Why is there something rather than nothing in the universe? Joe Rogan and Michael Shermer try to figure it out. They talk about it in the latest issue of Skeptic Magazine, where they discuss the idea that the universe might not be real at all, but rather, that it's all a ruse designed to keep us awake at night. They also talk about astrology, and whether or not the universe exists at all. And, of course, they answer the question, "Is there a purpose to life?" or is there no purpose at all? This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Additional music was made by Mark Phillips, and additional engineering and mixing by Bobby Lord. The show was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll, and Matthew Boll. Special thanks to our sponsor, Ajinx.co.nz. We are a proud supporter of the show, A Good Omens. and the Skeptic Podcast. A very special thank you to our patron, Alyssa Milano for making great sound quality and editing, and for supporting the show with amazing sound design and production. A very much appreciated. Thank you to A Good Ol for the use of our logo and logo by our logo design, and thanks to A. Gooding. for all the work done by our good friend, and our thanks to my good friend . , and to our supporter, , for all of our supporters, and to all of you, the listeners, for the support and support, and all of the support we get back from our supporters. , thanks to you, and thank you for your support, for making this podcasting efforts, and we really appreciate it, and your support and all the support, we really do appreciate it. thank you, thank you so much, and appreciate you all of your support. -A Good Ol Ol' Day? - Thank you, Thank you for listening, and keep on coming back, good day, and good night, and God bless you, good night. -- Thank you. Michael, Joe, and Good Night, Good Blessings, and Thank You, bye, bye. XOXO - Joe, Kristy, Thank You.
00:00:47.000Yeah, well, I think our limited understanding of what they're talking about, when I see those guys writing down on legal papers with all that scritchity-scratchity, crazy-looking, fake alien language mathematics, like, thank God you guys are out there.
00:01:03.000Well, I opened Heavens on Earth with, imagine yourself dead.
00:01:07.000You know, most people go, well, you know, I see myself in the casket, and my friends and family are around, and hopefully they're mourning.
00:01:13.000No, you wouldn't see anything, of course.
00:01:36.000I was going through Instagram the other day, and there was this one person who was talking about the purpose of life and when you die, what's going to happen.
00:01:47.000And I immediately just started laughing.
00:03:06.000Well, because the, well, it's called the Barnum Effect, where, you know, P.T. Barnum, you just offer something for everybody.
00:03:12.000So if you make it general enough, you know, I sense you're an intelligent, wise person that people really enjoy your company, and you like going to parties and being with other people, and yet you like the quiet solitude of a walk on the beach, you know, and people going, yep, that is so me!
00:03:28.000Well, I've pretty much described every scenario you can have.
00:03:54.000Well, so part of the problem is the astrologers and psychics are themselves remembering their hits and forgetting their misses, the confirmation body.
00:04:01.000So I knew a psychic or a magician who was working the Psychic Friends Network back in the 90s when it's hard to make a living as a magician doing kids' parties.
00:04:13.000They all want to have their own Vegas show, but only a few people get that.
00:04:15.000So you got to do something on the side.
00:04:17.000So this guy was doing Psychic Friends Network.
00:04:56.000So one of the problems that Psychic Friends Networks had was people were not paying their phone bills because they, you know, come back an $800 phone bill or whatever, so they would just not pay it.
00:05:04.000So the phone companies cracked down on the Psychic Friends Network company going, hey, this is getting out of hand.
00:05:39.000Shouldn't you have to, like, if you want to be a doctor, you have to go and you got to, you know, go to medical school, you got to get a degree?
00:05:45.000There's an interesting history there because in New York City, for example, it was difficult to outlaw, like, the three-card Monty guys on the sidewalk with the cardboard because it's just kind of a game.
00:05:56.000Now, it would be illegal to sell fraudulent stocks or something like that.
00:06:00.000Or sell a product that's advertised as a health product when it's not.
00:06:05.000But if, say, in that case, it's under food rather than drugs or, say, no health products like vitamins are under different standards than, say, medical drugs.
00:06:16.000A psychic is more like an entertainer.
00:06:19.000So this is for entertainment purposes only, so we can do whatever we want, as opposed to a medical doctor that's dispensing advice.
00:06:58.000Like, when they're looking at you from behind, is that horseshit?
00:07:00.000Well, it's not been consistently replicated.
00:07:05.000So is it possible that some people with a certain sensitivity can detect?
00:07:10.000Well, okay, so one explanation, the skeptic's explanation, is that if I'm in, say, a Starbucks or something, and I kind of have a sense that people are talking about me, maybe looking at me, and...
00:07:19.000And I look, and that catches somebody's eye, and they turn to me, and I think, oh, that person's looking at me.
00:07:25.000Or vice versa, I'm looking at them, and then they sense something or whatever.
00:07:29.000So there could be some element of chance to that.
00:07:31.000Now, the guy that does this, Rupert Sheldrake, you know, he believes that it's actually some kind of, like, psychic power through the medium.
00:07:40.000Like, when I'm looking at you, something's coming out of my eyes and tickling your neck, so to speak.
00:08:43.000So saying psychic ability, like maybe you have the ability to see if someone's looking at you, but you don't have the ability to pick the lottery.
00:09:02.000If somebody says, look, I'm just giving relationship advice, why is that illegal?
00:09:05.000If I say, like, the Tony Robbins Netflix documentary, I'm not your guru, which is basically I am your guru, He has that moment in this huge auditorium.
00:09:14.000There's like 3,000 people there, and he gets this woman up on stage, and she's got relationship problems.
00:11:37.000All of that, any of these self-help books, Jocko's books or Amy Alcon, there's a lot of stuff that's very similar to what Tony Robbins' issues.
00:11:48.000Set goals and And be motivated and think positive.
00:11:51.000Maybe err a little bit on the side of over-optimism so you can push through the failures.
00:11:55.000But don't be blind because maybe it's certain times to cut and run and change course in your life, something like that.
00:12:01.000The hard part is studying that, which, you know, experimentally, which are the best techniques versus others.
00:12:08.000And there was a guy who wrote a book called SHAM, S-H-A-M, Self-Help Actualization Movement, and he was the head book guy for Rodeo Press that publishes these self-help books.
00:12:19.000And so his takeaway in this book was that the number one predictor of people who will buy self-help books are people who already bought self-help books, and they continue buying them.
00:13:48.000Well, I think you could physically keep up that enthusiasm that Anthony Robbins provides, but you have to be...
00:13:54.000Either you have to have some sort of an office environment that is incredibly enthusiastic to the point where you guys have engineered this environment where everybody's pumped up.
00:14:07.000I mean, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for the individual to be themselves.
00:14:10.000I feel like that would be terrible to work in a place like that where everywhere you go there's motivational sayings and people are, you know, chanting things in the hallway and everybody's just got to Energy at 10!
00:15:41.000So those little things apparently do matter.
00:15:43.000There's a theory of crime called the broken windows theory that is favored by criminologists to explain the decline, the crime decline in the 90s.
00:16:01.000They started You know, boarding up windows so there's no broken windows or replacing the windows.
00:16:06.000The theory is that if there's a signal in society that no one's paying attention, there is no law and order here, there are no rules or norms, do whatever the fuck you want.
00:16:17.000If you send the signal through little things like, we're not going to allow graffiti on this wall anymore, and no more turnstile jumpers in the subways, and so on.
00:16:26.000So when that happened, then there was a trickle-down effect, and then crime declined.
00:16:30.000So that's the most popular theory for that, and I think there's something to that.
00:16:35.000And what they did with New York City is really kind of fantastic.
00:16:38.000If you go back to when I was a kid and I traveled to New York City the first time and I saw Times Square, I guess I was probably like 18 or 19. I was like, look at this fucking crazy place.
00:16:50.000And, you know, you see it in movies and it's just always this horrific scene.
00:16:55.000It's always peep shows and hookers and pimps and thugs and drug dealers.
00:17:01.000And you go there now and it's like a mall threw up.
00:17:04.000You know, it's like a giant neon Mall of America, like Times Square.
00:17:10.000If you took a person, if you grabbed a guy from like 1988 and you put him in a time machine and said, hey man, I'm going to bring you 30 years in the future and you're going to see New York City the way it looks then.
00:17:22.000Like, oh my God, it's going to be like Blade Runner.
00:17:25.000People are going to be shooting people and selling body parts and No, you get there and it's like Guy Fieri's restaurant and huge, gigantic LCD screens.
00:17:34.000And there's some people that would long for the old days, the dirty seediness that Lenny Bruce talked about, you know, when he lived there.
00:18:24.000The word was, according to my friend Bob Fisher, who owns the Ice House, he said that what it was was in the early days of Hollywood, the producers would all buy homes in Pasadena.
00:18:36.000They have these beautiful old estates in Pasadena.
00:19:41.000But you've got to think that if there's anything that has changed malls more than anything, it's got to be the ability to just shop online on your phone.
00:20:56.000They're just not the richest people in the world now.
00:20:58.000But after all these bookstores went out of business, there's some irony that Amazon now wants to start opening physical brick-and-mortar stores.
00:22:03.000Well, they probably have cameras everywhere, too.
00:22:05.000But the online purchasing, that must be putting the most...
00:22:12.000As far as like the most impact on stores, brick and mortar stores, it's like the ability to purchase online has got to be devastating for them, right?
00:22:19.000And up in Santa Barbara where I live now, just riding up State Street this morning at the end of the ride, you know, it's like maybe a quarter of the stores are closed, out of business.
00:23:32.000Yeah, but I think that human beings When they're living in these gigantic communities, whether it's Los Angeles or New York or something like that, there's just a certain amount of...
00:24:11.000But it's not 6 million or 10 million, which is just like L.A. It's just too many.
00:24:16.000Have you ever seen that study that they did where they set up a camera on one end of the street and a camera on the other end of the street and they timed people walking through and in the footage of those people walking through they were able to determine by how fast these people walked They got an average,
00:24:35.000which was really accurate, of how many people lived in the city.
00:24:42.000Yeah, there's that book, that physicist, West, Jeff, G-E-O-F-F, West, I think is his name, wrote that book.
00:24:49.000The bigger the city, the more efficient and faster things become.
00:24:52.000Yeah, including dialogue, the way people communicate.
00:24:55.000They talk a little faster, they walk a little faster.
00:24:58.000And he had a formula showing how many restaurants per 100,000 or gas stations per 100,000 you'll get as you scale up.
00:25:05.000You don't need as many restaurants and gas stations as populations increase because there's more efficiency in the flow of traffic and people throughout the city, whereas smaller towns are less efficient.
00:25:45.000You know, when I lived in Boulder for a short amount of time, one of the things, you know, Boulder's small as well, I think it's 100,000 people.
00:25:52.000When I came back here, the first thing I realized is how fast everyone's driving.
00:25:56.000Everyone's just cutting everybody off and zooming ahead, and people are really in a rush everywhere they go.
00:26:02.000And that has to be, in some way, shape, or form, it has to be influenced by all the other people around them and their energy, right?
00:27:49.000I mean, but there's a difference between West Coast-type culture, or large groups, rather, and East Coast large groups.
00:27:58.000Do you think that's influenced by weather?
00:27:59.000It's one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot.
00:28:01.000The aggression of East Coasters is very different than the aggression of West Coasters, and I always wonder, it's like, how much of that is because they have to deal with shit weather for five months out of the year?
00:29:18.000You know, they're still paying Israel reparations for that.
00:29:21.000There are these little stumbling stones that are these sort of brass square cubes all over Germany of the name and year that the person was murdered.
00:30:21.000So it's the person's name, and they're in front of the house where they used to live, the date that they were departed and the date that they were murdered, and where they were murdered, Auschwitz or Treblinka or Majdanek and so on.
00:30:45.000Really, you can do it through the law from the top down, but really it's more culture from the bottom up.
00:30:51.000You were saying that there's another reason besides the Holocaust that they're sensitive to Scientology?
00:30:58.000Oh, yeah, because in Germany, they have a religious withholding tax.
00:31:03.000So when you get your first job, they do a withholding for your religion, and they give a percentage of your paycheck to your religion, the religion you were born into, baptized, whatever.
00:31:58.000And in this case, it was kind of a funny story, they go, okay, so just to make sure you know, now if you sign this, you can't get married in the Catholic Church, you can't get buried in the Catholic Church, you can't go to the ceremonies and so on, you're done.
00:32:10.000And she goes, yep, that's the way I want it.
00:32:12.000And she went down there with her Four Horsemen t-shirt, said Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens.
00:32:20.000Anyway, so they said, oh, but now, okay, the moment you sign, it starts effective today, but there's a three-month lag for us to not take the money out of your paycheck.
00:32:56.000Well, it is amazing that in this country, I mean, I would like to know what the number is.
00:33:02.000If the churches in this country had to pay taxes, I mean, clearly, especially when you look at the televangelists that are driving Rolls Royces and flying around in private jets, I mean, there's profit.
00:33:13.000There's extreme amount of profit and it's discretionary income.
00:33:16.000They can do whatever they want with it.
00:33:17.000And you're dealing with massive, massive sums of money, and they don't contribute.
00:33:22.000So these people are clearly personally benefiting from the contributions of these people, and then they don't pay taxes on it.
00:33:28.000And in the case of ministers who live in a church-owned home, they don't have to pay property tax.
00:33:34.000So there's a lot of hidden benefits there.
00:34:03.000I mean, it's just the most nonsensical nonsense writing, and yet they don't have to pay taxes because it's considered a legitimate religion.
00:34:11.000Harlan Ellison, the great science fiction writer, died this year.
00:34:14.000He told me the famous story where L. Ron Hubbard allegedly said, you know, I'm going to go start a religion.
00:35:09.000First of all, for the longest time, all we thought of when you thought about Scientology, you thought about positive thinking and John Travolta and Tom Cruise.
00:35:18.000Super positive, you know, and they're getting things done and there's auditing and they're really taking care of their mind and, you know, thinking clearly and eliminating all the negative influences.
00:35:29.000But then once, there's a bunch of factors, I think, but once the internet opened up, We're good to go.
00:36:15.000I'm like, oh, let's get the fuck out of her way.
00:36:17.000You know, it was like that she's just like super...
00:36:21.000Active and just getting things done and just being productive.
00:36:25.000I mean, that's what you thought about when you thought about Scientology.
00:36:28.000But now what you think about it is like nonsense and foolishness.
00:36:32.000And once Going Clear aired and you got to see L. Ron Hubbard and listen to him talk and you see the captain's outfit he had on with the medals that he gave himself.
00:37:18.000Well, back in the 90s when the internet first got cranked up, we were doing articles on Scientology is when some of these ex-members started posting the secret doctrines, the Zenu story and the Going Clear, you know, at level 8 or whatever when you find out the inside story.
00:37:46.000Well, and they somehow got around that.
00:37:48.000I mean, this would be like the Catholic Church not telling you about Jesus and the resurrection until level 8 after you've paid $100,000 or something like that.
00:38:49.000I mean, if you want to talk about guys coming back from the dead after being buried for three days or Adam and Eve being the only two people and they have kids and their kids just start having sex with each other and that makes all the people in the world or Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus walking on water.
00:39:04.000I mean, you're looking at horseshit everywhere.
00:40:09.000Well, see, this guy, Joseph Smith, he found these gold plates in his backyard, and he translated them from ancient hieroglyphics into English, and with these magic stones, and they're going on, and then Jesus came to America, and there was the good Indians and the bad Indians,
00:40:26.000and Julia's like, I just want to tell them, okay, don't start with this story.
00:41:09.000Look, being alive is so titanically bizarre.
00:41:13.000Just being a human being looking through eyeballs at each other across from this wooden table that was cut down from living organisms that turn into hard surfaces and you sand them and saw them and then you put it in a building and it's got electricity's rolling through the walls and if you stuck a fork in there you'd die.
00:41:53.000Whenever you say something that you're not sure of, and you say, this is what's going to happen, but you don't really know, you're a huckster.
00:42:47.000It's like one guy might have write it down a long time ago, but then a bunch of other dudes got together and had to revise it.
00:42:54.000They had like a new draft, and the new draft, they get to decide, people got to decide what goes in and what doesn't go in, and some of the stories are based on accounts from hundreds of years after Jesus' death.
00:44:35.000And, you know, that Theseus' ship, you know, the Greek Minotaur slayer, Theseus, comes back and is a hero, and they preserve his ship in the museum forever.
00:44:46.000But the wood rots, and they replaced the ship, and over the centuries, there's no wood left from the original.
00:46:31.000I think through incremental struggle, whether it's rigorous exercise or learning something.
00:46:37.000I think everything that I do that's difficult makes me just a little bit more aware, a little bit better at other things, just a little bit...
00:46:45.000A little bit better to talk to, a little bit easier to deal with, a little more friendly.
00:46:50.000All those things I think I wouldn't give up for anything.
00:46:54.000I think that's more important than whatever injuries I've got with.
00:46:59.000I wonder how you're going to feel when you're 80. I wonder if you'll feel like that.
00:47:02.000There's got to be a point of diminishing returns.
00:47:05.000I'd rather be stupid in 40 than to be enlightened and can't get out of bed very well.
00:47:10.000My older athletic friends tell me it's about mid-80s when things drop off fairly quickly.
00:47:16.000You know, they can stay pretty fit into their 70s, maybe still racing, bike racing at 80, but 85 or so, things drop off pretty quick.
00:47:24.000That's where you've got to go to hormone replacement therapy.
00:47:28.000Or the ice plunges or the young person's blood or something like that.
00:47:32.000Okay, so I deal with, you know, there's no breakthrough miracles yet.
00:47:36.000But again, I'm not against any of these things happening.
00:47:38.000You know, when someone like Jeff Bezos puts $100 million into an aging company, I hope he's successful.
00:47:45.000Does he have $100 million in an aging company?
00:47:47.000He and Peter Thiel and the Google guys through Calico and a few others have invested many hundreds of millions of dollars into companies like Calico, for example.
00:47:57.000These are companies that are trying to – their big goal is to defeat aging through reengineering cells, okay?
00:48:04.000And the sort of philosophical goal behind it is we have to defeat aging so people can live for centuries or forever.
00:48:12.000To which I say, let's not worry about living 500 years.
00:48:16.000Let's worry about prostate cancer and breast cancer and Alzheimer's and dementia and so on.
00:48:23.000Just the little incremental medical problems that people have.
00:49:15.000So, of course, if you're healthy and happy and you don't want to off yourself or whatever because you're super depressed or something like that, yes, you're just going to want to keep going.
00:49:23.000Nothing wrong with that, if we can do that.
00:49:27.000But what if you die and it's way better?
00:49:32.000You leave your physical body, there's no need for emotions and all of the entanglements of human existence and you go to this beautiful place of bliss and life and love and it's just pure love without a body, unembodied, unhindered.
00:50:44.000The things that we're attracted to, the things that we enjoy, accomplishments and achievements and all these things, they exist only inside of civilization, inside of this realm that we've created.
00:50:54.000The significance of them is entirely based on our own agreements that it's important when you take the king.
00:51:02.000It's important when the ball goes into the net.
00:52:59.000It's just hilarious that someone would be so confident to put that picture online knowing full well that the world is going to see that picture and start writing on it.
00:53:09.000Remember the guy who sold his soul on eBay?
00:54:13.000It's one of the best things ever in terms of, like, there's so many people that are paying attention and so many people that are funny that aren't comedians, per se.
00:54:23.000They just might work in an office somewhere, and they've got a little bit of free time, and they'll make a hilarious meme about something, and then everybody runs with it, and things just get mocked mercilessly.
00:54:31.000Remember the video of the guy, he was having an interview and his kid started walking in behind him and he's trying to talk about foreign relations in Poland or something and the little kid is back here and then somebody, the wife rushes in and so on.
00:54:43.000Anyway, there's a bunch of funny spoof videos on that where some woman is sitting there talking about nuclear strategy or whatever and then the kid comes in and she's ironing the shirt and then she defuses a bomb and then she cleans up the socks or whatever.
00:54:58.000Yeah, it's just we were always – all of our information was distributed to us through these very controlled networks, whether it's CBS or NBC or ABC. And everything was very cut and dry and very professional in the way people talked,
00:55:26.000I Google it, and then I'll go to Twitter.
00:55:28.000And when I go to Twitter, it's all pictures and memes, and it's the dude with the question marks.
00:55:35.000There's so many memes that people will throw up when anything crazy happens in the world.
00:55:40.000It becomes so interesting to hear the news and hear commentary on the news from this just gigantic mass of humans and it's what's most funny or most interesting or most succinct or poignant that rises to the top.
00:56:48.000But taking me out of the equation, like the New York Times did that huge New York Times Sunday Magazine article on Trump's business going all the way back to the 70s.
00:56:58.000They spent like a year working on this, like 10 journalists.
00:57:01.000This would have been a Pulitzer Prize winning piece.
00:57:04.000This would have done in anybody else but Trump, right?
00:57:07.000I mean, they had his old business contracts and lawsuits and all the shady stuff going on.
00:57:13.000And this got huge media attention for about a day and a half.
00:57:17.000And by Sunday morning, by Tuesday, no one's talking about this anymore.
00:57:21.000It's like, these guys spent a year working on this.
00:57:24.000I mean, what did it take to get that lawsuit paperwork from the courthouse?
00:57:28.000And they had hundreds of things like that.
00:57:49.000The big ones are the lawsuits, the businesses, you know, the construction businesses where he didn't pay small companies, you didn't pay them.
00:58:18.000What he represents is the American flag and eagles.
00:58:22.000They have this really juvenile sense, some folks do, of what he is and what he represents.
00:58:30.000Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they have him in this category that he's going to drain the swamp and these liberals are just going to cry and he's going to make America better.
00:58:52.000It's like if you work eight hours a day and you have children and hobbies, how much time are you really paying attention to Trump's ethics?
01:00:09.000Yeah, the only thing we can count on with the media is that there's lots of sources, and you just have to just cross-check as many as you can.
01:00:18.000Well, I wish there was a really, truly objective service.
01:00:22.000Like, it would be wonderful if there was people that were dedicated to no editorial slant whatsoever, just 100% fact, this is how we know the facts, regardless, left, right, no ideological curve to it at all.
01:00:38.000Wouldn't that be – there's got to be a market to that.
01:00:55.000And I think there's a market competition amongst those people to get more hits.
01:00:59.000Like, we're fact-checking more than the other guys are fact-checking.
01:01:02.000Although there is two different – there was aim, accuracy in media, and then there was another one, I forget the name, and one was left-leaning and one was right-leaning.
01:01:12.000It's like, can I have one without a wing?
01:01:17.000It seems like that – I mean, I'm – Reading Jonathan Haidt's book, the two books that I've been reading recently, one of them we discussed on the podcast we did on Monday, but the other one is The Coddling of the American Mind.
01:01:39.000Jonathan's on to something good there with the Heterodox Academy, which I'm a professor at Chapman University, and so I was the first member there.
01:01:47.000And our university is pretty centrist.
01:01:50.000We don't get a lot of these protests and microaggressions and safe space stuff.
01:02:26.000I do think talk radio and television feeds into that, you know, if you just – or now social media in the bubble there.
01:02:35.000But on the other hand, again, the Heterodox Academy has like 2,000 members now, professors that said, yep, I'm going to stand up against this censorship.
01:02:45.000On college campuses, you were talking to Jonathan about Pete Boghossian.
01:04:32.000It's like, I can't tell the difference between the conceptual penis paper, which I know is a hoax because Pete wrote it, and the feminist glaciology paper.
01:04:55.000Fraudulent research, faking data, that he didn't go through the institutional research board, which approves experiments that professors want to run.
01:05:05.000Like, for example, you could not do Milgram shock experiments, where you hook people up and tell them you're going to give electric shocks to somebody.
01:05:47.000Pete was affiliated with it, so they're getting him on that.
01:05:50.000And that he didn't go through the IRB and get approval.
01:05:54.000Well, of course, if you're going to tell people, if you're going to fake something, you can't tell them ahead of time that we're going to fake because it's going to get out and then the gig is up.
01:06:03.000The analogy I made the other day was in 1971, a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan, a clinical psychologist, sent a bunch of his graduate students into mental hospitals all over the country and said, just tell them you're feeling kind of blue and that you kind of hear this inner voice and that you just kind of don't feel right and you need some help.
01:09:08.000And writing things, and then his YouTube videos, they're so insightful and wonderful that people just got drawn to him, and then they go to see him speak live.
01:11:44.000And I'm glad that he's doing a podcast now.
01:11:46.000But when you listen to him talk and you listen to Neil talk, Neil just has this booming presence and this sense of drama and energy and entertainment.
01:12:58.000I mean, you can hone it and refine it, but you can't just sort of naturally be funny and engaging.
01:13:02.000I think it's personality that comes out.
01:13:04.000I think you can certainly improve, but I think you're right.
01:13:07.000I think whatever personality you have, he has that kind of engaging, fun personality, and it translates very well to doing those public speeches.
01:13:18.000Since I was here a year ago, I saw Jordan's event in Thousand Oaks at the Kavli Theater there, 2,000 seats, sold out, standing room only.
01:14:06.000And I think, you know, life is hard enough for most people that they like, back to the self-help thing, it's nice to be reminded, here are a few simple things you could do to get your life in order.
01:14:17.000It's like, yeah, well, yeah, I kind of knew that.
01:14:19.000I'm going to go back out and do that again.
01:14:21.000Well, his principles are very effective, too.
01:14:23.000They're very straightforward, as you said.
01:14:25.000But for the guy like Pete Bogosi, you know, to bring it back to that, what could he do if he does get fired?
01:14:30.000It's going to be very difficult for him to get a job at another university.
01:14:40.000It's not like he's a closeted conservative and they're after him.
01:14:43.000He's definitely more liberal than me, and I could tell even years ago that they're going to go after him, I can tell, mainly because he puts truth and free speech ahead of Political positions.
01:14:57.000He might say, I'm a liberal and these are my political positions, but more important to me is the truth.
01:15:04.000Well, that's not, as Jonathan points out in his book, universities are now at this divide between are we here for social justice or are we here for truth?
01:15:25.000I don't think that's an effective way to pursue social justice.
01:15:28.000If you're ignoring the truth, you undermine your message, because then it's not like it's hidden somewhere.
01:15:34.000It's not like people can't read into it and see exactly what you've said and how you've supported certain causes and denied the reality of others.
01:18:46.000It's fascinating to find out why people are attracted and when you see that there's actual There's actual statistics in terms of what fields men are more attracted to or what fields women are more attracted to.
01:18:58.000Now, on the other hand, if there's a reason why women aren't attracted to those fields because they get harassed when they go into them, well, that should be demonstrated, and that's obviously a bad thing, and that should be addressed.
01:19:58.000The concern that if the science doesn't come out a certain way, then people won't be treated equally is a bad idea because then you're going to force the science to be distorted if it doesn't match your political ideology.
01:20:11.000So whether trans is natural or whatever percentage is or how old you have to be before you get trans surgery and the hormones or whatever, that's a raging debate right now.
01:20:21.000But underlying that debate is, like, we have to make it come out in a way that trans people are treated equally.
01:20:28.000It's like, no, no, they should be treated equally anyway, regardless of what the science says.
01:20:37.000Now, the problem for people like Pete and Brett, like, joining a think tank is almost all these think tanks are politically affiliated left or right.
01:21:06.000Right, but is that the only option today?
01:21:08.000When you see that, I mean, I know he's not Jordan and, you know, there's very few people like Jordan, but Sam Harris is also able to do these speeches.
01:21:43.000But you put a date on the calendar and you tell the world, do they come?
01:21:47.000Do they pay $10 a ticket, $50 a ticket, $100 a ticket?
01:21:50.000Not many people can fill a 3,000-seat auditorium or a 500-seat auditorium.
01:21:55.000One thing he could do is do a lecture series on the grievance studies and have the three of them on stage talk about how silly these things were.
01:22:06.000If they could put that together as a theatrical presentation, it would really be funny because there's some hilarious subjects that they covered.
01:24:15.000He had a talk show back in the 90s I was on when my first book came out, Why People Believe Weird Things, and I talk about conspiracies there.
01:24:21.000So he asked me, well, tell me about conspiracies.
01:24:24.000I said, well, you tell me about conspiracies.
01:24:29.000That is my number one beef with conspiracy theories, is that when you, you know, some of them that are so preposterous, like whether it's Flat Earth or the really dumb ones.
01:24:39.000There's a base on the opposite side of the moon and NASA knows about it.
01:24:42.000Aliens are living in New Mexico, the lizard people.
01:24:45.000The problem with those is they undermine actual conspiracies.
01:24:52.000And they get categorized as conspiracy theories.
01:24:57.000Then when someone says, well, there's a conspiracy about this, well, it's already a tainted idea, because the word conspiracy is connected to nonsense.
01:25:06.000Because there's so many nonsense conspiracy theories, it's hard to recognize, oh, something like Enron, that really did happen.
01:26:16.000So the sort of baloney detection tools are not too finely tuned.
01:26:21.000The problem is that the tendency is to look for some global, simple explanation for complex systems.
01:26:28.000So while we all kind of recognize, yes, we know corporations cheat and stock traders trade with inside information, but that's kind of small and mundane.
01:26:51.000There's these 12 guys in London called the Illuminati, and they're calling the shots, and they're controlling the Bilderbergers, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Illuminati, the CFR, the New World Order.
01:27:28.000And also, he would know because he worked in government, most people are pretty incompetent.
01:27:32.000So the idea that you could orchestrate a thousand people, and each of them is going to go out and do this one thing at 9 o'clock Tuesday, and it's all going to come together just perfect, impossible.
01:27:43.000I mean, they couldn't even break into the Watergate Hotel room to get these papers.
01:27:47.000Well, it's also who is getting into government in the first place.
01:27:50.000Are they the geniuses of the world, the heads of their field, or are they people that just, like, decided to get into a job?
01:27:56.000You know, and this is a good percentage of the people that are involved in government.
01:28:00.000If those people know as well, these unexceptional folks that are just, like, uninspired, and they're also there, like, do they – it's they.
01:28:18.000I mean, this idea that operatives went into the World Trade Center buildings, both of them, two of the most tightly controlled and secure buildings in the world, and under the pretense of working on the elevators, managed to get into and break through the drywall to get into the main beams to wrap them up in explosive devices,
01:29:07.000Well, anytime you have a gigantic catastrophe like that, just a gigantic, horrific event, there's so many emotions, there's so much chaos, there's so much going on that you're going to get a bunch of really wacky eyewitness accounts because people just aren't good at remembering things when they're under extreme duress.
01:29:45.000Right, and everything, once something happens, then you back up and look for all the sort of pregnant moments leading up to it that otherwise would have been unnoticeable.
01:29:55.000With the JFK assassination, there's a famous story about the Umbrella Man.
01:30:03.000And for decades, you can go online, you can see these examples of how the umbrella could have been turned into a rifle, and then he shot like that.
01:30:12.000Anyway, somebody finally tracked this guy down decades later, and he said, I was out there protesting Kennedy.
01:30:17.000The umbrella was a protest, and that stems back to Neville Chamberlain coming back after meeting with Hitler before Hitler annexed – I think it was the Sudetenland – and he came back and said, you know, holding his umbrella, here Hitler signed this paper and promised he wouldn't do anything more bad.
01:30:34.000And so the umbrella became a symbol of sort of caving into evil people or what's the word for it?
01:31:24.000Well, there's never been a controlled demolition that went from the top down either.
01:31:29.000Like the way they did it, the plane slammed in.
01:31:32.000They all go from the bottom up, right?
01:31:33.000The one that looks crazy is Building 7, Tower 7. That one looks crazy.
01:31:38.000It does, but it burned for like eight hours or something.
01:31:43.000That one's just slightly fuzzier, but explosive experts tell me that it's fully explicable by burning all day.
01:31:50.000Well also when you see the images of it collapsing what you don't see is the interior structure had collapsed previously and there's video of that where you watch the interior cave in and that as this fire was burning because apparently there was Obviously I don't know what really what happened,
01:32:06.000but there was diesel tanks apparently in the basement and the diesel fuel had burned incredibly hot and the whole inside of it all the structure had been completely weakened and and then as it collapsed it just all gave out.
01:32:33.000There was some issue with the legal insurance payout to the owner of the World Trade Center buildings, whether this was like one event or two events or one building or two.
01:32:45.000The difference was between like $8 billion and $16 billion payout or something like that.
01:32:51.000How do they get people to get into that new building?
01:34:38.000No theory explains every single thing that's out there that we want to study.
01:34:43.000There's always going to be some, like, quirky thing that the main theory here that explains all these things here doesn't account for that.
01:35:12.000If you have an alternative theory of physics, go to this page.
01:35:15.000So they go there and it has, your theory has to explain all of these things over here that our theory currently explains and your, whatever your said anomaly is.
01:38:40.000I think he's like a cab driver or something now.
01:38:42.000He was involved in the news or local television or something like that, back where he's from.
01:38:49.000Then he released a documentary called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.
01:38:53.000And in his documentary, one of the things he did have is some really interesting footage of the lunar module, where it looks like they're faking a shot of them being really far out, but then when they remove this cover,
01:39:09.000the covers from all the windows that were inside the lunar, not the lunar module, what is the one, the orbiter?
01:39:17.000It really looks like they're in low Earth orbit.
01:39:20.000And this is like the main thing pointing to that they couldn't get out of low Earth orbit.
01:39:26.000Then there was also the fact that they lost all of the telemetry data, which was the binary, you know, the ones and zeros that show the position of the lunar module at every stage.
01:39:38.000There was a bunch of different things.
01:39:39.000The fact that no one wanted, especially Neil Armstrong, he became a recluse, never wanted to talk about it.
01:39:45.000You go and watch the press conference, the press conference, they look very shady, look like they're completely full of shit.
01:39:50.000Yeah, but Buzz Aldrin's not like that.
01:39:53.000He was a drunk for a long time, though.
01:39:54.000He was very depressed and became an alcoholic after the moon landing.
01:39:59.000And the idea is that, in conspiracy circles, if I'm talking as them, the idea is that he got over it after a while and needed to make a living, and now he talks about it constantly.
01:40:50.000So the first one is clearly he's in a studio and they're working on things and just trying to understand how all this stuff works.
01:40:58.000And the second one, they took the exact same photo and just reversed it and blacked out the background.
01:41:03.000But that doesn't mean that they didn't go to the moon.
01:41:06.000That just means that someone got a hold of some photographs and faked it.
01:41:11.000It's way more likely that there was more of that going on than that people didn't actually go to the moon.
01:41:20.000The thing about going to the moon that's really interesting is if they can go again, and they do go again, and they find all that stuff there, You know, then everybody has to just go, oh, yeah, I guess we were wrong.
01:41:49.000But the Russians did that too with Lankahood 1 and 2. I believe they left solar or laser reflectors up there as well with an unmanned mission.
01:41:58.000Japan has video footage as of like last week.
01:42:13.000What's interesting is the images of the dark side of the moon look exactly, even like the landing and the whole setup looks very similar to the Apollo missions.
01:42:22.000So they would have to either be in cahoots or have worked together with NASA. Same sound studio.
01:42:28.000Yeah, to figure, they'd use the old stuff.
01:42:32.000I mean, goddamn, that looks eerily similar to what you saw when the Apollo astronauts were there.
01:42:40.000I think it is entirely possible that some of the practice film footage of them on the surface or doing things turned out to be pushed off as actual footage of moon landings.
01:43:02.000There was no ability to review things and watch them over again.
01:43:06.000They projected something on television one time and that was it.
01:43:10.000So when they released pressed releases and videos, it's entirely possible that some of those videos that got through were actually just tests.
01:43:19.000It's entirely possible that there was, just like the Michael Collins photos, that there was some fuckery going on.
01:43:24.000You're dealing with so many human beings.
01:43:50.000And there's some wonky shit that looks like they fall down and then they get pulled back up by wires when they're on the surface of the moon.
01:44:10.000But I think also, I don't know jack shit about space travel.
01:44:14.000I don't know anything about astrophysics.
01:44:16.000I don't know anything about, like, what it takes to land on the moon and come back and whether or not...
01:44:22.000And most of the people that talk about this don't know.
01:44:24.000You know, the Mythbusters did a nice episode on, you know, did we fake going to the moon, and they showed a bunch of little things.
01:44:30.000For example, on the moon with its gravity, when you go something like that into the dust, you know, the particles come up and they arc back down in a certain way that would be different than if you're on Earth.
01:44:41.000So the gravity is different, causes the dust to settle in a different way.
01:44:44.000There was a bunch of things like that that proved we were there.
01:44:48.000Well, it certainly proved that what took place took place in a vacuum.
01:44:53.000Yeah, and a gravitational pull, the same as the moon.
01:45:02.000Well, yes, in a vacuum, yes, that's right.
01:45:05.000Yeah, but even a feather and a hammer, it depends upon what kind of feather it is.
01:45:12.000But a feather and a hammer, even if you just held them here and dropped them on the ground, they probably would land at a very similar pace.
01:45:19.000There's a spoof video about, that we never went to the moon, but a couple of British comedians.
01:46:24.000And what happened with me is I got way better at spotting bullshit and learning critical thinking skills and then paying attention to all sides.
01:46:37.000With something like that, is if someone could prove, definitively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that not only is it impossible, that no one ever went to the moon, absolutely prove it, that would be giant.
01:46:58.000The other analogy I use, like with the WikiLeaks, is there, of all those tens of, hundreds of thousands of memos and papers and letters and government documents, there's not one mention anywhere of 9-11 as an inside job, you know.
01:47:10.000And we had to allocate these funds to go to this construction company who was then, you know, seen working at the World Trade Center.
01:47:26.000And something like that would be true for the moon landing.
01:47:29.000I mean, all those people that worked on that, not one of them saw anything and wanted to write a book, go on 60 minutes.
01:47:36.000The idea would be that it was compartmentalized and that everyone, like say if you're working on the O-rings, you don't have access to the people that are working on the thrusters.
01:47:43.000If you have access to this, you don't have access to that.
01:47:46.000And that there was only a very small group of people that controlled everything.
01:47:50.000Also, 1969 was a very different environment in terms of what you could get away with and not get away with, what you could say.
01:49:14.000And then if you have really high speed camera, you just see the insect.
01:49:18.000But if you have low speed, standard definition video cameras, it creates this artifact as these things pass by very close to the lens at a high rate of speed, it elongates their video signal and it makes them look like this jellyfish type thing.
01:49:33.000But it's really just a video artifact.
01:49:36.000Yeah, again, it's a good example of anomalies.
01:49:38.000You know, here's this weird video anomaly.
01:49:55.000The other aspect with conspiracy theories is cognitive dissonance.
01:49:59.000That is, we want the size of the event to be matched by a cause that's equally of that size.
01:50:05.000So the analogy I use is, you know, the Holocaust, the worst genocide in human history caused by the Nazis, the worst regime, political regime in human history.
01:50:49.000He has a massive book where he lines up every single one of the arguments by the JFK conspiracy.
01:50:55.000For example, Experisists make a big deal about how Oswald got a job at the Book Depository building, which just happened to be where the parade route was going, so he could have a clear shot.
01:51:07.000So it was Posner that tracked down when the White House determined, even when Kennedy was going to Dallas, let alone what the parade route would be, and Oswald already had the job there.
01:51:31.000Well, that's been settled by the fact that the way it's shown in the videos is that the two seats are like this, and that the bullet has to do this.
01:51:38.000Well, in fact, the seats were like that, and that Connelly was down here in Kennedy.
01:51:42.000Well, you're explaining this in audio form, just when you're saying it's like stadium seating.
01:51:49.000So the bullet actually, when it passes through the neck, Through Kennedy's neck and then hits Connolly's shoulder, it is already moving down.
01:52:32.000Well-versed in firearms and shot animals and hunted.
01:52:38.000Sometimes a bullet goes straight through, and sometimes it hits bones and wacky things happen, things deflect.
01:52:45.000But on the negative side, they always distort.
01:52:48.000Bullets always distort, particularly when they hit bone.
01:52:51.000What bothered me was that they found that bullet in Connelly's gurney, When they brought him to the hospital, they just conveniently found this bullet.
01:53:31.000But one thing I do know a lot about is I know quite a bit about what bullets look like when they hit things.
01:53:38.000I've looked into this pretty extensively and I've talked to a lot of people in law enforcement, military, hunters, and none of them believe that that bullet Hit bones, shattered bones, and came out looking like that.
01:53:50.000Is it possible that that bullet was the only bullet ever in the history of the world that did do that?
01:54:36.000If you don't know who they are, just because you don't know who they are doesn't mean they didn't exist.
01:54:40.000Okay, but why do we need to postulate extra people?
01:54:43.000Because of all the gunshots that happened in a short amount of time.
01:54:46.000The reason why they came up with the theory of the magic bullet in the first place, because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb underneath the overpass.
01:56:29.000There was some grand conspiracy, but I do think it's entirely possible that someone took that posthumously, took that rifle, and wanted to pin it on Lee Harvey Oswald definitively.
01:56:39.000Look, there's people that do things when they know someone's guilty, and they plant evidence.
01:56:43.000Mark Furman did that with O.J. Simpson.
01:56:45.000They found his glove, and they planted evidence.
01:56:48.000And that was one of the reasons why O.J. got off, because there was some sort of conspiring to make it look like he was, you know, the evidence was a clear path.
01:56:56.000They could have just taken that rifle and...
01:56:59.000Look, it could have been that Oswald did it alone.
01:57:59.000I mean, Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy, and that was evident pretty quickly afterwards, and they rounded him up.
01:58:06.000World War I was launched by a conspiracy with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian group called the Black Hand, a group of nationalists.
01:58:14.000Well, we already talked about the Vietnam War, too, the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
01:58:21.000There are conspiracies to assassinate foreign leaders.
01:58:24.000Hitch wrote this book on Kissinger as a war criminal, that all the shenanigans we were doing in South America with dictators there were backing this dictator because he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch versus this guy, and we're going to assassinate Castro,
01:58:39.000all the stuff that came out that Johnson tried to cover up that came out.
01:58:43.000In the Pentagon Papers about Kennedy plotting to have Castro assassinated, that's a kind of conspiracy.
01:58:53.000The question is, did it happen in that particular case or this one or here?
01:58:57.000And the evidence, in my opinion, after reading particularly Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, it's There's a funny internet meme that went around last week of a guy that dies goes to heaven and God says, you've been such a good fellow your whole life.
01:59:12.000I'll grant you one which you can ask me anything.
01:59:15.000He said, all right, who killed Kennedy?
01:59:16.000And God said, it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone using his own Carcano rifle.
01:59:21.000And the guy goes, this goes higher up than I thought.
02:00:32.000Yeah, it kind of comes out the front, and one thing that does happen when people or things get shot is you have nerves, and nerves react, and things do weird results in your body.
02:00:46.000If you get hit by something, it doesn't...
02:00:48.000Well, like the throat one where his hands come up like that.
02:00:52.000Well, he's grabbing his neck, apparently.
02:00:54.000That was the other thing, was there was a difference in the autopsy results from Bethesda, Maryland versus in Dallas, Texas.
02:02:37.000Who's to say that he wasn't with other people and they killed him because this guy was going to go to jail and he was going to start talking?
02:02:43.000When they arrested him, he said, I'm a patsy.
02:03:39.000So all those years later, and then people got a chance to see the footage, and they were like, whoa, this is not how it was described to us at all.
02:03:47.000There's a good NOVA show on ballistics and the head and testing the rifle and could you shoot that many times and that many seconds and so on.
02:04:38.000I was, like, really bummed out when I went on stage.
02:04:40.000And then I realized, like, oh, you can't – like, I didn't know any better.
02:04:44.000I'd only been doing comedy for three years.
02:04:45.000I'm like, oh, you can't go on stage bummed out.
02:04:47.000Like, you've got to get your head together.
02:04:48.000You can't just say the jokes and not have some emotional attachment to them.
02:04:51.000But that book highlights – what it was was Lifton was a bookkeeper or an accountant, I believe.
02:04:58.000And he was hired to do something with the Warren Commission Report.
02:05:03.000And because he found some contradictions, and he went over the entire Warren Commission Report, which is an enormous, enormous publication, and he found all of these problems, all of these problems in the Warren Commission Report, and all these contradictions.
02:05:19.000It was his determination after reading everything and writing his book.
02:05:23.000He thought that the conclusion they made, they made before the fact and that they wrote all this stuff to sort of back up their conclusion that it wasn't based entirely on an objective version of the facts and of the event itself.
02:05:39.000And his take was there was a conspiracy.
02:05:42.000Well, it's launched a mini-industry of books and films.
02:06:34.000Well, this assassination of Franz Ferdinand that triggered the First World War, they messed up.
02:06:41.000I mean, they had like seven of them, and they met in secret, and they got their weapons that morning, and so on, and a couple of them chickened out, somebody else got lost.
02:06:49.000Somebody threw a hand grenade, missed, rolled into the car behind Franz Ferdinand, and they got hurt and went to the hospital, and he's like, oh, fuck this.
02:08:04.000Like, when you're talking about something that goes faster than the speed of sound, a bullet, boom, firing out of a rifle.
02:08:12.000That is going incredibly fast, and to be able to get that reticle exactly on where you think that bullet's going to hit requires a lot of adjustments.
02:08:20.000When you go to the range, they set up a lead sled.
02:08:22.000You put your rifle down on this sled so you're not holding the rifle.
02:08:26.000And by the way, Osball wasn't holding it either.
02:08:51.000If you drop that rifle, that scope gets knocked, the adjustment's out the window.
02:08:55.000So the idea that there's like a perfect chain of command between Lee Harvey Oswald pulling that trigger and that scope never got rattled at all.
02:09:02.000No, but the conspiracy theorists want you to think there's no way he could have made that shot.
02:09:51.000And then you go up to the museum and you're on the sixth floor, the book depository, and you look down and they have an X, the two X's in the street.
02:09:58.000And you think, that's just right there.
02:10:00.000Dude, I could shoot that with an arrow.
02:10:04.000If you give me some time, you give me some time.
02:10:06.000If you put a target right where that thing was, right where that Lincoln was, and you put me in that window, I guarantee you I hit that target with a bow.
02:10:44.000Then the other question I had, when you're coming up Houston Street and going left, I always wondered why he didn't shoot him there when the car's coming right at him.
02:11:03.000So I always wondered why he didn't shoot him when the car was coming right at him, because that would have been a cleaner shot, it seems to me.
02:11:56.000What do you You're always going to get a bunch of really wacky conspiracies whenever anything happens in the news, whatever it is, anything and everything.
02:12:05.000Particularly if it's big and famous, again, back to this cognitive dissonance, like Princess Di, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt.
02:13:05.000They flew in 15 people, including a guy who was a...
02:13:11.000He was a forensics expert, and he was an expert in forensics evidence, and they think that he was there to make sure that there was nothing left behind.
02:14:08.000Well, I have to say on this that Michael Moore's film on 9-11, he made the point, he was the first I'd seen make the point, that the Saudi Arabia family got out of the United States on 9-12 when all flights were canceled.
02:15:19.000There's so much money involved in Saudi Arabia.
02:15:21.000In this article I was writing, I cited the criminologist Manuel Eisner in a study of 1,500 monarchs in 45 monarchies across Europe between AD 600 and 1800. Found that about 15% of them,
02:15:36.000227, were assassinated, corresponding to a homicide rate of about 1,000 per 100,000 ruler years, 10 times the background rate.
02:15:44.000So in other words, assassinations in history are pretty common.
02:15:47.000This is how power often changes hands before liberal democracy spread and after 1970s.
02:15:55.000So we shouldn't be surprised that people believe this kind of stuff because there's some truth to that.
02:16:00.000The Khashoggi thing is unsettling to folks because what he was killed for, they think, well, there's two different versions of it, right?
02:16:08.000He was killed for criticizing the Saudi Arabian government, but there's also that he was criticized because he was aware, or he was killed, rather, because he was aware of some spy software that's being utilized and that if he wrote a story about this spy software being utilized by the Saudi Arabian government that it would be a huge disaster Could be.
02:16:59.000And I think that something like that does go on, maybe not quite so secretly, but just that, you know, you and I don't need to know these things.
02:17:06.000We need to know basis, and the President does.
02:17:32.000What's fascinating to me about Trump is that he doesn't seem to care at all about violating protocol or about releasing information that he probably should.
02:17:44.000I mean, he's already accidentally released top secret information.
02:17:49.000I would just feel like if he knew for sure some stuff, he would be the last guy you would want to trust with that.
02:18:00.000But, you know, this thing about him wanting to pull the troops out of Syria, there's got to be another story behind there.
02:18:06.000Like, you know, Putin maybe said, look, we got to take care of our business here in Syria.
02:18:10.000We're going to take care of Americans over here and you get your Trump Tower in Red Square when I'm gone.
02:18:17.000Whatever, you know, there's some kind of – that kind of stuff is the sort of thing that will come out in a – The equivalent of a WikiLeaks in 20 years will go, oh, like the Gulf of Tonkin.
02:20:00.000It depends on who your group is and do they have power or not.
02:20:04.000So we know from studies that people that are out of power tend to concoct conspiracy theories about those in power.
02:20:12.000And the moment they get in power, they drop the conspiracy theories and the ones that are out.
02:20:16.000So you're going to get more conspiracy theories about Republicans when the Democrats are out of power from left-leaning people and vice versa.
02:20:24.000Blacks are more likely to think that the CIA planted crack cocaine in the inner cities and those sorts of things.
02:20:30.000Conservatives are more likely to fear big government conspiracies.
02:20:34.000Liberals are more likely to fear big corporate conspiracies.
02:20:37.000There may be elements of truth in all of these things, but the ones you latch on to have to do with How much power you perceive the other guy has that you don't have, and therefore they must be doing something to get that that I can't do.
02:21:38.000I mean, who do you call to start a war and cause inflation or whatever?
02:21:42.000More likely, it's like in the Cuban Missile Crisis, where you have jockeying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
02:21:49.000Okay, look, we're going to give you the missiles in Turkey if you take the missiles out of Cuba.
02:21:54.000And it just ends up being some boring little thing that dissolves...
02:21:58.000The tension that could have been World War III. It's like, wow, just this little thing.
02:22:03.000So much of history turns on those little – so in a way, we got lucky there, but not just luck.
02:22:09.000I mean, Kennedy and Khrushchev both wanted to untie the knot.
02:22:14.000Khrushchev sent a memo to Kennedy saying – You have pulled on this rope, and I have pulled on this rope, and I don't know if either of us can untie it, but here's an idea.
02:22:23.000That's when he floated the, you take the missiles out of Turkey.
02:22:26.000And I was just watching this Netflix documentary on this, and there was a thing about Castro sent a memo to Khrushchev saying, light him up!
02:22:35.000You know, comrade, we are ready to die for the cause.
02:22:38.000You can just nuke all of Cuba and nuke America.
02:22:56.000They talked about this in this Netflix.
02:23:00.000This was during the times of Operation Northwood when they were going to blow up a drone jetliner and blame it on the Cubans and arm Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay and use it as a motivation to get us into war.
02:23:14.000Castro was a fascinating case because that guy kept that place 90 miles away from Miami.
02:23:20.000He kept that place running on his own until he died.
02:23:42.000I was just in Moscow a few months ago for a conference, and so I went to visit their World War II museum, what we would call a World War II museum.
02:25:19.000I mean, every country has its perspectives in that regard, which is why it's good to know some history so you know what other people are thinking and what they went through.
02:25:27.000Well, it's again, though, it's very similar to what we were talking about earlier in terms of the distribution of the news.
02:25:33.000It would be very nice if there was one absolute news source you can trust with no slant on it whatsoever.
02:25:39.000When it comes to the distribution of history, it's of course always written in a way that favors the people that are writing it.
02:26:10.000So I'm interviewing or dialoguing with Rachel Kleinfeld.
02:26:14.000She has a new book called A Savage Order.
02:26:17.000And it's about failed states and what happens to them and why corruption spreads so quickly and then how to basically squelch that.
02:26:24.000So like after the Soviet Union fell apart, you know, all these mobs basically took over and it's like the Russian mafia, the Republic of Georgia fell apart fairly quickly.
02:26:34.000And then, you know, so one of the reasons people apparently like Putin is he kind of came in and squelched all that.
02:26:41.000And maybe one of his points of popularity is that at least we have one bad guy who's kind of keeping order instead of all these little mafioso-type gangs.
02:27:28.000Another Netflix series I just binge-watched, Trotsky.
02:27:31.000It's called Trotsky, and this is a Russian-made movie.
02:27:34.000It's a drama and it's really good and it really shows – it's interesting because Trotsky was on the outs all the way until just recently because Stalin had him assassinated and then Stalin had him literally airbrushed out of photographs because for a while it was Lenin,
02:28:08.000No one knows what's really going on here.
02:28:10.000You've been in this business, this debunking conspiracies in the skeptic business for quite a long time.
02:28:15.000Do you feel like there is any improvement in the critical thinking skills of people and their ability to recognize the falsies and the flaws and the way they're approaching these things?
02:28:33.000I like to think we're having an influence.
02:28:36.000There are some studies that show fewer people believe in these pseudosciences and quackery and paranormal, but the declines are not that dramatic over, say, the last few decades.
02:28:48.000There are deprogramming, biased deprogramming studies and programs in which you can teach people about the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and so on.
02:28:58.000The problem with those is they work really well to teach people how to spot the biases in other people.
02:29:37.000If they think that 9-11 was a conspiracy, their identity is somehow inexorably connected to this conspiracy being a fact.
02:29:46.000And then you argue it as if you're arguing your own value.
02:29:50.000It's a really weird thing that happens when people start talking about ideas.
02:29:56.000You very rarely find people that are disconnected from their ideas to the point where you could point out that something's incorrect and they go, oh, thank you, I didn't know that.
02:30:06.000Like, most people aren't that confident.
02:30:09.000Or they just look at it the wrong – it feels like a personal attack on them.
02:30:12.000Also, if it's a belief or claim or theory or whatever affiliated with a political or moral or religious value – The people auto-correct in their brains when they hear global warming, they hear liberalism, communism, anti-capitalism,
02:30:28.000control of the market, big government, and I'm against those things, so that global warming thing has got to be false.
02:30:33.000Yeah, that is one of the weirder aspects of tribal thinking, right?
02:30:37.000Pinker makes the point that Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, was a terrible thing for the environmental movement because it associated global climate change with liberalism, the Democrats, And all that.
02:30:48.000And it's like, okay, I see what's going on.
02:31:46.000You know, Leah Remini doing her show on Scientology.
02:31:49.000Anyone watching that would think, okay, I'm not joining this church.
02:31:53.000And so if you had a thousand of those for bad beliefs, hopefully we'd see that shift.
02:31:58.000I would love it if there was some sort of a secular option, a community-driven, ethics-driven, morality-driven, friendship-driven thing where people could go and instead worship, maybe just appreciate life.
02:32:14.000And sort of confirm some of the best aspects of community and culture and who we are and do it in a place where it makes you really conscious of it.
02:32:24.000So, because I think there's some real benefit to people going to church and everyone in the community dresses up nice and you're sort of agreeing, hey, we're committed to being civil and to being kind and to worshiping.
02:32:38.000And that this belief in a higher power, if...
02:32:43.000It empowers people to think this way, and it gives people a motivation to be kind.
02:32:49.000It would be nice if there was a secular option like that that is decentralized.
02:32:53.000It's not run by one person who winds up banging everybody's wife and taking all the money, because that's what happens, right?
02:34:10.000There's something great about that with church.
02:34:14.000I mean, I was having this conversation with Bill Burr about this recently.
02:34:17.000We were talking about it, and he's like, I don't really want to go to church, but I think there's something to that, to go into a place and putting your faith in all the people around you and the higher values and morals and ethics that you're all agreeing to.
02:35:11.000Now, of course, people like Richard Dawkins will point out, yeah, but can we decouple all the supernatural nonsense from the social community?
02:35:37.000It's now 25% of all Americans, 33% of millennials, those born after 1991. And it looks like probably with iGeners it's going to be closer to 50%, people born after 1995. Now, they're not necessarily atheist, agnostic skeptics, but they don't affiliate with any religion.
02:35:54.000And that's good because in the sense that, you know, it's religious behavior that causes some of these social problems that we are encountering now with Islam, for example.
02:36:06.000You know, so if somebody privately believes in God or whatever and they don't act on it, okay, I guess I don't care in that sense.
02:36:13.000It's the acting on your beliefs that causes the problem.
02:36:15.000Well, when you enforce those beliefs on other people in particular.
02:36:18.000So when it spills over in politics, education, science education in particular.
02:36:22.000Well, that's one of the real problems they're having in Europe when they're dealing with people that are coming over from other countries where they have a different set of values and they're seeing women in skirts and they're calling them whores.
02:36:31.000And it's like, oh, bro, you're in England.
02:37:15.000And so I make the case in one of my Scientific American columns on abortion that You know, if our mutual goal between pro-lifers and pro-choicers is to reduce the amount of abortions, we know the formula.
02:37:29.000Educate women, empower women, birth control, access to birth control, and so on.
02:37:54.000Let's just work to the common goal of reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.
02:37:59.000My favorite one that still exists is abstinence.
02:38:02.000The idea that they're trying to push this on these, essentially, especially when you're talking about really young people that are just getting horny for the first time.
02:38:48.000Not only are they not effective, they're worse, because then people go into a date or something unprepared.
02:38:54.000And then the hormones kick in, and they start going at it, and then they don't have protection.
02:39:00.000Well, there's also the thing where Catholic schools, like when I was a kid, we always knew, and we're talking about in the 80s, everyone knew that girls who went to all-girls Catholic schools were freaks, because they were never around boys,
02:39:17.000because they were all in just a school with girls, and everything is suppression, suppress, suppress, suppress.
02:39:29.000I mean, this is not something that I knew as a comedian or as a person who studies culture.
02:39:33.000This is something I knew as a 14-year-old.
02:39:36.000Everyone knew that girls who went to all-girl Catholic schools were freaks.
02:39:42.000It just has the opposite intended effect.
02:39:44.000There was a study, a British study I found, that found some small, it was like 1.5% or whatever, of 10,000 women who said they got pregnant without having sex.
02:40:26.000Well, it's – the need for belief systems is – it's so – I mean, it helps people to have belief systems if they're positive and they're objective and they're well-reasoned and they're – you know, these are, you know, backed by facts and knowledge.
02:41:22.000You don't have to have the correct philosophical arguments to get there, but, you know, just everybody should be treated equally under the law.
02:41:31.000I mean, if you start off with – Pinker makes this point in Enlightenment Now – if you start off with, Jesus died for our sins, that's the most important value to me, you're not going to get agreement in a room full of, you know, UN diversity.
02:41:44.000You've got to start with something super basic in general.
02:41:53.000You've been in this for a long time, and you've done some really valuable work.
02:41:57.000It's so nice that there's someone like you that really has dedicated their life to really illuminating truth, exposing all the flaws in people's thinking.
02:42:07.000Do you feel like the reception of this is...
02:42:11.000It's easier now, or there's momentum behind this kind of thinking?
02:42:23.000We're a pretty liberal society here, so I'm empathetic to people that write me from Oklahoma or Arkansas, and I'm in this little town, everybody.
02:42:31.000The only question is, which Christian church do you go to?
02:42:34.000You know, the Baptists or the Presbyterians?
02:43:29.000And so across the board, the acceptance now of atheists, humanists, secularists, agnostics, whatever, has become much better.
02:43:37.000In most places, there's still some, of course, Islamic countries where Not only would they burn me and you, they'd burn Catholics because they picked the wrong religion.
02:43:48.000I wonder if there's some improvement there in those countries because of the internet with younger people when they're being exposed to these new ideas.
02:43:56.000The last time I saw a big poll was on how supportive you would be of Sharia law.
02:44:02.000And these were pretty scary, like a third to a half.
02:44:05.000Of Muslims living in Muslim countries said they would support Sharia law.
02:44:09.000And if you look at Sharia law, as you know, it's pretty scary.
02:44:12.000Very anti-democratic, illiberal attitudes about rights and women and things like that.
02:44:19.000So there, I think the prediction would be, yes, millennials and iGeners, when they get into power, then maybe – not just political power, but like controlling talk shows, radio shows, TV shows, scripts, things like that.
02:44:33.000I think most moral change happens in people's minds from inculcating it from culture, pop culture, of just how you talk about other people.
02:44:43.000Dawkins makes this point that you can tell pretty much down to the decade when a book was written by the way they talk about women, like a novel, talk about women or blacks or whatever, going back, say, a century.
02:44:54.000You can say, well, that was 1930s, the way they're talking about Jews, you know?
02:44:58.000And that's the kind of thing that shifts very slowly.
02:45:02.000But from people like you, comedians, you tell certain jokes or you say certain things and it becomes more acceptable.
02:45:08.000Scripts for television shows and films.
02:45:12.000And all of us kind of watch it and absorb it and just think, yeah, you know, we shouldn't be saying those kinds of things about women and Jews and blacks or whatever.
02:45:35.000Well, that's the bottom-up thing that takes the course of decades or maybe a century.
02:45:40.000And it takes generations sometimes because the new young kids have to see the flaws in the way their parents are thinking and have access to this information and form their own opinions on these things, hopefully based on objective reasoning and reality and all the awesome stuff that's available now.
02:45:57.000My stepdad was in the Pacific War, and the way he talked about Japanese, you know, when I was a kid in the 60s, I'm like, whoa.
02:46:06.000And then by the time I became an adult, I'm like, Dad, don't say this stuff.
02:46:36.000Like, it happened faster for women than it did for blacks.
02:46:39.000It happened faster for gays than it did for women.
02:46:42.000Maybe whatever's next, animal rights or something like this will accelerate even more, maybe trans rights or something like that.
02:46:48.000What do you think about the pushback against this idea that we are living in the safest time ever and that there is an absolute trend?
02:46:54.000Like Pinker gets criticized about this, where people say, no, the world is still not safe for these people, for this group, for that group, and for you saying that the world just shows your white privilege and this white male perspective and...
02:47:09.000I'm on board with Steve across the board on these things.
02:47:20.000The question is, is society getting better?
02:47:22.000Of course there's ups and downs, and this group is doing better than that group, and yes, there's still some racial discrimination, and yes, there's still clearly anti-semis, as we've seen recently.
02:47:32.000But across the board, if you take the last 200 years, Which direction are the trend lines going?
02:47:38.000They're all going in the right direction.