Michael Shermer examines conspiracy theories, arguing they’re not inherently irrational—some, like MKUltra (CIA LSD experiments) or Operation Paperclip (Nazi scientists recruited by the U.S.), are proven, while others, like JFK’s assassination, lack consensus despite 60+ years of debate. He critiques viral trends (e.g., wolf-child TikTok) and mass hysteria (1980s satanic panic, McMartin preschool case), comparing them to modern phenomena like cancel culture and flawed eyewitness testimony. On sports, Shermer warns against post-puberty male-to-female transgender participation, citing a 26-hour gap in endurance races and parallels to doping, while Rogan debates fairness in separate divisions. The episode questions whether cultural validation drives identity trends, like the rise in young trans identification, and explores untested claims—from DMT’s "alternate realities" to Bigfoot sightings—highlighting the tension between evidence and belief in an evolving world of science and society. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, first of all, my argument is that it's not irrational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true.
That it pays to err on the side of assuming more of them are true than actually are, then missing real conspiracy theories, and then that's a costlier error to make.
Yeah, well, around that time, right, before that, before World War II, really, conspiracy theories were kind of common knowledge.
Everybody knew that things were going on behind closed doors, and it was just kind of commonly known, and we just got to try to figure it out.
It didn't become really fringy until right after the JFK thing.
It kind of got as a meme that you're crazy to think these conspiracy theories are true.
It became pathologized.
Richard Hofstetter's, you know, the paranoid style in American politics kind of put that on the map.
It's conspiracy theories are...
It's something delusional.
It's a pathology in your brain.
Whereas before that, it wasn't.
It was just, I mean, even the Declaration of Independence, it's a conspiracy theory.
It's saying, look, the British are doing this whole train of abuses and usurpations, and here's what we think they're up to, and here's what we think they want to do, and we're against that.
It's printed right there in the Declaration.
So it's not fringy, right?
It was kind of commonly known that these things happen.
Oh, well, I have a whole chapter on it and we can get into that in a second.
The twist about it where it seems like there was something up was that President Johnson was worried that if it looks like there's a conspiracy afoot with the Cubans or the Russians, that that could lead to a nuclear exchange.
So we don't want the American people to think that this is some kind of vast conspiracy of the Russians.
Well, before the Oliver Stone film, I hadn't really given it that much thought.
Well, the Warren Report seems pretty thorough, but who knows?
What do I know?
And then the Oliver Stone film, which floats every conspiracy theory there was in one package, and I thought, well, if 10% of this is true, it seems like there was something else going on.
But then, you know, there were webpages posted of, like, here are all the mistakes in the film and here are all the counterarguments.
And then I read Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and why all the evidence points to him.
And then Vincent Bogliosi's book, Reclaiming History, which is like 1,500 pages long.
And it dissects every one of the hundreds of conspiracy theories.
Something on the order of 140 people have been accused and a couple hundred organizations have been affiliated with the JFK assassination.
The problem is that there's no convergence of evidence to any other one than Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.
It worries you because it makes people suspicious or it worries you because it points to their withholding information because that information looks bad?
So if you draw a line straight back to the sixth floor window of the book depository building, the bullet goes straight through his back, out his neck, into Connelly, through his arm, into his leg, and so forth, in a straight line.
I know a lot about bullets, and one of the problems about bullets is there's never been a bullet that's gone through bone and shattered bone and gone through two different bodies and came out looking like that.
That looks like a bullet that was shot into water.
Even rifle bullets that are copper, because in California you can't use lead bullets anymore because condors and a lot of other Birds of prey, they eat the lead bullets and they get lead poisoning.
Because, like, if there's an animal that gets shot and the hunter doesn't recover it, and then the condor or something else eats that, you know, some sort of a raptor eats that, then they get lead poisoning.
But bullets expand and they break up.
They don't look like that.
That bullet was found in Connelly's gurney, which is, like, so ridiculous.
The idea that, oh, look, we found the bullet here.
It just managed to magically fall out of his body and look pristine.
And during the time he was in jail, he was visited by Jolly West, who was the head of the CIA's MK Ultra LSD experiments.
They most certainly did something to Manson while he was in jail.
And they also supplied him.
There's anecdotal evidence that shows that they supplied him with LSD when he got out of jail.
Every time he got arrested for violating parole, these cops and these local sheriffs that had caught him were told that it was above their pay grade and they had to release him.
Manson got out for multiple offenses after he was on parole, things that should have kept him locked up.
There's some real good evidence that, you know, about MKUltra was a real thing.
Okay, but my point is that, let's say it was the mayor of Dallas that was shot that day, would there be vast conspiracy industry of books and films and so on?
It doesn't seem right that a lone nut like Lee Harvey Oswald could have pulled this off, or that 19 guys with box cutters could have taken down the World Trade Center bill.
It just doesn't feel right.
So we add elements.
This is my theory.
We add elements of causality to match it.
You know, princes die, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seat belt.
But it doesn't feel right that a princess, famous and so forth, would die the same way most people do.
How do you know which conspiracy theories are correct?
They tag an actual conspiracy, right?
So I draw this two-by-two grid.
So up here you have real conspiracy theories that are real, and you associate them with that correctly.
You say, yeah, that's what I agree.
That's a hit.
So conspiracy theories that are real, and you go, no, I don't believe it.
I don't think there's a real conspiracy.
That's a miss.
So that's a big miss, right?
That's a type 2 error.
You don't want to miss those because those are real.
That could harm you.
Down here you have conspiracy theories that are not true and you think they are.
So that's a false positive, a type 1 error.
That's a low-cost error to make.
It doesn't cost a lot.
It's not risky to assume a conspiracy theory is real when it's not.
And so this is my argument, is that we've evolved this cognition to be very suspicious and paranoid about other people and what they're doing because, historically and evolutionarily-wise, in these small bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers, anthropologists tell us there's a lot of conniving and cabals and so on.
But it also pays to be rational and recognize which ones are conspiracies and which ones are probably people just in the moment of chaos like 9-11 adding a bunch of stuff to what they've experienced and just the chaos of the incident.
I've heard explosions.
I saw this.
I saw that.
And you know that in times like that of great distress, people and eyewitness testimonies are some of the most unreliable because people are so blown away by the extreme moment that they can't really recall things correctly.
If I had to guess, it would be something like what the CIA was up to even more than what we know about, you know, overthrowing, rigging elections in South American countries, assassinating communist dictators.
Well, there was a made-for-television BBC trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in absentia, in which Jerry Spence was his defense attorney in absentia, and what's-his-name was the prosecutor, the Reclaiming History, the Manson guy, the guy who put Manson away.
I just mentioned his name.
I'm sorry, I'm spacing out on it.
Biosi?
Vincent Biosi.
Again, the jury, again, it's not a real jury, it's a made-for-TV series, but they presented all the evidence and they acquitted, I mean, they convicted Oswald based on the evidence as the lone assassin, because there was just nothing pointing to anybody else.
So here's how I think about it.
There could be somebody else involved.
But we need some evidence, at least some paper trail.
Why in the Pentagon Papers that released all these top secret documents that Nixon tried to cover up and prevent from being published?
There's nothing in there about, you know, the conspiracy to assassinate the CIA. Right, but they've stopped release of all of the documents about the Kennedy assassination.
Well, that's only one piece that, I mean, his assumption that it was because of Them trying to get out of Vietnam was only one of the assumptions that they made.
His other assumptions were the mob.
It was the CIA. He wanted to get rid of a lot of the intelligence agencies.
He had a real problem with secret societies and secrecy and secrecy in government.
He made that famous speech about secret societies.
Where the FBI was sending in agents to act as social justice activists in American Indian movement, feminist groups, the Black Panthers, and so on, including blackmailing Martin Luther King Jr., recording his sexcapades in hotel rooms.
But I talked to Mike Baker, who was formerly with the CIA. I use air quotes formally.
He had investigated that for his television show and he said that is one of the weirdest ones because that guy was funded in some strange way.
Like he was kind of a loser and then all of a sudden he had money and there was someone he believes was involved in aiding that guy to assassinate Martin Luther King.
Now, to be fair to the other side, you know, if you read about the development of the U-2 spy plane and the AR-71 Blackbird, you know, this was done in Burbank, near where you used to live.
And that's right in the heart of LA. How did they do this for all those years and nobody knew about it, right?
So, again, like with the recent UAP sightings, What I want, my initial response is the SR-71 Blackbird was, before it was declassified, there were commercial pilots going, oh my god, there's something going 3,000 miles an hour, 50,000 feet above me at 30,000 feet.
This is impossible.
We don't have anything like that.
Well, actually, we did have something like that.
So I suspect that some of these UAPs, I think in a decade or two, we're going to find out, oh, we had these incredible drones that could fly at these peaks.
It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things with no visible means of propulsion, no technology that we currently know is available could act in the way those things were acting.
I wonder if that is what it is, if they have some sort of very advanced drones.
And the fact that they seem to be transmedium, they seem to be able to enter into the ocean and then leave the ocean, I wonder.
I wonder if that's something that we have because these things, they're – one of the ones that he described is like a translucent circle with a black sphere inside of it.
And that when they updated their radar systems in 2014, they started seeing them all over the place on their systems.
And that these people spotted them visually and that they were behaving in a way like at 130 mile an hour winds or completely stationary.
Particularly in the places where people like Graves say they—I mean, when Graves told you, we saw these things every day, it's like, every day, there surely must be high-resolution photos of these things.
But listen, the federal government, imagine they are running top secret programs using advanced drones and the technology that we're not currently aware of, right?
And that the United States government has these.
They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things.
And according to Christopher Mellon, a guy who, you know, did work for the Defense Department, he said there are top secret videos and photographs that he's seen or that he's aware of that are pretty spectacular that they don't understand.
Just like the Blackbird, just like the Stealth Bomber, many of the other projects that they have that were top secret before they became public, why would they release all that information?
Probably wouldn't.
I wonder what that stuff is.
And the fact that it happens so often in that very specific area...
I mean, the Russians had, you know, so 1945 was Hiroshima and 1949 the Russians, they stole our secrets, right?
So this idea that, you know, these are super advanced drones that we have and the Russians and Chinese don't have, it's not likely they would not know the technology that we know, the physics, the aerodynamics and the engineering and all that, because they read the same journals, they do the same research we do.
But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the data that they've acquired, when they're looking at something like Commander David Fravor, who, when they were off the coast with the Nimitz, when they tracked that thing that went from above 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second, what's that?
What is that thing that they have visual contact by multiple sources, and they tracked it, and they have video of this thing moving off at insane rates of speed?
But if there was any evidence that pointed to something that operated in a way that we can't comprehend any of the known technologies being able to reproduce, that's one of them.
Right, but if you're talking about something from another planet or something from another civilization that we're not aware of that's on Earth, maybe that lives in the water.
We don't know.
We don't know.
And when you're seeing these things, when you're talking about people that are the best fighter pilots that we have available, that are operating with the most sophisticated fighter jets, with tracking systems that are constantly being updated, and then when they update them, they start picking up these things, like Ryan Graves discussed on the podcast.
Why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else?
So the question is, what do we do with that other 5 percent of anomalies?
No theory explains everything.
There's always going to be anomalies in every scientific theory.
What do you do with it?
Nothing.
You assign it to a graduate student to figure it out.
That's future research.
Rather than going to a grand theory of visitation by aliens or the Russians or Chinese have these super advanced technologies that we don't have or we have them and they don't have.
I mean, again, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something pretty close to that.
There's nothing from the videos in Ukraine of any Russian drones that act anything like these UAPs.
Surely they would use this technology if they had it.
I mean, why would we assume that these things, if they're capable of behaving in this way and they're just some sort of a device that can travel at insane rates of speed, why would we assume that those things can launch missiles or act in a military capacity?
Yeah, but okay, so Avi did a nice paper on that showing that these were artillery shells and not what the other people said they thought it was, that it was like a drone or a plane or something weird like that.
He showed that if it was what they thought it was, it would have had a much bigger impact going through the atmosphere at that speed and burning up, but it didn't, so these are artillery shells.
Have you seen some of the new discussions based on the observations from the James Webb telescope that maybe the Big Bang Theory needs to be revisited?
And we would assume that with more and more sophisticated ways of viewing the known universe, that we could possibly get some new data that would change our ideas of what the theory of the Big Bang theory or the theory of the universe itself would be.
And that's one of the things that they're discussing right now.
What was that?
There was a recent article.
What was it in?
Which scientific publication they were discussing whether or not the Big Bang Theory needs to be revisited?
I mean, what kind of discovery would it take in terms of UAPs for you to revisit your position?
And say it's highly likely that this is either something that we don't understand that we are observing that's come from somewhere else or something that we don't understand because it's technology that hasn't been released.
Why is it so fun, though, to think that it's from somewhere else?
It's so much more fun to think that we're being visited than to think that our government has some super sophisticated gravity-propelling drones that somehow or another violate our laws of space-time.
I think it's an idea that it feels like we're not alone.
And when you think about the narratives from different religions, that there's something, an agent, a person, a being, not just matter, not just the laws of nature.
And by the way, in the climax scene where the authorities kill him and they put him in the tomb, it's like the crucifixion of Jesus, and they put him in the tomb, and three days later, he's resurrected.
Well, and then she goes to the robot and says, what you just said, and he goes there, burns a hole into the morgue, takes the body, takes it back to the spaceship, lays it on that slab, does some stuff with the lights, and he comes back to life.
Now, in the original script...
She, the Mary Magdalene character woman, says, Patricia Neal, you mean this is the power that extraterrestrials have?
And in the original one, he goes, yeah, we have the power of life and death.
And the Breen Censorship Board in 1950 said, no, no, no, you can't say that to the American public.
Well, I mean, even Star Trek, the original series, I mean, Roddenberry had to sneak in a lot of anti-Vietnam War commentary through these characters and had to be careful of how they...
They were, you know, kind of presented because censorship boards are like that.
You know, Captain Kirk, you know, he always got the woman, but, you know, you never saw anything, right?
I didn't know that they would have a censorship board that would say you can't offend religious people by saying that aliens have the power to bring things back from the dead.
Because as you went through the scenario earlier, a thousand years more advanced than us, a million years more advanced than us.
Look how far we've come in a hundred years.
Extrapolate that out.
They'd be able to engineer life forms, probably even engineer entire planetary systems to create Dyson spheres to capture all these fantastic scenarios.
That would all be possible if you had sufficient time and intelligence.
How would that be any different from what religions think God is?
Yeah, I mean, and now extrapolate, go from here to 100,000 years of technology as long as we don't blow ourselves up or have a super volcano kill us all.
Scientists from University of Cambridge have created model embryos from mouse stem cells that form a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations of all other organs of the body.
So if you think of a life form that exists out there, you know, millions of light years away that has achieved this sort of advanced technology, Do you think that they would want to be visiting us and be interested in us with our nuclear power and all of our chaos and our territorial behavior and the fact that we have these thermonuclear weapons and we're pointing them at each other?
Well, not in principle just because you're a cynic or, you know, a nihilist.
Not for that reason.
The question is, you know, what should we believe?
You know, justified true belief.
What should I believe is true?
Some things are true.
Some things are not.
I want to believe the correct things.
How do I know?
So this is what science has kind of developed, science and rationality, over the centuries.
Okay, so we know we're biased.
We know we have to be careful about the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and so on.
So we have to set up some kind of system where it's not just me claiming it.
You can look at it, too.
You can run the experiment.
Here's how I did it.
You do it.
And when that's not done, we have all kinds of problems, like the replication crisis in psychology and medical science over the last decade or so.
Some significant two-digit percentage of these experiments can't be replicated.
Even though they went through peer-reviewed professional journals and they were done by professional scientists at real universities and so on, So it's hard to know what to believe.
There's also a problem of basing science on falsified studies, like the Alzheimer's issue that they're dealing with now.
The whole amyloid plaque thing where they found out that a lot of...
I don't want to butcher this because obviously I'm not a scientist, but there's a series of Alzheimer's drugs that were based on research that was falsified.
And they're finding this out now.
And this is a terrible thing for people that have invested their health in these medications, people that have promoted these medications, that this was all based on falsified data.
Or how about the- Find that, because that's pretty fascinating.
Because that, here it is, this is a legitimate conspiracy.
Neuroscience Image Sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer's articles threatening a reigning theory of the disease.
That's terrifying to find out that the people that are responsible for doing these experiments falsified.
Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University, got a call that would plunge him into a maelstrom.
Of possible scientific misconduct.
A colleague wanted to connect him with an attorney investigating an experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease called semifilam.
The drug's developer, Cassava Sciences, claimed an improved cognition, partly by repairing a protein that can block sticky brain deposits of the protein amyloid beta, a hallmark of Alzheimer's.
The attorney's clients, two prominent neuroscientists who are Also, short sellers who profit if the company's stock falls believe some research related to simulflam may have been fraudulent according to a petition later filed on the behalf of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Rare that a journalist from the outside discovers that he's usually a grad student or something that's suspicious of what the mentor professor is doing.
So that's a problem, right?
So that's why you have to disclose any financial connections you have to companies.
That might be affiliated with a drug that could treat the thing you're studying, that sort of thing.
So there's more pressure to do that.
There was another big meta-analysis on SSRIs, the antidepressants, showing big massive meta-analysis.
50 years we've been prescribing these SSRIs for depression, and they do no better than nothing or just chance or just talking to friends or whatever.
So now there's a movement afoot to kind of have scientists say ahead of time, post on these websites, this is the experiment I'm going to do.
Here's exactly what I'm going to do.
I will report all of the data.
So then you avoid the file drawer problem where you only publish the successful ones, the rest go in the file drawer that are not successful.
I mean, a lot of major journals will not publish replication experiments.
They're not interested in that.
They want cutting-edge new research.
Well, this is a problem because, again, if you have this theory and no one can replicate it, but no one wants to publish the non-replication because it's not interesting, then you can go down this rabbit hole of an error perpetrating for decades.
I have a friend, and my friend's wife is a schoolteacher.
And she told him that there was discussions in the school that a mother wanted to put a litter box in one of the bathrooms.
And he told me this, and I talked about it on here, and then people were saying, that's not true, it's an internet rumor.
So I contacted him again, and I said, tell me exactly what she said and contact her and find out.
She no longer works for that school, she works for another school.
She contacted the other school, she didn't get a response.
I don't think they actually did it.
I think there was discussions about doing it because there was one particularly wacky mother, but it doesn't seem that there's any proof that they put a litter box in there.
The reason why I was interested in it and willing to entertain it was...
It was about 10 years or so ago, we went to, there was a UFC in Pittsburgh.
And when we went there, as we landed where we're driving from the airport to the hotel, we see all these people with mascot outfits on.
We're like, what is going on?
And we talked to this guy and he said, there's a furry convention in town.
So they were at bars and on the streets, and it was like a get-together.
They used to do it in San Diego, but at the time, San Diego was a little bit more conservative, and they were having a hard time doing it, so they moved it to Pittsburgh.
And this was the year they moved it to Pittsburgh.
This is according to him.
So we check into the hotel.
The hotel, the guy who was working the front desk was saying how crazy it was that these folks were asking for their food to be delivered in bowls on the ground so they could eat it like animals.
And I'm like, that is crazy.
And then he said, they asked for a litter box in the lobby.
There is a report from ABC, though, where they went and talked to a bunch of younger kids and parents that were having a meeting, and they're like, our kids like to dress up and talk this way.
But you should see how different they are when they do it.
Yeah, but so what happens then is—so there's an element of truth to the—and this is true with conspiracy theories—a little element of truth, and then it gets blown up into something else.
And then if it gets politicized, oh, that's just the sort of thing those libtards would do in these schools of trying to groom our children.
Then you get a moral panic.
It's like the satanic panic of the 1980s.
It started with that McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach.
Before the OJ trial, this was the longest and most expensive trial in California history, that McMartin preschool case.
But it launched this kind of satanic panic around America.
There's one of these cults in every city.
And finally, the FBI got involved and said, all right, we better look into this.
And they found nothing.
Okay, you can always find some weirdo who's a Satanist, right?
And maybe they do some weird things with a cat or something, or a cat gets mutilated by a dog, and then you got the Satanist, he's over there, and then the mutilated cat was found over there, there must be some connection, and before you know it, you get this spiraling moral panic.
And it was similar to the recovered memory movement in the 90s that when we started in 92, we started covering this because it was the same kind of thing where these were adult, mostly women, going into therapy for various issues, sleep problems, depression, weight issues, whatever.
And the therapist who had bought in all this Freudian stuff that you suppress, you suppress your memories, and we can get them out as if memory is like a video recording, and you can watch it on the little Cartesian theater of your mind as if there's a little homunculus in there looking at the screen.
Okay, play back for me what your father did.
Now, they don't start off like that.
They just go, okay, so what are your issues?
And the client says what the issues are.
Well, you know, some people that have those symptoms were molested when they were children.
Well, no, that didn't happen to me.
Well, I know you don't think it happened to you.
But in fact, we know about repressed memories that you repress the memory of that trauma because it's so traumatic.
Really?
Yeah.
How do I know?
Okay, have you ever had a dream or ever had fleeting thoughts about this, this, and this?
Yeah, I think I might have.
So six months later...
Now the person thinks, I think this actually happened to me.
And then there's this big moment of confrontation with the father, grandfather, uncle, whoever it is.
And, of course, they're just in a state of shock, like, this is horrible.
And then it got worse where they were actually tried, put on trial.
And some of these guys were convicted based on nothing other than one of these recovered memories.
And it was a similar situation where they were using hypnotic regression.
And the problem was the way the questions were formulated and the way these hypnotic regression sessions were conducted, a lot of people thought was extremely unscientific and in fact could have introduced these ideas.
Because one of the things was like, oh, this is a uniform tale that everyone keeps telling.
Okay, well, do you have the same person asking these people these questions?
And how are they doing this?
And do they have a vested interest, like perhaps maybe they're publishing a book?
Do they have a vested interest in trying to make this a narrative?
And it turns out, yeah, that seems to be the case, that they were asking these people these very leading questions and taking them through these hypnotic regression sessions, and they were all convinced that they were abducted by aliens.
Yeah, the pioneering researcher on this, Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who studies memory, she made famous these studies of where you show people like a video of a car accident, and you ask one group, how fast would you estimate the cars are traveling when they collided?
Second group, how fast would you estimate the cars were traveling when they smashed into each other?
The latter one gets a higher estimated speed.
Or you show subjects a little 30-second video clip of somebody sitting on a park bench and some guy walks up and grabs her purse and runs off.
All right, what color was his hat?
Oh, it was a blue hat, it was a baseball hat, it was a knit cap, and so on.
Her most famous research was on the lost in a mall.
So these are adult subjects who had been screened, and they know that when they were children they were never lost in a mall, right?
But they introduced, amongst many things that they were talking about, do you remember the time when you were five, because your parents told us about this, when you were lost in the mall?
Oh, yes.
Oh my god, it was terrible.
I was so scared.
And then I remember hearing the voice of my mom, and then this guy helped me, and he was wearing this flannel shirt, and he took me to my mommy, and so on.
And so they just make up this complete...
It never happened.
She just made that up on the spot.
So we have this little internal storyteller to try to make sense of this chaotic world.
And so the moment you get new information, you've got to try to fit it somewhere in there.
Because in the criminal justice system, back to our signal detection problem, right?
You got the guy sitting there.
Is he guilty?
If he's really guilty and you find him guilty, then that's good.
That's a hit, right?
But if he's really innocent and you find him guilty, that's really bad, right?
So we have this kind of what's called the Blackstone ratio of 10 to 1. Better 10 guilty people go free than that one innocent person be found guilty.
And so the criminal justice system has the same problem.
Before DNA and some of that forensic evidence, it was all eyewitness, and it's terrible.
So the Innocence Project has, as you know, exonerated, I don't know, 300-and-something people, many of them on death row, for crimes they never committed.
And that's the problem.
Even like forensic stuff you see on CSI, you know, the bite marks or the hair analysis of the fabric, even that's not very well tested and replicated.
In fact, Josh Dubin, who worked with the Innocent Project, talked about that.
He has a podcast on junk science and particularly discuss bite marks about how you can tell people that it was a bite mark from a specific individual and they'll go with it.
And then you can show them that that absolutely is not the case.
And, you know, this is not like DNA evidence.
It's not like something that is absolutely 100% true.
Also, like, you have to have a very specific response to, like, this question.
And everyone's response to stimuli and stress, they vary.
Some people are going to react in a certain way, but that's not indicative of evidence like you can absolutely prove.
Also, there was a woman who was convicted, I believe, in India from fMRI data of a murder because she had knowledge of the crime scene.
And so, like, I discussed this with a neuroscientist in America and she was like, that is absolutely not evidence that that person committed the crime.
But if you are in a trial and you have knowledge of the crime scene because they've told you this is the case, this is what they're saying happened, and then they use this fMRI data to show that you have knowledge of the crime, Well, of course you have knowledge of the crime.
You're about to go to fucking jail for something you didn't do, and they're telling you, you know, it was Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick.
Like, oh, look, through MRI data, we can show she knows about Colonel Mustard.
And how bad the relationships were between the LAPD and the African American community, particularly right in downtown LA. And they did plant evidence.
They did do things like that, right?
So there's an element of truth, back to conspiracism.
And if he gets off, he's going to commit another crime.
So we're doing the justice thing here by planning it.
Enough of that has happened that it's reasonable for African Americans to be suspicious.
Same thing with their higher rates of vaccine hesitancy now, recently anyway, because of the Tuskegee experiments, you know, where our government did do these things, right?
The syphilis patients that were not treated when they could have been.
Their children, some of them got, you know, it's terrible.
And it's the kind of thing that Nazi, you know, doctors were doing.
And you know about Operation Paperclip, right?
Because you had Annie Jacobson on the show.
She's really good on these things.
Her books are just first-class good journalism on that, where she tracked down.
If you put a paperclip on the file, it means we're going to adopt this guy as one of our scientists before the Russians—these are German scientists—before the Russians get him, right?
And a lot of these guys were doing chemical warfare experiments, biological warfare experiments, and, of course, Wernher von Braun with the V-2 rockets, the most famous of the paperclip experiments.
So enough of that goes on.
It's like, wait a minute.
On the one hand, we're trying these guys at the Nuremberg trials and executing them for war crimes.
And then we have these other guys that did pretty much the same thing.
That was a crazy one because they were just justifying it based on, listen, we're in the middle of a Cold War with Russia, and if we don't get these people, the Russians are going to get them.
And yes, they are Nazis, but they're also very advanced scientists, and they have research that could benefit us and our rocket programs and a lot of our other scientific experiments.
It's pretty wild shit when you find out that it's true.
He won two Nobel Prizes, one for peace, one for chemistry.
And he was spied on by the FBI. And he was not allowed to go...
Well, he was allowed to go collect his one Nobel Prize, but he couldn't go to some conferences because they thought he might be a communist and all this stuff because he was anti-nuclear war.
Well, when he was a child, he had some sort of an ailment where they took him from his parents.
and they put him in an orphanage or some sort of a children's hospital where when he was a baby, he had no contact with human beings.
He would just cry in his crib.
They would feed him and that's it.
And this went on for months.
And they think that just that development really fucked up his brain.
And then on top of that, he goes to Harvard and he's involved in the LSD experiments.
And apparently those experiments were very abusive because they were studying like what would happen if you give these people LSD and you emotionally and psychologically abuse them.
And he had, according to his brother, all sorts of real problems with relationships and other human beings.
I'm two hours in and I still have no idea what's going on.
Come on!
Get to the point!
Yeah, so this was Frank Olson, one of the chemists that worked in the MKUltra program, but they dosed him.
He's just at some bar and some club with the other CIA guys, and they said, hey, let's put some LSD. And then like 10 days later, he jumps out of a New York City high-rise window, or did he?
And there was evidence that there was a couple of CIA guys that were there.
Maybe they pushed him.
And then his son, Eric Olson, who's been kind of keeping this story alive.
This happened in the 50s.
You know, had the body exhumed and there was evidence of like a blow to the head, like a crack in the skull.
Like they hit him first and then shoved him out the window.
Yeah, and so when you have someone like Alex Jones, when he was on your show, and I show a clip of this to my class actually last night, you know, where he's ranting on about NASA has this headquarters in San Francisco where they're dosing people to talk to the aliens, you know, he goes off on something, right?
But that the CIA was dosing people with, you know, hallucinogenic drugs, that's true.
Well, it's also the problem with, like, if you're going to find all these different conspiracies, how much time do you have?
How much time do you have to investigate all of these in a very thorough manner?
It's almost impossible to get to the bottom of every single one of those and have an objective analysis of the facts.
I was talking about Tom O'Neill, the book Chaos, where he covered Manson.
He wrote that book for 20 years, 20 years on one case.
He started off, he was hired to do a article, I forget what magazine it was for, but whatever publication it was for, it was the anniversary of the Manson case.
So he was just supposed to do this little thing about the case, and so he's a really good journalist, and as he goes into this story, he keeps uncovering more and more evidence of fuckery, more and more evidence of There's a bunch of weird shit, and it becomes obsessed.
It takes him 20 years to eventually publish that book, and the book is phenomenal.
I can't recommend it enough, because Tom O'Neill is a really good journalist, and the book Chaos is riveting.
Well, when you talk to like schizophrenics and they make those maps of all the connections, That people, this person met that person, who met that person, who met this person, who was in the same airport as that person in 1969. So therefore, they're involved with this, that, and the other thing.
He was saying, he goes, you know, they're seeing that in Russia with a lot of the Russian, someone else was explaining this to me, that a lot of these Russian weapons, they're faulty.
And one of the reasons why they're faulty is because there's corruption.
And the people that are responsible for making them are skimming.
They're taking, you know, you're supposed to spend X amount of money.
And so a lot of the shit doesn't even work correctly because of corruption, because there's a bunch of people that are involved that are, you know, they're Profiting in an absurd way.
I remember I was visiting this guy who was a doctor.
And this is back when you had to get a medical marijuana license in California.
So he was that kind of doctor.
I was going to him, and he gives me this book, and he was very loony, and he gives me this book saying that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by Tesla energy.
And I'm like, what?
And he goes, yeah, there's no way to turn concrete into dust in these buildings.
I go, but what about if when concrete smashes?
It's made out of fucking powder that you mix with water.
Wouldn't it just become dust?
And so I'm like breaking down this argument with this guy in the office while I'm trying to get a license for medical marijuana.
I'm like, I gotta get my life together.
Like, what the fuck?
What kind of conversations am I having?
Because this guy was imploring me to read this book.
I'm like, oh boy.
That it was Tesla technology that they used some sort of a...
I remember when they started the embargo with Cuba, when they wouldn't let you get Cuban goods, before they did it, Kennedy famously got boxes and boxes of cigars sent to him.
I'm like, you motherfucker.
Like, you motherfucker.
Like, I enjoy a cigar as much as the next guy, but Jesus Christ.
But that's, you know, but that's always the case with people in power.
They, you know, they'll come up with things that look good in terms of optics and like these are the measures that we're going to take and everyone has to abide by them except for me.
I don't think they know, because until you're the nominee, until you're the head nominee and it's close, are you allowed to know what's really going on, right?
I mean, I think when Obama won, when he actually won the election, I think that's when they gave him the, whatever they call them, the white papers or the debriefing papers.
You know, from the National Security Agency and so on.
And I'm pretty sure it's like he had all this list of stuff.
And then point to the fact that every single president that's ever said they were going to do all these things, once they get in office and they get the information, Yeah, so here's what I'm conflicted about.
He's schooling Tom Cruise on the stand, you know, son, we live in a world with walls, and on those walls are men with guns, and you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall, you know, and so on.
Like the United States was a civilization or was a country rather that was started because people were fed up with the way things were run in Europe and they said, well, we're going to go over here and we're going to – Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and we're going to establish this land of the free.
And, you know, it worked out pretty well for a long time.
And, you know, as time goes on, it gets more and more complex and more and more fucked up.
But it seems like if you started with 10 people at Mars and then you had 1,000 and then 10,000 and then 100,000 and then a million, you're going to end up with lawyers and courts and mediators and police.
And all those are based on biological needs, like these primate desires that we have to acquire wealth and status and to have breeding rights and all the things that motivate people, greed and ego, that motivate people to do what they do now.
The artificial intelligence, unless we program that into it, won't have that.
And if they are sentient...
If they're sentient and far more intelligent than us, it seems to me that that would be the thing that they would realize right away is a real problem with the programming.
Like, why do we have all this nonsense, ego, and all these needs to acquire things and control things?
Why is that baked in?
Why do we even need to communicate with people?
If sentient artificial intelligence was really far more intelligent than us, why would it even talk to us?
This is my argument for why I don't fear making contact with extraterrestrials.
This is the argument that we shouldn't try to communicate with them or send signals out because look what happened historically when an advanced civilization came in contact with a less advanced civilization.
They enslaved them or genocide or so on.
But I don't think you could get to the point where you have an interstellar civilization and you have Dyson spheres and you have massive super advanced technology and so on and still be colonials, enslaving people, genocidal maniacs.
I don't think you could get there with that kind of attitude.
Do you think that the only thing that separates the biological organism from this advanced creature, the only way to get past that, because everything that evolves biologically evolves in a state of competition, right?
I mean, there's a reason why it advances and improves its natural selection and there's a lot going on there.
Would that be the only way that we could get past all of these bizarre human emotions and ego and greed and need is to separate ourselves from biological evolution and become...
I mean, they used to, you know, burn cats and slavery and the death penalty and torture and, you know, this was common.
And people just, you know, burning witches, burning women as witches.
This was common.
And now it's not.
Why?
What happened?
Our nature didn't change.
There's no biological evolution.
You know, we just kind of learned to channel our inner better angels and kind of suppress our inner demons through not just laws, you know, top-down laws you probably have to have.
But, you know, we don't really need laws now to prevent slavery from happening.
I mean, it's just pretty much nobody, no government's going to say, hey, I got this great idea that's enslaved people.
The norms have shifted.
Pretty much nobody wants to do that.
And that has driven a lot of human progress without having to do the biological evolution or genetic engineering or reprogramming.
Because you don't want to take out somebody's sense of I don't know, pride and avarice, and I want to be successful, I want to make money, I want to be creative, I have these drives.
And there's a dark side to that.
Maybe you're also a little bit of a psychopath, and you're kind of mean and nasty in your competitiveness.
But if you take all that away, then what's the motive to do anything?
I think that is happening and that's one of the reasons why, you know, when things happen like this sort of social progress movement and, you know, social justice movement The reason why I think that's a good thing is like maybe it goes too far in some ways, but the direction of it, the thought process behind it is making the world a fairer, better place, which I think is ultimately good.
And there's going to be like, it's not a perfect thing because humans aren't perfect.
So it's like there's a wave, the ebbs and the flows.
There's an overreach and then there's a correction.
And I think that if you look at Pinker's work, and one of the pushbacks on Pinker's work is, you know, Pinker says that the world is safer, it's better in so many ways now than it's ever been before.
And people will say, what?
How can you say this when there's all this crime and injustice and racism and murder and rape and thievery and all this shit that's going on?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
That's not denial of all the horrors and atrocities that exist currently.
But if you look at the grand scale of what the world was like during Genghis Khan's reign versus the world is like today, it's far safer than it's ever been before.
This is the best time to be alive ever, even though things are still relatively fucked up in comparison to utopia.
Utopia is a terrible goal to have because we're never going to get there.
And also, it gives a perverse calculation that, you know, we can achieve this perfect society in which everybody is happy forever if it weren't for those people right there.
So how about just, so this is what Kevin Kelly calls protopia, not utopia, just make tomorrow just a little bit better than today, just incremental, just a tiny bit, and just goes two steps up, one back, okay, adjustments, boom, boom, boom, and then in a century, you know, things are twice as good as they were.
It's slower than most people would like because there's an idea of what we would like society to be like and it doesn't fit that yet.
And so we're angry and frustrated.
But I think it's a time management issue too.
You know, the human being is only alive for 100 years.
But during that 100 years, think about how much has changed.
I remember when I was a kid, I guess I was 11 years old, and we moved to Florida.
And I moved from San Francisco to Florida.
And San Francisco, we lived in a gay neighborhood, and our neighbors were gay.
My aunt used to go over there and smoke pot and play bongo drums naked with this gay couple.
It was very normal, because it was during the Vietnam era, and they were all hippies.
And we went from there to Florida.
Which was very regressive in that way.
And I had this friend, he was Cuban, and his dad was very homophobic.
And his dad was really angry because he was reading this story.
And I'll never forget it because I was 11. And he's like, oh, these gays want to get married.
And he was really mad.
He was throwing this newspaper down on the table.
And I remember thinking, why does he give a fuck?
If these gay people want to get married, what is that?
How weird is that?
Because there's always going to be some parts of our culture that are still regressive.
But if you compare that then to today...
You know, so this was, I'm 55, so this is 44 years ago.
So look back from 44 years ago today.
Well, it's normal for, you know, no one's going to say, if I went over to someone's house and they're like, these gays want to get married, like, what do you give a fuck?
Because there's a lot of historical evidence that points to urgot poisoning and mass hallucinations and chaos.
There's one from, I believe it was, was it 1950?
There was one in France where they had a situation that was similar.
There was ergot poisoning where a bunch of people died, in fact, because ergot is also toxic.
But in some quantities, it produces these LSD-like effects, and they coincide the Salem witch trials.
And this is controversial, but there seems to be some evidence that points to that, that coincides it with a late frost, and that this late frost produced this fungus on the wheat and the grains, and that these grains were likely infected with ergot.
So you could have, I could see, like, one, say, teenage girl does this and hallucinates and is chattering in voices or whatever, and then her other friends, they start mimicking it, sort of a social contagion.
Like, it's fun, and then it's like, oh, it's more than fun, and then the adults go like, oh, what's going on here?
And then you have, like, a half a dozen elements going on there.
And in the case of the witch, you know, in a way, the witch craze is a kind of conspiracy theory, right?
Because one thing conspiracy theories do is they offer a causal explanation.
For chaos and randomness.
Our brains are not well designed by evolution to understand randomness.
My examples of this are like the stars in the sky are random, but they look like patterns, right?
Or the Apple iPod Shuffle feature was introduced in which your songs are fed to you randomly and Apple got complaints.
It's not random.
Certain songs are coming up more than others.
Like, that is random.
So Apple apparently, I'm told, had to reprogram it and program it so it feels random intuitively, but it's not.
It's crazy, right?
So much of life is just randomness, right?
Shit happens.
The bumper sticker, shit happens.
But that's uncomfortable.
It's like, no, there must be something behind it.
And if you don't have an explanation, no meteorology to explain weather and no germs theory of disease to explain disease and so forth, what have you got?
So that's the fear during mass hysteria, that people are going to turn on each other because they're afraid that someone's going to come after them, so they come after you first.
I'm going to get somebody on my campus and they used the wrong pronoun or the wrong adjective and I'm going to denounce them before I get denounced and make the mistake.
Yeah, so you get this thing called pluralistic ignorance or the spiral of silence where everybody thinks everybody else is thinking something when, in fact, nobody's actually thinking that.
The classic experiment on this was binge drinking on college campuses.
So you ask individual students by themselves, how do you feel about this?
I don't really like it, but I know everybody else likes it.
So everybody thinks that everybody else likes binge drinking, but actually, individually, they really don't like it.
But I got to do it because everybody else is doing it, right?
So this in part explains the kind of sustaining of the Nazi regime.
Everybody – well, initially Hitler was popular because he stopped the depression and got the economy going again and so on.
And then he starts escalating and everybody thinks, well, I'm not too happy about this policy and the thing with the Jews, I don't know.
But everybody else seems to be going along with it.
And then by the time you get to the point where somebody needs to speak up and say, you know, this is wrong, they have concentration camps for those people.
And they did it in a way that you could see your neighbor being hauled out and think, I'm keeping my mouth shut.
Right, you can't have everything, because also you're going to have people that take advantage of, you know, the current cultural climate that might be sexual predators.
There's a strawweight division, a flyweight division, there's a featherweight division, a bantamweight division.
There's multiple divisions that are filled with elite female combat sports athletes and some of those fights are fantastic.
And, you know, up until Ronda Rousey came into the UFC, which is not that long ago, was it 10 years ago?
When they first started having women's MMA fights in the UFC, there was only one division.
It was 135 pounds.
That was it.
And you didn't have all these other weight classes.
Now, these other weight classes, like flyweight in particular and strawweight, some of the most competitive.
And they have incredible fights.
So it's, I think if you build it, they will come.
And if there are that many trans female, you know, trans women MMA competitors out there, maybe if they developed a division and they had that, maybe you would see a lot of competitors that would enter that and it would become an exciting division.
But to make them compete against biological females, or excuse me, to make biological females compete against people who identify as female, I think is just insane.
You know, in the 1980s, I got into ultra-distance cycling, you know, Race Across America.
I did that five times.
In the 90s, I was the race director.
So we had, in 93, 94, 95, I had two women that were competing, Shawna Hogan and Muffy Ritz, and they were phenomenal athletes, just really tough as could be.
This is coast-to-coast, nonstop.
Every competitor has a motorhome behind them and so on, and it's just the clock never stops, and so it's really ultra-distance.
And I remember in, I think it was 93 or 94, Shauna led the entire field all the way into Colorado.
And me and my staff were thinking, maybe we don't need a women's, men's division.
Maybe we are the sport that can, you know, it's all equal.
Right?
But by the end of the race, it was like a one-day, like 26-hour difference between the top man and Shauna.
What is that about human beings, though, that they don't want to speak out and that we're willing to accept something that we know is not fair because culturally that's an accepted thing?
So there might be some complex psychology there where I get this preemptive denunciation and also virtue signaling.
Like if I stand out as being super virtuous, I'm going to get some points for that.
You know, some of that, I think, is going on, you know, multiple factors.
And, you know, we're in the middle of it now, I think, probably within five years.
I mean, what, five years ago, no one was talking about, was it a Ricky Gervais bit about, you know, the use of the term, you know, a woman without a penis?
Yeah, but the thing is there's a reward for speaking out and saying the things that everybody thinks but they're afraid to say, particularly with audiences.
Like when you're anonymous in a crowd and you're having a couple of cocktails and it's dark and someone says it like, yes, finally!
You see it in comedy clubs that people are taking chances because they're recognizing that it's rewarded to speak out and say these things.
Another thing I think back to the kind of moral progress that we might be experiencing now is we've made so much moral progress.
Today's young activists that want to do something to make the world a better place, well, you know, slavery, torture, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, done!
Do you think eventually it's one of those things, like as we were talking about before, the ebb and flow of things that, you know, there's an overcorrection, and then things kind of bounce itself out?
There are people who identify as the other sex and so on.
Sure.
That's real.
Is it really the numbers that we're now seeing, you know, spike, 2,000% spike in the last two years and these massive increases in the U.K.? Probably some of that is social contagion.
I had a student maybe two years ago that came out as trans.
She decided she wanted to be a man.
It's like, okay.
And everybody was super curious about this.
It's a small discussion seminar type class that I teach.
And as the course of the weeks went by, it would come up almost every week.
It came up a lot.
I thought...
I wonder if she really wants to be a man or she wants to be trans, because trans, this was a cool thing to be.
She got love bombed and everybody's asking her questions.
What are you going to do about this?
How are you going to dress?
What about that?
But if it was just like, I'm just going to be a man and I'm not going to tell anybody, I'm just going to change the way I'm living my life.
I think that would not be as interesting or rewarding.
There would be no social, you know, reinforcement for that.
So I think in part, again, multiple things.
Some of it's real.
Some of it's social.
I think some of it is this kind of a trendy thing to be.
Andrew Sullivan writes about this.
It's not cool to be gay anymore.
Where'd the lesbians go?
Right?
There's no more lesbians.
They're all gone.
And he makes the point, and since he's a gay guy, he could do this, you know, that when he was a teenage boy, 13, 14, 15, he finds himself attracted to other guys and not women.
And what if he was told at that time, you're not gay.
You're actually a woman.
You're just in the wrong body.
And then that's kind of, in a way, he says it's kind of homophobic.
That's like a giant monkey wrench into your equation.
That doesn't make any sense.
It seems to be just an aspect of human beings.
But again, going to moral progress, it is a clear sign of moral progress, the difference between when I was 11, my friend's dad, who was so angry that people were gay and they were getting married, versus today, where it's very accepted.
For the most part.
A tiny percentage of people, I'm sure, still have a problem with it, like really extreme religious fundamentalists.
But for the most part, society has kind of accepted that.
I'm hoping that this is just a couple of far-out GOP candidates that are trying to appeal to their base by saying, you know, we're going to take away gay marriage, and by the way, we're going to get rid of contraception, too.
We want women to just be in the bedroom making babies.
I'm hoping that the GOP en masse says, no, no, that's not what we're about.
Getting rid of gay marriage, getting rid of contraception, like, hey, hey, hey, hey.
But isn't that the pendulum, though?
Like what we were talking about.
With moral progress, there's going to be an overcorrection.
And that some people, you know, the outliers of the religious fundamentalists who don't want any progress, they basically want things to go back to like a religious fundamentalist version of what a Christian society should be.
And there's some people that are out there, and it's not a small number.
There's a new documentary out of, oh, a CNN film about him, in which this is a, he's got huge crowds, in which he's basically saying we need to return America, make America great again, but make America Christian again, is what he's saying.
Which is, if you've watched the documentary, Into the Storm, have you seen the HBO? Of course, yeah.
That's amazing.
That's so good.
And I had the gentleman on who created that and it just, what a fucking wild thing it is to see the actual people that created it and to see what a scam they pulled off and how weird it is that people just hopped on board and they really did think that there was some people working behind the scenes that were working for God and country and they were going to expose all these pedophiles and Satanists and...
Do you think when people say, you know, they tell a poster, yeah, I think there could be something to the QAnon or Pizzagate or whatever, do they really believe it?
I mean, the one guy did, Edgar Welch, who went to that Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria with his AR-15 and shot up the place.
But most people don't do that.
You know, if you really thought there was a pedophile ring, a crime going on, and the police wouldn't do anything about it, wouldn't you go there?
Wouldn't you want to do something?
So I'm thinking – I'm wondering, do these people really believe it or are they just kind of like, well, I don't know.
It seems like the kind of thing those Democrats would do and I don't like them.
With those poor people, and some of them that were Obama supporters, that just flipped over to, you know, now I realize they're the bad ones, and we're the good ones, and we're patriots, and it's crazy.
There was a video that showed up in my YouTube feed, and I clicked on it, and then you know how YouTube on the right-hand side gives you, maybe you want to watch this?
And so I forget what the initial video was, but I went three or four videos down the hole, and I got to a professor out of Oregon, and I've actually meldred him.
Well, this is, again, my argument why the rational believe the irrational.
These are not uneducated, stupid people wearing tinfoil hat.
No, they're not.
They're smart people.
But smart people and educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs they hold for non-smart reasons, right?
So Dino Reinhold Mesner, the great alpinist that summited Everest, I think seven times without oxygen, considered the greatest climber of all time, a German alpinist.
He wrote a book about Bigfoot, a Yeti, you know, because he's heard all about Yeti in the Himalayas, and he had told all the Sherpas, okay, look, if you see this thing, you know, just wake me up out of the tent.
unidentified
Right.
So one day they're like, boss, boss, it's there, it's there, Yeti!
I've seen them walk multiple steps on their back feet.
Now, if you were looking at that through the forest, like a deep forest, I don't think it's a coincidence that the Pacific Northwest is where they sight a lot of them, because there's a rainforest out there that are so dense.
The way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips.
Like, seeing through the Q-tips, you can't possibly see.
So if you saw a bear walking on two legs, Through like a couple of trees and then your mind starts going, oh my god, did I just see a gorilla or some sort of an ape creature?
It's Bigfoot!
And then you have it in your head that you saw a Bigfoot because you saw a bear.
You know, a bear, a big black bear is a seven foot animal.
It's a big creature.
They're walking upright like that.
You would assume that that is a giant Sasquatch that you just saw.
And then your mind starts working on it.
Your memory sucks anyway, especially with chaotic, extremely novel events like that.
And so then you get it in your head that you saw a Sasquatch.
You know, those auditory illusions where they put the words on the top of the screen and they play the voice.
You can't quite make out what it is, but when you see the words, and it flips back and forth, back and forth.
So this works because when you can't quite tell what it is, then a cue, a prime, it's called priming, will direct your brain to hear one thing or the other thing, or see things.
This is how these visual illusions work, right?
So it's always degraded information, right?
The shadow, I can't quite see if you squint and use your imagination.
Well, given human sexual psychology and the differences between men and women and how indiscriminate men are compared to women, women are much more risk-averse about that.
Yes, that there was these little three-foot-tall, and they don't really know what they looked like other than guesswork, but they think they were hairy.
These hairy little three-foot-tall bipedal people-like things that were a separate branch of the evolutionary chain of primates.
It describes last month an expedition in the jungles of Sumatra.
Interesting.
So, even the age of satellite mapping, global positioning, there remains lost worlds where few humans tread, where species of animals unrecognized by science live.
I'll say this name.
Karensi Seblat National Park in West Sumatra is one such place.
The size of a small country, its dim, steamy interior has never been explored properly, and last month I returned to these jungles for the fourth time to track an elusive and yet unrecorded species of ape known to the locals as the Orang Pendek or Short Man.
This year's expedition was the largest of its kind to ever visit the area.
It consisted of two teams.
I'm just guessing there.
The second team consistent of Dr.
Okay.
What does it say?
Before team left, one guide, Sahar, introduced us to an eyewitness called Pak Entis, who claimed to have seen an orang pendek in the garden area in April.
He described it as around three feet tall, but with massive shoulders and chest.
He pointed to a piece of washing on the line to indicate the color of its hair.
A mid-tan.
It had an ape-like face, walked upright on two legs while swinging its arms.
And, you know, Neanderthal, it looks like they had language based on the skull size back here and some other things here and their genome.
It looks like they had the genes for language, maybe.
Something like, not ours totally conceptually, but maybe something like that.
Were they held back by us?
You know, because they had Europe to themselves for about 300,000 years.
But their toolkits don't get progressively more complex and their art doesn't get more complex like ours does.
When we got to Europe and they went extinct and then you see that kind of progress.
So it's an open question that no one knows the answer to.
But it touches on the SETI thing because...
Is there kind of a directionality to evolution where you end up with communicating technologically sophisticated civilizations or is it pretty random and you could get pretty far and then we'd never know that they were there?
I had an interesting discussion with Richard Dawkins one time about to what extent that aliens would look anything like us.
Like the alien abduction stories, it's always this bipedal primate with the big eyes and the bulbous head and no ears and so forth.
But one of the chances they'd look anything like us evolved on some other planet, right?
They could be like octopuses or something.
But Richard points out it may not be as random as I'm describing because Simon Conway Morris, who studies convergent evolution, Shows that based on physics of water, air, and land, to move around on the land, you've got to have something like legs.
To move through the water, you have to have kind of a smooth, fusiform body to slide through such a dense medium.
If you're in the air, you've got to have something like wings, right?
And so you're going to have probably creatures with most of the sensory apparatus and brains on one end, waste disposal system on the other end, some arms and legs to move around on the land.
You could get something like a bipedal primate.
It may not be a mammal or whatever.
It could be a dinosaur that was bipedal.
And if you have a big enough brain, they could make tools and so on.
Could be, but then you also have the intelligent life that we know exists on Earth that doesn't have the ability to manipulate its environment like orcas and dolphins, which is fascinating because orca and dolphin have enormous brains.
They have complex languages that we can't decipher.
They have very sophisticated social systems.
Right.
But they don't possess the ability to manipulate their environment like we do.
Although people like Jack Horner, the paleontologist, he thinks they're much more social and communicating in a social way than we've given them credit for.
They weren't dumb.
Not big brains like you're thinking of like the cetaceans.
Yeah, we also had that experiment where he had the woman living in the home with a dolphin and she had to masturbate the dolphin to get it to pay attention.
And so they killed the study once that came out.
Which is unfortunate.
But he was also like, he invented the sensory deprivation tank.
He was a really out there guy.
And he was into ketamine for whatever weird reason.
He would take intramuscular ketamine and then get in the sensory deprivation tank.
I just want to ask you directly, you know, when somebody takes LSD or one of the others and they feel like it's a door opening doors of perception into some other reality, is there really a reality or is it just brain chemistry?
The reason why dimethyltryptamine is so interesting is because it's endogenous.
The human brain produces it.
It's trackable.
You can find it.
And now through the Cottonwood Research Foundation, they've found that the brain...
They used to think it was the pineal gland.
But I had...
Dr. Rick Strassman on, who conducted the first FDA-approved studies on psychedelics with dimethyltryptamine, where they were IV dosing these people with it.
And I actually had a conversation with Graham Hancock when I was in London this weekend, and he said that they're doing some at the University of London now, too, that are very fascinating.
Where they're doing the same sort of thing, where they're using IV drips so they can prolong the DMT state for very long periods of time and then come back with these very similar descriptions of what's going on.
Who fucking knows?
Who knows what is happening?
If that is a doorway that opens up in the mind that leads you to another dimension or whether it's the human consciousness, the imagination, And the visual cortex interacting with these incredibly powerful psychoactive compounds that give a similar visual hallucination to everyone.
You know, I don't think there's a way to know right now.
I don't know what the answer to that is, but I do think that it would benefit you to try it just so that you could experience something that's so profoundly unique that it throws into question what reality is Because we think of reality as only being things that we can measure, things that we can touch, things that we can put on a scale.
And you, as the editor of Skeptic Magazine in particular, you're very skeptical about things.
But what you experience with the most potent of hallucinogens, whether it's mushrooms, whether it's psilocybin, or whether it's dimethyltryptamine, or any of these really, really potent ones...
You experience something that seems so much more vivid than reality itself.
It's very confusing.
It's like, what is happening here?
Am I actually interacting with entities, or are there thoughts that I have in my mind that are so potent and profound, like things like creativity and love and emotions, that if you attach them to this psychedelic compound, they dance for you in a way that seems like they're an actual entity.
Who knows?
But I would like you to do it.
I'd like you to do it just because I respect your opinion and I'd like to see what your thought is when you come back from it.
I think he did LSD or maybe—I actually can't remember now.
But, you know, he writes about the brain.
He's a neurologist and so on.
And it's like, okay.
So what does this mean?
What is he saying?
And how would it be different when I—so, like, I read about people who have near-death experiences.
Then I read, you know, Oliver Sacks' experience.
Or you talk about in the opening of one of Sam Harris' books, he talks about taking—was it— What did he take?
I think it was LSD. Maybe Graham.
Oh, there's this whole other world out there that I didn't know about.
And here's what I'm worried about, Joe.
If we were having this conversation 500 years ago, and somebody's telling us about dark energy and dark matter and quantum physics, and we'd be going, this is bullshit.
The thing about dimethyltryptamine in particular, which is what ayahuasca, that's the psychoactive compound, is that it's endogenous to the human body, and it's one of the most transient drugs ever observed.
It's really...
Your body brings you back to baseline very quickly, especially with the smoked version of DMT. The oral one is different, the ayahuasca, you know, because you're...
Orally, it's broken down in the gut by monoamine oxidase.
And so with ayahuasca is a combinatory medication where you're taking DMT from one plant and MOA inhibitors from another plant.
And that's what allows you to take it orally.
So it's a longer acting but less profound version in terms of like the flash of DMT is so much more vibrant apparently.
But it doesn't seem to be dangerous.
It seems like everybody who takes it comes back.
You've done this.
Yes.
I've only done DMT, which is the more potent version of it.
The ayahuasca version I haven't done yet, but I'm doing it soon.
And that is supposed to be the long term.
And the thing about the benefit of the long one seems to be that the more you can interact with that state, the more you come back with life lessons.
Well, there was something about the ayahuasca where you revisit dark memories and bad things in your life, and I'm not sure I want to go through that again.
Yeah, the way I've described it is imagine if you could have a conversation with God, absolutely real conversation with God, where you could go to a place and have a conversation with this Loving, knowing entity that knows all and sees through you and explains to you that we're all connected in this unseen cosmic way.
And if you just address that in your life and treat people that way, you will live a better life.
And you have this brief meeting with God and it's very profound.
And then you come back and you have to sort of come to grips with what you've experienced.
That you wouldn't be able to measure either.
That feeling, that experience, how would you be able to prove to people that you had a conversation with God?
You would just have to, like, learn from that experience yourself and somehow or another try not to slip back into the human folly and all the bad behavior and thought patterns that we've all existed with.
Well, psychedelics in the most profound breakthrough way are like that.
They are like having a conversation with God.
And whether or not it's a hallucination or whether or not it's actually meeting and interacting with all knowing entities, the experience is the same.
So whether it's real or whether it's an imagination or a hallucination, the profundity, the profound nature of the experience is the same.
Yes, but these things are not measurable, and that's one of the more interesting things about them, that these psychedelic experiences are not measurable, and they're very personal, and they're very profound.
And he was a scholar who was assigned to be one of the people to deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And after 14 years of working on it, it was his belief that the Christian religion was really initially about consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
But, you know, good luck trying to decipher that and find out if it's right.
I've changed my stance on religion over the years in that I think that the real benefit is that it acts as a moral scaffolding for a lot of people.
And whether or not those things are true, that clearly, whether they're true or not, whether the origin was actually the Word of God, Clearly they've been affected by human beings.
When you read things in the Bible that treat women as second-class citizens and condone slavery and talk about murdering people for disobeying, clearly the work of man is involved in there somewhere.
We know people are full of shit and we know that they lie in order to To prop up their better interests.
And there's clearly some of that in religion.
But there's also a moral scaffolding involved in religion that seems to be very beneficial to some people because it allows them to live their life with a structure that they think is for the greater good.
You were talking about this earlier that a lot of the, like, even, like, the woke attitudes that people have and a lot of the progressive dogma that people talk about...
It seems to be religious in nature.
It seems to be that we almost have like a default way of looking at certain things.
And then if we are atheists and we are separated from this moral scaffolding that is imparted upon us by religion, we'll find it in other things that we have culturally agreed upon.
Because we get our truths in part socially, like other people guide us in our youth and professors and our teachers and books and experts, and we determine what's true in part by what other people believe.
So you do depend on that.
Because none of us are smart enough to figure out the world on our own, so we have to have other people.
That's why we need communication like that.
But the other people are sometimes wrong, right?
And so if our tribe believes, I call this tribal conspiracy, this is what our tribe believes.
This is what we do.
To challenge that may make me feel like I'm not part of my tribe anymore.
Where's my moorings?
This is my group.
And so, if you're Catholic, you believe this.
If you're Mormon, you believe that.
If you're Jewish, you believe this.
I always point out to Christians, the theologians that I debate on, the resurrection really happened, here's the arguments, here's the six best arguments, the empty tomb, Mary was there, and then the body was gone, and this and that, and this finger in the side, and whatnot.
If these arguments are so good, why don't Jews accept Jesus as the Messiah who was crucified and resurrected?
Well, if they understood the arguments, they would know—it's like, they understand the arguments.
So I do think, again, if you were chronically frozen and came back a thousand years from now, and you found out all this stuff that we're talking about, oh, this was this, that's the explanation, oh...
I thought that was bullshit, right?
So I don't want to do that, but there may be these, you know, Mysterian mysteries, you know, about the Mysterians.
These are the philosophers who think our brains are just not structured or big enough to solve certain problems.
We just can't know, like, where the universe come from, ultimately, before the Big Bang.
You know, why is there something rather than nothing?
God's existence or free will.
You know, there's just certain things that are conceptually kind of don't make sense for our brains.
Like consciousness, you know, this is why it's the hard problem of consciousness.
Well, it's also, if you think about this stage of evolution that we currently exist in, we think of this as the pinnacle.
But if you went back to the early hominids and you tried to express any of the thoughts that we have today or looked at the civilization that we've created, the cities, the flying airships and the satellite images and the fucking video flying through your cell phone to someone in New Zealand instantaneously, all of it is witchcraft and voodoo and chaos.
If you keep going, if we keep going in whatever...
Capacity.
If we evolve to a million years from now, we're going to look back on this as like, what a bunch of goofs.
What a bunch of silly, primitive people that couldn't even read each other's minds.
They're just lying to each other and pretending polygraph tests are real and using hypnotic regression to try to uncover past truths.