Aug. 2, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It's just one of these major events like 9-11 or, you know, the assassination of RFK or something like that. | ||
| It's going to be a game changer. | ||
| So, of course, I went to social media to see, well, what are the conspiracy theories? | ||
| Again, within minutes, you know, they were popping up. | ||
| And to be sure, there's a lot of anomalies. | ||
| So we call this anomaly hunting. | ||
| Whenever there's a big event, people go searching for little details that don't seem to fit the narrative. | ||
| The narrative being that this lone assassin, a nut, a deranged kid, tried to take Trump out. | ||
| That appears to be what happened. | ||
| But there are a lot of questionable things that the Secret Service director in her interview so far has not been | ||
| terribly helpful as you said. | ||
|
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All right, people, it is August 1st, 2024. | |
| I am Dave Rubin, but I am officially off the grid for August, as you know. | ||
| But we did tape a whole bunch of stuff for you this month. | ||
| That way the algorithm doesn't kick us out and I don't become completely and utterly irrelevant till I come back in September. | ||
| And I'm very excited to have this chat with my good friend Michael Shermer, who, of course, is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and the executive director of Skeptic Society. | ||
| And a Californian. | ||
| I'm not exactly sure why. | ||
| I'll have to talk to him about that. | ||
| Michael, it's good to see you. | ||
| Elon's on his way out. | ||
| Maybe I should follow Elon to Texas. | ||
| Maybe you should follow Elon to Texas, but you are fighting it out. | ||
| You are in Los Angeles. | ||
| You've moved a little bit outside of the city these days, but you're still fighting in California. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to leave Santa Barbara. | ||
| It's pretty nice here, but we just found out this morning the local public school here had one of their teachers arrested yesterday for having planted a camera in the girls' locker room or bathroom or something. | ||
| It's like, really? | ||
| And then, actually he was arrested two days ago, and then we found out this morning he's out on bail already. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I would say unbelievable, but of course is actually the thing that we're supposed to say as it pertains. | ||
| So, and of course, as you know, also, uh, Gavin Newsom signed, uh, SB one nine five five into law. | ||
| And now the state can quite literally hide from the parent, uh, not can, will quite literally hide from the parent, whether that child is being called by another name or another gender or other pronouns at school. | ||
| I mean, it's, it's really bananas stuff. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Well, here's an argument for a school choice then, you know, just leave those schools that do that, practice that sort of thing, public schools it is. | ||
| Of course, it's not fair to, you know, parents that can't afford that and a lot of private schools are expensive. | ||
| So, you know, ultimately the solution is you just can't have laws like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the reason that I thought it would be good to have you on for sort of our first off the grid thing, and we are taping this about a week in advance. | ||
| So we're taping this at the end of July. | ||
| So there's a lot of things moving at the moment as it, as it pertains to, uh, let's say some skepticism around what happened with Trump a couple of weeks ago and some of the conspiracy theories around Joe Biden and a bunch more. | ||
| But I thought we could do some of that and then some sort of more evergreen stuff that you're always talking about, about what's been happening in the scientific community and a whole bunch more. | ||
| But why don't we start with some of the weirdness around the Trump assassination? | ||
| And again, there is a little bit of a delay between when we're taping this and posting it. | ||
| So some of the evidence, evidence or theories might change. | ||
| But one of the first thoughts that I had about an hour after the initial shock of Trump being shot. | ||
| Uh, was that we were going to go down some crazy, crazy rabbit holes as to what really happened here. | ||
| And I have to say our secret service and the people in charge, they're not, they don't seem to be doing themselves any favors when it comes to putting these conspiracy theories to bed. | ||
| So this, this is your expertise. | ||
| You've written many books about conspiracy theories and everything else. | ||
| How do you look at an event like that? | ||
| Were you immediately, basically when it was happening, were you immediately like, okay, here we go. | ||
| This is what I'm an expert in and I'm going to have to explain a lot of this to people. | ||
| Yeah, I'd just gotten off a plane from Vegas for the Freedom Fest conference where, in fact, the day before, RFK Jr. | ||
| was speaking. | ||
| And all the other presidential candidates were there, the Libertarian Party and the Green Party, Jill Stein, and the Constitution Party, and Cornel West, you know, Brother Cornel West, he was there. | ||
| None of them had any security. | ||
| They were just walking around. | ||
| People didn't even know who they were, really. | ||
| But when RFKJ, I mean, like three hours before he was supposed to arrive, I mean, there were armed guards, there were guards with dogs, German shepherds running around, I thought, oh, this is gonna be different. | ||
| I had a signed copy of my book for him, conspiracy, because I thought, this guy needs to read my book, and I'll just wait in the green room for him, but he wasn't coming in the green room. | ||
| I found out he's going through a secret entrance and exit that nobody was to know about, and I'm like, wow, okay. | ||
| And then the next day, this happens, like, okay, this is getting serious. | ||
| And now I see that the White House has ordered the Secret Service to provide protection for RFK Jr., which is good. | ||
| It's only fair. | ||
| Yeah, so when I got off the plane, I'm in the Uber, and I'm reading the, you know, the scrolls through my phone, and the Uber driver's a big Trump fan. | ||
| So he's like, oh my God! | ||
| Then he calls his dad on the spot, who's also a big Trump fan. | ||
| Dad, turn on the news! | ||
| I mean, it's just one of these major events like 9-11 or, you know, the assassination | ||
| of RFK or something like that. | ||
| It's going to be a game changer. | ||
| So of course I went to social media to see, well, what are the conspiracy theories? | ||
| Again, within minutes, you know, they were popping up. | ||
| And to be sure, there's a lot of anomalies. | ||
| So we call this anomaly hunting. | ||
| Whenever there's a big event, people go searching for little details that don't seem to fit | ||
| the narrative, the narrative being that this lone assassin, a nut, a deranged kid tried | ||
| to take Trump out. | ||
| That's, you know, appears to be what happened. | ||
| But there are a lot of questionable things that the Secret Service director in her interview so far has not been terribly helpful, as you said. | ||
| Uh, you know, so for example, why, if they're securing the area, it's not that big of an area. | ||
| How come they left that particular building alone? | ||
| That building was a staging area for the local police. | ||
| How come they didn't hear this guy climbing up on the roof? | ||
| Right. | ||
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They were quite literally in, they were in the building. | |
| Yeah, yeah, and there's a ladder. | ||
| You can see I just posted an article this morning titled conspiracy or incompetence. | ||
| I'm leaning toward the incompetence because in general most government agencies and people in power are relatively incompetent when they try to pull off something like this. | ||
| But how did that ladder get there? | ||
| I mean, it's a pretty tall ladder. | ||
| It must be 15, 20 foot ladder. | ||
| And, you know, was that just by chance? | ||
| And then there's the videos, you've seen these, I'm sure, of the people pointing out to the local police, look at there, there's a guy right there on the roof. | ||
| And so somebody put a clock on that one video that was two minutes and two seconds before the shots rang out. | ||
| And so, you know, the police said, well, OK, and then there was the cop that climbed up the ladder and then ducked back down or fell back down. | ||
| We're not sure when he saw when the guy whirled and pointed the gun at him. | ||
| How come he didn't have his gun out, like ready to go? | ||
| And then another curious one is the sharpshooters on the roof, the Secret Service sharpshooters, and they're aiming at that guy. | ||
| Now, I thought, well, maybe they have a, you know, no shooting on warning. | ||
| You have to wait to the person shoots first. | ||
| But no, according to a lot of Retired Secret Service agents have been giving interviews, no, you shoot if there's a warning or a threat. | ||
| But they didn't. | ||
| And so you hear in the video, you know, bam, bam, bam, and then bam, bam, bam, they shoot him, right, within seconds. | ||
| So they must have, it looks like they had him in the scope. | ||
| Right, the sniper is looking directly at him and shot him dead within the second that he shot, you know, basically within a second or two. | ||
| So that seems a little bit odd in and of itself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then Trump goes down, and then he pops back up. | ||
| Now according to some of these retired Secret Service agents giving interviews, they would have never let that happen. | ||
| Remember when Reagan got shot, they threw him in the car like a ragdoll. | ||
| You know, he's not getting back up. | ||
| Trump's a big guy, you know, maybe it's just he's a big guy. | ||
| He's, you know, 6'4 and weighs 250 or whatever he is. | ||
| And also that 5'4 woman, you know, what is she gonna do? | ||
| He's basically, you hope that they shoot at his waist because the head is totally exposed when he pops back up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That seems kind of weird. | ||
| I don't think all of this adds up to a conspiracy other than a conspiracy of dunces that just screwed up. | ||
| So, right, so that's exactly where I wanted to go with this. | ||
| Look, I do think it's possible there was some nefarious activity and I would be willing to entertain those conversations, but my gut feeling is that with everything that you just described there, it's just Incompetence. | ||
| Incompetence across the board. | ||
| People not knowing what their job is. | ||
| A lot of DEI hiring. | ||
| You mentioned, you know, basically a 5'4 woman trying to guard a 6'4 former president. | ||
| People that maybe didn't know what the standard operating procedures were. | ||
| I'd love to find out some more information about that sniper specifically. | ||
| Or I'm sure you heard the head of the Secret Service who said that they didn't have someone on the roof because it was sloped. | ||
| Which to me, isn't that an invite to every assassin everywhere? | ||
| Let's just find the sloped roof? | ||
| Yes, I know. | ||
| And it's really barely sloped at all. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Really, I'd have no trouble walking around on it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But how do you, as someone that debunks this stuff, how do you balance what seemingly is a catastrophic level of incompetence that lends itself to all the conspiracy theories? | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| Well, that's just the way it goes. | ||
| How do you counter? | ||
| Well, you look for some kind of—there'd have to be some kind of extra evidence, like a whistleblower on the inside that said, you know, I was in the building and people heard him and they said, you know, quiet, let him go, or something a little more direct other than just, you know, again, a conspiracy of dunces, you know, operating like that. | ||
| I've heard people say, well, you know, how do you know how you would respond in a crisis like that? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I probably would screw up, but I'm not trained to do this. | ||
| I don't know what it's like to be a Secret Service agent. | ||
| I just presume they go through these drills periodically, like, let's pretend the president just got shot. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And let's just run through it. | ||
| I assume that. | ||
| You know, when I was an undergraduate at Pepperdine, Gerald Ford came to speak, 1975, September 75. | ||
| And it was quite something. | ||
| Days ahead of time, they were scouting the campus and going around. | ||
| And then that morning that Ford was supposed to come, there were snipers on the roofs. | ||
| It's kind of on the side of a hill, Pepperdine, so the buildings are just kind of sloped down. | ||
| And they had sharpshooters on each rooftop. | ||
| It's like, wow! | ||
| It was impressive. | ||
| So again, how come Trump didn't get that? | ||
| I mean and there was there was some stories about that the Secret Service was thinned out a little bit that day because of Dr. Jill had some public event and they had to protect her something. | ||
| I'm not sure if that one's true. | ||
| But and again, there's so much swirling around and the fact-checking comes slower. | ||
| So we'll have to wait and see on that. | ||
| What's with all the bird flu chatter over the last couple weeks? | ||
| First off, do birds actually get the flu? | ||
| Seems like people playing Scrabble just combined two words and said, let's use this. | ||
| But real talk, something is unfolding. | ||
| I've seen about 15 different headlines recently. | ||
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of A. | |
| What do you make of the strange situation where if you were to go back to say JFK's assassination in 63, you know, there's the Supruder film, there's limited video of it, right? | ||
| Because not everybody was walking around with a camera. | ||
| Now, not only do we have way more media, but literally everybody, every single person there likely had a camera and there's all sorts of video breaking. | ||
| And I was thinking there's a strange moment here because On one hand, if you have more video, you would think you would have more clarity about the situation, and yet it sort of seems that we have less clarity about the situation because we have so much video. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it increases the anomaly hunting and just offers more quirky things that happen. | ||
| I mean, there was one of a woman behind Trump. | ||
| Who, you know, the shots are fired, he falls down, she ducks down, and then she pops back up with her phone, and you see her starting to shoot. | ||
| They go, how did she know she was supposed to film? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| I mean, everybody there has got whipping their phones out, right? | ||
| That's not unusual. | ||
| And so again, you're just going to have hundreds of those kinds of things. | ||
| Alex Jones has been on a rampage for the last three days. | ||
| You know, it's the globalists that are taking Trump out. | ||
| You know, okay, who's they, the globalists, you know? | ||
| So you're basically always looking, so for people watching this that think that there's, there is some level of globalism and people that are anti-Trump and all of these things, which I think that that conceptually is largely true. | ||
| What you're always trying to do is basically say, okay, if, if that piece of it's true, if you've got sort of your, your red meat right there, how do we thread all of that to something that actually happened? | ||
| And that's where many people I think online seem to get crossed up. | ||
| Yeah, I think the real conspiracy or problem, I guess, would be the polarization, the equating of Trump with Hitler, which was always a bad idea because he's not. | ||
| But, you know, again, we know from surveys and just, you know, the response to von Stauffenberg and the other assassins that tried to take Hitler out in the 30s. | ||
| They're heroes in Germany. | ||
| They have statues and plaques and they honor them. | ||
| And so and almost everybody agrees in surveys, you know, would it be moral to have killed Hitler? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So if, you know, then Trump equals Hitler, so therefore, ergo. | ||
| So we shouldn't be surprised. | ||
| Now, of course, most people that might make that argument would not turn to murder, but somebody will. | ||
| You know, law of large numbers, you have 340 million people, if just 0.001% are mentally ill, that's all you need. | ||
| Now, again, we don't know that much about this kid yet, Crooks, but You know, a loner, didn't have any friends, got bullied, you know, was got kicked out of the gun club, which is really weird. | ||
| And so, you know, maybe he was a bad shot. | ||
| Maybe that's why Trump survived. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But it was pretty close. | ||
| And, you know, it's just hard to say what the, you know, what the ultimate motive is. | ||
| We don't know yet. | ||
| His father wisely has been quiet, waiting, you know, for more information. | ||
| Yeah, it's just a stunning turn of events here. | ||
| What do you find the tricks are? | ||
| We've discussed this a little bit before, and many people who've been watching you and I do talks for years now will remember that we did an event at Arizona State University where I jokingly said to the crowd, are there any Nazis here? | ||
| Someone actually raised their hand. | ||
| I said, okay, you'll get the question. | ||
| The first question in the Q&A, it turned out to be a trans Nazi. | ||
| Yes, really. | ||
| Maybe we can find some B-roll video of that if it still exists anywhere. | ||
| But basically then this trans-Nazi went on to this long tirade about how the gas chambers never exist, and you calmly just debunked all of the nonsense or confusions right there. | ||
| But I would relate that to sort of what's happening to a lot of people right now, | ||
| as they're waking up to some of the confusions around mainstream media. | ||
| Say, very fine people on both sides, which turned out to be a hoax, or a lot of the COVID stuff | ||
| that turned out to be really dishonest from the mainstream media, or my audience knows the long | ||
| list of things. What do you think the techniques are to get people to fully let go of bad ideas | ||
| or wrong ideas that they have just held on to for so long? | ||
| Because I think a huge amount of people are doing that right now to some extent as it pertains to mainstream media. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, in my book, I go through a number of factors that are at work that lead to conspiracism. | ||
| One, the larger the event, the more likely there's going to be some conspiracy theories surrounding it. | ||
| You know, the death of Princess Diana, assassination of JFK, 9-11. | ||
| These are world-changing events, and so people, again, then go searching for anomalies, anomaly hunting, in those big events. | ||
| And any event has weird things that happen to it, you know, like 9-11. | ||
| How did that passport get over there? | ||
| How did this piece of the engine end up over there? | ||
| What was that weird thing they found at the bottom of the rubble? | ||
| There's hundreds like that. | ||
| And then, you know, then we have a kind of proportionality bias. | ||
| The larger the event, the larger the cause should be to match it. | ||
| You know, since you mentioned the Nazis, you know, the Holocaust, the worst, one of the worst genocides in human history. | ||
| Cause of that was the Nazis, one of the worst political regimes in human history. | ||
| There's kind of a balance there. | ||
| But, you know, JFK assassinated by some lone nut. | ||
| Princess Diana died of, what, drunk driving, speeding, and no seatbelt? | ||
| That just seems too mundane. | ||
| Or, you know, 9-11? | ||
| You're telling me 19 guys with box cutters pulled this off? | ||
| Come on, it doesn't feel like there's a balance there. | ||
| And, you know, the Trump assassination attempt, that was a big event, you know. | ||
| This guy Crooks, he's 20, he's just some dweeby looking kid. | ||
| I mean, come on, it seems like there should be something larger there. | ||
| So people lead to that. | ||
| And then, you know, could it be? | ||
| Yeah, it could be. | ||
| But, you know, the more elements you have to have, if you were to plan that, And ahead of time and say, OK, now we know the Secret Service is probably going to be courting off that building. | ||
| So how are we going to get around it? | ||
| Oh, well, we'll just hope the local police fumble around and make mistakes and then we'll get our shooter up there. | ||
| You know, and if you were the Secret Service or the CIA or whoever would be behind it. | ||
| The never-Trumper Republicans, or whoever it is, supposedly in on the conspiracy. | ||
| Would you pick this guy as your assassin? | ||
| I mean, this isn't exactly Luca Brasi here, right? | ||
| He doesn't look like a professional hitman. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, same thing with Oswald. | ||
| You know, would the CIA really pick this guy? | ||
| I mean, he's like a major loser. | ||
| But would the counter-argument be to that, well, that's why you picked them? | ||
| Because they don't look like Luca Brasi? | ||
| They look like a lone nut. | ||
| That is the counter-argument, yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But at some point, you actually want the person to be competent at what they're doing. | ||
| And these people are usually just lucky. | ||
| I mean, this kid just got lucky. | ||
| He even got that close. | ||
| I mean, it could have gone the other way if Trump had turned. | ||
| But, you know, again, these things turn on chance events. | ||
| incompetence and randomness or chance are at play more than conspiracy. | ||
| And I also wrote about other attempts in U.S. history. | ||
| Four presidents have been assassinated in U.S. history. | ||
| Lincoln was definitely a conspiracy, but we knew within hours. | ||
| They had captured several of them, and one of them chickened out and got drunk and failed | ||
| to show up. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Another guy was supposed to kill Secretary of State Seward. | ||
| Seward had been in a carriage accident the day before. | ||
| He's in bed with a brace around his neck and then his collared shirt up over it. | ||
| The assassin gets in there and stabs him with a knife in his neck to try to cut his jugular, but it hits the brace and he fails. | ||
| I mean, this is completely random, you know, and even getting Lincoln, you know, just the bodyguard was down at the bar. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| And, you know, had they not pulled the bullet out, he probably would have survived. | ||
| There's all these just kind of random chance events. | ||
| The same thing with JFK. | ||
| Most people think it was a conspiracy. | ||
| I don't think it was just Oswald acting alone, but just the quirkiness of it. | ||
| He happened to get a job at the Book Depository building, you know, the month before Kennedy was to come there. | ||
| That looks suspicious, but in fact, they tracked down when the motorcade was planned, the route for the motorcade was planned, and it was weeks after Oswald got the job there. | ||
| In hindsight, the hindsight bias, you look back and start connecting the dots, it looks very suspicious, but you have to look at them carefully. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what do you make at a sort of societal level for where we're at? | ||
| Even putting aside the situation with Trump right now, but that so few of us seem to believe the same things or that we watch the same exact videos and come to very different conclusions. | ||
| I mean, at a societal level, it seems like that that can't hold for very long. | ||
| No, I'm really worried about the Republicans. | ||
| I was worried before the Trump assassination attempt, just with the Biden meltdown, cognitive meltdown. | ||
| And even before that, you know, it was pretty polarized. | ||
| If we make it to November, I'm going to be pretty happy. | ||
| And if we get through the other end, I'm actually now hoping for, you know, I've never been a Trump supporter, but I'm actually hoping for a massive landslide by Trump. | ||
| So everybody just calms down and the country gets back to business as usual in 2025. | ||
| The stock market's nice and stable. | ||
| The economy does not like uncertainty. | ||
| Let's just all go back to work. | ||
| That's what I'm hoping for. | ||
| That's quite an admission by you, my friend. | ||
| I was not going to ask you who you were voting for. | ||
| We had a dinner a couple weeks ago in L.A. | ||
| where I had a lot of my more conservative-leaning friends, and you sort of said, well, I'm still the liberal here, so I didn't know which way you were going to go. | ||
| So you think that basically, and that's been my argument on this show, is that if Trump wins by a true landslide, like a Reagan re-election 84 landslide, that I think it will give enough oomph For us to push away the really radical elements of the left that have caused so many of the problems here. | ||
| I don't think they'll actually go away. | ||
| And I still think that, you know, they can still cause chaos on the streets and all of that sort of stuff. | ||
| But I think there'll be enough of a cultural shift that we actually might be able to get to the other side of this thing. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm hoping the Democrats realize what a huge, colossal mistake this was, just strategically, whether they believe it or not, to go so far left with the woke progressive stuff. | ||
| I think most of them don't go along with it, ideologically or internally, what they really believe. | ||
| They don't really think men can become women and get pregnant and so on. | ||
| But that they either censor themselves or they go along with it to virtue signal, I think that'll all just disappear. | ||
| If they get wiped out and they lose the House and Senate and the presidency, wow, you know, they may have to recalibrate for 2028 election and just kind of reset their goals. | ||
| That may be good. | ||
| To me, these things do happen. | ||
| They swing back and forth. | ||
| You know, it's just the way it goes in American politics. | ||
| Well, it's either that or we follow them into the abyss. | ||
| And I would prefer not to do that. | ||
| We don't want to do that. | ||
| We don't want to do that. | ||
| Let, let me ask you about a couple other things that sort of more broadly have affected the science community over the last couple of years. | ||
| Cause you've written a lot about this as well. | ||
| Uh, you know, people sort of thought originally when the woke thing appeared that, Oh, it would affect the humanities and okay, fine. | ||
| They've got the acting department at Columbia or something like that, or they've got the, you know, social sciences. | ||
| But that the STEM departments wouldn't be affected and that the labs would still operate just fine and true research wouldn't be touched. | ||
| But that really has not held up in any way whatsoever. | ||
| No, the sciences, even the physical sciences, the STEM fields, have been deeply affected by this. | ||
| They've all bought onto the DEI woke programs and, you know, kind of self-flagellate their own supposed guilt for the past, even though they didn't do anything. | ||
| You know, you'll often hear these people say, you know, that we have to, you know, purge the university of all these, you know, racists and bigots. | ||
| And it's like, who? | ||
| Name names. | ||
| You know, like, who in your department? | ||
| Well, I just kind of mean generically. | ||
| Which also means everybody, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that Princeton issued that statement, like, we've been guilty of, you know, violating people's civil rights in the Trump administration. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Tell us exactly what you did, because you probably broke the law." | ||
| And they're like, well, we don't mean, you know, exactly that we did this. | ||
| We just mean kind of generically over the centuries we've been bad. | ||
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Right? | |
| There's enough of that. | ||
| The journals have all turned to this, looking for statements to go along with submitted papers. | ||
| Scientific papers that have nothing to do with social science or humanities. | ||
| Just, say, a physics journal article or something on black holes or something like that. | ||
| They're still looking for, you know, some kind of statement in there for, you know, how is this going to help the community of minorities or oppressed peoples or people of color and so on, even though the research has nothing to do with this subject. | ||
| You know, so there's that. | ||
| And that's in the major journals, Science, Nature, even in Scientific American, where, as you know, I was a columnist for 18 years. | ||
| You know, that kind of wound down when, you know, I was not going woke as they were. | ||
| And there was no big incident. | ||
| It was just, you know, I could tell the way they were editing my pieces that they were unhappy with the way I was kind of presenting things. | ||
| And then they went even worse after I got cut. | ||
| You know, just that mathematics, like one of them was, mathematics is, you know, still racist and bigoted and there's still these bad people in math. | ||
| Yeah, again, who? | ||
| Name names. | ||
| Which professors are you saying are misogynist? | ||
| You know, the problem to solve is how come there aren't more women in STEM fields? | ||
| Specifically, mathematics, engineering, and physics. | ||
| And I can tell you, places like Caltech, they're falling over themselves to get more people of color and women. | ||
| That doesn't prove the numbers of how many mathematicians you have in a department doesn't prove that they're anti-woman or anti-black or anything else. | ||
| It might be a A certain set of people are self-selecting in or happen to be better for a various set of reasons. | ||
| Yes, mainly probably vocational interest. | ||
| You know, what are people interested in going in? | ||
| Because there's lots of asymmetries in the other direction. | ||
| Steve Pinker points out, for example, that in his field, linguistics, it's, you know, like 80-20 women. | ||
| And he doesn't feel like, well, they must really hate us men. | ||
| No, it's just people going to different fields out of different interests, not skills. | ||
| And that's almost surely the case here because, again, if you ask the people that are saying this is a problem in STEM, are you one of the people that are keeping women out of your department? | ||
| Oh, no, not me. | ||
| Well, who? | ||
| Is it the department chair? | ||
| Is it your colleague over there? | ||
| No, no, I'm not saying this specifically. | ||
| Okay, come on. | ||
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| Do you connect that? | ||
| Why DEI has so destroyed so many of these institutions and departments. | ||
| In a weird way, I think we could connect that back to where we started with the assassination attempt, because it might just be incompetence based on that. | ||
| So we talked about it might be a confederacy of dunces, but over time, if you just keep hiring people for the wrong reasons, a lot of people will become conspiracy theorists because nothing will work properly. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| That's actually a great connection. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Our latest issue of Skeptic is on culture wars. | ||
| I have an article in here by an archaeologist named Elizabeth Wise at San Jose State University. | ||
| You should have her on the show. | ||
| Basically, she ended up in a lawsuit with them and finally settled and is now doing something different. | ||
| Had to leave her profession of archaeology, studying bones of Native Americans in California, primarily, of a huge collection after 20 years because she refused to go along with the idea that you can't say what sex a skeleton is because we don't know how those people 5,000 years ago would have identified And she's like, what? | ||
| I mean, look at the pelvis. | ||
| This is a male pelvis. | ||
| This is a female pelvis. | ||
| We know this from centuries of science. | ||
| And they're like, oh, no, you can't say that. | ||
| At best, you could argue maybe they dress in a different way than their pelvis would have implied, but that's different. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, she's not even talking about gender and culture. | ||
| She's just talking about bones, just basic biology. | ||
| And there's just differences between men and women. | ||
| Biologically, it's binary. | ||
| Everybody knows this, despite what the activists say or the virtue signallers say. | ||
| Everybody knows this. | ||
| But she had to fight for this. | ||
| She ended up at the Heterodox Academy in New York, Jonathan Haidt's group, for a year just to kind of make that transition. | ||
| Now she's going to have to be an independent scholar. | ||
| And they also had some weird stuff about, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, you know, Teddy Roosevelt's old place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of course they had to take down his statue. | ||
| Yeah, which, oh, that was my favorite museum growing up. | ||
| We used to go there a couple times a year from school and my folks and yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they have some Native American artifacts there, totem poles. | ||
| Sorry, you can't call them that anymore. | ||
| I forget what a politically correct term is, but they had them in these cases. | ||
| And they're kind of acknowledging that, you know, the people that made these believe they are infused with spirit power. | ||
| But then the placard says something like, you know, they actually could exude spirit power. | ||
| So this is the worst one. | ||
| If you're menstruating or pregnant, you should be careful getting near this artifact. | ||
| And she just could not believe it. | ||
| And then she actually got asked at some, like she goes to some collection to do some research there, you know, if you're menstruating or pregnant, you know, you can't come in. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| You know, she's a feminist. | ||
| She's like an old school feminist. | ||
| She's like, this is anti-feminism. | ||
| This is something like something some guys in the 1940s would have said. | ||
| And now the liberals are saying this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, this is completely backwards. | ||
| This is upside down. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| This is anti-liberalism. | ||
|
unidentified
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What is old is new again. | |
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I had a friend of mine about eight or nine years ago when the woke thing was sort of just bubbling up who we got into a debate at dinner over trans issues. | ||
| And basically I just said, Hey, I don't mind how someone lives as an adult, how they identify, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But I, but that doesn't change my view on biological reality. | ||
| And after about a three hour conversation, he said to me, you don't understand quantum physics. | ||
| And I said, I said, you're right, but either do you. | ||
| But that's the level of thinking that I think we're dealing with with a lot of this. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| So, right, it's an abandonment of objective reality, you know, everybody's truths are equal. | ||
| Yeah, if you want to go for a deep root cause, well, it's, you know, postmodernism, the challenges to objective reality, science is just another narrative. | ||
| The old version was science is just another story. | ||
| Now the new version is it's not just a story, it's a story created by colonialist, power-hungry, hegemonic, you know, Western ideologues who are racist and so on and so on. | ||
| And then, of course, if you believe that, then why would you respect science as a tool for understanding reality? | ||
| You wouldn't. | ||
| And that's the problem with going down that road. | ||
| And again, most liberals—so here I kind of break from liberals—they don't believe that there's objective moral truths. | ||
| They think it is really culturally bound. | ||
| Of course, you can always push them and say, so you think it's okay for female genital mutilation of women? | ||
| Well, I don't personally think so. | ||
| Yeah, I know you don't personally think so, but you think it's okay for somebody else to do it? | ||
| Well, I don't want to judge—you know, come on! | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And do you think there's some culture somewhere where it's going to be okay to enslave people in the future or to, you know, gas Jews? | ||
| Is that morally acceptable? | ||
| And it just happens to be in Western culture that we don't think it's a good idea, but somebody else— We'll think it's a good idea and we should respect their rights to gas. | ||
| No, no, no, no, right? | ||
| So that's the problem with going too far down that road. | ||
| Has that been a challenge for you over the last couple years? | ||
| You know, we've done many, many shows together, often talking about atheism versus belief and religion and all that. | ||
| We had a great debate. | ||
| Probably about eight years ago already with you and Dennis Prager talking about belief and all that versus skepticism. | ||
| But has that been a bit of a challenge for you in the skeptic community and a well-known atheist watching largely that side of the aisle? | ||
| collapse into a lot of the ideas that you were fighting against while it was the belief side of the aisle that didn't if you fear that if you feel that's a fair way of framing. | ||
| It is yes and and someone like Prager and I would you know disagree about the ultimate source of objective moral values is comes from God, mine comes from secular sources of reason and rationality and And so on. | ||
| But that's no longer where the debate is. | ||
| Now the debate is people like Steven Pinker and I are considered to be, you know, gateways to the far right by liberals. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| Or Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. | ||
| I mean, Richard Dawkins is, you know, so old school liberal. | ||
| You know, 20 years ago, you would say, this guy is so liberal. | ||
| Now he's like centrist or to the right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, you saw probably a few months ago where he had a very interesting statement basically saying that he's very happy to live in a Christian society that respects his right to be an atheist, which was quite an admission by him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That was in response to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's coming out as a Christian. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Richard called that a cultural Christian. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Judeo-Christian Western values, you know, equal rights and treatment under the law and respect and dignity and so on. | ||
| Yes, yes, I'm on board with that. | ||
| But 20 years ago, Richard and I would have been on one side and the Christians on the other side. | ||
| Now we're all kind of like, hey, we're all in the same camp together of embracing these values against these other people. | ||
| You know, so that's an interesting divide. | ||
| It may just be age, you know, a lot of the younger, maybe, say, millennials or Gen Z, you know, don't see people like myself as part of their team or their tribe. | ||
| And now, because it's so tribal, now we're the enemy, rather than that. | ||
| So now I find myself gravitating toward conservatives, because at least they know what a woman is. | ||
| The bar has been set pretty low. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Do you think there's something that the skeptic community could have done differently? | ||
| I mean, I remember years ago going to the Reason Rally and I spoke at the mall in D.C., you know, kind of like the Forrest Gump scene. | ||
| And I remember saying, hey, we, because I was more on that side of things and saying, hey, we have to watch out for this encroachment of these bad ideas that are coming from the left. | ||
| We didn't really call it woke at that time. | ||
| That's how long ago it was. | ||
| But was there anything maybe that could have been done that wouldn't have left us, you think, in this situation? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I didn't predict that this would happen. | ||
| You know, the initial split came, well, in the early 90s when I got into this and started Skeptic Magazine and then kind of visited the humanist groups. | ||
| They were kind of in this category of, like, here's the 12 things that, if you're a secular humanist, you believe. | ||
| Well, you know, I ticked the box for, like, 8 of the 12. | ||
| And, you know, I remember talking to the director, am I in the club or not? | ||
| I mean, how many do I have to tick? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What would have been something that you didn't tick, for example? | ||
| Uh, well, more economic, lower taxes, and, you know, less government, things like that. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| So it was like policy-based also, alright. | ||
| Yeah, some kind of libertarian in that sense. | ||
| Fiscally conservative, socially liberal. | ||
| But to the old humanists, you know, we're just old-school liberals, like from the 30s. | ||
| And I thought, you know, that's not a very big tent approach. | ||
| I have the same problem with libertarians, you know. | ||
| You guys need a bigger tent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Small in number, right? | ||
| So that's always a problem there. | ||
| And then after Dawkins' book, The God Delusion became a bestseller in 2006, then there was kind of a split in the atheist and humanist skeptics movement about how militant you are in your atheism. | ||
| You got to be really militant. | ||
| It's like, no, you don't. | ||
| And so that alienated a lot of people. | ||
| Then there was an atheist plus movement, the plus being social justice. | ||
| That was around 2008, 2009, when the social justice thing became a thing. | ||
| I mean, social justice is old. | ||
| I believed in social justice, but not the new version. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, which is, as you know, it has to do with not equality under the law and equal opportunity, but equal outcomes. | ||
| And that's very different. | ||
| And once you go down that road, you know, this is not healthy. | ||
| So you think there's nothing that could have been done? | ||
| It was just inevitable in a weird way? | ||
| That there was no guardrail that the more secular or atheist people could have put up to stop this? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, it's a good question. | ||
| I can't do anything about it now, but, you know, can we, moving forward, you know, let's drop the, you know, if our mission, what is your mission statement? | ||
| If it's, you know, to understand reality, understand nature, understand what truth is. | ||
| You have to drop the ideology, because if that's your North Star, the world has to turn out a certain way, because this is the way I want it to be, you're going to distort reality. | ||
| It has to be the opposite. | ||
| The North Star is just what is true. | ||
| And then from there, and even there, you can say, well, we can separate values from facts. | ||
| So I don't think people should ever be enslaved, regardless if you could make a case Yeah, but what if the greatest good comes at the expense of the minority of people that don't want to be slaves, right? | ||
| but good for the whole. This is the problem with utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number. | ||
| Yeah, but what if the greatest good comes at the expense of the minority of people that don't want to be slaves, right? | ||
| This is why we have a Bill of Rights, and this is why deontological ethics sometimes trumps utilitarian ethics. | ||
| There's some things that doesn't matter. | ||
| The tyranny of the majority is a problem in a democracy, which is why we don't have a democracy. | ||
| We have a republic. | ||
| If you can keep it. | ||
| If you can keep it. | ||
| Michael, I have one more question for you because as I mentioned, we're taping this end of July. | ||
| It's airing on August 1st. | ||
| I am off the grid with no phone, no news, no newspaper, no outside information for a month. | ||
| I suspect this is going to be the craziest August I've ever done this. | ||
| Do you think the world will be wildly different when I come back, or kind of just we're going to be in the same old roughly crazy place? | ||
| You want to make a prediction for me? | ||
| I don't think it can change. | ||
| I think the big change will come in November. | ||
| I think the build-up, the weeks before November, things could get crazy. | ||
| I hope you're safe and quiet in November for the vacation. | ||
| I might do the same. | ||
| But you never know, because look what just happened. | ||
| I mean, I thought things were going to settle out two months ago, and then all of a sudden the Biden meltdown after the debate and all his interviews. | ||
| It's just painful to watch him. | ||
| I'm just holding my breath, hoping he can get to the end of the sentence. | ||
| And then the Trump thing happens, like, oh my God. | ||
| And then the RNC, you know, the other night where they have the Teamsters, the head of the Teamsters, like, what? | ||
| What has happened here? | ||
| Look, that's the realignment and that's the wide tenting that you called for earlier. | ||
| So I think in that sense, there's a lot of hope. | ||
| Well, I suspect that we'll see what happens in August, but I suspect that whatever happens in November, there will be many conspiracy theories related to it. | ||
| So we will probably do this again sometime in the second week of November. | ||
| All right, Dave. | ||
| Good to see you, my friend. | ||
| Nice to see you too. | ||
| If you're looking for smarter conversations about academia, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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