groups.
Do heaps of nefarious things, right?
That's what they do.
But he said that the actual idea of conspiracy theories, the concept, was a product of these...
Intelligence agencies.
And that it might have been related to the CIA trying to cover up that they assassinated JFK.
Now that is itself a conspiracy theory, right?
That is not a plausible one.
I'm sorry.
Sorry, Matt.
Are you being pejorative?
Because we shouldn't, you know, conspiracy...
Yeah, so, like, he is positing a conspiracy theory for the origin.
Of negative connotations being attached to conspiracy theories.
Well, with skeptics like this on our side, Chris, who needs enemies?
Yeah.
And the last part, Matt, the last section of it was this.
If you just go through some of the conspiracies I cover in the book, you know, the CIA MKUltra program of dosing American citizens without their knowledge or consent with psychoactive drugs.
What?
Or Operation Paperclip, where we're hiring these Nazi scientists to build weapons of mass destruction for us, while some of their colleagues are being put on in the docket at Nuremberg and executed for war crimes, doing the same thing, right?
Or the Project COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program by the FBI, to infiltrate civil rights.
Like the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement and feminist groups and so on, with plants to make them look bad, to do stupid things, to do illegal things so that they could be busted by the FBI, all the way up to the point of tape recording Martin Luther King Jr.'s sexcapades in hotel rooms and then blackmailing him with a letter.
So that's him highlighting that point of breaking that, you know...
The government, the American government in particular, has been engaged in various programs that were underhand and did real damage to people and should make people skeptical that the government would never engage in anything underhand or harmful to populations.
So examples that are often cited, some of which he mentions here, are Iran-Contra, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the NSA prism.
Surveillance system, Tuskegee sephilis study, so on.
Now, the way that that is often presented, and Shermer does it here, is that conspiracy theorists broke the case, right?
But actually, no, it was whistleblowers and investigative journalists, you know, people who actually had evidence to support.
It was not the conspiracy theorist communities that broke this.
By and large, it's whistleblowers.
And it is...
Reported on and becomes a story because the mainstream media reveal and protect the people that are promoting the story.
So I'm just saying that those stories are often presented as if it was just cranks in the wilderness.
And there are some examples of that, but the examples which are often cited are not that.
They're actually the cases of people either being whistleblowers or doing investigating.
Journalism, which is not conspiracy theorizing.
No, I mean, again, I think this goes back to that previous issue of the conflation of mundane conspiracy theories, that is, governments and powerful groups doing nefarious things.
I mean, that's the world we live in, right?
I'll give you a different example.
It doesn't get cited as one of the conspiracies that turned out to be true.
You know, it's just one of the normal day-to-day kind of shit that governments do.
And so Australia, East Timor, Indonesia, Chris.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but there was a thing.
East Timor was an occupied part of Indonesia for a long time.
There was an independence movement.
Australia supported their independence movement.
Very, very, very nice of us, all that stuff.
Eventually sent peacekeepers and things like that.
So when the newly independent East Timor...
Which is a very small island off the northwest coast of Australia.
And the new government were there negotiating with the Australian representatives about who had the rights to the oil and gas fields in the Timor Gap.
This will shock you, Chris, but the naughty, naughty Australian spy agencies basically planted bugs in the rooms of our friends, right, that the people we were supporting in East Timor.
To find out what their private discussions were about these negotiations so that they would have an edge in the negotiations.
Big scandal.
It all came to light.
Complete stuff up and pretty underhand behavior.
I mean, I'm sorry to break it to people, but this is the kind of underhanded thing that governments or powerful organizations, companies, whatever, do on a regular basis.
This is not the same.
As a conspiracy theory.
Again, it's the conflation of, oh, look, our government, which you think is so great, did experiments on the Tuskegee thing and stuff like that.
They actually did some bad things, believe it or not.
That shouldn't be...
So surprising.
So surprising.
No.
No, and, you know, I'm from Northern Ireland, in case you didn't know, and there was various evidence revealed that the government there colluded.
With unionist paramilitaries during the troubles and allowed them to execute various people, you know, that were opposing the British military paramilitary people by and large.
But like, again, they were working with unionist paramilitaries.
So that's to say that, yes, governments doing nefarious actions.
It's not a surprise to me.
You know, that can happen.
Chris, by the way, I haven't told you this, but I'm currently watching a BBC series called Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland.
It's like a documentary series about the Troubles.
It's good.
Very detailed, lots of interviews.
Yeah, conspiracies abound.
They've made a lot of movies about it.
The IRA had conspiracies.
They definitely had conspiracies, right?
Yeah.
The English government certainly wasn't.
Telling the BBC everything they were doing at the time.
I mean, people separate the mundane, normal shit that goes on in the world, much of which is bad, with a capital B, with, okay, well, anything could be happening.
I get to indulge in motivated reasoning and cherry-picking evidence and all of the things that we associate with conspiracy theories.
Well, let's see.
Does Schirmer do that?
Is that what he's up to?
He wouldn't be drawing those kind of erroneous conclusions from those kind of examples.
It's astonishing the things that our government is doing.
CIA assassinations of foreign leaders.
This was a thing for decades.
You know, the attempts to kill Castro are, you know, famous, right?
Dozens of attempts to kill Castro.
And Che Guevara, the CIA, assassinated him in Bolivia in 1968.
That was our government.
So, you know, when we rail about Putin having people assassinated, yeah, that's bad.
But our government has done things like that.
So when people say, you know what, I don't really trust the U.S. government.
I don't trust Fauci.
I don't trust the CDC.
I don't trust the CIA, the FBI.
I say, I understand.
There's good reasons why you shouldn't.
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, Chris?
That's his libertarian philosophy, I guess, like bleeding in.
Extremely heavily, isn't it?
Yeah, and it's the notion that because the government isn't something that you should uncritically accept, you know, everything that they say, ergo, anything goes, right?
And you've got to be very suspicious, like they've tried to assassinate leaders.
So yeah, Fauci probably did lie and cover up the origins of the pandemic and gene function research may well be the source of the virus.
And no, No, actually, there is relevant evidence that you can assess there and just relying on the heuristic that governments don't always tell the truth.
Ergo, every speculation is plausible and shouldn't be looked upon skeptically.
No, that's the wrong conclusion.
That's a conspiracy theorist conclusion.
And it's notable that he's talking about being skeptical of Fauci or the CDC.
Right?
The examples that he gave always have a particular flavor to them.
And it's a very familiar flavor amongst the libertarian heterodox set.
It's actually very sad to me to see.
I mean, I have little awareness of Michael Shermer and no feelings towards him one way or the other.
But, I mean, if he did have some genuine track record in skepticism and critical thinking, at least on some topics, like Bigfoot...
It is a genuine shame to see him repeating these very tired tropes.
Like, these are the kinds of arguments that, oh, the government lied to us about such and such, so probably they did kill Kennedy, or they are hiding aliens.
Like, that's very weak, and it's the kind of thing you see from, like, a real C-grade reply guy on Twitter.
Yeah.
And on top of that, Matt, I get the feeling that a lot of people, while they're warning everyone else, don't be naive about, you know, accepting government and stuff.
When you hear Schremer elaborate, his viewpoint sounds to me like it was naive and that the disappointment leads him to conclusions that are unwarranted.
Like, listen to him talk about Obama.
It's not just being smart and rational and educated.
Can protect you from conspiracism.
And again, the reason I'm arguing is because it is rational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true that we should be suspicious of powerful groups, rich people.
You know, it's like even Obama, who's, you know, Mr. Transparency, very smart, educated, rational.
I really liked him.
And then, you know, he gets in there and all of a sudden, you know, the NSA program was ramped up.
Homeland Security is ramped up.
We're surveilling the American public, not just metadata, but actually surveilling people's calls and so on.
Even tracking Angela Merkel's cell phone call.
Our government, under Obama, not just Bush, but under Obama.
You know, he's going to close Gitmo.
Didn't happen.
It sounds disillusioned, right?
You had hope for Obama, and look, he didn't do all of the things.
A lot of things were business, as usual, for an American president.
But the lesson taken is not, don't put your faith too strongly in politicians and their promises when they're campaigning, even if you like them.
A lot of things will be business, as usual.
The lesson is, don't trust.
Anyone.
The government is always lying.
I was wrong.
And it's reasonable to be a conspiracist because they're always lying to you, right?
You're like, no, no.
You should be critical.
You should have an appropriate amount of skepticism.
But what he's doing is essentially saying, because of governments not being completely transparent, because of intelligence, organizations, surveillance.
All of the conspiracy theorists are actually being pretty reasonable in how they respond to that situation.
And it's like, no, they aren't!
Even with all that shitty stuff, they're still getting things really wrong and drawing extremely unwarranted conclusions.
And yeah, his conflation of everything together is what's so annoying.
But it gets a bit worse.
So you heard the thing about the, I want to bring back the conspiracism of the...
Pre-World War I era.
I want to make it not a pejorative.
So just listen to this last bit, which follows on some speculation about maybe what happened to Obama when he got into office.
So no wonder, you know, that people are suspicious.
There's something happens when people get into power.
I don't know what it is.
It's like...
All of a sudden, you start thinking differently.
I think they take you in the back room and they go, okay, here's what's really going on in the world.
Oh, I was going to pull the troops out.
Yeah, yeah, no, you're not doing that.
Yeah, no, I can't do that.
So that's like a secret puppet masters that actually control the world.
Like Obama goes in and then he's told what he actually can do.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting, isn't it?
Like, it pertains to people's heuristics about how the world works, and that's what Shermer is revealing here.
Like, you and I, we do not have a rose-tinted view about how the world works.
No.
I don't think it's conspiratorial.
I mean, we understand that, look, every president in the United States is constrained by all kinds of pragmatic things.
And when they roll up to the podium and they give their inspirational speech, the things that they say are not necessarily reflecting all the political calculations and pragmatics.
I mean, I think every normal person appreciates that.
But my gut feeling is that Sherma has that slightly more childish worldview, which is that it's...
I mean, it's conspiratorial.
It's a conspiracy theory that this secret agenda, that there's this whole hidden world going on down there, that it has no relation to anything you can observe and that it's all very nefarious and completely working against our interests.
And it dovetails perfectly well with his libertarian political point of view because they, frankly, are somewhat paranoid about...
Any kind of government.
They think it is inherently corrupt and that basically you need as little of it as possible.
Yeah, and so I think that Schirmer's heuristics aren't good in part because he lets his politics intrude.
On the way that he approaches things.
But I can give an example of something which I think illustrates bad heuristics, arriving at a conclusion that I agree with and is not political.
Just to highlight that it isn't just about, you know, disagreeing with his political take.
So here's him talking about Epstein's death and, you know, whether it was a suicide or something more nefarious.
Let me give you my take on that.
When Epstein died...
And there were conspiracy theories about that he was killed.
I thought, nah, that's probably not the case.
And then they had the CCTV video.
Well, the camera went out.
I went, okay, that's a little fishy.
And then the story came out about the second camera was out.
I'm like, okay, that sounds pretty iffy.
If you hear a knock on the door, you think, oh, what was that?
If you hear...
You're like, ah, that sounds like a pattern.
If you heard one, two, three, it'd be somebody's at the door, right?
So that seems suspicious to me.
I posted on Twitter, you know, yeah, I think there's something to the conspiracy theory.
And then somebody wrote me, emailed me from that prison.
He said, I used to work at that prison, and nothing works there.
It's a dump.
I thought, okay, so this is the conspiracy principle.
Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or chance.
I'm back to thinking he probably just killed himself because he had nothing left.
He just hit the wall.
There was nothing more he could do.
He's leading a miserable life, and he's probably not going to ever be freed.
The issue there is not...
I agree with the reasoning about Epstein likely killed themselves, and that...
There are various coincidences and things which pulled out in isolation look bad, right?
But if you actually look at the base rate of how many things in a prison aren't working at any given time or so on, and what is required for the conspiracy to happen, right?
As in somebody has to go into a prison and kill someone and then presumably exit.
And all of the logistics, it's kind of anomaly hunting, right?
But the heuristic I want to highlight here is that Shermer He reacts very much on his sense of intuition, right?
He starts off that he's like, oh, it's a suicide.
Then he hears something about the camera and he hears two cameras and he's like, well, you know, what's the odds of that?
Then somebody emails him and says, I was at the prison and this is normal.
And then he completely flips, right?
Like it's like he's operating by a very labile.
A set of standards for what convinces him.
And it reminded me of when Brett Weinstein, after he came back from, he was on some trip, and he came back onto the internet, and this was when the pandemic had just started.
And his followers were asking him about the possibility that it's a man-made virus.
And he basically started out and responded saying, no, you know, I've worked with bats, they're reservoirs for...
All sorts of viruses.
So actually, it's quite likely it's just a natural thing.
And then one of his followers in the comments said, did you know there's an Institute of Virology in Wuhan?
And then Brett said, hold on.
What?
And then immediately started tweeting out, you know, I've been informed by followers and that all shifted.
But it's that dramatic swing from like just receiving one piece of feedback and it completely shifts.
Your conclusion on things.
And I think where Schirmer has landed is correct, an accurate assessment of the evidence, but it will just take another fellow landing on the other side of the scale and off he'll go.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying about the reasoning being loose, right?
It's loose reasoning.
But, I mean, in his defense, I mean, don't we all do that to some degree?
I mean, if he's speaking loosely.
And saying, yeah, here's how I feel about that.
I mean, we all kind of do that implicit weighting of...
Yeah, but the difference here, and the reason that I think it's deserving of more criticism, is Sharma's a professional skeptic.
Somebody who for decades has been talking to people about how to assess evidence, how to critically respond to things.
And yet, Matt, as highlighted with the Lab League...
He is very reactive to discourse, like to some new headline finding.
And that is what I think this is an illustration of, is that heuristic in effect.
So yes, everybody reacts to new information and seeing some article that they find persuasive, but professional critical thinkers should know that their initial reaction needs to be...
Kind of contextualized alongside the existing evidence if you want to do it properly.
But his seems to be more based on the reaction, right?
And what if he had received an email from somebody who worked at the prison that said, oh, you know, my opinion is that this is very unusual and, you know, you should really rethink this.
It sounds like his position would be, so I received an email and it made me think, well, you know, if somebody in the prison said it.
Then they know what they're talking about, right?
And that's a terrible set of heuristics to operate by as a skeptic.
Yep, I take that point.
Definitely.
Yeah, so some other illustrations.
The Great Reset.
You know, our friend Constantine mentioned that he wasn't interested in focusing on that.
And if you want to hear him presenting how...
You know, he doesn't swallow these kind of things uncritically.
Here's Constantine bringing up the issue of the Great Reset.
Michael, one of the things that I think has happened, particularly in recent years, and I do connect it to the pandemic, is I think a lot of people have been persuaded that there is an agenda Take more power away from ordinary people and to accumulate it in the hands of a few.
The WF, the Great Reset, and all of that.
And as someone who likes the occasional spliff, I've stayed away from it just because during the pandemic, I was tempted to sort of believe all that stuff.
So I'm like, let's not look at it.
Because I might believe it, because right now it seems quite credible.
But a lot of people are talking about, we were actually going to be talking to Michael Schellenberger, who's written about this, and he's a guy I really respect.
I think he's a great journalist, and he's written about it, and he says that there are elements of it which are true, and there's a book, and the website, and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, I looked on the website, it didn't seem...
Uber suspicious to me, but a lot of people are persuaded by all of this stuff.
First of all, what do you make of all this stuff about Klaus Schwab?
I mean, Klaus Schwab doesn't help himself the way he speaks and looks.
He looks like a stereotypical villain.
What do you make of the WF, the Great Reset, and all of that?
I'm very curious to find out what he thinks.
I mean, many people are saying, Chris, many people are saying.
He's not saying it, but...
Many people are thinking, well, there's something to it.
There's this great reset and the WF.
Yeah, you notice that little way to distance yourself and still present all of the arguments that other people are saying, which, you know, they sound convincing that they're making points, but, you know, I didn't see...
I agree with everything.
I looked at the website.
It's okay.
But there's a lot that's there, isn't it?
I've been avoiding the pot because, you know, it seems pretty convincing.
But before we talk about that, I just got to say, I'm really annoyed by the trigonometry people.
Like, Shermer, to his credit, didn't take the bait and jump in with both feet on the Schwab and the World Economic Forum Great Reset conspiracy theory.
But why the hell, Chris, were they even...
Inviting him to take that leap.
I mean, that says an awful lot about those people.
But putting that aside...
Yeah, so let's see what Shermer says in response to that.
So this is him in general talking about like...
A kind of conspiracy stew, mixture of truth and conspiracies, which the Great Reset might be an example of.
But in people's minds, you kind of throw all that together and you end up with the Pizzagate thing.
And then the QAnon drops, you know, cheese, pizza, CP with child pornography, and then the thing just takes off.
That's a conspiracy theory that's not true, technically.
There's no pedophile ring at this pizzeria.
But it has elements to it.
Oh, and the one other thing of the drinking of the blood.
You know, there was the stories about these tech billionaires who wanted to have the...
Blood transfusions from young children to get that adrenal hormone that supposedly leads to anti-aging and things like that.
So you throw that in the mix, right?
And those tech billionaires tend to be liberals.
You know, industrial rich people lean right and tech people, rich people lean left.
So something there, you kind of throw all that together and you get a conspiracy theory that technically isn't true, but the little elements of it are true.
And then that's what happens in people's minds.
So, this is the foundation.
We'll get to the Great Reset, but there's just, like, all of these conspiratorial melange that is around there.
Yeah.
Nobody's drinking blood, or...
Or are they?
Some of them might be, but it's tech elites.
There are elements that are true.
Right, and of course, Matt, the tech billionaire is famed for the political liberal.
Not at all for libertarianism.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel.
Yep, yep, yep.
Very left-wing people, those are.
He might be missing the slight skewer towards libertarianism there, but never mind.
In any case, let's get to the Great Reset.
He looks into the Great Reset, I guess, is what I'm getting at.
Not really.
Let's talk about that.
Give me the...
Well, I haven't looked into it that much.
A lot of people keep talking about it.
So what I'd love to do is, if you get a chance to have a look at it, let me know what you think about it, because I think a lot of people would be curious.
Well, again, if by this you mean this, you know, we're going to reset the entire economic political system of the world, first of all, that's not going to happen.
And second, the people that...
They're open about it.
That's not a conspiracy.
You know, there are a lot of Marxists and anti-capitalists around.
Not a majority, and they're probably not going to get elected to do anything about it, but they're out there.
And certainly they try to influence people, like academics, you know, are very far left-leaning and are super critical of capitalism.
But that's a little bit different than there's a secret group, Cabal, the Illuminati, or whoever, you know, the World Economic Forum in Davos and so on.
Their targets are very specific.
This is what we want to do in order to gain some advantage for our group or our tribe, our nation, our corporation, whatever.
Yes, that happens.
But I would be skeptical of a conspiracy theory that said, you know, they're meeting to take over the world or something like that.
Okay.
What was he saying there, Chris?
Was he saying that the great research is a conspiracy theory or isn't it?
Or what?
Well, one of the impressive things is that he said, I don't really know about...
The Great Reset, could you...
This is someone whose job is...
He wrote a book about conspiracy theories, but hasn't really looked into the Great Reset, right?
I'm just like, is this your job?
Is it really your job?
But...
Yeah, he hasn't heard about it because he knows that the audience is sympathetic to it and he doesn't want to dunk on it, but he doesn't want to endorse it.
I mean, isn't that the reality?
I don't know.
I genuinely, I didn't read it like that, but that could be part of it.
But I think that the thing that he ends up on is actually good.
It's a reasonable thing, right?
He's basically saying, yeah, like, people have agendas, the World Economic Forum has an agenda, but it's pretty open about it.
So, like, is that a conspiracy?
Just that people are capitalists or environmentalists?
And he kind of makes this point about open conspiracies, which I actually think...
It's a rare win by Schomer.
This is a good point that he makes related to that.
Okay.
Well, here, first of all, is that a conspiracy theory?
A lot of these people, just take a Greta Thunberg-type person, you know, there's no secret about what she believes, right?
Or the Bernie Sanders of the world, or, you know, socialists, or whoever.
They're open about it.
Like, yeah, we should end capitalism, you know?
It's all the kind of Antifa people, you know?
We should destroy the entire system, colonialism, capitalism, white, you know, all the white way of thinking, and so on.
That's not a conspiracy because they're pretty open about it.
Now, are there people that meet in secret to do things?
Yes, but the more specific the target, the more likely that conspiracy theory is to be true, right?
So, like, control, you know, world domination, taking over the world, you know, that's a pretty hard thing to do.
That's a big ask.
People meet in secrecy to influence specific things.
My example, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards.
Of the EU in order to make more money.
Well, we know corporations do things like that, insider trading and stuff like that.
You know, when these Disney executives play golf with politicians, you know, of course they're chatting up in between the holes.
That's not bad, right?
Yeah, that's fine, I guess.
Yeah, he's still doing his sort of obfuscation between mundane...
Conspiracies of corporate donations having an influence in politics.
Is there nothing going on at Mar-a-Lago with Trump?
They never seem to bring up those examples.
It's Greta Thunberg.
Is she a socialist?
Is she plotting world communism and so on?
I thought she was just an environmental activist.
I never...
Yeah, but I took that to be him a little bit just...
Arguing that, that people have ideologies and they're pretty upfront about them.
And he doesn't like anti-capitalist or environmentalist activism, but he recognizes it's just that they're pretty upfront about what they're about.
And I guess I took that as a win.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
It's good that he acknowledged that.
There are people like Greta Thunberg who are doing things that...
He and the trigonometry people don't like.
And it doesn't necessarily mean they're actors in a conspiracy theory.
Yes.
But, you know, look, we had him express that he hadn't really looked into the Great Reset.
Weller, he did that for...
Pragmatic reasons or because he actually hasn't looked into it in any depth.
He was asked about Alex Jones.
And again, Matt, let's just hear Shermer talk about Alex Jones and issues of free speech and whatnot.
Look, Michael, I agree with you broadly.
However, there are more complex cases than the ones that you've just cited.
What about Alex Jones, for instance?
Doesn't Alex Jones deserve a platform?
But he spouts conspiracy theories, as in the case of Sandy Hook, which are very real, very dangerous, and people could have been killed.
Yeah, I'm a little conflicted about that.
I'm not an Alex Jones fan, to say the least, and I've spent years debunking him.
Why is he responsible for what his lunatic wackadoodle followers do?
Why aren't they responsible?
I only know of one case of a woman who actually went into somebody's house or was on their lawn or something who was convicted for harassing somebody at their home.
The other family members were harassed by these people.
I guess they were out on the public street.
So it's harder to, you know, to, to, to.
Yeah, that's his libertarian.
Philosophy coming through loud and clear.
Hey, you've really got responsibility for what you do.
You can say anything you want.
Caveat emptor.
If other people act on it, that's totally their responsibility.
Nothing to do with you.
I'd like to ask about, say, the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, where, as was famously known, when all hell broke loose in that country, there were Activists on the radios inciting violence,
saying that the Tutsis were cockroaches, were snakes, and had to be exterminated.
But, you know, that's just free speech.
If somebody acts on that, then all the responsibility lies with them, right?
This is the libertarianism that really freaking annoys me.
Well, I mean, it annoys me too, but what also annoyed me about...
That response is that he says, you know, why is Alex Jones responsible for his followers?
And he says, was there like one woman who went somewhere on property?
And I think there was one case.
Sorry, Michael.
You obviously haven't paid much attention to the trial of Alex Jones, which detailed hundreds of examples of people being harassed and abused and things like Alex Jones employing people.
Who went to harass parents?
Sending people down, encouraging them to go, giving them a platform, going on his show during the trial and talking about the parents, suggesting that they had agreed with him that they were being used as pawns and so on and so forth.
The thing that gets me, Matt, is this, again, is a professional skeptic who knows less than a mightily interested person in the Alex Jones.
He clearly hasn't looked into it.
And there are lots of things that make Alex culpable for what his followers done.
There's so many examples from the trial of Alex and his network being directly responsible for the abuse and harassment of parents in ways that wouldn't have happened.
Or very unlikely to have happened without his network and the sustained attention that it gave to unhinged conspiracism.
And we're talking about here, Matt, cases where, for example, parents received notes that people were trying to dig up the bodies of their children, had pissed on the graves of the dead children, and Shermer dismissed it.
You know, what's the harm?
Maybe there was one, like somebody had their property.
No!
Parents of children who were slain had to move house repeatedly because a conspiracy fear is sick.
There's followers on them.
And I do feel moral outrage at it because all of the heterodox chuckle fucks that comment on it, they don't do any research to it.
And at the very least, they have the excuse that they're just lazy.
It's not their area of expertise.
Schirmer doesn't have that excuse.
This is supposed to be...
He said, I've been covering Alex Jones for years.
How do you know so little about this topic?
And why is your immediate reaction to downplay the involvement?
He was assigned damages northward of a billion.
And there is a reason for that.
It wasn't just because people just don't like Alex Jones.
It's because of the absolute contempt for proceedings and how culpable.
He was deemed to be at the trials.
Yes, it is annoying.
I take your point.
You're better informed on the Alex Jones thing than me or Michael Schirmer.
So, yeah.
It's not my job, Omar.
That's the thing.
I'm not a professional fucking scantik.
So, yeah, it's just what is so annoying.
You know, okay, so he follows this up.
This is like a little bit more on the Alex Jones point.
So that's kind of what you're getting at there, you know.
Yeah.
Should we hold Alex Jones responsible?
Maybe.
But again, first of all, he does have a platform, you know, Kanye West and...
The other guy, Nick Fuentes, was just on a show.
He still has a massive following.
So he's not, the government did not go in and shut him down.
Private Platform said, we're not going to have you on anymore.
Would I have done that if I owned Twitter?
Probably not.
You know, it's like, I want to know what this lunatic is thinking.
And I tend to have more faith in people that they may be unduly confident in people's rationality.
I know some people are more influential than others.
Jones is apparently one of them.
But how is that different from Rush Limbaugh rambling on about, you know, or Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or any of those rambling on about, you know, the left, the liberals, the libtards, you know, and they go on and on this every day for hours.
And people are definitely influenced by that.
To the extent that they just hate liberals.
They hate Democrats.
They're satanic evil people.
This is not the politics of old.
Why are Hannity and Carlson and Ingram and the Rush Limbaugh radio people of the world, why are they not being censored or kicked off platforms for their undue influence on people?
That's a reasonably good question, I think, Chris.
I think.
I mean, I get it.
Don't worry.
I know.
Alex Jones is...
A little bit special.
He actually specifically sicks his more insane followers on targets like the parents of slain children, which is a little bit special.
But, you know, the broader point, which is that there is an awful lot of absolutely insane political diatribe on all kinds of media platforms.
I mean, he's kind of implying that all of that stuff is insane.
And that it's not really possible to censor it or filter it out.
Yeah, so, you know, I think one of the issues here is that he's pointing to inconsistent standards, right?
In Shermer's case, I think he wants to argue, look, lots of people say extreme things and encourage their followers to hate a particular group.
So where do you draw the line?
What makes Alex Jones?
Not okay, but Tucker Carlson okay when the rhetoric is similar.
And, you know, I think Shermer probably isn't wanting to draw as tight parallel stars as it sounds because I believe he's argued that Tucker's, you know, overall pretty good before.
But on that specific issue, I would say, Matt, that the answer is why was Alex Jones banned?
Because he did things that went...
That made it so that the platforms were receiving more pressure to moderate him because of things like people being targeted or just incitement to violence kind of things.
But the point is that the social media platforms, they do make arbitrary decisions about those things.
But if somebody is taking off all of them, it's usually because they've done something quite extreme.
And Alex Jones has.
Endlessly done things quite extreme.
So you can make the case that it's inconsistent and there are people like Alex Jones who don't get it.
But the answer to this question is you have to basically make enough of a stink that the social media companies feel obligated to remove you when you're a high-profile figure.
If you're a small fry, they'll remove you for fairly minor infractions sometimes.
The standards are not consistently enforced, unfortunately.
Yeah, I guess Sherba wasn't making the point that I was hearing from him, which is that a lot of these people like Tucker Carlson are almost as bad, in a way, as someone like Alex Jones, right?
Because they are all lying and they are inculcating hatred of an outgroup, etc.
I mean, but there are degrees.
And when you start getting specific and you start saying these people are lying, they're agents of the deep state and...
They need to be held to account, and you start actually inciting violence against them, then they do cross the line.
But, you know, he is a free speech absolutist, right?
This is where his libertarianism leads him.
And the reason why he wants to make that equivalence between Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, etc., is that, look, it's all free speech.
You know, it might all have downsides to it.
You can point things that are bad to it, but...
If you censor Alex Jones, then you have to censor everyone.
And this is the real problem I've got with these free speech absolutists, which is it's the same kind of equivalence he makes about conspiracy theories.
Oh, look, some conspiracy theories are real.
Well, therefore, we should have an open mind to every insane claim that people make.
And it's like, no.
And the same goes for free speech.
I mean, I think even people that are fully on board on the free speech side of Acknowledges that there is some kind of speech which is outside of the Overton window.
If I represent myself as a medical professional and that I can cure your cancer with my healing hands and you have to pay me half a million dollars for me to do it, then I could get in trouble.
If I represent myself as a financial advisor and I can definitely help you double your money in a couple of months and I take your money to do that and don't give it back.
Then, you know, I think everyone acknowledges that there's a spectrum.
And I don't think it's necessarily an easy problem, an easy question of deciding where exactly that Overton window is.
But I get annoyed with people like Sherma because what they seem to believe is that, well, you know, anything goes.
You know, who can say?
And that there is no limit to the Overton window whatsoever.
No consequences for everything.
Caveat emptor.
It's up to you.
You don't have responsibility.
Anything you say, all the responsibility lies on the other parties to be able to tell the difference between people that are bullshitting you and people that aren't.
Well, there's a part that ties this kind of approach to free speech or like the lack of responsibility for what speech might encourage people to do when he discusses January 6th.
Like Trump's speech on January 6th that morning.
I'm told by First Amendment attorneys that it's a very high bar.
To meet.
To connect words to actions.
Your words to somebody else's actions.
And that, you know, probably you cannot convict Trump for causing the January 6th insurrection directly because of his words.
Or, just to go back in time, Manson, Charlie Manson, telling his followers, his cult followers, go to the Tate-LaBianca homes and murder those people.
Sharon Tate and so forth.
And they did.
He wasn't even there.
And he got convicted for first-degree murder by Vincent Bugliosi, who famously also got the women convicted.
So it's an interesting case of, you know, free will.
To what extent are you unduly influenced by somebody else?
It's a hard psychological problem to solve, you know, that you made these people do this.
This is great news for, like, you know, mafia bosses and organized crime bosses.
Because they don't actually...
All they have to do is not directly say it.
Or even if they say it, like, you killed the person, so it's you.
Yeah, it's like, hey, so-and-so, he needs to take a long rest, you know?
It's like, okay, boss, it's all right, you know, you didn't do it.
But at the point that he made about, like, it's hard to get someone to be culpable for instigating others' actions.
But, like, wasn't Trump indicted by his own...
Party for his role in promoting the January 6th, right?
I think these people just need to apply common sense.
Like, if I'm on the radio in Rwanda and I say, exterminate the cockroaches, the time is now, go and do it, kill them all, then if some years later in some truth and reconciliation type of tribunal,
like, could it not be said that I had something to do with it?
I mean, this is just crazy that you had absolutely no responsibility for what you say.
Even in that case, in your hypothetical, like, you know, a radio person giving speeches.
It's not hypothetical, but yeah.
No, no.
If it was you, unless you're coming out now as a member of the Rwandan radio during the genocide.
But the point is, you would be a radio host or whatever.
In the case of Trump, He's the leader, right?
He's the leader inciting the followers to march to the Capitol.
So, like, that case specifically, it's just a very odd one to say.
Who can say if there's a strong connection between...
Is there any connection between all of these people marching on the Capitol and the boss telling them to?
Well, you know, it's a mystery.
It's a question for the philosophers, Chris.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know...
And if you want to hear just a little bit more about the kind of libertarian mindset when it applies to the pandemic, this question was reused about looking back on the pandemic.
In spring 2020, we had no idea.
And at that time, Francis, myself, everybody I knew, frankly, supported the lockdown.
But there were other opportunities later when we knew more about the virus, which is where people, I think, are asking legitimate questions.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I think it was clear maybe...
Say, mid-2021, summer of 2021, when the lockdowns were probably not necessary.
You know, the obsessive masking and social distancing was probably a little over the top.
I think that seems clear now, in hindsight.
Maybe not at 2021, but...
It seems clear to some of us, I'm not going to lie.
Yeah, so, okay, fair enough.
So just, you know, that kind of masking doesn't work, social distancing was useless, all of the public health stuff.
It's just kind of what you would expect.
But again, that's not what the scientific consensus around the issue is.
That's the discourse consensus in, like, Brett Weinstein and Heterodox Land.
But that isn't exactly what the relevant research literature says.
I can see what it is about this discussion.
Annoyed you, Chris.
That triggered you.
Triggered me, yeah.
Which is that it's a bit like our objection to a lot of the gurus that use the trappings of science and academic intellectual inquiry to mask what is whatever.
Rank conspiracism, rank populism, rank appeals to emotion, etc.
I mean, with these guys, it's whatever their political valance is.
It's some libertarian, slightly reactionary, anti-woke thing or whatever.
They're using all the language that this is all kind of just about being rational, just about being a critical thinker, just about being able to detect what's a real conspiracy theory or not.
But, you know, that's not really what's going on here.
It really is just a political broadcast with these trappings.
Yes.
And so I just have two clips to finish with.
You know, as is tradition, I'll finish on something positive.
But before...
I get to that.
Just to note, you know, applying the insight that Chemer has had about constructive conspiracism and his enlarged categories of conspiracy theories, it means you reach conclusions like this.
And so that would be a kind of conspiracy, back to my definition of conspiracy, two or more people plotting secret to do something to a third party or somebody else illegally or immorally.
That would be the case.
They're lies that, you know, we are a politically neutral platform, but secretly behind the scenes they're shadow banning people.
So that would be a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.
It is a conspiracy.
That's the Twitter files.
They are a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.
Another example for you there, Matt.
But look, we've said Very negative.
Some critical things about Shermer's approach to conspiracism.
I will give him credit for two points that he made that I think are good.
And one concerned how common conspiracies are throughout histories and in general.
I think it's fair to say that whatever your view of conspiracy or conspiracy theories or whatever it is, we've never had more of them.
We've never had more of them in our faces.
And do you think that's because we've become more conspiratorially minded or we just have way more access to information now?
The latter.
There's just as many conspiracy theories a hundred years ago as there are now.
It's just that they diffuse through culture much more quickly now because of social media.
So if you look at, like, there's data collected about letters to the New York Times in the 1890s to the 1970s.
And you can see there's plenty of conspiracy theories even a century ago about what the Mormons are doing or the Catholics are doing or the Jews, of course, always.
I don't trust any of them.
We need to get back to...
Yeah.
The question, though, the question was, are there more conspiracy theories?
Yeah.
And so the former is that we have more access to information, whatever.
But he said the latter.
Yeah.
From the other context, he was asking, like, there appears to be more of them now.
Is that the case?
And Shermer is saying, no, we've always dealt with conspiracy theories, which is accurate, I think.
Then he also talked about this point, Matt, which I think you will agree with about conspiracies as like a proxy for other things.
So here is what I call proxy conspiracism or tribal conspiracy.
I think when significant percentages of Republicans say, yeah, they think there might be something to the Pizzagate, the QAnon, the whole pedophile thing.
Do they really believe that?
Or are they just kind of ticking off the box to pollsters?
Yeah, that's what our tribe believes.
Yeah, it's a proxy for something else.
I don't like the Clintons.
I hate Hillary.
I want to own the libtards.
I don't like Democrats.
So even if I took you to the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria and go, look, there's no basement.
There's no pedophile ring here.
It's not like you're going to go, oh, in that case, I'll vote for Hillary.
You were never going to vote for Hillary, right?
So it's a stand.
It's a proxy.
I don't like this group over here.
People are saying they're doing these things.
Yeah, maybe there's something to it.
Even if there isn't in that case, There's kind of a more general negative valence to your opinions about them.
Yeah, yeah.
I agree with that, Chris.
I mean, to a large degree, belief in conspiracy theories is an outcome.
It's an outcome of your motivated reasoning and your desire to fit the world, the observable facts or reality to fit your ideology.
So recently I came across someone on Twitter who was talking about The conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama is really a man, yeah?
This rather despicable conspiracy theory.
And, you know, that's clearly an outcome of their very strong political or broader views.
I don't think they actually are that committed to it.
And if they had indisputable evidence that Michelle Obama was, in fact, a woman...
It wouldn't really affect any of the sort of ideological prize that they had.
Yeah, I think that's like a function of the political dislike of the Obamas and the kind of racism, to be honest, that exists in those communities.
Yeah.
Racism, sexism, you name it.
It's all in there.
It's all in the mix.
It's a nice mix.
Yeah.
So, you know, this content, it is what it is.
Shermer's heuristics, perhaps the best way to spot a conspiracy-prone individual would be for him to look in the mirror.
Because to some extent, he seems to suffer from a lot of the maladies that are typical of conspiracy theorists, including believing that there's a secret cabal that instructs politicians what to do when they get in the office.
And let's hope that he doesn't want to bring us back the Catholic and Mormon conspiracies, that that was just an odd way of thinking.
Conspiracies were normal, Chris.
They were normal, right?
We've always thought that the Jews were interfering with our children.
It's only after World War II that...
The stigma.
Good one, Shermer.
Yeah, and the very last thing, Matt, I'll just play.
It's not Shermer.
It's just to remind you, because you might have got, you know, confused by some of this content from some of our alert coverage about trigonometry and potential slants that they may have.
And when they were discussing the Twitter files, the reaction to it, you know, they brought up this point.
Michael, you mentioned the social media companies and Twitter in particular is an interesting one because of the Twitter files, information drops we've had over the last couple of weeks.
And it's interesting to watch the different sides of the political spectrum.
You know, Francis and I are somewhere in the center, so we just sit back and watch it unfold.
And I look at the right, so to speak, if there is such a thing, and the right is like, this is a massive conspiracy.
And on this particular issue, I actually...
I lean towards not so much a conspiracy, but these people were doing things they shouldn't have been doing.
They were lying about what they were doing.
That's my opinion.
And while the decisions, as you rightly say, are very difficult, they did not quite live up to the standards that they claimed to be upholding, in my opinion.
That's odd, isn't it?
You know, Constantine and Francis are so centrist, but on this particular issue, he does.
Just this one.
Yeah.
And if there is a right, if there is a right, Matt, you know, if the right even exists as a concept.
Then they could be right about this particular thing.
Oh, it's surprising.
Surprising.
Yeah.
Just like all the other things, Constance.
Yeah.
But you're centrist.
Don't worry.
You're centrist.
You're enlightened centrist.
Don't worry.
It's not going to challenge you.
Just wanted to remind you there in case you were getting confused by some of the clips I've played.
But yeah, that's it.
And then there's a little follow-up on that where Shermer gives some points which don't quite gel.
And then Constantine responds like this.
There's a difference, though.
No one's been gaslighting the public for years claiming Fox News is a left-of-center publication.
Whereas with Twitter, the argument was, oh no, we're not shadowbanning anyone, except they were.
Oh no, the decision to ban Donald Trump wasn't made because of personal animosity, yet we find out that Yael Roth, one of the major executives, had said that Nazis were in the White House three years earlier.
So we were being told one thing, and then we find out, Actually, yes, I agree with you.
I was not surprised to find out that what Twitter had been saying for years was a lie.
However, they were saying it wasn't a lie, and now we know and have evidence that it was a lie.
I think that's quite significant, don't you?
You know, Constantine again, in the center.
Yeah, no sympathies.
No sympathies for the absolutely, insanely right Trump administration.
Of the United States.
Yeah, it's just funny how, you know, the opinions seem to be so well calibrated to that sphere.
But anyway, it is what it is.
But saying, yes, Matt, that was that.
I will say that despite the fact that I think that Schumer Letts' libertarianism influences various takes quite significantly, I don't think he's quite as far gone as like a Rogan or someone.
I think he still retains the ability to occasionally criticize the right and Trump.
Like, it does come up a couple of times in this content, so that's good to see.
And he does have some points he makes about conspiracism and, you know, the prevalence of it and aspects of it, which I think are pretty spot on.
But it's just the kind of...
Big things that he gets wrong as a skeptic and specialist in conspiracy theories that he really shouldn't.
And the mean one is that thing about because conspiracies exist, ergo, conspiracy theorists are right.
I hear you.
I understand your frustration in the sort of laziness and the poor reasoning.
And I guess the other aspect is the degree to which his...
Whatever.
Libertarian, shall we say, leanings.
And his position as one of these independent public intellectuals, which naturally leads him into the orbit of people like Jordan Peterson or the trigonometry people.
And it's like, you can tell by the leading questions.
Like, you almost have to.
You almost have to veer in that direction.
Otherwise, it just doesn't work.
Like, the sad thing for me has nothing to do with Shermer particularly, but just about anyone.
In that situation, it almost feels like there's this, like, ineluctable, inevitable, magnetic draw that pulls them towards a particular political place.
So, yeah, I mean, it makes me feel a bit depressed, really, because it feels like a force of nature.
Like, anyone out there in the media sphere taking this position is drawn to these positions.
And you almost see it with Shurmur, because as you say, there are glimmers of him being responsible, not willing to take the bait and say, I'm going to, yeah, I'm on board with the WEF type conspiracy.
Well, you know,
I'll just say on that specific issue.
Shermer, as the head of a skeptical organization at the height of the pandemic, interviewed Brett and Heller Weinstein after months of anti-vaccine advocacy.
They were very high-profile anti-vaccine people promoting conspiracy theories.
Shermer interviewed them, announced that people were saying, make sure you pull them up on it.
He asked zero questions to them in that over an hour interview about their anti-vaccine stuff.
Help them promote their book, which in itself is a book full of pseudoscientific, naturalistic fallacy reasoning.
So I'm just mentioning that to illustrate that, yes, I definitely think those kind of considerations apply.
And, you know, you would imagine that a principled skeptic might want to pull even people that are his friends, that are high-profile anti-vaxxers, but Schumer did not.
Did not.
No.
Yeah.
Not one question.
Not one question.
I think you're completely right.
And I think that illustrates that he knows what bread, what side his bread is buttered on.
And he knows what bread is.
It's a shame.
It's a shame.
Okay, now I'm depressed.
Thank you for that.
Don't mention that.
I don't even get the, you know, give you the review of reviews and all the nice things that just like tick the...
This thing out.
So, yeah, that was what it is.
It's a bit of a depressing thing, but, you know, what are you going to do?
It's the world we live in.
It's the world we live in.
I'm going to forget about all of this.
Go eat your dinner.
I'm going to log off.
I'm going to log off.
I'm going to spend some time with my family now, Chris, if that's okay.
Yeah.
That's all right.
Yeah, that's all right.
And, you know, watch out, though, Matt.
As Shermer says, there's a lot of...
Dodgy going on.
A lot of agents out there.
So distributed idea suppression complexes are real.
And you'd be a rube if you weren't looking out for the map.
