Michael Shermer examines how COVID-19 policies—like school closures and beach bans—were framed with exaggerated certainty (e.g., "absolutely must do") instead of Bayesian probability, fueling distrust in media (99% Democrat-aligned) and academia. He critiques historical revisionism, from Churchill’s WWII distortions to Hitler’s mythic benevolence, comparing it to debunked Holocaust denial by figures like David Irving while questioning motives behind claims from Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Darrell Cooper. Truth, he argues, is provisional, not absolute, warning against dismissing evidence due to source bias amid AI-generated disinformation. Despite credible UFO/UAP reports (e.g., Navy pilots Graves/Grush, Senators Reed/Rubio), Shermer insists most explanations are mundane, like drones, and scoffs at unproven extraterrestrial claims—even betting $1,000 against Avi Loeb on 2030 disclosure. The episode underscores how misinformation thrives when transparency fails, eroding trust in evidence-based narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
If you're a policymaker, you're a politician, and you're sitting there in front of the microphones with all the media, and they go, Okay, what should we do on Monday?
Do we open the schools or keep them closed?
They're not looking for, well, I'd say a 60%.
The policymakers, politicians feel the need to say, This is what we absolutely must do.
So, never sign a zero or a hundred percent to anything because we're fallible.
You can read biblical stories and religious literature and find some deeper truths in them.
So, instead of just saying these are just myths, fake stories, taking a more respectful approach that Democrats are now, they're all a bunch of atheists, seculars, you know, cat ladies, no babies, and we're going to be overrun by Islam.
And even if I'm not a Christian, at least the Christians, you know, understand what Islam is up to, and they even know what a woman is, right?
So, we have now independent journalists.
So, that's good.
I think many sources checking out stories is good, but I don't trust any one of them either.
I think you really need to sample multiple independent journals.
What Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper are up to, I don't know.
I don't know what's worse.
They know it's and they're doing it for clicks, and that's the financial model of their podcast, or they don't know and they've never read much.
How concerned are you that truth will just be lost because we will be inundated with so much counter information constantly that nobody will be able to pilfer anything true out of anything?
All right, I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the founder of Skeptic Magazine and the author of the new book, Truth.
What it is, how to find it, and why it still matters.
My old friend and Rubin Report returning guest, probably top five Rubin Report guests of all time, at least in appearances.
If someone said, What is on Michael Shermer's business card?
I mean, obviously, author, and you've run Skeptic Magazine for years and everything else, and you're an incredible, incredible debater, and we've done some live events together over the years.
And one of the things that I love about you, and then we'll dive into the book and we'll do some current events and all that, is that you're a great creditor to the people that you get ideas from.
I mean, you even did it right there with Pinker.
And it's something that I've really tried to incorporate in the show.
You know, I know so many people that kind of try to steal ideas or pretend everything popped out of thin air or they came up with it that morning.
And I remember when I sat down with you the first time, you mentioned all of these people and it's an homage to them and it's an honorable thing to do.
And one reason to write the book is to say, let's get back to trust in our institutions and our experts and science and rationality and so on.
It's really come under assault because of, I think mainly because of COVID and the whole pandemic and the inability of professional scientists and public policymakers and politicians to be more Bayesian in how they make suggestions.
But by Bayesian, I mean you assign a probability of something being true with a small T between 1 and 99%.
So never assign a zero or 100% to anything because we're fallible.
Does the vaccine stop the spread, slow the spread?
What does it do?
And so on.
And instead of saying, you know, at the moment, we think we should close the schools and have social distancing and wear masks, you know, but we're really actually not sure.
So we're going to recommend this now, and then maybe in a week or two, we'll change our minds.
But they don't say that.
They go, okay, here's what the science has settled.
Here's what we know.
And then, you know, a month later, oh, never mind.
Now we're going to go with this.
You know, and now we know that by the fall of 2020, let's say everything started to shut down in March of 2020.
By the fall, it was clear, you know, this is Jay Bhattacharya's Great Barrington Declaration.
You know, we really don't need to keep the schools closed anymore.
I mean, this virus mainly affects older people, people with preexisting conditions, obesity, and so on.
These kids are going to be fine.
But they didn't do that.
And now with the paper trail, it looks like they knew that they didn't need to keep the schools closed, not to mention businesses and so on.
Well, what do you think that, where does that come from?
Is that hubris on the part of the scientists?
Or does that tell you a little bit more about just what the nature of power is and that when these people were given a certain power over other people, they simply just didn't want to give it up?
I think there's several factors because they wouldn't act that way with other propositions.
They'd be more Bayesian and careful and couch their recommendations more cautiously.
I think because it was a pandemic and we didn't know, they wanted to err on the side, you know, the precautionary principle just in case.
You know, what if it turns out it's more like Ebola or AIDS or something, just super deadly?
It didn't turn out to be that way, but they didn't know for sure at the time.
But then also, it now looks like the timing, although probably people won't admit to this, but when they were, it looked like, for example, the teachers' unions were thinking of reopening the schools in the fall of 2020.
And then I think in June or July, Trump said, I want the schools open in the fall.
And then immediately the teachers of the unions are like, oh, no, in that case.
Now, you know, I think really Trump derangement syndrome is, it's a thing.
I've seen many of my friends and colleagues, they just cannot think clearly when that word comes into the conversation.
And I think there's some of that.
And then also, you know, if you're a policymaker, you're a politician, and you're sitting there in front of the microphones with all the media and they go, okay, what should we do on Monday?
Do we open the schools or keep them closed?
And, you know, they're not looking for, well, I'd say a 60%.
You know, I think the policymakers, politicians feel the need to say, this is what we absolutely must do.
And we're going to do that.
And they wouldn't do that for other things, but I think it's that because just the circumstances.
It's interesting because you said get back to trusting our institutions.
And I think so many people have so soured on our institutions that I don't know how many can be gotten back to.
Obviously, what Bobby Kennedy is doing at HHS and then bringing in Bhattacharya and some of these other people, there's some new faith, I would say, from where I sit.
But I know that there's a lot of people on the other side that now trust those institutions even less.
Well, suddenly Variety is doing a hit piece on her, which to me, I was like, oh, that means she must be doing something good because now Variety is going after her.
So how concerned are you that in a world that now offers independent journalists and anyone can open a YouTube channel?
And, you know, in essence, you can put a desk down and put on a nice jacket and do what I do.
Anyone can do these things.
Hopefully they don't do it.
I guess if I do it okay, hopefully not as well as me.
But in that world where we all can do this, how concerned are you that truth, and I would like you to define truth, by the way, but how concerned are you that truth will just be lost because we will be inundated with so much counter information constantly that nobody will be able to pilfer anything true out of anything?
Remember Steve Bannon's line about throwing, just throw shit at the system and people won't know what to believe, and then we'll tell them what the truth is.
That's not a good solution either.
So well, truth is defined.
I define truth as something confirmed to such an extent it would be rational to offer our provisional assent, that is to say truth, of the small T, provisional, I could change my mind tomorrow.
In Bayesian language, my priors, what I know now about something, lead me to a certain level of credence or confidence that it's true, 80% or 60% or whatever.
But I may change my mind.
I mean, so Bayesian reasoning is all about assessing new evidence and when you should change your mind when the evidence changes.
And that's an ongoing process that I think, you know, if more of us could adopt that, that would be helpful to evaluate these particular claims.
But I worry about like, you know, like the just say the Somali fraud cases in Minneapolis.
Apparently, this has been known for Minnesota, been known for a long time.
No, this kid, I'd met him once or twice before this, and literally with this thing in his pocket, he did more journalism in a day than I think you could argue CNN has done in two decades almost.
So, so, all right, if we have some of individuals that are out there that are looking for the truth on the quest for truth, and we have institutions that are rattled at the moment, we're in an algorithmic warfare, there's AI coming and everything else.
I mean, one of the things that people say to me all the time, if I go to the supermarket, people say the same thing to me all the time: Dave, they always say, Dave, you're the only person I trust, which I always think is hilarious because it's like, man, we're in deep doo-doo if I'm if I'm it.
You know, I'm trying, but like that, it can't be.
So, how do you think in a modern world with this technology, we can get out of this?
Well, I do think that some of the fact-checking sites are good, like PolitiFact and Snopes, skeptic.com.
Uh, also now, the new uh LLMs, so I use Grok and uh Gemini, but there's others, uh, and I even checked multiple ones.
I'll just ask a question, you know, how many people actually died from the COVID over and above, you know, and you know, here's the 27 articles that they scraped from the internet, and they're all pretty much the same.
So, I thought, okay, well, maybe the LLM programs work pretty well.
It's not perfect, but at least it's a good fact-checking site there.
One problem is that who has time to do all this for everything, right?
Well, I think we're all going to have our own digital assistant that's just basically going to live with us.
You know, right now it's our phone, but I think there's going to be something that's just going to be an automatic fact-checking device kind of built into our system.
Except that I keep, so I have a Tesla too, and I, every now and again, she just starts speaking out of nowhere like I've somehow accidentally triggered it.
And I go, and I go, and I go, are you listening to me right now?
Yeah, so I've had some change of heart on some of that relationship with science and religion.
In this book, I'm trying out some new things.
So science, you know, just standard, as I said, Bayesian reasoning and rationality and the scientific method and testing hypotheses and the randomized controlled trials and determining causality from causality from correlation and what you got to do to do that.
So I have chapters on that.
But then to what extent does that apply to some of these bigger, more metaphysical type questions?
Does God exist?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
What was there before the Big Bang?
What is consciousness?
What about free will?
And so let's just take religion.
So instead of just saying, these are just myths, false, fake stories.
They're not true.
It's all bullshit.
Just don't believe it.
I've given up on that.
I don't think that works.
And I've taken a more respectful approach that, you know, biblical stories, let's say, or any kind of religious literature is a form of great literature.
And that just like in great literature, Dostoevsky or Jane Austen or J.R.R. Tolkien's, you know, is there really a middle-earth that J.R.R. Tolkien writes about in The Lord of the Rings?
You know, but to even ask that question is ridiculous.
Of course, these are made-up stories, but they carry deeper truths, you know, sort of mythological truths or psychological truths, a little bit along the lines of what Jordan Peterson talks about or who's the great mythologist from back in the 80s.
Anyway, so that whole thing, I think, says you can read biblical stories and religious literature and find some deeper truths in them.
So was, you know, Jonah really swallowed by a great fish or a whale and lived three days in there.
No, you're missing the point of the story by asking if it really happened.
It's a story, an allegory that has other meanings.
In this case, the three days is very similar to the three days Jesus in the tomb.
So even that, I would say, let's not take that literally.
I mean, there was probably somebody, a carpenter from Nazareth named Jesus.
He probably was crucified.
The Romans did this routinely.
And he really was dead.
But was he risen from the dead?
You know, the evidence is not very good for that.
But I think just to ask that, you're missing the point of the story, which has to do with redemption and starting over, being born again, forgiveness, overthrowing your oppressors, in this case, the Romans, and so on.
And I think I can then engage with religious people in a more respectful, open way and learn something.
Because when I first met you, that was sort of at the ascendancy.
Maybe it was the end of the ascendancy of the new atheist movement.
And there was a real feeling like what I think a certain set of people liked about it was that it was a little more kind of aggressive atheism and sort of anti-religion.
And what some people didn't like was that it was too anti-religious.
What caused you?
You mentioned there was a shift in you here that you're looking at a new way.
And it often had to do with deep personal reasons and deeper truths that they get out of these stories and these accounts and their beliefs that are not meant to be taken literally in a scientific sense.
I'll give you a story where Richard Dawkins and I were on stage with Ken Miller, the great biologist who debunked all the intelligent design creationist arguments.
But at the end of his book, he says, you know, I'm a Catholic and I accept Jesus as my Savior.
So, you know, Dawkins is sharpening the knives up there on the stage, like, okay, Ken, you know, and let's say we found a piece of the true cross and on a piece of the true cross is a little bit of flesh, and that's Jesus' flesh.
We extract the DNA from that, and then we'll find out if he was really truly born of a virgin or not.
You know, and Ken just stops him and says, Richard, I'm not claiming this is true in some scientific sense, like we're going to test the DNA.
I'm a Catholic.
This is what we believe.
And Richard's like, oh, oh, okay.
What do we do with that?
Nothing.
Okay.
So, you know, and then I've gotten to know people like Charles Murray, who's recently found God, and others.
Jonathan Rausch has a new respect for religion.
And Ross Douthett from the New York Times has, you know, written a book about belief.
And Ayan Herci Alley, our friend, you know, she has, she found Jesus.
She found God.
Okay, so I know the backstory.
People find in religion really deep, important truths for them personally.
It's a kind of pragmatic truth.
And as long as they're not trying to convince me or convert other people, then it doesn't really matter.
It's a different kind of truth than an empirical truth.
Yeah, there have been attempts over the years to build a, you know, like secular churches in every city.
And there are these secular humanists organizations that have wedding ceremonies and funerals and coming of age and whatever.
You know, and they've never really caught on.
And, you know, I've been to some of these Sunday morning gatherings where people give testimonies about how they lost God, they lost their religion, or they sing hymns to Newton and Darwin, you know, and it's like, come on.
But so I do think religions have figured out some deeper emotional pragmatic truths about what people need, what society needs.
Whether or not they're literally true is beside the point that there's this recent movement now of cultural Christianity.
Dawkins himself said, well, I guess I'm a cultural Christian.
This is in part in response to the whole Islamism, Islamic influence in the West now, then immigration into Europe.
And so people are going, hey, you know what, those Christians, you know, they had some pretty good ideas.
At least that got incorporated with the establishment of Western democracies and free market capitalism and so on.
They found ways to make Christianity work really well with that, whereas Islam has never gone through an enlightenment and come out the other side as a more rational worldview.
So I think by that, people are saying, I know, maybe it's, you know, this story is not true, but there's value in some of their principles.
And to me, putting aside my own beliefs for a second, that seems like enough of a reason to argue for a loosely, let's say, Christian Western world, because Dawkins himself has basically said he's thrilled to live in a Christian country because he knows that the purely secular version of it, there's no chance in hell they're going to stand up to radical Islam.
And actually, ironically, the Christian West may not stand up to it either, which that's a whole other topic, I suppose.
Yes, I'm also worried about that in terms of like Democrats are now portrayed as they're all a bunch of atheists, seculars, you know, cat ladies, no babies, and we're going to be overrun by Islam.
And even if I'm not a Christian, at least the Christians, you know, understand what Islam is up to, and they even know what a woman is, right?
I've actually had theists go, yeah, that Shermer guy, he's an atheist, but at least he knows what a woman is.
And it shows you how their ideology then gets put above truth because she basically, the next thing out of her mouth when she couldn't answer the question was, well, I wanted to know if you were asking me for political purposes, but that's separate.
That's completely separate than what the truth is.
Let me ask you something else.
So you, for years and years, you have been debunking conspiracy theories, whether it's 9-11 stuff, Holocaust stuff, aliens.
We can do a long list of the stuff that you've really been on the forefront and done work on the ground and gone to places to get first-hand evidence and everything.
You know, one of the things that I'm seeing right now that you see online, I don't know how much of it's bubbled into the real world, is there seems to also be an upending of our history, particularly, I would say, starting in World War II.
There now is just a group of people online that are just trying to rewrite everything.
Churchill was the architect of evil during World War II, and Hitler was kind of a good guy.
Like just all of this stuff.
Again, I mean, it's sort of connected to what we discussed earlier, but in an age of information where we're going to be slammed with everything, like how are we going to, how are we going to preserve a true past?
I have a chapter in the book on historical truths.
How do we know what happened in the past?
Well, we can know.
You know, you can actually test different hypotheses, look what the evidence points to, look for a convergence of evidence to one conclusion over another, look at what the consensus of what professional historians say about this, like in response to the 1619 project, a group of historians, all liberals, almost progressive liberals, going, hey, wait a minute, this is not what actually happened.
We have to stand up against it.
You have to stand for truth.
Okay, so there's that.
Now, when I wrote the chapter, this was before, you know, the Darrell Cooper going on, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens going around the bend on all this stuff, just asking questions.
When I heard all this, I thought, okay, I've heard all of this.
This is David Irving from the late 80s and early 90s that we debunked back then.
And then I wrote that book, Denying History, about, you know, here's their arguments.
Here's why they're wrong.
Here's what David Irving is actually up to.
What Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper are up to, I don't know.
I suspect, you know, I don't know what's worse.
They know it's bullshit and they're doing it for clicks, and that's the financial model of their podcast, or they don't know and they've never read much.
I mean, none of them are.
They're not historians at all.
And, you know, I could just, if they just picked up my book, they go, oh, okay, never mind.
This is, I was wrong about that because I have all those arguments right there.
So I don't know what's worse there.
And, you know, it has contaminated the environment.
I mean, there's people, apparently millions of people watch their shows, astonishingly.
You know, Darrell Cooper, you know, he's called America's Greatest Historian Working Today by Tucker Carlson.
It's like, no one's even heard of him.
He's not a historian.
He's nothing.
How that happens, I don't know.
But that's the landscape we live in.
I guess what, you know, my free speech Puritanism, in essence, says, no, I don't want the government to come in and ban Tucker Carlson.
What do you make of sort of the psychological makeup of the people who can be swayed by these things?
I've sort of, in the last two years, as we've seen kind of more of this just asking questions, craziness, and conspiracy theories that never go anywhere.
And stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting episode, which never gets to the conclusion.
One of the things that I've sort of started to think is, well, there's just a certain type of person that is willing or not willing, that is in some sense preconditioned to that kind of thinking.
And another type of person just somehow inherently has some defenses against that.
There may be a religious reason for some of this.
I don't know exactly, but what do you make of that?
Well, there's a theory in cognitive psychology called default to truth.
That is to say, most of us, most of the time, just default to believing what we're told because who has time to fact check everything?
That's true in some cases, but if it's something important, people actually are reasonably rational and cautious and skeptical.
Or else everybody would join cults, for example.
Cults is a good example.
We can name them, you know, Scientology or Heavensgate or Jim Jones or whatever.
And people pointed that, look how gullible and stupid people are to join those things and just believe whatever they're told.
But what we don't have is called base rate neglect in Bayesian reasoning.
What's the base rate?
How many people, you know, join the group and never sent Scientology their second mortgage or never committed suicide or whatever.
Most of them don't.
You know, my other example is that Netflix doc on the tender swindler and how this guy got away by getting these women to fall in love with him.
And then months down the line, he's on this business trip in Switzerland and he needs her to wire him $50,000 before Monday to close the $200 million deal.
That's the moment of truth.
And they found four women that did it.
And they're like, we feel like idiots.
But what we don't know is how many women did he try this out on?
And they told him to go, fuck off, right?
And or how many never even got to the second date.
And so it could be, it's, you know, one out of a hundred fall for cults, not one out of ten.
Where they'll just put some clip on, just keep cycling through as the host is talking.
And kind of the impact is like, wow, look at how many cars were on the sidewalk or whatever.
No, that's the same car.
They're just running the tape over and over and over.
And so even that's deceptive.
So when the whole Renee Good incident happened, I thought, okay, I better not comment here for at least 24 hours because I know there's going to be more videos.
There's going to be more angles and more analyses.
And I didn't know who this guy, Tim Poole, was.
And he posted one that was pretty interesting about how the tire was pointed left and then it spun as she tried to back up, then it pointed right.
And I'm like, oh, okay.
So I post that.
Actually, it wasn't even a post from him.
It was somebody else who posted his video.
And people went ape shit against me.
Like, don't you know who he is?
You know, he's a Russian agent, and he got paid by the Russians.
Like, what has that got to do with the tires?
I'm just looking at the tires.
What's wrong with his argument?
Oh, you can't trust him.
Okay, so this is the genetic fallacy.
I can't discount somebody's argument because of who they are or where they came from or what the origin of the story.
Well, that sort of brings me to the next part of this, which is, you know, we kind of discussed the text version of the truth when it comes to AI, meaning, you know, will you get honest answers as it pertains to history or medical advice or whatever?
But, you know, the next frontier of this, of course, is video.
And we are getting pretty damn close.
Maybe by the time I finish this sentence to the point where AI video will be completely, will be completely inseparable from real video.
But the amount of people who can be fake, you know, it always reminds me, I know you know the story, but when War of the Worlds came out on radio, what year was that, 1929 or something?
And people literally thought that aliens were invading New Jersey and one woman jumped out of her window and died.
So now we're doing that on steroids 100 years later.
Well, because if you trust the institutions and then they show you something, again, that's a reasonable default to truth because you have a history of trusting.
It's Walter Gronkite, you know.
And so that's famously when he turned against the Vietnam War.
Nixon's like, uh-oh, because everybody trusts this guy.
And anyway, so yeah, so if we can get back to that, you know, I'm also worried about universities, the academy, they have a history of being a reliable institution and source of knowledge of what we should believe about the real world, about the physical world, biological world, social world, and so on.
But again, since COVID and also the, you know, the whole trans thing, the woke stuff, and then the political orientation, you know, when I was in college, it was maybe 60, 40, a Democrat, Republican, by the 80s, it was maybe 70, 30.
You know, by the 90s, it's like 80, 20, and now it's like 99, 1.
And there's just no possible way, first, that students are going to get a balanced take on anything.
And then, two, whatever they recommend for policymakers, here's our findings, here's our recommendations, here's our white papers, here's what you should trust.
Why would anybody trust them?
I mean, again, they can't even answer the question, you know, what is a woman?
Or in the case of the Harvard and MIT and Penn professors, you know, does threatening to kill Jews constitute hate speech on your campus?
The moment people hear this, it's like, okay, why would I believe these guys when they tell me climate change is going to do this or that vaccines are going to do that?
Let's finish up with something that is huge in a certain corner of the internet that I've touched on a little bit, but you just referenced right there, which is UFOs and life outside of our universe.
You know, if you I've gone down some of the Instagram rabbit holes and followed some of these accounts and I've had some interesting conversations.
And, you know, Rogan does a ton of this stuff with UFOs.
There are, I would say, probably more people than ever that right now believe that aliens have been here, that the government's been working with them.
I mean, there's 10 versions of all of that.
We're using their technology now, and that's sort of how we got into modernity was redoing some of the stuff that crashed here.
Well, there was a phase transition from UFOs to UAPs in 2017 when the New York Times ran that front page story about the Pentagon secret program to investigate what these things are because they're flying over military bases in U.S. airspace and so on.
Now, they weren't saying that we think it's aliens.
They were just going, hey, you know, this is our job to keep track of this stuff.
So let's look into it.
But it's really taken off since then.
And even the linguistic transition from UFO, which was always tin oil hat wearing kooks, to UAP, ooh, that sounds, you know, what is that?
Unidentified aerial phenomena.
Then it morphed into unidentified anomalous phenomena, even more technical.
And then you have people like Navy pilots like Graves and Grush and Senator Reed and these are not fringers, right?
Marco Rubio is on there going, yeah, we're going to look into this.
There's something weird happening here.
Okay, so that tells me mostly it's probably something like drones or DARPA projects, if it's anything.
Once you discount all the 95% that are explained as balloons and birds and things like that, that even the ufologists admit are mostly just prosaic explanations.
But if it's anything, it could be something like a DARPA project.
Remember, I mean, there were reports in the, I think it was the early 70s of commercial airline pilots, you know, saying, oh my God, dude, what is that up there?
You know, and it was the SR-71 Blackbird.
It's going, you know, like 4,000 miles an hour at 90,000 feet.
And you're at 30,000 feet going 600 miles an hour, going, holy shit.
You know, turns out it's SR-71 Blackbird, right?
The U-2 spy plane, also the same thing.
You know, so it could be something like that, if it's anything.
I do think the impulse to know has a deeper, this is what I talk about at the end of the book, a deeper religious kind of impulse, the idea that we're not alone, that there's something out there that's far more advanced and intelligent and moral than us.
They know we're here and they're going to come and rescue us.
Because that's the underlying current with the UAP people: they have this technology that can do all this stuff that we can't do.
That means free energy.
We don't have to have oil anymore.
Energy too cheap to meter.
It's going to save civilization, the whole thing.
And so I was encouraged by Elon saying, you know, I would totally be into this.
This would be great.
I would adopt this for my cars.
I looked into it.
I just can't find anything.
So I think there's probably, they're not here.
I think they're probably out there somewhere in the cosmos, but I think they just haven't come here.
And I hope he wins because, Michael, let's not forget that President Bill Pullman in Independence Day did not know about the aliens because of plausible deniability.