Michael Shermer joins Joe Rogan to debunk modern spiritual hucksters, exposing cold reading tactics and confirmation bias from the 1990s. They critique viral internet trends like "selling souls" hoaxes and media bias in cases like Pete Boghossian’s firing, where satire was weaponized against ideological targets. Shermer argues moral progress—seen in declining discrimination and cultural shifts—is real but uneven, citing Pinker’s data despite backlash. The episode blends skepticism with broader debates on truth, power, and societal change. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, well, I think our limited understanding of what they're talking about, when I see those guys writing down on legal papers with all that scritchity-scratchity, crazy-looking, fake alien language mathematics, like, thank God you guys are out there.
I was going through Instagram the other day, and there was this one person who was talking about the purpose of life and when you die, what's going to happen.
And I immediately just started laughing.
I'm like, you don't know.
How are you saying this?
Like, when you die, what happens?
And he was like one of them spiritual-type characters, just kind of a huckster.
There's a lot of spiritual hucksters out there these days.
Well, because the, well, it's called the Barnum Effect, where, you know, P.T. Barnum, you just offer something for everybody.
So if you make it general enough, you know, I sense you're an intelligent, wise person that people really enjoy your company, and you like going to parties and being with other people, and yet you like the quiet solitude of a walk on the beach, you know, and people going, yep, that is so me!
Well, I've pretty much described every scenario you can have.
Well, Reagan, well, Nancy Reagan did that for his travel after he was shot.
She got real paranoid about that.
Well, so part of the problem is the astrologers and psychics are themselves remembering their hits and forgetting their misses, the confirmation body.
So I knew a psychic or a magician who was working the Psychic Friends Network back in the 90s when it's hard to make a living as a magician doing kids' parties.
They all want to have their own Vegas show, but only a few people get that.
So you got to do something on the side.
So this guy was doing Psychic Friends Network.
And he told me all about it.
They gave him a book, a three-ring binder.
Here's the kinds of things you should say.
And people are calling for love, health, money, career questions.
So you can spend 20, 30 minutes at $3.95 a minute just going through there.
I sense you're in a relationship right now, and one of you is more committed than the other.
Tell me about that.
Ten minutes later, they're still talking.
And you're thinking about travel.
You're not happy with your job.
There's some financial stress in your life right now.
And then he told me about stuff like, now go get a crystal and then a candle, and I want you to set it up here on your desk.
So one of the problems that Psychic Friends Networks had was people were not paying their phone bills because they, you know, come back an $800 phone bill or whatever, so they would just not pay it.
So the phone companies cracked down on the Psychic Friends Network company going, hey, this is getting out of hand.
There's an interesting history there because in New York City, for example, it was difficult to outlaw, like, the three-card Monty guys on the sidewalk with the cardboard because it's just kind of a game.
Now, it would be illegal to sell fraudulent stocks or something like that.
Or sell a product that's advertised as a health product when it's not.
But if, say, in that case, it's under food rather than drugs or, say, no health products like vitamins are under different standards than, say, medical drugs.
A psychic is more like an entertainer.
So this is for entertainment purposes only, so we can do whatever we want, as opposed to a medical doctor that's dispensing advice.
Well, okay, so one explanation, the skeptic's explanation, is that if I'm in, say, a Starbucks or something, and I kind of have a sense that people are talking about me, maybe looking at me, and...
And I look, and that catches somebody's eye, and they turn to me, and I think, oh, that person's looking at me.
Or vice versa, I'm looking at them, and then they sense something or whatever.
So there could be some element of chance to that.
Now, the guy that does this, Rupert Sheldrake, you know, he believes that it's actually some kind of, like, psychic power through the medium.
Like, when I'm looking at you, something's coming out of my eyes and tickling your neck, so to speak.
So these, like, why is it legal for the phone psychics?
Because you can't pin them down.
If somebody says, look, I'm just giving relationship advice, why is that illegal?
If I say, like, the Tony Robbins Netflix documentary, I'm not your guru, which is basically I am your guru, He has that moment in this huge auditorium.
There's like 3,000 people there, and he gets this woman up on stage, and she's got relationship problems.
He says, do you have your phone?
She goes, yeah.
Take out your phone and call him right now.
And he talks her through dumping this guy on stage, on the phone, and he's at work or something.
He's like, what?
And then she hangs up, and everybody's happy that she did this.
All of that, any of these self-help books, Jocko's books or Amy Alcon, there's a lot of stuff that's very similar to what Tony Robbins' issues.
And okay, that makes sense.
Set goals and And be motivated and think positive.
Maybe err a little bit on the side of over-optimism so you can push through the failures.
But don't be blind because maybe it's certain times to cut and run and change course in your life, something like that.
The hard part is studying that, which, you know, experimentally, which are the best techniques versus others.
And there was a guy who wrote a book called SHAM, S-H-A-M, Self-Help Actualization Movement, and he was the head book guy for Rodeo Press that publishes these self-help books.
And so his takeaway in this book was that the number one predictor of people who will buy self-help books are people who already bought self-help books, and they continue buying them.
So if you say, does it work?
Well, it works if you work it sort of consistently.
Like you got to listen to the tapes like every weekend or every low moment.
It's not like taking the pill and your cancer's gone.
You have to kind of keep practicing it as a lifestyle change for it to work.
Well, I think you could physically keep up that enthusiasm that Anthony Robbins provides, but you have to be...
Either you have to have some sort of an office environment that is incredibly enthusiastic to the point where you guys have engineered this environment where everybody's pumped up.
But that's going to be it.
I mean, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for the individual to be themselves.
I feel like that would be terrible to work in a place like that where everywhere you go there's motivational sayings and people are, you know, chanting things in the hallway and everybody's just got to Energy at 10!
Let's go!
That's what a guy like Anthony Robbins will provide you with a short burst.
Comes a little easier and so it's also those things that are in the background if you know that your your life is a mess Your car is filled with fast food wrappers.
You know, you're you've got that Thing that you haven't taken care of in the back your head that that will That's gonna disrupt it's gonna be flowing in your thoughts for the most part.
It'll be a distraction right So those little things apparently do matter.
There's a theory of crime called the broken windows theory that is favored by criminologists to explain the decline, the crime decline in the 90s.
What happened?
In New York City, they started cleaning up the graffiti.
They started catching the turnstile jumpers.
They started cleaning up the streets.
They started You know, boarding up windows so there's no broken windows or replacing the windows.
The theory is that if there's a signal in society that no one's paying attention, there is no law and order here, there are no rules or norms, do whatever the fuck you want.
You're going to get more crime.
If you send the signal through little things like, we're not going to allow graffiti on this wall anymore, and no more turnstile jumpers in the subways, and so on.
So when that happened, then there was a trickle-down effect, and then crime declined.
So that's the most popular theory for that, and I think there's something to that.
And what they did with New York City is really kind of fantastic.
If you go back to when I was a kid and I traveled to New York City the first time and I saw Times Square, I guess I was probably like 18 or 19. I was like, look at this fucking crazy place.
Like, this is madness.
And, you know, you see it in movies and it's just always this horrific scene.
It's always peep shows and hookers and pimps and thugs and drug dealers.
And you go there now and it's like a mall threw up.
You know, it's like a giant neon Mall of America, like Times Square.
If you took a person, if you grabbed a guy from like 1988 and you put him in a time machine and said, hey man, I'm going to bring you 30 years in the future and you're going to see New York City the way it looks then.
Like, what do you expect?
Like, oh my God, it's going to be like Blade Runner.
People are going to be shooting people and selling body parts and No, you get there and it's like Guy Fieri's restaurant and huge, gigantic LCD screens.
And there's some people that would long for the old days, the dirty seediness that Lenny Bruce talked about, you know, when he lived there.
The word was, according to my friend Bob Fisher, who owns the Ice House, he said that what it was was in the early days of Hollywood, the producers would all buy homes in Pasadena.
They have these beautiful old estates in Pasadena.
But you've got to think that if there's anything that has changed malls more than anything, it's got to be the ability to just shop online on your phone.
Like Amazon.
The fact that they figured that out.
I remember when Amazon came out and it was just a bookstore.
I was like, who the fuck is going to buy books online?
And up in Santa Barbara where I live now, just riding up State Street this morning at the end of the ride, you know, it's like maybe a quarter of the stores are closed, out of business.
Yeah, but I think that human beings When they're living in these gigantic communities, whether it's Los Angeles or New York or something like that, there's just a certain amount of...
People become less valuable.
There's just too many of them.
You lose that sort of appreciation for people, and there's a tension.
Have you ever seen that study that they did where they set up a camera on one end of the street and a camera on the other end of the street and they timed people walking through and in the footage of those people walking through they were able to determine by how fast these people walked They got an average, which was really accurate, of how many people lived in the city.
They talk a little faster, they walk a little faster.
And he had a formula showing how many restaurants per 100,000 or gas stations per 100,000 you'll get as you scale up.
You don't need as many restaurants and gas stations as populations increase because there's more efficiency in the flow of traffic and people throughout the city, whereas smaller towns are less efficient.
I mean, but there's a difference between West Coast-type culture, or large groups, rather, and East Coast large groups.
Do you think that's influenced by weather?
It's one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot.
The aggression of East Coasters is very different than the aggression of West Coasters, and I always wonder, it's like, how much of that is because they have to deal with shit weather for five months out of the year?
So it's the person's name, and they're in front of the house where they used to live, the date that they were departed and the date that they were murdered, and where they were murdered, Auschwitz or Treblinka or Majdanek and so on.
Yeah, there you go.
So it's pretty moving, and it's kind of a reminder, this is what we did, and we're not going to do this again, remember?
So that's changing norms.
How does this happen?
Really, you can do it through the law from the top down, but really it's more culture from the bottom up.
Oh, yeah, because in Germany, they have a religious withholding tax.
So when you get your first job, they do a withholding for your religion, and they give a percentage of your paycheck to your religion, the religion you were born into, baptized, whatever.
It's mostly Catholic and Protestant.
But others want to get in on that because that's cumulative.
You know, you can make some money doing this as a religion.
The humanists of Germany get a little piece of this action.
It's considered a religion.
So Scientology, when they saw that, they went, oh, okay, free government money, tax money.
And the Germans go, no.
You're not a real religion, and you're not getting in on this.
And yeah, so again, when my wife came here, before she came here, she quit church.
And you literally have to go down to the courthouse, fill out a form, and say, I am leaving the church.
Please don't take my money anymore out of my paycheck.
So you have to opt out.
You will be giving money to your religion unless you fill out the form and opt out.
Wow.
And in this case, it was kind of a funny story, they go, okay, so just to make sure you know, now if you sign this, you can't get married in the Catholic Church, you can't get buried in the Catholic Church, you can't go to the ceremonies and so on, you're done.
And she goes, yep, that's the way I want it.
And she went down there with her Four Horsemen t-shirt, said Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens.
And they're like, who's this?
Anyway, so they said, oh, but now, okay, the moment you sign, it starts effective today, but there's a three-month lag for us to not take the money out of your paycheck.
Well, it is amazing that in this country, I mean, I would like to know what the number is.
If the churches in this country had to pay taxes, I mean, clearly, especially when you look at the televangelists that are driving Rolls Royces and flying around in private jets, I mean, there's profit.
There's extreme amount of profit and it's discretionary income.
They can do whatever they want with it.
And you're dealing with massive, massive sums of money, and they don't contribute.
So these people are clearly personally benefiting from the contributions of these people, and then they don't pay taxes on it.
First of all, for the longest time, all we thought of when you thought about Scientology, you thought about positive thinking and John Travolta and Tom Cruise.
They're all...
Super positive, you know, and they're getting things done and there's auditing and they're really taking care of their mind and, you know, thinking clearly and eliminating all the negative influences.
But then once, there was a bunch of factors, I think, but once the internet opened up the doctrines, and you got a chance to read it, and people got a chance to mock it.
And then South Park did that whole series on it, where this is what they actually believe.
And you see, when South Park did that, everybody was like, holy shit, wait a minute, is that real?
And then people started Googling it, and then looking into it, and then it started to unravel, slowly but surely.
People started leaving the church longs.
Lawrence Wright wrote the book.
All these things are happening.
And now Leah is coming in.
And Leah was, you know, I knew her.
I mean, I'm friends with Kevin James from The King and Queen.
So I've known Leah for 20-plus years.
And when I first met her, she was just like this hard-ass, beautiful woman who's just like driven.
And like, she's a Scientologist.
I'm like, oh, let's get the fuck out of her way.
You know, it was like that she's just like super...
Active and just getting things done and just being productive.
I mean, that's what you thought about when you thought about Scientology.
But now what you think about it is like nonsense and foolishness.
And once Going Clear aired and you got to see L. Ron Hubbard and listen to him talk and you see the captain's outfit he had on with the medals that he gave himself.
Well, back in the 90s when the internet first got cranked up, we were doing articles on Scientology is when some of these ex-members started posting the secret doctrines, the Zenu story and the Going Clear, you know, at level 8 or whatever when you find out the inside story.
And they got raided.
I mean, the Scientologists went to court, to judges, and said, this is copyrighted material.
And it's like, wait, you're a religion?
How can you copyright a religious...
Well, and they somehow got around that.
I mean, this would be like the Catholic Church not telling you about Jesus and the resurrection until level 8 after you've paid $100,000 or something like that.
I mean, if you want to talk about guys coming back from the dead after being buried for three days or Adam and Eve being the only two people and they have kids and their kids just start having sex with each other and that makes all the people in the world or Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus walking on water.
I mean, you're looking at horseshit everywhere.
It's just older horseshit.
It's, you know, whether or not it's based on some real events or some real people, who knows?
So she was born and raised Catholic, loved being a Catholic, the whole culture and all that was great.
And then she started reading Dawkins and me and Harris and so on, and then kind of let all that go, and then she wrote a monologue.
It's very moving.
So the monologue opens.
She's in her house in Hollywood, and the Mormon boys come by.
And she invites them in and they want to, you know, tell the story and she's thinking, this is like a Hollywood pitch story.
You're going to pitch the story and I'll get back to you later until you know how I like it.
No, no, they wanted to, you know, to actually, you know, press to see if she could join right then and there, you know.
They're on their two-year mission that they do, you know.
So picture these two 18-year-olds with their white start shirts and their bicycles and...
So, Julia starts pressing him a little bit.
So, what's the story here?
Well, see, this guy, Joseph Smith, he found these gold plates in his backyard, and he translated them from ancient hieroglyphics into English, and with these magic stones, and they're going on, and then Jesus came to America, and there was the good Indians and the bad Indians, and Julia's like, I just want to tell them, okay, don't start with this story.
This is a bad-pitched story.
Even the Scientologists know, don't tell them about Xenu until way down the line.
But then she says, reflecting on it, you know, if I told somebody my Catholic story who never heard of it, it would sound just as wacky.
When you die, what's going to happen is you don't know.
You don't know.
And the reality is, look, maybe there is an afterlife.
Maybe when we stop living, something happens and our essential energy dies.
It goes into another dimension.
It's possible, but you don't know.
Look, being alive is so titanically bizarre.
Just being a human being looking through eyeballs at each other across from this wooden table that was cut down from living organisms that turn into hard surfaces and you sand them and saw them and then you put it in a building and it's got electricity's rolling through the walls and if you stuck a fork in there you'd die.
All of it is crazy.
The fact that we're on a planet.
I mean, the fact that the universe is at least, as far as we can tell, infinite.
All that stuff is crazy.
The idea that your essential energy doesn't transfer into some other state.
It's like one guy might have write it down a long time ago, but then a bunch of other dudes got together and had to revise it.
They had like a new draft, and the new draft, they get to decide, people got to decide what goes in and what doesn't go in, and some of the stories are based on accounts from hundreds of years after Jesus' death.
And, you know, that Theseus' ship, you know, the Greek Minotaur slayer, Theseus, comes back and is a hero, and they preserve his ship in the museum forever.
But the wood rots, and they replaced the ship, and over the centuries, there's no wood left from the original.
But it's still cherished.
So I call this Shermer's Mustang, because my first car was a 66 Ford Mustang, a classic, and I had that for 19 years.
He and Peter Thiel and the Google guys through Calico and a few others have invested many hundreds of millions of dollars into companies like Calico, for example.
These are companies that are trying to – their big goal is to defeat aging through reengineering cells, okay?
And the sort of philosophical goal behind it is we have to defeat aging so people can live for centuries or forever.
To which I say, let's not worry about living 500 years.
Let's worry about prostate cancer and breast cancer and Alzheimer's and dementia and so on.
Just the little incremental medical problems that people have.
And people's answer is whatever the current average lifespan is.
So, well, 80 seems about right.
Okay, fast forward to the day before your 80th birthday.
Tomorrow you're going to go.
You want another week?
Yeah, I'll take another week.
Okay, fast forward six days.
Would you like another month?
I'll take another month, thank you.
And that would never end.
So, of course, if you're healthy and happy and you don't want to off yourself or whatever because you're super depressed or something like that, yes, you're just going to want to keep going.
You leave your physical body, there's no need for emotions and all of the entanglements of human existence and you go to this beautiful place of bliss and life and love and it's just pure love without a body, unembodied, unhindered.
The things that we're attracted to, the things that we enjoy, accomplishments and achievements and all these things, they exist only inside of civilization, inside of this realm that we've created.
The significance of them is entirely based on our own agreements that it's important when you take the king.
It's important when the ball goes into the net.
We've agreed.
When someone shoots a three-pointer, it's really not that big a deal.
You're just throwing a ball into a hole.
Nothing really significant happens.
But because we've attached all this meaning to that, then it's something that we really want to see.
It was that picture of him holding his hand up like that, but it was just the background wasn't rainbows and shit like that.
You can find it, man.
I have faith in you.
I found it the other day.
It's, you know...
It's just hilarious that someone would be so confident to put that picture online knowing full well that the world is going to see that picture and start writing on it.
His one hand is down, so he's not taking it with that hand.
The other hand is up.
That's him in heaven.
Love it.
The internet is so good for mocking things, though.
It's so good.
It's one of the best things ever in terms of, like, there's so many people that are paying attention and so many people that are funny that aren't comedians, per se.
They just might work in an office somewhere, and they've got a little bit of free time, and they'll make a hilarious meme about something, and then everybody runs with it, and things just get mocked mercilessly.
Remember the video of the guy, he was having an interview and his kid started walking in behind him and he's trying to talk about foreign relations in Poland or something and the little kid is back here and then somebody, the wife rushes in and so on.
Anyway, there's a bunch of funny spoof videos on that where some woman is sitting there talking about nuclear strategy or whatever and then the kid comes in and she's ironing the shirt and then she defuses a bomb and then she cleans up the socks or whatever.
Yeah, it's just we were always – all of our information was distributed to us through these very controlled networks, whether it's CBS or NBC or ABC. And everything was very cut and dry and very professional in the way people talked, the way information was presented.
But now it's just – It's open.
As soon as I find out about something happened in the world, I Google it.
I go, what is it?
What happened?
What happened?
I Google it, and then I'll go to Twitter.
And when I go to Twitter, it's all pictures and memes, and it's the dude with the question marks.
There's so many memes that people will throw up when anything crazy happens in the world.
It becomes so interesting to hear the news and hear commentary on the news from this just gigantic mass of humans and it's what's most funny or most interesting or most succinct or poignant that rises to the top.
The problem is, as a content producer myself, is that the half-life of these articles is so short.
When I post one of my Scientific American columns, I put a lot of work into it, and then a couple hours later, maybe a day later, gone.
No one's talking about it.
Done.
Well, I put a lot of work into that.
But taking me out of the equation, like the New York Times did that huge New York Times Sunday Magazine article on Trump's business going all the way back to the 70s.
They spent like a year working on this, like 10 journalists.
This would have been a Pulitzer Prize winning piece.
This would have done in anybody else but Trump, right?
I mean, they had his old business contracts and lawsuits and all the shady stuff going on.
And this got huge media attention for about a day and a half.
And by Sunday morning, by Tuesday, no one's talking about this anymore.
It's like, these guys spent a year working on this.
I mean, what did it take to get that lawsuit paperwork from the courthouse?
Well, it's also what he represents to those people.
It doesn't necessarily have to be what he really is.
It's what he represents.
What he represents is the American flag and eagles.
They have this really juvenile sense, some folks do, of what he is and what he represents.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they have him in this category that he's going to drain the swamp and these liberals are just going to cry and he's going to make America better.
That's the side that they're on.
They're on the Make America Better side.
Don't you think it's also people don't have the time to really look into this stuff?
Well, I wish there was a really, truly objective service.
Like, it would be wonderful if there was people that were dedicated to no editorial slant whatsoever, just 100% fact, this is how we know the facts, regardless, left, right, no ideological curve to it at all.
Wouldn't that be – there's got to be a market to that.
Well, of course, they all say that that's what they do.
Yeah, but we know better.
PolitiFact is pretty good.
They're the fact-checking organization.
I mean, they're not reporting news.
They're reporting on the facts said by politicians and so on.
So that's useful.
And I think there's a market competition amongst those people to get more hits.
Like, we're fact-checking more than the other guys are fact-checking.
Although there is two different – there was aim, accuracy in media, and then there was another one, I forget the name, and one was left-leaning and one was right-leaning.
It seems like that – I mean, I'm – Reading Jonathan Haidt's book, the two books that I've been reading recently, one of them we discussed on the podcast we did on Monday, but the other one is The Coddling of the American Mind.
Jonathan's on to something good there with the Heterodox Academy, which I'm a professor at Chapman University, and so I was the first member there.
And our university is pretty centrist.
We don't get a lot of these protests and microaggressions and safe space stuff.
It's pretty quiet.
And Jonathan's point is that it's more of a sort of East Coast, West Coast public university thing, or maybe Harvard, that kind of thing.
Middle of the country, you don't see as much of that.
But the polarization thing has gotten worse.
You can see the polls since like 1990 to 2018. You ask people, how evil are the Democrats or Republicans?
And it used to be tiny little differences, and then they diverge like that now.
Where the other side is not just wrong, but they're immoral.
They are evil.
I do think talk radio and television feeds into that, you know, if you just – or now social media in the bubble there.
But on the other hand, again, the Heterodox Academy has like 2,000 members now, professors that said, yep, I'm going to stand up against this censorship.
On college campuses, you were talking to Jonathan about Pete Boghossian.
You had Pete on.
I've known Pete for many years before the hoax papers, and I think they've had it in for him long before the hoax papers.
Glaciers are very hard and erect, and, you know, it's all masculine, and, you know.
Anyway, so I called the university that was affiliated with the lead author, and I said, this is a hoax, right?
Come on, just before I say anything, I don't want to be embarrassed.
This is a hoax, right?
No, no.
This is real.
It's like, I can't tell the difference between the conceptual penis paper, which I know is a hoax because Pete wrote it, and the feminist glaciology paper.
Fraudulent research, faking data, that he didn't go through the institutional research board, which approves experiments that professors want to run.
Like, for example, you could not do Milgram shock experiments, where you hook people up and tell them you're going to give electric shocks to somebody.
They wouldn't approve that.
Mm-hmm.
You randomly assign students to be prisoners or guards and they end up beating each other up.
They would never approve that.
Okay.
So since those sort of guerrilla theater experiments of the 60s, the universities have tightened up the kind of research you're allowed to do.
Even like the kinds of questions you would ask in a survey, they have to approve all of that.
So, of course, Pete and James and Helen didn't do that because – but first of all, James was the primary director of this thing.
He's not affiliated with the university.
He doesn't have to answer to anybody.
Pete was affiliated with it, so they're getting him on that.
And that he didn't go through the IRB and get approval.
Well, of course, if you're going to tell people, if you're going to fake something, you can't tell them ahead of time that we're going to fake because it's going to get out and then the gig is up.
The analogy I made the other day was in 1971, a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan, a clinical psychologist, sent a bunch of his graduate students into mental hospitals all over the country and said, just tell them you're feeling kind of blue and that you kind of hear this inner voice and that you just kind of don't feel right and you need some help.
So they did.
They all got themselves checked in.
And then from there on out, they acted perfectly normal.
And then the goal was, let's see how long it takes you to get out.
And so it was a study in how mental hospitals treat people who are completely sane.
So the title of his famous paper is called, Being Sane in Insane Places.
So first of all, the grad students report it's incredibly boring.
So one of them would sit there and write essays and take notes.
And so in the psychiatrist's evaluation of this patient is, you know, patient exhibits excessive writing behavior.
This is clearly an example of his erupting libidinal impulses from his childhood, blah, blah, blah.
Another one was a painter, so she's doing paintings with landscapes and so on.
Oh, patient, you can see in the paintings the erupting emotions and the conflicts in her personality.
They're just acting normal, right?
So the point of this hoax was that there's something wrong with our mental institutions.
If they can't tell the difference between a sane and an insane person, what are they doing?
So, of course, the industry got pretty upset about being hoaxed.
So Rosenhan came back and said, okay, in the next year, I'm going to send in some more.
Let's see if you can find him.
And he didn't send anybody.
Oh, wow.
So they're like, okay, we think this guy's fake.
Again, they couldn't tell the difference in their own patients, and no one was even faking.
So in a way, this is kind of what Pete and James and Helen did.
It's like, if they're sending these papers out, if you can't tell, then what are you doing in this field?
Because if he does get fired from the university, what could he possibly do?
I mean, what Jordan has done is pretty extraordinary.
He's essentially left teaching.
Because of the controversies that he went through, he became famous.
He became famous for doing podcasts.
And writing things, and then his YouTube videos, they're so insightful and wonderful that people just got drawn to him, and then they go to see him speak live.
They've made him into a monster.
By censoring him, by attacking him, they've essentially turned him into a global, international star.
Since I was here a year ago, I saw Jordan's event in Thousand Oaks at the Kavli Theater there, 2,000 seats, sold out, standing room only.
And it was good.
He was, like, different than Neil, of course, but just as engaging.
It wasn't political.
A lot of people there, you know, recognized me and I could see, you know, these aren't like right-wing nuts.
These aren't young male, angry males.
This isn't like this at all.
And his message was, you know, pretty straightforward.
Get your life in order.
You know, this is the way life is.
It's hard.
And he kind of went through his thing and it's like, all right, that makes sense.
And people loved it.
Very, almost no politics in it.
And Dave Rubin tells me he doesn't really get political on stage.
So that's not the motive.
And I think, you know, life is hard enough for most people that they like, back to the self-help thing, it's nice to be reminded, here are a few simple things you could do to get your life in order.
It's not like he's a closeted conservative and they're after him.
He's definitely more liberal than me, and I could tell even years ago that they're going to go after him, I can tell, mainly because he puts truth and free speech ahead of Political positions.
He might say, I'm a liberal and these are my political positions, but more important to me is the truth.
Well, that's not, as Jonathan points out in his book, universities are now at this divide between are we here for social justice or are we here for truth?
Yes.
And they're having to make a decision, and too many of them are going for it.
We're here for social justice.
Well, then just be honest about it, because you can't bury it.
Because, again, it's not a value assessment of women.
If women choose to go into the medical fields, more women are physicians, more women...
Disproportionately attract women.
That's not a negative value assessment.
That's just people are different.
You know, I don't want to do what certain people do because I'm different than them.
I'm not attracted to those fields.
It's fascinating to find out why people are attracted and when you see that there's actual There's actual statistics in terms of what fields men are more attracted to or what fields women are more attracted to.
Now, on the other hand, if there's a reason why women aren't attracted to those fields because they get harassed when they go into them, well, that should be demonstrated, and that's obviously a bad thing, and that should be addressed.
The concern that if the science doesn't come out a certain way, then people won't be treated equally is a bad idea because then you're going to force the science to be distorted if it doesn't match your political ideology.
So whether trans is natural or whatever percentage is or how old you have to be before you get trans surgery and the hormones or whatever, that's a raging debate right now.
But underlying that debate is, like, we have to make it come out in a way that trans people are treated equally.
It's like, no, no, they should be treated equally anyway, regardless of what the science says.
But that's a problem now.
Now, the problem for people like Pete and Brett, like, joining a think tank is almost all these think tanks are politically affiliated left or right.
You have to...
And therefore, you have to kind of toe the political line.
This is our ideology in this think tank, and you're going to write white papers and op-eds and send them out with our kind of slant.
The problem with that is, well, but what if I disagree with this and this and this here?
When you see that, I mean, I know he's not Jordan and, you know, there's very few people like Jordan, but Sam Harris is also able to do these speeches.
He's very compelling as well.
He's doing a lot of public speeches and doing these big, big events.
There's more opportunity to do alternative things now than have ever been before, and I would hope that that becomes available.
Look, I hope Pete just keeps his job.
But if he can't keep his job at Portland State, I would hope that some other avenue, some other path is possible.
That is my number one beef with conspiracy theories, is that when you, you know, some of them that are so preposterous, like whether it's Flat Earth or the really dumb ones.
There's a base on the opposite side of the moon and NASA knows about it.
Then when someone says, well, there's a conspiracy about this, well, it's already a tainted idea, because the word conspiracy is connected to nonsense.
Because there's so many nonsense conspiracy theories, it's hard to recognize, oh, something like Enron, that really did happen.
So the sort of baloney detection tools are not too finely tuned.
The problem is that the tendency is to look for some global, simple explanation for complex systems.
So while we all kind of recognize, yes, we know corporations cheat and stock traders trade with inside information, but that's kind of small and mundane.
It's not very interesting.
Global domination of the world.
This is, ooh, ooh, who's doing that?
Then it becomes like a Dan Brown novel.
It's more compelling as a narrative story about how the world works.
It's super simple.
There's these 12 guys in London called the Illuminati, and they're calling the shots, and they're controlling the Bilderbergers, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Illuminati, the CFR, the New World Order.
The more people that have to be involved, the less likely it is to be true.
It was Gordon Liddy that told me this, that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
People can't keep their mouths shut.
And also, he would know because he worked in government, most people are pretty incompetent.
So the idea that you could orchestrate a thousand people, and each of them is going to go out and do this one thing at 9 o'clock Tuesday, and it's all going to come together just perfect, impossible.
I mean, this idea that operatives went into the World Trade Center buildings, both of them, two of the most tightly controlled and secure buildings in the world, and under the pretense of working on the elevators, managed to get into and break through the drywall to get into the main beams to wrap them up in explosive devices, this thermite stuff.
Yeah.
We know how long it takes to demolish a stadium or a big building.
They're there for weeks or months preparing all the explosive devices.
Somehow they did this in the World Trade Center building without anyone noticing.
Not to mention all the people that worked on this.
They never told their spouses or friends or buddies what they were doing or they didn't mention it to anybody.
They don't want to go on CNN or 60 Minutes and go, I saw something and here's what happened.
Well, anytime you have a gigantic catastrophe like that, just a gigantic, horrific event, there's so many emotions, there's so much chaos, there's so much going on that you're going to get a bunch of really wacky eyewitness accounts because people just aren't good at remembering things when they're under extreme duress.
It's just a fact.
They hear things, they remember explosions, they see things that aren't necessarily what was really in front of them.
That's just...
The human memory is one of the most flawed ways of gathering information.
Right, and everything, once something happens, then you back up and look for all the sort of pregnant moments leading up to it that otherwise would have been unnoticeable.
With the JFK assassination, there's a famous story about the Umbrella Man.
And for decades, you can go online, you can see these examples of how the umbrella could have been turned into a rifle, and then he shot like that.
Anyway, somebody finally tracked this guy down decades later, and he said, I was out there protesting Kennedy.
The umbrella was a protest, and that stems back to Neville Chamberlain coming back after meeting with Hitler before Hitler annexed – I think it was the Sudetenland – and he came back and said, you know, holding his umbrella, here Hitler signed this paper and promised he wouldn't do anything more bad.
And so the umbrella became a symbol of sort of caving into evil people or what's the word for it?
Well also when you see the images of it collapsing what you don't see is the interior structure had collapsed previously and there's video of that where you watch the interior cave in and that as this fire was burning because apparently there was Obviously I don't know what really what happened, but there was diesel tanks apparently in the basement and the diesel fuel had burned incredibly hot and the whole inside of it all the structure had been completely weakened and and then as it collapsed it just all gave out.
It just happened to be a shit design.
If I was the guy who owned that building, I would sue everybody.
I mean, he got his money back, I guess, because there's some insurance money.
There was some issue with the legal insurance payout to the owner of the World Trade Center buildings, whether this was like one event or two events or one building or two.
The difference was between like $8 billion and $16 billion payout or something like that.
So the other problem with conspiracies, just to get back to that for a moment, is the problem of anomalies.
What do you do with anomalies?
This is true in all science.
No theory explains every single thing that's out there that we want to study.
There's always going to be some, like, quirky thing that the main theory here that explains all these things here doesn't account for that.
Okay, what do we do with that?
Well, my joke is you assign it to a grad student.
Let them figure it out.
But what outsiders mistake is that, well, my theory explains this little anomaly, so therefore it should replace this theory.
And so people like Neil and Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku has like two webpages.
He has a link on his webpage.
If you have an alternative theory of physics, go to this page.
So they go there and it has, your theory has to explain all of these things over here that our theory currently explains and your, whatever your said anomaly is.
And, of course, they can't.
So it's not that scientists are dogmatically close-minded to the anomalies.
It's that we can't explain everything, and you don't have to do anything with that.
Just leave it there.
Maybe eventually they'll pile up, and there'll be a new theory, like with Einstein's relativity.
Okay, there's enough anomalies here, like the orbit of Mercury and a few other things.
And so we have to modify Newtonian physics a little bit.
Okay, that happens.
But for the most part – and so conspiracies are filled with these things.
Like the moment something big happens, you go back and – okay, but there's this weird thing here.
He absolutely believes that we never went to the moon.
100% believes it.
I don't know if he still believes it.
I think he's like a cab driver or something now.
He was involved in the news or local television or something like that, back where he's from.
Then he released a documentary called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.
And in his documentary, one of the things he did have is some really interesting footage of the lunar module, where it looks like they're faking a shot of them being really far out, but then when they remove this cover, the covers from all the windows that were inside the lunar, not the lunar module, what is the one, the orbiter?
It really looks like they're in low Earth orbit.
And this is like the main thing pointing to that they couldn't get out of low Earth orbit.
Then there was also the fact that they lost all of the telemetry data, which was the binary, you know, the ones and zeros that show the position of the lunar module at every stage.
There was a bunch of different things.
The fact that no one wanted, especially Neil Armstrong, he became a recluse, never wanted to talk about it.
You go and watch the press conference, the press conference, they look very shady, look like they're completely full of shit.
He was very depressed and became an alcoholic after the moon landing.
And the idea is that, in conspiracy circles, if I'm talking as them, the idea is that he got over it after a while and needed to make a living, and now he talks about it constantly.
But Neil Armstrong never did the thing that's compelling is that there was there were some There's some faking going on if you look at Gemini was a Gemini 15 Michael Collins.
There's an image of Michael Collins when they were testing some of the space walking stuff and some of the some of the the things they would do to to walk outside of a spaceship They had them all strapped up with cables and they're just experimenting with these things.
They took that photograph and then blacked out the background.
Probably some overzealous PR agent.
You mean when they're in the pool in Houston?
This is it right here.
So what it is is like...
So the first one is clearly he's in a studio and they're working on things and just trying to understand how all this stuff works.
And the second one, they took the exact same photo and just reversed it and blacked out the background.
But that doesn't mean that they didn't go to the moon.
That just means that someone got a hold of some photographs and faked it.
It's way more likely that there was more of that going on than that people didn't actually go to the moon.
The thing about going to the moon that's really interesting is if they can go again, and they do go again, and they find all that stuff there, You know, then everybody has to just go, oh, yeah, I guess we were wrong.
What's interesting is the images of the dark side of the moon look exactly, even like the landing and the whole setup looks very similar to the Apollo missions.
So they would have to either be in cahoots or have worked together with NASA. Same sound studio.
Yeah, to figure, they'd use the old stuff.
Yeah, look at it.
I mean, this is the footage.
I mean, goddamn, that looks eerily similar to what you saw when the Apollo astronauts were there.
I think it is entirely possible that some of the practice film footage of them on the surface or doing things turned out to be pushed off as actual footage of moon landings.
There was no television.
Back then there was no internet.
There was no VCRs.
There was no ability to review things and watch them over again.
They projected something on television one time and that was it.
So when they released pressed releases and videos, it's entirely possible that some of those videos that got through were actually just tests.
It's entirely possible that there was, just like the Michael Collins photos, that there was some fuckery going on.
You're dealing with so many human beings.
You're dealing with so many people.
See, an estimated 530 million people watched Armstrong's televised image and heard his voice described.
You know, the Mythbusters did a nice episode on, you know, did we fake going to the moon, and they showed a bunch of little things.
For example, on the moon with its gravity, when you go something like that into the dust, you know, the particles come up and they arc back down in a certain way that would be different than if you're on Earth.
So the gravity is different, causes the dust to settle in a different way.
There was a bunch of things like that that proved we were there.
That is funny, but the conspiracy theorists would say, well, they couldn't send someone to the moon, so they had to fake it.
That's why they haven't been back.
They went from 1969 to 1973, is that what it was?
Six successful missions, seven attempts, Apollo 13 being the one that didn't make it.
It's a fun theory.
And what happened with me is I got way better at spotting bullshit and learning critical thinking skills and then paying attention to all sides.
I mean, the real issue...
With something like that, is if someone could prove, definitively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that not only is it impossible, that no one ever went to the moon, absolutely prove it, that would be giant.
The other analogy I use, like with the WikiLeaks, is there, of all those tens of, hundreds of thousands of memos and papers and letters and government documents, there's not one mention anywhere of 9-11 as an inside job, you know.
And we had to allocate these funds to go to this construction company who was then, you know, seen working at the World Trade Center.
Nothing like that.
So that, in this case, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The idea would be that it was compartmentalized and that everyone, like say if you're working on the O-rings, you don't have access to the people that are working on the thrusters.
If you have access to this, you don't have access to that.
And that there was only a very small group of people that controlled everything.
Also, 1969 was a very different environment in terms of what you could get away with and not get away with, what you could say.
It's just, it was really fun.
It was really fun to believe that they're fake going to the moon.
I spent an inordinate amount of time looking at it, but I completely dropped it.
And then if you have really high speed camera, you just see the insect.
But if you have low speed, standard definition video cameras, it creates this artifact as these things pass by very close to the lens at a high rate of speed, it elongates their video signal and it makes them look like this jellyfish type thing.
The other aspect with conspiracy theories is cognitive dissonance.
That is, we want the size of the event to be matched by a cause that's equally of that size.
So the analogy I use is, you know, the Holocaust, the worst genocide in human history caused by the Nazis, the worst regime, political regime in human history.
He has a massive book where he lines up every single one of the arguments by the JFK conspiracy.
For example, Experisists make a big deal about how Oswald got a job at the Book Depository building, which just happened to be where the parade route was going, so he could have a clear shot.
So it was Posner that tracked down when the White House determined, even when Kennedy was going to Dallas, let alone what the parade route would be, and Oswald already had the job there.
One, on the pro side, the idea that bullets will take a straight path is ridiculous.
I've talked to hunters that have shot animals in the front and had a bullet come out the same side they shot it.
It ricocheted off bones and came out like the front of the animal.
Like bullets take weird paths when they hit things in particular.
So do arrows.
They take, and as a person who's well versed in firearms and shot animals and hunted, you Sometimes a bullet goes straight through, and sometimes it hits bones and wacky things happen, things deflect.
But on the negative side, they always distort.
Bullets always distort, particularly when they hit bone.
What bothered me was that they found that bullet in Connelly's gurney, When they brought him to the hospital, they just conveniently found this bullet.
But one thing I do know a lot about is I know quite a bit about what bullets look like when they hit things.
I've looked into this pretty extensively and I've talked to a lot of people in law enforcement, military, hunters, and none of them believe that that bullet Hit bones, shattered bones, and came out looking like that.
Is it possible that that bullet was the only bullet ever in the history of the world that did do that?
Because of all the gunshots that happened in a short amount of time.
The reason why they came up with the theory of the magic bullet in the first place, because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb underneath the overpass.
Under no circumstances do I feel that this bullet could hit a wrist and still not be deformed.
We proved that by experiments as a chief consultant in wound ballistics for the U.S. Army who supervised tests for the Warren Commission.
Here's the thing.
I don't necessarily think that...
There was some grand conspiracy, but I do think it's entirely possible that someone took that posthumously, took that rifle, and wanted to pin it on Lee Harvey Oswald definitively.
Look, there's people that do things when they know someone's guilty, and they plant evidence.
Mark Furman did that with O.J. Simpson.
They found his glove, and they planted evidence.
And that was one of the reasons why O.J. got off, because there was some sort of conspiring to make it look like he was, you know, the evidence was a clear path.
They could have just taken that rifle and...
Look, it could have been that Oswald did it alone.
It's possible.
But it also could have been that some other people were shooting at him, too.
It could have been that they had decided to have Oswald be a part of this.
And when Jack Ruby ran in and shot him, that doesn't look a little suspicious?
That some guy with ties to the mob gets right up to this guy who just shot the president and shoots him?
There are conspiracies to assassinate foreign leaders.
Hitch wrote this book on Kissinger as a war criminal, that all the shenanigans we were doing in South America with dictators there were backing this dictator because he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch versus this guy, and we're going to assassinate Castro, all the stuff that came out that Johnson tried to cover up that came out.
In the Pentagon Papers about Kennedy plotting to have Castro assassinated, that's a kind of conspiracy.
Absolutely, this does happen.
The question is, did it happen in that particular case or this one or here?
And the evidence, in my opinion, after reading particularly Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, it's There's a funny internet meme that went around last week of a guy that dies goes to heaven and God says, you've been such a good fellow your whole life.
I'll grant you one which you can ask me anything.
He said, all right, who killed Kennedy?
And God said, it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone using his own Carcano rifle.
And the guy goes, this goes higher up than I thought.
Yeah, it kind of comes out the front, and one thing that does happen when people or things get shot is you have nerves, and nerves react, and things do weird results in your body.
I was, like, really bummed out when I went on stage.
And then I realized, like, oh, you can't – like, I didn't know any better.
I'd only been doing comedy for three years.
I'm like, oh, you can't go on stage bummed out.
Like, you've got to get your head together.
You can't just say the jokes and not have some emotional attachment to them.
But that book highlights – what it was was Lifton was a bookkeeper or an accountant, I believe.
And he was hired to do something with the Warren Commission Report.
And because he found some contradictions, and he went over the entire Warren Commission Report, which is an enormous, enormous publication, and he found all of these problems, all of these problems in the Warren Commission Report, and all these contradictions.
It was his determination after reading everything and writing his book.
He thought that the conclusion they made, they made before the fact and that they wrote all this stuff to sort of back up their conclusion that it wasn't based entirely on an objective version of the facts and of the event itself.
Well, this assassination of Franz Ferdinand that triggered the First World War, they messed up.
I mean, they had like seven of them, and they met in secret, and they got their weapons that morning, and so on, and a couple of them chickened out, somebody else got lost.
There's like three of them there.
Somebody threw a hand grenade, missed, rolled into the car behind Franz Ferdinand, and they got hurt and went to the hospital, and he's like, oh, fuck this.
I'm not giving my speech.
Let's go to the hospital and visit, see how he's doing.
So they double back like half an hour later.
They double back and come back down the same route.
And the guy who had missed, he was just sitting there on the curb.
If you put a target right where that thing was, right where that Lincoln was, and you put me in that window, I guarantee you I hit that target with a bow.
Then the other question I had, when you're coming up Houston Street and going left, I always wondered why he didn't shoot him there when the car's coming right at him.
What do you You're always going to get a bunch of really wacky conspiracies whenever anything happens in the news, whatever it is, anything and everything.
They flew in 15 people, including a guy who was a...
He was a forensics expert, and he was an expert in forensics evidence, and they think that he was there to make sure that there was nothing left behind.
This is the official story.
They strangled him, caught him up, and there's even recordings, apparently, that people have listened to.
Well, I have to say on this that Michael Moore's film on 9-11, he made the point, he was the first I'd seen make the point, that the Saudi Arabia family got out of the United States on 9-12 when all flights were canceled.
In this article I was writing, I cited the criminologist Manuel Eisner in a study of 1,500 monarchs in 45 monarchies across Europe between AD 600 and 1800. Found that about 15% of them, 227, were assassinated, corresponding to a homicide rate of about 1,000 per 100,000 ruler years, 10 times the background rate.
So in other words, assassinations in history are pretty common.
This is how power often changes hands before liberal democracy spread and after 1970s.
This was not uncommon.
So we shouldn't be surprised that people believe this kind of stuff because there's some truth to that.
The Khashoggi thing is unsettling to folks because what he was killed for, they think, well, there's two different versions of it, right?
He was killed for criticizing the Saudi Arabian government, but there's also that he was criticized because he was aware, or he was killed, rather, because he was aware of some spy software that's being utilized and that if he wrote a story about this spy software being utilized by the Saudi Arabian government that it would be a huge disaster Could be.
And I think that something like that does go on, maybe not quite so secretly, but just that, you know, you and I don't need to know these things.
Right.
You need to know basis.
And the president does.
When they're candidates, they say, oh, whatever they say to get elected.
And then they get in there and go, okay, I didn't realize that the Saudis are doing this and this and this, and we need them for these six reasons over here.
Okay, they did this bad thing, and if we condemn them, then they're not going to do these things over here, so I better lay off the condemnation.
What's fascinating to me about Trump is that he doesn't seem to care at all about violating protocol or about releasing information that he probably should.
I mean, he's already accidentally released top secret information.
I would just feel like if he knew for sure some stuff, he would be the last guy you would want to trust with that.
But, you know, this thing about him wanting to pull the troops out of Syria, there's got to be another story behind there.
Like, you know, Putin maybe said, look, we got to take care of our business here in Syria.
We're going to take care of Americans over here and you get your Trump Tower in Red Square when I'm gone.
Whatever, you know, there's some kind of – that kind of stuff is the sort of thing that will come out in a – The equivalent of a WikiLeaks in 20 years will go, oh, like the Gulf of Tonkin.
It depends on who your group is and do they have power or not.
So we know from studies that people that are out of power tend to concoct conspiracy theories about those in power.
And the moment they get in power, they drop the conspiracy theories and the ones that are out.
So you're going to get more conspiracy theories about Republicans when the Democrats are out of power from left-leaning people and vice versa.
Blacks are more likely to think that the CIA planted crack cocaine in the inner cities and those sorts of things.
Conservatives are more likely to fear big government conspiracies.
Liberals are more likely to fear big corporate conspiracies.
There may be elements of truth in all of these things, but the ones you latch on to have to do with How much power you perceive the other guy has that you don't have, and therefore they must be doing something to get that that I can't do.
I'm on the outside.
And so we tend to misperceive how much control and power people really have in positions of power, CEOs, politicians, and so on.
Usually they don't have as much control and power as we think they do.
And people that get in there, they go, oh, I don't have this kind of control or power.
I thought I would when I got here, but obviously I don't.
Too many things that have to check some balances that are in place.
In other words, like 12 guys in London are going to control the world's economy.
How are they going to do that?
I mean, who do you call to start a war and cause inflation or whatever?
More likely, it's like in the Cuban Missile Crisis, where you have jockeying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Okay, look, we're going to give you the missiles in Turkey if you take the missiles out of Cuba.
And it just ends up being some boring little thing that dissolves...
The tension that could have been World War III. It's like, wow, just this little thing.
So much of history turns on those little – so in a way, we got lucky there, but not just luck.
I mean, Kennedy and Khrushchev both wanted to untie the knot.
Khrushchev sent a memo to Kennedy saying – You have pulled on this rope, and I have pulled on this rope, and I don't know if either of us can untie it, but here's an idea.
That's when he floated the, you take the missiles out of Turkey.
And I was just watching this Netflix documentary on this, and there was a thing about Castro sent a memo to Khrushchev saying, light him up!
You know, comrade, we are ready to die for the cause.
You can just nuke all of Cuba and nuke America.
I don't care.
We're ready to die.
And Khrushchev apparently was like, holy fuck, this guy's a madman.
This was during the times of Operation Northwood when they were going to blow up a drone jetliner and blame it on the Cubans and arm Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay and use it as a motivation to get us into war.
Castro was a fascinating case because that guy kept that place 90 miles away from Miami.
He kept that place running on his own until he died.
I mean, every country has its perspectives in that regard, which is why it's good to know some history so you know what other people are thinking and what they went through.
So I'm interviewing or dialoguing with Rachel Kleinfeld.
She has a new book called A Savage Order.
And it's about failed states and what happens to them and why corruption spreads so quickly and then how to basically squelch that.
So like after the Soviet Union fell apart, you know, all these mobs basically took over and it's like the Russian mafia, the Republic of Georgia fell apart fairly quickly.
And then, you know, so one of the reasons people apparently like Putin is he kind of came in and squelched all that.
And maybe one of his points of popularity is that at least we have one bad guy who's kind of keeping order instead of all these little mafioso-type gangs.
Yeah.
And then I said, so if he actually held an election, he might win.
It's hard to say because we don't have a good source of what the Russian people really like.
We have the Russian media saying, the Russian people love Putin.
Another Netflix series I just binge-watched, Trotsky.
It's called Trotsky, and this is a Russian-made movie.
It's a drama and it's really good and it really shows – it's interesting because Trotsky was on the outs all the way until just recently because Stalin had him assassinated and then Stalin had him literally airbrushed out of photographs because for a while it was Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky as the big three.
And then when Lenin had a stroke, it was like, okay, so Stalin and Trotsky, who's going to take over when the boss is gone?
You've been in this business, this debunking conspiracies in the skeptic business for quite a long time.
Do you feel like there is any improvement in the critical thinking skills of people and their ability to recognize the falsies and the flaws and the way they're approaching these things?
There are some studies that show fewer people believe in these pseudosciences and quackery and paranormal, but the declines are not that dramatic over, say, the last few decades.
There are deprogramming, biased deprogramming studies and programs in which you can teach people about the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and so on.
The problem with those is they work really well to teach people how to spot the biases in other people.
They're really good at that.
But then you say, well, what about you?
Oh, you know, fortunately, I'm above all that.
So there's a blind – that's called the blind spot bias.
You can't see your own bias, but you can see it in other people.
The reason these studies are done is because we have a problem with climate change.
We have climate deniers.
How do we get people who don't know anything about it to shift from I'm a skeptic to I'm a believer?
And it turns out just piling on facts isn't going to do it.
No, people's identity are trapped in their initial beliefs.
Their initial statements.
If they think that 9-11 was a conspiracy, their identity is somehow inexorably connected to this conspiracy being a fact.
And then you argue it as if you're arguing your own value.
It's a really weird thing that happens when people start talking about ideas.
You very rarely find people that are disconnected from their ideas to the point where you could point out that something's incorrect and they go, oh, thank you, I didn't know that.
Also, if it's a belief or claim or theory or whatever affiliated with a political or moral or religious value – The people auto-correct in their brains when they hear global warming, they hear liberalism, communism, anti-capitalism, control of the market, big government, and I'm against those things, so that global warming thing has got to be false.
Pinker makes the point that Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a terrible thing for the environmental movement because it associated global climate change with liberalism, the Democrats, And all that.
I would love it if there was some sort of a secular option, a community-driven, ethics-driven, morality-driven, friendship-driven thing where people could go and instead worship, maybe just appreciate life.
And sort of confirm some of the best aspects of community and culture and who we are and do it in a place where it makes you really conscious of it.
So, because I think there's some real benefit to people going to church and everyone in the community dresses up nice and you're sort of agreeing, hey, we're committed to being civil and to being kind and to worshiping.
And that this belief in a higher power, if...
It empowers people to think this way, and it gives people a motivation to be kind.
It would be nice if there was a secular option like that that is decentralized.
It's not run by one person who winds up banging everybody's wife and taking all the money, because that's what happens, right?
I mean, I was having this conversation with Bill Burr about this recently.
We were talking about it, and he's like, I don't really want to go to church, but I think there's something to that, to go into a place and putting your faith in all the people around you and the higher values and morals and ethics that you're all agreeing to.
The percentage of nuns, people tick the box for no religious affiliation.
That used to be in the single digits.
It's now 25% of all Americans, 33% of millennials, those born after 1991. And it looks like probably with iGeners it's going to be closer to 50%, people born after 1995. Now, they're not necessarily atheist, agnostic skeptics, but they don't affiliate with any religion.
And that's good because in the sense that, you know, it's religious behavior that causes some of these social problems that we are encountering now with Islam, for example.
You know, so if somebody privately believes in God or whatever and they don't act on it, okay, I guess I don't care in that sense.
It's the acting on your beliefs that causes the problem.
Well, that's one of the real problems they're having in Europe when they're dealing with people that are coming over from other countries where they have a different set of values and they're seeing women in skirts and they're calling them whores.
These are primitive beliefs having to do with men wanting to control women's reproductive rights.
There's evolutionary reasons for this.
You had Brett and Heather on here, and they explained that beautifully.
But we have to overcome that.
Just because it's an evolved tendency for men to want to control women's reproduction doesn't mean we should do that.
In fact, it's the opposite.
And so I make the case in one of my Scientific American columns on abortion that You know, if our mutual goal between pro-lifers and pro-choicers is to reduce the amount of abortions, we know the formula.
Educate women, empower women, birth control, access to birth control, and so on.
It just happens automatically.
The pregnancy rates go down, therefore abortion rates are going to go down.
We know how to do this.
But still, people, the pro-lifers, just glom on to it.
But it's a moral issue.
Take the moral out of it.
I understand it's a human life or potential human, whatever you want to argue about that.
The idea that they're trying to push this on these, essentially, especially when you're talking about really young people that are just getting horny for the first time.
Well, there's also the thing where Catholic schools, like when I was a kid, we always knew, and we're talking about in the 80s, everyone knew that girls who went to all-girls Catholic schools were freaks, because they were never around boys, because they were all in just a school with girls, and everything is suppression, suppress, suppress, suppress.
They just can't wait.
They get out, they find a boy, and they go crazy.
Like, everybody knew it.
I mean, this is not something that I knew as a comedian or as a person who studies culture.
This is something I knew as a 14-year-old.
Everyone knew that girls who went to all-girl Catholic schools were freaks.
There was a study, a British study I found, that found some small, it was like 1.5% or whatever, of 10,000 women who said they got pregnant without having sex.
Well, it's – the need for belief systems is – it's so – I mean, it helps people to have belief systems if they're positive and they're objective and they're well-reasoned and they're – you know, these are, you know, backed by facts and knowledge.
It helps.
But the need for belief systems is so strong that we'll take a belief system that's wonky.
That's the way I put it, and something's going to be in there.
So let's try to put in those brains rational, science-based values.
And we have those.
I mean, humanist values, the humanist movement is now almost a century old.
Universal Human Rights, the Universal Human Rights Declaration just celebrated its 50th anniversary.
You can get diverse people to agree.
You don't have to have the correct philosophical arguments to get there, but, you know, just everybody should be treated equally under the law.
Can we at least agree on that?
Yes, okay.
I mean, if you start off with – Pinker makes this point in Enlightenment Now – if you start off with, Jesus died for our sins, that's the most important value to me, you're not going to get agreement in a room full of, you know, UN diversity.
You've got to start with something super basic in general.
You've been in this for a long time, and you've done some really valuable work.
It's so nice that there's someone like you that really has dedicated their life to really illuminating truth, exposing all the flaws in people's thinking.
Do you feel like the reception of this is...
It's easier now, or there's momentum behind this kind of thinking?
Obama in 2011. Although you never know when a politician says something.
Of course.
But now, so I predict, you know, like the gay marriage thing, no one will even be talking about it in another year or two.
It'll change so quickly.
And so across the board, the acceptance now of atheists, humanists, secularists, agnostics, whatever, has become much better.
In most places, there's still some, of course, Islamic countries where Not only would they burn me and you, they'd burn Catholics because they picked the wrong religion.
I wonder if there's some improvement there in those countries because of the internet with younger people when they're being exposed to these new ideas.
The last time I saw a big poll was on how supportive you would be of Sharia law.
And these were pretty scary, like a third to a half.
Of Muslims living in Muslim countries said they would support Sharia law.
And if you look at Sharia law, as you know, it's pretty scary.
Very anti-democratic, illiberal attitudes about rights and women and things like that.
So there, I think the prediction would be, yes, millennials and iGeners, when they get into power, then maybe – not just political power, but like controlling talk shows, radio shows, TV shows, scripts, things like that.
I think most moral change happens in people's minds from inculcating it from culture, pop culture, of just how you talk about other people.
Dawkins makes this point that you can tell pretty much down to the decade when a book was written by the way they talk about women, like a novel, talk about women or blacks or whatever, going back, say, a century.
You can say, well, that was 1930s, the way they're talking about Jews, you know?
And that's the kind of thing that shifts very slowly.
You hardly notice it.
But from people like you, comedians, you tell certain jokes or you say certain things and it becomes more acceptable.
Scripts for television shows and films.
And all of us kind of watch it and absorb it and just think, yeah, you know, we shouldn't be saying those kinds of things about women and Jews and blacks or whatever.
Stop doing that.
Not consciously.
You just kind of soak it in.
So I think you still need laws.
We have to sometimes change the law and just say, okay, it's now illegal to discriminate against Jews or whatever.
You can't do that.
Now, people may still want to do that.
How do we change their thinking?
Well, that's the bottom-up thing that takes the course of decades or maybe a century.
And it takes generations sometimes because the new young kids have to see the flaws in the way their parents are thinking and have access to this information and form their own opinions on these things, hopefully based on objective reasoning and reality and all the awesome stuff that's available now.
What do you think about the pushback against this idea that we are living in the safest time ever and that there is an absolute trend?
Like Pinker gets criticized about this, where people say, no, the world is still not safe for these people, for this group, for that group, and for you saying that the world just shows your white privilege and this white male perspective and...
I'm on board with Steve across the board on these things.
He's got the data.
It depends on the question you're asking.
It's like if you say, yeah, but my life is not better.
We're not talking about your life.
The question is, is society getting better?
Of course there's ups and downs, and this group is doing better than that group, and yes, there's still some racial discrimination, and yes, there's still clearly anti-semis, as we've seen recently.
But across the board, if you take the last 200 years, Which direction are the trend lines going?
They're all going in the right direction.
So again, it's scale.
The question is, what's the scale we're talking about?
So it's a little unfair to Pinker to say, well, you're blind to that thing over there.