Jan. 12, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(dramatic music) | |
| If you follow me on the Twitter, you know that I'm not a big fan of award shows in general, | ||
| but all the talk post Golden Globes this week is about Oprah Winfrey potentially running | ||
| for president in 2020. | ||
| 2020. | ||
| Mainstream media is in love with the idea of Oprah for president, and CNN, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and a slew of others have all already run think pieces on her chances in just three short years. | ||
| Hollywood, of course, is also in love with the idea. | ||
| The conscience of lefty Hollywood, Jimmy Kimmel, has already said that he's on board with Oprah 2020, and NBC even tweeted from their official account at NBC that Oprah is our next president, though they eventually deleted the tweet. | ||
| Make no doubt, the elite class that was dealt a swift blow by the election of Trump in 2016 will quickly fall in line if Oprah decides to make a run for 2020. | ||
| Oprah has an absolutely remarkable life story. | ||
| She grew up in a Milwaukee boarding house in extreme poverty. | ||
| She survived absolutely horrific physical and sexual abuse, including being raped by her own cousin when she was only 9 years old. | ||
| From these unimaginably difficult beginnings, Oprah eventually made it to local news in | ||
| Chicago and then on to her syndicated talk show, which not only changed the TV landscape, | ||
| but had a cultural relevance unlike almost anything in the pre-internet age. | ||
| Every politician, pop culture icon, and ordinary person doing something extraordinary seemed | ||
| to make it to Oprah's couch. | ||
| Since she ended the talk show 7 years ago, Oprah's had many professional ups and downs, | ||
| continuing to navigate Hollywood, starting her own TV network OWN, which hasn't quite | ||
| caught on, doing plenty of charity work, and of course, and perhaps most importantly, always | ||
| making time to eat bread with very excited strangers around a fancy table in a forest. | ||
| As for Oprah's politics, I'm not sure anyone other than Oprah herself has a full view of | ||
| She was a big Obama supporter during his first two campaigns, and I have no doubt that she falls on the Democrat progressive side of things. | ||
| How she falls specifically on every issue, I'm not totally sure, but we seem to be veering towards a cliff where the issues will have almost nothing to do with who gets elected. | ||
| The cult of personality we're building around politicians and what that means for the health of our society in the long term is quickly becoming a massive problem that's hidden in plain sight. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I don't have to say much on the cult of personality that is Donald Trump. | ||
| Make no mistake, whether you love or hate Donald Trump, we elected a reality TV star, | ||
| a man created by, and now hated by, the mainstream media. | ||
| Trump's rise used all the tools of the media against itself, and that's why right now the | ||
| media is endlessly looking to destroy him. | ||
| They want their narrative and control back. | ||
| Notice the shift in TV coverage and articles about Trump in the last two weeks or so. | ||
| It's shifted from endless Russia stories to Trump's mental health. | ||
| In most cases, the people writing these stories are the same people who said that stories about Hillary's health were conspiracy theories, even after she collapsed and was dragged into an SUV by security guards that autumn day in New York City. | ||
| So what we have right now is a cult of personality, Trump, versus the cult of the media. | ||
| This has made a lot of people a lot of money. | ||
| As long as they keep churning out articles and think pieces, true or not, people do get paid. | ||
| To this end, Trump is their perfect foil. | ||
| He has no shortage of tweets to send out and people to mock, so we've got a match made in hell playing right in front of our eyes. | ||
| Now back to Oprah for a moment. | ||
| Oprah is basically the exact reverse of Trump, even at the identity politics level. | ||
| She is a black woman and he is a white man. | ||
| She grew up poor, he grew up rich. | ||
| But more importantly than these, she says all of the right things. | ||
| She talks about love and spirituality, and is loved by the Hollywood and media class as one of their own. | ||
| Trump on the other hand is their perfect enemy, as if they had written the script themselves. | ||
| Alas, Trump was one of their own until he became too powerful, and now he is enemy number one because they've lost control of the narrative. | ||
| Their hope is that they can win some of that narrative back with another celebrity who will play by their rules, but I think this is short sighted at best and disastrous at worst. | ||
| Just imagine what kind of insane, polarizing, sensationalized lunacy the potential matchup of Trump vs. Oprah will lead to as we head into 2020. | ||
| It'll be great for clicks and ratings, but it'll be terrible for ideas and debate. | ||
| You thought Hillary vs. Trump was polarizing? | ||
| Just wait until Trump and Oprah battle it out in the Thunderdome on primetime television. | ||
| Sadly it doesn't look like we'll ever turn back to being governed as our founders intended, with a limited federal government and strong states that empower people to control their lives at the local level. | ||
| While Trump has done some good work in limiting the power of the federal government, he's obviously happy to govern by executive action as Congress cedes more and more of their duties to the executive branch instead of the legislative branch where laws are supposed to be written. | ||
| His Justice Department too is happy to step on the 10th amendment and allow the federal government to trample on states' rights, just look at Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision to allow the feds to crack down on states' ability to legalize marijuana. | ||
| So to sum up, we'll have a president that will most likely be a celebrity, whether it's Trump or Oprah or Mark Cuban or The Rock, along with an executive branch that will continue growing and growing in power. | ||
| This cult of personality will continually put people into office not on what they believe and whether they understand or even care about how government is supposed to work, but rather by what they make us feel and how they can manipulate us into thinking exactly as they do. | ||
| That feeling, coupled with the growing power of the office of the presidency, is a recipe for the authoritarian control we all should be wary of. | ||
| The only way to fight this tide of celebrity-induced idiocracy is to get involved now before it's too late. | ||
| Either that or get ready to bow to Supreme Leader Justin Bieber in 2024. | ||
|
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me today is a New York Times best-selling author, a presidential fellow at Chapman University, | ||
| the founder of Skeptic Magazine, and now a four-time Rubin Report guest, | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| My fourth time here. | ||
| Four times? | ||
| I don't know if that's a record or what. | ||
| You are close. | ||
| You're definitely in the top two or three. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Depending on how this goes. | ||
| Do I get a pay bump yet? | ||
| No, but there's plenty of booze behind you. | ||
| That's right, yeah, that's right. | ||
| So, alright, there's a ton I want to talk to you about. | ||
| You've got a new book coming out. | ||
| I was saying to you right before you started, you're the only guest that has two books in the Rubin Report Library. | ||
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Alright! | |
| Don't get the moral arc skeptic. | ||
| Okay, good, well. | ||
| You are doing well. | ||
| We can bump the skeptic and put heavens on earth there. | ||
| I'll concede to that. | ||
| Okay, all right, we'll do that. | ||
| Because I hate to be the lifeboat guy that kicks the other person out of the lifeboat. | ||
| Fair enough, all right, we will swap those two. | ||
| I thought a fun way, though, to start this conversation with you would be to tell a little story that happened to us both when we spoke at University of Arizona about two or three months ago. | ||
| We were speaking there with, who were we with that night? | ||
| We were with Steve Simpson. | ||
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Yes. | |
| From the Ayn Rand Institute. | ||
| We're just doing a talk on free speech, about an hour talk, half hour or so Q&A. | ||
| And in the middle, I jokingly said to the audience, by a show of hands, are there any Nazis here? | ||
| And to our surprise, someone raised their hand, a woman raised her hand and said that she was a Nazi. | ||
| And she started to ask a question, I said, you know what, hang tight, respect our free speech, we're gonna do our thing, but then when we open this up to the Q&A, we're gonna throw the first question to you. | ||
| So this person then proceeded to ask a question. | ||
| Can you paraphrase what the question was, basically? | ||
| Oh, well, it was something about, she had encountered me before at some public event about the Holocaust story. | ||
| You know, some details about the gas chambers and, you know, one of these kind of technical arguments that they come up with that are supposed to stump Holocaust historians, but that I've refuted before, and then she wanted to revisit that. | ||
| So basically, it was, so she was a Holocaust denier. | ||
| And the beauty of what happened, why I wanted to start this conversation with this antidote, was she asked you this question about the doors at Auschwitz and why they didn't lock and all of this stuff. | ||
| That's right, the doors at Mauthausen, yeah, that's right, yeah. | ||
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Right. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And basically you gave her a great answer of why the doors didn't lock and they didn't want to scare people with doors that lock at an obviously very scary place and all this stuff. | ||
| It was a really nice moment for free speech, I thought. | ||
| She actually respected our free speech. | ||
| We then allowed her to have the question. | ||
| You then answered her question. | ||
| Now, it was pretty obvious to me that you didn't change her mind at the end. | ||
| So that's the first question I wanted to ask. | ||
| When you come by, as someone that debunks conspiracy theories all the time and created Skeptic Magazine, when you come across these people that are so sort of tightly held to their conspiracy theories or the ideas that they can't prove but they just believe them, how often can you actually break through to them? | ||
| You can, actually. | ||
| I get letters all the time. | ||
| I don't have, like, a data set from 25 years with 10,000 subjects or anything like that, but I get a ton of letters just from people saying, you know, I used to believe X and now I believe Y. I changed my mind after reading your book or Ewan Dawkins or Harris or Hitchens or, you know, whatever. | ||
| There's sort of a list of people that we know. | ||
| And so I do think this idea that you can't talk somebody out of something that they didn't, you know, you can't reason somebody out of a belief they didn't reason their way into, I think it's not true. | ||
| even though probably they didn't reason their way into the belief in the first place, | ||
| once you have the belief in place, then you find reasons to believe it, | ||
| and smart people are really good at this, educated, well-versed people | ||
| can pile up the arguments and data in favor of their belief and ignore the disconfirming evidence, you know, the | ||
| confirmation bias. | ||
| But you can do that, you can. | ||
| And now there are studies on this by cognitive psychologists, | ||
| if you're teaching critical thinking and the students believe this, | ||
| how do you get them from there to there, whatever it is, ESP or UFOs, conspiracies, or some political economic idea. | ||
| So you can do this by not standing at the blackboard yammering away, | ||
| but by getting them to debate and engage with each other, like, okay, so you're pro-choice, okay, you're now going to | ||
| argue the pro-life position against this person here, who's going to take the opposite | ||
| position to what they believe. | ||
| And that sort of forces them to think, well, okay, what are the arguments in favor of this? | ||
| Now I've got to make them. | ||
| And then that forces them to listen to the other person and think about that. | ||
| And then they really have a sense of what's the best arguments, because they have to make them. | ||
| So really, it's just engaging in a process. | ||
| It's like, you're not going to learn to play the violin by reading a book about violins or listening to a lecture about how the violin works. | ||
| In your years of doing this, have you learned anything about the mind of the type of people that are prone to conspiracy theories? | ||
| Is there like a certain set of ideas that they more broadly subscribe to before it gets to whatever the conspiracy theory might be? | ||
| It's a very cognitive style that everything happens for a reason. | ||
| Now, for religious people, this is, you know, Jesus or God is sort of directing things, everything from the parking spot you got to the college you went into, your spouse that you met, and so forth. | ||
| The little to the big questions. | ||
| For the conspiracists, it's the government. | ||
| It's little g, God, government, that's, you know, pulling the strings. | ||
| And even if it's, you know, it's the Illuminati or the One World Or whoever, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, it's still kind of a government type. | ||
| There's somebody up there pulling the strings so that everything that happens for a reason. | ||
| And we know from surveys that people that tick the box that JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy are also more likely to tick the box that Princess Diana was murdered, Elvis is still alive, the aliens are being hidden in Area 51. | ||
| So they go down the path. | ||
| They tend to accept more and more ideas. | ||
| Now we might call that a gullibility tendency or something like that, but there's something | ||
| beneath that which is Everything has a reason for why it happens in that they | ||
| downplay the role of chance and randomness So it's interesting how you relate that to the religious | ||
| mind because there's a desire Really to understand what's happening and yet right in the | ||
| desire I think you would argue that you then have to take a lot of | ||
| things that aren't true for fact Like, there's sort of no ending to it, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They never get to the end of the conspiracy theory, and then it's exposed, really. | ||
| It just sort of takes you further and further down the rabbit hole. | ||
| It's like an X-Files series of, you know, it's like one episode leads to the next, and they keep pulling the strings, the thread, and then it keeps unraveling forever. | ||
| So it's really a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way, right? | ||
| If you can never be proven wrong because you hold these beliefs to a certain extent. | ||
| That's right, yes, yes, yeah. | ||
| So I was just debating, just online, UFO people about this new story about the Pentagon had this program to study UFOs. | ||
| Now they call them unidentified aerial phenomenon. | ||
| UAP sounds more technical and not as goofy. | ||
| But of course, you know, they're interested in unidentified aerial something or other because it could be the Russians or the Chinese or who knows what, you know. | ||
| So it's perfectly reasonable to also then understand that, well, the government's, you know, they lied to us. | ||
| Yeah, no kidding. | ||
| Governments do lie to their citizens. | ||
| But a good counter to this is the WikiLeaks. | ||
| Here we have millions of documents that were secret, that we weren't supposed to see, and now we see them. | ||
| And there's nothing in there about 9-11 was an inside job, the alien bodies are being held at Area 51, the UFO was engineering, technology was back-engineered, and this is how we got the space shuttle. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Nothing like that. | ||
| So, this is a good example. | ||
| Well, that they've released yet. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, but, presumably, you know, the WikiLeaks guys weren't, you know, hiding the good stuff and releasing only because they released, you know, millions of documents. | ||
| So, this is an example of the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. | ||
| In terms of that argument. | ||
| Usually that doesn't hold water, but in this case I think it does. | ||
| So where are you, just sort of personally, are you feeling good about the state of skepticism at the moment, or are you feeling that fake news and the authoritarian control on both sides these days, just that everything's so up in the air? | ||
| Do you feel good about what it is that you do and what the things that you do? | ||
| I know it seems like we're not supposed to in the era of Trump and all this stuff but really things just keep grinding along in a positive fashion. | ||
| The counter to the fake news and alternative facts are all the new fact-checking sites like PolitiFact and Snopes has gotten huge now and it's skeptic we're just we're gonna launch a fact-checking site because this is the kind of thing we should be doing and and there's I don't know there's half a dozen of those sites that Every political speech now given is followed by really clickbait tweets on, here are the 27 facts that are wrong in this speech. | ||
| Oh, boom, I wanna see what they are. | ||
| So really, that's the market counter to that. | ||
| Not censorship, or we need laws about fake news. | ||
| No, we just need people fact-checking. | ||
| And then, we get nailed. | ||
| But it's the inherent problem with even that, that people go to those sites, and then even if you fact-check it, they still don't believe the facts that they don't like. | ||
| Like, we've really run that to the ground, sort of. | ||
| Maybe, but on the other hand, the moment postmodernists or even behavioral economists say that we're incapable of reason, yeah, what are your arguments and reasons for that statement? | ||
| And the moment they open their mouth, they've refuted themselves, because we still use arguments and reason. | ||
| Even if your arguments or your data are fake or questionable, you're still trying to make a good argument. | ||
| So that enlightenment program of we use science and reason to make political progress is still in place. | ||
| Yeah, well, that concept, I think, is really interesting because you have all these people right now who think either the Armageddon's coming tomorrow or everything's never been worse. | ||
| I think we hear that a lot. | ||
| We've never hated each other more, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure it was the first time I had you on the show and we were talking about the moral arc, which is right over there, that you were saying that the arc of progress has bent so that actually things are better. | ||
| But it seems like we don't really stop and smell the roses these days. | ||
| That seems like a bigger problem to me at the moment. | ||
| And when something does get exposed as, you know, here's this evil in society that now we're alerting to, like the Me Too movement and some of the other ones that have happened in the last year or so, that just exposes how far we've come and how sensitized our moral compass is to things that are really bad and that we're going to jump on it and not allow this anymore. | ||
| So, if anything, and like with the stuff we've talked about with the student protests, complaining about Halloween costumes, okay? | ||
| This is actually a sign of progress. | ||
| I mean, no one worried about Halloween costumes in the 1950s, right? | ||
| The moral crusaders like Martin Luther King weren't, you know, oh, what are the Halloween costumes? | ||
| They're worried about the KKK costumes that are real. | ||
| Okay, so that's how far we've come, when it can be so finely tuned that we're gonna pick these little nits over here. | ||
| Does that also show you why the level of hysteria maybe is ramped up so much? | ||
| Because the less stuff there is to really fight about. | ||
| There isn't some stuff, but the less stuff that really we don't, this isn't the 1950s KKK, it's maybe a couple losers with a truck. | ||
| But that's why the people that scream about it have to scream louder, because they sort of need it. | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| The fact is, say students at colleges like at Evergreen, they have their moral modules ramped up to 11 like any of us do on A Cause We Believe In. | ||
| It's just that, from a bigger picture, when you look at, well, what are you all ramped up about? | ||
| Why is your moral module dialed to 11 over this silly little thing here? | ||
| Well, they don't know what it used to be like, you know, half a century ago. | ||
| They weren't even alive. | ||
| So they have the issues they're concerned about, but they have the same moral modules everybody else has. | ||
| So what do you make of the state of education in general? | ||
| I mean, everything we talk about, everything you've written all these books about, Yeah, it's based in educating some people first. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's still the most important thing we can do I don't think higher education is going to disappear. | ||
| I don't think brick-and-mortar Universities are going to disappear. | ||
| I think they'll just be more options online options say You know all these MOOC courses and you know teaching company courses and audio books and podcasts and so on these are just more avenues for dispersing information and ideas and discussing them I think that's just going to continue and along with Standard educational things. | ||
| Now again, I mentioned earlier about, you know, the professor standing at the blackboard yammering away for hours while the students are on there. | ||
| Now they're just on social media, not even listening. | ||
| Okay, so that's what has to change, I think. | ||
| Professors, teachers need to get more engaged. | ||
| I'm a professor, I know. | ||
| This is harder to do. | ||
| It's easy once you've got the lectures written, you've got the PowerPoint set up, you just walk in, boom! | ||
| And you're off and running. | ||
| Fifty minutes later, you're done and you're off having your coffee. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It takes more preparation to think about, okay, how am I going to get these students to engage in this subject in a way that they'll actually get something out of it, and that takes more work. | ||
| So I think you gave me an example already, but tell me a little bit about how you prepare. | ||
| So you're teaching Skepticism 101 at Chapman. | ||
| From everything I know about Chapman, who's the dean that I heard speak? | ||
| Daniele Struppa, I think, is the president now. | ||
| Yeah, so I heard him speak a couple months ago in Dallas at an event, and it was an absolutely wonderful defense of free speech, of enlightenment values, of what academia is supposed to be. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I wanted to say hi to him after I mentioned that you've been on my show a couple times. | ||
| So it seems like you guys are doing something right over there. | ||
| Is that fair to say in a broad sense? | ||
| They are, yes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They are not a politically left or right university. | ||
| They're just open to ideas. | ||
| The fact that they have statues of civil rights champions like Martin Luther King, but also economic freedom champions like Hayek and Volmisius there on campus. | ||
| Others might think, oh, this is a right-wing, you know, libertarian nut job. | ||
| No, actually, I had my students one semester for their research project do, try to sample the faculty on their political beliefs. | ||
| Now, I talked to Daniele about this, and he and the administration are not allowed to do this. | ||
| They can't ask professors what their political persuasions are. | ||
| But the students can just, you know, just sort of email, take my little survey. | ||
| And it was pretty centrist. | ||
| There was still a slight leaning toward the left, I don't know where you'd put it on the scale, | ||
| but left leaning. | ||
| But by Berkeley or Evergreen standards, this would be right wing, alt right, nut job campus. | ||
| But really, they're just kind of centrist. | ||
| And I actually think there's probably a little bit of a bias that you and I have been subject to | ||
| in the sense that we focus on the Evergreens and the Middlebury incidences 'cause they do stand out. | ||
| And we forget all that, you know, so Evergreen has like 4,000 students. | ||
| There was maybe 200 involved in the whole Brett Weinstein thing. | ||
| All right, what were the other 3,800 doing? | ||
| They were probably holed up in their dorm rooms. | ||
| They don't want to get involved. | ||
| They're not interested. | ||
| They just want to study. | ||
| But my fear with them is that it's a little bit of intellectual hostage taking, that yes, you might be right, the large bulk of them may not care about this or may think it's silly or whatever, but I think there's a huge percentage, I don't know what the percentage is, that are just afraid to speak because of this. | ||
| Because every time I speak at colleges, that's what they ask me in the Q&As. | ||
| I don't want to get kicked out of college, I don't want to get kicked out of my fraternity, have my professor flunk me, all that. | ||
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That there is this feeling of that, I don't know that I've never seen numbers on that. | |
| That would be a good question. | ||
| Hard to get the data. | ||
| It's self-reported data and it's hard to get people to be honest about that sort of thing. | ||
| But let's say it's 50-50. | ||
| Half don't care, half do care and keep their mouths shut. | ||
| Every semester I ask my students, how many of you self-censor because you're afraid to say something in the political correct language or whatever. | ||
| And most of them raise their hand, yes, they do some self-censoring. | ||
| So for sure that happens. | ||
| But I was encouraged by the Reed College. | ||
| where the humanities 101 was protested. | ||
| It's two white male, Shakespeare and Greeks and Romans. | ||
| And then finally some black students said, "Get out, I wanna get my education. | ||
| "I'm paying $50,000 a year." | ||
| And it's like, good, all right, so fighting back. | ||
| What do you think it makes the audacity of a 18 year old to get up? | ||
| I mean, I watched that video. | ||
| People can find it on YouTube. | ||
| I mean, I think the class was about the history of Greeks who have given us almost every value | ||
| that logic and reason that we have right now. | ||
| And talking about how it's white supremacists and all the usual nonsense. | ||
| But to me it was like, those kids who get up and do this, it's like the level of self-importance is so off the charts that you dare, it's not even what you're doing to yourself, it's what you're doing to all of these other people who paid to go to school. | ||
| And you think you're wiser than the professors and administrators and all that. | ||
| Well, we do have research on this from social psychology for decades now, that you only need a few confederates, people that will just go along with you. | ||
| Confederates is not the right word, that's what experimenters put somebody in there, but affiliates, somebody that will stand with you. | ||
| Like in the Milgram experiments, if there's somebody else in the room with you that says, wait a minute, I don't think we should be shocking this guy, then the actual subject will not go as far on the shock things. | ||
| And same thing with the line length, Solomon Asch's famous one, you know, here's three lines, you know, here's one line, and pick the one that matches it, and everybody in the room says it's this one over here, it clearly doesn't match, and most of the subjects go along with the group. | ||
| But if you have one other, In the room that picks the right link line, then almost everybody does pick the right. | ||
| So, you only need one or two affiliates, just somebody to stand with you. | ||
| And it's just sort of common knowledge that, like the emperor has no clothes, if somebody would just say it, maybe two or three people would say it, then everybody else who already knows what the truth is, then they have the courage to say it. | ||
| If there's not punishment for it. | ||
| So, fascistic regimes and communist regimes have always kept a check on that by punishing dissenters. | ||
| Which is why, you know, free speech is so important, but also whistleblowing. | ||
| We have to protect whistleblowers. | ||
| We have to protect and in a way, you know, like with virtue signaling, we need to signal to the people that are willing to stand up. | ||
| You get moral points for what you just did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think that's why I've tried to be part of this conversation at some level, but also talk to all of these people. | ||
| So when this happened with Brett Weinstein or Laura Kipnis or Lindsey Shepard, "or Jordan Peterson, et cetera, et cetera." | ||
| I offered them that chair because I want people to see-- | ||
| Perfect, yes, that's right. | ||
| As Douglas Murray said to me when I asked him, people think you're so brave, | ||
| you talk about all of this stuff and the crumbling of the West and all this. | ||
| And I said, "Well, what makes you so brave?" | ||
| And he said, "Well, something to the effect of," | ||
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in his great British accent, "The water isn't so cold when you actually get in." | |
| And I think that that's what it is. | ||
| We sort of imagine that if you start saying what you think, horrible things are gonna happen. | ||
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But in most cases, I think they don't. | |
| Yeah, so I mean, like the Lindsey Shepard. | ||
| She's a complete nobody. | ||
| Who's ever heard of her? | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Now she's like this sensational star of freedom and liberty and free speech. | ||
| And the same thing with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| I know he has a lot of enemies, but boy, he's got a lot of followers, my God. | ||
| It's just huge and so I think there's more people on that side. | ||
| They haven't been as loud and the other side has a bigger voice because negativity always trumps positivity. | ||
| It's like I talk about in the book, people hate to lose more than they like to win. | ||
| It's a behavioral economics loss aversion. | ||
| Losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good. | ||
| Our brains are tuned to negative things for very good reasons. | ||
| Evolution and life before the modern world was a dangerous place. | ||
| There's a lot of things that could take you out and very few things that make life better. | ||
| So it's better to focus on the negative things that can take you out and then just sort of accept | ||
| the good days as they come, but you don't have to pay that much attention to it. | ||
| So the negative tweets in social media, they always stand out, which is why you just don't read 'em. | ||
| It's hard not to, but-- | ||
| So is this sort of the theory behind, I guess, every local news broadcast in the history of the world, | ||
| right, it's just fire here, murder here, car accident. | ||
| I mean, that's their task to do that, that's okay. | ||
| We just have to remind ourselves that is not representative of the way life is. | ||
| How can we change our brains to think differently then? | ||
| 'Cause I think a lot of people want that right now. | ||
| I think there's an exhaustion with the outrage, I think there's an exhaustion with. | ||
| Hating each other and all that. | ||
| And I think that's why, you know, what we're doing in this broader group of people is trying to make some sense. | ||
| I think that's why it's working. | ||
| We just have to make our voices louder and just remind people, you know, there are lots of sources to go to, to show how good, just reading one in your green room of a site that had the 99 best things that happened in 2017 that made it the best year in the history of humanity. | ||
| It was like a long title, like the 99, oh my God. | ||
| I started scanning that, I was like, "Oh yeah, I forgot about that last February, this really cool thing happened." | ||
| Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| And even I, I'm a super optimist and I pay attention to stuff. | ||
| I didn't know half the things on this list. | ||
| Like, "Oh yeah, wow, okay, so here we go." | ||
| And people like you and Pinker, you know, Matt Ridley, who, you know, track the, what's that site? | ||
| Our World in Data, humanprogress.org, I think, or .com, Human Progress. | ||
| And they just, this is all they do is track this stuff. | ||
| You know, poverty will be extinguished by 2030, maybe sooner. | ||
| You know, the Gates Foundation posts all this stuff, the work they're doing to eradicate disease in Africa, you know, specific target. | ||
| Which is why, you know, I rail against Utopia. | ||
| We're gonna dive deep into this book, but let's just do a little bit more before then. | ||
| In a thousand years, we're gonna have a perfect world. | ||
| Forget that. | ||
| Just try to eradicate this particular disease in the next 10 years in that country, right there. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, we're gonna dive deep into this book, but let's just do a little bit more before then. | ||
| You said you're an optimist. | ||
| How does a skeptic become an optimist? | ||
| Well, this may just be temperament. | ||
| I'm just sort of a happy fellow and I just tend to see the world fairly optimistically. | ||
| I'm not sure why. | ||
| That could just be the behavior genetics stuff. | ||
| Half of our temperament is heritable. | ||
| I just got it from my parents. | ||
| Steve Jobs had that reality distortion field he talked about. | ||
| No, Steve, we can't program this in by next month. | ||
| Yes, we can, and you will. | ||
| You know, these are not the drones you're looking at. | ||
| I will get it programmed, but yes. | ||
| I have a little bit of that, not to that extent. | ||
| That can be a little dangerous, you know, like I'm going to ignore the cancer and just, you know, no. | ||
| There's some things you shouldn't ignore. | ||
| For the most part, when I get up, you know, it's like, like everybody else is like, uh, what am I going to do today? | ||
| And I don't feel that motivated. | ||
| And then I just sort of get going. | ||
| And then, and then I tend to perceive things that could be negative in a positive way. | ||
| Sometimes I have to sort of force myself. | ||
| I do follow people on Twitter, for example, that are pretty positive, like Pinker or like Jocko Wilnick. | ||
| You know, he's, he's, you know, he tweets every morning his workout. | ||
| I've started. | ||
| You see his watch, 430. | ||
| Oh, AM? | ||
| Yeah, AM. | ||
| All right, so then I think, okay, you know what? | ||
| I can do this. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| And so I tend to distort reality a little bit. | ||
| We do know from research on entrepreneurs and other people that it's good to be a little on the optimistic side versus pessimistic side. | ||
| Now, you don't want to have the over-optimism bias. | ||
| See, the entrepreneurs that think, I can succeed no matter what, and they just keep plowing money into a failed business, you know, that's not good. | ||
| And of course we only hear about the Steve Jobses of the world. | ||
| You know, here's the model. | ||
| Drop out of college, move back to your parents' house, and start a startup in the garage. | ||
| And you'll be a billionaire. | ||
| Actually, there's a lot of people that did that in the 70s. | ||
| And no one writes biographies of them because they went out of business. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of pissed parents with old kids in the basement. | ||
| So there's too much of that. | ||
| But too much negativity makes you feel what's called learned helplessness. | ||
| Like, there's nothing I could do. | ||
| I mean, you know, we got Trump and we got the economy and North Korea, Syria. | ||
| Oh, it's all lost. | ||
| What's the point? | ||
| I can't do anything. | ||
| I'm just one person. | ||
| And then you just kind of sink. | ||
| You're like, there's nothing to do. | ||
| And that's not good either. | ||
| So as an optimist and a skeptic, regardless of how much of this was just built in in your DNA, how much do you think is sort of the right amount of news to take in? | ||
| Because I think we're also dealing with that now. | ||
| Sometimes people say, well, Dave, why don't you do a daily show? | ||
| We could do this five days a week. | ||
| And my feeling generally, beyond that I don't even know that the economic part makes sense to us, is that I think there's a limit to how much people should be talking about politics all the time. | ||
| Dave, you could have a Twitter feed screen right here and sit here 24-7. | ||
| It would never end. | ||
| Literally sounds like my worst night. | ||
| Hold on, look what happened now! | ||
| Yeah, I think that's too much. | ||
| I'm a consumer of content. | ||
| I do tend to prefer the kind of long-form essays, you know, the old New Yorker Atlantic styles, and I still read those, but now there's a lot of good sites like this Aeon, A-E-O-N site, Quillette in Australia. | ||
| They have these three to five thousand word essays. | ||
| They're great. | ||
| That's the kind of content I like. | ||
| I do sometimes slip over into just the daily stuff and I find if I don't stop, you know, I'm just, I'm sliding down and my optimism is like, oh God, what can I do? | ||
| It's just, Sturmer, stop, just get off, close it, close the laptop. | ||
| You're pretty good about it, though, because I don't see you fighting with that many people online. | ||
| Although, every now and again, I've seen you get into something with another academic somewhere, and I've opened the door. | ||
| I can't even remember the woman's name. | ||
| It's not even that important unless you want to specifically talk about it. | ||
| But you got into something with some woman about postmodernism, and I said, hey, let's talk about it on the show. | ||
| And then she immediately said something that is basically that you're a sexist and I'm impartial. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, I'm 63, right, so I'm not, you know, super engaged because I'm slightly older, although I did get into the social media enough to, like, I could see this is kind of where the conversation is shifting, you know, from books and, you know, public lectures to online content, and I like it, but I'm not obsessed about it. | ||
| You know, people that are maybe in their 20s and that maybe they just can't, you hear about this, you know, addicted to social media, addicted to your phone, it's like, really? | ||
| But I can see how it happens. | ||
| You get the little dopamine hit every time you scroll through and you see your name on there. | ||
| Do you think that amount of information at our fingertips also feeds into why people believe in conspiracy theories? | ||
| Well, it's just more available, yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, so like maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago, it would have been harder for the 9-11 truthers to get a toehold, whatever the equivalent of that would have been, the Watergate inside job or whatever, because they didn't have a platform. | ||
| That everyone's a publisher now and you can just have your own web page. | ||
| It looks like a magazine or whatever and that they would have been harder to find. | ||
| They're available. | ||
| I mean you could find stuff, but you know, it's more like ersatz publishing or you put pamphlet leaflets on car windshields or you know, you go to lectures and say stuff. | ||
| Now it's just it's too easily available. | ||
| But on the other hand, so are the counter pages that can debunk them. | ||
| Yeah, that part's good. | ||
| So, I wanna talk a little bit about your politics specifically, because you took the political compass test a couple months ago, and you posted your results online, and then I took it maybe a day or two after. | ||
| We were pretty damn close. | ||
| I was like, all right, that's good, because I like Schermer, he seems sane to me. | ||
| Okay, and basically we both came out sort of center-right. | ||
| So, as you know, I've tried for a long time to reform the left. | ||
| I think this has left me as a liberal to be right in the odd ways that things change over time. | ||
| What do you even consider yourself at this point? | ||
| I know you kinda said you were a libertarian the first time I had you on. | ||
| Yes, yes, well, I bought your T-shirt. | ||
| Yeah, you were wearing the classical liberal T-shirt. | ||
| Classical liberal, I think maybe is the right... | ||
| Phrase now, the libertarian label has gotten a lot of baggage over the years. | ||
| It's collected a lot of stuff from people on the fringes. | ||
| You know, oh, so you don't believe in any government? | ||
| Oh, no, no, no, and that's not what I believe. | ||
| Or, you know, you're like Rand Paul or Ron Paul or you're Ayn Rand or, you know, they pluck these people out. | ||
| And it's a cognitive shortcut, a heuristic, in which I don't have to actually talk to you about anything. | ||
| I already know what you think. | ||
| So I don't like that. | ||
| It's like, well, okay, don't ask me what my political affiliation is. | ||
| Ask me my position on abortion, gun control, death penalty, and so on, and I'll tell you what I think, why I think it, and then we can go from there. | ||
| But of course, who has time to do all that? | ||
| So we like the labels. | ||
| Yeah, but let's do one of those, because I had Ben Shapiro on last week, and we had a really, I think, interesting, honest, sort of painful, at some level, discussion about abortion. | ||
| It's one of the most difficult topics to talk about. | ||
| We never in mainstream media see it discussed honestly, really, that I see anyway. | ||
| And basically, my argument was that I'm pro-choice, but at basically 20 weeks, where they've been proven that at that point, the fetus can feel pain, that at that point, I think you probably could say, all right, you can have an abortion, but then that leads to all sorts of other questions, which is, does the state have to have a responsibility, which I don't like that. | ||
| Anyway, Ben is pro-life. | ||
| You sent me a very brief email with your thoughts on this. | ||
| Yeah, well, I was watching that live, which is great, and so I just sent that. | ||
| It was an article from Aeon, actually, about the history of infanticide in our species. | ||
| Lots of species do this. | ||
| And evolutionary biologists have studied this for a century. | ||
| Why would, in a Darwinian model, why would a parent kill an offspring? | ||
| That's their DNA. | ||
| Well, it depends on the calculation of resources available for how many you can bring to reproductive age. | ||
| That is, RS, reproductive success of a species, depends, is defined by how much of your genes get into the future genome of the species going forward. | ||
| So if you are our selected species, you have like salmon, you have 10 million eggs and | ||
| a hundred of them make it to the top of the stream and they're the ones that succeed. | ||
| If you're an elephant or a primate, you have two or three and you put all of your resources | ||
| into those. | ||
| And so these are different reproductive strategies. | ||
| And in our species, what's happened all the way up until really well into the 20th century, | ||
| until the introduction of birth control, women just killed their babies after they were born. | ||
| And it sounds cruel, but it's just a basic triage decision to make. | ||
| I can't feed any more kids. | ||
| When you live in really any time before the 20th century, it was pretty impoverished compared | ||
| to today's standards, which is what we're used to. | ||
| You just can't have that many kids. | ||
| They're just going to starve to death or whatever. | ||
| And, you know, in lots of societies, anthropologists tell us, you know, like these Inuits, you know, they just leave the kid out there, and if he survives for two days, then we'll bring him in and make him a part of our family, if not, out. | ||
| You know, Spartans did this, lots of societies did this, not because they were immoral, Presumably, they feel grief about it, but they just can't do it. | ||
| So, one argument among many. | ||
| Wait, well, is there a moral argument there, though? | ||
| Is it not that they're not immoral? | ||
| You know, is there something? | ||
| Yeah, this is a hard question. | ||
| Okay, so, I'm making the argument that, practically speaking, if you restrict women's ability to control their family size, they're gonna do it anyway. | ||
| Say, okay, you can't have an abortion. | ||
| Well, we're just gonna get more trash can babies, more infants left in the park. | ||
| Now that's not a pure moral argument. | ||
| Ben would say something like, "Oh, so you're saying murder is fine before or after birth?" | ||
| No, I'm just telling you historically this is what happens. | ||
| Now the ideal solution would be more prosperity for women, more control over their reproductive | ||
| choices, more control over their family size, and so on. | ||
| Access to abortion if you need it. | ||
| But we do know from studies that abortion rates go down when women have more political power, more economic freedom, and especially access to birth control technologies. | ||
| And so religion has traditionally restricted those, and that leads to more abortions, or in other cases, more infanticide. | ||
| So that's one angle I come at it. | ||
| It's really more of a practical, historical angle than a purely moral one. | ||
| Right, so you're really just giving me the realest... | ||
| Yes, it's a realist. | ||
| Now, morally, with these difficult questions, we have competing moral dilemmas, or competing moral positions, and they're going to conflict with one another. | ||
| So, you have the rights of the fetus, the rights of the woman. | ||
| So, there's not one right answer. | ||
| So, if you say, well, you should be a utilitarian, or you should be a Kantian, this will tell you what you should do. | ||
| But those aren't necessarily absolutely right across the board. | ||
| No one could be a pure utilitarian or pure Kantian or Aristotelian virtue ethics. | ||
| None of them work across the board. | ||
| You can always find some exception, which is why we still have these elaborate ethical debates, because it's not solvable. | ||
| You know, the state should have some say over whether citizens murder each other or not, and they should be able to implement punishments that are appropriate. | ||
| So, death penalty. | ||
| Yeah, but there's all these other sides. | ||
| So, you have these conflicting... So, how do we resolve it? | ||
| Debate, votes, laws that get changed, legislation that changes. | ||
| It's hard because there's not one clearly right answer. | ||
| So I suspect that you thought my argument was actually pretty decent then, right? | ||
| Against Ben? | ||
| Absolutely, of course, 100%. | ||
| I'm a pro-choice, I forget exactly the way you said it, barely. | ||
| But that basically at 20 weeks, you're right, it gets caught in now, okay, well, If you believe it's a life, it's a life at 18 weeks and at 20 weeks. | ||
| So where are we drawing these lines all the time? | ||
| You have to draw the lines somewhere. | ||
| Frozen embryos. | ||
| There's millions of them now. | ||
| Why are they not life on Benz? | ||
| The moment there's fertilization, that's a life. | ||
| Okay, that's true. | ||
| That's it's well. | ||
| It's a potential human life now There's the question of personhood slightly different because a person has legal rights under the Constitution of the particular country And it's a slightly different question than a biological question, but either way once by Ben's argument once the fertilization that happens That's a human life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yeah, it's potential human life so killing the embryos Also wrong? | ||
| I don't know what he'd say about that. | ||
| Actually, I haven't heard his position. | ||
| But I'd say it's a continuum. | ||
| And the problem, the difference between the law and science is that science deals in continuums and gray areas and shades and nuance. | ||
| The law, by definition, has to just say, OK, this is the law. | ||
| We draw the line on this day of this month. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| No abortions after that are illegal. | ||
| And I'm OK with that. | ||
| Life is messy. | ||
| We have to draw the line somewhere. | ||
| All right, so one more thing before we get to the book. | ||
| So I think one of the best things that I did or that I was part of last year was the debate that we had here with you and Dennis Prager about God and morality. | ||
| And obviously you took the position that you do not need God or a higher power to be moral. | ||
| Dennis took the opposite position. | ||
| So two questions on this. | ||
| So first, when we finished that, I sort of, My brain basically, and most of my being, basically agrees with your argument, that I don't think my morality purely comes from believing in God, or that most people's, that you can figure out a way to be moral. | ||
| The interesting part of the conversation came down to this micro versus macro argument. | ||
| Where basically Dennis was saying to you, well, you, Michael, on the micro level, you as an individual can be very moral and I have no doubt that you're a very moral person, I'm basically paraphrasing him, but that at a societal level, somehow the man-made morals that you prescribe to can't tie a society together | ||
| in the long term so that we need these Judeo-Christian values, | ||
| which then allow the enlightenment to happen to then have morals for a society. | ||
| I suspect you don't agree with that. | ||
| We got into it a little bit, but I just wanted to kick it to you | ||
| without someone else. | ||
| Yes, well, Hitch dealt with this in his book, "God is Not Great," and he even cites Prager. | ||
| He said, I was on Prager Show once, and he asked this question. | ||
| Of course, you personally could be moral, but as a society, wouldn't you rather walk down the street at three in the morning in a dark alley in a society that was more religious than less religious? | ||
| And Hitch promptly rattled off cities he had walked around at three in the morning after drinking. | ||
| That were very religious and he was not at all feeling comfortable or safe. | ||
| And he had them by name and year and so on. | ||
| It's like, yes, okay, that's right. | ||
| At what point in history? | ||
| I mean, most Judeo-Christian countries centuries ago were not safe places where you could be burned as a heretic if you had the wrong beliefs about the king or whatever. | ||
| It didn't matter what year. | ||
| Religious beliefs are these were your fellow Christians killing you and all the way up to World War one, you know Christian Germans killing French Christians Did I say that right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Anyway, so Yeah, so No, but even so, that argument is really more of a pragmatic kind of utilitarian argument that whether or not there's a God or religion is true or not, believing in it, this is what Dandana calls belief in belief, you know, I don't believe, but I think people need to believe. | ||
| There are some people that make that, a lot of atheists make that argument. | ||
| It's sort of a condescending way of looking at your fellow citizens, you know. | ||
| I don't need it, I can be moral, but these morons, they've got to have the little policeman in their head or they're going to kill each other. | ||
| In a way, the Founding Fathers, Jefferson and these people talked about that more in a deistic way. | ||
| If we're going to have a self-organized, self-policing society, we can't get the state out there to those western states, which was like Ohio at the time. | ||
| You know, it would be good if people believed in moral values, so they really believed in an education and moral education as well. | ||
| And I think that's true, but what's happened is that we've inculcated those beliefs into our own beliefs without the need of religion anymore, without the need of an eye in the sky watching us, because we're kind of watching each other. | ||
| And so I think To go one more step for Dennis, he needs to say that it actually needs to be a supernatural implementation of a moral sense into human cognition. | ||
| And I think that is what he believes. | ||
| God gave us our morals. | ||
| Of course, I had counters on that, which we talked about. | ||
| But ultimately, he still needs that supernatural dropping in, because we can show that societies can learn to be better and moral just with secular law and order. | ||
| Yeah, I like that you brought the founders into it because, as I say all the time, I go to D.C. | ||
| every couple months, probably at this point, and I go to all of the monuments and all that, and when you read these things, especially Jefferson, it's like, this guy was talking about church and state, separation, the necessity for church and state to be separate, while at the same time was sort of, was basically acknowledging some sort of higher power. | ||
| How much he believed in it is, I think, a little unclear. | ||
| But that then led to all of the values that And it's long ago enough that we're used to talking in language that doesn't include God talk. | ||
| At that time, there were virtually no atheists. | ||
| No one was talking about, it's okay not to believe in God. | ||
| There's a famous story about Hume coming to somebody's dinner at the Enlightenment time. | ||
| You have Adam Smith and all these now famous people. | ||
| Hume says, well, I don't know any atheists. | ||
| And it's like, you have a room full of them here. | ||
| It's like, really? | ||
| You know, oh my God. | ||
| Yeah, now you and I, well, of course we live in LA and California is a little more liberal. | ||
| We're in the most godless place known to man. | ||
| Yeah, so it's not a big deal. | ||
| But I think more and more it's becoming more acceptable and therefore where do morals come from? | ||
| Well, you know, we talk about the secular values enshrined in the Constitution and the, you know, the law and order of our society, Western society, expand and include Europe and so on. | ||
| And all of a sudden you have, you know, the fastest growing group are the nuns, the non-religious people. | ||
| Okay, there's going to be a third, maybe a half of the world in a few decades, maybe. | ||
| Where are they going to get their morals? | ||
| Well, we know where they're going to get them, where we get them from. | ||
| Do you think you can live a full life while still splitting the difference on these two positions? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people are like that, and I think sometimes I even fall into that. | ||
| I sit around so many people that are really smart, that make compelling arguments, and I can understand their lines of thinking, and I think that sometimes I can go to those different places in different ways. | ||
| Do you think you can live a full, complete life without ever fully getting to an answer that satisfies you on that? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, like everybody else, I would prefer to have definitive answers. | ||
| Often have to remind myself. | ||
| It's what I always say. | ||
| It's okay not to know But I'm not always comfortable with that. | ||
| It'd be nice to know But really by temperament again, I think I think I'm just of that scientific mindset of it's okay to just have this question and the more I study morals particularly when I was writing the moral arc and now I'm getting ready to teach this honors course at Chapman on Morality and ethics and evolution, you know, so I'm rereading all these, you know debates about abortion capital punishment We have a textbook we're using that You know, here's the best argument for abortion, here's the best argument against abortion, and so on. | ||
| And it's like, OK, yeah, these are really good arguments on both sides. | ||
| And, you know, it's like these ethics and moral seminars, you know, where the professor is driving you down, like a Peter Singer kind of thing. | ||
| Is it okay to sacrifice children, you know, that are mentally retarded? | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| But when you actually listen to the arguments, okay, it's not clear at all which is the right moral position here. | ||
| And so recently I was just writing about utilitarianism, you know, because this is a popular idea now. | ||
| It's like, wait, wait, wait, there's some really big flaws with you. | ||
| Well, then what? | ||
| Were you like Kantian, you know, the categorical imperative? | ||
| No, that has flaws. | ||
| What about Aristotle's, you know, virtue ethic? | ||
| No, that has flaws. | ||
| You know, they all have flaws. | ||
| All I can think of is, it's something like this. | ||
| The analogy I used in a paper I wrote, My Moral Manifest, is that when Kepler discovered that planets travel in ellipses and not circles, no one could have discovered something else if they're doing their sums right, and they're actually making accurate measurements, because that's what orbits actually travel in. | ||
| I think human societies are just many degrees of freedom more complicated, and that we're not going to discover the answer to These moral dilemmas, but but but it's not like post-modernism. | ||
| There is no moral truth. | ||
| Yeah Maybe there's six, you know that the planets have these six variations of planetary orbit So humans, you know have like utilitarianism Kantian ethics and so I think we've kind of figured out You know a few basic principles like you have to consider the other person's position, you know, John Rawls is veil of ignorance like when you Dave Ruhman are going to write a law. | ||
| You have to do it as if you might be a black woman. | ||
| Okay, all right. | ||
| In that case, I'm not going to write it to favor white males. | ||
| In fact, I'd better write it so that everybody gets treated equally under this law I'm about to write. | ||
| Okay, that's super basic, but it really works in terms of fairness. | ||
| By just asking somebody else, how would you feel if this law were passed and you were the one affected by it? | ||
| They'll tell you. | ||
| So that principle that we have to think about that when we're legislating. | ||
| That's one of those. | ||
| Again, so there's maybe in the last couple thousand years, maybe half a dozen of these kind of moral positions. | ||
| And you can see how they've sorted themselves out. | ||
| And there are not many new ones that come up. | ||
| Try this, try that. | ||
| And they either take hold or they don't, because they work in terms of improving humanity a little bit. | ||
| Well, now I know why I'm so close to you on the political scale, because I love that answer. | ||
| And that's the spirit that I try to bring to the show every week. | ||
| I would love to say I'm pro-choice and those guys are absolutely 100% wrong. | ||
| Ben Shapiro, I know why he's wrong. | ||
| No, actually, I don't. | ||
| I think I can out-argue him just slightly. | ||
| But at some point, here's my arguments, they're good. | ||
| Here's his arguments, they're also pretty good. | ||
| All right, so we just decide. | ||
| All right, your new book. | ||
| It is out this week. | ||
| It is sitting right in front of me. | ||
| Heavens on Earth, The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia. | ||
| Well? | ||
| Did you figure it out? | ||
| I have the answer! | ||
| You've got the answer? | ||
| Is there any scientific evidence for any of those things, Michael Shermer? | ||
| Well, no, I'm sorry to say that there's not. | ||
| There's actually some good news at the end of the book, but I do address all of the different versions of the afterlife heaven. | ||
| I go through the monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of course. | ||
| And right off the bat, you see there's a huge body of literature in those areas of the history of heaven. | ||
| And the fact that history, that heaven has a history, and now I'm a historian of science, | ||
| so like cosmology has a history, the history of cosmology. | ||
| How did we figure out how big the universe is and all that stuff? | ||
| But there, there's kind of a sense of progress, like we're getting ever closer to understanding | ||
| what's actually out there. | ||
| With these history of heaven literature, there's no sense of progress at all. | ||
| It's like, well, this group used to believe that, and then they encounter the Egyptians, and then they change it to this, and then the Babylonian captivity, and the Jews inculcated their worldview, and there's no sense like, oh, well, there's something out there, and we're getting closer to it. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| So that was kind of interesting. | ||
| And also how they change. | ||
| Did that surprise you? | ||
| Because just hearing you say it, it doesn't particularly surprise me. | ||
| I mean, that wasn't a big thing. | ||
| It was just sort of an interesting observation. | ||
| I then do also have to deal with the non-monotheisms. | ||
| You know, what's called the Eastern wisdom traditions. | ||
| Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism. | ||
| So I have a whole chapter on that. | ||
| I went to Deepak's Chopra Center down in Carlsbad and got into the whole meditation and yoga and chanting and The tea and the incense and they're like, okay Deepak, let's talk about this and so he gave me the whole thing So I really that was kind of my avenue into talking about Consciousness and you know their view the Buddhist view is there's no life and death in the sense There's a beginning and end like in Western culture. | ||
| We have this idea of a linear of linear time There's a beginning and an end the Big Bang that you know and so forth but in in this worldview You know, the physical universe, including us, we're just temporary physical instantiations of consciousness. | ||
| Consciousness is pervasive. | ||
| It is, well, okay, Deepak's language, the ground of all being, you know, the ontological primitive. | ||
| Okay, so he says these things and it takes me, you know, a page to deconstruct. | ||
| What do you mean by the ontological primitive? | ||
| And part of the problem is that as a Western scientist, we use words in a certain way and they don't. | ||
| And they use words in a different way. So we're often just talking cross-purposes there. | ||
| So much of my conversations with Deepak have been just, "Stop. | ||
| Tell me what you mean by this word." | ||
| Because all we have are words. I can't read your thoughts. | ||
| Anyway, but the core of the book really is scientific attempts. I call this the afterlife or atheists. | ||
| These are all the people that don't necessarily think that there's a heaven. | ||
| In fact, they're pretty sure there isn't anything like a traditional heaven because there's no evidence for that. | ||
| But interestingly, in surveys I was looking up, about a third of atheists think that there might be an afterlife. | ||
| So they say, "I don't believe in God, but there might be something else." | ||
| Now, what are they talking about? | ||
| Well, you're a Star Wars fan. | ||
| You know, something like The Force. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, there's something out there that you continue on. | ||
| And some of them do find that kind of Deepak worldview, that sort of Buddhist, you know, Buddhism has quite a resurgence now. | ||
| There's a number of books, you know, Bob Wright's book, Buddhism is True, and so on. | ||
| What do you mean it's true? | ||
| Okay, that's a big statement, the truth statement, okay. | ||
| Well, okay, so they think when you die, you just go back to where you were before you were born. | ||
| As I open the book, say, when people say, where do you think you go when you die, Shermer? | ||
| I say, the same place I was before I was born. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| You weren't anywhere, right? | ||
| Well, to the Buddhists, you actually are returning to where you were. | ||
| Because consciousness is just always, there's no beginning or end, it's just always was and is and everywhere, okay? | ||
| That's really hard for us to grasp. | ||
| So, what the scientists group, these communities I delve into, the cryonisists, the transhumanists, the extropians, they're against entropy. | ||
| Good luck with that. | ||
| They're against entropy? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| As a theory? | ||
| Well, just, you know, they start off simple enough, which seems obvious, you know, diet, nutrition, exercise, you know, be healthy and so on. | ||
| In a way, all of life is pushing back against entropy. | ||
| Most of what we do is a push back against entropy. | ||
| You know, we have a house, we have a ceiling to protect us from the weather. | ||
| That's fighting entropy. | ||
| Basically, nature just wants to kill us all, all the time. | ||
| That's basically what it does. | ||
| And so, natural selection selected those that were able to push back against it. | ||
| But ultimately, you can't defeat it, right? | ||
| So, you start off, it's a transhumanist, they're all in the same category. | ||
| The soul is your genome and your connectome, the pattern of all your information. | ||
| All of the stuff that your body is made out of gets recycled about every decade or so. | ||
| Your skin cells, blood cells, it's all, none of the material, almost, is the original from ten years ago even, much less when you were born. | ||
| So, you're not the Dave Rubin you were a decade ago. | ||
| I know your friends tell you that. | ||
| You've changed a lot, Dave. | ||
| So when we say, well, there's a unit there called Dave Rubin who's a person and a self who has a sense of self and I have a sense of who you are. | ||
| That's not the material. | ||
| That's the pattern of information that's in your memories and your genome and so on. | ||
| that keeps it going. | ||
| So their idea, the singularity people, the mind uploading, somehow you've got to keep that going. | ||
| So it starts super basic, diet and exercise, just kind of keep the body going. | ||
| But no one's ever gone above the upper ceiling of about 120, 125. | ||
| So first of all, one of the myths I debunk is this idea that people live twice as long as they used to. | ||
| No. | ||
| More and more people are getting up to the upper ceiling thanks to public health measures and vaccinations and things like that. | ||
| But it's not like no one 100 years ago or 200 years ago lived to be in their 80s or 90s. | ||
| Lots of people did, just not as many as do today. | ||
| So to get that, the upper ceiling there is Blocked by a bunch of different systems that all fall apart at the same time. | ||
| Around in your 80s or so, you know, just the telomeres at the end of your chromosomes that break off every time a cell divides, they can only do that so many times. | ||
| It's called the Hayflick number. | ||
| So, one of the goals of the science of aging is to somehow figure that out. | ||
| Well, there's lots of claims about, well, if you eat this supplement every day, your telomeres will be better. | ||
| Acai berries, isn't that the answer to everything? | ||
| Yes, red wine. | ||
| Actually, sleep apparently is really good for keeping your telomeres more in place. | ||
| It doesn't allow your cells to divide more, but they don't die quite as quickly. | ||
| Again, these are all measures to just get more and more of us up to the upper ceiling. | ||
| The only way to break through there would be a complete genetic re-engineering of the genome to stop that from happening without, because there's a name for cells that divide indefinitely, it's called cancer. | ||
| So without turning people into cancerous blobs, and that's just one of dozens of systems that all fall apart. | ||
| So we're not even close to the science of figuring that out and breaking through. | ||
| But when you hear this, and then you hear about, who's the Google guy, I'm blanking on his name suddenly, that's doing the singularity. | ||
| Yeah, Ray Kurzweil. | ||
| Kurzweil, yeah. | ||
| When you hear it, like he's taking like, what, like some insane number of pills a day? | ||
| 250 supplements a day, yeah. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Supplements, 250 supplements. | ||
| 250 supplements a day. | ||
| He's trying to, he wants to break that top layer. | ||
| That's right, absolutely, totally. | ||
| Yeah, no, so their program, okay, so every aging expert I've talked to, the world's leading, this is all bullshit. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| Not without program. | ||
| You'd have to, so maybe a CRISPR, a future CRISPR technology where you actually reprogram the genome to stop the telomeres from breaking off so frequently and the cell then dying Without creating cancer. | ||
| Okay, that's a huge problem, but that's just one of many. | ||
| You know, Aubrey de Grey, any documentary you've ever seen on aging and longevity and immortality, you've seen him. | ||
| He's got long red hair, a long Methuselah beard, he loves beer, he's a British guy, he has a great British accent, and you know, the first person to live a thousand years is alive today! | ||
| And you know, he's got a whole program, SENS, S-E-N-S, basically these seven things you've got to do to reprogram your cells. | ||
| So, you can read about it, look him up, it's great stuff. | ||
| And he likes beer, and beer's on the list, so that's good. | ||
| What a coincidence! | ||
| But ultimately, no, none of this is going to work. | ||
| Now, the Kurzweil program goes beyond that. | ||
| Even if we don't succeed, you can have yourself chronically frozen and maybe a thousand years from now. | ||
| Okay, well, first of all, you're being frozen on the worst day of your life, the day you die, because the state treats cryonics as a form of burial. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you can't, like, prep yourself with the anti-freeze stuff or all that, because they'll kill you and then that would be murder. | ||
| So you actually have to just let things take their course and you're dead. | ||
| Then the team rushes in and packs you in ice and ships you off to Alcor, one of these places, and they pump you full of this anti-freeze stuff to try to prevent the freezing from destroying your cells. | ||
| Anyway, it doesn't work because Disney, frozen or not? | ||
| is huge compared to an embryo. | ||
| So you can freeze an embryo and bring it back, IVF, it works, not brains, they're too big. | ||
| And so, so far everybody frozen to date, they're never being brought back, it's not gonna happen. | ||
| Disney, frozen or not? | ||
| No, no, that was-- | ||
| That's just not even true. | ||
| The day he died was the day that, I think it was Alcor, one of them opened their doors | ||
| and there was the two conflating press releases. | ||
| Ted Williams, though, is apparently, his head is frozen at Alcor. | ||
| Apparently that is true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the first person ever frozen was a Glendale College psychology professor where I went as a student. | ||
| He was already dead and frozen by the time I got there, but I thought, oh, that's a weird thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, so here's the other problem with Kurzweil's idea. | ||
| Okay, so in the meantime, if we could copy your connectome. | ||
| Again, you are represented by your memories, all your pattern information in there. | ||
| Put it in a computer. | ||
| Just scan every synaptic connection and put it in a giant computer. | ||
| Okay, so first of all, we're not even remotely close to having a big enough computer to hold even one brain. | ||
| Much less 100 brains of the elite or everybody's brain. | ||
| But even so, let's say Bohr's Law carried out 100 years from now. | ||
| The problem here is the problem of identity. | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| So let's say we scan your brain and put it in the computer. | ||
| At what age? | ||
| When you're 29 or 30? | ||
| Because that's supposedly the ideal age because that's when Jesus died. | ||
| You know, because in Christianity there's a debate about when you wake up in heaven with Jesus there and so on, who's there? | ||
| Are you physically there? | ||
| You know, some of them say, yeah, you're physically there. | ||
| How old? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, okay, 30. | ||
| 30, okay. | ||
| Nobody wants to get to heaven as the 95 year old, right? | ||
| I guess not, but if you think about that, well then what about all the memories I've had since I was 30? | ||
| Because I've had 33 of them. | ||
| 33 years of memories. | ||
| They'd be lost. | ||
| That would be tragic. | ||
| But it's okay. | ||
| No, you can have the memories of your total life. | ||
| Yeah, but the memories now, I'm 63 now, the memories of when I was 40 now are very different from the memories when I was 40 when that was happening. | ||
| Whatever it was, my interpretation of that now is different. | ||
| Everything is different. | ||
| So even scanning every memory isn't really capturing you. | ||
| as hard a problem that would be. | ||
| And then there's also the point of view problem. | ||
| Like when you go to sleep tonight, you wake up tomorrow morning, you're a little groggy, | ||
| but consciousness comes back and you're looking at the world through your eyes. | ||
| So I call this the point of view self, instead of the memory self. | ||
| So the point of view self is there's a continuity of consciousness and perspective. | ||
| Now you go under general anesthesia, You wake up. | ||
| It's a little groggier five hours later, and it comes back If you are copied and put in a computer, and they turn it on like Johnny Depp and transcendence He's in the computer looking out through the little camera hole right you know and there's his girlfriend with the guy what you know you're doing what and yeah, no and No, that's not going to happen, because your point of view isn't going to transfer from your body into the computer. | ||
| Because let's say we did this to a fancy fMRI brain scanner, and we did this while you're standing there, we slide you in, scan your brain, we get every single synaptic connection, put it in the computer, turn it on, and you're still standing there next to the machine. | ||
| You all of a sudden don't go into there, your point of view, you're still standing there going, hey, no, I'm Dave over here. | ||
| And the computer's going, no, I'm Dave. | ||
| It's just a copy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And no twin ever looks at their sibling and goes, well, there I am. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| So the Kurzweils of the world will say, yes, there could be ten Dave Rubins, but each of them thinks they're the real Dave Rubin. | ||
| But of course the moment you diverge and have different life experiences, you go left and the other one goes right out of the room and all of a sudden life becomes different, you're going to have different memories and different connections. | ||
| So who's the real you? | ||
| Okay, so it's really a problem of philosophy these guys have. | ||
| You're not going to wake up in the computer. | ||
| It's just a copy. | ||
| So where are you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And religions kind of have the same problem. | ||
| You know, you're dead in the grave and what, Jesus takes you up there? | ||
| Well, what's going up there? | ||
| Well, the soul. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| It's a pattern of information. | ||
| At what age? | ||
| They have the same set of logical problems. | ||
| Because for Jews in particular, the body is still in the grave. | ||
| And many Christian sects say, you know, your body is not resurrected, it's just your soul. | ||
| Yeah, but your memories are in there, in the grave. | ||
| No, no, they get taken up there. | ||
| How does this happen? | ||
| Oh, God works in mysterious ways. | ||
| Okay, boom. | ||
| Man, I just watched The Matrix for like the thousandth time last week, so there's a lot of Matrix ways I can go with this, but I'll try to keep it a little more narrow for this. | ||
| So, is there an inherent problem discussing all this that you're trying to look at something through a scientific lens that the people who are the believers simply don't look through that lens? | ||
| So you're never gonna get to a... I guess this is the struggle of the skeptic all times, right? | ||
| It's hard to get... | ||
| to break through to somebody that is going off a different set of premises to start. | ||
| Yes, okay, that is a problem, right. | ||
| But my book is a work of science. | ||
| The primary focus is, not only that I'm skeptical of religious versions of the afterlife, but all these scientific attempts, they're not going to succeed. | ||
| Therefore, what we do now is all the more important. | ||
| Our lives, our loves, our connections, and all that. | ||
| So I end with a really uplifting chapter. | ||
| But ultimately, yes, I do think in the chapter on Deepak, I talk about this problem of language. | ||
| Seeing the world through a scientific perspective is very, it's not in the majority position. | ||
| Most people are dualists. | ||
| Paul Bloom calls us natural-born dualists. | ||
| And in his lab with children, he shows that, like a little two-year-old, you know, here's a mouse and it gets munched by the alligator. | ||
| Now the mouse is dead, you know. | ||
| Where is the mouse? | ||
| Oh, the mouse is off in this other place and he misses his mom and he's hungry. | ||
| From a very early age, we have the sense that something continues on. | ||
| So I actually opened the book by talking about this problem of imagine you're dead. | ||
| You know, I know most people say, well, yeah, I see my body in the casket and all my friends and family are there and hopefully they're mourning. | ||
| But of course you wouldn't see anything because, you know, to be conscious of anything you have to be alive. | ||
| And so, you know, imagine. | ||
| You can't imagine. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| It's like, imagine there's no universe. | ||
| Not just no planets, stars, and galaxies, no space-time, no light, nothing! | ||
| You can't actually imagine that. | ||
| So here we bump up against the epistemological wall and the language wall. | ||
| Like Wittgenstein talked about this, these words we use, they get reified into things. | ||
| Even the word nothing. | ||
| It's no thing. | ||
| It's a thing that doesn't exist. | ||
| Well, when you're dead, it's not like you're going to this place called nothing. | ||
| No! | ||
| See, all of a sudden, when you just hit this word, like, if there's no universe, there's nothing, as if nothing is a thing. | ||
| It's not even that. | ||
| So, that you ended this book on a positive note, I guess by arguing that there's no scientific basis for an afterlife, or a utopia, or whatever else, you're really putting the onus, I think this is what you were just saying, sort of, you're putting the onus on us right this moment, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, which is scary for a lot of people. | ||
| Well, I think it should be uplifting. | ||
| It's like, because instead of thinking, well, either I don't matter or none of this really matters, I'm just waiting for the next stage or the next play, the next act in the play in this proscenium drama we're in here. | ||
| It's just a temporary thing. | ||
| You're going to miss out on something. | ||
| Now, look, I don't know that there's no afterlife. | ||
| Nobody does for sure. | ||
| So whether there's an afterlife or not, This is the life we live in, right here, right now. | ||
| I call this Alvy's Error. | ||
| So, in Annie Hall, there's a flashback scene where Woody Allen plays Alvy Singer, and he's eight years old or whatever, and he won't do his homework, and his mother takes him to the psychiatrist, and says, Alvy, why won't you do your homework? | ||
| The universe is expanding! | ||
| The universe is expanding, yeah, the universe is expanding, and eventually it's all gonna blow up, so none of this matters, and his mother yells at him, we live in Brooklyn! | ||
| Brooklyn's not expanding! | ||
| You gotta do your homework! | ||
| Well, that's kind of my message. | ||
| We live in Brooklyn. | ||
| We don't live 15 billion years from now, the heat death of the universe, nothing matters. | ||
| We don't live in heaven with Jesus now. | ||
| None of that actually matters now. | ||
| What matters is now, and the people you're in the room with, the society you live in, the people you engage with, and so all of those things matter more than ever once you think about it and put them in big perspective, whatever your beliefs are in the afterlife. | ||
| When you were around all these different groups of people, whether they were Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or whatever it is, even if none of it could be proven one way or another and none of the science was there backing up anything, did you sense that any group of them had a better handle on I think Jews are a little more realistic about it. | ||
| I mean, the original idea of the afterlife for Jews was nothing. | ||
| It's like, we just don't go anywhere. | ||
| Now, modern Jews, they do believe in an afterlife. | ||
| Extreme, like Christians have a whole elaborate idea of what it's going to be like and the left behind and all that stuff. | ||
| I think Jews are more realistic, particularly their focus on rituals now, family, community, taking care of one another. | ||
| And so the Christian sects that do that, I admire more and respect more. | ||
| The Christian groups that want to help the poor now, man the soup kitchens, care about people that are suffering. | ||
| As opposed to those that are fanatically obsessed with, you know, say, the afterlife or evangelizing, converting people. | ||
| There is this kind of split in Christianity on, you know, that it's kind of a political split. | ||
| You know, liberal Christians tend to be more like, our duty is now, and Jesus wants us to help poor people. | ||
| And, you know, and so therefore women's rights and, you know, rights of minorities and so on. | ||
| And the others that tend to be more conservative, conservative Christians, that started in the 80s with the | ||
| moral majority. | ||
| We're not worried about those people. Our job is to get our guy into the White House, | ||
| and then we can influence the elections and legislation with our beliefs. | ||
| Because Jesus was big on politics, right? | ||
| Yeah, he was big on the rich, yeah. Wait, when did that happen? | ||
| When did Jesus become a conservative? | ||
| Anyway, so I think you asked, you know, I think those, the idea of the here and now and taking care of people, making the world a better place, that's where it's at. | ||
| Yeah, the utopia one is interesting to me because first off, did you get a sense that across the board when people say utopia they mean the same thing? | ||
| What do they mean by utopia? | ||
| Do they mean just this endless place of pleasures and spectacular wonders? | ||
| What do they actually mean by utopia? | ||
| Well, people mean different things by it, but, you know, I cover that from the communes, 19th century American communes, which are relatively harmless, you know, people weren't murdered, they didn't commit mass suicide, and they had a lot of free sex, so, you know, how bad could it be? | ||
| not very successful, they didn't last long, to the kind of utopian cults like the Heaven's | ||
| Gate or the Jonestown, where that does get a little riskier, like we're going to sacrifice | ||
| ourselves and go to the other side where it's even better. | ||
| I mean, Jones' final speech, he's talking about this sort of utopian communist state | ||
| that we're all going to in this next world. But really, Marxism, if you look at Marxism, there's | ||
| a book about this on comparisons of Christianity and Marxism. There was a glorious, paradisiacal | ||
| state before the fall, and that's when there was no property, no private property, everybody | ||
| had an equal share, everybody did their equal share of work, and then there was the fall, | ||
| like the fall of men. | ||
| But when was that exactly? | ||
| Yeah, well, this is… Well, they think in Paleolithic times, prehistoric, they had this idea, this is the way it was like. | ||
| Now it's true, hunter-gatherers are more egalitarian than we are, but they're far from any kind of idealistic communist state. | ||
| They also had a certain set of problems. | ||
| They certainly did. | ||
| Much worse, more violence, more tribalism. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| But this is Marx's idea. | ||
| Then the fall, which is private property. | ||
| Capitalism comes on, ruins everything. | ||
| And then we have our second coming. | ||
| Capitalism will eventually collapse on its own, but we can kind of help it along. | ||
| And then when it collapses, communism will return. | ||
| It's a very prelapsarian, and then the fall, and then the return to the golden age. | ||
| It's an old idea that comes up often. | ||
| And we have a big enough brain to imagine what life could be like. | ||
| And it could be better than now. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| So therefore we should aim for this perfect state. | ||
| So I talk about why does this fail? | ||
| They always fail. | ||
| And the problem is human nature is too variable. | ||
| There's too many different interests and talents and skills and whatever. | ||
| The question, what's the right society? | ||
| There is no answer. | ||
| Because there isn't one right society. | ||
| So the flaw is us, right? | ||
| I mean, this is what I'm talking about a lot lately. | ||
| We can't make a perfect system because we are not perfect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And even saying it that way, I would say we're just so variable. | ||
| There's multiple Well, I like Sam's metaphor, multiple peaks on the moral landscape. | ||
| There isn't one right answer, there's multiple answers. | ||
| Now, there's a bunch of wrong answers, and some peaks are higher than others. | ||
| But, let's say, what's the right democracy? | ||
| Should we have an electoral college or not? | ||
| Should we have a progressive tax, regressive tax, or flat tax? | ||
| I'm not sure there's a right answer to those. | ||
| You might say, well for us, this is what we want to do. | ||
| Because this is what we like. | ||
| It's like the private community that says, no doors can be painted red in this neighborhood. | ||
| Period. | ||
| And you can't paint your house pink either. | ||
| You know, these association rules. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Okay, but this association over here, you know, there's sort of the hippie commune. | ||
| We want, you can paint your door any color you want. | ||
| And in fact, the more colors, the better. | ||
| Okay, so in a free market, you just let this kind of happen. | ||
| So the problem with a top-down by fiat, these are the rules because this is the right way | ||
| to live. | ||
| That will always fail because there is no right way to live. | ||
| So it's interesting, I mean, your book is about belief and science and all that, but you're making great arguments, really, again, for things that I know you believe in otherwise, like the individual, and limited state power, and local control, and you owning your life, and being present, and all the rest. | ||
| Well, I think there's evidence and reason for those positions as being correct. | ||
| The individual is the fundamental unit of political nature because it's the individual who can suffer. | ||
| It's the individual brain that experiences pain and suffering, not the collective. | ||
| Races don't vote. | ||
| Individual members of a race vote. | ||
| Again, we have to get out of this problem we've talked about with identity politics. | ||
| I don't want to be A white guy, that's how you treat me. | ||
| I'm just an individual. | ||
| I'm me. | ||
| I'm Michael Shermer. | ||
| You're Dave Rubin. | ||
| We're different. | ||
| The individual is what counts. | ||
| And we know from experiments over, say, the last three or four centuries, in governance, some work better than others. | ||
| Now, again, it could be that a progressive tax is slightly better than a regressive tax. | ||
| You can debate that. | ||
| But a totalitarian state is Objectively, measurably worse than a democratic state. | ||
| You only have to ask yourself, would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? | ||
| Would you rather have lived in West Germany or East Germany? | ||
| And so on. | ||
| You just pick these. | ||
| These aren't controlled experiments. | ||
| They're natural experiments that happen anyway, and we can then study them after that. | ||
| That's science. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what scientists do. | ||
| Most of science is not done with controlled experiments. | ||
| It's done with the comparative method. | ||
| Most social science. | ||
| What has already happened? | ||
| Okay, so these states have these gun control laws. | ||
| These have these different gun control laws. | ||
| Let's compare them. | ||
| Now, it's messy. | ||
| You know, you get in these correlational studies that are very complicated, but still, it's a method that can get us there, I think. | ||
| Yeah, it's sort of like, well, would you rather live in Venezuela right now or the United States? | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And I'll see every now and again the official socialist Twitter handle that's verified, which I always think is hilarious. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know there was such a thing. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know, the Socialist Party of America or something, and it's verified. | ||
| And of course, they're using all the tools of capitalism to promote the very same things that they did. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| But people always say, well, look at Venezuela. | ||
| They say, well, no, it was just never done right. | ||
| Their argument is it was just never done right, which perhaps says there's something wrong with the East. | ||
| Yeah, and I see some of that in the kind of far extreme libertarians that sort of anarcho-capitalists. | ||
| You know, well, we don't really need government. | ||
| Yeah, well, but what about all these, oh, that's just not capitalism done right. | ||
| Okay, wait a minute, guys. | ||
| Now, we've had, you know, two centuries here of the experiment in America, which is relatively free, and still you see why some, you know, steering from the government is good. | ||
| Some rules. | ||
| People will cheat if you don't have rules. | ||
| Just look at sports. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They may cheat either way, but that doesn't mean there should be no rules. | ||
| That's right, we need rules. | ||
| So, again, just don't go to extremes. | ||
| Extremes are almost always the problem. | ||
| Anyway, so the chapters on utopias and dystopias are addressing the claims about what we can create heaven on earth. | ||
| Again, like when Ray Kurzweil said to me, don't you want to live to be a thousand years Shermer? | ||
| Listen, just get me to 90 where I don't have cancer. | ||
| Get me to 100 where I don't have Alzheimer's and I don't even know who I am. | ||
| 110 where I'm not on a morphine drip in a bed. | ||
| Just a little bit. | ||
| And again, let's just try to lower the crime rates in Chicago this year. | ||
| Just one thing. | ||
| We know that if you park a squad car at the corner of Pico and Sepulveda, the crime rate | ||
| will go down right there. | ||
| One little bit. | ||
| Now, to the average college student, that's not sexy. | ||
| I wanna aim for 1,000 years from now, we're gonna have the perfect society. | ||
| You mean like the Third Reich? | ||
| You mean that kind of? | ||
| Right, where it just never gets there. | ||
| I guess it's the inherent problem with that, though, that when Michael Shermer's 90 and let's say they've done enough things and you've tweaked it, right, so that you don't have Alzheimer's and your body's basically okay, but you know you're getting to the end, suddenly you are gonna keep wanting to extend that. | ||
| Of course, absolutely. | ||
| So, you know, surveys show that most people will say, how long would you like to live? | ||
| It's almost always right around the average lifespan that we have now. | ||
| You know, about 80, 85, 90 seems about right. | ||
| Now, if you'd asked them 50 years ago, well, I'd be happy if I make it to 65 | ||
| and get my retirement, you know. | ||
| But this is easily refuted. | ||
| If you were now 82 and we said, would you like to, tomorrow's the day. | ||
| No, no, I need another week. | ||
| Okay, then the week is up. | ||
| Would you like another month? | ||
| I'll take another month. | ||
| No, I'm not talking about you're on a morphine drip in a bed and you're out of it. | ||
| I'm talking about just leading a normal, healthy life and you're conscious and aware and sharp. | ||
| Would you like another year? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I'll take another year. | ||
| Of course people would say that once you get there. | ||
| Now people are thinking, I'm either going to be in a bed on a morphine drip or they're thinking, oh, this is bad for society. | ||
| There'll be too many people, overpopulation of people lived 150 years. | ||
| They need to die. | ||
| You know, like it's a soylent green thing. | ||
| Like, we're going to turn them into food. | ||
| It's never them, of course, that's going to do this. | ||
| It's always, you know, it's the same thing with people, you know, overpopulation. | ||
| Well, we need to get, those people need to get a handle on birth control and they can't have babies. | ||
| You mean those people over there. | ||
| You know, the other ones that are not like us, you know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, no, no good. | ||
| It's so interesting, this reminds me of my grandma's cousin, so I guess she's my first cousin, twice removed, I suppose. | ||
| Barbara, she's 87 years old, I think maybe 88, lives in Manhattan. | ||
| Manhattan, born and bred, her entire life, basically, in Manhattan, which is a really unique type of thing. | ||
| She's a piano teacher, and I was talking to her about life, meaning of life, all this stuff, about a year ago, and she said, I just have so much more to do. | ||
| I don't have time to do everything I want to do. | ||
| What a great thing for an 87-year-old who's happy and laughs and-- | ||
| I don't have time to do everything I wanna do. | ||
| Still, I go out for drinks with her and she's still fun and vibrant and all of that. | ||
| But I thought, that's really something. | ||
| I still have so much more to do when most people are kinda packing it up | ||
| or fiddling around. | ||
| Well, the research on that shows that does make a difference. | ||
| Again, not to live 200, whatever, just to live, and back to the here and now, just to live a higher quality, more richer life, which we have the availability to do so now. | ||
| Not for a thousand years from now just for tomorrow and next week and next year and so on and those kinds of things being actively involved Working out exercising every day eating whole foods. | ||
| I mean even even the diet stuff is you know That's really hard to get you know, we know now at least a few things sugar and you know starches processed Carbohydrates, you know the fast foods that stuff's not so good You know now it turns out meat and eggs are back in yay whole milk. | ||
|
unidentified
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I can drink whole milk on my cereal I told you when you got here, I'm starting this paleo diet. | |
| So I'm off the sugar, I'm off the bread. | ||
| It's a lot of butter and coconut oil, basically. | ||
| I think my temperament's been pretty good. | ||
| Yeah, so far you're not falling apart. | ||
| I've been all right. | ||
| But those are the things. | ||
| You're saying basically take control of the things you can in your life to maximize your health. | ||
| Yes, and like having lots of choices, making decisions. | ||
| Like old people in, what are they called, the sort of homes, I lost my train of thought there, but you know, these nursing homes, the more the nurses do for them, the worse it is for the patient. | ||
| They really need to be actively involved and get out and move and just get the blood flowing and decision making and so on. | ||
| Any of those studies on the nuns that kept diaries their whole life, you know, they had lower rates of Alzheimer's. | ||
| There's a few studies that show being mentally active. | ||
| may help attenuate the plaques and tangles that are associated with Alzheimer's. | ||
| That research is a little complicated, and it's not as good as I would like it. | ||
| If I just played chess or did Sudoku puzzles every day, I won't get Alzheimer's. | ||
| Unfortunately, we can't really say that. | ||
| I think we can say Twitter is destroying Alzheimer's. | ||
| Yes, it's destroyed. | ||
| That's probably fair. | ||
| Twitter, Alzheimer's, they're both going up. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| Yes, that may be one of those correlations. | ||
| Well, listen, Shermer, I think we should, well, I have a feeling we're gonna do this, you know, many times over the course of many years. | ||
| I can come back for the bonus round. | ||
| Right, certainly we should do it when you're about 90, let's say. | ||
| Yes, let's see where I'm at. | ||
| And then we'll go, huh, does he want a little more time here, or does he go? | ||
| I'll take two more Rubin shows when I'm 100. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Listen, it's always an absolute pleasure. | ||
| You're pretty much the perfect guest, and I want to get more people to our, quadrant of the political thing, because I think you've proven here, perhaps proven, but maybe in a more broad sense, you've illustrated that it's not just about that political part. | ||
| There's something else about how to live or something that puts us maybe in that quadrant that we're always working on, and that's very cool. | ||
| Well, what you're doing is talking to people. | ||
| That's where it starts. | ||
| What else can we do but talk and then act? | ||
| What else can we do but talk and act? | ||
| All right, Heaven's on Earth. |
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