In this episode, I sit down with skeptic and author Greg Levene to talk about his new book, "Skeptics: How to Find Something You Like to Do and That You're Good At" and why it's a great book to read. Greg has been a skeptic for a long time and has a lot of experience in the field of science and philosophy. He's also the author of a number of other books and is a regular contributor to Skeptics Magazine and the New York Times. Greg is also the co-author of several other books, including "How to Get Down That Rabbit Hole: A Guide to Finding Your True Calling in Life" and "The Biggest Thing You Can Do That Nobody Knows About." He also is a frequent contributor to Science Magazine and has been featured in the New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times, and is one of the best-selling authors in the world. Greg has a wife, a daughter and a son, and a daughter-in-law, and he is a great father and husband. He is also an avid cyclist and an avid hiker and hiker. He lives in Los Angeles, California. We talk about how he got down that rabbit hole, what it's like to be skeptical, and what it means to be weird, and how it's okay to be odd, and why you should be weird. . I hope you enjoy this episode and that you enjoy it! - Tom and I hope that you can find something to do what you're good at, and that it doesn't have to be like that you like it. Thanks for listening to this episode! - Timestamps: 1: 2:00 - How to find something you like to do 3: What are you good at? 4:30 - How do you know you can do it? 5: What do you like? 6:40 - What is your favorite thing to do? 7: How can you be weird? 8:15 - What makes you feel weird or strange? 9: What kind of oddballs? 10: What s your favorite part of your life? 11: What is weird or weirdest thing you like about your body? 12: How weird is weirdest? 13:00 14:30 15:20 - How weird people can do weird things? 16:40
00:03:37.000What I meant is, though, that it's one of those things where a normal person can do it, but to do it the way a Lance Armstrong can do it or the way a Greg LeMond can do it, you get into that weird area where you're just tweaking every single aspect of your body.
00:03:53.000The way you eat, the way you sleep, what you do, your mental attitude, your motivation.
00:04:03.000It was a 40-hour-a-week, but really more like a 60-hour-a-week job where you're training, but there's a lot of preparation before you go out on a ride, when you come back from a ride, and then you add weights or stretching, yoga, whatever.
00:06:00.000And then you get blood infections, and that's not, that's dangerous.
00:06:03.000Is Hep C the disease that was recently in the news because there was that young guy who owns some pharmaceutical company and they charged a ridiculous amount of money for...
00:07:40.000So, you know, back then, that was the only thing you could do was blood doping.
00:07:45.000When EPO was introduced in the early 90s, that really made a big difference.
00:07:49.000And as you know, Greg first discovered this when his teammates came to him and said, you know, we found out these other guys are doing this stuff.
00:08:51.000Well, and this is why it's still an immoral act, because there are people that don't do it, or they don't want to do it, and we'll never know how they would have done compared to the people that are doping.
00:09:02.000But again, we know that all the other people that were on the podium with Lance for those seven years, they all have been busted for doping, or admitted that they doped.
00:09:13.000So how far down do you go to give the jersey to 127th place guy or something?
00:09:18.000Because we know how so many of them were doing it.
00:09:21.000It's just so fascinating to me from a perspective of these guys are essentially experimenting with their bodies, trying to find the right levels, trying to find out what's the best method to do so.
00:09:32.000And along the entire career that Lance had, you see all these adjustments that these people are making and everyone trying to...
00:09:40.000Well, one of the early books out, before all this came out about Lance, was called Breaking the Chain by Willy Voigt, who was a soigneur, or, you know, one of the people who give massage therapies to, or no, I think it was one of the mechanics, anyway, with the Festina team that got busted in 98. And he said,
00:10:00.000basically, these guys were just experimenting randomly.
00:10:32.000And then by the time they scrambled to catch up...
00:10:34.000Tyler talks about this in his book, you know, after he left the postal team and got his own team.
00:10:40.000And then, of course, Ferrari wasn't available, so he hired this other guy, Fuentes, who screwed up and mixed the bags of blood and gave him the wrong drug.
00:12:00.000And he would have gotten away with it because had he stayed retired.
00:12:04.000But back to where you started, it's, you know, when you're at that level and you push your body every day and you get all the endorphins and the testosterone and the camaraderie with the guys, it's great.
00:12:15.000I still ride four or five days a week with the guys that I used to race with and Friends in the area here and I you know if I missed three or four days a week Traveling I'm just crawling out of my skin.
00:12:25.000I just got to get back on Wow, that's interesting.
00:12:28.000Yeah, and I'm 62 years old so imagine you're Lance and you have you know the highest competitive edge probably you know anybody and And you're a super athlete and super gifted and then you push push push and then you got those seven straight and then you retire and then what golf Yeah.
00:12:45.000And so I completely understand why, you know, so many of these guys come back.
00:12:48.000Remember Brett Favre came back a couple of times?
00:12:51.000And, you know, it's just hard to break that habit.
00:12:55.000Yeah, I see it all the time with fighters, unfortunately, where the consequences are much graver.
00:13:00.000You know, when you're older and your body doesn't respond the same way and you've already taken a lot of damage, but yet you still have this jonesing for the spotlight and you see them come back.
00:13:40.000I mean, he was so beloved when he was doing the Livestrong Foundation and the whole deal of trying to help people with cancer and his own struggle overcoming cancer.
00:15:20.000But then we started in my garage, Skeptic Magazine and the lecture series at Caltech on science and pseudoscience and cults and science and religion and alternative medicine and quackery and all this stuff.
00:15:32.000And I thought that's an interesting niche to have.
00:15:36.000And so that just got bigger and bigger in my first book.
00:15:40.000White People Believe Where Things came out in 97. And about that time, Occidental College was going through a financial crisis, and they were letting go their adjuncts, which at the time I was not on a tenure track.
00:16:06.000It's a little risky, but I had already done the risky thing of just dropping everything and doing the Race Across America stuff, so I thought, okay, I can do it.
00:16:15.000I still teach one class a semester at Chapman, but my main job is writing books and running the society, publishing the magazine, Skeptic, and it's kind of a niche market.
00:16:27.000It's like my column in Scientific American.
00:16:29.000I cover the topics in there that aren't covered in the rest of the magazine.
00:16:33.000You know, like cancer quackery, or like I'm working on one now on Charlie Sheen's quack cancer doctor, his AIDS doctor, I mean.
00:17:24.000But then, much to my amazement, Bill Maher on his show a couple weeks ago had this guy on, this guy from Mexico who has this cure for AIDS. And if you take this, the blood of an arthritic goat,
00:17:40.000so a goat that has arthritis, how this is determined, I'm not sure.
00:17:45.000And so allegedly, Charlie went to Mexico and did the arthritic goat blood treatment, and it cured his AIDS. Well, none of this is true.
00:19:30.000We would take on that and go, okay, here's their ten arguments, the best arguments they have, and then here's the answers of how we know global warming is real.
00:19:49.000Well, it's an important resource because whether it's global warming or 9-11 truth or anything, there's so much confusion out there when it comes to trying to figure out what's real and what's not real.
00:19:59.000Someone sends you a link and you're like, what is this?
00:20:32.000The beauty of that film, made by Robbie Kenner, who's now a friend of mine, was very clever because he tracked down the same scientists who were hired by the tobacco companies.
00:20:43.000Not just the same arguments, you know, planting a seed of doubt, sometimes the same people, you know, paid by these front groups.
00:20:52.000It's so theatrical, the way they present their arguments.
00:20:54.000It's one of the reasons why I've always hated those television shows where you have, you know, a host, and then you have the split window, and one person talking over them on this side, and one person's on the left, one person's on the right, literally and figuratively.
00:21:09.000They're yelling at each other, and you never get anything done.
00:21:33.000It's almost like there's a science czar that calls all the shots, and if we can just find out what's going on there, we're going to blow this whole thing.
00:21:41.000There's 10,000 climate scientists working in all these labs.
00:21:44.000And their findings converge to this same conclusion.
00:21:47.000So for there to be conspiracy, they'd all have to be meeting on the weekends going, okay, I'm going to say that the, you know, the parts per million of this particular gas is this.
00:21:58.000If you want to make a name for yourself and you're a young scientist, you know, just debunking one of these arguments about tree ring data or the ice core data would be huge, and they try.
00:22:11.000It's like the people saying, you know, Einstein was wrong.
00:22:13.000Okay, there's been a hundred years of scientists testing Einstein.
00:22:17.000If he was wrong, we would know by now.
00:22:19.000Oh no, they're all conspiring to cover the truth.
00:22:24.000Isn't there, there's also this appeal or this, for some reason, people are drawn to this idea of being a no-nonsense person.
00:22:34.000The no-nonsense person is like, you believe in Al Gore?
00:22:38.000You believe that if you've seen an inconvenient truth?
00:22:41.000But I find that when I talk to these people that really dismiss global climate change or dismiss a lot of people's concerns about those things, they haven't really researched it that much.
00:23:31.000Okay, well, maybe he lied about this little thing or maybe it was misdirection or bad information, but the idea of orchestrating an entire event like 9-11 and coordinating the flying of the planes into the buildings and, you know, what do they do with the passengers and how do they get the people into the World Trade Center buildings to break open the drywall and plant the explosive devices without anybody noticing how many thousands of people would have to be involved?
00:23:54.000You think the federal government could pull off something like that?
00:25:59.000Not to mention, as G. Gordon Lindy once told me about Watergate, the incompetency problem and the people-can't-keep-their-mouths-shut problem.
00:26:08.000The more people you have involved, the more they're going to screw up or chicken out or change their mind or then tell their friends and lovers and so forth.
00:26:19.000I know the guy that did it, and pretty soon they're on your show telling about what they saw.
00:26:23.000How come no one's come out to say, you know, I was sitting there in my office and I saw these guys breaking through the drywall and putting these things inside the...
00:26:31.000You know, so, I mean, someone like Jesse Ventura thinks, oh, it was all done under the cover of fixing the elevators in the World Trade Center.
00:27:06.000The unfortunate thing about conspiracies is that it's not all cut and dry.
00:27:10.000There was things like Operation Northwoods, where the government really did plan on orchestrating these artificial attacks, arming Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay.
00:27:19.000They were going to blow up a jetliner and blame it on Cuba.
00:28:01.000And then there was a real one that was apparently being planned by Dick Cheney on the way out.
00:28:05.000They were planning on doing something with Iran.
00:28:08.000They were planning on some sort of a false flag.
00:28:10.000But when people look at Operation Northwoods and they look at that where it would have cost American lives, they had a real conspiracy that President Kennedy vetoed that was actually signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
00:28:20.000Well, the Bay of Pigs, that was a conspiracy.
00:29:05.000But the replacement level, there are a number of countries below the replacement level, and we know what the factors are, the things I just said.
00:29:12.000You know, just being a prosperous democracy in which women have the franchise, and they're economically empowered and educated, and they have access to birth control, the family planning happens naturally.
00:29:23.000You don't have to do the China one-child rule.
00:29:27.000So if you're pro-life, so-called pro-life, and you're against abortion, and you want to reduce the amount of abortions, just educate women, give them power, and give them choice and access to birth control, and it happens naturally.
00:29:39.000Yeah, that's a weird statistic, isn't it?
00:29:42.000That the more prosperous cities become, the more the civilization becomes advanced as far as, like, education and technology, you get less birth rate.
00:31:38.000And I forget how many countries, 20-something countries are below 2.1 replacement level.
00:31:42.000But it'll take until about 2050 before we see the topping off of the population growth and then start to go back down.
00:31:49.000It's one reason you almost never see the curves after 2050. Because if you're a pro-environmentalist or pro-anti-population organization, you don't want to show the good news from 2050 to 2100. But the UN, two of the three UN projections, they have like a Conservative,
00:32:04.000middle, and then more radical projections.
00:32:08.000And that by 2100, the modest middle one shows us back down to around probably 6 or 7 billion.
00:32:16.000We'll hit a peak of 9 or 10 billion in 2050, back down to where we are now in 2100. And then by 2200, maybe 1 or 2 billion.
00:33:30.000But then there's also the food distribution conversation, which is a very fascinating one.
00:33:35.000I had these guys on from the documentary Cow Spiracy, which is well intended, but apparently got a bunch of stuff wrong about how many acres it takes to have a cow graze, what are the requirements, and what you can do with veganism.
00:33:52.000Essentially, they were really heavily biased in promoting a vegan lifestyle, which is their choice.
00:35:48.000Let's just, you know, meatless Mondays, just cut it down, you know, and try to, you know, if you shop at Whole Foods, you know, get the Happy Farm meat, you know, that sort of thing.
00:36:00.000Well, obviously, if you can afford Whole Foods.
00:37:17.000There's a bunch of people that argue that it's very difficult to get the same amount of protein, but then there's also people that argue that you really don't need the amount of protein that most people consume anyway.
00:38:43.000I mean, if they do create synthetic meat, will it have the same properties?
00:38:49.000I would imagine you could even build in marbling, just put fat cells in there to make it juicier or something, and maybe that won't be as healthy, but maybe you think, well, I don't care.
00:38:57.000Yeah, but I would be, you know, I mean, there's a difference between the way it tastes, like a marble, like a fat from a grass-fed cow versus a fat from a corn-fed cow versus a fat from a lab-built cow.
00:40:12.000I've been buying Macs for 25 years, since the late 80s, and I pay the same price.
00:40:20.000You've got $2,400, you get pretty much the same, double the computer for the same price every three years.
00:40:26.000And that's what most technologies go through.
00:40:30.000Yeah, well, I think that's one of the cool things about following it.
00:40:33.000One of the things that's so fascinating to me about following technology is like, ooh, Samsung has the new Galaxy S9, and it's waterproof, and you can show the moon.
00:40:42.000These things are so interesting to see where this innovation is going.
00:40:47.000And when the innovation is, you know, when it's just things like, essentially, I've made the argument that if you leave cell phones alone, if everyone that's making cell phones right now said, let's just make the same cell phone forever, we're good.
00:41:33.000There is a lot of nonsense that they do when they update things, but that's also because they're trying to build in new features, and they're planning several steps ahead for the future.
00:41:41.000They want everything to be in the cloud, which is kind of weird.
00:42:48.000Yeah, so this car is actually made out of hemp.
00:42:51.000The fenders, and Lotus did one recently where they had an exposed hood, but what's interesting about this, when you see it, Henry Ford, I don't know if it's this video, but he hit it with a hammer.
00:43:56.000This is the new Lotus that is the entire roof.
00:44:00.000If they show it, let's see if you can find a picture where they show the actual car itself, Jamie.
00:44:04.000But all these panels are made out of hemp, and look how it's insanely light.
00:44:11.000Yeah, but if you show the actual car itself, Jamie, you can see, maybe go to the front, the beginning of the video, you can see the actual hood of the car.
00:46:17.000So when they were making marijuana illegal, they didn't even know that they were making hemp illegal.
00:46:22.000It was very tricky the way they did it.
00:46:24.000They made these articles, they printed all these articles about Mexicans and blacks raping white women because they were high on this new drug.
00:46:32.000That's also what funded Reefer Madness, which I'm sure you've seen.
00:46:35.000See, all those, those are real Yes, absolutely.
00:46:39.000And that's people that had a vested financial interest in making something illegal, a commodity.
00:46:45.000It's so crazy because the fact that marijuana or the cannabis plant is so versatile, it does so many different things, they figured out a way to attack one aspect of it and demonize the entire plant and then eliminate competition.
00:47:17.000So, well, and there's a documentary on about the public transportation system here in LA that was quite extensive in the 30s with the, you know, electric trolleys and all this stuff.
00:47:29.000And they all got ripped out and torn down and the cars were burned and so on just because the automobile industry and the oil industry wanted it.
00:47:37.000You know, it's like LA should be a car.
00:49:34.000I went around and I talked to experts, believers, non-believers, scientists, all these different people about a bunch of different subjects.
00:50:01.000A bunch of people that want to believe.
00:50:04.000They have these ideas in their head and they want to chase these ideas down, whether it's Bigfoot or whether it's UFOs, and they're not being objective even remotely.
00:50:12.000The vast majority of the people that are a part of the movement or the community Yeah.
00:50:17.000They're like researches ghosts or researches Bigfoot or researches nice people.
00:50:22.000But the way they're looking at it is the same.
00:50:26.000It's the same whether it's Bigfoot or chemtrails or UFOs.
00:50:53.000So there's a certain personality that gravitates toward those kinds of beliefs and then buys the whole thing, even when they contradict each other.
00:51:01.000Like people that believe that Princess Di was murdered also are more inclined to say she faked her death and is still alive somewhere.
00:51:13.000But again, there's some cognitive dissonance.
00:51:16.000We want a balance between the size of the event and the size of the cause.
00:51:20.000I think the Holocaust, one of the worst things that's ever happened, worst genocide ever, conducted by one of the worst political regimes in human history.
00:51:31.000But if you have, like, JFK, you know, the leader of the free world, you know, powerful, articulate, handsome, and so on, and he's brought down by who?
00:51:39.000Lee Harvey Oswald, some lone nut, this loser, you know, there's a...
00:51:42.000So you've got to pile on, you know, the mafia and the CIA... Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?
00:54:38.000The person wasn't there to give them their weapon.
00:54:42.000There's like three of them left and then one of them threw the hand grenade and bounced off the car and went under another car and damaged that car but not the Archduke's car.
00:54:53.000And off he went and he gave his speech and then he decided to go back to the hospital to visit the people that were hurt in the trailing car.
00:55:03.000And they took the parade route backwards on the course.
00:55:07.000And there's this guy, Princeps, sitting there on the curb, despondent, like, well, that was a screw-up.
00:55:43.000And obviously, if Oswald had that job, you know, long in advance, it shows before they ever planned that out, it showed that there's a lot of randomness involved.
00:55:52.000Lincoln assassination, that was a conspiracy.
00:55:55.000They were going to assassinate the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of war.
00:56:00.000And they had all the guys going to do this.
00:56:56.000He had said that on his deathbed, he was a CIA spy, and on his deathbed, he obviously convicted Watergate conspirator, and he said that he was involved in the assassination.
00:57:07.000He said that on his deathbed, he talked about how he's an active participator.
00:57:41.000How do they cover the fact that the magic bullet theory was concocted because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb under the overpass?
00:58:10.000The idea that you're going to accurately determine when someone shoots someone and hits bone where that bullet's going to go next is crazy.
00:59:27.000And when a bullet shoots into a pillow or it shoots into anything, you're going to have some distortion because there's just a sheer force and velocity of that bullet.
00:59:36.000But when you shatter bone, they all get bent up and distorted.
00:59:55.000That smacks of conspiracy, that bullet more than anything.
00:59:58.000I'm not saying that I know what happened, but I know that the reason why they came up with the fact that one bullet did the damage, not just in Kennedy, but also in Connolly, was because they had an account for that bullet that hit the underpass.
01:00:10.000It hit the underpass that ricocheted, hit some guy, and that guy went to the hospital.
01:00:14.000They found the bullet hole in the granite of the curb stone, so they had to account for that, and that's why they came up with it.
01:00:21.000Also, Arlen Specter was one of the guys who came up with that theory.
01:00:30.000There's a lot of funkiness, is what I'm saying, and I have been in the past inclined to gravitate towards some pretty ridiculous conspiracies, but that bullet is...
01:00:39.000Anybody that knows anything about hunting or guns or any person that I know that I've talked to, like, is this shot anything?
01:00:50.000One thing to remember is that in all investigations or fields of inquiry, there's always a residue of unexplained anomalies.
01:01:00.000That any physics theory, evolution, whatever, there's always, yeah, but how do you explain this one little weird thing here that doesn't really get accounted for by your explanation over here?
01:01:14.000But if you have an alternative theory, you have to explain all the stuff over here that the mainstream theory explains and the anomalies, if you want to be taken seriously.
01:01:23.000And usually the focus on the anomalies is to the exclusion of all the other stuff that is nicely explained by the mainstream theory.
01:01:30.000So again, Lone Assassin explains a lot, not everything.
01:01:55.000But we also don't know that one bullet did all that damage, and the only reason why we believe that one bullet did all that damage is because that was what was presented, and that they had this one bullet that they said that they found in Connelly's gurney that caused all this damage.
01:02:42.000You're gonna get people that are caught.
01:02:44.000You're gonna get some people that have served maybe in the military and are used to, like, chaotic events that can recall it clearly and soberly.
01:02:52.000You're gonna get a few of those, but good luck sifting through all that shit.
01:02:55.000Eyewitness evidence is, like, that's one of the things that drives me crazy about 9-11.
01:03:00.000When people are really into the 9-11 story, they say, people heard explosions in the buildings.
01:03:04.000This guy said that he saw this and he saw...
01:03:06.000They don't know what the fuck they saw.
01:03:08.000These giant buildings are falling down.
01:03:24.000You know, like, I was worried about wolves, so I thought I saw, for like, I mean, I'm in a legit solid two seconds, I thought this fucking squirrel was a wolf.
01:03:33.000So I don't buy the eyewitness stuff, but I also don't buy these people that are trying to, like, neatly, like, case closed.
01:04:00.000I think what Kennedy was trying to do as far as close the Federal Reserve, he wanted to get rid of the CIA. He wanted to do a lot.
01:04:06.000He was opposed to Secret Service or Secret Societies.
01:04:10.000I mean, that massive speech that he did about secret societies, he was a very fascinating guy in a lot of ways.
01:04:17.000And, you know, flawed in many as well.
01:04:19.000And I'm sure if he was a president today, he would be involved in probably, he would be like one of the most scandalous presidents of all time.
01:05:11.000Yeah, there's too many things going on.
01:05:13.000After the fact, it's so easy to be an armchair quarterback and go, you know, I'll tell you what, they would have known, they should have known.
01:05:19.000Well, after Pearl Harbor, there were conspiracy theories that Roosevelt either knew, either orchestrated or knew it would happen, let it happen, to squelch the American Firsters movement, which was supported by Lindbergh, and he had promised Churchill, you know, support,
01:05:34.000but he could only do so much, the destroyers and all that, you know, we need to have...
01:06:51.000Well, I think you would have to be an expert in code as well.
01:06:54.000You'd have to be an expert to be able to understand what they had intercepted, what codes had intercepted, and what information they actually had back then.
01:07:03.000It's, again, one of those things that, after the fact, it's very easy to draw conclusions saying this had to be a conspiracy.
01:07:09.000I mean, I think even the History Channel had something where they were saying that they knew that the attack was going to happen.
01:07:15.000They had let it happen so that they could get into World War II. Right.
01:07:18.000Well, that was a conspiracy theory at the time, and there was a congressional investigation, so the equivalent of the Warren Report, about that and concluded, no, that there was no conspiracy on the part of the U.S. government or any administration that should be held responsible.
01:07:34.000I mean, a few people I think were fired for not having the planes in the right place or something like that.
01:07:40.000And then the other thing we had, the other psychological effect is that we tend to, when you're on the outside, you tend to see big organizations as more powerful than they really are.
01:07:48.000Big corporations, CEOs, big government agencies, and the administrators that run them.
01:07:53.000From the outside, it looks like I know they have a lot of power and they can do a lot of things.
01:07:58.000But when you get the job, then you find out, oh, there's a lot of things I can't do.
01:08:03.000And here's another one of these conspiracy theories that might be true.
01:08:06.000When you get elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, okay, here's what's actually going on at Gitmo.
01:08:11.000Here's what's actually going on in Iraq.
01:08:13.000No one knows, but you can't pull the troops out.
01:08:28.000But I think when you're dealing with something like these massive global events, after they occur, people are always trying to do some sort of investigative reporting.
01:08:39.000They're trying to go back over the pieces and connect things that make sense.
01:08:42.000And the problem is you get confirmation bias on both sides.
01:08:46.000You get confirmation bias where people are trying to show very clearly that there was no conspiracy whatsoever.
01:08:51.000And then you get people that are trying to see conspiracy in everything.
01:08:54.000And I think with a lot of these stories, a lot of these major events, like whether it's JFK's assassination or many other ones, there's a lot of weirdness to them that make it real hard to wrap up nice and tight.
01:09:06.000And when people can't wrap them up nice and tight, they get very uneasy.
01:09:09.000And it's okay to just say, I don't know, it could be a conspiracy.
01:10:28.000Well, they have these leading questions, and then you give them partial answers, and then they fish for more, and then before you know it, you're filling in the blanks together, and they want to believe, you know?
01:10:39.000And a lot of times, there's some weird social aspect to it, like hand-holding or something like that, which is an intimacy thing where you don't...
01:10:47.000You don't want to be confrontational with this person, and so you sort of kind of help them.
01:10:52.000You're both in each other's space because you're only like two feet away from each other.
01:11:16.000So he told me, you know, he operated from home, and you just have another phone line, and they send you the calls, and you get, I think he got 60 cents on the minute, and the company got, you know, it was $3.95 a minute, and he got 60 cents on the minute, but they rewarded you.
01:11:28.000The longer you keep them on the subjects on the line, the more higher percentage you get of each minute.
01:11:34.000And so he would do this by, you know, working through different categories.
01:11:38.000And mostly people call it night and weekends.
01:11:40.000They're lonely, need somebody to talk to.
01:11:42.000You know, love, health, money, career, especially love, relationships, you know, jobs, your boss.
01:14:51.000But he was really adamant about letting you know, like, these people that are psychics, that are telling you about your future, your past, they're all con people.
01:15:40.000I was on a cruise with him once, one of these cruise ship things with other skeptics.
01:15:45.000So he did some of these mentalism stuff, and he told me how he did one of them.
01:15:49.000He's pretty good about not telling the tricks, but I really pressed him on this particular thing where he would touch somebody on the shoulder here.
01:15:56.000And then you're blindfolded, and then you would say, I felt like you touched me on the left shoulder or the right.
01:16:02.000And he had a whole sequence of these things where the other person was picking up on the cue of where he was being touched.
01:16:24.000And that's really probably the best reason why you don't want to know how the magicians do it, because it's almost always super simple and like, oh, I should have seen that, but you don't.
01:16:35.000Teller really doesn't talk that much, but there was an old show that was on television in Australia or radio.
01:16:42.000I think it was on radio or television.
01:16:44.000I don't remember, but there was this trick that they did and it was The way that Penn, like, goddammit, I'm trying to, I'm struggling to remember how exactly it worked.
01:16:57.000But it was this woman who could, she could tell the future or she could, some sort of psychic ability.
01:17:52.000Because the power of the, you know, the sort of, you know, following his gaze or following the movement of the hand and this and that, it's done so well that you still miss it, even though with the clear plastic.
01:18:03.000So this is a good example where even knowing the trick, you might still be fooled.
01:18:08.000What is it about people that want to fund?
01:18:36.000Well, what it is is just learning and survival.
01:18:39.000So, you know, I call this patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.
01:18:44.000And my thought experiment is imagine you're a hominid on the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago, small brain australopithecine, your name is Lucy.
01:18:53.000Is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind?
01:18:56.000So if you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, that's a type 1 error, false positive.
01:19:02.000You thought A was connected to B, but no harm.
01:19:05.000You just become skittish and cautious or whatever.
01:19:07.000But if you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch.
01:19:14.000You've just been given a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early before reproducing.
01:19:18.000So, in other words, it's better to just assume that all things you think are connected, all rustles in the grass, are dangerous predators and not the wind, just in case.
01:19:29.000There's not a big cost to pay for making a type 1 error, a false positive.
01:19:32.000There's a higher cost for making a type 2 error, a false negative.
01:19:36.000So we assume that this is the basis of superstition and magical thinking.
01:19:39.000We just assume that this is connected to that.
01:19:46.000And this is what Skinner showed back in the 50s, where you just randomly give reinforcements to rats and pigeons.
01:19:51.000And whatever they were doing just before they got rewarded, they'll just repeat that behavior, even if it's like twirling counterclockwise twice.
01:20:10.000So all of us are subject to making those connections.
01:20:14.000Some are more gullible than others, say, or more skeptical.
01:20:17.000But for the most part, all of us can easily be fooled if it's done right.
01:20:22.000That's the beauty of good cons, good scams, is that anybody could fall for them, even smart people.
01:20:28.000And if anything, smart people are more likely to believe weird things in this sense, that once they believe it, they think they've drawn a connection, they're better at rationalizing the reasons why they believe than, say, less educated or less intelligent people.
01:20:41.000And so, as people like Banachek will tell you, there's nothing better than an audience of scientists at MIT. Oh, boy!
01:20:48.000I can really fool them because they think they're so smart.
01:20:52.000Wow, okay, he must be doing something really, really super psychic because, you know, I'm super smart.
01:20:59.000Well, no, because all of our sensory apparatus works the same and magicians know how to manipulate your gaze, your attention, whatever, and how to fool you.
01:21:08.000It's just so weird how people are drawn to trying to uncover mysteries, though.
01:21:13.000You know, whether it's ghosts or whether it's...
01:21:15.000Like, how many goddamn ghost shows do they have to have where no one ever sees a ghost before they stop having ghost shows?
01:21:33.000Okay, astrology as far as, like, you know, hey, you're a Leo, so you're inclined to be a leader, like that kind of bullshit.
01:21:40.000But is there anything to those really complex astrological readings where they look for the time of day you were born and Mercury's and retrograde and all that?
01:21:57.000It's all in the psychology of the reading.
01:21:59.000So if you mix up somebody's reading for, you know, you're a Leo, but, you know, we give you the Virgo reading or whatever for that day, almost everybody will go, yep, boy, that's a perfect— So it's all total hustle.
01:22:22.000I mean, this got played up quite a bit for Ronnie's travel schedule, a little bit.
01:22:27.000I don't think we can say that state decisions were being based on astrological readings.
01:22:32.000And it could have also been like, you know, you always know someone who has a wacky husband or a wacky wife that believes in any shit, and then the person's sort of like, oh dear.
01:23:07.000When I was really young, I got into the Roswell thing.
01:23:13.000And there's a lot of different connections with the Roswell conspiracy about this crashed UFO in New Mexico in 1947 and all the eyewitness reports.
01:23:25.000Boy, you go down the rabbit hole of that thing and you could waste years of your life.
01:23:29.000You know, there was a study done, I think it was a UFO report done in the late 50s, I think it was 59, on the 500 most important UFO cases of the last 20 years.
01:24:38.000Because, of course, it was a high-altitude surveillance balloon listening for the acoustic signatures of a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere by the Soviets.
01:24:48.000So, of course, when this debris came down in the farmer's field there outside of Roswell, Mexico, of course they're not going to come out and hold a press conference and go, well, see, actually what we were doing is launching this project to listen to Soviet...
01:26:22.000If you didn't know, and you had never heard of one of those before, and you looked up in the sky, you'd be sure that that came from another planet.
01:26:28.000I mean, it looks like it's right out of Star Wars.
01:26:30.000In the 1890s, there were UFO sightings in America, and the UFOs looked strangely like blimps.
01:27:48.000The problem also with social media is it becomes clickbait.
01:27:50.000It becomes someone writes a blog, or someone has a thing, and there's a video that's linked to it, and then everybody starts sending that out to their friends, and before you know it, that becomes the narrative, right?
01:28:36.000I've always been so confused as to what it is about...
01:28:41.000I mean, I've known grown adults that have spent years and years of their life...
01:28:47.000I'm fascinated with Bigfoot, fascinated with UFOs, fascinated with these mysteries.
01:28:53.000And when you look at the amount of resources that they actually expend chasing after these things, say, well, if you put that into something positive, something constructive, my God, you would do so well.
01:29:07.000I often see that about certain scammers.
01:29:10.000I'm like, my God, if these people just started a business with the same amount of enthusiasm, how good would they be doing it?
01:30:08.000In the remake with Keanu Reeves, it was global warming.
01:30:11.000And the authorities won't see him, so he mingles among the common people, like Jesus did.
01:30:15.000And then he takes up with the Patricia Neal character, who's the single mom in the town, and then he's killed by the authorities, and he's put in the morgue.
01:30:26.000He's put in this morgue, which is sort of like the tomb.
01:30:29.000And then in the famous scene where Patricia Neal goes to Gort the robot, he's standing there and the visor comes up and he's going to zap her.
01:30:36.000And she gives him the famous message, you know, Gort Klaatu Barada Nikto, which basically says, go get Klaatu.
01:32:25.000I mean, if there are 100 years in advance of us, if we're thinking about colonizing Mars in the next few decades, you get some sort of an advanced civilization that has less conflict than us and more cooperation.
01:32:35.000Because of how long it takes to get from bacterial-grade life to intelligent communicating life.
01:32:44.000So whenever your planet starts, the chances of it going to be in a perfect synchrony of every step along the way from bacterial-grade life to big brains, if anything, it's probably going to be millions of years of difference in time scale.
01:33:30.000Yeah, or they could be on one that has a lot of them, so...
01:33:33.000The answer to the Fermi Paradox, where is everybody, because this should have happened already, is probably the universe is teeming with bacterial-grade life, but the number of steps to get from there all the way to a communicating, technological society is enormous, and so that winnows down the number of possibilities out there.
01:33:51.000You could get all the way to Neanderthals, like here on Earth.
01:33:54.000You know, their big brain, 1500 cc's, about the size of our brain, maybe a little bit larger.
01:33:59.000And, you know, they had fire, they had tools.
01:34:34.000Maybe they didn't have language, or if they did, maybe they didn't have symbolic language.
01:34:41.000We don't know why they went extinct, but when humans, Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe, within a few tens of thousands of years, there was no more Neanderthals.
01:34:51.000And it's a big debate, paleoanthropology circles, why.
01:34:54.000But my point is that you could have three and a half billion years of evolution on a planet and get all the way to Neanderthals who have stone tools, and it just stops.
01:35:03.000For whatever reason, they never develop symbolic communication.
01:35:06.000They have opposable thumbs so they can make stuff, they can make tools, but they never make Take the next step.
01:35:14.000They think that had Homo sapiens not dominated Europe when they came in, Neanderthals might have gotten there within a few centuries more, maybe.
01:35:25.000Well, there's also the thought that even though the universe is infinite, right, that it had some sort of a beginning, whether you buy that or don't buy that.
01:38:34.000But what I was trying to get at, though, is that...
01:38:38.000There's a thing that we do where it's not just...
01:38:41.000I mean, there's the longing for extraterrestrial life, you know, the search for the technological daddy, you know, the advanced alien daddy that's out there that's going to show us the error of our ways.
01:38:53.000But then there's also this weird pull where we want to believe that these intelligent beings from other planets can recognize who our elected leaders are and be in cahoots with them.
01:39:03.000As if they give a shit about Obama or anything...
01:39:07.000I mean, if you descended upon an ant colony, would you have a deal with the queen?
01:39:13.000Like, look, I know you're the one who is in charge of this.
01:39:20.000And since you are so moral and ethical, and you don't lie to your people at all, I'm only going to communicate with you.
01:39:26.000And in exchange for technological secrets, I would like some DNA. It's so preposterous.
01:39:33.000It's such a stupid idea that they would come down and they would talk to the military leaders, especially military leaders from the 1940s, who knew almost nothing about technology.
01:39:44.000Or this idea that at Roswell, we capture one of their spacecraft and back-engineer their technology, and that's where silicon chips and computers came from.
01:39:52.000Do you know about the American Computer Company?
01:39:56.000There was a company called the American Computer Company, and this is like back during the Art Bell days of Coast to Coast with Art Bell, which I loved.
01:40:08.000It was one of the highlights of my life.
01:40:10.000It was recently when he came back on the radio or internet.
01:40:13.000So I was driving home from the comedy store one night and they were talking about this American computer company and there's this guy that ran this American computer company that was...
01:40:25.000And he, apparently, he had this theory and this whole website dedicated, I don't know if it's up anymore, they might have taken it down, but it's dedicated to showing the timeline of the creation of the transistor and all this came out of Bell Labs, which is where they had the Air Force base outside of Bell Labs to protect it from alien invasion.
01:40:49.000And that this is where all of our technology came from.
01:40:51.000So we're supposed to believe that the aliens were only about five to ten years more advanced than us, from vacuum tubes to the silicon transistors.
01:43:15.000They love the investigative journalism aspect of blowing the lid off, this global conspiracy.
01:43:21.000Well, I think that's what drives some of the, you know, kind of anti-medical establishment, anti-big pharma, you know, anti-vaccination.
01:43:28.000You know, those guys, they're behind closed doors, the big powerful people, corporations and government agents, the CDC and this company and the CEO and the politics, you know, they're all and they want to make money.
01:43:39.000And, you know, and first, they think they're more powerful than they really are.
01:43:44.000And second, that's not how the world works.
01:43:46.000I mean, these people are not trying to keep us poisoned or keep us sick so they can make money.
01:43:52.000The real conspiracies are, how come we can't get our drugs cheaper?
01:43:57.000What sort of behind-the-door deals are being done that prevent healthcare from being cheaper?
01:44:05.000I had a conversation with someone who was trying to tell me they already have a cure for cancer.
01:44:08.000They just don't want you to have the cure because then the money's in the treatment.
01:44:13.000I go, why do you think the same person has the cure?
01:44:17.000As the same people that are selling the treatment.
01:44:20.000Do you really think they're the same person?
01:44:21.000Do you know how many people work in the field of creating new medicine?
01:44:26.000I mean, that's so ridiculous that it would be the same thing.
01:44:28.000I mean, and that one person of the tens of thousands of employees at Amgen or wherever is going to leave and go, oh, I found something out, and I'm coming on your show to tell you all.
01:44:38.000Well, it just doesn't make any sense that it would be the same person.
01:44:42.000The odds of it being the same person or the same company, there's so many different people that work in the pharmaceutical industry, so many different people that are trying to do research on new medications, and there's so much money involved in it.
01:44:54.000The idea that this one company would come up with a cure and they would keep it under wraps because they are in cahoots with the other company that's got the treatment.
01:45:03.000And so, I mean, if that's true, then all the people that were sick from polio and all the businesses and companies that were making money from polio patients, how come they didn't stop the polio vaccine?
01:45:14.000Or, you know, just pick any particular industry like that where we have made real progress.
01:45:19.000But then there are some things where you go, okay, there's definitely too many people that are getting prescribed pain pills.
01:45:27.000Like, what is going on, and what is the conspiracy?
01:45:30.000I've had conversations with people that went to doctors, you know, they had something wrong with them, and the doctor wants to prescribe them.
01:46:30.000And so they're making money, and that's reality.
01:46:34.000I mean, the sheer volume of pain pills that they've sold in this country since the 1980s, it's stunning.
01:46:41.000But also, I saw this when my stepdad was ill for probably 10 years of just going through in his 80s, just melting down one thing after another.
01:46:50.000And I was the one taking him around to all the different docs.
01:46:53.000And, you know, I could sort of see how it works.
01:46:55.000You know, the docs go, look, Dick, I don't know what the problem is.
01:47:58.000Well, we'll give him, you know, these drugs here.
01:48:01.000And okay, so all of a sudden, you know, the hyperactive little kid who's just kind of fun and maybe a little disruptive is now medicalized.
01:49:46.000But there's also the very real problem with human beings in that there's so much biological diversity that medication that affects one person is going to affect another person in a totally different way.
01:49:57.000So if they give you a medication, your body has no problem with that medication whatsoever.
01:50:02.000If they give that same medication to another person, there's going to be some issues.
01:50:05.000And when people say, well, you know, my child got vaccinated and there was some adverse reaction to the vaccination, there's people that want to immediately dismiss that and say, well, that's malarkey, that's junk science.
01:50:18.000But there is a very real situation that happens with human beings where they take medication where it does not agree with some of them.
01:50:24.000Sort of how, like, some people have allergies to things that are completely innocuous to you or I. You give a certain type of nut to Jamie, and he might die.
01:50:38.000This is what I try to explain to people that talk about vaccinations being dangerous, and, you know, we don't need vaccinations, and they're...
01:51:13.000But there's a lot of fucking people that are being vaccinated.
01:51:16.000If there really was this global epidemic of you give kids vaccinations and they turn into this decrepit, mentally disabled child, boy, it would be a lot bigger.
01:51:28.000It would be a lot bigger than it is because so many people are getting vaccinated.
01:51:31.000Exactly the right way to think about it.
01:51:33.000A million to one odds happen 300 times a day in America.
01:51:39.000This is what I try to explain to people when we talk about just the raw numbers of stupidity.
01:51:43.000I think that it's really conservative and really kind to say that one out of a hundred people are fucking idiots, and there's not a damn thing you can do.
01:52:09.000It's the sheer numbers that we deal with whenever, you know, when people started throwing these, you know, these theories around and they use this as their evidence, I always try to just try to put it into that perspective.
01:52:23.000Just stop and think about the numbers.
01:52:25.000If you could see it on a board, If you could see seven billion human beings just as little dots on a board, and then, you know, then let's find the morons.
01:52:36.000You know, then let's look at the problems.
01:52:38.000Let's look at the, oh, this is what we're dealing with.
01:52:40.000What we're dealing with is almost just insurmountable numbers.
01:52:43.000It'd be like a cancer cluster, except it'd be a stupidity cluster, because they're going to cluster in various places, usually cities probably.
01:52:49.000Yeah, well, and they'll find each other, and then there's the confirmation bias that comes from the groups getting together and only sharing information that correlates to their beliefs, whether it's Bigfoot or UFOs or psychics or...
01:53:02.000That's why it seems like, you know, any of these groups, the UFO people or the Bigfoot people or whatever, it seems like, well, there's a lot of people.
01:53:10.000You know, there's maybe a hundred in that club or something like that, but it's a small number of people compared to the whole population.
01:53:18.000They get so mad when you bring this up.
01:53:20.000If you bring up these facts or these thoughts, these ideas, and you tell these people that you don't believe in UFOs or you don't believe that we have ever been visited, they get emotionally mad.
01:53:36.000They're connected, like who they are, is connected to these beliefs.
01:53:41.000And the more psychologically invested you are in a belief, the harder it is to change your mind.
01:53:45.000So this is, again, an example of cognitive dissonance, which was discovered by Leon Festinger in In December of 1954, on the 21st, he went to the top of a hill with a UFO cult who was waiting for the mothership to come.
01:54:01.000And he wanted to see, well, presumably the mothership's not going to come, the world won't come to an end.
01:55:18.000I had a guy that I had a conversation with who really was absolutely adamant that the world was going to change December 21st, 2012. He's like, it is undeniable.
01:55:35.000The days started getting longer on December 22nd.
01:55:39.000But it's also that the people that came up with this idea, their culture doesn't even exist anymore.
01:55:44.000I mean, you're talking about the Mayan civilization.
01:55:46.000A wonderful, spectacular, advanced civilization that did all this amazing architecture, and they had these really cool statues that they had built.
01:55:56.000Really interesting language, sort of like hieroglyphic.
01:56:37.000Actually, one of my cycling training partners, Nick Coe, his father, Michael Coe, at Yale University, was the guy that first cracked the Mayan Code.
01:58:30.000Either ours is culminating in this great thing that's going to happen, or things are terrible, but if we can get through that, then we're the ones that are going to come out the other side, the born-again, the left-behinders, the Christian apocalypse.
01:58:45.000There's plenty of secular versions of this.
01:58:47.000Marxists had this idea that the end of capitalism and the beginning of socialism and communism, this is a big stage thing.
01:58:55.000A lot of science fiction is like this.
01:58:58.000It makes a drama better when there's a beginning point, an end point.
01:59:03.000We're at this crisis moment, and things are going to be great again, or they're going to come to an end, and then they'll be great.
01:59:09.000But there's always that tension between decline and progress.
01:59:13.000But there's also this realization that there will be an end for you.
01:59:28.000And then we find this thing, and if you're really inclined to be gullible, you get sucked into the Heaven's Gate folks who think, well, the way it's going to happen is there's a UFO behind this meteor, and what we've got to do is, when the comet is near, we've got to kill ourselves and wear purple Nikes,
02:00:39.000It's like, did you not have one person in that group that you might have thought, like, well, maybe Mike's got some better ideas than Marshall.
02:00:45.000We should listen to Mike for a little bit.
02:01:29.000David Miscavige took over from L. Ron, and he was charismatic, and people turned their...
02:01:34.000They acknowledged him as the new leader.
02:01:38.000One of my favorite moments in all of comedy is when Miscavige and Tom Cruise are on stage, and they salute L. Ron Hubbard to L.R.H., And they salute him.
02:01:46.000There was a lot of testosterone right there on that stage.
02:02:34.000Well, not only that, how about the fact that he lived for a long time on a boat off the shore because he owed so much taxes he couldn't land.
02:02:41.000So that's where all the C Corps and all that crazy shit came from.
02:02:45.000He wrote more books than anyone who's ever lived.
02:02:48.000You know, he wrote more fiction than anyone ever.
02:02:54.000Harlan Ellison, who I know is a science fiction writer, says he was there at the meeting when L. Ron...
02:03:00.000Well, the meme is that he said, if you really want to make money writing science fiction, you can start your own religion.
02:03:06.000What actually was, according to Harlan Ellison, is there was a group of them just sort of sitting around complaining about the fees that people paid writers, like all of us writers complain about.
02:03:19.000And so that's when somebody said, well, you know, if we started a religion, and then Elrond kind of jumped in and said, yeah, yeah, let's start a religion.
02:03:26.000And then he actually went out and did it.
02:03:28.000Whereas the rest of them, you know, they just kept writing science fiction.
02:07:45.000And it seems like part of what Scientology was, was his attempt at self-help.
02:07:50.000And that was one of the things that Lawrence Wright went into, that it seems pretty clear that this guy used all these available psychological techniques at the time to try to cure himself.
02:08:01.000It was like a self-diagnosis and self-help thing.
02:08:04.000I think a lot of people go into psychotherapy because they themselves have issues that they're dealing with.
02:08:10.000Well, when I was in college, that was the only thing that was interesting to me.
02:08:13.000Psychology was interesting to me because I was trying to figure out my own brain.
02:08:16.000I was like, God, I've got to get this fucking thing under wraps.
02:08:53.000And we did a story on the self-help movement in Skeptic by a guy who wrote a book called SHAM, The Self-Help and Actualization Movement.
02:09:03.000And this guy, he used to work for Rodeo Press, which is one of the big publishers of self-help books.
02:09:10.000And the marketing department said that the number one predictor of anybody who would buy one of these self-help books is somebody who had already bought a self-help book.
02:09:18.000Well, if they work, why do you need to keep buying the tapes and the books and all that stuff?
02:09:23.000And the answer is that they only work temporarily.
02:09:28.000Like, if you bring Tony Robbins into your corporation, he is for sure going to get your sales force really motivated.
02:09:34.000Man, I'm going to make 50 calls a day rather than 30 calls a day, and I'm going to...
02:10:13.000That's why diets are so difficult to work.
02:10:15.000You have a lifetime of you have this fat level and you have this kind of food your body's used to, and to shift it, it's not going to happen in weeks or months.
02:10:23.000It's a lifestyle change forever, really.
02:10:26.000Yeah, if you turn into a diet, like you can commit to a diet for a long period of time, but a lot of people when they're committing to, like I'm on a diet right now, for 60 days, Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint, it's like a sort of a ketogenic diet.
02:11:30.000Sisson's idea is, and Sisson was a big ultra-endurance guy as well, the idea is that your body functions more efficiently on high-fat content than it does on high-carbohydrate content.
02:11:45.000So it's very low-carbohydrate, no added sugar, no grains whatsoever, no pastas.
02:11:53.000The mental clarity aspect of it is really interesting.
02:11:56.000I had a few friends that had tried the same diet and that was one of the things they pointed out.
02:12:02.000And I think there's a certain amount of brain fog that comes from heavy carbohydrate meals that you avoid.
02:12:08.000And then once your body becomes into a state of ketosis, which I think takes like 20 something days, Or there's a bunch of different supplements.
02:12:40.000He figured out how to add grass-fed butter, MCT oil, which is medium-chain triglycerides, essentially the healthiest aspects of coconut oil.
02:13:27.000I did it just because I wanted to feel what it would be like to try this diet because I had read about Sisson and he's a really interesting guy.
02:13:33.000And then I'd also listen to a Tim Ferriss podcast.
02:13:37.000Tim Ferriss had this great podcast with this Dr. D'Augustino, I believe his name is, who is heavily into ketosis, heavily into ketogenic diets, and the science behind it.
02:13:47.000He's a really, really brilliant guy and fascinating podcast.
02:13:51.000We have to listen to it like 10 times in a row and take notes.
02:13:53.000But one of the things that they brought up, which is really interesting, is the mental benefits of it and the fact that it helps children with epilepsy.
02:14:00.000When they put them on a ketogenic diet, it stops epilepsy in its tracks.
02:15:37.000Ostrich meat is very very very good for you very lean and healthy and it's a rich dark red meat yeah it's filled with iron and nutrients but the idea behind it is that you get your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrates because that's primarily with human that's why it's not to be confused like the problem with the whole concept of paleo you know the paleo diet well The term can be debunked pretty easily because they say,
02:16:03.000well, in the Paleolithic period, people ate a lot of bread.
02:17:17.000I felt like homogenized and pasteurized milk Once you do that, I mean, it's great as far as you could store it in a store and it lasts for a long time, but you're cooking out all the enzymes.
02:18:53.000When they think that it's all going to happen, but they had this Russian billionaire character who had developed some artificial, something that he was going to unveil that was like a robot of him that's going to be in artificial intelligence,
02:19:31.000But if they shut off your brain and turn it back on inside a computer, Would you wake up and go, oh, okay, this is like waking up?
02:19:38.000Or would it just be, you're gone, and it's just a copy?
02:19:41.000And this copy is just functioning completely on its own, and it has no idea what it's doing, because it's not connected to biology, it's not connected to all those things.
02:19:50.000Maybe there's like a leap of faith they have to make before they hit the switch.
02:20:26.000But if he wants to make a bunch of Donald Trumps, some egomaniac was...
02:20:31.000And of course, the moment you turn on the new copy, they start having different memories because they're in a different environment, in a different body, and they're having different interactions.
02:20:39.000And so if it's a biological system, then there's new neural connections growing that are different than yours, than the Joe Rogan copy.
02:21:09.000Also, the good point is from here on out, you're going to have different life experiences.
02:21:13.000So if you made an exact duplicate of yourself at this day, but one went to New York and the other one moved to Miami, you have totally different lives, totally different experiences, totally different...
02:21:23.000One's going to be liberal, one's going to be conservative.
02:21:25.000Well, you're going to make different conclusions based on your life experiences.
02:21:29.000And that's just a reality of being a person is that we're constantly accumulating data and processing it.
02:21:35.000And then also, it's the environment that you surround yourself with as far as the unique individuals that you choose to associate with.
02:21:45.000It's so difficult to look at a person as an individual because every individual is profoundly influenced by all the other people around them.
02:22:25.000It's a little bit like the transhumanists, that we're going to slowly replace our body parts, and not just new joints, but if you replace your nerve cells...
02:22:36.000But you still have to have the continuity.
02:23:31.000If you believe in evolution, which I assume you do, and you assume that people are going to continue to change shape, we're going to continue...
02:23:41.000I mean, if we used to be multi-celled organisms that are coming out of the muck, the primordial ooze, and now we're people...
02:23:48.000What are we going to be a million years from now?
02:23:50.000Are we going to stifle that and just lock ourselves into this form?
02:24:25.000What if we do to people what we did to tomatoes?
02:24:28.000We fucked up tomatoes, but they last forever.
02:24:30.000Well, in a way, with international travel and the internet, the poorest borders in centuries or so, everyone will look like Tiger Woods or something like this.
02:24:49.000But if we colonize another planet, say we start a colony on Mars, in a way that's a founder population that can then begin to diverge away from the earthly population.
02:24:59.000And in a million years you'd have two different species, say.
02:25:03.000They'd probably still be able to interbreed because there's still connections.
02:25:08.000You'd also have a problem in that you've got a whole civilization of people so fucking crazy they decided to move to Mars.
02:25:29.000And, assuming none of them were religious, if you came back a thousand years from now, would they have a shrine to a god and a religion and all this...
02:25:43.000It's one of the interesting things about Scientology and the Mormon Church is that we have a clear recent history and a paper trail to see what happened.
02:25:53.000What we don't have for Christianity is that it's old enough that it's lost in the murkiness of time, so you can kind of fill in the blanks with miracles and things like that.
02:26:02.000Here we know Joseph Smith was killed, and then Brigham Young moved to Utah to get away from the authorities, and we know exactly how it all unfolded, and so you can diagram how to start a religion.
02:26:13.000Well, you know the whole Mitt Romney story, too, about his family in Mexico, right?
02:26:48.000Basically, he's already having an affair with this woman down the street, so basically he goes, well, honey, I was talking to God, and he told me that I'm supposed to have sex with so-and-so.
02:29:12.000Well, the law only exists in terms of all the other people outside of their community or their neighborhood or their family recognizing it.
02:29:19.000It's just you're writing something down.
02:29:21.000If you have a law that says this, but everybody in the town, including the police, captain, the courts, well, the judge.
02:30:55.000I mean, and then it becomes, okay, where's the line get gray?
02:30:59.000Okay, if a Mormon can't do it, if you can't take someone when they're really young, raise them as a Mormon, and then once they become of age and they become an adult, tell them, you know, well, now you can get married and you can be involved in this polygamous marriage.
02:31:12.000And, well, they grew up in this religion.
02:33:12.000So when they say, I get my morals from the Bible, it's like, no, you don't, and that's a good thing.
02:33:16.000You're getting your morals from the same place we nonbelievers get it, and, you know, we're inculcating it from culture, from the Enlightenment, secular values.
02:33:25.000Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because that was an article that I'd read that you had written about Islam, and that Islam was the only religion that had not gone through the Enlightenment.
02:33:49.000Well, the law changed, the culture changed, and the Enlightenment ushered in secular values that all people should be treated equally under the law, that people are born with equal rights, and And so forth.
02:36:16.000So, I mean, the moral arc, that's what that's about, tracking how much moral progress we've made over the centuries, particularly just the last 50 years since.
02:36:39.000They're down to Halloween costumes, Taco Tuesdays, he wore a sombrero, cultural appropriate, you know, they're all fired up about what you and I is just like, you know, Safe spaces.
02:37:07.000You know, the idea that they won't let these conservatives perform or have these speeches at the universities, and they try to shut them down, they scream at people, they hit fire alarms.
02:37:45.000And so you're getting this attitude, well, we know what the truth is.
02:37:49.000Well, maybe you don't know what the truth is, and you need to listen to the other side, because that's what It's driven science and reason and the Enlightenment is open debate, because I might not be right.
02:38:00.000And so the only way to find out is if I ask you your opinion.
02:38:03.000And so I tell my students, you've got to read the Wall Street Journal in addition to the New York Times.
02:38:08.000You've got to listen to conservative talk radio in addition to NPR. You've got to listen to Rush Limbaugh.
02:38:15.000Oh, I know, he's a knuckle-dragging mouth breather.
02:38:18.000But somebody on that side, just to see what...
02:39:07.000He's a young earth Christian who every day will talk about how horrible Obama is and Obama's the death of this country.
02:39:14.000And I'll follow this guy and follow people who retweet him and go to their links and go to their blogs and read their blogs and go, what the fuck?
02:39:22.000Trying to explore how their mind works, trying to piece together how much of it is just a blanket hatred of liberals, how much of it is racism, how much of it is this, how much of it is that, and just trying to objectively assess where their mindset is and what the root of their thinking is.
02:39:42.000That's what I did back in the 90s when the Holocaust denial movement started taking off.
02:39:46.000And these guys were appearing on Montel Williams and Donahue.
02:39:50.000And it's like, okay, what is this about?
02:39:52.000It turns out their offices are in Costa Mesa.
02:39:55.000So I drove down there and I just sat down with, you know, they have a little journal of historical review.
02:40:01.000And it's like, all right, who are these guys?
02:40:03.000So we had beer and pizza, you know, I just sort of get them to open up, what is your story here?
02:40:22.000But also there's some conspiratorial thinking, you know, the Jews are doing this, but not just the Jews, you know, the media, the this and that.
02:40:28.000Is it one of those exposing the mystery thing, too?
02:40:30.000Yes, it's a little bit of that, you know, the government.
02:41:25.000All of a sudden, he gets all this attention.
02:41:28.000And then he concocts this idea of, I'll give $1,000 to anybody that can show me the order from Hitler to, you know, to orchestrate the Holocaust.
02:41:36.000You know, I hereby command we exterminate the Jews.
02:41:43.000It's a whole conglomerate of little steps along the way from sterilization of the feebly-minded in the early 30s all the way up to, you know, gassing them.
02:41:53.000Okay, there's like a hundred steps in between.
02:41:56.000But that got him all this attention, and all of a sudden he's a big star at these conferences where these people meet.
02:42:01.000So I went to some of these, and it's like, whoa, okay, he is being worshipped as this great scholar who And you could sort of see how it fed the ego, get a lot of attention.
02:42:12.000So I think that we can't discount just the pure psychology of getting some attention for your views as pushing people further than they would normally go.
02:42:20.000Yeah, I think that's a very, very good point because there's a massive attraction to that.
02:42:26.000People are massively attracted to anything that can get them a lot of attention, even for a ridiculously controversial idea.
02:42:34.000Have you paid attention lately, and this is one of the most confusing things that's been going on, there's a gang of people that believe the earth is flat.
02:44:28.000Anyway, if you put a stick here and 500 miles away, make it, I don't know, Tucumcari, New Mexico, that's 1,000 miles from L.A., you put a stick there at noon at the same time, they'll have different shadows.
02:44:42.000Because the Earth is curved, so at 12 noon, it's actually 1 o'clock in New Mexico when it's 12 noon in LA, and that's why we have time zones, because it's curved.
02:44:52.000And when you want to watch a rocket, a SpaceX rocket or NASA rocket launch from Florida, it arcs.
02:45:00.000It's arcing because it's going into orbit and the Earth is curved, so you have to arc out.
02:45:05.000Otherwise, it would just go straight up, and it doesn't do that.
02:45:08.000Anyway, those are five different, you know, quick reasons.
02:45:10.000Pretty good, but you sound like a shill for this round, bullshit government.
02:45:16.000There was the guy that co-discovered Natural Selection with Darwin, a guy named Alfred Russell Wallace.
02:45:50.000Not that he cribbed from him, but that they sort of combined their ideas.
02:45:52.000It's more of a simultaneous thing, and they were in correspondence.
02:45:56.000Wallace actually incorporated some of Darwin's work.
02:45:58.000Darwin was older than him and had already done quite a bit more work than Wallace had.
02:46:02.000And in any case, Wallace was super open-minded.
02:46:05.000So here's an example of being too open-minded.
02:46:07.000Darwin was open-minded and he came up with new ideas, but he was also very skeptical of the whole spiritualism seance movement that was getting big in England.
02:46:38.000And then he made the mistake of answering an ad in a magazine saying, One of these flat earthers who said, I give 5,000 pounds to anybody, or 500 pounds, I guess it was, anybody who can prove the earth is round.
02:46:58.000And so Wallace said, okay, I can do it.
02:47:00.000So they went to the old Bedford Canal, which is like 20 miles straight, you know, without a bend.
02:47:06.000So you could set up two little telescopes, you know, the little surveyor telescopes, and they put a mark on a bridge.
02:47:15.000And so when I'm looking, so there's one, two, three marks.
02:47:19.000If it's straight, then it should be all lined up.
02:47:22.000If it's curved, then the one here that's exactly three feet above the ground like this one here that's five miles down the road, down the canal, it should be lined up, or if it's not, it's dropped a little bit.
02:47:32.000And in five miles, you can actually measure a little bit of the Earth's curve by, I don't know, it's like a centimeter, half a centimeter or something.
02:47:54.000And Wallace—so he had to sue this guy to collect the prize money.
02:48:00.000This is why you shouldn't get involved with the wackadoodle people too far, because he spent 15 years— We're dealing with this guy, and this guy was sending crazy letters to his wife and to the National Geographical...
02:48:12.000I actually found some of these letters at the National Geographical Society.
02:48:15.000This guy threatening, you know, you've got this crazy man, Wallace, working for you, and so on.
02:48:37.000What really happened was it accelerated Darwin to get his work done, to get the book done.
02:48:42.000He was just sort of lollygagging around, doing his research.
02:48:46.000One reason for that is in 1844, there was a book on evolution published called The Vestiges of Creation.
02:48:53.000It was published anonymously, and it was trashed by the scientific community.
02:48:57.000So Darwin got back from the Galapagos in 1836. Throughout the 1840s, he was just taking notes, composing his ideas, running experiments.
02:49:06.000He got married and had, you know, 10 kids, and he had a lot of money invested in the railroad.
02:49:11.000So he was a pretty active independent scholar.
02:49:15.000And so I just started taking his sweet time about developing his theory, and also he didn't want to be embarrassed and come out with a book that wasn't very solid, and then he would be criticized, so he was just compiling.
02:49:26.000Anyway, one day he gets this letter from Wallace, from the other side of the world, who's in the Malay Archipelago, saying, I came up with a few ideas.
02:49:34.000He had like a feverish nightmare from malaria, and he hatched this natural selection.
02:50:17.000And then Darwin went to Charles Lyell and some of the other big scientists at the time and said, I got this letter from this guy on the other side, and you know I've been working on this.
02:50:27.000This is really similar, and what do I do?
02:50:31.000So they said, all right, we'll publish both of them simultaneously, and they did on July 1st, 1858 at the Linnaean Society.
02:50:37.000They presented both papers, some of Darwin's notes and essays he had written, and Wallace's letter to Darwin with a little handwritten paper.
02:50:46.000And they entered them both into the record the same day, July 1st, 1858. Boom!
02:50:52.000Wallace, Darwin, then spent the next basically nine months just, you know, the pen moves mighty fast when you're afraid you're going to get scooped.
02:51:35.000Well, but that often, you know, the spark of scientific genius or creativity in any field, I was taking a shower, and boom, the idea came to me.
02:52:19.000They like to write, and then they go for a walk.
02:52:21.000And then after they're done writing, they go walk, and they try not to think about anything, and then the ideas just pop into their head, or a correction in the idea, or a new revelation in the idea.
02:52:32.000It's just always been amazing to me, ideas that come out of dreams, like the origins of creativity.
02:52:38.000Like, where are these thoughts emanating from?
02:52:43.000Like, the idea of science came from a dream.
02:52:47.000Einstein's dream of being in an elevator.
02:52:50.000You know, if you're in an elevator and the elevator drops at, you know, just the speed of gravity and you let go of your pen or your coffee mug, it's just going to hover there like you're hovering inside the elevator as it drops.
02:53:02.000So the acceleration of the elevator at the speed of gravity means there's no gravity.
02:53:08.000And that's where he came up with this idea of relativity.
02:53:11.000The elevator is the frame of reference that you and the cup are in.
02:53:15.000And so this is what weightlessness is.
02:53:17.000When you do the vomit comet, basically all you do is you go up high enough to drop.
02:53:21.000And so the plane is plunging down for about a minute or two, I guess.
02:53:33.000And so to do this in the space shuttle, for example, it has to go, what, 17,500 miles an hour to maintain the same speed accelerating at which it would also drop.
02:53:46.000So you're going straight forward and straight down.
02:53:48.000The halfway in between is 17,500 miles an hour for our planet.
02:55:09.000Even Mozart, you know, he was composing since the age of four, and his father was a composer.
02:55:14.000So it's not like this comes out of the vacuum.
02:55:16.000There's not a muse that pops into your head.
02:55:19.000You know, you and I aren't going to come up with an Einstein-type dream, because we're not Einstein, and we're not physicists.
02:55:26.000So the balance seems to be being ensconced in a field to know what the problems are to be solved and what the details are and what's already been done.
02:55:35.000They tried this, they tried this, this didn't work, and so on.
02:55:37.000But not be so entrenched in it that you can't see outside the box.
02:57:01.000What led these ideas to cross each other and bink, and a little fire gets lit, and then you write it down on a napkin, and your life changes.
02:57:59.000I've had a few of those people on, and I have a conversation with people about quantum consciousness, and they're like, I don't even know what you're saying.
02:58:05.000I don't even know if you know what you're saying.