Michael Shermer debunks fringe theories like 9/11 truthers’ claims of controlled demolition, citing overwhelming evidence of plane impacts, and dismisses Alex Jones’ assertions about elite-driven population control, instead pointing to natural demographic trends in nations like Japan. He critiques pharmaceutical industry influence on doctors—free samples and trips exploit reciprocity—while addressing the medicalization of traits like ADHD and vaccine-autism myths as false correlations. Shermer argues open debate refutes conspiracy theories, like Holocaust denial rooted in anti-Semitism or flat Earth beliefs, using empirical evidence such as lunar eclipses and rocket trajectories. The conversation underscores how patternicity and cognitive dissonance fuel implausible claims, from alien conspiracies to speculative theories like quantum consciousness, urging skepticism over unproven narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
And I went to a big event at Griffith Park where they had a Yoplait Yogurt 50-kilometer bike race.
And Jonathan Boyer was the big star.
He was the first American to do the Tour de France.
And I saw him.
I was like, wow, this is a cool sport.
So I just got into it.
I just started riding and racing.
And then we started Race Across America in 1982. And so I quit my job and just did that for a decade.
I had corporate sponsors.
We had ABC Wide World of Sports contract with them to film it, and we turned it into a little mini-culture business.
But the ultra-endurance sports were just taking off.
The Ironman became famous in the early 80s.
John Howard, who won it, was one of the first to do the race across America with me and two other guys.
And I did a rod dog sled race.
And then soon after that were all those sort of long distance mixed sport type things where you run and hike and swim.
And anyway, so that was just part of that culture.
And I was young and single and didn't have a house or mortgage, you know, that stuff.
stuff so you can do do those kinds of things that's a fascinating thing to get into too because I mean that's a real rabbit hole you get into too when you start into cycling and endurance racing and you you understand the culture and you get into those people there they're a bizarre group of people they are yes actually the subculture of ultra endurance athletes as a number of weirdos but so does the sort of skeptical movement I've decided I'm excited that all kind of social subcultures have a handful of real weirdos.
The people that show up at your door like, can I stay here this weekend?
What I meant is, though, that it's one of those things where a normal person can do it, but to do it the way a Lance Armstrong can do it or the way a Greg LeMond can do it, you get into that weird area where you're just tweaking every single aspect of your body.
The way you eat, the way you sleep, what you do, your mental attitude, your motivation.
It was a 40-hour-a-week, but really more like a 60-hour-a-week job where you're training, but there's a lot of preparation before you go out on a ride, when you come back from a ride, and then you add weights or stretching, yoga, whatever.
Is Hep C the disease that was recently in the news because there was that young guy who owns some pharmaceutical company and they charged a ridiculous amount of money for...
Well, and this is why it's still an immoral act, because there are people that don't do it, or they don't want to do it, and we'll never know how they would have done compared to the people that are doping.
But again, we know that all the other people that were on the podium with Lance for those seven years, they all have been busted for doping, or admitted that they doped.
So how far down do you go to give the jersey to 127th place guy or something?
Because we know how so many of them were doing it.
It's just so fascinating to me from a perspective of these guys are essentially experimenting with their bodies, trying to find the right levels, trying to find out what's the best method to do so.
And along the entire career that Lance had, you see all these adjustments that these people are making and everyone trying to...
Well, one of the early books out, before all this came out about Lance, was called Breaking the Chain by Willy Voigt, who was a soigneur, or, you know, one of the people who give massage therapies to, or no, I think it was one of the mechanics, anyway, with the Festina team that got busted in 98. And he said, basically, these guys were just experimenting randomly.
No one knew what to do.
What's the dosage?
How many days every other day?
How do I incorporate the other things I'm doing?
What about food training?
It was just, you know, Katie bar the door.
Let's just try anything.
So again, one of the things Lance did was hire the best doctor, this Michele Ferrari, in the business.
The guy that knew the most about how to do it.
Properly.
And adjust it for each body, because everybody's body is different.
Okay, so we're going to try it.
And you do this for months before the big race, and you figure it out.
And other people weren't doing that.
And then by the time they scrambled to catch up...
Tyler talks about this in his book, you know, after he left the postal team and got his own team.
And then, of course, Ferrari wasn't available, so he hired this other guy, Fuentes, who screwed up and mixed the bags of blood and gave him the wrong drug.
So he got...
He got popped, he said, for—well, he was doping, but he got popped for somebody else's dope.
You know, guys putting bags of blood on the hook in the hotel room on the wall where the painting is, so it drips down.
It's like, you know, this is really a barbaric system in the early days when they were experimenting.
So again, what Lance did was just take it to another level.
Since it's going on anyway, we might as well do it professionally.
Okay.
And he would have gotten away with it because had he stayed retired.
But back to where you started, it's, you know, when you're at that level and you push your body every day and you get all the endorphins and the testosterone and the camaraderie with the guys, it's great.
It is so fun.
I still ride four or five days a week with the guys that I used to race with and Friends in the area here and I you know if I missed three or four days a week Traveling I'm just crawling out of my skin.
Yeah, and I'm 62 years old so imagine you're Lance and you have you know the highest competitive edge probably you know anybody and And you're a super athlete and super gifted and then you push push push and then you got those seven straight and then you retire and then what golf Yeah.
It doesn't have the same intensity.
And so I completely understand why, you know, so many of these guys come back.
Remember Brett Favre came back a couple of times?
And, you know, it's just hard to break that habit.
Yeah, I see it all the time with fighters, unfortunately, where the consequences are much graver.
You know, when you're older and your body doesn't respond the same way and you've already taken a lot of damage, but yet you still have this jonesing for the spotlight and you see them come back.
I mean, he was so beloved when he was doing the Livestrong Foundation and the whole deal of trying to help people with cancer and his own struggle overcoming cancer.
Well, I was still teaching college at night while I was doing the bike racing stuff.
And then I got burnt out, you know, just the training and all that and decided, okay, I can't do this forever.
So I went back and got my PhD in the history of science.
And then I started, I was teaching at Occidental College.
And I was like, okay, I'm a college professor.
That's a great gig.
It's a good life.
But then we started in my garage, Skeptic Magazine and the lecture series at Caltech on science and pseudoscience and cults and science and religion and alternative medicine and quackery and all this stuff.
And I thought that's an interesting niche to have.
And so that just got bigger and bigger in my first book.
White People Believe Where Things came out in 97. And about that time, Occidental College was going through a financial crisis, and they were letting go their adjuncts, which at the time I was not on a tenure track.
I was a full-time adjunct.
And I could see the writing on the wall, okay, this may not end up being a tenure track job.
And the skeptic thing was getting big, and I got a big contract through my agent for my second book.
So I thought, okay, I'm just going to go for it.
I'm going to be a full-time writer.
It's a little risky, but I had already done the risky thing of just dropping everything and doing the Race Across America stuff, so I thought, okay, I can do it.
And this then became really my job.
I still teach one class a semester at Chapman, but my main job is writing books and running the society, publishing the magazine, Skeptic, and it's kind of a niche market.
It's like my column in Scientific American.
I cover the topics in there that aren't covered in the rest of the magazine.
You know, like cancer quackery, or like I'm working on one now on Charlie Sheen's quack cancer doctor, his AIDS doctor, I mean.
And he got HIV. And so he immediately went on the drug cocktail, which works.
This is a miracle of modern medicine that kind of just sort of slipped by without anybody making a big fuss about it.
Huge teams of medical researchers, and they figured out the right cocktail, and then you adjust it for each person.
And you can't get rid of the HIV virus, but you knock it down so much that it doesn't cause the AIDS symptoms.
You get pneumonia or whatever.
And so he did that.
But then, much to my amazement, Bill Maher on his show a couple weeks ago had this guy on, this guy from Mexico who has this cure for AIDS. And if you take this, the blood of an arthritic goat, so a goat that has arthritis, how this is determined, I'm not sure.
And so allegedly, Charlie went to Mexico and did the arthritic goat blood treatment, and it cured his AIDS. Well, none of this is true.
He stopped the drug cocktail.
He went down there and stopped the normal drug cocktail for AIDS. HIV. And it came roaring back, of course.
If you don't keep taking the drugs, the virus starts multiplying and it roars back in your body.
The goat blood didn't work and then he came home and went back on the drug cocktail and he's fine now.
Even though they don't guarantee it, just in case it's hiding in the nooks and crannies of your nervous system or wherever.
So that's the kind of thing that Scientific American wouldn't normally cover, but we would cover.
Or conspiracy theories, like the 9-11 truthers.
What about the free fall of the buildings and the puffs of smoke and this and that?
Some of these are empirical questions we can get at, you know, that normal science journals wouldn't cover, that we cover.
So skeptic is kind of a niche market for, you know, fringe claims, borderlands claims.
Right.
You know, like Scientific American deals a lot with global climate change, but they don't deal with the global warming deniers.
Who are these people?
What are their arguments?
We would take on that and go, okay, here's their ten arguments, the best arguments they have, and then here's the answers of how we know global warming is real.
How do you know it's human caused?
How do we know these things?
Normal science journals don't have to deal with that.
They're already down the path and like, okay, what are we going to do about it and that sort of thing.
Well, it's an important resource because whether it's global warming or 9-11 truth or anything, there's so much confusion out there when it comes to trying to figure out what's real and what's not real.
Someone sends you a link and you're like, what is this?
And it's a YouTube video.
You go to the YouTube, you are being lied to.
You watch it and you're like, what the hell's going on?
You don't know what's going on, and then you watch it.
Global warming is just one of the many ones that confuses shit out of people.
And then you find out that there's companies that actually have a vested interest in confusing people.
Have you ever seen that documentary, Merchants of Doubt?
The beauty of that film, made by Robbie Kenner, who's now a friend of mine, was very clever because he tracked down the same scientists who were hired by the tobacco companies.
Not just the same arguments, you know, planting a seed of doubt, sometimes the same people, you know, paid by these front groups.
It's so theatrical, the way they present their arguments.
It's one of the reasons why I've always hated those television shows where you have, you know, a host, and then you have the split window, and one person talking over them on this side, and one person's on the left, one person's on the right, literally and figuratively.
They're yelling at each other, and you never get anything done.
You never figure out anything.
But the person who's better at expressing that opinion in a real quick, you know, three or four minute soundbite of an interview...
They get their argument across, and that's what these Merchants of Doubt guys were doing.
It's almost like there's a science czar that calls all the shots, and if we can just find out what's going on there, we're going to blow this whole thing.
That isn't how it works.
There's 10,000 climate scientists working in all these labs.
And their findings converge to this same conclusion.
So for there to be conspiracy, they'd all have to be meeting on the weekends going, okay, I'm going to say that the, you know, the parts per million of this particular gas is this.
What are you going to say?
This is not how it works.
It's a very competitive enterprise.
If you want to make a name for yourself and you're a young scientist, you know, just debunking one of these arguments about tree ring data or the ice core data would be huge, and they try.
It's like the people saying, you know, Einstein was wrong.
Okay, there's been a hundred years of scientists testing Einstein.
Isn't there, there's also this appeal or this, for some reason, people are drawn to this idea of being a no-nonsense person.
The no-nonsense person is like, you believe in Al Gore?
You believe that if you've seen an inconvenient truth?
But I find that when I talk to these people that really dismiss global climate change or dismiss a lot of people's concerns about those things, they haven't really researched it that much.
They're so definitive on their ideas.
But they haven't really researched it that much, but they don't want to be a fool.
And that seems to be a lot of the appeal to them, to take this hard stance.
It's like they don't want to be one of those fools.
One of the appeals of conspiracy theories is, you know, we're going to blow the lid off, and I'm not being fooled by the government.
I know the Bush administration lied, and we're going to...
So, I mean, that's one of the appeals of the 9-11 truth movement, is that, you know, we know what really happened, and...
And, you know, Bush lied.
Okay, well, maybe he lied about this little thing or maybe it was misdirection or bad information, but the idea of orchestrating an entire event like 9-11 and coordinating the flying of the planes into the buildings and, you know, what do they do with the passengers and how do they get the people into the World Trade Center buildings to break open the drywall and plant the explosive devices without anybody noticing how many thousands of people would have to be involved?
You think the federal government could pull off something like that?
Not to mention, as G. Gordon Lindy once told me about Watergate, the incompetency problem and the people-can't-keep-their-mouths-shut problem.
The more people you have involved, the more they're going to screw up or chicken out or change their mind or then tell their friends and lovers and so forth.
I know the guy that did it, and pretty soon they're on your show telling about what they saw.
How come no one's come out to say, you know, I was sitting there in my office and I saw these guys breaking through the drywall and putting these things inside the...
You know, so, I mean, someone like Jesse Ventura thinks, oh, it was all done under the cover of fixing the elevators in the World Trade Center.
Fixing the elevators.
I mean, this would have had to go on for weeks and weeks and...
The unfortunate thing about conspiracies is that it's not all cut and dry.
There was things like Operation Northwoods, where the government really did plan on orchestrating these artificial attacks, arming Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay.
They were going to blow up a jetliner and blame it on Cuba.
But when people look at Operation Northwoods and they look at that where it would have cost American lives, they had a real conspiracy that President Kennedy vetoed that was actually signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But the replacement level, there are a number of countries below the replacement level, and we know what the factors are, the things I just said.
You know, just being a prosperous democracy in which women have the franchise, and they're economically empowered and educated, and they have access to birth control, the family planning happens naturally.
You don't have to do the China one-child rule.
You don't have to do that.
It happens naturally.
So if you're pro-life, so-called pro-life, and you're against abortion, and you want to reduce the amount of abortions, just educate women, give them power, and give them choice and access to birth control, and it happens naturally.
Well, Japan, Sweden, Russia, I don't know, there's at least a dozen, mostly northern European countries.
But their populations are still growing by the momentum of past decades.
But the current generation will have, you know, 1.9 children on average.
2.1 is the replacement level.
And I forget how many countries, 20-something countries are below 2.1 replacement level.
But it'll take until about 2050 before we see the topping off of the population growth and then start to go back down.
It's one reason you almost never see the curves after 2050. Because if you're a pro-environmentalist or pro-anti-population organization, you don't want to show the good news from 2050 to 2100. But the UN, two of the three UN projections, they have like a Conservative, middle, and then more radical projections.
And that by 2100, the modest middle one shows us back down to around probably 6 or 7 billion.
We'll hit a peak of 9 or 10 billion in 2050, back down to where we are now in 2100. And then by 2200, maybe 1 or 2 billion.
But then there's also the food distribution conversation, which is a very fascinating one.
I had these guys on from the documentary Cow Spiracy, which is well intended, but apparently got a bunch of stuff wrong about how many acres it takes to have a cow graze, what are the requirements, and what you can do with veganism.
Essentially, they were really heavily biased in promoting a vegan lifestyle, which is their choice.
They can do that.
But that's the big argument today.
It's like, do we have enough land?
Do we have enough resources to feed all the people?
My conversation has always been like, okay, are we doing it right now?
In the Moral Archive, I have a chapter on animal rights in which I show that the numbers are still in single digits.
Even with all the environmental movement and all the, you know, vegetarian, pro-vegetarian, it's still less than 10%.
It's more like 6% or 7% of the population in the United States.
So I like the reducitarian movement.
It's a new word, reducitarian.
Let's just, you know, meatless Mondays, just cut it down, you know, and try to, you know, if you shop at Whole Foods, you know, get the Happy Farm meat, you know, that sort of thing.
Well, the ethical considerations are the reason why people think that it's a good way to go.
Not necessarily protein-wise.
There's a bunch of people that argue that it's very difficult to get the same amount of protein, but then there's also people that argue that you really don't need the amount of protein that most people consume anyway.
I would imagine you could even build in marbling, just put fat cells in there to make it juicier or something, and maybe that won't be as healthy, but maybe you think, well, I don't care.
Yeah, but I would be, you know, I mean, there's a difference between the way it tastes, like a marble, like a fat from a grass-fed cow versus a fat from a corn-fed cow versus a fat from a lab-built cow.
Yeah, well, I think that's one of the cool things about following it.
One of the things that's so fascinating to me about following technology is like, ooh, Samsung has the new Galaxy S9, and it's waterproof, and you can show the moon.
These things are so interesting to see where this innovation is going.
And when the innovation is, you know, when it's just things like, essentially, I've made the argument that if you leave cell phones alone, if everyone that's making cell phones right now said, let's just make the same cell phone forever, we're good.
There is a lot of nonsense that they do when they update things, but that's also because they're trying to build in new features, and they're planning several steps ahead for the future.
They want everything to be in the cloud, which is kind of weird.
The fenders, and Lotus did one recently where they had an exposed hood, but what's interesting about this, when you see it, Henry Ford, I don't know if it's this video, but he hit it with a hammer.
I mean, incredibly durable.
Hemp is an amazing, amazing plant.
I don't know if you've ever picked up a hemp stalk.
But it's incredibly hard, but really light.
Like, very, very different than any other wood.
Like, it's hard like a walnut, but it's light like a balsa wood.
It's very, very strange.
It's a very unusual car.
Pull up the Lotus, because it was real recent, like last year.
If they show it, let's see if you can find a picture where they show the actual car itself, Jamie.
But all these panels are made out of hemp, and look how it's insanely light.
Yeah, but if you show the actual car itself, Jamie, you can see, maybe go to the front, the beginning of the video, you can see the actual hood of the car.
Well, I believe it was, I want to say, it was 33 or something like that, or 35 when it was made illegal.
And they made it illegal and they were calling it marijuana, which is really interesting, which is a slang for a Mexican wild tobacco.
It's not even cannabis.
So when they were making marijuana illegal, they didn't even know that they were making hemp illegal.
It was very tricky the way they did it.
They made these articles, they printed all these articles about Mexicans and blacks raping white women because they were high on this new drug.
That's also what funded Reefer Madness, which I'm sure you've seen.
See, all those, those are real Yes, absolutely.
And that's people that had a vested financial interest in making something illegal, a commodity.
It's so crazy because the fact that marijuana or the cannabis plant is so versatile, it does so many different things, they figured out a way to attack one aspect of it and demonize the entire plant and then eliminate competition.
So, well, and there's a documentary on about the public transportation system here in LA that was quite extensive in the 30s with the, you know, electric trolleys and all this stuff.
And they all got ripped out and torn down and the cars were burned and so on just because the automobile industry and the oil industry wanted it.
You know, it's like LA should be a car.
The entire country should be a car culture rather than a public transportation culture.
My wife's from Cologne, Germany.
Public transportation in Europe is fantastic.
You really don't need a car for, except for rare occasions here.
When she moved here to be with me, it's like, ugh, gotta have a car.
He can't get anywhere.
And again, that's kind of a conspiracy.
And those are the kinds of things we should be focusing on and talking about.
I went around and I talked to experts, believers, non-believers, scientists, all these different people about a bunch of different subjects.
And boy...
My desire to do that show before I started doing it was very high.
And my desire to completely avoid any of that nonsense towards the end of the show was...
It was almost like I couldn't do it anymore.
Really?
Because I had already recognized what was going on in so many of these cases.
It was like, this is just...
A bunch of people that want to believe.
They have these ideas in their head and they want to chase these ideas down, whether it's Bigfoot or whether it's UFOs, and they're not being objective even remotely.
The vast majority of the people that are a part of the movement or the community Yeah.
They're like researches ghosts or researches Bigfoot or researches nice people.
But the way they're looking at it is the same.
It's the same whether it's Bigfoot or chemtrails or UFOs.
They're not being objective.
They're going, well, maybe this.
What about that?
Well, have we considered this?
Nope.
They're just going, we know the evidence is out there.
The government has been hiding extraterrestrial life in this country.
We want a balance between the size of the event and the size of the cause.
I think the Holocaust, one of the worst things that's ever happened, worst genocide ever, conducted by one of the worst political regimes in human history.
It was like Restoring History or something like that.
It's a big, massive thing.
He did a shorter version.
But he lined up all those claims.
One of them was, how did Oswald get a job at the book depository building that was right on the parade route?
He's got a turn right in front of it.
There's Kennedy.
He must have known he was planted there by operatives that knew this was going to happen.
No.
So I think it was Posner who tracked down when the White House determined that Kennedy was even going to go to Dallas.
And then, you know, months later, the parade route is determined just before he went.
And Oswald had that job there months before.
It was just pure chance, randomness.
So much of human history turns on random events.
It's like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that triggered the First World War.
This was a conspiracy.
There were seven operatives of the Black Hand, which was this Serbian nationalist organization, and they wanted to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Okay, so, and we know what the, you know, they went to this house to get the weapon and that house to get the grenade and the rifle and they, you know.
You stand on this corner.
I'm going to be over there.
And this is typically how it goes.
A couple of them chickened out.
They went to the house.
The person wasn't there to give them their weapon.
There's like three of them left and then one of them threw the hand grenade and bounced off the car and went under another car and damaged that car but not the Archduke's car.
And so the whole thing was bungled.
And off he went and he gave his speech and then he decided to go back to the hospital to visit the people that were hurt in the trailing car.
And they took the parade route backwards on the course.
And there's this guy, Princeps, sitting there on the curb, despondent, like, well, that was a screw-up.
And obviously, if Oswald had that job, you know, long in advance, it shows before they ever planned that out, it showed that there's a lot of randomness involved.
He had said that on his deathbed, he was a CIA spy, and on his deathbed, he obviously convicted Watergate conspirator, and he said that he was involved in the assassination.
He said that on his deathbed, he talked about how he's an active participator.
And when a bullet shoots into a pillow or it shoots into anything, you're going to have some distortion because there's just a sheer force and velocity of that bullet.
But when you shatter bone, they all get bent up and distorted.
They don't get like that.
That's not something that hit anything, in my opinion.
I think that if that, not only that, the way they found it on the gurney, on Connelly's gurney when he was in the hospital.
Oh, look, we found the bullet.
Here it is.
It's ridiculous.
That smacks of conspiracy, that bullet more than anything.
I'm not saying that I know what happened, but I know that the reason why they came up with the fact that one bullet did the damage, not just in Kennedy, but also in Connolly, was because they had an account for that bullet that hit the underpass.
It hit the underpass that ricocheted, hit some guy, and that guy went to the hospital.
They found the bullet hole in the granite of the curb stone, so they had to account for that, and that's why they came up with it.
Also, Arlen Specter was one of the guys who came up with that theory.
He was a notorious scumbag.
He was on the Watergate Commission.
Right.
There's a lot of funkiness, is what I'm saying, and I have been in the past inclined to gravitate towards some pretty ridiculous conspiracies, but that bullet is...
Anybody that knows anything about hunting or guns or any person that I know that I've talked to, like, is this shot anything?
One thing to remember is that in all investigations or fields of inquiry, there's always a residue of unexplained anomalies.
That any physics theory, evolution, whatever, there's always, yeah, but how do you explain this one little weird thing here that doesn't really get accounted for by your explanation over here?
And the answer is, I don't know.
No theory explains everything.
But if you have an alternative theory, you have to explain all the stuff over here that the mainstream theory explains and the anomalies, if you want to be taken seriously.
And usually the focus on the anomalies is to the exclusion of all the other stuff that is nicely explained by the mainstream theory.
So again, Lone Assassin explains a lot, not everything.
So what do you do with the anomalies?
Nothing.
You don't have to do anything with them.
I mean, it's okay to say, okay, that's weird.
Let's keep investigating.
But to then make the leap, well, we know there was a second shooter.
We definitely don't know there was a second shooter.
There's no evidence whatsoever that we can say, look, here we know for a fact there was a second shooter.
We don't.
There's nothing, right?
But we also don't know that one bullet did all that damage, and the only reason why we believe that one bullet did all that damage is because that was what was presented, and that they had this one bullet that they said that they found in Connelly's gurney that caused all this damage.
You know, like, I was worried about wolves, so I thought I saw, for like, I mean, I'm in a legit solid two seconds, I thought this fucking squirrel was a wolf.
So I don't buy the eyewitness stuff, but I also don't buy these people that are trying to, like, neatly, like, case closed.
Not?
Really?
No.
No, there's a lot of weird shit with that Kennedy assassination thing.
There's also a lot of people that were mad at him.
Well, after Pearl Harbor, there were conspiracy theories that Roosevelt either knew, either orchestrated or knew it would happen, let it happen, to squelch the American Firsters movement, which was supported by Lindbergh, and he had promised Churchill, you know, support, but he could only do so much, the destroyers and all that, you know, we need to have...
And then something happens.
Okay, so it looks like, oh, he must have been involved because he is then able to act and get America into the Second World War.
Right.
But usually politicians act in response to something, now's my opportunity to take advantage of this thing that happened to get my way.
Well, all politicians do that.
It doesn't mean they're conspiring to make the thing happen to get their way.
Well, I think you would have to be an expert in code as well.
You'd have to be an expert to be able to understand what they had intercepted, what codes had intercepted, and what information they actually had back then.
It's, again, one of those things that, after the fact, it's very easy to draw conclusions saying this had to be a conspiracy.
I mean, I think even the History Channel had something where they were saying that they knew that the attack was going to happen.
They had let it happen so that they could get into World War II. Right.
Well, that was a conspiracy theory at the time, and there was a congressional investigation, so the equivalent of the Warren Report, about that and concluded, no, that there was no conspiracy on the part of the U.S. government or any administration that should be held responsible.
I mean, a few people I think were fired for not having the planes in the right place or something like that.
But again, that's just...
And then the other thing we had, the other psychological effect is that we tend to, when you're on the outside, you tend to see big organizations as more powerful than they really are.
Big corporations, CEOs, big government agencies, and the administrators that run them.
From the outside, it looks like I know they have a lot of power and they can do a lot of things.
But when you get the job, then you find out, oh, there's a lot of things I can't do.
And here's another one of these conspiracy theories that might be true.
When you get elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, okay, here's what's actually going on at Gitmo.
Here's what's actually going on in Iraq.
No one knows, but you can't pull the troops out.
You can't close the base.
You can't.
Oh, well, I said I was going to do that.
Yeah, don't worry about it.
They all say that, that you can't do it.
Oh, all right.
I think there's a lot of act that goes on that you don't find out, that we just don't know until maybe later.
But I think when you're dealing with something like these massive global events, after they occur, people are always trying to do some sort of investigative reporting.
They're trying to figure it out.
They're trying to go back over the pieces and connect things that make sense.
And the problem is you get confirmation bias on both sides.
You get confirmation bias where people are trying to show very clearly that there was no conspiracy whatsoever.
And then you get people that are trying to see conspiracy in everything.
And I think with a lot of these stories, a lot of these major events, like whether it's JFK's assassination or many other ones, there's a lot of weirdness to them that make it real hard to wrap up nice and tight.
And when people can't wrap them up nice and tight, they get very uneasy.
Well, they have these leading questions, and then you give them partial answers, and then they fish for more, and then before you know it, you're filling in the blanks together, and they want to believe, you know?
And a lot of times, there's some weird social aspect to it, like hand-holding or something like that, which is an intimacy thing where you don't...
You don't want to be confrontational with this person, and so you sort of kind of help them.
You're both in each other's space because you're only like two feet away from each other.
I had a friend who worked the Psychic Friends Network line back in the 90s when Dionne Warwick owned that company.
And he was a magician that couldn't quite make a decent living doing magic stuff, so he did this on the side.
And it became fairly lucrative.
So he told me, you know, he operated from home, and you just have another phone line, and they send you the calls, and you get, I think he got 60 cents on the minute, and the company got, you know, it was $3.95 a minute, and he got 60 cents on the minute, but they rewarded you.
The longer you keep them on the subjects on the line, the more higher percentage you get of each minute.
And so he would do this by, you know, working through different categories.
And mostly people call it night and weekends.
They're lonely, need somebody to talk to.
You know, love, health, money, career, especially love, relationships, you know, jobs, your boss.
People would just yak, yak, yak, yak.
And then he got pretty good, sort of like...
The analogy I make is like with Dr. Laura's call-in talk show.
She has a rich database of problems that people have, why they call her.
So every call, she knows within 10 seconds, oh, it's problem number 7. It's number 16. You're the one with the guy.
And you just hone right in on it.
So these psychics, they have a deep database of human psychology.
And he was bending spoons, doing all this craziness.
Yeah.
Did card tricks, all kinds of crazy stuff where you go, this is insane.
How is this possible?
But he was really adamant about letting you know, like, these people that are psychics, that are telling you about your future, your past, they're all con people.
They're doing terrible things.
They're trying to pretend that your dead relatives are communicating with you from the great beyond.
They're giving you this sense of hope.
But they're all scammers.
And, you know...
Having a guy like that who's very skilled at that style of, you know, I think he calls it, he's a mentalist.
And that's really probably the best reason why you don't want to know how the magicians do it, because it's almost always super simple and like, oh, I should have seen that, but you don't.
Teller really doesn't talk that much, but there was an old show that was on television in Australia or radio.
I think it was on radio or television.
I don't remember, but there was this trick that they did and it was The way that Penn, like, goddammit, I'm trying to, I'm struggling to remember how exactly it worked.
But it was this woman who could, she could tell the future or she could, some sort of psychic ability.
And Penn explained it.
And the way he explained it, he didn't want to explain it.
They did it on the radio.
It's for Radio Lab, the Radio Lab podcast.
And they explained it on their web.
I'm doing a terrible job explaining this.
But when you hear the explanation, I won't give it out because I don't want to ruin it for anybody who hasn't heard it before.
But when you hear the explanation, you go, oh, God.
Because the power of the, you know, the sort of, you know, following his gaze or following the movement of the hand and this and that, it's done so well that you still miss it, even though with the clear plastic.
So this is a good example where even knowing the trick, you might still be fooled.
So, you know, I call this patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.
And my thought experiment is imagine you're a hominid on the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago, small brain australopithecine, your name is Lucy.
And you hear a rustle in the grass.
Is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind?
So if you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, that's a type 1 error, false positive.
You thought A was connected to B, but no harm.
You just become skittish and cautious or whatever.
But if you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch.
You've just been given a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early before reproducing.
So, in other words, it's better to just assume that all things you think are connected, all rustles in the grass, are dangerous predators and not the wind, just in case.
There's not a big cost to pay for making a type 1 error, a false positive.
There's a higher cost for making a type 2 error, a false negative.
So we assume that this is the basis of superstition and magical thinking.
We just assume that this is connected to that.
You pull the slot.
You do this.
You pull the slot machine.
You win or whatever.
And this is what Skinner showed back in the 50s, where you just randomly give reinforcements to rats and pigeons.
And whatever they were doing just before they got rewarded, they'll just repeat that behavior, even if it's like twirling counterclockwise twice.
And that's the basis of superstition.
There's nothing wrong with their brains.
They're just trying to find causal connections between events and the environment.
And that's the basis of survival.
So all of us are subject to making those connections.
Some are more gullible than others, say, or more skeptical.
But for the most part, all of us can easily be fooled if it's done right.
That's the beauty of good cons, good scams, is that anybody could fall for them, even smart people.
And if anything, smart people are more likely to believe weird things in this sense, that once they believe it, they think they've drawn a connection, they're better at rationalizing the reasons why they believe than, say, less educated or less intelligent people.
And so, as people like Banachek will tell you, there's nothing better than an audience of scientists at MIT. Oh, boy!
I can really fool them because they think they're so smart.
I can't be fooled.
Wow, okay, he must be doing something really, really super psychic because, you know, I'm super smart.
Well, no, because all of our sensory apparatus works the same and magicians know how to manipulate your gaze, your attention, whatever, and how to fool you.
Okay, astrology as far as, like, you know, hey, you're a Leo, so you're inclined to be a leader, like that kind of bullshit.
But is there anything to those really complex astrological readings where they look for the time of day you were born and Mercury's and retrograde and all that?
So if you mix up somebody's reading for, you know, you're a Leo, but, you know, we give you the Virgo reading or whatever for that day, almost everybody will go, yep, boy, that's a perfect— So it's all total hustle.
And it could have also been like, you know, you always know someone who has a wacky husband or a wacky wife that believes in any shit, and then the person's sort of like, oh dear.
You know, there was a study done, I think it was a UFO report done in the late 50s, I think it was 59, on the 500 most important UFO cases of the last 20 years.
Because, of course, it was a high-altitude surveillance balloon listening for the acoustic signatures of a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere by the Soviets.
So, of course, when this debris came down in the farmer's field there outside of Roswell, Mexico, of course they're not going to come out and hold a press conference and go, well, see, actually what we were doing is launching this project to listen to Soviet...
The problem also with social media is it becomes clickbait.
It becomes someone writes a blog, or someone has a thing, and there's a video that's linked to it, and then everybody starts sending that out to their friends, and before you know it, that becomes the narrative, right?
I've always been so confused as to what it is about...
I mean, I've known grown adults that have spent years and years of their life...
I'm fascinated with Bigfoot, fascinated with UFOs, fascinated with these mysteries.
And when you look at the amount of resources that they actually expend chasing after these things, say, well, if you put that into something positive, something constructive, my God, you would do so well.
I often see that about certain scammers.
I'm like, my God, if these people just started a business with the same amount of enthusiasm, how good would they be doing it?
Because they're often portrayed as godlike figures.
And if you don't believe in the traditional god, then that is kind of – they're out there.
They're very powerful.
They know about us.
They're coming to rescue us, save us.
So much of science fiction is – you know, has these kinds of themes to it.
Like The Day the Earth Stood Still, that classic 1951 film.
Michael Rennie as Klaatu and the ship comes to Washington, D.C. It's a Christ allegory.
He's come to talk to the authorities.
Humans are sinning.
We have to stop this.
In this case, it was nuclear war.
In the remake with Keanu Reeves, it was global warming.
And the authorities won't see him, so he mingles among the common people, like Jesus did.
And then he takes up with the Patricia Neal character, who's the single mom in the town, and then he's killed by the authorities, and he's put in the morgue.
He's put in this morgue, which is sort of like the tomb.
And then in the famous scene where Patricia Neal goes to Gort the robot, he's standing there and the visor comes up and he's going to zap her.
And she gives him the famous message, you know, Gort Klaatu Barada Nikto, which basically says, go get Klaatu.
He's in the tomb.
So he marches over to the tomb and burns a hole in it, takes the body, returns it to the ship and resurrects him right there in the ship.
Well, why would it have to be millions of years in advance?
Couldn't it just be 100?
I mean, if there are 100 years in advance of us, if we're thinking about colonizing Mars in the next few decades, you get some sort of an advanced civilization that has less conflict than us and more cooperation.
So whenever your planet starts, the chances of it going to be in a perfect synchrony of every step along the way from bacterial-grade life to big brains, if anything, it's probably going to be millions of years of difference in time scale.
The answer to the Fermi Paradox, where is everybody, because this should have happened already, is probably the universe is teeming with bacterial-grade life, but the number of steps to get from there all the way to a communicating, technological society is enormous, and so that winnows down the number of possibilities out there.
You could get all the way to Neanderthals, like here on Earth.
You know, their big brain, 1500 cc's, about the size of our brain, maybe a little bit larger.
Well, even when you correct for body size, their brains are slightly larger, but only slightly.
The brain size may not make any difference.
It may be brain modularity.
Maybe they didn't have language, or if they did, maybe they didn't have symbolic language.
We don't know why they went extinct, but when humans, Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe, within a few tens of thousands of years, there was no more Neanderthals.
Gone.
They went extinct.
And it's a big debate, paleoanthropology circles, why.
But my point is that you could have three and a half billion years of evolution on a planet and get all the way to Neanderthals who have stone tools, and it just stops.
For whatever reason, they never develop symbolic communication.
They have opposable thumbs so they can make stuff, they can make tools, but they never make Take the next step.
Well, there's also the thought that even though the universe is infinite, right, that it had some sort of a beginning, whether you buy that or don't buy that.
There's actually been some arguments.
Wasn't there some arguments recently that perhaps the universe didn't have a beginning or an end, but that it's been eternal?
But what I was trying to get at, though, is that...
There's a thing that we do where it's not just...
I mean, there's the longing for extraterrestrial life, you know, the search for the technological daddy, you know, the advanced alien daddy that's out there that's going to show us the error of our ways.
There's that pull.
But then there's also this weird pull where we want to believe that these intelligent beings from other planets can recognize who our elected leaders are and be in cahoots with them.
As if they give a shit about Obama or anything...
I mean, if you descended upon an ant colony, would you have a deal with the queen?
Like, look, I know you're the one who is in charge of this.
So I'm only going to talk to you.
I'm going to be super secretive.
And since you are so moral and ethical, and you don't lie to your people at all, I'm only going to communicate with you.
And in exchange for technological secrets, I would like some DNA. It's so preposterous.
It's such a stupid idea that they would come down and they would talk to the military leaders, especially military leaders from the 1940s, who knew almost nothing about technology.
Or this idea that at Roswell, we capture one of their spacecraft and back-engineer their technology, and that's where silicon chips and computers came from.
There was a company called the American Computer Company, and this is like back during the Art Bell days of Coast to Coast with Art Bell, which I loved.
It was recently when he came back on the radio or internet.
So I was driving home from the comedy store one night and they were talking about this American computer company and there's this guy that ran this American computer company that was...
He's out of his fucking mind.
And he, apparently, he had this theory and this whole website dedicated, I don't know if it's up anymore, they might have taken it down, but it's dedicated to showing the timeline of the creation of the transistor and all this came out of Bell Labs, which is where they had the Air Force base outside of Bell Labs to protect it from alien invasion.
Well, I think that's what drives some of the, you know, kind of anti-medical establishment, anti-big pharma, you know, anti-vaccination.
You know, those guys, they're behind closed doors, the big powerful people, corporations and government agents, the CDC and this company and the CEO and the politics, you know, they're all and they want to make money.
And, you know, and first, they think they're more powerful than they really are.
And second, that's not how the world works.
I mean, these people are not trying to keep us poisoned or keep us sick so they can make money.
The real conspiracies are, how come we can't get our drugs cheaper?
What sort of behind-the-door deals are being done that prevent healthcare from being cheaper?
I mean, and that one person of the tens of thousands of employees at Amgen or wherever is going to leave and go, oh, I found something out, and I'm coming on your show to tell you all.
Well, it just doesn't make any sense that it would be the same person.
The odds of it being the same person or the same company, there's so many different people that work in the pharmaceutical industry, so many different people that are trying to do research on new medications, and there's so much money involved in it.
The idea that this one company would come up with a cure and they would keep it under wraps because they are in cahoots with the other company that's got the treatment.
And so, I mean, if that's true, then all the people that were sick from polio and all the businesses and companies that were making money from polio patients, how come they didn't stop the polio vaccine?
Right.
Or, you know, just pick any particular industry like that where we have made real progress.
But there's also the very real problem with human beings in that there's so much biological diversity that medication that affects one person is going to affect another person in a totally different way.
So if they give you a medication, your body has no problem with that medication whatsoever.
If they give that same medication to another person, there's going to be some issues.
And when people say, well, you know, my child got vaccinated and there was some adverse reaction to the vaccination, there's people that want to immediately dismiss that and say, well, that's malarkey, that's junk science.
But there is a very real situation that happens with human beings where they take medication where it does not agree with some of them.
Sort of how, like, some people have allergies to things that are completely innocuous to you or I. You give a certain type of nut to Jamie, and he might die.
You know, there's a reality to that.
And when you look at the...
This is what I try to explain to people that talk about vaccinations being dangerous, and, you know, we don't need vaccinations, and they're...
They're horrible to people.
Think about how many people you're talking about.
You're talking about 300 million in this country alone.
How many cases are people that have vaccinations where things go wrong?
Is it 1,000 a year?
Well, if it is 1,000 a year, do you know how low that is?
I know it's not low if it's 10 a year if it's your child.
It's awful.
But there's a lot of fucking people that are being vaccinated.
If there really was this global epidemic of you give kids vaccinations and they turn into this decrepit, mentally disabled child, boy, it would be a lot bigger.
It would be a lot bigger than it is because so many people are getting vaccinated.
This is what I try to explain to people when we talk about just the raw numbers of stupidity.
I think that it's really conservative and really kind to say that one out of a hundred people are fucking idiots, and there's not a damn thing you can do.
That's open-minded.
That's really looking at the bright side of things.
That's a glass-half-full perspective, right?
That means there's three million morons in this country.
It's the sheer numbers that we deal with whenever, you know, when people started throwing these, you know, these theories around and they use this as their evidence, I always try to just try to put it into that perspective.
Just stop and think about the numbers.
If you could see it on a board, If you could see seven billion human beings just as little dots on a board, and then, you know, then let's find the morons.
Yeah, well, and they'll find each other, and then there's the confirmation bias that comes from the groups getting together and only sharing information that correlates to their beliefs, whether it's Bigfoot or UFOs or psychics or...
That's why it seems like, you know, any of these groups, the UFO people or the Bigfoot people or whatever, it seems like, well, there's a lot of people.
You know, there's maybe a hundred in that club or something like that, but it's a small number of people compared to the whole population.
If you bring up these facts or these thoughts, these ideas, and you tell these people that you don't believe in UFOs or you don't believe that we have ever been visited, they get emotionally mad.
They are connected.
Yep.
Emotionally connected, yep.
They're connected, like who they are, is connected to these beliefs.
And the more psychologically invested you are in a belief, the harder it is to change your mind.
So this is, again, an example of cognitive dissonance, which was discovered by Leon Festinger in In December of 1954, on the 21st, he went to the top of a hill with a UFO cult who was waiting for the mothership to come.
And he wanted to see, well, presumably the mothership's not going to come, the world won't come to an end.
What will they do afterwards?
So he thought, well, I mean, will they just change their mind?
Will they go home?
Whatever.
So he recorded this and wrote a book about it called When Prophecy Fails.
And the answer is they doubled down on their belief.
Not only did they say, well, this was a dumb idea.
Let's go home.
You know, they went home and started recruiting more people and, well, we miscalculated.
It was Eastern Standard Time.
It was tomorrow night or it's next year.
We got to carry the one when we did our end-of-the-world calculations and so on.
And so they recruit more people to join the group.
So he called this cognitive dissonance that, you know, when you have a belief that conflicts with the facts, What gives?
Well, the facts have to give because the belief is right.
I had a guy that I had a conversation with who really was absolutely adamant that the world was going to change December 21st, 2012. He's like, it is undeniable.
It's going to happen.
I'm like, how can you say that?
How can anybody say that it's definitely going to happen?
It's the idea of progress in history and decline in history.
And so when people write about it, it's usually we're in a period of decline.
It's like Republicans right now.
America is the greatest nation ever, except it's in a shithole.
It's the worst it's ever been now because of this guy.
But before – we're going to return back to the way it used to be.
Every generation has this.
Ours is the special generation.
Either ours is culminating in this great thing that's going to happen, or things are terrible, but if we can get through that, then we're the ones that are going to come out the other side, the born-again, the left-behinders, the Christian apocalypse.
There's plenty of secular versions of this.
Marxists had this idea that the end of capitalism and the beginning of socialism and communism, this is a big stage thing.
A lot of science fiction is like this.
It makes a drama better when there's a beginning point, an end point.
We're at this crisis moment, and things are going to be great again, or they're going to come to an end, and then they'll be great.
But there's always that tension between decline and progress.
But there's also this realization that there will be an end for you.
That we are finite beings.
We have a beginning, we're born, we have an end, we die.
And it's gonna happen.
So when is it happening?
I don't know when it's...
I'm fucking scared.
Is something coming?
Oh, it's coming!
The apocalypse!
Oh Jesus, here it is.
And then we find this thing, and if you're really inclined to be gullible, you get sucked into the Heaven's Gate folks who think, well, the way it's going to happen is there's a UFO behind this meteor, and what we've got to do is, when the comet is near, we've got to kill ourselves and wear purple Nikes, and then we'll live forever.
One of my favorite moments in all of comedy is when Miscavige and Tom Cruise are on stage, and they salute L. Ron Hubbard to L.R.H., And they salute him.
Harlan Ellison, who I know is a science fiction writer, says he was there at the meeting when L. Ron...
Well, the meme is that he said, if you really want to make money writing science fiction, you can start your own religion.
What actually was, according to Harlan Ellison, is there was a group of them just sort of sitting around complaining about the fees that people paid writers, like all of us writers complain about.
We don't make enough money.
And so that's when somebody said, well, you know, if we started a religion, and then Elrond kind of jumped in and said, yeah, yeah, let's start a religion.
And then he actually went out and did it.
Whereas the rest of them, you know, they just kept writing science fiction.
And it seems like part of what Scientology was, was his attempt at self-help.
And that was one of the things that Lawrence Wright went into, that it seems pretty clear that this guy used all these available psychological techniques at the time to try to cure himself.
You know, set goals and write them down and don't get distracted from these things.
Stay focused.
You know, this is pretty basic stuff that actually is true.
It works if you work it.
And we did a story on the self-help movement in Skeptic by a guy who wrote a book called SHAM, The Self-Help and Actualization Movement.
And this guy, he used to work for Rodeo Press, which is one of the big publishers of self-help books.
And the marketing department said that the number one predictor of anybody who would buy one of these self-help books is somebody who had already bought a self-help book.
Well, if they work, why do you need to keep buying the tapes and the books and all that stuff?
And the answer is that they only work temporarily.
Like, if you bring Tony Robbins into your corporation, he is for sure going to get your sales force really motivated.
Man, I'm going to make 50 calls a day rather than 30 calls a day, and I'm going to...
Really do this.
And they see a spike for a while.
And then people go back to their baseline where they were.
And that's why you got to keep listening to the tapes and listening to the music and the books and all that stuff to kind of keep it up.
So it only works to a certain extent and for a limited period of time.
You have a lifetime of you have this fat level and you have this kind of food your body's used to, and to shift it, it's not going to happen in weeks or months.
Yeah, if you turn into a diet, like you can commit to a diet for a long period of time, but a lot of people when they're committing to, like I'm on a diet right now, for 60 days, Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint, it's like a sort of a ketogenic diet.
Sisson's idea is, and Sisson was a big ultra-endurance guy as well, the idea is that your body functions more efficiently on high-fat content than it does on high-carbohydrate content.
So it's very low-carbohydrate, no added sugar, no grains whatsoever, no pastas.
Here's what's interesting about it.
The mental clarity aspect of it is really interesting.
I had a few friends that had tried the same diet and that was one of the things they pointed out.
And I think there's a certain amount of brain fog that comes from heavy carbohydrate meals that you avoid.
And then once your body becomes into a state of ketosis, which I think takes like 20 something days, Or there's a bunch of different supplements.
See this stuff right here?
This is a ketogenic cream product that you can add to coffee.
I did it just because I wanted to feel what it would be like to try this diet because I had read about Sisson and he's a really interesting guy.
And then I'd also listen to a Tim Ferriss podcast.
Tim Ferriss had this great podcast with this Dr. D'Augustino, I believe his name is, who is heavily into ketosis, heavily into ketogenic diets, and the science behind it.
He's a really, really brilliant guy and fascinating podcast.
We have to listen to it like 10 times in a row and take notes.
But one of the things that they brought up, which is really interesting, is the mental benefits of it and the fact that it helps children with epilepsy.
When they put them on a ketogenic diet, it stops epilepsy in its tracks.
Ostrich meat is very very very good for you very lean and healthy and it's a rich dark red meat yeah it's filled with iron and nutrients but the idea behind it is that you get your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrates because that's primarily with human that's why it's not to be confused like the problem with the whole concept of paleo you know the paleo diet well The term can be debunked pretty easily because they say, well, in the Paleolithic period, people ate a lot of bread.
Yeah, you can have milk, but I'm not really a milk drinker.
I like milk with cookies, but since I'm not eating cookies, no milk.
I'm not like a milk guy.
I don't mind raw milk.
Raw milk I like.
I felt like homogenized and pasteurized milk Once you do that, I mean, it's great as far as you could store it in a store and it lasts for a long time, but you're cooking out all the enzymes.
When they think that it's all going to happen, but they had this Russian billionaire character who had developed some artificial, something that he was going to unveil that was like a robot of him that's going to be in artificial intelligence, but it wasn't ready.
And this copy is just functioning completely on its own, and it has no idea what it's doing, because it's not connected to biology, it's not connected to all those things.
Maybe there's like a leap of faith they have to make before they hit the switch.
And of course, the moment you turn on the new copy, they start having different memories because they're in a different environment, in a different body, and they're having different interactions.
And so if it's a biological system, then there's new neural connections growing that are different than yours, than the Joe Rogan copy.
So that's no longer you.
You might have the same past memories, but you're now going to have different...
Also, the good point is from here on out, you're going to have different life experiences.
So if you made an exact duplicate of yourself at this day, but one went to New York and the other one moved to Miami, you have totally different lives, totally different experiences, totally different...
It's a little bit like the transhumanists, that we're going to slowly replace our body parts, and not just new joints, but if you replace your nerve cells...
But you still have to have the continuity.
It's still you as a person in there.
Just uploading it to another platform is, I don't think it's going to do it.
I think it's not you anymore.
The Johnny Depp inside the computer, turn it on, transcend it, there he is.
Well, in a way, with international travel and the internet, the poorest borders in centuries or so, everyone will look like Tiger Woods or something like this.
You think so?
I think the racial barriers will eventually dissolve.
But if we colonize another planet, say we start a colony on Mars, in a way that's a founder population that can then begin to diverge away from the earthly population.
And in a million years you'd have two different species, say.
They'd probably still be able to interbreed because there's still connections.
A fun scenario would be, what kind of government would they set up?
What kind of economic system?
And, assuming none of them were religious, if you came back a thousand years from now, would they have a shrine to a god and a religion and all this...
It happened again!
How did this happen?
But we'd have the history of it.
So it's an archetype.
It's one of the interesting things about Scientology and the Mormon Church is that we have a clear recent history and a paper trail to see what happened.
What we don't have for Christianity is that it's old enough that it's lost in the murkiness of time, so you can kind of fill in the blanks with miracles and things like that.
Here we know Joseph Smith was killed, and then Brigham Young moved to Utah to get away from the authorities, and we know exactly how it all unfolded, and so you can diagram how to start a religion.
You know, Brigham Young was originally against polygamy.
Really?
Yeah, until he tried it, and then he was like, oh!
Well, one of my favorite books is John Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.
He's a great writer.
But he kind of reconstructs the moment when Joseph Smith tells his wife, Emma, that he got this revelation from God about polygamy.
Celestial marriage, he called it.
Basically, he's already having an affair with this woman down the street, so basically he goes, well, honey, I was talking to God, and he told me that I'm supposed to have sex with so-and-so.
I mean, and then it becomes, okay, where's the line get gray?
Okay, if a Mormon can't do it, if you can't take someone when they're really young, raise them as a Mormon, and then once they become of age and they become an adult, tell them, you know, well, now you can get married and you can be involved in this polygamous marriage.
I mean, nobody would embrace—no Christian today would embrace most of the stuff that's in the Bible.
They just wouldn't.
So when they say, I get my morals from the Bible, it's like, no, you don't, and that's a good thing.
You're getting your morals from the same place we nonbelievers get it, and, you know, we're inculcating it from culture, from the Enlightenment, secular values.
Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because that was an article that I'd read that you had written about Islam, and that Islam was the only religion that had not gone through the Enlightenment.
You know, I mean, Christianity, they used to behead Jews and witches, burned them at the stake.
You know, I mean, the kinds of stuff ISIS does today, Christians used to do that centuries ago.
It's very common.
And they stopped.
Why?
Well, the law changed, the culture changed, and the Enlightenment ushered in secular values that all people should be treated equally under the law, that people are born with equal rights, and And so forth.
And that all changed.
Everything.
And everybody is incorporated.
Just think about, remember when the former owner of the Clippers, Donald Sterling, made these remarks.
But most old guys thought like that just 50 years ago and weren't particularly quiet about it.
So, I mean, the moral arc, that's what that's about, tracking how much moral progress we've made over the centuries, particularly just the last 50 years since.
The civil rights movement.
It's one reason why I think all these campus protests have gotten so out of hand.
They're so disproportionate because the students have a moral module.
They're still passionate about, you know, making the world a better place.
But all the big stuff's been taken.
It's all done.
They're down to Halloween costumes, Taco Tuesdays, he wore a sombrero, cultural appropriate, you know, they're all fired up about what you and I is just like, you know, Safe spaces.
Any argument that's worth, it has to stand on its own merits.
You have to be able to discuss things.
Like having a university where you can't discuss ideas.
Even bad ideas.
Like, bad ideas should be debated.
You know, the idea that they won't let these conservatives perform or have these speeches at the universities, and they try to shut them down, they scream at people, they hit fire alarms.
I mean, it's madness.
It's everything that you're not supposed to do when you're defending and exploring ideas.
I think the deepest cause of this is the asymmetry between left and right in the academy.
In some of these departments, it's 20 to 1, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican.
Only in the economics department, the social sciences, do you get something like a balance.
Everywhere else, it's super slanted.
And so you're getting this attitude, well, we know what the truth is.
Well, maybe you don't know what the truth is, and you need to listen to the other side, because that's what It's driven science and reason and the Enlightenment is open debate, because I might not be right.
And so the only way to find out is if I ask you your opinion.
And so I tell my students, you've got to read the Wall Street Journal in addition to the New York Times.
You've got to listen to conservative talk radio in addition to NPR. You've got to listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Oh, I know, he's a knuckle-dragging mouth breather.
Yeah, and try to balance, look at things through their perspective.
Even if you don't agree with their perspective, just relax yourself.
Relax yourself and allow yourself to explore the way they think.
I follow a bunch of wackadoos on Twitter.
Just so I can listen to their arguments and read their stuff.
I follow this one guy.
He's a young earth Christian who every day will talk about how horrible Obama is and Obama's the death of this country.
And I'll follow this guy and follow people who retweet him and go to their links and go to their blogs and read their blogs and go, what the fuck?
Just because I'm just...
Trying to explore how their mind works, trying to piece together how much of it is just a blanket hatred of liberals, how much of it is racism, how much of it is this, how much of it is that, and just trying to objectively assess where their mindset is and what the root of their thinking is.
Yes, it's a little bit of that, you know, the government.
They don't want us to know.
Wait, who's the they?
Because that's us, right?
Well, no, they have this superpower.
So there's a lot of that behind there.
And then also, there's some, you know, basically, I can get attention.
By saying this wacko, the wackadoodle kind of stuff, and then people pay attention to me, and that feels good, and so I'll run with it.
David Irving was their big intellectual, and he was a self-trained historian, but also a pretty smart guy, good writer.
And he wrote some of his early stuff on Goebbels and some of the stuff on the Second World War was quite good.
But then he found he wasn't in the academy.
He was self-taught and just published his own books and kind of made a living doing that.
And he found that when he started migrating toward this, you know, maybe Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust.
And it was really Goebbels and Himmler, and they're the ones that did it.
And Hitler didn't know.
All of a sudden, he gets all this attention.
And then he concocts this idea of, I'll give $1,000 to anybody that can show me the order from Hitler to, you know, to orchestrate the Holocaust.
You know, I hereby command we exterminate the Jews.
Okay, there is no such order.
There's no single point.
It's a whole conglomerate of little steps along the way from sterilization of the feebly-minded in the early 30s all the way up to, you know, gassing them.
Okay, there's like a hundred steps in between.
So there is no single order.
But that got him all this attention, and all of a sudden he's a big star at these conferences where these people meet.
So I went to some of these, and it's like, whoa, okay, he is being worshipped as this great scholar who And you could sort of see how it fed the ego, get a lot of attention.
So I think that we can't discount just the pure psychology of getting some attention for your views as pushing people further than they would normally go.
Yeah, I think that's a very, very good point because there's a massive attraction to that.
People are massively attracted to anything that can get them a lot of attention, even for a ridiculously controversial idea.
Have you paid attention lately, and this is one of the most confusing things that's been going on, there's a gang of people that believe the earth is flat.
But of course, if that were true, then why are all the continents located on the one side of the pizza?
And if they're on the flip side, how do you get from one continent to another when you do a transcontinental flight?
Because you're curving around it.
You're not...
All of a sudden hitting an edge and then flipping around to the backside of the pizza.
And so there's a second reason.
If you're high up and you look out, you can see the mass of a ship sailing away.
The hull goes first and then you see the mass last because it's curved.
Right.
Anyway, if you put a stick here and 500 miles away, make it, I don't know, Tucumcari, New Mexico, that's 1,000 miles from L.A., you put a stick there at noon at the same time, they'll have different shadows.
Because the Earth is curved, so at 12 noon, it's actually 1 o'clock in New Mexico when it's 12 noon in LA, and that's why we have time zones, because it's curved.
And when you want to watch a rocket, a SpaceX rocket or NASA rocket launch from Florida, it arcs.
It's arcing because it's going into orbit and the Earth is curved, so you have to arc out.
Otherwise, it would just go straight up, and it doesn't do that.
Anyway, those are five different, you know, quick reasons.
It's more of a simultaneous thing, and they were in correspondence.
Wallace actually incorporated some of Darwin's work.
Darwin was older than him and had already done quite a bit more work than Wallace had.
And in any case, Wallace was super open-minded.
So here's an example of being too open-minded.
Darwin was open-minded and he came up with new ideas, but he was also very skeptical of the whole spiritualism seance movement that was getting big in England.
See, Darwin was just like, I'm not going to a seance.
Are you fucking kidding me?
I mean, this is insane.
And Thomas Henry Huxley, the other great scientist, said, you know, pay five shillings to talk twaddle to the dead.
I mean, come on.
But Wallace, oh no, I'm going.
This might be true.
And then he made the mistake of answering an ad in a magazine saying, One of these flat earthers who said, I give 5,000 pounds to anybody, or 500 pounds, I guess it was, anybody who can prove the earth is round.
So they went to the old Bedford Canal, which is like 20 miles straight, you know, without a bend.
So you could set up two little telescopes, you know, the little surveyor telescopes, and they put a mark on a bridge.
And so when I'm looking, so there's one, two, three marks.
If it's straight, then it should be all lined up.
If it's curved, then the one here that's exactly three feet above the ground like this one here that's five miles down the road, down the canal, it should be lined up, or if it's not, it's dropped a little bit.
And in five miles, you can actually measure a little bit of the Earth's curve by, I don't know, it's like a centimeter, half a centimeter or something.
And Wallace—so he had to sue this guy to collect the prize money.
This is why you shouldn't get involved with the wackadoodle people too far, because he spent 15 years— We're dealing with this guy, and this guy was sending crazy letters to his wife and to the National Geographical...
I actually found some of these letters at the National Geographical Society.
This guy threatening, you know, you've got this crazy man, Wallace, working for you, and so on.
What really happened was it accelerated Darwin to get his work done, to get the book done.
He was just sort of lollygagging around, doing his research.
One reason for that is in 1844, there was a book on evolution published called The Vestiges of Creation.
It was published anonymously, and it was trashed by the scientific community.
So Darwin got back from the Galapagos in 1836. Throughout the 1840s, he was just taking notes, composing his ideas, running experiments.
He got married and had, you know, 10 kids, and he had a lot of money invested in the railroad.
So he was a pretty active independent scholar.
And so I just started taking his sweet time about developing his theory, and also he didn't want to be embarrassed and come out with a book that wasn't very solid, and then he would be criticized, so he was just compiling.
Anyway, one day he gets this letter from Wallace, from the other side of the world, who's in the Malay Archipelago, saying, I came up with a few ideas.
He had like a feverish nightmare from malaria, and he hatched this natural selection.
Some species compete with others.
The populations increase in a Malthusian way, and so not all of them can survive.
They weren't exactly collaborating, although they had communicated.
And also Darwin, not only was Wallace not upset about this, he was thrilled.
He wrote his mom and said, Oh my God, the great Charles Darwin wrote me back.
This is so cool.
And then Darwin went to Charles Lyell and some of the other big scientists at the time and said, I got this letter from this guy on the other side, and you know I've been working on this.
This is really similar, and what do I do?
So they said, all right, we'll publish both of them simultaneously, and they did on July 1st, 1858 at the Linnaean Society.
They presented both papers, some of Darwin's notes and essays he had written, and Wallace's letter to Darwin with a little handwritten paper.
And they entered them both into the record the same day, July 1st, 1858. Boom!
Simultaneous discovery.
Wallace, Darwin, then spent the next basically nine months just, you know, the pen moves mighty fast when you're afraid you're going to get scooped.
And then after they're done writing, they go walk, and they try not to think about anything, and then the ideas just pop into their head, or a correction in the idea, or a new revelation in the idea.
It's just always been amazing to me, ideas that come out of dreams, like the origins of creativity.
You know, if you're in an elevator and the elevator drops at, you know, just the speed of gravity and you let go of your pen or your coffee mug, it's just going to hover there like you're hovering inside the elevator as it drops.
So the acceleration of the elevator at the speed of gravity means there's no gravity.
And that's where he came up with this idea of relativity.
The elevator is the frame of reference that you and the cup are in.
And so this is what weightlessness is.
When you do the vomit comet, basically all you do is you go up high enough to drop.
And so the plane is plunging down for about a minute or two, I guess.
I've never done it.
And you and this camera and whatever else is in there is just floating because the whole frame is dropping.
And so to do this in the space shuttle, for example, it has to go, what, 17,500 miles an hour to maintain the same speed accelerating at which it would also drop.
So you're going straight forward and straight down.
The halfway in between is 17,500 miles an hour for our planet.
Basically, that creates zero gravity.
So if you want to go to Mars and have some gravity, you just spin the spaceship so that the floor is the outside wall.
Even Mozart, you know, he was composing since the age of four, and his father was a composer.
So it's not like this comes out of the vacuum.
There's not a muse that pops into your head.
You know, you and I aren't going to come up with an Einstein-type dream, because we're not Einstein, and we're not physicists.
So the balance seems to be being ensconced in a field to know what the problems are to be solved and what the details are and what's already been done.
They tried this, they tried this, this didn't work, and so on.
But not be so entrenched in it that you can't see outside the box.
I've had a few of those people on, and I have a conversation with people about quantum consciousness, and they're like, I don't even know what you're saying.