RFK Jr. argues environmentalism should reject carbon science in favor of spiritual connections to nature, framing data as "devilish" while dodging climate specifics—like parks for kids over measurable impact. This mirrors America’s anti-science movements, from vaccine denial to well-funded skepticism, where cognitive comfort trumps evidence, akin to fans resisting Moneyball’s cold stats. Science’s perceived soullessness stems from its methodical nature, not lack of meaning; Dave suggests critical thinking over confronting beliefs reshapes reality without alienating. [Automatically generated summary]
If it comes up, if I find a spot to naturally introduce it, I will.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
We'll just do a new intro here.
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that's building language for the disinformation age.
Hopefully I'm able to get that tagline right eventually on the first try.
So back again with my new friend Dave.
These episodes, two of them are going to, I'm going to release them at the same time, but they'll be separate, distinct episodes so that if we ever want to refer to each individual idea, we can just have the one episode that links to it.
But yeah, we were just talking about in the episode that goes along with this about how with especially very complicated concepts, knowing more about them tends to make them less fascinating and knowing something about them, but not everything about them tends to make them more fascinating, more alluring, if you will.
And so we cut that off at that part of the conversation.
We're picking right up here after just a few minutes break.
And we're getting right into this.
So first of all, hello again.
Hey, Spencer, good to be back.
Yeah.
And the title of this episode is probably going to end up being spirituality versus science.
And the reason for that is going to become very clear very, very quickly, I hope.
So I have a thought about spirituality in general, which is that it has a lot of different definitions depending on who is making the definition and what their collection of beliefs is.
And most people aren't like me.
Most people don't try to define all the terms they ever have or come across in life.
A lot of people who use the term spirituality haven't really thought too much about the exact definition, what it might be for them.
And they probably should, because really I think everyone should.
But it occurred to me at some point when I was thinking about it that what some people might think of as a useful definition for spirituality is the collection of ideas that cannot be exactly defined or measured by science.
So in this way, this would include, definitely include things like gods, angels, demons, ghosts.
If you think that trees talk to each other and form a community that is just like the human communities, then that would be part of that too.
I mean, all of those esoteric beliefs that can't be exactly defined, they're all part of spirituality.
And I think that a fair number of people would sort of recognize that definition and maybe even nod along as I say it.
But I think that this leads to a problem.
So I'm going to lead this right into a clip that I have.
This is a clip that I heard from the Conspirituality podcast, a podcast that I listen to a great deal and enjoy a lot.
And it's that, although the clip isn't any of the people from Conspirituality speaking, it's.
They had a clip of RFK Jr.
Speaking to Tucker Carlson.
This happened, this about uh, six or seven months ago I think it was in the summertime when this uh, this occurred and they, they caught the clip and then they did an episode where they, they talked about it.
But so mostly this is just Rfk Jr speaking uh, and he's speaking to to Tucker Carlson, although I can't remember if, if you can hear Tucker in in anything, if he, if he responds at all.
But uh, let's just listen to the clip right now and then we'll uh, we'll talk about how it relates to this concept.
Here, here we go.
The Democrats have become subsumed in this carbon orthodoxy, and you and I have talked about this, that the only issue is carbon, and what that's done is it's forced them to do something that you should never do if you're an environmentalist, which is to commoditize and quantify everything.
So everything is measured by its carbon footprint, how many tons of carbon it produces, and you know, you're basically you're you're putting everything in that kind of box of being able to quantify it and explain its value by you know, by a numerically, and the reason that we protect the environment is just the opposite of that.
reason that we protect the environment is because there's a spiritual connection there's a you know there's a love that we have we you know i got in the environment because i i wanted you know this connection to the fishes and the birds and the wildlife and the whales and um and the purple mountains majesty and that you know i understood that the way you know god talks to human beings through many vectors through each other through organized religion
through the great prophets, through the wise people, the great books of those religions, but nowhere with the kind of detail and texture and grace and joy as through creation.
And when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine, understand who god is and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.
It's not about quantifying stuff.
That's what the devil does.
He quantifies everything right, and that is, you know, what he wants us doing.
Put a number on it.
And the reason we're preserving these things is not, is because we love our children, you know, and it's, it's because we, we get.
Nature enriches us, enriches us economically and spiritually and culturally and historically.
It connects us to those 10 000 generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops and it, you know, and it connects us to the.
The most important spiritual lesson you're getting the point there is that he's talking about, about the way that we are exactly measuring things and and scientifically determining what is changing our climate is the amount of carbon that's available in the atmosphere, and but to actually pay attention to it, to know it exactly, to to count the carbon is, is not the way to do it,
because to him it has something to do with feelings and and unquantifiable stuff uh, and to him I mean in this moment anyway uh, which anyone can tell if he really believes it or not.
I I can't tell, but even if he doesn't believe it, it tells us something about what he thinks is going to sell to his audience, which is still useful is that knowing things to their exact degree is the opposite of what is useful, of what is good, of what is is going to connect you with the spiritual.
And so I mean I already had this, this idea that people had this, this uh um um, way of looking at the science versus the spiritual.
But I once i'd heard this on the conspiratuality podcast, I knew that okay, other people sort of have this idea too although, in this case, Rfk Jr doesn't have this idea and think that it's it's potentially a problem.
He has this idea and think it's the opposite of the problem, that that measuring things and knowing them exactly is the problem.
So we'll start here.
We'll start here Dave, what what's?
What's your thought on this?
Well, my first thought is that this is a classic example of Kennedy trying to sound as religious and meaningful as possible.
Oh sure, which are two things I would never associate with him.
Um, he has never struck me as remotely religious.
He's always struck me as someone who is very good at making the right kind of religious noises, which is true of most politicians, whether American or not, who wish to be seen as religious.
There are, in my experience, very few politicians who are genuinely devoutly religious and actually actively so, and can be said to be sincerely religious.
Um, Kennedy has certainly never struck me as a genuinely religious person.
It's the is.
He's the kind of person who assumes that as a mantle for respectability purposes.
That sounds right.
Yeah, that sounds right to me.
Secondly, I think he is doing his usual lawyer's trick of talking out of both sides of his mouth.
He wants to be able to say things that he can reinterpret to different people, something that he can claim to be that other people are misunderstanding so he can clarify it further down the track, and something that he can also redefine if he needs to further down the track and when he gets to the point about.
It's not about quantifying stuff, that's what the devil does.
That's where he's taking shelter in his appearance of devout Christianity and that is a cunning little piece of sophistry where he says, you know, oh well, it's not really about quantifying the thing various bits and pieces, and and it's not really about how much carbon there is or what we do with it.
It's about preserving things for our children.
Well, what does preserving things for our children involve?
How would we go about doing that?
That's what I think the UM CAN Spirituality podcast attempts to do, unpacking that, that statement.
But Kennedy, I don't think, ever provides a satisfactory answer.
He has a genuine general, vague idea about preserving the environment, but He's not always explicit about how that should be done.
He wants to be able to make a case that is acceptable to his pro-environmentalist audience that he's built up over a number of decades, but also to the more ruthless, you know, laissez-faire capitalist audience that he's been tapping into recently.
So he doesn't want to say anything that upsets either side too much.
He wants to be able to come up with something that can be suitably interpreted by either side in a way that will be satisfying to them.
Yeah, I have a word for a term for that that I use on this podcast.
I call it Schrödinger's meaning.
He wants both meanings at the same time.
What I think he does here a lot, what he does a lot in general, and I see other politicians doing, is that especially the ones that don't want to need to do anything about climate change, they tend to ignore questions about climate change and instead reinterpret it as the environment.
I want to do things about the environment.
I want to stop things from bad things from poisoning the environment so that the soil and the trees and the parks are safe for children and usually bringing in these picturesque ideas of children and families having picnics and everything else.
And that if there's industrial waste or whatever, which is a concern, you shouldn't just let industrial waste destroy waterways and this sort of thing.
But this isn't the same thing as climate.
And what he's doing here when I hear him, he's attempting to ignore the cause and effect relationships that science has determined occur inside our little biodome we have of a planet with the amount of each gas that is part of our atmosphere and the way that we know that when there's more carbon in the atmosphere,
more of the heat from the sun is trapped inside our little very delicate little dome.
But what he's doing here when he does this is, first of all, he is attempting to ignore cause and effect as science has determined it by just moving around it.
You know, he doesn't have any experimentation, obviously, that shows that the experiments that were done that show that carbon will tend to trap heat inside the atmosphere don't do that.
He attempts to just say, oh, that's all that is just something else, some other kind of, you know, that's bad.
That's the devil's work, that the devil counts carbon.
And that's the actual name of the episode of Conspirituality, if anyone wants to listen to that.
RFK Jr. says the devil measures carbon.
I like the way they hit things right on the nose on that podcast.
But this comes back to what we were just talking about in the episode where we were just before, you know, the first part of our conversation about this, where when things are known to us, they're less fascinating.
And when they have these sort of gaps, when even the explanation requires our imagination in order to exist, which is the case for him here, they're more alluring to us, that they engage that part of us.
And I think that what we're getting here when we get this is we're going to have, well, we already probably already have had and continue to have an ongoing battle between spirituality and science.
And we, you and I, I think, if I understand your body of work correctly, look at this as there's no possible way spirituality could defeat science because it's the heavyweight champion undisputed for several hundred years now and it's not stopping.
But I think that there's several parts of the human factors that science is ill-equipped to deal with.
And I think we're starting to see more of this now, that humans are going to make decisions outside of the, you know, the realm of how this works with science.
And they've already started to.
And this is part of this pushback we see against not just individual scientific concepts as we see, but the very idea that science itself has any real answers.
So I'll leave that with you and see how I've done so far on explaining, on explaining this.
When we look at the past couple of decades and the rise of the anti-vax movement, particularly in the US, and I say the US because in Australia, the anti-vax movement is toothless.
It really is.
Anti-vaxes are a tiny, irrelevant voice squealing in the wilderness.
No one cares about them.
And in Australia, both sides of politics, the Conservatives and the left-wingers, the two major parties are united in their support for vaccine mandates and for strong science-based policy.
So we don't have that kind of polarization on that issue that you do in the States, where you can predictably say a red state will have a lower vaccination rate.
It's not like that in Australia.
Plus, in Australia, it's important to add that our states change color more frequently than American states do.
American states stay red or blue for decades.
Australian states, they will flip back and forth.
Just about every state in Australia, every state or territory is a swing state or territory, with the exception of the Australian Capital Territory, which is largely populated by civil servants and therefore tends to stay more left-wing.
So it's a different type of political climate here.
Most anti-vax content for the English-speaking world, most of it, the overwhelming percentage of it comes from America, where the anti-vax movement is extremely well bankrolled, extremely well supported, has a massive megaphone and is able to blast its message out not just all over the country, but all over the internet.
And that leaves people like me and you and the brilliant experts upon which we rely trying to clean up the mist left by these Americans, which is unfortunately quite typical historically.
So that said, I think there's something else going on here.
If I can recall a famous line from a famous TV show, The Exiles.
That line is, I want to believe.
The classic line from um um, what's his name?
From Mulda Fox Muldum.
Yep, I want to believe.
Doesn't matter particularly why he wants to believe, but what's important to in the context of this discussion is that he wants to believe, and the power of the human desire to believe is phenomenal.
Now, in the past couple of decades, we have seen a number of global challenges that you would think would push humans universally towards science, particularly say in the modern developed world, especially in the West, the affluent, science-based, sophisticated, high-tech West.
And for the most part, that has been true.
Climate change has gained, has pushed a lot of people who didn't take it seriously to taking it seriously.
And the pandemic has woken up a lot of people to the need for vaccination and other science-based medical measures.
Not so in America.
In America, there has been a bizarre inversion of that process, a very, very strong pushback.
Why?
Because people want to believe their alternative reality.
They want to believe that science can't do these things, that climate change isn't real, that vaccines are more trouble or danger than they're worth.
And that belief takes care of everything.
It blankets out the awkward problems raised by cognitive dissonance.
It safely insulates uncomfortable ideas and renders them relatively harmless or tucks them in the back of the brain where they can't be found or tripped over by accident.
It does all those things.
And so what we've seen in America during the pandemic and during the increasing urgency of the climate change situation is a very strong desire to deny that evidence and simply believe an alternative reality.
And that, I think, is something that science is not able to address directly because science doesn't have the right tools for that.
This is about worldview.
This is about philosophy.
For a lot of people, it's about theology.
For some people, it's about spirituality.
It's a worldview issue, not an evidence issue for these people.
Now, you might say, well, hang on a second.
Surely our worldviews are shaped by evidence.
And yes, even religion to some extent is shaped by evidence.
People will point to, say, historical artifacts that support the account of the Bible in a particular place.
They'll say, oh, look, this black obelisk was uncovered by archaeologists and it describes the account of the victory of the Sicyrian king over this particular Jewish king or the Hebrew king.
And yes, and that's all historical and very legitimate and everything.
It doesn't necessarily prove all the supernatural elements of the Bible, though it does provide some historical backing for some of those historical claims.
So even religion does have appeals to evidence, but there are certain types of evidence that science provides that religion and spirituality have no interest in because they conflict with that deeply held desire to believe.
And that, I think, is something that cannot be addressed simply by science, because once you've reached that point, you are dealing with people for whom empirical evidence does not work.
What you need to address there, in my view, is epistemology.
How do you know what you know?
Your worldview is shaped by your way of knowing.
Your worldview is shaped by the way you access information, draw information together, interpret information.
That is epistemology and that is philosophy.
And that, I think, is where critical thinking can play a vital role.
Well, that was well said.
And I think that there's something that you say there.
Like, you know, people do want to believe.
But I think that there's something more happening, something else, actually.
I mean, it's not only in situations where you have a political wedge issue, for example, that's a problem where this is happening.
And I'll point out another example that I just thought of a few minutes ago that I think is relevant.
I don't know how much do you watch.
Do you watch baseball very much?
You have baseball very much there?
No?
I do not watch baseball at all.
Baseball is...
That's okay.
Yeah.
For Australians, baseball is a game played by the Japanese and by Americans, and it has no relevance and nobody follows it.
That's okay.
There was a fairly well-publicized movie about baseball.
It was called Moneyball.
And it was cribbed from a true story.
It was how exactly true, but it was more or less, the basic facts were more or less true.
It was about a manager of a baseball team who hired someone, an accountant, to help him trade players and come up with a better way to win baseball games.
Now, baseball is a sport that, I mean, some people love it to death, right?
But some people consider it to be more like a little bit more slow.
Each play is sort of a discrete interplay of at maximum like three players, right?
So, you know, and the bases don't move, you know what I mean?
And home plate's always a home plate.
I mean, nothing else is in a different spot.
And it's always a pitcher and a batter or a batter and a catcher.
And so each individual play for that reason can have a much more reliable set of statistics.
So this is exactly what this accountant did.
He broke down all of the plays in a new variety of statistics.
And he came up with, he compared all of his new statistics against the ability to actually get people across the plate to score a point.
And he found that there were players were being misvalued in a great way.
Some players who should never have been valued very high were being valued high and some who probably should be valued higher were not.
Because almost all of how players were chosen and valued and recruited was based on the experience of other players who came before them who perhaps weren't in the major leagues anymore or didn't quite make it or whatever, were still good players, but maybe didn't quite make it to the major leagues.
And then they became recruiters and scouts and this sort of thing.
And they would just kind of, with their own experience, look at players and get feelings about them, how they did what they did.
And then just say, yeah, this one's good or this one isn't or whatever.
And it just became a mishmash of feelings about people.
And in some cases, collective feelings, because you might get a lot of people who feel strongly about a player.
But in the end, if it doesn't win games, it didn't really matter.
And so this is how this was the crux of not only the movie Moneyball, but the phenomenon in baseball, which became Moneyball, which a lot of people in general tended to not like was this idea of Moneyball because it wasn't very exciting.
When you were choosing players based on these individual new statistics, they weren't very exciting players.
They didn't give you strong feelings that you had a strong team.
And so you got this situation where mathematics and the ability to measure in a different way, and in this case, a more precise way, how everything was happening, it took a lot of the feeling out of this thing that a lot of people were enjoying.
I think they still enjoy baseball, right?
But when it was first happening, they were thinking to themselves, I mean, moneyball was a curse.
Oh, they're just playing moneyball.
That's just, it's a thing that has no soul, right?
And this is a thing that's happening.
It doesn't have the feeling that it had before.
And in this way, I think it was, and I think for some people at least, it still is, squeezing a joyous thing out of a game, to just leave it be, to not let math come in and exactly define all these things, all these very complicated statistics and everything else.
And they've tried Moneyball, the concept of Moneyball, these more complicated statistics in other sports.
I don't think they've worked quite as well because very particularly, I think it works okay in football, but less so in games like hockey and basketball because it's much more difficult to exactly define.
Each play isn't like just between two players or three players, right?
It's a much wider dynamic of all the different things happening in the field.
And your position on that field matters a great deal more in all those other sports than it does in baseball.
So, and because of that, it's much more difficult to do.
They're trying and they're getting to some degree, but it's not changing the game the same way it changed baseball essentially forever because the teams that were doing it were winning and winning not just the race of the pennant, but in some cases, like the Boston Red Sox, they were winning the, what's it called in baseball when you win?
I don't even know.
I'm not a baseball fan, obviously.
I just watched the movie, but I also read about Moneyball because it was interesting to me as a guy who did math.
I guess it's the World Series, right?
You win the World Series, right?
Sorry to any American friends who really like baseball that I didn't remember right away that it was a World Series.
There's no cup at the end.
I don't understand a sport that doesn't have a cup.
But it took some of the soul out of it.
And to me, I understand part of that because as much as I like knowing that mathematics can determine a great deal of things about my world, and I would want it to if it was going to extend my life, which it has already, if it was going to make life more comfortable for me and everyone that I like.
When I do things like play video games, there's some people who have worked out all the numbers for the video games and the exact way you should do each thing to get the exact right, you know, perfect thing.
And I don't want to do that when I play video games.
I just want to just play and let my mind experience it as it is.
And if I'm not doing it the opportune way, well, so what?
I'm not interested in being the number one player in the world or whatever.
So I just enjoy the game on that level.
So on that way, I do understand why they think it's got no soul or less soul anyway when they do that.
But I think there's something to this idea that to some people, when you look at it as this spiritual versus science, they see science as eating and destroying spiritual things when it learns new things.
Like the idea that science could eventually totally understand and explain all the ways that people used to think that ghosts appear probably frightens people that really want to believe that ghosts are real, right?
And right now they have to deal with that.
And that's part of, I think, some part of anyway, this little piece, one part that causes people to want to just reject all of science and just say, ah, science, who needs it?
Like, why?
Why do we need all this science and math and things that make everything exact and precise and soulless?
What do you think of that?
That makes perfect sense to me.
And it's the difference, I think, if I can follow your video game analogy.
Sure.
It's the difference between people who play a game for the story and for the characters, for the narrative, maybe even for the music, the environment, the freedom to explore a world, and the people who play it to speedrun.
Speedrunners are not interested in an environmental experience.
They're interested in challenging themselves to produce the fastest run possible.
And they'll analyze and scrutinize and work out every little second and half second and microsecond down to the nth degree.
And they'll do whatever they can to maximize their speed, minimize their time, profit from any exploits that they can identify, and complete the game as quickly as possible.
That's their sole goal.
But other people would take a leisurely approach to the game.
They'll enjoy it as they feel it was meant to be enjoyed.
And if the world was set up for a certain reason, it's made to make you feel a certain way.
The sounds and the music are there to evoke certain emotions.
Even relatively simple games like or basic puzzle games or even some of the more challenging puzzle games like Bennett Fody's Getting Over It or Jump King, they still have their own little environments.
They have soundtracks.
They have, you know, atmosphere.
And some people are content to take a long, lazy stroll through those games, just working away at their own place while they're chatting to friends.
They might be streaming it online.
And it's a more relaxing experience for them.
And other people just want to speedrun it.
And that I think is a good way of looking at it.
Some people are there for the experience, for the drama, for the excitement.
And some people are there just to crack it.
They're just there to crack it and see how quickly and efficiently they can get through it.
And those two views are simply not compatible.
Yeah.
So yeah, I think that we have a conflict between people that just want to experience things and want to feel things and then a world that increasingly sees profit in not doing it that way.
I mean, I use the word profit just sort of generally.
There is profit in knowing that a certain medication will, you know, applied a certain way will tend to extend lives, right?
But knowing that your liver reacts in a certain way usually doesn't appeal to most people.
Most people don't care about it.
And the idea that you could take a pill every day that will then allow you to live longer.
Some people would like to live longer, but they don't care to have to take the pill every day.
I think that we have, and we're going to see more of, this general conflict.
And I think science is ill-equipped on its own because science isn't a team.
It's not a mob.
It's not a collective.
It's not a group.
It's, you know, as much as people who oppose science try to personify it that way, that it's a team, a collective, a collaborative, it's a cabal, it's a group of people who mean you harm and that sort of thing.
It's just a process.
That's part of what makes it almost worse in that way.
It's not even human.
It's not even personifiable that way.
It's just a way of doing things, right?
So that you can repeat them, so that you can get them again, so that you can keep learning and learning more the next time.
And that almost makes it ickier.
That almost makes it have less soul if it needed a way to have even less soul.
It almost has more soul if it's a collection of people in lab coats with steepled fingers trying to, you know, whatever they think they're doing, depopulate or whatever they think is the current thing that they think scientists are doing.
It almost has more soul if it is that, but it's actually not even that.
It's just a list of instructions, which makes it even more dry, even more soulless.
And I think that we need to consciously identify that and understand that that conflict exists in order to avoid the pitfalls that would come from ignoring it.
Because I think that the anti-science movement is going to gain speed.
It's going to gain strength.
And understanding at least in one more way in which it's getting that strength is going to be the only way to deflate it.
I mean, only knowledge can defeat lack of knowledge, right?
This is one of the reasons that I believe critical thinking is the path to success here.
Because with critical thinking, which is, I suppose, a subset of philosophy or a philosophical tool, it's the neutral zone.
It's not science, but it's not spirituality or religion either.
It's simply talking about ways of knowing.
How do you know the things you know?
How do you determine for yourself what is a verifiable fact or not?
What's your definition of objective reality?
Do you subscribe to the idea that we all have our own subjective reality and that we somehow manage to share those subjective realities with each other occasionally and that's how it all works?
Or do you believe that there is one objective shared experience that we all have, though we may have our different perspectives and interpretations of it?
That, I believe, is the pathway forward.
You're not talking about science, not talking about spirituality, you're not talking about religion, you're not challenging anyone's beliefs or positions on any of those issues.
All you're talking about is how do you interpret the world around you?
How do you arrive at your conclusions?
What is your process for determining what you know and whether or not it is right?
That, I think, is the right way forward because it invites the person to reconsider the tools that they are using to interpret the world and shape their worldview.
And that can lead them to a better way of doing that and can do so without making failure judgments, without appearing to disparage their worldview or their personal beliefs or their commitment to science.
It's simply, I think, a practical, sensible way forward.
Well, I think that was well said.
And I think we're going to end this episode on that note because it was well done.
So where can people find your work, Dave?
Well, they can find me at www.thevaccinationstation.org.
That website has links to my podcast, to other people's podcasts and YouTube channels that I recommend.
It has links to my Facebook page and my Blue Sky account and anything else that you might need to find there.
Great.
And if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they've heard on this podcast, especially if you think we got it wrong in some way and you want to tell us about it, I definitely want to hear that.
I love being told that I'm wrong.
It sounds like I don't, but I really do.
Send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.