David Bloomberg and Spencer debate belief’s role in shaping reality, contrasting blind faith—like flat-Earth conspiracy theories requiring global deception—with evidence-based acceptance of science. Bloomberg dismisses "manifesting" claims (e.g., Scott Adams’ 1997 The Dilbert Future) as illusory, linking them to conspiracy logic that ignores complexity, like Georgia’s 2020 Senate vote altering COVID policies or evolution’s cumulative proof. While creationists demand a single disproving fact, Bloomberg argues Occam’s Razor falters against intricate systems, where oversimplified beliefs (e.g., vaccines as Illuminati tools) offer false control. Their focus shifts to combating harmful misinformation via social media, blending sports, science, and critiques of figures like Elon Musk to uphold rigor—even if it risks alienating entrenched audiences. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
We're going to talk about the power of belief today with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Good, good.
How are you?
Yeah, pretty good.
Before we get into the topic today, I just want to mention that if there's any comments about the podcast and the topic, you want to tell us that we got something right, you want to tell us we got something wrong?
You want to just add your own story about something or other, send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And without further ado, let's get right into it.
Okay.
Belief itself is the confidence in the truth of an idea without the need for evidence.
That's really essentially, very simply, what it really is.
You don't need to be convinced of anything that you already believe.
You don't need the evidence for it.
You just believe it to be true.
I believe my mother loves me.
I don't need her to, she still does.
She still does do things that, you know, convince me, you know, but she doesn't need to.
I would believe it regardless.
That's, it's just a thing, right?
I also believe, I mean, I know how the Earth and the planets move, but even before I knew how they moved, I believed that the sun would rise tomorrow, every day of my youth, before I knew anything about how the Earth and the Sun moved in relation to each other.
I just believed it.
I didn't need to be convinced.
I just believed it would happen.
And of course, it did.
And that reinforced my belief.
So I guess in a way that was becoming sort of some kind of evidence, but it's related to something that's like assumption, that you're going to assume things when you believe them.
That's they're they're they're linked in that way.
Although assumption is kind of more passive.
It's not as strong of a thing when you're just assuming something versus when you believe it.
So first take on belief.
I know that you have a lot of thoughts on this topic, which is why I really wanted to have you on for this.
Yeah, I think I would go with your definition, you know, kind of the faith definition of belief.
And that's why, you know, over my many years of debating and discussing science, I really don't like it when someone says, oh, you believe in evolution?
No, I don't believe in evolution.
I accept the science behind evolution.
And, you know, so there's a lot, I mean, that could be applied to lots of different topics, but I've seen it most applied to evolution more than anything.
Right.
I mean, this brings up immediately an interesting point you do make is that I've pointed out on other episodes of other people that most people don't have the mathematical and geometric skills to themselves prove that the Earth is spherical.
But still, most people, when asked, will say that it's a sphere or spherical, that it's not flat.
And this is part of what leads to this interesting situation is that in essence, they are sort of believing that the Earth is spherical because they can't really prove it.
They can't themselves go into space and look at it.
They could point out all day that they believe that the pictures being shown by NASA are real pictures and not faked somehow.
And, you know, that those are good.
But they aren't going there themselves to see with their own eyes.
They have to see through someone else's eyes, through someone else's experience that this is happening and be reassured by the people who can do the math and the geometry that the Earth really is a sphere.
And I think that's part of what leads to some of the situations that we find in our current space where we have people that believe things that are the opposite of what we feel must be true.
I feel it must be true that the earth is spherical because I actually can do the math and the geometry that show it.
I don't really need to believe that it's spherical anymore now that I did that.
But most people I talk to who also believe the Earth is spherical, they have to believe it.
What's your thoughts on this?
you know, there are some things inevitably that we have to believe because we don't have the technical means to do all the stuff.
We have to believe information we get about vaccines because we can't do the work ourselves.
What's your thought on that?
Well, I guess it goes back to the definition of, you know, believe, because I believe what you said, sorry, was, you know, belief is without evidence.
Well, there's plenty of evidence.
Even if I can't do the math to prove independently that the Earth is a sphere, there is plenty of evidence out there.
There is plenty.
There are plenty of other scientists who have studied it.
The scientific consensus shows it.
So the opposite, I would say, would be to believe it is flat because that goes against all of the evidence.
And you would have to, again, believe that there are so many conspiracies that there has been so much made up in order to reach that point that it is nothing more than conspiracy belief at that point.
And so many different things go back to conspiracy belief.
You mentioned vaccines.
If you are an anti-vaxxer, then you hold at the root conspiracy beliefs.
And there's a doctor that I follow on Twitter.
He writes a number of blogs, Dr. Gorski.
He has said that if you scratch any alternative medicine, underneath it is conspiracy beliefs.
I believe that.
I'm paraphrasing, so I apologize to him if I'm misparaphrasing at all.
But it really is true because if you have any alternative medicine, the whole reason it's alternative is because it doesn't have the scientific backing.
If it had scientific backing, it would just be medicine.
And I can't take credit for that statement either, that many people have said that, but it's true.
And so, yeah, if you want to go out there and promote some alternative medicine, you're doing it as a conspiracy belief.
Yeah, that's a thing I mentioned in, I believe it was the podcast I did a few weeks ago with Brent Lee, where I mentioned that for a lot of these ideas, these sort of conspiracy hypotheses, a global conspiracy just comes with it as like the ugly cousin.
Because in order to believe that the Earth is flat, you have to also believe that a large number of people are willfully lying to you about the shape of the Earth and about what they know about math and geometry and everything else.
And all of, you know, with that is this large organization that looks a lot like the government that we call NASA that also has to be lying.
And so the idea of a global conspiracy comes with it.
It's not the center of the belief.
It just has to come along with it in order to, you know, make your core belief fit.
And that's dangerous.
Right.
And it's not just NASA.
It would be every country's.
Yeah.
Space organization, including the ones that we're enemies with.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, like what would cause the Soviets to carry on this farce, right?
Right.
It has to be, you know, the Illuminati or whatever other, you know, the lizard people who are controlling everything.
I mean, you, you know, that's how deep it gets at that point.
Right.
So I have a fundamental question that hopefully someday I get to ask of a person who's much more ensconced in the world of faith and belief.
But for now, I'll ask you, David: can we believe in something with enough force to cause it to manifest in our world?
So, of course, as soon as I say that, all the rational people in the audience immediately say, Well, of course, you can't do that.
That's ridiculous.
You can't just believe that there's a square block in front of you and suddenly there will be one.
That's crazy.
But I think some people are doing this.
They are convincing themselves that they can do it because the evidence that it exists in the way that they think is also intangible.
And so it's easier for them to believe that they've done this in this crazy bit of circular logic.
If they can believe hard enough that the earth is a different shape, and then they don't need to look at the earth closely enough to see that it isn't that shape, then they can convince themselves that, yes, this is true.
And of course, the thing falls apart as soon as you ask them, well, what happens if everyone stops believing that?
Does it stop having that shape?
One thing I would love to ask a Christian is: if everyone stopped believing in God and we all forgot that anyone ever did believe in God, would God's existence fail?
Would God no longer actually exist?
Or is God, to a Christian, at least, part of objective reality?
That, of course, God would exist if we didn't believe in him.
Because that's a difficult question, I think, because then you get into the fact that, well, how do you know that this is really the shape that God takes?
What if God is something else entirely and you were just duped into believing this?
Because he's going to have that other shape, even if you believe in this shape.
So, you know, that's a slope that I think many people in that space try to avoid.
It's a question they don't like to ask, I think.
You know, maybe I'm wrong about that.
Maybe they do like to ask it and answer it all the time.
But I don't, you know, I don't know anyone who believes in it strongly enough that would answer that question honestly.
But what do you think of this idea that some people are being led to believe that they are making the shape of the thing that they believe because of the force of their belief in it?
That is a big multi-part question.
So let me think there's a couple of separate things there.
There are certainly people who believe that they can manifest reality.
Okay.
There was that book, The Secret, as one big one that Oprah pushed.
And there have been many thoughts like that.
I think that's separate from the flat earthers or the anti-vaxxers believing that things are the way they are.
I don't think anti-vaxxers are saying if we believe hard enough, then these things about vaccines will be true or false.
I think they just believe in a reality where it's already that way.
All right.
And I think that's the same with Christians, you know, to go to your other question.
Right.
Because in the creation story, God existed before humans could believe.
Yeah, right.
Right.
And so therefore, theoretically, if all Christians disappeared, God should still be a constant in the universe according to that belief system.
Now, what you have suggested is actually portrayed rather amusingly throughout Terry Pratchett's books, the Discworld series.
I might have to read those someday.
I've heard a lot about this.
Yeah, gods can gain or lose strength according to the number of followers they have.
I think this is an idea that's really part of Dungeons and Dragons in general, is that the gods are real and that they have more strength if you believe in them harder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, you know, so there's that way.
But I think that if, you know, not speaking as a Christian, because I am not one, but I think that if you are a Christian and you believe that God exists, you are going to believe that God exists no matter what happens.
Now, you start asking different people what that means for like alien life.
Then you get a whole bunch of different answers and a whole bunch of philosophy and a whole different topic.
Well, we haven't actually gained any proof that alien life, extraterrestrial life exists either.
Well, that's true.
You know, that's an interesting one when it comes to belief, because I think that alien life exists.
I don't have any specific evidence of it other than math, you know, which is seems likely to have occurred separately somewhere else.
Exactly.
Set of complicated chemical reactions that led to life existing here.
Exactly.
So that is, you know, some people would call that a belief.
Maybe it is, but I think it's one with a lot of mathematical basis.
I think I was asked once by a Christian, it might have even been a Jehovah's Witness at the time, that if you took a toaster apart into its component pieces and you put them all in a bag and you shook them all up, how long would you have to shake them before you got another toaster?
And this was meant to be a proof that life on this planet would never have been possible without the guiding hand of a heavenly being thinking entity that put it the way it was so that you could have a toaster finally.
And of course, this is less obvious if the pieces of the toaster are, first of all, like maybe some form of magnetics.
They attract each other.
Secondly, that you don't just have the pieces for one toaster.
You have the pieces for 10 to the power of 50,000 toasters.
And you have billions of years with which to move them around, such as to attract and repel each other to such point that you might, you know, get all kinds of other variations other than just the toaster that you're looking for.
That it's not incredibly obvious once you state it more succinctly that way, which is probably closer to what actually we think occurred, which is that all these molecules have natural ways of combining and breaking apart.
And there's so many of them to have those reactions with.
And then also, there was a very, very long time with which to do it.
And so, once you look at it more like that, you instead of carving away the pieces that are really relevant and then just saying, well, you're never going to make a toaster out of that.
That equation isn't clear that you're not going to make a toaster.
And of course, as you succinctly point out, properly point out, that we have all the components here, and there doesn't appear to be anything particularly special about this planet except for its specific distance from the sun to make this temperature range.
And with many, many hundreds of thousands and millions actually of other planets orbiting other stars that are similar size, what's to say that similar chemical reactions aren't happening on those planets.
So you don't have water that's moving in a similar fashion to the way it is here.
And you don't have an atmosphere.
You don't have-I mean, it doesn't even need to be something that uses oxygen.
It could be chemicals happening in some other way.
And that's what you really mean when you say that it's, you know, mathematically, it seems like it should also be happening somewhere else because there really isn't anything very special about this particular planet.
Right.
And to add to your toaster analogy, throw in there also that sometimes the, you know, that's assuming that you want a toaster.
Yeah.
You know, if you just put a bunch of parts in there, maybe you don't get a toaster.
You get an oven.
You get a mixer.
You get a steamer, you know, and all those things are perfectly viable pieces of equipment.
Because the person who was giving you that analogy assumed that humanity was the end point.
Yeah.
But it's just one of many possible endpoints, one that happened to be helped along by a large item hitting the Yucatan Peninsula, you know, among other things.
Otherwise, we might be those lizard people.
We were, you know, we might have been.
Yeah.
It might have been that dinosaurs developed enough to think and write and create Shakespeare plays and every other thing.
So, yeah, but as to your core question, if you don't mind me jumping back to that about, you know, this idea that you can just manifest your reality.
Like I said, this is, you know, the idea behind the secret and all these other things.
And I've got a couple things on, well, I have more than a couple things on this, but I'll condense it down to a couple.
One part of this that the promoters of this belief don't want people to think about is that it blames the victim when things don't go your way.
Right.
So did you really want that job, but you didn't get it?
Yeah, you didn't think about it hard enough.
Did you want your parent to survive cancer, but they didn't?
Well, that's your fault and their fault for getting cancer to begin with because they weren't thinking healthy thoughts long enough or hard enough.
And it's a natural extension of this kind of belief.
And I have to tell you, I unfortunately have had cause to be in an oncology center due to a relative of mine recently.
And they have some inspirational quotes with people, like former patients of theirs, posted on the wall.
And one of them is the guy who said, We just gathered together and held our hands and prayed.
That's not really what I want at an oncologist's office.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I understand they're, you know, they cater to a number of different people.
Um, and this isn't a, you know, religious hospital, which many are.
But, you know, I'm sure they cater to many religious people too.
But I don't want that.
That is not inspiring to me when it comes to the idea that this doctor is going to try to solve the problem.
And because that's really little different than the secret, you know, the affirmations or manifestation is your brain can do it, as opposed to this, which is, you know, you pray for someone else to do it.
I think it's there's another piece of this that's like an illusion inside a human brain of some version of telekinesis, right?
That some people are able to, and I've even able, you know, admittedly, I've even been able to trick myself into thinking this at different times myself, where I've thought about a certain outcome occurring and then it occurs.
And I've tricked myself into believing for a few moments at least that it occurred because I thought about it hard enough.
You know, the Vancouver Canucks, they won their series.
That's my favorite hockey team, by the way.
It's an albatross I have to wear.
But when they were doing well in the playoffs and they scored the right goal at the right time, and I was watching and I was paying close attention and I was really, really rooting for them.
And then it happened.
It was a thing where I was able to say, you know, like, would they have been able to do it if I hadn't thought, hadn't been watching and thinking about it?
And of course, the same outcome would have occurred.
The butterfly that flaps its wings in Brazil and eventually a tornado or a hurricane happens in Florida, you know, there was a bunch of time that had to happen.
The tornado that's happening tomorrow in Florida isn't happening by the butterfly flapping its wings today.
The butterfly had to flap its wings a long time ago.
And then a whole bunch of other coincidences that weren't controlled by the butterfly might have occurred that helped with, you know, it wasn't only the butterfly, there was other things also involved.
It's possible that some decision I make in the universe might in some way inadvertently help the Vancouver Canucks win a playoff game.
But the six degrees of separation between me and that are completely unknown to me.
And there's no way I could possibly predict all the things I would have to do to make that occur.
It's just, it's far too complicated.
We haven't made computers strong enough to do all those, to know all the factors and do all the predictive algorithms to make that happen.
The best we can do is some version of close in, you know, training, which means that only the people that are very close to the players could maybe do this.
And they have to insist that they show up to practice and they, you know, practice in a certain way and the coach has the right plan and all those things.
Those people are close enough that they could influence the result reliably.
I'm too far away to do that.
But when I watch the game, it's still possible sometimes for me to get so involved.
And I really want it to happen so badly that when it does, I feel such elation that for a few brief moments, I go, wow, I was part of that.
But that's just endorphins in my head.
That's congratulating me on the thing I did.
You know what I mean?
That's not a real thing.
Yeah, I mean, we're pattern-seeking animals, you know, and even I have, you know, done that.
And I'm one of the most skeptical people you'll meet when it comes to that sort of thing.
But yes, I find myself thinking about something, and then something may happen.
And you're like, oh, did I cause that?
You know, did, you know, did I make that happen?
No, no, I didn't, you know.
But there are people who believe, and it's been going on for a long time.
So to take you back a few decades here, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.
Okay.
Anyone who knows him beyond just the Dilbert comic strip knows at this point that he's nuts.
There's no other way to put it.
But a few decades ago, you know, people just thought of him as a guy writing a funny comic strip.
Then in 1997, he wrote a book called The Dilbert Future.
And this wasn't a comic collection.
It was a funny and enjoyable book about, you know, just various things.
I barely even remember most of it.
But the last chapter, he wrote his serious musings on the world.
And it was probably the first insight into where he was really breaking from reality.
Five years ago already.
Wow.
Yeah.
And he started with a logical fallacy: basically that if he couldn't understand something, then it's not understandable by anyone and probably not true.
Yeah.
Oh, good.
And then he just went from there.
And so I wrote a review of this for a local newsletter at the time.
I happened to focus on his story about a so-called psychic.
So he went on and on about how there's no way this psychic could have fooled him.
And I found numerous places in there where it would have been really easy for the psychic to have fooled him, intentionally or unintentionally.
And fine.
Well, he also had a bunch of stuff in there about affirmations and his belief in the ability to change reality with your mind by thinking about it.
So even though this was, you know, the early days of the internet, he found my review and he responded to me.
Wow.
And so we published his response in the newsletter, which was both paper and online.
And then I responded back.
So he said that, you know, lots of people have told him affirmations worked for them.
And, you know, so that must mean something.
But then he said it doesn't actually matter if they shape reality.
And the thing is, yeah, it absolutely does matter if they shape reality because that completely alters the nature of reality.
And if it does work, we should really be looking into that.
Yeah.
You know, if you can think hard enough to cure cancer, that's something we should work on.
Seems like an inexpensive way to get a really good outcome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But first, you have to prove that it works.
The other thing is, he contradicted himself both in his response and in the book, because he said in his reply, there's no scientific evidence that affirmations shape reality.
Sure, absolutely agree with that.
But in the book, he said things like, everything that I thought I knew about how the universe was wired was wrong.
Because he used affirmations and got a higher score on his GMAT exam.
And he said, when I think back to my GMAT results, I believe the contents of the envelope were variable until the moment I perceived what was inside.
And then he said, every day it gets harder for me to believe my thoughts are separate from reality.
So even though there's no scientific evidence by his own admission, that didn't stop him from repeatedly telling his reader that he believes affirmations do indeed shape reality.
Like I said, he believed those exam results were variable until he opened that envelope, which is frankly preposterous.
They were entered into a computer.
The computer, someone printed out the results, they put them into the envelope.
They mailed it to him.
His results had to be tabulated along with everyone else's in order to determine what percentile he and everyone else fell into, because the results of those tests are comparative.
And all those things are clearly and obviously true, but he didn't take any of those things into account.
This is the dice in a cup thing, right?
You have five dice in a cup and you turn the cup over on the table.
The result of the role is determined.
You just don't know it yet.
You can't anymore affect anything about the movement of those dice.
All you can do is reveal them.
Right.
Yeah.
And now he went even further than this at times and said that he believed affirmations helped him become a successful cartoonist.
And if memory serves, this is a few years ago.
I believe he also said it helped his comic make it to TV.
Now, the listener will be forgiven if they don't remember that Dilbert was a TV cartoon for a little while because it was a little while.
I actually had the DVDs of the series.
Now, I want to know: did he blame the TV cancellation on him not doing enough affirmations?
Yeah.
Did he blame newspapers recently cutting his strip due to reduced comic space?
Because one of the major distributors cut his strip, among others, because they're reducing the amount of space.
Did he not do enough affirmations?
I mean, in the latter case, no, he blamed them on punishing him for being too, you know, not woke enough.
But, you know, that's that's a whole other story.
But the point is, if everyone could do things just by affirming them enough, we'd have a lot more billionaires, a lot more presidents of the United States, a lot more actor or Oscar-winning actors, and a lot fewer people dying of cancer and other diseases.
Yeah.
The other side of that argument is that, you know, if we, if we didn't have this affirmation leaning on this scale, we would have more people dying of cancer and we wouldn't even have as many of these.
But what you say is absolutely true that we need to understand what it is that affects outcomes of situations.
Like the ability for my favorite hockey team to work together is intrinsically linked to their ability to score goals.
That's clear.
Everyone should be able to understand that.
It has nothing to do with whether I'm watching the game or how hard I believe that they might win or any of those things.
And of course, that makes that's really clear when I talk about a hockey team.
That makes perfect sense.
When we talk about something that's unknown, whether or not you get cancer is in many ways still unknown, what all the factors are.
So, because it's a little unknown, it's behind the curtain, and some people get an easier time believing that they can affect that outcome because how the machine works is unknown to them.
And that's a thing that I come back to at different points: is that when how it works is unknown, it's easier to convince yourself that it works in some other way.
Like flat earth, all the flat earthers are either no good at math and geometry or they've forsaken all knowledge about that so that they can continue to believe the thing they want to believe.
And the nature of the thing that they're attempting to manifest here is either already unknown to them behind the curtain, or they've pushed some knowledge particularly behind the curtain on their own.
Those two things, one or the other, must be true about everyone who believes in a flat earth.
You know, I don't even know how you get around that, because if you knew how everything worked, you'd know that it wasn't flat, right?
It's one thing to believe that the experts are telling you that it's a sphere, but it's another thing if you really believed, like if you really knew how all the physical factors and all the geometry worked, you wouldn't need to believe, you would know.
And so, for all these people, it must be that that knowledge is behind some kind of veil for them.
And this is true, this is more true of vaccines because vaccines are many times more complicated than the shape of the earth and the movement of the earth in relation to the sun and all of these things.
It's a lot easier to see the shape of the earth by our own with our own eyes, with things we can view with our own eyes, than it is to see how vaccines work.
And so, already we get this level of complication that allows some of us to cynically dismiss it and say, well, that's, you know, that's just big pharma trying to sell us more vaccines or, you know, even worse, put chips in our brains to somehow, you know, control us or reduce the population somehow or whatever they think is really happening.
And because it's behind that veil, I worry that for some percentage of us, it's always going to be a situation where they cynically just dismiss it as, well, that's that's obvious that that's the Illuminati trying to cinch the noose around our neck, right?
Yeah.
And, you know, where, where do we go with this?
Do we just accept that some portion of us will always be deluded by this?
Or do you think there's something we could maybe do?
Like, not all of us can become biologists who understand how viruses work.
How do we get out of this?
I mean, that's a question that has been asked for many, many years.
I mean, I have spent, I mean, obviously, like I said, I was, you know, writing this review in 1997, and I have been involved one way or another to a greater or lesser extent in this kind of effort since the early 90s, whether it's through local activism or writing articles for bigger publications.
And it is a big question for those groups.
Like, I personally think there are some people who will always remain lost.
But Well, at this point, yeah.
But, you know, then you look at people who were raised in a cult, spent 40 plus years in a cult and somehow got out.
And you wonder, what was the breaking point for them that they finally realized it and got out?
And usually it's something very personal that happens that they suddenly realized it.
And so, you know, it's hard to do that with every single person.
And I do think some are just, I don't want to say they're too far gone, but I really do think some are too far gone.
I think it's a matter of trying to figure out where to expend the efforts best.
And does it make sense to try to convince, you know, the person who is so dug into their beliefs or someone who's more, I don't know, middle of the road, like, well, yeah, I've heard that vaccines could, you know, be bad for you, but I'm not sure what to believe.
Those are the people that you really want to try to help to understand the reality of the situation.
And, you know, I would say the people who are not as dug into their beliefs, you know, to circle back around to that because so much of it is inherent in that.
I remember having a conversation with two creationists in a library.
So it was the same local group that I wrote that newsletter for.
We were having a meeting and these guys were math teachers at the local community college.
And they were also creationists.
And they came and they like to try to pull gotcha moves.
Right.
And they were like, you show me the one piece of evidence that proves evolution.
And I was like, you're in a library.
Yeah.
Go upstairs to the scientific publications rack.
Start going through nature magazine, science magazine.
But they wanted one thing because what do they have?
They have the Bible.
And their belief in the Bible was 100%.
And in the Bible, it said God created the earth.
That was their one thing.
They wanted science to have one thing that rebuts that.
But that's not the way science works.
That's the way belief works.
I think part of this might be wrapped up in a desire to make things simpler.
In philosophy and in logic, we have a thing called Occam's Razor that many people have heard of.
Almost everyone attempts to use it to prove that their side is one of thing.
It's the idea that when you have two explanations for a thing, the less complicated of the two is more likely the answer.
And I think that works well when you look at things like, is that a UFO in the sky or is it just a weather balloon?
Right.
It's more likely that it's a weather balloon because weather balloons exist in many other places and we're not sure that there's UFOs at this time, right?
I mean, that's a much more complicated explanation.
So it's more likely a weather balloon.
But this idea has difficulty with a thing like evolution because evolution is so complicated that the answer that God did it with a wave of his hand is actually much simpler.
Even though you rely on the existence of a God and all of those things.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
Until you ask, where did God come from?
And then, and well, God has always been.
Yeah.
That's still okay.
Right.
Yeah, that's pretty simple, but it doesn't make sense, you know.
Right.
Whereas you need to study biology for actually a fair amount of time before you really get into the nuts and bolts of what's going on with evolution.
And so this tool, Occam's Razor, seemed like at first a good notion.
When we have, I mean, if you asked how your cell phone worked, and I said, okay, I can tell you that this is just a simple device that is imbued with magical powers, or you need to go to electrical engineering for four years before you even have a hope of understanding how it really works.
Occam's Razor sort of breaks down in that situation that it's our everyday devices that we know are complicated and we know aren't powered by magic, they're a lot easier to explain just by invoking magic.
And I think that's what's happening with a lot of conspiracy hypotheses: the world is a complicated place and that it's easier to explain it with something simple that you can just believe in the moment without having to go into all the other stuff to read all of the things that you would have to read in order to know whether the thing you believe is really true or not.
It's a whole lot simpler to just say, well, of course that's true.
And I no longer need evidence to support it.
I can just believe in this thing.
Right.
I can believe that Trump won the election.
I can believe that vaccines are dangerous.
That's a very simple thing for me to believe.
Do you think that there's anything that we can do to make the world less complicated?
Or are we just, as the world complicates, we're going to just be further down this hole?
I don't think you can make the world less complicated because it is complicated.
Life is complicated.
You know, I mean, you talked about the butterfly effect.
I mean, think about this: how the voters in Georgia, how a few voters in Georgia elected their Senate, their senators in 2020, helped determine whether certain people would live or die during COVID.
You know, because if it had been a Republican Senate, things might have happened very differently.
Yeah.
You know, how a few voters in Wisconsin or maybe a couple other states, relatively few.
I mean, obviously it's a few thousand, but how they voted, you know, giving their state to Trump determined the entire makeup or a large chunk of the makeup of the Supreme Court for years and years to come.
I mean, that's complicated.
That is a huge butterfly effect.
Yeah.
And I do think that people find, and I think you hit on this in one of your earlier podcasts.
I think that people find conspiracies in a way to be more comforting because it's not chaos.
It's a group that controls everything.
Now, you may not like that group, but at least there's someone to fight against if you know there's a group.
Yeah.
If it's just chaos, if it's, you know, based on the whim of a few thousand voters in Wisconsin, how do you fight against that?
It's very difficult.
And I may have mentioned this last time I was on.
I suspect I didn't, but I feel like I might have.
I have been involved in a couple of political campaigns, not high up involved, but helping, where, you know, when they say one vote can make all the difference, I've been in a campaign where a school board candidate lost by one vote.
Okay.
I was in it.
Was uh helped out another campaign where it was a tie.
It had to be, it had to go down to essentially a coin flip.
Wow.
Now, the coin flip was a city council one, and the candidate that I supported won that coin flip.
The one where the school board candidate lost, well, she was the deciding.
There were two Republicans and two Democrats on the board.
Because she lost by one vote, the entire board slanted to Republican side instead of Democrat side because of one to two votes.
That's that's chaos.
I mean, however you want to say it, that sort of thing is the butterfly flapping its wings.
The one person who forgot to vote that day or didn't think their vote would matter.
And suddenly the entire school policy for the city is changed.
And it can, you know, move higher up than that.
But to take it back to the conspiracies, you know, the, you know, if you believe that there's one Illuminati who's controlling everything, well, it doesn't really matter because they were going to make it work that way no matter what.
Yeah, it's the ultimate cynical approach.
And it's almost like a form of depression that everything was going to turn out for crap regardless of anything I did because someone else has got a stronger hand on the wheel and they're veering it in the direction they're veering it and there's nothing I can do to stop it.
Right.
And not great.
Yeah.
And if you believe in that conspiracy, it's also completely illogical.
And I think, again, I think you may have mentioned this, like I have discovered that there's this conspiracy and I'm putting out YouTube videos about how they control all the media.
Yeah, but they're not going to shut down this YouTube channel.
It would be actually very easy to shut down.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, we see it now.
I mean, literally, and I don't know when this will go out, but literally, as we're recording this, Elon Musk is saying, free speech, free speech.
Unless you make fun of me, then I'm deleting your account.
You know?
And so it's really easy.
Yeah.
If there were some all-powerful organization, those YouTube accounts would be gone.
But somehow, because, again, of belief, they fit that into their framework that they have discovered the way to get the point across, even though, you know, nobody else has figured it out.
Yeah.
But I did want to, by the way, circle back to one thing about manifesting.
Sure.
Because sometimes people use that in a different way.
Like they will tell themselves, I am going to be a successful whatever.
And they will work at it.
They will remind themselves and they will do it.
And then when they do it, sometimes they talk about, well, I manifested it.
And, you know, it came true.
But you worked at it.
Okay.
About 10 or 12 years ago, I decided after basically about, you know, four decades of being overweight and out of shape, I decided it was time to do something about that.
I didn't just sit down and think about it.
I did something about it.
I changed my eating.
I changed, well, I started exercising quite a bit.
I tracked calories.
I did all the things that you need to do.
I worked at it and I dropped a ton of weight.
Did I manifest it?
Not the same way that we talked about earlier.
You know, I didn't just like think about losing weight.
No, I decided I was going to and I took the necessary steps to.
It's like the affirmations that were done were only meant to change your outlook and your behavior as a person.
And then that behavior on down the chain was then changed such that you made decisions that led to you doing the actions that would lead to you getting the outcome, which is a different thing entirely.
You're right.
It's a different thing entirely than just like hoping for your business to do well.
I'm going to think really hard about my business getting customers and then they'll walk in the door.
I'm going to think really hard about my favorite team winning the playoffs and then they'll do well this year and win the playoffs.
You know, what you're talking about is more like just changing your own behavior, which is really the way that it should work.
If you're going to change, you know, this is to me, this is the Michael Jackson thing.
It's the man in the mirror, right?
You know, you're going to change, you know, comically, I guess, but, you know, what he said was right, that if you want to change things, change yourself.
And that's, that's what people should really do.
If they want to make a change in the world, they should change what they're doing to make things do.
And in some ways, that's what I'm doing with this little podcast I'm doing.
I got tired of having people say things that were demonstrably untrue and having to just kind of accept them.
I'm sort of drawing a line in the sand and saying, you know, across this line, we have to start agreeing at some point.
And, you know, if you're going to be around me now, you're going to have to accept that I'm not going to just swallow untruths and let them go because of social rules about not being rude and whatnot.
And I have to stick with that.
I have to hold myself to that same standard and I have to maintain this thing because, you know, when I say that flat earth is at the top of my list of things to change, but flat earthers aren't really hurting anyone, but anti-vaxxers are.
Right.
The real decision as to what's true there really makes a real difference to millions of lives every year.
Right.
That's the thing that we need to get right more so than flat earth.
Yeah.
I mean, Jenny McCarthy has contributed to the deaths of untold people through her anti-vax campaigns.
And yet she's on a major national television show sitting next to a doctor.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's just stunning to me.
Now, you know, I said I've been, you know, one way or another, you know, fighting this for over 30 years.
And, you know, for me, it started probably in college where I saw the campus preacher and I couldn't believe that people were listening to this guy and, you know, became a regular, I guess, heckler and, you know, pointing out the flaws in the logic in the things he was saying.
And it went from there to, you know, becoming part of and helping to form the group I talked about.
And just, you know, right now, if someone follows me on Twitter, I have a very, as you know, eccentric Twitter account, which, by the way, people can follow at David Bloomberg.
But a lot of people will follow me for takes on reality TV and Survivor because I do a survivor podcast.
But you don't just get reality TV from me.
You get science, you get politics, you get my takes on Elon Musk.
I mean, I know other people who have separated their accounts, and they're like, Well, here is my reality TV account, and here is my other account.
But I don't have the biggest following, certainly.
But I figure that's the way you're going to reach people, not by separating.
But if someone follows me because of Survivor and they learn something about science or medicine, I think that's a bonus.
Yeah.
And if they hate it so much that they can't stand it, well, they can unfollow me.
And, you know, that's obviously one way we found each other.
Yeah.
And others as well.
And that's one thing that bothers me about the Musk takeover of Twitter and the possibility that, you know, of people leaving or it becoming virtually useless is the way it could bring together such different people.
Like, where else would I find out that an ER physician who writes articles about medicine and the importance of science and medicine also watches Survivor and listens occasionally to my podcast?
You know, how else am I?
Where else in the world are you going to accidentally find something like that out?
Yeah.
And so that's why I continue to do that on my Twitter.
And yeah, you get a mix of different topics on my Twitter, but a lot of them are pointing out the flaws in this type of belief.
Yeah.
Personally, my favorite part about your Twitter is what happens every Sunday when you watch football.
Now with college football, too, Saturday and Sunday.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, I would almost like, I wish I had time to watch you were joking the other day about doing it on a Twitch feed.
And I think that that might be worth the price of admission.
You're a lot of people.
You're so animated about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's it.
I, you know, I sometimes wonder, like, am I losing followers because of this?
Oh my gosh.
Like just this past weekend, this prestigious doctor followed me because of some other interaction we had.
And right afterwards was the Bears game.
Yeah.
And, you know, I had all my Bears tweets.
And I'm like, well, he works in Chicago or maybe he'll be okay with it.