The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1888 - Michael Shermer

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00:00:15.000 Thank you very much.

00:00:19.000 Why the rational believe the irrational.

00:00:22.000 Right.

00:00:23.000 Why is that?

00:00:24.000 Is it simple?

00:00:25.000 It wouldn't be this big of a book if it was simple.

00:00:28.000 Yeah, it's not that simple.

00:00:29.000 Well, first of all, my argument is that it's not irrational to believe conspiracy theories because enough of them are true.

00:00:37.000 That it pays to err on the side of assuming more of them are true than actually are, then missing real conspiracy theories, and then that's a costlier error to make.

00:00:49.000 That's a rational perspective.

00:00:51.000 The term conspiracy theory got thrown about.

00:00:54.000 There was the first introduction of it into the zeitgeist was during the Kennedy assassination, correct?

00:01:00.000 Yeah, well, around that time, right, before that, before World War II, really, conspiracy theories were kind of common knowledge.

00:01:08.000 Everybody knew that things were going on behind closed doors, and it was just kind of commonly known, and we just got to try to figure it out.

00:01:15.000 It didn't become really fringy until right after the JFK thing.

00:01:19.000 It kind of got as a meme that you're crazy to think these conspiracy theories are true.

00:01:25.000 It became pathologized.

00:01:27.000 Richard Hofstetter's, you know, the paranoid style in American politics kind of put that on the map.

00:01:33.000 It's conspiracy theories are...

00:01:35.000 It's something delusional. 0.99

00:01:36.000 It's a pathology in your brain.

00:01:39.000 Whereas before that, it wasn't.

00:01:40.000 It was just, I mean, even the Declaration of Independence, it's a conspiracy theory.

00:01:44.000 It's saying, look, the British are doing this whole train of abuses and usurpations, and here's what we think they're up to, and here's what we think they want to do, and we're against that.

00:01:53.000 It's printed right there in the Declaration.

00:01:54.000 So it's not fringy, right?

00:01:55.000 It was kind of commonly known that these things happen.

00:01:58.000 The term as a pejorative, though, it was introduced into sort of the American...

00:02:08.000 Yeah, that's an interesting story because I'm convinced Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

00:02:14.000 Really?

00:02:14.000 Yes, I am.

00:02:15.000 What makes you convinced of that?

00:02:16.000 Oh, well, I have a whole chapter on it and we can get into that in a second.

00:02:20.000 The twist about it where it seems like there was something up was that President Johnson was worried that if it looks like there's a conspiracy afoot with the Cubans or the Russians, that that could lead to a nuclear exchange.

00:02:35.000 So we don't want the American people to think that this is some kind of vast conspiracy of the Russians.

00:02:41.000 Have you gone back and forth on that at all?

00:02:44.000 Or is it just something you've always believed?

00:02:46.000 No, no.

00:02:46.000 Well, before the Oliver Stone film, I hadn't really given it that much thought.

00:02:50.000 Well, the Warren Report seems pretty thorough, but who knows?

00:02:55.000 What do I know?

00:02:55.000 And then the Oliver Stone film, which floats every conspiracy theory there was in one package, and I thought, well, if 10% of this is true, it seems like there was something else going on.

00:03:06.000 But then, you know, there were webpages posted of, like, here are all the mistakes in the film and here are all the counterarguments.

00:03:12.000 And then I read Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and why all the evidence points to him.

00:03:18.000 And then Vincent Bogliosi's book, Reclaiming History, which is like 1,500 pages long.

00:03:23.000 And it dissects every one of the hundreds of conspiracy theories.

00:03:27.000 Something on the order of 140 people have been accused and a couple hundred organizations have been affiliated with the JFK assassination.

00:03:36.000 The problem is that there's no convergence of evidence to any other one than Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.

00:03:44.000 And all the evidence points to him.

00:03:46.000 So it's not impossible.

00:03:48.000 All the evidence points to him.

00:03:49.000 Massive amounts of evidence, right.

00:03:51.000 So now we're supposed to get a new trance of documents.

00:03:56.000 But they're not.

00:03:56.000 They won't release them.

00:03:57.000 They keep stopping the release of these documents.

00:04:00.000 This worries me because that makes people suspicious, as it should.

00:04:05.000 But wait a minute.

00:04:07.000 It worries you because it makes people suspicious or it worries you because it points to their withholding information because that information looks bad?

00:04:17.000 I would love to see the information, and I would change my mind in a heartbeat.

00:04:21.000 What are your thoughts on the magic bullet?

00:04:24.000 Okay, the magic bullet is not a magic bullet.

00:04:26.000 It's a single bullet theory.

00:04:27.000 That is, what it's usually rendered as is Kennedy and Connolly are sitting like this.

00:04:32.000 Oh, I'm aware of all of it.

00:04:34.000 Yeah, right.

00:04:35.000 So the bullet doesn't have to go left, right, and so forth.

00:04:37.000 Kennedy was elevated.

00:04:39.000 Yes, right.

00:04:40.000 So if you draw a line straight back to the sixth floor window of the book depository building, the bullet goes straight through his back, out his neck, into Connelly, through his arm, into his leg, and so forth, in a straight line.

00:04:52.000 Well, you know the only reason why they had to come up with the theory that that one bullet did all that damage.

00:04:57.000 You know that, right?

00:04:58.000 Well, you know why?

00:05:00.000 Well, I don't know.

00:05:02.000 Go ahead.

00:05:03.000 Because someone was hit by a ricochet in the underpass.

00:05:05.000 And so they had to attribute all that damage to one bullet.

00:05:09.000 Right.

00:05:09.000 That's right.

00:05:09.000 Yeah.

00:05:10.000 But there's more in Connolly's body.

00:05:12.000 There was more pieces of bullet than were missing from the actual bullet itself.

00:05:18.000 Did you ever look at the actual bullet itself?

00:05:20.000 Have you studied it?

00:05:21.000 Yeah, I have a picture of it in there.

00:05:22.000 I know a lot about bullets, and one of the problems about bullets is there's never been a bullet that's gone through bone and shattered bone and gone through two different bodies and came out looking like that.

00:05:32.000 That looks like a bullet that was shot into water.

00:05:34.000 It is deformed, though.

00:05:36.000 Yeah, it's slightly deformed, but every bullet that leaves a gun is slightly deformed.

00:05:39.000 That indicates even more so that it didn't hit anything.

00:05:43.000 When bullets hit things, they deform.

00:05:46.000 That's the whole purpose of making bullets like that.

00:05:49.000 These bullets are designed to shatter things and expand upon impact and it creates more damage.

00:05:54.000 Well, hollow point bullets are.

00:05:56.000 Sure, but all bullets are.

00:05:57.000 Yeah.

00:05:58.000 Hollow points even more specifically, but all bullets are designed to expand upon impact.

00:06:04.000 Right.

00:06:05.000 Even rifle bullets that are copper, because in California you can't use lead bullets anymore because condors and a lot of other Birds of prey, they eat the lead bullets and they get lead poisoning.

00:06:16.000 Because, like, if there's an animal that gets shot and the hunter doesn't recover it, and then the condor or something else eats that, you know, some sort of a raptor eats that, then they get lead poisoning.

00:06:25.000 But bullets expand and they break up.

00:06:27.000 They don't look like that. 0.96

00:06:29.000 That bullet was found in Connelly's gurney, which is, like, so ridiculous.

00:06:34.000 The idea that, oh, look, we found the bullet here.

00:06:36.000 It just managed to magically fall out of his body and look pristine.

00:06:41.000 Okay, 80% of the earwitnesses heard three shots.

00:06:45.000 Yeah, but you know witnesses.

00:06:46.000 And the first shot missed.

00:06:47.000 But witnesses.

00:06:48.000 Yeah, but okay.

00:06:50.000 That's just asking people what happened.

00:06:52.000 If you talk to witnesses after 9-11, they said they heard explosions.

00:06:55.000 Yes, right.

00:06:56.000 Yeah, right.

00:06:56.000 Exactly.

00:06:57.000 So again, it's a probability argument.

00:06:59.000 It's not black or white.

00:07:00.000 But the probability of that having gone through bodies is very low.

00:07:07.000 Well, I don't know if you've seen those tests where they shoot the bullet through the foam stuff that mimics a human body and so forth.

00:07:18.000 Yeah, but that's gel.

00:07:19.000 And it does get deformed like that.

00:07:19.000 That's ballistic gel.

00:07:21.000 Ballistic gel is not bone.

00:07:23.000 But they have shot it through pigs with the bone and tendons and ligaments and muscles and all that.

00:07:28.000 Doesn't look like that.

00:07:28.000 Never looks like that.

00:07:29.000 Well, anyway, there's good shows on this.

00:07:31.000 No, no, no, no, no.

00:07:32.000 It never looks like that.

00:07:34.000 There's no evidence of bullets hitting bone where they come out looking like that.

00:07:38.000 I don't know, Joe.

00:07:39.000 Are you sure?

00:07:40.000 I am sure.

00:07:41.000 I'm pretty sure it was either NOVA or National Geographic that did this and replicated it, shot it right through a body.

00:07:47.000 No, I saw that.

00:07:48.000 They looked deformed.

00:07:49.000 The bullets looked deformed.

00:07:51.000 They were bent up.

00:07:52.000 Yeah.

00:07:53.000 Okay.

00:07:53.000 So what is your counter then?

00:07:55.000 I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved.

00:07:59.000 I certainly think he was involved.

00:08:01.000 And I think the possibility of a conspiracy is high.

00:08:04.000 I do not know whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

00:08:08.000 I think Lee Harvey Oswald was most certainly a part of it.

00:08:11.000 But when Lee Harvey Oswald was captured, when they were talking to him, he said, I'm a patsy.

00:08:16.000 Yeah.

00:08:16.000 I'm inclined to believe he was a Patsy, but I'm also inclined to believe that he had knowledge of it.

00:08:21.000 He was there for probably a very specific reason and they're probably setting him up.

00:08:25.000 I think there's probably multiple people involved.

00:08:28.000 Yeah.

00:08:28.000 Who's the they?

00:08:29.000 Who is the they? 1.00

00:08:30.000 That's the question.

00:08:31.000 Is it the CIA? Was it the mafia?

00:08:33.000 Were they upset because he turned on them after they got him elected?

00:08:38.000 Because there was a conspiracy to help him get elected.

00:08:42.000 The mob was involved in getting JFK elected.

00:08:45.000 Was it the people that were upset because of the Bay of Pigs incident?

00:08:49.000 Was it the CIA because he wanted to disband them?

00:08:52.000 Who knows?

00:08:53.000 I think there was a lot of people that John F. Kennedy upset.

00:08:56.000 Well, that's true for every president, though.

00:08:58.000 But the ones that don't get shot, then no one pays attention to that.

00:09:01.000 How many people hated Trump or Nixon especially?

00:09:04.000 Right, but we're talking about an actual murder.

00:09:07.000 To say it's true of every president is fine, but we're talking about a president that was murdered.

00:09:13.000 And you look at the people that may have had some sort of a vested interest in getting rid of them.

00:09:18.000 Okay.

00:09:18.000 So here's one argument I'm making.

00:09:19.000 It's the argument from proportionality, that the effect should have a matching size cause.

00:09:25.000 So let me just back up here for a second.

00:09:27.000 If you take a little pebble and throw it, it doesn't take a lot of effort to do it.

00:09:31.000 A fist size stone takes more effort, a big boulder, massive effort.

00:09:35.000 So our folk physics, we feel like cause and effect should match, right?

00:09:39.000 So interesting experiment if you take subjects and give them two dice and say, okay, now try to roll a low number.

00:09:45.000 They'll kind of just gently toss it like that.

00:09:47.000 Now try to roll a high number, like an 11 or 12. They'll give it a good heave like that.

00:09:51.000 Well, that's dumb people. 0.99

00:09:52.000 Well, but that's our intuition. 0.99

00:09:54.000 But that's people that don't know about DICE. We're not talking about trained assassins.

00:09:59.000 Okay, but let me finish.

00:10:00.000 So, you know, our sense is that big events, JFK assassination, Princess Di dies, 9-11, COVID-19.

00:10:10.000 Counterfactually, if Oswald had missed Kennedy or just wounded him and he didn't die, would there be massive conspiracy theories about who he was?

00:10:19.000 Okay, so this has actually happened.

00:10:22.000 That's a straw man, because you're saying that Oswald did act alone, if he had missed.

00:10:27.000 Yeah, if he had missed.

00:10:28.000 But we're talking about after the murder.

00:10:31.000 The reason why there's a conspiracy is because he was murdered.

00:10:35.000 Right.

00:10:35.000 So why are there no conspiracy theories about John Hinckley shooting Reagan?

00:10:40.000 Because John Hinckley has a real trail of mental illness.

00:10:44.000 He wrote letters to Jodie Foster. 0.53

00:10:46.000 He was a very specific human being who was obsessed with killing Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.

00:10:52.000 It's all really documented.

00:10:54.000 He's out now, too.

00:10:55.000 It's not like they got rid of him like they got rid of Jack Ruby.

00:10:59.000 Or Squeaky From tried to shoot Gerald Ford.

00:11:01.000 But she was also in the Manson family.

00:11:05.000 There's a big conspiracy about that, about the Manson family and the fact that Charles Manson was a part of N.K.Ultra.

00:11:13.000 Did you ever read Chaos by Tom O'Neill?

00:11:17.000 No, I haven't read that one.

00:11:18.000 It's a fantastic book.

00:11:19.000 It's all about why Manson kept getting released.

00:11:23.000 Manson was in jail.

00:11:25.000 Right?

00:11:26.000 And during the time he was in jail, he was visited by Jolly West, who was the head of the CIA's MK Ultra LSD experiments.

00:11:34.000 They most certainly did something to Manson while he was in jail.

00:11:39.000 And they also supplied him.

00:11:41.000 There's anecdotal evidence that shows that they supplied him with LSD when he got out of jail.

00:11:46.000 Every time he got arrested for violating parole, these cops and these local sheriffs that had caught him were told that it was above their pay grade and they had to release him.

00:11:55.000 Manson got out for multiple offenses after he was on parole, things that should have kept him locked up.

00:12:03.000 There's some real good evidence that, you know, about MKUltra was a real thing. 0.60

00:12:08.000 And that's an interesting conspiracy, right?

00:12:10.000 Because it's a real one, documented.

00:12:12.000 Our own government was doing this.

00:12:13.000 Yeah.

00:12:13.000 Well, there's Operation Midnight Climax that they were involved with.

00:12:16.000 Do you know about that one?

00:12:18.000 Mm-hmm.

00:12:18.000 That's where they were dosing up Johns when they would go to visit prostitutes and they would film them through two-way mirrors.

00:12:24.000 You know, Jolly West was a part of that and he also was a part in some way, shape or form of that Manson family.

00:12:33.000 Okay, but my point is that, let's say it was the mayor of Dallas that was shot that day, would there be vast conspiracy industry of books and films and so on?

00:12:40.000 Who knows?

00:12:41.000 But it wasn't the mayor.

00:12:42.000 It was the president of the United States, which makes it a far bigger issue.

00:12:45.000 Right.

00:12:45.000 That's my point.

00:12:46.000 We want something big.

00:12:47.000 It doesn't seem right that a lone nut like Lee Harvey Oswald could have pulled this off, or that 19 guys with box cutters could have taken down the World Trade Center bill.

00:12:56.000 It just doesn't feel right.

00:12:58.000 So we add elements.

00:12:59.000 This is my theory.

00:13:00.000 We add elements of causality to match it.

00:13:02.000 You know, princes die, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seat belt.

00:13:05.000 But it doesn't feel right that a princess, famous and so forth, would die the same way most people do.

00:13:11.000 Yeah, but you're adding a bunch of different conspiracies to one that's very specific.

00:13:15.000 You're adding a bunch that are much more easily disprovable than one that's very specific.

00:13:20.000 This is my problem with all conspiracy theories.

00:13:23.000 And one of the things that you said at the beginning, some of them are real.

00:13:26.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:13:27.000 All right.

00:13:28.000 So let's distinguish conspiracy theories from conspiracies.

00:13:31.000 Conspiracies, by definition, are two or more people plotting in secret to gain an unfair, illegal, or immoral advantage over somebody else.

00:13:37.000 That happens all the time, right?

00:13:39.000 Sure.

00:13:39.000 So how do we know?

00:13:40.000 So it's a signal detection problem.

00:13:41.000 How do you know which conspiracy theories are correct?

00:13:44.000 They tag an actual conspiracy, right?

00:13:47.000 So I draw this two-by-two grid.

00:13:49.000 So up here you have real conspiracy theories that are real, and you associate them with that correctly.

00:13:58.000 You say, yeah, that's what I agree.

00:14:00.000 That's a hit.

00:14:01.000 So conspiracy theories that are real, and you go, no, I don't believe it.

00:14:04.000 I don't think there's a real conspiracy.

00:14:05.000 That's a miss. 0.93

00:14:06.000 So that's a big miss, right?

00:14:08.000 That's a type 2 error.

00:14:09.000 You don't want to miss those because those are real.

00:14:10.000 That could harm you.

00:14:12.000 Down here you have conspiracy theories that are not true and you think they are.

00:14:15.000 So that's a false positive, a type 1 error.

00:14:18.000 That's a low-cost error to make.

00:14:19.000 It doesn't cost a lot.

00:14:20.000 It's not risky to assume a conspiracy theory is real when it's not.

00:14:24.000 And so this is my argument, is that we've evolved this cognition to be very suspicious and paranoid about other people and what they're doing because, historically and evolutionarily-wise, in these small bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers, anthropologists tell us there's a lot of conniving and cabals and so on.

00:14:43.000 This goes on.

00:14:44.000 So I call this constructive conspiracism.

00:14:46.000 It pays to be a little paranoid.

00:14:48.000 Because sometimes they really are out to get you.

00:15:05.000 In just the chaos of the incident.

00:15:07.000 I've heard explosions.

00:15:08.000 I saw this.

00:15:09.000 I saw that.

00:15:10.000 And you know that in times like that of great distress, people and eyewitness testimonies are some of the most unreliable because people are so blown away by the extreme moment that they can't really recall things correctly.

00:15:25.000 Okay, let's just do another counterfactual.

00:15:28.000 What would be true if this really was a conspiracy?

00:15:30.000 Well, there should be some documentation somewhere.

00:15:33.000 There is, and that's why they won't release it.

00:15:35.000 Well, okay, so this is the problem. 0.98

00:15:37.000 Release it, damn it. 0.98

00:15:38.000 Yeah, well, why do you think? 0.99

00:15:39.000 But what possible reason?

00:15:41.000 I thought Trump was going to release it.

00:15:44.000 I was quite surprised.

00:15:45.000 I don't think they want to let anybody release that stuff.

00:15:47.000 If I had to guess, it would be something like what the CIA was up to even more than what we know about, you know, overthrowing, rigging elections in South American countries, assassinating communist dictators.

00:15:59.000 Real conspiracies.

00:16:00.000 These are real conspiracies.

00:16:01.000 These things happen.

00:16:02.000 We found out about this in the 90s.

00:16:03.000 So why are you so convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

00:16:06.000 Okay, so let's just pull back for a second.

00:16:08.000 I'm not God.

00:16:09.000 You're not either.

00:16:10.000 I'm not omniscient.

00:16:11.000 We don't know for sure what happened.

00:16:13.000 Nobody does.

00:16:13.000 I'd like to get you in a room with Oliver Stone.

00:16:15.000 Because Oliver Stone is so compelling.

00:16:18.000 I mean, that guy will talk for days and days about that.

00:16:20.000 I know.

00:16:21.000 I watched his four-hour documentary.

00:16:22.000 I watched him on here.

00:16:23.000 What did you think about it?

00:16:24.000 Well, okay.

00:16:25.000 So, again, here's my problem, is that it's not just a black and white thing.

00:16:28.000 What's most likely to be true, okay?

00:16:30.000 Well, the evidence is massive against Lee Harvey Oswald, okay?

00:16:34.000 For sure, he was at least involved.

00:16:36.000 Yeah.

00:16:36.000 All right.

00:16:37.000 Who else would have been involved?

00:16:39.000 Okay.

00:16:39.000 So Stone, the CIA, Alan Dulles, something.

00:16:43.000 If you had Alan Dulles here, could you get a grand jury to agree?

00:16:47.000 We have enough evidence to put him on trial.

00:16:49.000 I don't think so.

00:16:50.000 There's nobody, in fact, that you could point to that a grand jury would say.

00:16:53.000 Well, we're talking about something that happened over 50 years.

00:16:55.000 Well, I mean, just rewind the tape to 10 years after or something.

00:16:58.000 Okay, so we got somebody.

00:17:00.000 Here he is.

00:17:00.000 Well, this actually happened, right?

00:17:01.000 Jim Garrison put on trial Clay Shaw and pointed all the evidence he could find, and the jury acquitted him in under an hour.

00:17:09.000 The jury also acquitted O.J. Simpson.

00:17:12.000 Yes, okay.

00:17:13.000 You know, I don't know if that's real good evidence.

00:17:15.000 Juries are, you know, they're not the most...

00:17:20.000 Well, there was a made-for-television BBC trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in absentia, in which Jerry Spence was his defense attorney in absentia, and what's-his-name was the prosecutor,

00:17:35.000 the Reclaiming History, the Manson guy, the guy who put Manson away.

00:17:41.000 I just mentioned his name.

00:17:42.000 I'm sorry, I'm spacing out on it.

00:17:43.000 Biosi? 1.00

00:17:43.000 Vincent Biosi. 1.00

00:17:45.000 Again, the jury, again, it's not a real jury, it's a made-for-TV series, but they presented all the evidence and they acquitted, I mean, they convicted Oswald based on the evidence as the lone assassin, because there was just nothing pointing to anybody else.

00:18:01.000 So here's how I think about it.

00:18:03.000 There could be somebody else involved.

00:18:05.000 But we need some evidence, at least some paper trail.

00:18:09.000 Why in the Pentagon Papers that released all these top secret documents that Nixon tried to cover up and prevent from being published?

00:18:16.000 There's nothing in there about, you know, the conspiracy to assassinate the CIA. Right, but they've stopped release of all of the documents about the Kennedy assassination.

00:18:25.000 They keep postponing it decades and decades.

00:18:28.000 My guess is probably the CIA was up to even more no good.

00:18:31.000 Back in the 60s and 70s.

00:18:33.000 You mentioned MKUltra.

00:18:36.000 Don't forget...

00:18:37.000 That's a good guess, but another good guess is that they were involved in the assassination in some way.

00:18:41.000 Okay, I'm a good Bayesian.

00:18:44.000 I'm willing to update my priors, change my credence, and change my mind completely and go, yes.

00:18:49.000 I'm just very suspicious of multiple parts of that assassination, including the fact that...

00:18:57.000 Do you know that Jolly West visited Jack Ruby while he was in jail? 0.87

00:19:01.000 And Jack Ruby, something happened to him when he went fucking completely insane after visiting with Jolly West.

00:19:07.000 And the assumption is that Jolly West gave Jack Ruby LSD while he was in jail. 0.92

00:19:12.000 Maybe.

00:19:13.000 But why would Jolly West go to visit the guy that killed Lee Harvey Oswald when he was the head of a mind control experiment for the CIA? Yeah.

00:19:21.000 Again, this is what's called anomaly hunting, like any big event.

00:19:26.000 We go searching for any little thing that's weird.

00:19:28.000 That's a giant anomaly.

00:19:29.000 Like, you know, the Umbrella guy, the Umbrella Man, Louis Witt. 1.00

00:19:33.000 Well, there's a lot of that silly shit. 0.99

00:19:36.000 But that points to be to this thing where people always try to look for connections. 1.00

00:19:41.000 And I do agree with you that a lot of conspiracy theories are ridiculous.

00:19:45.000 But a lot of conspiracies, as you said, are real.

00:19:49.000 I don't know if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but I have a feeling that there were other people involved based on the evidence, based on a lot of it.

00:19:58.000 And like Stone's thesis that the CIA military industrial complex and so on were involved because Kennedy wanted to get us out of Vietnam.

00:20:06.000 Nixon got us out of Vietnam.

00:20:08.000 How come no one assassinated him from the military industrial complex?

00:20:11.000 Well, that's only one piece that, I mean, his assumption that it was because of Them trying to get out of Vietnam was only one of the assumptions that they made.

00:20:19.000 His other assumptions were the mob.

00:20:22.000 It was the CIA. He wanted to get rid of a lot of the intelligence agencies.

00:20:28.000 He had a real problem with secret societies and secrecy and secrecy in government.

00:20:34.000 He made that famous speech about secret societies.

00:20:38.000 Right.

00:20:39.000 Well, and again, it's complicated by the fact that we did try to invade Cuba using Cuban nationalists in the Bay of Pigs.

00:20:46.000 That was a disaster.

00:20:48.000 Also, Operation Northwoods.

00:20:50.000 Operation Northwoods.

00:20:51.000 That's one of the creepiest ones.

00:20:53.000 Oh, totally.

00:20:53.000 The fact that that was a real conspiracy, that they were really planning on blowing up a drone jetliner and blaming it on the Cubans.

00:21:02.000 They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, all to get us to go to war with Cubans. 0.90

00:21:08.000 Pretty wild that that was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by Kennedy.

00:21:13.000 And McNamara.

00:21:14.000 He didn't go for it either.

00:21:15.000 But this is an example, again, of constructive conspiracism.

00:21:19.000 It's not irrational to think that a lot of conspiracy theories might be true because enough of them have been, you know, or co-intel pro.

00:21:27.000 Right.

00:21:27.000 Where the FBI was sending in agents to act as social justice activists in American Indian movement, feminist groups, the Black Panthers, and so on, including blackmailing Martin Luther King Jr.,

00:21:44.000 recording his sexcapades in hotel rooms.

00:21:47.000 I mean, our government was doing this?

00:21:49.000 What?

00:21:50.000 Yeah.

00:21:50.000 The guy who assassinated Martin Luther King...

00:21:54.000 Ray.

00:21:56.000 Ray.

00:21:57.000 Jesus Christ.

00:21:58.000 It escapes me.

00:22:00.000 What is his name?

00:22:03.000 James Earl Ray.

00:22:04.000 James Earl Ray.

00:22:04.000 I always forget that guy's name for some reason.

00:22:08.000 But I talked to Mike Baker, who was formerly with the CIA. I use air quotes formally.

00:22:14.000 He had investigated that for his television show and he said that is one of the weirdest ones because that guy was funded in some strange way.

00:22:23.000 Like he was kind of a loser and then all of a sudden he had money and there was someone he believes was involved in aiding that guy to assassinate Martin Luther King.

00:22:35.000 Again, so like we have the WikiLeaks, okay? 0.93

00:22:39.000 Millions and millions of top secret documents.

00:22:41.000 Why is there no mention of 9-11 as an inside job?

00:22:44.000 Some documentation of somebody inside.

00:22:46.000 Maybe 9-11 wasn't an inside job.

00:22:48.000 Maybe that's why.

00:22:49.000 And why is there nothing about JFK or the fake moon landing?

00:22:53.000 Nothing like that.

00:22:53.000 So we would expect, if X was true, that the following should happen.

00:22:58.000 WikiLeaks didn't get all of the documents that the government has ever hidden.

00:23:02.000 That's a weird way to connect the dots there, Mr. Shermer.

00:23:06.000 I'm disconnecting the dots.

00:23:07.000 Are you working for the governor or the government?

00:23:10.000 What's going on with you?

00:23:12.000 I'm an agent of disinformation.

00:23:13.000 I've been accused of that, actually.

00:23:14.000 Have you been?

00:23:15.000 I think I have been, too.

00:23:16.000 It's okay.

00:23:17.000 Yeah.

00:23:18.000 But, I mean, again, how do these systems really work?

00:23:21.000 You know, so this is my kind of conspiracy detection kit.

00:23:25.000 You know, the grander the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is to be true.

00:23:29.000 Like, say, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe.

00:23:33.000 You know, that's a very specific conspiracy theory.

00:23:36.000 Turned out to be true. 0.87

00:23:37.000 They really did do that.

00:23:39.000 And for obvious reasons, profit motive, right?

00:23:41.000 But if you scale up from that, oh, they're trying to control the entire European economy or something like, well, no, that's too big.

00:23:50.000 They're just trying to make money.

00:23:51.000 They're just trying to make money, right?

00:23:52.000 So, you know, the more people that have to be involved, the more elements that have to come. 0.97

00:23:57.000 People are incompetent. 0.95

00:23:58.000 People can't keep their mouth shut. 1.00

00:23:59.000 For the most part.

00:24:00.000 For the most part, yes.

00:24:01.000 Now, to be fair to the other side, you know, if you read about the development of the U-2 spy plane and the AR-71 Blackbird, you know, this was done in Burbank, near where you used to live.

00:24:14.000 And that's right in the heart of LA. How did they do this for all those years and nobody knew about it, right?

00:24:20.000 Well, they were acting on the interests of the government.

00:24:23.000 They were trying to be patriots.

00:24:25.000 They kept their mouths shut because they were trying to win a war against the evil others.

00:24:30.000 Right.

00:24:31.000 So, again, like with the recent UAP sightings, What I want, my initial response is the SR-71 Blackbird was, before it was declassified, there were commercial pilots going, oh my god, there's something going 3,000 miles an hour,

00:24:47.000 50,000 feet above me at 30,000 feet.

00:24:49.000 This is impossible.

00:24:50.000 We don't have anything like that.

00:24:51.000 Well, actually, we did have something like that.

00:24:53.000 So I suspect that some of these UAPs, I think in a decade or two, we're going to find out, oh, we had these incredible drones that could fly at these peaks.

00:25:01.000 I tend to lean towards that as well sometimes.

00:25:04.000 I go back and forth with it.

00:25:05.000 I had Ryan Graves on recently.

00:25:08.000 Yeah, I saw that.

00:25:08.000 It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things with no visible means of propulsion, no technology that we currently know is available could act in the way those things were acting.

00:25:21.000 I wonder if that is what it is, if they have some sort of very advanced drones.

00:25:27.000 I think?

00:25:49.000 And that these people spotted them visually and that they were behaving in a way like, you know, 130 mile an hour winds or completely stationary.

00:25:58.000 I wonder if those are super advanced drones.

00:26:01.000 Another problem with these videos is that they're very grainy, blurry, can't quite make out what's going on.

00:26:07.000 Like the one that looks like it goes in the ocean comes back out.

00:26:10.000 It's not clear that it goes in the ocean because the horizon in the ocean is so blurry, right?

00:26:15.000 So I'm a member of this Galileo project at Harvard, run by Avi Loeb, the head of the astronomy department there.

00:26:21.000 I had Avi on.

00:26:21.000 Yep, I know.

00:26:22.000 And, you know, he's raising money to put cameras, high-resolution cameras, all over the world.

00:26:28.000 Right.

00:26:28.000 Particularly in the places where people like Graves say they—I mean, when Graves told you, we saw these things every day, it's like, every day, there surely must be high-resolution photos of these things.

00:26:39.000 Those jets are not designed to take high-resolution video.

00:26:43.000 They're designed to fight against enemy jets.

00:26:45.000 That's what they're designed for.

00:26:47.000 They're designed to recognize these enemy combatants and engage with them in the most effective way possible.

00:26:53.000 That's not with high-resolution digital video.

00:26:56.000 Right.

00:26:56.000 Well, that would be the solution.

00:27:00.000 We just need better data.

00:27:01.000 Well, I wonder if they want better data.

00:27:04.000 Now, let's assume...

00:27:06.000 Well, we do.

00:27:07.000 But listen, the federal government, imagine they are running top secret programs using advanced drones and the technology that we're not currently aware of, right?

00:27:16.000 And that the United States government has these.

00:27:18.000 They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things.

00:27:22.000 Why would they?

00:27:23.000 Right, but everyone has one of these in their pocket.

00:27:27.000 Yeah, but you can't get digital video of something that's seven miles away moving at, you know, the speed of sound.

00:27:35.000 You're not going to get digital video.

00:27:36.000 That's what we want to do with the Galileo project.

00:27:38.000 And according to Christopher Mellon, a guy who, you know, did work for the Defense Department, he said there are top secret videos and photographs that he's seen or that he's aware of that are pretty spectacular that they don't understand.

00:27:52.000 Right.

00:27:52.000 I've heard him say that.

00:27:53.000 It's like, okay, then let's see him.

00:27:54.000 Yeah, but why would they release that?

00:27:57.000 This is the question.

00:27:58.000 Just like the Blackbird, just like the Stealth Bomber, many of the other projects that they have that were top secret before they became public, why would they release all that information?

00:28:09.000 Probably wouldn't.

00:28:11.000 I wonder what that stuff is.

00:28:13.000 And the fact that it happens so often in that very specific area...

00:28:18.000 You know, who knows?

00:28:20.000 Another thing I was thinking about with the UAPs is in the history of technology, no nation gets very far ahead of any other nation.

00:28:27.000 They either back-engineer it or copy it or steal the secrets and so on.

00:28:31.000 It's not likely we would have anything that the Russians and Chinese wouldn't be pretty close to having also.

00:28:37.000 You know, just think of just the development of jets.

00:28:39.000 Or the development of the nuclear bomb.

00:28:41.000 The nuclear bomb.

00:28:41.000 I mean, the Russians had, you know, so 1945 was Hiroshima and 1949 the Russians, they stole our secrets, right?

00:28:49.000 So this idea that, you know, these are super advanced drones that we have and the Russians and Chinese don't have, it's not likely they would not know the technology that we know, the physics, the aerodynamics and the engineering and all that, because they read the same journals,

00:29:05.000 they do the same research we do.

00:29:07.000 So what do you think it is?

00:29:09.000 Well, I think it's probably multiple things.

00:29:11.000 I think some of them might be drones, just really high-tech drones.

00:29:16.000 Some of them are just blurry videos.

00:29:17.000 I think the one of the sphere inside the cube is probably a balloon.

00:29:23.000 A balloon?

00:29:24.000 A balloon that stands stationary at 130-mile-an-hour winds?

00:29:28.000 Appears to stand stationary.

00:29:30.000 Appears with the most sophisticated tracking devices that these military jets have.

00:29:35.000 I know.

00:29:35.000 These are anomalies.

00:29:36.000 So we just need better data.

00:29:37.000 But why would you think it's a balloon?

00:29:38.000 Well, what else would it be?

00:29:40.000 Okay, it might be a drone.

00:29:43.000 It's certainly probably not an alien spacecraft and so on.

00:29:46.000 Certainly probably not.

00:29:47.000 Why do you say that?

00:29:48.000 Well, this kind of gets into the argument of the SETI program.

00:29:52.000 There's so much empty space out there, the chances of them finding us are pretty slim.

00:29:58.000 Really?

00:29:58.000 But we find planets all the time.

00:30:02.000 Yeah, but telescopes, not visiting.

00:30:05.000 Right, telescopes and satellites and all sorts of things that we send into space.

00:30:10.000 But we find planets all the time that are in the Goldilocks zone.

00:30:14.000 And we have a very relatively unsophisticated in terms of like what we'd expect from something that's capable of intergalactic travel.

00:30:22.000 Relatively simple technology in comparison to what we would think.

00:30:27.000 If you took what we have today and you increased our capabilities, you know, a thousand years from now.

00:30:34.000 You could imagine that it would be quite easy for someone to at least send a drone from another planet to visit Earth and observe.

00:30:42.000 This is the Fermi paradox.

00:30:43.000 Yes.

00:30:44.000 That you know of.

00:30:45.000 And where are they?

00:30:46.000 Well, of course, most scientists like him don't think that they're here.

00:30:49.000 So I separate two questions.

00:30:51.000 Most scientists?

00:30:52.000 Michio Kaku thinks they're here.

00:30:54.000 He's been a little fuzzy about that.

00:30:56.000 He's not totally committed to that.

00:30:58.000 He's totally committed.

00:30:59.000 You think so?

00:30:59.000 He was here and he talked about it on the podcast.

00:31:02.000 He said for the longest time he was a skeptic.

00:31:04.000 Oh yeah, that's right.

00:31:05.000 Okay, he has kind of come down on that side a little bit.

00:31:08.000 But why would you be firm on that?

00:31:10.000 When you think about the fact that there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe.

00:31:15.000 Yes, yes, yes.

00:31:16.000 Let's separate two questions.

00:31:17.000 Are they out there?

00:31:18.000 Have they come here?

00:31:18.000 Are they out there?

00:31:19.000 Almost certainly.

00:31:21.000 Right.

00:31:21.000 I would say 99.9% they're out there.

00:31:24.000 I would agree with you.

00:31:25.000 100 billion stars in our galaxy, 100 billion to a trillion galaxies, just do the numbers.

00:31:29.000 Yeah.

00:31:29.000 No matter how improbable it is you get from bacteria to big brains and civilization, it's going to happen.

00:31:34.000 Right.

00:31:35.000 But have they come here?

00:31:38.000 Okay, so how good is the evidence for that?

00:31:40.000 Not very.

00:31:41.000 It's pretty thin, right?

00:31:43.000 It's anecdotal.

00:31:45.000 It's human eyewitnesses.

00:31:46.000 It's blurry videos, grainy photos. 0.99

00:31:50.000 If they were here, damn it. 0.90

00:31:52.000 Pick up the widget on the dashboard and bring it back here. 0.96

00:31:56.000 But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the data that they've acquired, when they're looking at something like Commander David Fravor, who, when they were off the coast with the Nimitz, when they tracked that thing that went from above 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second,

00:32:18.000 what's that?

00:32:19.000 I don't know.

00:32:20.000 What is that thing that they have visual contact by multiple sources, and they tracked it, and they have video of this thing moving off at insane rates of speed?

00:32:31.000 What's that?

00:32:32.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:32:33.000 This is the problem with anomalies.

00:32:34.000 No theory explains everything.

00:32:36.000 But if there was any evidence that pointed to something that operated in a way that we can't comprehend any of the known technologies being able to reproduce, that's one of them.

00:32:47.000 But no technologies come out of a vacuum like that.

00:32:50.000 They always build on previous technologies.

00:32:52.000 Right, but if you're talking about something from another planet or something from another civilization that we're not aware of that's on Earth, maybe that lives in the water.

00:33:01.000 We don't know.

00:33:02.000 We don't know.

00:33:03.000 And when you're seeing these things, when you're talking about people that are the best fighter pilots that we have available, that are operating with the most sophisticated fighter jets, with tracking systems that are constantly being updated, and then when they update them,

00:33:19.000 they start picking up these things, like Ryan Graves discussed on the podcast.

00:33:24.000 Why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else?

00:33:29.000 It depends on how you want to, like, pose the problem.

00:33:33.000 So here's how I think about it.

00:33:34.000 So I take Leslie Keen's book on UFOs and, you know, pilots and generals go on the record and so on.

00:33:41.000 In that book, she says 90 to 95 percent of all sightings have perfectly normal explanations.

00:33:47.000 I would probably agree that's true.

00:33:49.000 So the question is, what do we do with that other 5 percent of anomalies?

00:33:53.000 No theory explains everything.

00:33:54.000 There's always going to be anomalies in every scientific theory.

00:33:57.000 What do you do with it?

00:33:58.000 Nothing.

00:33:59.000 You assign it to a graduate student to figure it out.

00:34:01.000 That's future research.

00:34:03.000 Rather than going to a grand theory of visitation by aliens or the Russians or Chinese have these super advanced technologies that we don't have or we have them and they don't have.

00:34:13.000 I mean, again, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something pretty close to that.

00:34:18.000 There's nothing from the videos in Ukraine of any Russian drones that act anything like these UAPs.

00:34:25.000 Surely they would use this technology if they had it.

00:34:27.000 Well, we're assuming that those UAPs are military in nature and not something that they use to observe things.

00:34:35.000 Could be.

00:34:36.000 I mean, why would we assume that these things, if they're capable of behaving in this way and they're just some sort of a device that can travel at insane rates of speed, why would we assume that those things can launch missiles or act in a military capacity?

00:34:50.000 Right.

00:34:50.000 And you know there are UAP sightings over Ukraine.

00:34:54.000 Yeah, but okay, so Avi did a nice paper on that showing that these were artillery shells and not what the other people said they thought it was, that it was like a drone or a plane or something weird like that.

00:35:07.000 He showed that if it was what they thought it was, it would have had a much bigger impact going through the atmosphere at that speed and burning up, but it didn't, so these are artillery shells.

00:35:17.000 Anyway, he did a nice paper on that.

00:35:19.000 Interesting.

00:35:20.000 But what about these things that supposedly move far faster than the speed of sound without the sonic boom?

00:35:27.000 Yeah.

00:35:28.000 How is that possible?

00:35:29.000 How is that possible?

00:35:30.000 That's right.

00:35:30.000 It's not.

00:35:31.000 That's where it gets weird.

00:35:32.000 That's where it gets weird, right.

00:35:33.000 But that's where the question is, is it ours?

00:35:36.000 Is it really moving at that speed?

00:35:37.000 Or is it a misperception of the video, a miscalculation?

00:35:41.000 Scientists make miscalculations of these sorts of things all the time.

00:35:44.000 Yeah, that was one of the things that was posed to David Fravor.

00:35:47.000 And he said they have multiple sources of data.

00:35:51.000 It's not just like one system that's monitoring these things.

00:35:54.000 It's multiple systems.

00:35:56.000 Yeah.

00:35:57.000 And I follow these guys.

00:35:58.000 I agree.

00:35:59.000 They are incredibly credible, right?

00:36:02.000 And they have good arguments.

00:36:03.000 What do you do with the anomaly?

00:36:05.000 I think you're an anti-conspiracy theorist.

00:36:08.000 That's what I think.

00:36:08.000 No, I'm a skeptic, Joe.

00:36:10.000 I know you are.

00:36:11.000 I'm just a skeptic.

00:36:11.000 You literally are the editor.

00:36:13.000 What's your position in Skeptic Magazine?

00:36:15.000 I'm the editor-in-chief, publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

00:36:18.000 There it is.

00:36:19.000 You're literally a skeptic.

00:36:19.000 Yeah, that is my day job.

00:36:21.000 Yeah.

00:36:21.000 But it isn't that I don't believe things.

00:36:23.000 I mean, I believe the theory of evolution.

00:36:26.000 I think the Big Bang Theory happened when people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and my quantum physics friends tell me quantum physics is true.

00:36:34.000 This is how we know it.

00:36:35.000 To me, it's weird, spooky.

00:36:37.000 I don't really understand it, but okay.

00:36:39.000 You know, we have tons of evidence.

00:36:41.000 Have you seen some of the new discussions based on the observations from the James Webb telescope that maybe the Big Bang Theory needs to be revisited?

00:36:54.000 Yes, vaguely.

00:36:55.000 It was the expansion rate changing, right?

00:36:58.000 Well, they're getting new data, right?

00:37:00.000 They're constantly getting new data.

00:37:01.000 And we would assume that with more and more sophisticated ways of viewing the known universe, that we could possibly get some new data that would change our ideas of what the theory of the Big Bang theory or the theory of the universe itself would be.

00:37:16.000 And that's one of the things that they're discussing right now.

00:37:19.000 What was that?

00:37:19.000 There was a recent article.

00:37:20.000 What was it in?

00:37:22.000 Which scientific publication they were discussing whether or not the Big Bang Theory needs to be revisited?

00:37:28.000 It was based on the James Webb...

00:37:30.000 Yeah, I did see that.

00:37:31.000 Yeah.

00:37:31.000 I mean, Joe, it would be astonishing if that didn't happen.

00:37:34.000 Right, right.

00:37:35.000 Because, you know, no theory in science is permanent.

00:37:37.000 Especially, like, right...

00:37:38.000 It's not like right now we have all the information about...

00:37:41.000 We have the entire universe mapped out, every planet, everything.

00:37:44.000 We know exactly what it is.

00:37:45.000 We know exactly how old everything is.

00:37:47.000 And we know for sure.

00:37:49.000 We just have a limited ability to look, right?

00:37:52.000 That's it.

00:37:53.000 It's the limitations of our technology.

00:37:54.000 So in the late 90s is when they discovered the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

00:38:00.000 Well, how can that be?

00:38:02.000 Because in an explosion, the initial explosion, the inflation in cosmology is really rapid, then it slows and slows and slows.

00:38:10.000 So it was supposed to slow down in another 10 billion years or something and maybe collapse back on itself.

00:38:15.000 And then they discover, oh my god, no, these Type II supernova, whatever it was, indicate that the expansion is accelerating.

00:38:22.000 So there's this weird force, dark energy, that pushes it away.

00:38:26.000 And dark matter is this proffered thing that explains why galaxies are held together.

00:38:32.000 Because they don't have enough mass to hold them together in the structures that they are, as I understand it, and rotate it the way they're rotating.

00:38:38.000 So there's something else we can't see.

00:38:40.000 So when astronomers talk about dark energy and dark matter to explain these two anomalies, like how could this be, that's not an explanation.

00:38:48.000 It's just a linguistic placeholder until we figure out what it is.

00:38:52.000 So surely there is going to be some discoveries of some kind of new energy or some kind of matter that we don't know of.

00:39:07.000 I mean, what kind of discovery would it take, in terms of UAPs, for you to revisit your position?

00:39:15.000 And say it's highly likely that this is either something that we don't understand that we are observing that's come from somewhere else or something that we don't understand because it's technology that hasn't been released.

00:39:29.000 The actual specimen.

00:39:30.000 The equivalent of the SR-71 Blackbird.

00:39:33.000 I can go to the museum.

00:39:34.000 I can see it, touch it, walk on it.

00:39:36.000 Everybody knows that.

00:39:39.000 Yeah, I do.

00:39:40.000 I do.

00:39:41.000 Nothing's 100%, right?

00:39:43.000 Why is it so fun, though, to think that it's from somewhere else?

00:39:46.000 It's so much more fun to think that we're being visited than to think that our government has some super sophisticated gravity-propelling drones that somehow or another violate our laws of space-time.

00:40:01.000 Why is it so much more exciting to think that?

00:40:03.000 I think it's a religious impulse.

00:40:05.000 I think it's an idea that it feels like we're not alone.

00:40:09.000 And when you think about the narratives from different religions, that there's something, an agent, a person, a being, not just matter, not just the laws of nature.

00:40:20.000 Space daddy.

00:40:21.000 Yeah.

00:40:22.000 Like when Einstein says, well, like Spinoza's God, it's just the laws of nature or God.

00:40:26.000 It's like, that's not particularly comforting.

00:40:28.000 It's like, well, they don't even know I'm here, right?

00:40:31.000 But the idea that they're out there, they're super advanced, and they know we're here, maybe they're even coming...

00:40:36.000 You know, it's like The Day of the Earth Stood Still, right?

00:40:39.000 That was a Christ allegory.

00:40:41.000 Remember, his earthly name was Mr. Carpenter in that film, in the first one, the 1951 film.

00:40:46.000 Oh, right.

00:40:47.000 Klaatu.

00:40:48.000 Klaatu.

00:40:48.000 But his earthly name was Mr. Klaatu Baratu Niktu.

00:40:50.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:40:51.000 Yeah, right.

00:40:52.000 Exactly.

00:40:52.000 And that was really a reflection of...

00:40:55.000 And by the way, in the climax scene where the authorities kill him and they put him in the tomb, it's like the crucifixion of Jesus, and they put him in the tomb, and three days later, he's resurrected.

00:41:07.000 Well, and then she goes to the robot and says, what you just said, and he goes there, burns a hole into the morgue, takes the body, takes it back to the spaceship, lays it on that slab, does some stuff with the lights, and he comes back to life.

00:41:21.000 Now, in the original script...

00:41:23.000 She, the Mary Magdalene character woman, says, Patricia Neal, you mean this is the power that extraterrestrials have?

00:41:30.000 And in the original one, he goes, yeah, we have the power of life and death.

00:41:34.000 And the Breen Censorship Board in 1950 said, no, no, no, you can't say that to the American public.

00:41:39.000 Really?

00:41:39.000 Yeah.

00:41:40.000 The Censorship Board said that?

00:41:41.000 Yeah, there was a Breen Censorship Board that censored films that said, you know, you can't defend religious people is one of their criteria.

00:41:48.000 Offend.

00:41:48.000 Yeah.

00:41:49.000 I think you said defend.

00:41:50.000 Yeah, offend.

00:41:51.000 Yeah.

00:41:52.000 So they changed the script.

00:41:54.000 Now he says something like, oh, no, no, we don't have the power.

00:41:56.000 Only the great spirit in this guy or something has that power.

00:42:00.000 I didn't know that there was a censorship board that would monitor films and say, you can't see these things.

00:42:06.000 Well, it's the same way we have it for ratings, PG ratings.

00:42:08.000 Yeah, but it's science fiction.

00:42:09.000 They had censorship boards for science fiction, but they didn't for vampires.

00:42:12.000 Well, I mean, even Star Trek, the original series, I mean, Roddenberry had to sneak in a lot of anti-Vietnam War commentary through these characters and had to be careful of how they...

00:42:23.000 They were, you know, kind of presented because censorship boards are like that.

00:42:27.000 You know, Captain Kirk, you know, he always got the woman, but, you know, you never saw anything, right?

00:42:32.000 Right.

00:42:32.000 But that's just how things were back then.

00:42:34.000 I didn't know that they would have a censorship board that would say you can't offend religious people by saying that aliens have the power to bring things back from the dead.

00:42:44.000 Right, because there it kind of secularizes God.

00:42:47.000 So in this scenario, I call it Schirmer's Last Law.

00:42:51.000 It was one of my Scientific American columns.

00:42:53.000 Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be indistinguishable from God.

00:42:56.000 Right.

00:42:57.000 Because as you went through the scenario earlier, a thousand years more advanced than us, a million years more advanced than us.

00:43:02.000 Look how far we've come in a hundred years.

00:43:04.000 Extrapolate that out.

00:43:06.000 They'd be able to engineer life forms, probably even engineer entire planetary systems to create Dyson spheres to capture all these fantastic scenarios.

00:43:15.000 That would all be possible if you had sufficient time and intelligence.

00:43:20.000 How would that be any different from what religions think God is?

00:43:24.000 Wasn't there some sort of a recent experiment where they created an artificial life form?

00:43:34.000 What was that thing?

00:43:36.000 We discussed this.

00:43:38.000 They had developed some sort of an artificial embryo.

00:43:43.000 Mm-hmm.

00:43:45.000 You know what I'm talking about?

00:43:46.000 Yeah.

00:43:46.000 Some sort of an artificially created embryo.

00:43:49.000 I think it even had a heartbeat.

00:43:50.000 Yes, that's right.

00:43:52.000 And before that, an artificial genome.

00:43:54.000 Yes.

00:43:54.000 I mean, it's coming, Joe.

00:43:55.000 It's coming.

00:43:56.000 Scientists grow synthetic embryo with brain and beating heart without eggs or sperm.

00:44:00.000 Right.

00:44:01.000 Yeah, I mean, and now extrapolate, go from here to 100,000 years of technology as long as we don't blow ourselves up or have a super volcano kill us all.

00:44:11.000 Scientists from University of Cambridge have created model embryos from mouse stem cells that form a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations of all other organs of the body. 0.98

00:44:21.000 Pretty wild shit. 0.96

00:44:23.000 Well, it's just a molecular machine, you know, life. 1.00

00:44:28.000 And once you know the blueprint, you just print it out.

00:44:32.000 So we're getting there.

00:44:32.000 It's a hard problem, but, you know, it's coming.

00:44:35.000 And it may not happen in our lifetime.

00:44:37.000 You know, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is coming 2030, 2040. Just take it out two centuries, right?

00:44:43.000 It's coming.

00:44:44.000 Something like that is coming.

00:44:46.000 And how would it be any different from what our religions describe God as an omniscient Right.

00:44:53.000 Especially if you go a million years from now, a million years of evolution, we conceivably would have the power of gods.

00:44:59.000 Yeah.

00:45:00.000 It's coming.

00:45:01.000 Yeah.

00:45:02.000 Assuming we live our lives long enough.

00:45:04.000 So if you think of a life form that exists out there, you know, millions of light years away that has achieved this sort of advanced technology, Do you think that they would want to be visiting us and be interested in us with our nuclear power and all of our chaos and our territorial behavior and the fact that we have these thermonuclear weapons and we're pointing them at each other?

00:45:28.000 I think they'd be pretty interested.

00:45:30.000 Or in the plot of many of these, like the Day of the Earth Stood Still, warning us to stop doing this or else.

00:45:36.000 Or intervening.

00:45:38.000 There's been discussions about them hovering over nuclear facilities.

00:45:41.000 Yes, I know about that.

00:45:42.000 But that may be a selection bias of where the cameras are located or where the monitoring of that.

00:45:49.000 Of course, we have more monitoring around our nuclear sites, missile sites.

00:45:52.000 So that could just be an artifact of measurement.

00:45:54.000 But nevertheless, your larger point.

00:45:56.000 Yes, maybe.

00:45:58.000 Yes, maybe.

00:45:59.000 Got to be skeptical.

00:46:00.000 Well, not in principle just because you're a cynic or, you know, a nihilist.

00:46:08.000 Not for that reason.

00:46:09.000 The question is, you know, what should we believe?

00:46:12.000 You know, justified true belief.

00:46:14.000 What should I believe is true?

00:46:15.000 Some things are true.

00:46:16.000 Some things are not.

00:46:17.000 I want to believe the correct things.

00:46:19.000 How do I know?

00:46:20.000 So this is what science has kind of developed, science and rationality, over the centuries.

00:46:25.000 Okay, so we know we're biased.

00:46:26.000 We know we have to be careful about the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and so on.

00:46:30.000 So we have to set up some kind of system where it's not just me claiming it.

00:46:35.000 You can look at it, too.

00:46:36.000 You can run the experiment.

00:46:37.000 Here's how I did it.

00:46:38.000 You do it.

00:46:39.000 And when that's not done, we have all kinds of problems, like the replication crisis in psychology and medical science over the last decade or so.

00:46:47.000 Some significant two-digit percentage of these experiments can't be replicated.

00:46:51.000 Even though they went through peer-reviewed professional journals and they were done by professional scientists at real universities and so on, So it's hard to know what to believe.

00:47:02.000 There's also a problem of basing science on falsified studies, like the Alzheimer's issue that they're dealing with now.

00:47:09.000 The whole amyloid plaque thing where they found out that a lot of... 0.95

00:47:14.000 I don't want to butcher this because obviously I'm not a scientist, but there's a series of Alzheimer's drugs that were based on research that was falsified.

00:47:26.000 And they're finding this out now.

00:47:28.000 And this is a terrible thing for people that have invested their health in these medications, people that have promoted these medications, that this was all based on falsified data.

00:47:40.000 Or how about the- Find that, because that's pretty fascinating.

00:47:44.000 Because that, here it is, this is a legitimate conspiracy.

00:47:48.000 Neuroscience Image Sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer's articles threatening a reigning theory of the disease.

00:47:56.000 That's terrifying to find out that the people that are responsible for doing these experiments falsified.

00:48:03.000 Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University, got a call that would plunge him into a maelstrom.

00:48:10.000 Of possible scientific misconduct.

00:48:12.000 A colleague wanted to connect him with an attorney investigating an experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease called semifilam.

00:48:21.000 The drug's developer, Cassava Sciences, claimed an improved cognition, partly by repairing a protein that can block sticky brain deposits of the protein amyloid beta, a hallmark of Alzheimer's.

00:48:34.000 The attorney's clients, two prominent neuroscientists who are Also, short sellers who profit if the company's stock falls believe some research related to simulflam may have been fraudulent according to a petition later filed on the behalf of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

00:48:50.000 So this is a huge scandal in medical science.

00:48:57.000 Right.

00:48:57.000 And this one appears to be more fraud than just error.

00:49:00.000 Right.

00:49:01.000 Or bias.

00:49:02.000 Right.

00:49:03.000 That's horrible, right?

00:49:04.000 Yeah, this is what whistleblowers are for.

00:49:06.000 Often these things are exposed through insiders.

00:49:08.000 I mean, almost always.

00:49:09.000 Rare that a journalist from the outside discovers that he's usually a grad student or something that's suspicious of what the mentor professor is doing.

00:49:17.000 So that's a problem, right?

00:49:19.000 So that's why you have to disclose any financial connections you have to companies.

00:49:25.000 That might be affiliated with a drug that could treat the thing you're studying, that sort of thing.

00:49:30.000 So there's more pressure to do that.

00:49:32.000 There was another big meta-analysis on SSRIs, the antidepressants, showing big massive meta-analysis.

00:49:39.000 50 years we've been prescribing these SSRIs for depression, and they do no better than nothing or just chance or just talking to friends or whatever.

00:49:49.000 Well, also that this idea that it's a chemical imbalance of the brain is not based on science.

00:49:56.000 Yeah, well, it's based on something, but it's probably incorrect science.

00:50:00.000 Yeah, fraudulent.

00:50:02.000 I don't know if it's fraudulent.

00:50:03.000 You know, that's a pretty hefty charge to heave on a scientist.

00:50:07.000 That's the end of their careers, the end of their lives.

00:50:08.000 If they get convicted of actual fraud, they'll never work again.

00:50:12.000 That's different than making errors.

00:50:14.000 Well, this Alzheimer's thing is certainly based on fraud.

00:50:17.000 It looks like it.

00:50:18.000 And it looks like it was successful for decades, which is terrifying.

00:50:22.000 Yeah.

00:50:22.000 Well, and there's dozens of examples like this from, say, the last 50 years.

00:50:26.000 Sure.

00:50:27.000 But it's still rare, and usually scientists that figure it out and then call them out.

00:50:31.000 Yeah, ultimately.

00:50:33.000 I like to think of it that it works.

00:50:36.000 Reasonably well, right?

00:50:37.000 I mean, we find out about the errors, the mistakes.

00:50:40.000 I mean, creationists always used to point out the errors that evolutionary biologists made, therefore God did it, right?

00:50:46.000 The theory is not sound, right?

00:50:47.000 But it was always scientists that disclosed that the error was made by other scientists.

00:50:51.000 Right, differences.

00:50:52.000 Scientists do have – there is an incentive to uncover these things.

00:50:57.000 Right, right, right.

00:50:59.000 So now there's a movement afoot to kind of have scientists say ahead of time, post on these websites, this is the experiment I'm going to do.

00:51:10.000 Here's exactly what I'm going to do.

00:51:12.000 I will report all of the data.

00:51:13.000 So then you avoid the file drawer problem where you only publish the successful ones, the rest go in the file drawer that are not successful.

00:51:20.000 I mean, a lot of major journals will not publish replication experiments.

00:51:25.000 They're not interested in that.

00:51:26.000 They want cutting-edge new research.

00:51:27.000 Well, this is a problem because, again, if you have this theory and no one can replicate it, but no one wants to publish the non-replication because it's not interesting, then you can go down this rabbit hole of an error perpetrating for decades.

00:51:43.000 How can they mitigate these problems?

00:51:47.000 Well, that would be one way, you know, just transparency.

00:51:49.000 Right.

00:51:49.000 But how could they mitigate the issue of a lack of transparency?

00:51:53.000 Is it funding?

00:51:54.000 Is it promotion of these?

00:51:57.000 Okay, so some of the publisher perish pressure leads.

00:52:01.000 There's studies on why scientists commit fraud, and it's, again, like conspiracies.

00:52:05.000 It's not a big, grand thing.

00:52:06.000 It's just like he wants to get tenure.

00:52:08.000 Right, right, right, right.

00:52:10.000 Just keep his job.

00:52:11.000 I remember one of the most interesting podcasts you had with Edward Snowden.

00:52:15.000 And you guys were talking about conspiracies, and he starts talking about, let me tell you how it really works.

00:52:20.000 Behind closed doors, it's just bureaucrats trying to keep their job, right? 0.97

00:52:24.000 So they're ramping up the threat of terrorism because if we don't have a threat, then we're going to lose our funding, right?

00:52:29.000 So very narrow.

00:52:30.000 I just want to keep our funding for our department.

00:52:32.000 And a lot of science works that way.

00:52:35.000 Without, let's say, external private money, you know, there's massive competition for public government money for research.

00:52:45.000 And that leads to these, you know, I'll just report the positive ones.

00:52:49.000 I'll kind of throw out these data points because they're too extreme, and that'll bring my p-value level to where I need it.

00:52:57.000 It's called p-hacking. 1.00

00:52:58.000 And, you know, the p-value is the probability of it being chance rather than a real effect.

00:53:02.000 And it's set at 0.05 or 0.01, and maybe you're at 0.06.

00:53:07.000 You go, well, I got this outlier data point here, so I'm just going to not count that.

00:53:11.000 Then all of a sudden now your p-value's at.04.

00:53:14.000 Oh, I'm in!

00:53:15.000 Now I can publish it.

00:53:16.000 You know, this used to happen a lot.

00:53:17.000 Now there's pressure, like, no p-hacking, right? 0.99

00:53:20.000 P-hacking. 0.97

00:53:22.000 So it's kind of the shift in norms.

00:53:24.000 Like in journalism is kind of going through this now.

00:53:27.000 You know, where's the fact checkers?

00:53:29.000 And the editors of the editors?

00:53:31.000 And, you know, the editor's editor should have editors, right?

00:53:34.000 Right, right, right.

00:53:35.000 And, you know, because too much gets published.

00:53:37.000 Right, who's managing the managers?

00:53:39.000 Yeah, or, you know, like, just think about, like, the Kyle Rittenhouse story, right?

00:53:44.000 And there's a bunch like that, that it fed a certain narrative, so it got published as a certain way.

00:53:49.000 And then it's like, oh, you know, weeks later, months later, when they dig into it, it's like, okay, well, that was misinterpreted.

00:53:54.000 Why did that happen?

00:53:56.000 Or the kitty litter boxes in schools from last week.

00:53:59.000 That got spread around as a meme because it kind of fit the conservative view of liberals and their confusion about gender and sex.

00:54:08.000 But the kitty litter boxes is a weird one.

00:54:11.000 It is weird.

00:54:12.000 It's more like an urban legend.

00:54:13.000 I fed into that.

00:54:14.000 I should probably clarify that a little bit.

00:54:16.000 I have a friend, and my friend's wife is a schoolteacher.

00:54:20.000 And she told him that there was discussions in the school that a mother wanted to put a litter box in one of the bathrooms.

00:54:29.000 And he told me this, and I talked about it on here, and then people were saying, that's not true, it's an internet rumor.

00:54:35.000 So I contacted him again, and I said, tell me exactly what she said and contact her and find out.

00:54:40.000 She no longer works for that school, she works for another school.

00:54:43.000 She contacted the other school, she didn't get a response.

00:54:46.000 I don't think they actually did it.

00:54:49.000 I think there was discussions about doing it because there was one particularly wacky mother, but it doesn't seem that there's any proof that they put a litter box in there.

00:54:57.000 The reason why I was interested in it and willing to entertain it was...

00:55:02.000 It was about 10 years or so ago, we went to, there was a UFC in Pittsburgh.

00:55:07.000 And when we went there, as we landed where we're driving from the airport to the hotel, we see all these people with mascot outfits on.

00:55:17.000 We're like, what is going on?

00:55:19.000 And we talked to this guy and he said, there's a furry convention in town.

00:55:23.000 Right.

00:55:24.000 And I said, wow, this is crazy.

00:55:25.000 So they all decided to get together.

00:55:27.000 So they were at bars and on the streets, and it was like a get-together.

00:55:30.000 They used to do it in San Diego, but at the time, San Diego was a little bit more conservative, and they were having a hard time doing it, so they moved it to Pittsburgh.

00:55:37.000 And this was the year they moved it to Pittsburgh.

00:55:39.000 This is according to him.

00:55:40.000 So we check into the hotel.

00:55:42.000 The hotel, the guy who was working the front desk was saying how crazy it was that these folks were asking for their food to be delivered in bowls on the ground so they could eat it like animals.

00:55:54.000 And I'm like, that is crazy.

00:55:55.000 And then he said, they asked for a litter box in the lobby.

00:56:00.000 Yeah.

00:56:01.000 Now, they didn't put a litter box into the lobby, but someone, according to this man, asked him for a litter box.

00:56:07.000 I'm like, that is crazy.

00:56:09.000 So I went and did a deep dive online.

00:56:12.000 I went to forums where furries go, because I was trying to find, like, is this a thing?

00:56:17.000 Do they like to use litter boxes?

00:56:19.000 Out of all of my searching, I could only find one poster, one guy who said he had used a litter box.

00:56:28.000 So this one person who was saying that he thought it was kinky and he liked to use it, he, they, it, them, whatever, liked to use a litter box.

00:56:37.000 So that was all I could find.

00:56:39.000 So is that something that people do or is it something that people talk about doing because it's fun?

00:56:46.000 I don't know.

00:56:47.000 But one of the things that I found about these furries is like it's sexual in some sort of weird way. 0.98

00:56:54.000 They like to get together and have sex with their furry outfits on. 0.98

00:57:00.000 And they don't want people to know who they are. 0.95

00:57:04.000 They want to keep the outfits on.

00:57:06.000 So it's a cosplay kind of thing.

00:57:07.000 Yeah, it's like a cosplay kink thing that some people engage in. 0.99

00:57:10.000 How that got connected to gender, I do not understand.

00:57:14.000 Because it seems to be a completely different sort of kink. 0.87

00:57:18.000 But what I think people have concern with is that it's nonsense.

00:57:22.000 And if this nonsense starts getting into schools, because there are...

00:57:27.000 Jamie, what was the thing that you were telling me that someone was telling you about one kid thinks they're a wolf?

00:57:33.000 I honestly don't know.

00:57:35.000 I think they're trolling.

00:57:38.000 I think there's something that happened on TikTok.

00:57:40.000 It got out of hand.

00:57:41.000 In that film, what is a woman? 1.00

00:57:44.000 Oh, there was that one person that said that they were a wolf.

00:57:46.000 You can always find somebody.

00:57:48.000 There is a report from ABC, though, where they went and talked to a bunch of younger kids and parents that were having a meeting, and they're like, our kids like to dress up and talk this way.

00:57:56.000 But you should see how different they are when they do it.

00:57:58.000 They went from being very reserved to outgoing.

00:58:01.000 Right, because it allows them to, when they pretend that they're a wolf, they can just be freer.

00:58:07.000 So maybe they're very shy, introverted kids, and this allows them some form of escapism.

00:58:15.000 Like you said, like a cosplay type thing.

00:58:17.000 Yeah, but so what happens then is—so there's an element of truth to the—and this is true with conspiracy theories—a little element of truth, and then it gets blown up into something else.

00:58:27.000 And then if it gets politicized, oh, that's just the sort of thing those libtards would do in these schools of trying to groom our children. 1.00

00:58:33.000 Then you get a moral panic.

00:58:35.000 It's like the satanic panic of the 1980s.

00:58:37.000 It started with that McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach.

00:58:40.000 Yes.

00:58:41.000 We'll talk about that because that's pretty crazy.

00:58:43.000 Totally crazy.

00:58:44.000 So this was kind of in the time in psychology where Freudianism, sort of unconscious memories of things and so on were becoming popular.

00:58:55.000 And there was this idea that, you know, there's a lot of molestation and secret satanic cults.

00:59:02.000 All over America.

00:59:04.000 And there's a lot of these kind of preschools.

00:59:06.000 So the McMartin preschool case was based on children telling these fantastic stories about the stuff that was going on at the day school.

00:59:15.000 Now, you have kids.

00:59:16.000 I have kids.

00:59:16.000 It's like, how?

00:59:17.000 This is impossible for parents not to know this.

00:59:19.000 Oh, they have tunnels, underground tunnels where they have horses. 0.94

00:59:22.000 They take them out to Catalina, and they do these satanic things to them.

00:59:26.000 And what, the parents?

00:59:27.000 No one noticed this?

00:59:28.000 And they were kind of coaching the kids when they were asking the kids these questions, like, what did they do?

00:59:33.000 Did they do this?

00:59:34.000 And the kids were like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:36.000 Remember the anatomical dolls, anatomically correct dolls?

00:59:39.000 Show me where they touched you.

00:59:40.000 Show me where he touched you, right?

00:59:41.000 Right, right.

00:59:41.000 And worse, you know, they separate the kids from their parents.

00:59:44.000 Right.

00:59:45.000 Mom's outside and the little kid's scared to death in this room.

00:59:48.000 Yeah.

00:59:48.000 And then he's like, okay, he touched me there.

00:59:50.000 Can I go back to my mommy now, you know?

00:59:52.000 Right.

00:59:52.000 And then this ruined people's lives and careers, and these people were accused of these horrible things that it turns out they did not do.

00:59:59.000 They didn't do.

01:00:00.000 Before the OJ trial, this was the longest and most expensive trial in California history, that McMartin preschool case.

01:00:04.000 But it launched this kind of satanic panic around America.

01:00:07.000 There's one of these cults in every city.

01:00:09.000 And finally, the FBI got involved and said, all right, we better look into this.

01:00:12.000 And they found nothing.

01:00:14.000 Okay, you can always find some weirdo who's a Satanist, right?

01:00:18.000 And maybe they do some weird things with a cat or something, or a cat gets mutilated by a dog, and then you got the Satanist, he's over there, and then the mutilated cat was found over there, there must be some connection, and before you know it, you get this spiraling moral panic.

01:00:32.000 Right.

01:00:33.000 And it was similar to the recovered memory movement in the 90s that when we started in 92, we started covering this because it was the same kind of thing where these were adult, mostly women, going into therapy for various issues, sleep problems, depression, weight issues, whatever.

01:00:48.000 And the therapist who had bought in all this Freudian stuff that you suppress, you suppress your memories, and we can get them out as if memory is like a video recording, and you can watch it on the little Cartesian theater of your mind as if there's a little homunculus in there looking at the screen.

01:01:06.000 Okay, play back for me what your father did.

01:01:08.000 Now, they don't start off like that.

01:01:10.000 They just go, okay, so what are your issues?

01:01:12.000 And the client says what the issues are.

01:01:14.000 Well, you know, some people that have those symptoms were molested when they were children.

01:01:18.000 Well, no, that didn't happen to me.

01:01:20.000 Well, I know you don't think it happened to you.

01:01:22.000 But in fact, we know about repressed memories that you repress the memory of that trauma because it's so traumatic.

01:01:28.000 Really?

01:01:29.000 Yeah.

01:01:29.000 How do I know?

01:01:30.000 Okay, have you ever had a dream or ever had fleeting thoughts about this, this, and this?

01:01:34.000 Yeah, I think I might have.

01:01:36.000 So six months later...

01:01:38.000 Now the person thinks, I think this actually happened to me.

01:01:40.000 And then there's this big moment of confrontation with the father, grandfather, uncle, whoever it is.

01:01:45.000 And, of course, they're just in a state of shock, like, this is horrible.

01:01:49.000 And then it got worse where they were actually tried, put on trial.

01:01:53.000 And some of these guys were convicted based on nothing other than one of these recovered memories.

01:01:58.000 That's a real issue with hypnotic regression, right?

01:02:01.000 You can introduce thoughts into people's minds.

01:02:03.000 You know, that was an issue with John Mack's work.

01:02:07.000 You're aware of John Mack?

01:02:08.000 John Mack, who was a psychologist out of Harvard, he wrote a book called, it was called Abduction, I believe it was?

01:02:15.000 Abducted.

01:02:16.000 And it was all about UFO abductees.

01:02:19.000 Right.

01:02:19.000 And it was a similar situation where they were using hypnotic regression.

01:02:24.000 And the problem was the way the questions were formulated and the way these hypnotic regression sessions were conducted, a lot of people thought was extremely unscientific and in fact could have introduced these ideas.

01:02:37.000 Because one of the things was like, oh, this is a uniform tale that everyone keeps telling.

01:02:42.000 Okay, well, do you have the same person asking these people these questions?

01:02:45.000 And how are they doing this?

01:02:47.000 And do they have a vested interest, like perhaps maybe they're publishing a book?

01:02:51.000 Do they have a vested interest in trying to make this a narrative?

01:02:55.000 And it turns out, yeah, that seems to be the case, that they were asking these people these very leading questions and taking them through these hypnotic regression sessions, and they were all convinced that they were abducted by aliens.

01:03:09.000 Yeah, the pioneering researcher on this, Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who studies memory, she made famous these studies of where you show people like a video of a car accident, and you ask one group, how fast would you estimate the cars are traveling when they collided?

01:03:24.000 Second group, how fast would you estimate the cars were traveling when they smashed into each other?

01:03:28.000 The latter one gets a higher estimated speed.

01:03:31.000 Or you show subjects a little 30-second video clip of somebody sitting on a park bench and some guy walks up and grabs her purse and runs off.

01:03:40.000 All right, what color was his hat?

01:03:43.000 Oh, it was a blue hat, it was a baseball hat, it was a knit cap, and so on.

01:03:46.000 The guy wasn't wearing a hat at all.

01:03:48.000 All right, so just asking the question.

01:03:51.000 Now the memory is corrupted.

01:03:54.000 Now the person thinks the person had a hat.

01:03:56.000 That's the new memory, right?

01:03:57.000 Right.

01:03:57.000 Her most famous research was on the lost in a mall.

01:04:00.000 So these are adult subjects who had been screened, and they know that when they were children they were never lost in a mall, right?

01:04:08.000 But they introduced, amongst many things that they were talking about, do you remember the time when you were five, because your parents told us about this, when you were lost in the mall?

01:04:16.000 Oh, yes.

01:04:17.000 Oh my god, it was terrible.

01:04:18.000 I was so scared.

01:04:20.000 And then I remember hearing the voice of my mom, and then this guy helped me, and he was wearing this flannel shirt, and he took me to my mommy, and so on.

01:04:27.000 And so they just make up this complete...

01:04:28.000 It never happened.

01:04:29.000 She just made that up on the spot.

01:04:32.000 So we have this little internal storyteller to try to make sense of this chaotic world.

01:04:36.000 And so the moment you get new information, you've got to try to fit it somewhere in there.

01:04:39.000 What's the narrative?

01:04:40.000 How does this fit with my life?

01:04:41.000 Well, this goes back to what we were talking about with chaotic events and eyewitness testimony.

01:04:46.000 Yeah.

01:04:46.000 It's always screwed up.

01:04:48.000 Not reliable.

01:04:49.000 Not reliable at all.

01:04:50.000 No.

01:04:51.000 No, and so what do we do about it?

01:04:53.000 Because in the criminal justice system, back to our signal detection problem, right?

01:04:57.000 You got the guy sitting there.

01:04:59.000 Is he guilty?

01:05:00.000 If he's really guilty and you find him guilty, then that's good.

01:05:03.000 That's a hit, right?

01:05:04.000 But if he's really innocent and you find him guilty, that's really bad, right?

01:05:08.000 So we have this kind of what's called the Blackstone ratio of 10 to 1. Better 10 guilty people go free than that one innocent person be found guilty.

01:05:17.000 And so the criminal justice system has the same problem.

01:05:20.000 Before DNA and some of that forensic evidence, it was all eyewitness, and it's terrible.

01:05:26.000 So the Innocence Project has, as you know, exonerated, I don't know, 300-and-something people, many of them on death row, for crimes they never committed.

01:05:34.000 And that's the problem.

01:05:35.000 Even like forensic stuff you see on CSI, you know, the bite marks or the hair analysis of the fabric, even that's not very well tested and replicated.

01:05:46.000 No.

01:05:47.000 In fact, Josh Dubin, who worked with the Innocent Project, talked about that.

01:05:51.000 He has a podcast on junk science and particularly discuss bite marks about how you can tell people that it was a bite mark from a specific individual and they'll go with it.

01:06:02.000 And then you can show them that that absolutely is not the case.

01:06:05.000 And, you know, this is not like DNA evidence.

01:06:11.000 It's not like something that is absolutely 100% true.

01:06:15.000 Even the polygraph, there's a reason it's not allowed in... 0.99

01:06:18.000 Oh, the polygraph's horse shit. 1.00

01:06:19.000 It's total horse shit. 1.00

01:06:20.000 Yeah, that's horse shit. 1.00

01:06:21.000 You know, someone tells you they passed a lie detector test, like, congratulations, you're a sociopath. 1.00

01:06:25.000 That's right. 0.99

01:06:26.000 It doesn't fucking mean anything. 0.95

01:06:28.000 If you believe it, you're not going to give up. 0.92

01:06:30.000 Also, like, you have to have a very specific response to, like, this question.

01:06:34.000 And everyone's response to stimuli and stress, they vary.

01:06:39.000 Some people are going to react in a certain way, but that's not indicative of evidence like you can absolutely prove.

01:06:46.000 Also, there was a woman who was convicted, I believe, in India from fMRI data of a murder because she had knowledge of the crime scene.

01:07:00.000 And so, like, I discussed this with a neuroscientist in America and she was like, that is absolutely not evidence that that person committed the crime.

01:07:09.000 But if you are in a trial and you have knowledge of the crime scene because they've told you this is the case, this is what they're saying happened, and then they use this fMRI data to show that you have knowledge of the crime, Well, of course you have knowledge of the crime.

01:07:25.000 You're about to go to fucking jail for something you didn't do, and they're telling you, you know, it was Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick.

01:07:32.000 Like, oh, look, through MRI data, we can show she knows about Colonel Mustard. 0.99

01:07:37.000 So I believe this woman was actually convicted.

01:07:40.000 There are people, neuroscientists, trying to figure out how to use MRIs to see if you can see if somebody's lying.

01:07:46.000 I think we're a long ways from that.

01:07:48.000 Long ways.

01:07:48.000 And I did a TV show once, I don't know, 20 years ago for Fox Family, Exploring the Unknown, and we did an episode on the polygraph.

01:07:55.000 So we found this guy, Doug Smith, who is now working. 0.98

01:07:58.000 He's a former cop in Dallas, and he was working with defense attorneys showing why the polygraph is bullshit. 0.88

01:08:04.000 So he had the funniest story where he said, first day on the job, he got the training on how to do the polygraph. 0.96

01:08:09.000 So his first day, his boss says, okay, we got the accused in there.

01:08:14.000 We think he's the perpetrator.

01:08:15.000 Go in there and do the polygraph test.

01:08:17.000 So he does the thing.

01:08:18.000 He comes back, well, boss, I think he's lying.

01:08:21.000 And he goes, yeah, we know he's lying.

01:08:23.000 They're all lying.

01:08:23.000 Get in there and get the confession.

01:08:25.000 He's like, what?

01:08:28.000 Tell him we know he's lying and tell him we got his fingerprints too.

01:08:31.000 You mean you just, yeah.

01:08:33.000 It's like, oh my God.

01:08:34.000 Jesus Christ.

01:08:35.000 Yeah.

01:08:36.000 So he gave up because he thought, oh, you mean this is like planting evidence in a way.

01:08:42.000 It is in a way, right?

01:08:43.000 This is my type specimen for what I call proxy conspiracies.

01:08:47.000 That is, they're a stand-in for something else.

01:08:51.000 The OJ case.

01:08:52.000 OJ was acquitted based on a conspiracy theory that the LAPD planted the bloody glove and the blood splatter and so forth, and the jury accepted it.

01:09:00.000 Now, you know, the evidence is pretty overwhelming.

01:09:02.000 He killed his wife and her friend, and there was no police tampering.

01:09:07.000 There was the one guy, Furman, who was probably a racist, but it wasn't clear that he did anything.

01:09:12.000 But my explanation is that in a way the jury said, yeah, maybe not this time, but the LAPD have done these sorts of things.

01:09:21.000 And there's this great ESPN documentary series called OJ in America.

01:09:25.000 And it's like six hours long and it tracks the history of the African American community post-World War II coming to Southern California.

01:09:32.000 Right.

01:09:32.000 And how bad the relationships were between the LAPD and the African American community, particularly right in downtown LA. And they did plant evidence.

01:09:41.000 They did do things like that, right?

01:09:42.000 So there's an element of truth, back to conspiracism.

01:09:45.000 I think there's some evidence that Furman did plant some evidence.

01:09:48.000 Or if it wasn't for Furman, that there was some evidence that something was planted.

01:09:54.000 Whether it was blood splatter or something.

01:09:57.000 And they use this excuse that they know he's guilty.

01:10:01.000 And so since they know he's guilty, it sort of justifies falsification.

01:10:07.000 That was the argument in the 50s and 60s.

01:10:09.000 Well, I don't know if this guy did it.

01:10:11.000 He's done something.

01:10:12.000 And if he gets off, he's going to commit another crime.

01:10:15.000 So we're doing the justice thing here by planning it.

01:10:20.000 Enough of that has happened that it's reasonable for African Americans to be suspicious. 1.00

01:10:24.000 Same thing with their higher rates of vaccine hesitancy now, recently anyway, because of the Tuskegee experiments, you know, where our government did do these things, right?

01:10:36.000 The syphilis patients that were not treated when they could have been.

01:10:39.000 Without their consent, without their knowledge.

01:10:41.000 I mean, it's Nazi-like experiments. 0.78

01:10:44.000 Let's see what happens if we don't treat them.

01:10:46.000 And it went on for decades.

01:10:47.000 It went on for decades.

01:10:48.000 And most of them died.

01:10:49.000 Their spouses got syphilis.

01:10:51.000 Their children, some of them got, you know, it's terrible.

01:10:53.000 And it's the kind of thing that Nazi, you know, doctors were doing. 0.77

01:10:57.000 And you know about Operation Paperclip, right?

01:11:00.000 Because you had Annie Jacobson on the show.

01:11:02.000 She's really good on these things.

01:11:03.000 Her books are just first-class good journalism on that, where she tracked down.

01:11:08.000 If you put a paperclip on the file, it means we're going to adopt this guy as one of our scientists before the Russians—these are German scientists—before the Russians get him, right?

01:11:16.000 Right.

01:11:17.000 And a lot of these guys were doing chemical warfare experiments, biological warfare experiments, and, of course, Wernher von Braun with the V-2 rockets, the most famous of the paperclip experiments.

01:11:27.000 So enough of that goes on.

01:11:29.000 It's like, wait a minute.

01:11:30.000 On the one hand, we're trying these guys at the Nuremberg trials and executing them for war crimes.

01:11:35.000 And then we have these other guys that did pretty much the same thing.

01:11:38.000 But now they work for us.

01:11:40.000 So there's enough of that.

01:11:41.000 You go, you know what?

01:11:43.000 That was a crazy one because they were just justifying it based on, listen, we're in the middle of a Cold War with Russia, and if we don't get these people, the Russians are going to get them.

01:11:51.000 And yes, they are Nazis, but they're also very advanced scientists, and they have research that could benefit us and our rocket programs and a lot of our other scientific experiments. 0.97

01:12:00.000 It's pretty wild shit when you find out that it's true. 0.97

01:12:03.000 The guy who invented sarin gas, the German chemist, and he lived in... 0.99

01:12:07.000 Fritz Haber.

01:12:08.000 Yeah.

01:12:08.000 No, not Fritz Haber.

01:12:09.000 No, Fritz Haber was the other guy.

01:12:11.000 The other guy.

01:12:11.000 Yeah, the other guy.

01:12:12.000 Mustard gas.

01:12:13.000 Yeah, he invented that and he also invented the Haber method of extracting nitrogen.

01:12:17.000 So they wanted him for Crimes Against Humanity while he was also up for the Nobel Prize for extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere.

01:12:25.000 Same thing with Linus Pauling.

01:12:27.000 He was one of the great scientists of all time.

01:12:29.000 He won two Nobel Prizes, one for peace, one for chemistry.

01:12:33.000 And he was spied on by the FBI. And he was not allowed to go...

01:12:38.000 Well, he was allowed to go collect his one Nobel Prize, but he couldn't go to some conferences because they thought he might be a communist and all this stuff because he was anti-nuclear war.

01:12:48.000 That was during the Red Scare.

01:12:49.000 Yeah.

01:12:49.000 Yeah, during the 50s, right?

01:12:51.000 So again, you think, wait a minute, our government was doing this?

01:12:54.000 Yeah.

01:12:55.000 Well, maybe I should be suspicious about current stuff, right?

01:12:59.000 Well, that's also the MKUltra experiments.

01:13:02.000 You know, there's so many people that were involved in that that, like, one of them was Ted Kaczynski.

01:13:08.000 He was involved in the Harvard LSD experiments and wound up being, you know, a horrible murderer. 1.00

01:13:14.000 Who knows what they did to his fucking brain. 1.00

01:13:17.000 While they were dosing him up with LSD and running these abusive studies on him. 1.00

01:13:21.000 Has that been confirmed by his brother?

01:13:22.000 Yeah.

01:13:22.000 His brother?

01:13:23.000 Yeah.

01:13:24.000 Not only did that, well, he had a horrible background.

01:13:28.000 I thought he was schizophrenic.

01:13:29.000 That too, yeah.

01:13:30.000 Well, when he was a child, he had some sort of an ailment where they took him from his parents.

01:13:37.000 Mm-hmm.

01:14:00.000 Apparently those experiences were very abusive because they were studying what would happen if you give these people LSD and you emotionally and psychologically abuse them.

01:14:10.000 And he had, according to his brother, all sorts of real problems with relationships and other human beings.

01:14:17.000 Just a really damaged human being overall.

01:14:21.000 Did you see Earl Morris' film, Wormwood, about the Frank Olson case?

01:14:25.000 No, I didn't.

01:14:26.000 I heard about it, but I didn't see it.

01:14:27.000 It's quite good.

01:14:27.000 It's a little long.

01:14:28.000 Netflix is cranking out these really long documentary series.

01:14:32.000 They're now to drag you in and keep you there.

01:14:34.000 I'm two hours in and I still have no idea what's going on.

01:14:36.000 Come on! 0.61

01:14:37.000 Get to the point!

01:14:39.000 Yeah, so this was Frank Olson, one of the chemists that worked in the MKUltra program, but they dosed him.

01:14:46.000 He's just at some bar and some club with the other CIA guys, and they said, hey, let's put some LSD. And then like 10 days later, he jumps out of a New York City high-rise window, or did he?

01:15:00.000 And there was evidence that there was a couple of CIA guys that were there.

01:15:04.000 Maybe they pushed him.

01:15:05.000 And then his son, Eric Olson, who's been kind of keeping this story alive.

01:15:09.000 This happened in the 50s.

01:15:11.000 You know, had the body exhumed and there was evidence of like a blow to the head, like a crack in the skull.

01:15:18.000 Like they hit him first and then shoved him out the window.

01:15:21.000 Oh, wow.

01:15:22.000 But, you know, but maybe he hit his head.

01:15:23.000 You know, it's like...

01:15:24.000 And Seymour Hersh was the journalist that kind of tried to track this down.

01:15:30.000 And they couldn't quite get the CIA to...

01:15:33.000 The CIA paid him off.

01:15:34.000 They gave him, I think, $750,000.

01:15:36.000 But they said, but no guilt.

01:15:38.000 We're not going to say we did anything.

01:15:39.000 It's like...

01:15:40.000 This is the problem with conspiracies, right?

01:15:43.000 That some of them are real.

01:15:44.000 Right, right.

01:15:45.000 Yeah, and so when you have someone like Alex Jones, when he was on your show, and I show a clip of this to my class actually last night, you know, where he's ranting on about NASA has this headquarters in San Francisco where they're dosing people to talk to the aliens,

01:16:01.000 you know, he goes off on something, right?

01:16:03.000 But that the CIA was dosing people with, you know, hallucinogenic drugs, that's true.

01:16:09.000 Yeah.

01:16:09.000 Right?

01:16:10.000 And so this is the problem with conspiracy theories is they start off with some element of truth.

01:16:15.000 Yeah, there's some facts there.

01:16:17.000 Okay.

01:16:18.000 And I was talking to Megyn Kelly about this because she came here to Austin, met with Alex, did a whole show when she was with NBC on Alex Jones.

01:16:26.000 Remember that?

01:16:26.000 And then she got a lot of heat for talking to him and letting him speak, as you did.

01:16:30.000 But she said, you know, she has a team of fact checkers at NBC. They go, okay, let's just fact check everything he said.

01:16:37.000 And it's like, you know what?

01:16:38.000 Pretty much everything he said starts off with some little thing.

01:16:40.000 Well, that's actually true, right?

01:16:42.000 And then he spins it off into something else, and this is the problem with conspiracism.

01:16:46.000 Well, it's also the problem with, like, if you're going to find all these different conspiracies, how much time do you have?

01:16:52.000 How much time do you have to investigate all of these in a very thorough manner?

01:16:58.000 It's almost impossible to get to the bottom of every single one of those and have an objective analysis of the facts.

01:17:08.000 I was talking about Tom O'Neill, the book Chaos, where he covered Manson.

01:17:12.000 He wrote that book for 20 years, 20 years on one case.

01:17:17.000 He started off, he was hired to do a article, I forget what magazine it was for, but whatever publication it was for, it was the anniversary of the Manson case. 0.99

01:17:28.000 So he was just supposed to do this little thing about the case, and so he's a really good journalist, and as he goes into this story, he keeps uncovering more and more evidence of fuckery, more and more evidence of There's a bunch of weird shit, 0.98

01:17:44.000 and it becomes obsessed.

01:17:46.000 It takes him 20 years to eventually publish that book, and the book is phenomenal.

01:17:52.000 I can't recommend it enough, because Tom O'Neill is a really good journalist, and the book Chaos is riveting.

01:17:58.000 I mean, even this, you know, that's already long enough, right?

01:18:00.000 Right.

01:18:01.000 And I just barely touch the surface.

01:18:02.000 I like how you connect even the word conspiracy.

01:18:06.000 It also has a C-I-A and S-O-R-O-S Soros. 0.94

01:18:12.000 It's all in there, yeah.

01:18:13.000 Well, when you talk to like schizophrenics and they make those maps of all the connections, That people, this person met that person, who met that person, who met this person, who was in the same airport as that person in 1969. So therefore, they're involved with this, that,

01:18:28.000 and the other thing.

01:18:28.000 It's like...

01:18:29.000 Well, the JFK for that chapter, that took me a long time to write because, again, it's just down the rabbit hole.

01:18:34.000 There's thousands of books.

01:18:36.000 Even Bogliosi's book, I mean, 1,400 pages. 0.92

01:18:39.000 Holy crap, guy. 0.69

01:18:40.000 Come on. 0.88

01:18:40.000 Yeah, that's a lot. 0.88

01:18:42.000 And then remembering it all when you're on page 900. What the fuck did he say on page 100? 0.97

01:18:46.000 He's got to go back and... 0.99

01:18:47.000 The 9-11 truth.

01:18:48.000 Once you go down there, what do I know about explosive devices and how buildings are demolished?

01:18:53.000 You know, someone had a really good point the other day.

01:18:56.000 They were talking to me about this person who was involved in construction.

01:18:59.000 And they were saying, let me explain to you construction in New York City.

01:19:02.000 When they say that that plane could have never taken down those buildings, He goes, when these people...

01:19:08.000 He goes, and I'm not accusing these people of doing it, but I've seen it with my own eyes.

01:19:12.000 When you're supposed to use half-inch steel, if you use quarter-inch steel, it's a lot less money.

01:19:18.000 And then there's a lot of this, and a lot of skimp in here, and a lot of skimp... 0.99

01:19:21.000 There's a lot of...

01:19:22.000 Oh, interesting.

01:19:23.000 He was saying, he goes, you know, they're seeing that in Russia with a lot of the Russian, someone else was explaining this to me, that a lot of these Russian weapons, they're faulty.

01:19:34.000 And one of the reasons why they're faulty is because there's corruption.

01:19:37.000 And the people that are responsible for making them are skimming.

01:19:40.000 They're taking, you know, you're supposed to spend X amount of money. 0.97

01:19:45.000 And so a lot of the shit doesn't even work correctly because of corruption, because there's a bunch of people that are involved that are, you know, they're Profiting in an absurd way. 0.84

01:19:55.000 His point was that the World Trade Center buildings were maybe not up to code? 0.98

01:19:58.000 Exactly.

01:19:59.000 I see.

01:19:59.000 That they weren't made the way they were supposed to be made.

01:20:01.000 Yeah.

01:20:02.000 Well, they probably weren't designed to be able to withstand a plane hit from two commercial airliners full of gas.

01:20:09.000 For sure.

01:20:09.000 Yeah.

01:20:10.000 I remember I was visiting this guy who was a doctor.

01:20:13.000 And this is back when you had to get a medical marijuana license in California.

01:20:17.000 So he was that kind of doctor.

01:20:19.000 I was going to him, and he gives me this book, and he was very loony, and he gives me this book saying that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by Tesla energy.

01:20:30.000 And I'm like, what?

01:20:31.000 And he goes, yeah, there's no way to turn concrete into dust in these buildings.

01:20:37.000 I go, but what about if when concrete smashes? 0.98

01:20:40.000 It's made out of fucking powder that you mix with water. 0.99

01:20:43.000 Wouldn't it just become dust? 1.00

01:20:44.000 And so I'm like breaking down this argument with this guy in the office while I'm trying to get a license for medical marijuana.

01:20:50.000 I'm like, I gotta get my life together. 0.99

01:20:52.000 Like, what the fuck? 0.99

01:20:53.000 What kind of conversations am I having? 0.99

01:20:55.000 Because this guy was imploring me to read this book.

01:20:58.000 I'm like, oh boy.

01:20:59.000 That it was Tesla technology that they used some sort of a...

01:21:03.000 Some sort of a thing.

01:21:04.000 Again, a big event like 9-11, we need a big cause.

01:21:07.000 Ooh, Tesla Energy, that sounds pretty good.

01:21:09.000 For Skeptic, we did an issue on that in which we commissioned an article from a guy that runs a demolition company.

01:21:17.000 This is what he does.

01:21:17.000 He brings big buildings down.

01:21:18.000 And he said, let me tell you how it's done.

01:21:20.000 I mean, you've got to go in there, break down all the drywall, get into the support beams, wrap them up.

01:21:24.000 There's no way this could have happened at the World Trade Center building as well.

01:21:27.000 No one noticed people in their brain.

01:21:30.000 You're constantly putting these detonators everywhere.

01:21:34.000 Yeah, that was the weird argument about Tower 7, too, right?

01:21:38.000 People were saying, look, Tower 7, it felt like a controlled demolition.

01:21:42.000 And it did.

01:21:42.000 It felt like a controlled demolition.

01:21:44.000 But if you see the full video of how it went down, the inside of it collapsed long before the whole building collapsed.

01:21:54.000 There was evidence that it was falling apart.

01:21:55.000 And it burned all day.

01:21:56.000 Well, yeah, it burned all day.

01:21:57.000 And there was diesel generators in the basement.

01:22:00.000 So there's all this diesel fuel that was on fire.

01:22:02.000 So you get extraordinary heat that's weakening the entire structure of this building for hours and hours.

01:22:07.000 And there's evidence that it collapsed at the top.

01:22:10.000 So everyone's like, oh, the way it fell, it was uniformly.

01:22:12.000 Yeah, but it already was falling apart.

01:22:15.000 Like, the whole thing was on fire.

01:22:17.000 You know, what really bothers me about a lot of these is it kind of distracts us from real shenanigans that are probably going on.

01:22:23.000 Like, what was the relationship between the United States government and the Saudi government?

01:22:27.000 Right.

01:22:28.000 Where was that money?

01:22:29.000 Who funded those 9-11 hijackers?

01:22:32.000 Right.

01:22:32.000 Why were the Saudi nationals allowed to leave?

01:22:35.000 Leave the next day.

01:22:35.000 Yeah.

01:22:35.000 It's like, why are we not talking about that?

01:22:38.000 Right.

01:22:39.000 Right.

01:22:39.000 That's real conspiracies.

01:22:41.000 Yeah.

01:22:42.000 Same thing again with the JFK paper.

01:22:44.000 Why aren't they releasing them?

01:22:45.000 I suspect it's because the CIA was up to some other things we don't want other countries to know that we were doing.

01:22:50.000 I'm sure there's some of that.

01:22:52.000 There's always some of that, right?

01:22:53.000 I mean, that's the way they operate.

01:22:56.000 And who knows if that's for our own good or if it's for their good.

01:23:00.000 I mean, there's a reason Castro was tagged as maybe one of the assassins because we tried to kill him.

01:23:04.000 Multiple times.

01:23:05.000 Multiple times.

01:23:06.000 Try to use exploding cigars.

01:23:08.000 And the sea cell conch with a bomb in it where he scuba dives.

01:23:12.000 I remember when they started the embargo with Cuba, when they wouldn't let you get Cuban goods, before they did it, Kennedy famously got boxes and boxes of cigars sent to him. 1.00

01:23:23.000 I'm like, you motherfucker. 1.00

01:23:25.000 Like, you motherfucker. 1.00

01:23:26.000 Like, I enjoy a cigar as much as the next guy, but Jesus Christ. 1.00

01:23:30.000 It's like Governor Newsom.

01:23:31.000 Yeah.

01:23:32.000 You gotta stay home.

01:23:33.000 Will's for thee, but not for me.

01:23:35.000 You gotta stay home, but I'm going to this nice, fresh restaurant.

01:23:37.000 Yeah, but don't worry, I'll be outside.

01:23:40.000 That's right.

01:23:41.000 Yeah.

01:23:41.000 Or Boris Johnson.

01:23:41.000 You know, there was a state trooper that took the photo of him.

01:23:44.000 Oh, it was?

01:23:45.000 No, no, I didn't know that.

01:23:45.000 Yeah, it was a state trooper who was on detail.

01:23:47.000 Right. 1.00

01:23:47.000 They took the photo of him and was like, you motherfucker. 1.00

01:23:50.000 Right. 1.00

01:23:51.000 Making everybody wear a mask and you're in there eating at the French laundry.

01:23:55.000 Right.

01:23:56.000 Yeah.

01:23:56.000 But that's, you know, but that's always the case with people in power.

01:24:00.000 They, you know, they'll come up with things that look good in terms of optics and like these are the measures that we're going to take and everyone has to abide by them except for me.

01:24:09.000 I'm Nancy Pelosi.

01:24:10.000 I want to get my hair done.

01:24:11.000 Right.

01:24:14.000 Here's one of my own pet conspiracy theories.

01:24:16.000 When you get elected president, they take you in a back room and they go, okay, here's what's actually going on.

01:24:20.000 But I said I was going to close Gitmo.

01:24:22.000 Yeah, yeah, you're not going to do that.

01:24:24.000 Oh, yeah, I guess I can't do that.

01:24:25.000 I was going to pull the troops out.

01:24:26.000 No, we can't pull the troops out.

01:24:27.000 What do you think really happens?

01:24:28.000 You think they're just lying when they're making their campaign speeches and they have no intention?

01:24:33.000 I don't think they know, because until you're the nominee, until you're the head nominee and it's close, are you allowed to know what's really going on, right?

01:24:43.000 No way.

01:24:43.000 I mean, I think when Obama won, when he actually won the election, I think that's when they gave him the, whatever they call them, the white papers or the debriefing papers.

01:24:52.000 You know, from the National Security Agency and so on.

01:24:54.000 And I'm pretty sure it's like he had all this list of stuff.

01:24:57.000 This is what I'm going to do.

01:24:59.000 Right.

01:24:59.000 It's like, I can't actually do those things because, all right, so we close Gitmo, then this happens, then this happens.

01:25:04.000 Right.

01:25:05.000 Remember, you wanted to impose the no first, what was it, nuclear weapons, no launch on warning, LOW, no launch on warning because it's too risky.

01:25:14.000 Right.

01:25:14.000 And he said, I'm going to do this.

01:25:16.000 And then it never happened.

01:25:17.000 And I think our NATO ally said, no, no, we want the Russians to think we made a strike at any moment, and not just defensively.

01:25:28.000 And no first use.

01:25:30.000 No, that was it.

01:25:31.000 No first use.

01:25:32.000 And he didn't do it.

01:25:33.000 He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his stance on nuclear weapons and then didn't do that.

01:25:38.000 Yeah.

01:25:38.000 Why?

01:25:39.000 And I think because our NATO allies said, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh, this is in the treaty, you've got to do this.

01:25:44.000 If you don't do that, then the Russians are going to do this and so on, back and forth, back and forth. 0.82

01:25:48.000 Yeah, somebody actually should bring that up during presidential debates.

01:25:51.000 Like, you have no idea what's going on until you get in there, sir.

01:25:53.000 Right.

01:25:54.000 So why even saying that?

01:25:55.000 Right.

01:25:55.000 And then point to the fact that every single president that's ever said they were going to do all these things, once they get in office and they get the information, Yeah, so here's what I'm conflicted about.

01:26:06.000 You know, I'm a big free speech guy.

01:26:07.000 Transparency is key.

01:26:08.000 But I'm sure there are national security secrets that it's probably good we don't know, right?

01:26:14.000 Yeah.

01:26:15.000 You know, this is the world we live in.

01:26:17.000 Right.

01:26:17.000 It's complex.

01:26:19.000 And there are bad people.

01:26:20.000 Yeah.

01:26:21.000 Okay, so my favorite film is A Few Good Men, you know, Jack Nicholson.

01:26:26.000 Yeah.

01:26:26.000 He's schooling Tom Cruise on the stand, you know, son, we live in a world with walls, and on those walls are men with guns, and you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall, you know, and so on.

01:26:36.000 It's like, yeah, he's right, actually.

01:26:38.000 He is right.

01:26:39.000 And that script was written to kind of make parody the conservative militarist position.

01:26:44.000 But in fact, it is correct, right?

01:26:47.000 It'd be better if we lived in a world without political borders and guns and so on.

01:26:51.000 And bad people.

01:26:52.000 And bad people.

01:26:52.000 That's not the world we live in.

01:26:53.000 Yeah, but you just can't imagine that they don't exist and operate as if they don't, because then you put us all in danger.

01:26:59.000 And this is my question for Elon Musk.

01:27:01.000 When we colonize Mars, what are we going to do there?

01:27:04.000 What kind of government?

01:27:05.000 What kind of an economy?

01:27:06.000 How many people are you going to have?

01:27:07.000 Do you have to have police?

01:27:09.000 Do you have to have laws?

01:27:10.000 Because his attitude is, oh, just minimize laws.

01:27:13.000 We're all just going to direct democracy.

01:27:15.000 Everybody votes.

01:27:16.000 Minimum laws because that's where things – yeah, okay, if you have 12 people, that probably works.

01:27:21.000 But if you have 1,200 or 12 million people … Do you think Earth is going to be the new United States?

01:27:26.000 Like the United States was a civilization or was a country rather that was started because people were fed up with the way things were run in Europe and they said, well, we're going to go over here and we're going to – Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and we're going to establish this land of the free.

01:27:42.000 And, you know, it worked out pretty well for a long time. 0.96

01:27:45.000 And, you know, as time goes on, it gets more and more complex and more and more fucked up. 0.95

01:27:50.000 Is it inevitable that government bureaucracies just grow? 0.94

01:27:54.000 They just can't not grow and they get more complex and you need more rules and laws and then you need guns and jails and...

01:28:00.000 It seems like it is.

01:28:01.000 It's just, I mean, you can have as many checks and balances as you can just to keep the growth in check, not too much.

01:28:07.000 Right.

01:28:08.000 But it seems like if you started with 10 people at Mars and then you had 1,000 and then 10,000 and then 100,000 and then a million, you're going to end up with lawyers and courts and mediators and police.

01:28:22.000 So what's the solution to that?

01:28:24.000 How do you mitigate that completely?

01:28:26.000 You don't, I don't think, because of human nature, right?

01:28:28.000 We're naturally selfish.

01:28:29.000 It's part of our nature.

01:28:31.000 And we're avarice, and we're greedy, and that's who we are.

01:28:35.000 I wonder if the solution to that is some sort of an integration with technology.

01:28:41.000 I wonder if things like Neuralink and these new proposed technologies that will increase the bandwidth of the human mind.

01:28:49.000 I wonder if those perhaps will come with an ability to read thoughts and minds and communicate telepathically, which is what I think ultimately...

01:29:00.000 You know, we talk about the evolution of the human body and the human animal from lower primate to what we are today.

01:29:07.000 We assume that it's going to be a biological evolution from here on out, but it might not be.

01:29:12.000 It might be symbiotic.

01:29:14.000 We might be connected to some technology, which seems inevitable.

01:29:18.000 There's another argument from the SETI people, is that if we encounter aliens, they're probably not going to be biological.

01:29:23.000 Right.

01:29:23.000 But they've moved past that.

01:29:25.000 Yeah.

01:29:25.000 Well, that's the fear of artificial intelligence, right?

01:29:28.000 The fear of artificial intelligence that has become sentient and it has no use for us.

01:29:33.000 Yeah, that's an interesting thing.

01:29:35.000 Let's think about that for a second.

01:29:36.000 Because when you say, well, the AA will want to conquer us or want to control us.

01:29:42.000 Wanting is a human emotion.

01:29:43.000 Why would a computer have wants?

01:29:46.000 Yes, that's a really good point.

01:29:48.000 Like, why would it have desires and needs?

01:29:50.000 And all those are based on biological needs, like these primates.

01:30:04.000 Right.

01:30:05.000 Right.

01:30:06.000 Right.

01:30:11.000 If they're sentient and far more intelligent than us, it seems to me that that would be the thing that they would realize right away is a real problem with the programming.

01:30:18.000 Like, why do we have all this nonsense, ego, and all these needs to acquire things and control things?

01:30:24.000 Why is that baked in?

01:30:26.000 Why do we even need to communicate with people?

01:30:28.000 If sentient artificial intelligence was really far more intelligent than us, why would it even talk to us?

01:30:34.000 Why wouldn't it just exist?

01:30:36.000 Right.

01:30:37.000 This is my argument for why I don't fear making contact with extraterrestrials.

01:30:41.000 This is the argument that we shouldn't try to communicate with them or send signals out because look what happened historically when an advanced civilization came in contact with a less advanced civilization.

01:30:51.000 They enslaved them or genocide or so on.

01:30:53.000 But I don't think you could get to the point where you have an interstellar civilization and you have Dyson spheres and you have massive super advanced technology and so on and still be colonials, enslaving people, genocidal maniacs.

01:31:10.000 I don't think you could get there with that kind of attitude.

01:31:13.000 Yeah, I don't think so either.

01:31:14.000 Do you think that the only thing that separates the biological organism from this advanced creature, the only way to get past that, because everything that evolves biologically evolves in a state of competition, right?

01:31:29.000 I mean, there's a reason why it advances and improves its natural selection and there's a lot going on there.

01:31:38.000 Would that be the only way that we could get past all of these bizarre human emotions and ego and greed and need is to separate ourselves from biological evolution and become...

01:31:49.000 Yeah.

01:31:50.000 In a way, that's what we've been doing, I think, through the last several centuries of moral progress.

01:31:56.000 Just take my previous book, The Moral Arc, or Steve Binker's books.

01:31:58.000 You know, talking about the shift in norms of what is acceptable behavior has been massive in the long run, right?

01:32:06.000 Right.

01:32:06.000 I mean, they used to, you know, burn cats and slavery and the death penalty and torture and, you know, this was common.

01:32:13.000 And people just, you know, burning witches, burning women as witches. 1.00

01:32:15.000 This was common.

01:32:16.000 And now it's not.

01:32:17.000 Why?

01:32:17.000 What happened?

01:32:18.000 Our nature didn't change.

01:32:20.000 There's no biological evolution.

01:32:22.000 You know, we just kind of learned to channel our inner better angels and kind of suppress our inner demons through not just laws, you know, top-down laws you probably have to have.

01:32:36.000 But, you know, we don't really need laws now to prevent slavery from happening.

01:32:40.000 I mean, it's just pretty much nobody, no government's going to say, hey, I got this great idea that's enslaved people.

01:32:45.000 The norms have shifted.

01:32:47.000 Pretty much nobody wants to do that.

01:32:49.000 And that has driven a lot of human progress without having to do the biological evolution or genetic engineering or reprogramming.

01:32:58.000 Because you don't want to take out somebody's sense of I don't know, pride and avarice, and I want to be successful, I want to make money, I want to be creative, I have these drives.

01:33:09.000 And there's a dark side to that. 0.98

01:33:10.000 Maybe you're also a little bit of a psychopath, and you're kind of mean and nasty in your competitiveness. 0.97

01:33:16.000 But if you take all that away, then what's the motive to do anything? 0.98

01:33:20.000 Why would you want anything?

01:33:22.000 Right.

01:33:22.000 Why would you?

01:33:23.000 I think we're stuck with both, right?

01:33:26.000 So we have to engineer it culturally.

01:33:29.000 From the bottom up by changing norms.

01:33:31.000 I think that is happening and that's one of the reasons why, you know, when things happen like this sort of social progress movement and, you know, social justice movement The reason why I think that's a good thing is like maybe it goes too far in some ways,

01:33:50.000 but the direction of it, the thought process behind it is making the world a fairer, better place, which I think is ultimately good.

01:33:59.000 And there's going to be like, it's not a perfect thing because humans aren't perfect.

01:34:02.000 So it's like there's a wave, the ebbs and the flows.

01:34:04.000 There's an overreach and then there's a correction.

01:34:07.000 And I think that if you look at Pinker's work, and one of the pushbacks on Pinker's work is, you know, Pinker says that the world is safer, it's better in so many ways now than it's ever been before.

01:34:15.000 And people will say, what? 0.98

01:34:16.000 How can you say this when there's all this crime and injustice and racism and murder and rape and thievery and all this shit that's going on? 1.00

01:34:23.000 Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. 0.99

01:34:24.000 That's not denial of all the horrors and atrocities that exist currently.

01:34:28.000 But if you look at the grand scale of what the world was like during Genghis Khan's reign versus the world is like today, it's far safer than it's ever been before. 0.94

01:34:38.000 This is the best time to be alive ever, even though things are still relatively fucked up in comparison to utopia. 0.60

01:34:46.000 Mm-hmm. 0.59

01:34:48.000 Utopia is a terrible goal to have because we're never going to get there.

01:34:51.000 And also, it gives a perverse calculation that, you know, we can achieve this perfect society in which everybody is happy forever if it weren't for those people right there.

01:35:01.000 Right, right.

01:35:02.000 And that's our enemy. 0.96

01:35:03.000 We've got to get rid of them. 1.00

01:35:04.000 The Jews, the Catholics, the Mormons, whoever it is. 1.00

01:35:06.000 The capitalists.

01:35:07.000 Everybody.

01:35:08.000 Whoever it is.

01:35:09.000 Yeah.

01:35:09.000 Find an enemy.

01:35:10.000 Find an other.

01:35:11.000 Right.

01:35:12.000 So how about just, so this is what Kevin Kelly calls protopia, not utopia, just make tomorrow just a little bit better than today, just incremental, just a tiny bit, and just goes two steps up, one back, okay, adjustments, boom, boom, boom, and then in a century,

01:35:27.000 you know, things are twice as good as they were.

01:35:29.000 Okay, that's good.

01:35:30.000 We should be happy with that.

01:35:31.000 I think ultimately that is kind of happening.

01:35:33.000 It's slower than most people would like because there's an idea of what we would like society to be like and it doesn't fit that yet.

01:35:40.000 And so we're angry and frustrated.

01:35:42.000 But I think it's a time management issue too.

01:35:46.000 You know, the human being is only alive for 100 years.

01:35:48.000 But during that 100 years, think about how much has changed.

01:35:52.000 I remember when I was a kid, I guess I was 11 years old, and we moved to Florida.

01:35:59.000 And I moved from San Francisco to Florida.

01:36:02.000 And San Francisco, we lived in a gay neighborhood, and our neighbors were gay. 0.77

01:36:06.000 My aunt used to go over there and smoke pot and play bongo drums naked with this gay couple. 1.00

01:36:11.000 It was very normal, because it was during the Vietnam era, and they were all hippies. 0.83

01:36:17.000 And we went from there to Florida.

01:36:20.000 Which was very regressive in that way. 0.86

01:36:22.000 And I had this friend, he was Cuban, and his dad was very homophobic.

01:36:29.000 And his dad was really angry because he was reading this story.

01:36:32.000 And I'll never forget it because I was 11. And he's like, oh, these gays want to get married. 0.98

01:36:35.000 And he was really mad. 0.96

01:36:36.000 He was throwing this newspaper down on the table. 0.99

01:36:38.000 And I remember thinking, why does he give a fuck? 1.00

01:36:41.000 If these gay people want to get married, what is that? 1.00

01:36:44.000 How weird is that?

01:36:46.000 Because there's always going to be some parts of our culture that are still regressive.

01:36:53.000 But if you compare that then to today...

01:36:57.000 You know, so this was, I'm 55, so this is 44 years ago.

01:37:02.000 So look back from 44 years ago today. 0.99

01:37:05.000 Well, it's normal for, you know, no one's going to say, if I went over to someone's house and they're like, these gays want to get married, like, what do you give a fuck? 0.99

01:37:12.000 Almost no one gives a fuck now. 1.00

01:37:14.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:37:15.000 You have to be the hardest right-wing Christian fundamentalist to think that gay people shouldn't be allowed to get married now. 0.97

01:37:24.000 Think how fast that happened. 0.97

01:37:26.000 Pretty quickly.

01:37:26.000 2011, Hillary and Obama both said they were against same-sex marriage.

01:37:30.000 Yes.

01:37:31.000 They had to politically.

01:37:32.000 They had to politically.

01:37:33.000 They probably didn't think that.

01:37:34.000 Yeah.

01:37:35.000 And now nobody, it's not even a discussion.

01:37:37.000 And remember when interracial marriage was a thing?

01:37:39.000 Well, me neither, because that was when I was a young child.

01:37:43.000 But 1967 was the Supreme Court loving decision.

01:37:46.000 It was illegal before that.

01:37:48.000 Well, it was a states' rights thing.

01:37:49.000 Many states had it illegal for interracial couples to marry.

01:37:54.000 Astonishing.

01:37:55.000 That's, you know, the 60s.

01:37:57.000 That's not that long ago.

01:37:58.000 Right.

01:37:59.000 And now no one even, pollsters don't even ask anymore.

01:38:01.000 It's just like, well.

01:38:02.000 So it's relative to the fact that we have such a short lifespan.

01:38:06.000 Like the progress is happening rapidly if you look at history, like historically it's rapid, but a human being doesn't live very long.

01:38:15.000 Right.

01:38:16.000 You know, so we're frustrated.

01:38:17.000 We want these changes.

01:38:19.000 We want progress to appear like almost overnight.

01:38:22.000 Right.

01:38:22.000 Yeah, I was reading a review of this book on witches and just one town in New England and what life was like there.

01:38:30.000 And it's just this miserable life where people are dying and diseases and the Indians are going to get us and the drought and this winter storm. 1.00

01:38:39.000 And, you know, pretty much life was nasty, brutish and short.

01:38:42.000 Yeah.

01:38:42.000 And there's like, we have no explanation for this.

01:38:46.000 It's the witches, right?

01:38:48.000 Do you know the story behind that?

01:38:49.000 What they think the motivation for the witch trials were?

01:38:52.000 Which ones?

01:38:53.000 The Salem?

01:38:53.000 Urgot poisoning.

01:38:54.000 Oh, urgot poisoning.

01:38:54.000 Yes, I know about that.

01:38:56.000 That is why.

01:38:56.000 Because there's a lot of historical evidence that points to urgot poisoning and mass hallucinations and chaos.

01:39:02.000 There's one from, I believe it was, was it 1950?

01:39:06.000 There was one in France.

01:39:09.000 I think?

01:39:31.000 And that this late frost produced this fungus on the wheat and the grains and that these grains were likely infected with ergot.

01:39:40.000 And I think they've found evidence of ergot.

01:39:42.000 I have read this.

01:39:44.000 I think it's possible as an element.

01:39:46.000 No human behavior is explained by one thing.

01:39:48.000 Right.

01:39:49.000 It doesn't exist in a vacuum.

01:39:50.000 So you could have, I could see, like, one, say, teenage girl does this and hallucinates and is chattering in voices or whatever, and then her other friends, they start mimicking it, sort of a social contagion.

01:40:01.000 Like, it's fun, and then it's like, oh, it's more than fun, and then the adults go like, oh, what's going on here?

01:40:06.000 And then you have, like, a half a dozen elements going on there.

01:40:09.000 Right.

01:40:10.000 And in the case of the witch, you know, in a way, the witch craze is a kind of conspiracy theory, right?

01:40:15.000 Because one thing conspiracy theories do is they offer a causal explanation.

01:40:18.000 For chaos and randomness.

01:40:19.000 Our brains are not well designed by evolution to understand randomness.

01:40:24.000 My examples of this are like the stars in the sky are random, but they look like patterns, right?

01:40:28.000 Or the Apple iPod Shuffle feature was introduced in which your songs are fed to you randomly and Apple got complaints.

01:40:37.000 It's not random.

01:40:39.000 Certain songs are coming up more than others.

01:40:40.000 Like, that is random.

01:40:42.000 So Apple apparently, I'm told, had to reprogram it and program it so it feels random intuitively, but it's not.

01:40:48.000 It's crazy, right?

01:40:49.000 So much of life is just randomness, right? 1.00

01:40:52.000 Shit happens. 1.00

01:40:53.000 The bumper sticker, shit happens. 1.00

01:40:55.000 But that's uncomfortable. 0.99

01:40:57.000 It's like, no, there must be something behind it.

01:40:59.000 And if you don't have an explanation, no meteorology to explain weather and no germs theory of disease to explain disease and so forth, what have you got?

01:41:09.000 Witches?

01:41:09.000 Well, you talked about the satanic craze of the 80s, Right.

01:41:16.000 So imagine the satanic craze of the 80s and then on top of that, ergot poisoning.

01:41:21.000 Right. 0.95

01:41:21.000 Well, oh my God, now you're drowning witches. 0.95

01:41:23.000 Right. 0.95

01:41:24.000 And that was the thing, they would drown a lot of witches and they would say that if they drowned them, if they lived, clearly they were witches. 0.64

01:41:31.000 Right. 0.99

01:41:31.000 Well, no one fucking lived. 0.99

01:41:32.000 So it was a lot of whoops, well, I guess we killed a fucking innocent. 1.00

01:41:36.000 They just kept killing people thinking that they were witches. 1.00

01:41:38.000 Right.

01:41:39.000 And there's a lot of research on this, also accusing people who are marginalized, poor people, women, and so on, who didn't have any power.

01:41:49.000 So the magistrates, people that had power and money that could have lawyers, whatever, they escaped.

01:41:54.000 Right, right.

01:41:55.000 And also, there was motivation to accuse people of horrific things, and you could use that to take their property.

01:42:02.000 Do you know the story of Elizabeth Bathory?

01:42:04.000 No.

01:42:05.000 Elizabeth Bathory is a woman who lived... 0.86

01:42:08.000 God, I want to say it was like the 1200s, something like that, and she was accused of doing these horrible things to other women. 0.98

01:42:15.000 She was accused of being one of the greatest mass murderers and serial killers that's ever existed. 1.00

01:42:21.000 And that she would take these beautiful young women and kill them and bathe in their blood and all this. 1.00

01:42:26.000 And so we told the story and then someone sent me a link to an article that said there's probably something more to that.

01:42:34.000 And that really what it was was they were accusing her of these things so that they could imprison her and take her land.

01:42:44.000 And that it might have been that.

01:42:46.000 And so they accused her of these horrific atrocities in order to take away her land. 0.99

01:42:54.000 Yeah, there's some of that kind of practical thing and revenge against people you don't like.

01:42:58.000 Sure.

01:42:59.000 And then there's something called preemptive denunciation.

01:43:01.000 You denounce people before you get denounced.

01:43:04.000 Right.

01:43:05.000 And that you denouncing somebody means you must not be a witch if you're denouncing them. 0.98

01:43:08.000 And then you get this kind of competitive denunciation, no, you're a witch, no, you're a witch! 0.95

01:43:12.000 Right, right, right. 0.97

01:43:13.000 Much like the communist show trials, right?

01:43:15.000 Right, right.

01:43:15.000 You've got to denounce your neighbors as communists before they denounce you, or as non-communists, they denounce you, right?

01:43:23.000 So that's the fear during mass hysteria, that people are going to turn on each other because they're afraid that someone's going to come after them, so they come after you first.

01:43:29.000 Right.

01:43:30.000 I think we're going through that a little bit with cancel culture.

01:43:32.000 Right.

01:43:33.000 Sure.

01:43:33.000 For sure.

01:43:34.000 Yeah.

01:43:35.000 I'm going to get somebody on my campus and they used the wrong pronoun or the wrong adjective and I'm going to denounce them before I get denounced and make the mistake.

01:43:44.000 Right.

01:43:44.000 I will be the social justice warrior so you couldn't possibly think that I had done anything wrong.

01:43:49.000 Right.

01:43:51.000 Yeah, so you get this thing called pluralistic ignorance or the spiral of silence where everybody thinks everybody else is thinking something when, in fact, nobody's actually thinking that.

01:43:58.000 The classic experiment on this was binge drinking on college campuses.

01:44:02.000 So you ask individual students by themselves, how do you feel about this?

01:44:06.000 I don't really like it, but I know everybody else likes it.

01:44:08.000 So everybody thinks that everybody else likes binge drinking, but actually, individually, they really don't like it.

01:44:14.000 But I got to do it because everybody else is doing it, right?

01:44:16.000 So this in part explains the kind of sustaining of the Nazi regime.

01:44:22.000 Everybody – well, initially Hitler was popular because he stopped the depression and got the economy going again and so on. 0.89

01:44:30.000 And then he starts escalating and everybody thinks, well, I'm not too happy about this policy and the thing with the Jews, I don't know.

01:44:36.000 But everybody else seems to be going along with it.

01:44:38.000 And then by the time you get to the point where somebody needs to speak up and say, you know, this is wrong, they have concentration camps for those people.

01:44:47.000 And they did it in a way that you could see your neighbor being hauled out and think, I'm keeping my mouth shut.

01:44:53.000 I'm not saying anything.

01:44:54.000 Right.

01:44:54.000 So this is what's called a common knowledge problem.

01:44:57.000 If I know that you know that I know something, then together we can kind of both stand up and say, we're putting a stop to this, right?

01:45:04.000 It's like the Leah Thomas thing with the swimming thing.

01:45:07.000 None of the women competitive swimmers thought this was fair, right?

01:45:12.000 It's a guy competing against us.

01:45:13.000 It's not right.

01:45:14.000 But any one of them by themselves that speaks out, you know, they may just get kicked off the team or get punished by their peers or whatever.

01:45:21.000 It would really take, you know, how do we reverse this trend we're in?

01:45:25.000 It would take all of them together saying, we're not going to compete, all of us, if that person comes in here.

01:45:30.000 Right.

01:45:31.000 And that's the only way it would stop.

01:45:32.000 So that's a common knowledge problem.

01:45:34.000 You know, we all have to know that we know about this to put a stop to that.

01:45:39.000 That's an interesting modern example of that, right?

01:45:42.000 Because that is the case when you see someone who's a biological male who competes against biological females and dominates them.

01:45:49.000 When they were, as a biological male, not doing nearly as well, there's clearly something wrong here.

01:45:56.000 And yet these women are called transphobes and they're, you know... 1.00

01:46:03.000 We're ostracized, and some of them are kicked off teams, and it's a horrible situation.

01:46:08.000 It's very similar to that.

01:46:10.000 Have you seen this video?

01:46:11.000 This came out of a male-to-female trans playing competitive volleyball, and she goes up for the spike and just, boom!

01:46:19.000 And it hits this girl in the face, and she's down and out, you know, concussion.

01:46:25.000 And it's like, okay...

01:46:27.000 I support trans rights.

01:46:29.000 You know, I don't think people should be discriminated against for whoever they want to identify as or whatever, but there's conflicting rights.

01:46:35.000 What about women's rights? 1.00

01:46:36.000 And, you know, my favorite quote from Thomas Sowell, there are no perfect solutions, there's just compromises.

01:46:42.000 You know, yes, trans rights, but women's rights, you know, women's bathrooms, but the guy wants to go, no, no, you can't, no.

01:46:49.000 You just can't have everything, right?

01:46:51.000 Right, you can't have everything, because also you're going to have people that take advantage of, you know, the current cultural climate that might be sexual predators.

01:47:00.000 There are examples of that.

01:47:01.000 Yes.

01:47:18.000 I'm not that worried about the bathroom thing.

01:47:20.000 No, I'm not, but it's a weird one.

01:47:21.000 The sports thing bothers me, because I've been an athlete my whole life, and it's obvious why we have women's divisions in sports. 0.79

01:47:28.000 It couldn't be more clear.

01:47:30.000 We just celebrated Serena Williams' career.

01:47:33.000 She'd had no career if there was no women's tennis division. 0.97

01:47:37.000 And it's like that for most sports.

01:47:40.000 I'm always curious why there are women's divisions in chess. 1.00

01:47:43.000 For example, I really don't know why that is the case.

01:47:45.000 You know, that's the case with pool as well.

01:47:47.000 There's a trans woman who has become a world champion in certain billiards games.

01:47:54.000 And people are confused about that.

01:47:57.000 That's a weird one, in my opinion, because it's not a power-based game.

01:48:01.000 But there's something about testosterone and the understanding of 3D space that there's some sort of an advantage.

01:48:09.000 It's very weird.

01:48:11.000 Pool is a weird one because it's a game that I'm obsessed with and I've always wondered.

01:48:16.000 There's only been like a few women who have been very competitive and been able to beat men consistently in competition. 0.78

01:48:25.000 And a lot of them are lesbians. 1.00

01:48:26.000 I don't know what that's all about.

01:48:28.000 But there's- Well, they have more masculine physiology.

01:48:33.000 That's why.

01:48:33.000 So it's an on average.

01:48:34.000 Just think of two overlapping bell curves.

01:48:36.000 Of course, there are some women that can beat some men. 1.00

01:48:39.000 Sure.

01:48:40.000 That's not what we're talking about.

01:48:41.000 But we're talking about the best of the best.

01:48:43.000 Right.

01:48:43.000 Once you get up to the six standard deviations out, you're 0.01% top performer.

01:48:47.000 Right.

01:48:48.000 1% is a huge difference at that level.

01:48:51.000 Gigantic.

01:48:51.000 Yeah.

01:48:52.000 Yeah.

01:48:52.000 It's curious.

01:48:54.000 The chess thing is also very curious.

01:48:56.000 You know, that was what was fascinating about the Queen's Gambit film, you know, the Netflix thing.

01:49:02.000 Right.

01:49:02.000 This woman is just dominating all these men.

01:49:04.000 She has a superior chess mind. 0.99

01:49:06.000 But in reality, that doesn't really exist very often.

01:49:09.000 Right.

01:49:10.000 It's weird.

01:49:11.000 Like, why not?

01:49:12.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.90

01:49:12.000 Well, you've always made the point of an MMA fight, if it was a trans woman that killed a woman, that'd probably end it. 0.90

01:49:21.000 Probably lawsuits would end it. 0.87

01:49:22.000 Yeah, well, I'm for people being able to do that if they want to do that.

01:49:28.000 If it's a woman who's a biological woman who chooses to compete against a trans woman. 0.84

01:49:33.000 And one of the examples that I've used is there's a woman named Jermaine Durandamy, who's a multiple-time world Muay Thai champion.

01:49:39.000 She was a UFC champion.

01:49:41.000 And she actually had a boxing match with a man and knocked him out, a biological man. 1.00

01:49:45.000 But she's extraordinary.

01:49:47.000 She is the 1% of 1% in terms of elite female combat sports athletes.

01:49:54.000 And so I'm in favor of her being able to make that decision to compete against a man. 0.98

01:49:59.000 But to force a biological woman to compete against a trans woman in MMA, I think, is criminal.

01:50:05.000 I think that is crazy. 0.73

01:50:06.000 And to pretend that they're the same thing is crazy.

01:50:09.000 That doesn't make any sense to me.

01:50:11.000 If there was enough, you could have their own division.

01:50:13.000 Yes.

01:50:14.000 That would solve it.

01:50:15.000 That would solve it.

01:50:16.000 And that, I think, is the solution.

01:50:19.000 That, to me, is the only compromise.

01:50:21.000 And is there enough?

01:50:22.000 I don't know.

01:50:23.000 Maybe.

01:50:24.000 Maybe if you made a division like that.

01:50:26.000 Look, for the longest time, they thought there weren't enough women to compete in combat sports to justify UFC's women's division.

01:50:33.000 But now, the women's division of MMA is some of the most competitive and exciting.

01:50:37.000 Really?

01:50:38.000 Oh my god, yeah.

01:50:39.000 There's a strawweight division, a flyweight division, there's a featherweight division, a bantamweight division.

01:50:46.000 There's multiple divisions that are filled with elite female combat sports athletes and some of those fights are fantastic.

01:50:53.000 And, you know, up until Ronda Rousey came into the UFC, which is not that long ago, was it 10 years ago?

01:51:01.000 When they first started having women's MMA fights in the UFC, there was only one division. 1.00

01:51:06.000 It was 135 pounds.

01:51:07.000 That was it.

01:51:08.000 And you didn't have all these other weight classes.

01:51:10.000 Now, these other weight classes, like flyweight in particular and strawweight, some of the most competitive.

01:51:15.000 And they have incredible fights.

01:51:17.000 So it's, I think if you build it, they will come.

01:51:19.000 And if there are that many trans female, you know, trans women MMA competitors out there, maybe if they developed a division and they had that, maybe you would see a lot of competitors that would enter that and it would become an exciting division.

01:51:36.000 But to make them compete against biological females, or excuse me, to make biological females compete against people who identify as female, I think is just insane.

01:51:47.000 Right.

01:51:48.000 So there, I think we're thinking that fairness and justice trumps rights.

01:51:53.000 Yes.

01:51:53.000 Yeah, you should have the right, but it should also be fair.

01:51:56.000 Yes.

01:51:56.000 What's interesting in many sports is women are allowed to compete against men.

01:52:03.000 If biological females are allowed to enter into certain wrestling tournaments with biological males, they're allowed to. 1.00

01:52:11.000 You can do that.

01:52:12.000 But we never allow biological males to compete against biological females.

01:52:15.000 We never allow someone who is both biologically male and identifies as male to compete against females in sports. 0.69

01:52:24.000 You know, in the 1980s, I got into ultra-distance cycling, you know, Race Across America.

01:52:29.000 I did that five times.

01:52:30.000 In the 90s, I was the race director.

01:52:32.000 So we had, in 93, 94, 95, I had two women that were competing, Shawna Hogan and Muffy Ritz, and they were phenomenal athletes, just really tough as could be.

01:52:42.000 This is coast-to-coast, nonstop.

01:52:45.000 Every competitor has a motorhome behind them and so on, and it's just the clock never stops, and so it's really ultra-distance.

01:52:52.000 And I remember in, I think it was 93 or 94, Shauna led the entire field all the way into Colorado.

01:52:58.000 And me and my staff were thinking, maybe we don't need a women's, men's division.

01:53:04.000 Maybe we are the sport that can, you know, it's all equal.

01:53:07.000 Right?

01:53:08.000 But by the end of the race, it was like a one-day, like 26-hour difference between the top man and Shauna.

01:53:15.000 Wow.

01:53:15.000 And it's like, okay, I think we need...

01:53:17.000 And I also talked to the women about it in off-season conversations.

01:53:21.000 It's like, do you want a women's division?

01:53:23.000 Yes.

01:53:24.000 Yeah.

01:53:25.000 Because even with ultra-distance, people were making arguments at the time, well, maybe...

01:53:30.000 Women can endure pain better than men over the course of 3,000 miles rather than 100 miles.

01:53:35.000 All those differences even out.

01:53:37.000 But no.

01:53:38.000 Even there, it just wasn't fair to make them compete against the men.

01:53:45.000 So we had two divisions.

01:53:47.000 And, of course, we have, like most sports, age divisions.

01:53:50.000 I think the first cut is at age 30, 40, 40-plus, 50-plus, 60-plus, and so on, for obvious reasons.

01:53:58.000 Biological decay of testosterone and strength, it just goes down.

01:54:02.000 So to me, male to female trans post-puberty is doping. 0.87

01:54:09.000 It's like taking testosterone or human growth hormone or EPO or whatever.

01:54:15.000 As you know, in cycling, this is a big issue.

01:54:18.000 Because it makes a difference.

01:54:20.000 I mean, I think Lance said it was like a 10% difference.

01:54:22.000 If you do the drug cocktail, you do it right, and you have somebody professional that's coaching you on this.

01:54:28.000 That's a huge difference at the top level.

01:54:30.000 And it would be the same if you're post-puberty.

01:54:33.000 So the NCAA had that rule.

01:54:35.000 You know, if you go one year of testosterone suppression post-puberty, then we're going to count you as a woman. 0.98

01:54:40.000 But I don't see the evidence for that at all.

01:54:43.000 And the International Swimming Organization finally said, no, that's not enough.

01:54:47.000 Because post-purity, the changes have already happened.

01:54:50.000 Yes.

01:54:50.000 It took till Leah Thomas started dominating that they made that decision, though.

01:54:55.000 Exactly.

01:54:55.000 Right.

01:54:56.000 When somebody, finally, some of these women and the parents were speaking up, like, this is not fair.

01:55:01.000 And, like, the boy pointed to the emperor's has no clothes.

01:55:05.000 You know, finally everybody goes, yeah, we all see it.

01:55:08.000 He doesn't have clothes.

01:55:09.000 Finally, somebody said something.

01:55:10.000 Everybody could see this is not fair.

01:55:11.000 Everybody knows it's not fair.

01:55:12.000 Yeah.

01:55:13.000 What is that about human beings, though, that they don't want to speak out and that we're willing to accept something that we know is not fair because culturally that's an accepted thing?

01:55:24.000 Well, part of it is fear of punishment.

01:55:26.000 You punish the outliers, the people who speak out.

01:55:30.000 And that's part of it.

01:55:31.000 But why are we punishing the outliers when that seems so obvious that it's not fair?

01:55:35.000 Yeah, that's an interesting question.

01:55:37.000 So there might be some complex psychology there where I get this preemptive denunciation and also virtue signaling.

01:55:44.000 Like if I stand out as being super virtuous, I'm going to get some points for that.

01:55:49.000 You know, some of that, I think, is going on, you know, multiple factors.

01:55:54.000 And, you know, we're in the middle of it now, I think, probably within five years. 0.99

01:55:58.000 I mean, what, five years ago, no one was talking about, was it a Ricky Gervais bit about, you know, the use of the term, you know, a woman without a penis? 0.99

01:56:07.000 Yes. 0.99

01:56:08.000 We would have never uttered this sentence five years ago.

01:56:12.000 Whatever it was, it was a really funny bit.

01:56:15.000 And probably five years from now we won't be talking about this either.

01:56:18.000 Well, that's a good example because Ricky Gervais got a lot of death threats because of that.

01:56:22.000 He had to really radically ramp up his security.

01:56:25.000 Right.

01:56:25.000 Yeah.

01:56:26.000 Well, okay.

01:56:27.000 So he's non-cancelable, right?

01:56:30.000 But what about all the comedians down here that are cancelable?

01:56:34.000 They're going to probably keep their mouth shut.

01:56:36.000 Yeah, but the thing is there's a reward for speaking out and saying the things that everybody thinks but they're afraid to say, particularly with audiences.

01:56:49.000 Like when you're anonymous in a crowd and you're having a couple of cocktails and it's dark and someone says it like, yes, finally!

01:56:56.000 You see it in comedy clubs that people are taking chances because they're recognizing that it's rewarded to speak out and say these things.

01:57:08.000 Another thing I think back to the kind of moral progress that we might be experiencing now is we've made so much moral progress.

01:57:15.000 Today's young activists that want to do something to make the world a better place, well, you know, slavery, torture, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, done!

01:57:25.000 Yeah.

01:57:26.000 What's next?

01:57:27.000 Oh, trans rights. 1.00

01:57:28.000 Okay, I'm going to get out there.

01:57:29.000 Okay, good.

01:57:30.000 That's good.

01:57:31.000 But as you said, the problem is that it gets in the way of women's rights. 1.00

01:57:34.000 Right.

01:57:35.000 Especially when it comes to athletic competition.

01:57:37.000 Right.

01:57:37.000 So, conflicting rights.

01:57:39.000 Well, you can't have everything, right?

01:57:40.000 So, anyway, I think that's part of it.

01:57:42.000 Like, I want to do something, right?

01:57:43.000 Or, like, just think about the George Floyd protests and the BLM movement.

01:57:47.000 You know, what can I do about police violence against African Americans?

01:57:51.000 I'm nobody.

01:57:52.000 I'm not the chief of police.

01:57:54.000 I'm not the mayor.

01:57:55.000 I'm just a citizen.

01:57:57.000 Well, there's a march tomorrow, and we're going to go down there and we're going to voice our disapproval of the way African Americans are treated.

01:58:04.000 Yes, I'm going to go down there and do it.

01:58:05.000 So I feel like I'm doing something.

01:58:07.000 A little bit like commenting on Twitter.

01:58:10.000 I'm outraged by this.

01:58:11.000 I feel like I did a little something, even though it probably doesn't do anything.

01:58:16.000 How do you think this stuff all plays out?

01:58:19.000 Do you think eventually it's one of those things, like as we were talking about before, the ebb and flow of things that, you know, there's an overcorrection, and then things kind of bounce itself out?

01:58:27.000 I think you said it right.

01:58:28.000 That's right.

01:58:28.000 It's a pendulum, right?

01:58:29.000 Yeah.

01:58:30.000 And I think the pendulum going in this direction, well, that's good, that's good, that's good.

01:58:32.000 Whoa, whoa, whoa!

01:58:33.000 Come back.

01:58:33.000 Well, we went a little crazy.

01:58:35.000 Yeah.

01:58:35.000 Reel that thing in a little bit.

01:58:37.000 And then overall, through time, we will get moral progress because of that.

01:58:40.000 Yeah.

01:58:41.000 Yeah.

01:58:42.000 I mean, there are trans.

01:58:43.000 There are, you know, there's intersex people.

01:58:45.000 There are people who identify as the other sex and so on.

01:58:47.000 Sure.

01:58:48.000 That's real.

01:58:49.000 Is it really the numbers that we're now seeing, you know, spike, 2,000% spike in the last two years and these massive increases in the U.K.? Probably some of that is social contagion.

01:59:00.000 It's sort of this is the thing to do.

01:59:02.000 Some of it may be real.

01:59:04.000 Well, we know social contagion is real.

01:59:06.000 We know that's real.

01:59:07.000 That's a real phenomenon.

01:59:08.000 So to say that that can't be it seems a little disingenuous and seems like a lot of virtue signaling.

01:59:16.000 Right.

01:59:17.000 Right.

01:59:17.000 So it's, well, their counter to that is, well, society's more acceptable now, accepting of people that are different.

01:59:23.000 So that's why these people are coming out.

01:59:25.000 But the counter to that is, yeah, but it's only in a certain cohort, age 15 to age 13 to 17 or so, where the huge spike is.

01:59:33.000 It's a lot of biological females, too. 1.00

01:59:35.000 Yeah.

01:59:35.000 And it's way more.

01:59:36.000 Yeah.

01:59:37.000 And that's Abigail Schreier's work. 1.00

01:59:39.000 Right.

01:59:40.000 Irreversible damage.

01:59:41.000 Right.

01:59:42.000 I had a student maybe two years ago that came out as trans.

01:59:46.000 She decided she wanted to be a man.

01:59:48.000 It's like, okay.

01:59:49.000 And everybody was super curious about this.

01:59:51.000 It's a small discussion seminar type class that I teach.

01:59:54.000 And as the course of the weeks went by, it would come up almost every week.

01:59:59.000 It came up a lot.

02:00:00.000 I thought...

02:00:01.000 I wonder if she really wants to be a man or she wants to be trans, because trans, this was a cool thing to be.

02:00:08.000 She got love bombed and everybody's asking her questions.

02:00:10.000 What are you going to do about this?

02:00:11.000 How are you going to dress?

02:00:12.000 What about that?

02:00:14.000 But if it was just like, I'm just going to be a man and I'm not going to tell anybody, I'm just going to change the way I'm living my life.

02:00:19.000 I think that would not be as interesting or rewarding.

02:00:23.000 There would be no social, you know, reinforcement for that.

02:00:26.000 So I think in part, again, multiple things.

02:00:29.000 Some of it's real.

02:00:30.000 Some of it's social.

02:00:30.000 I think some of it is this kind of a trendy thing to be.

02:00:36.000 Andrew Sullivan writes about this.

02:00:38.000 It's not cool to be gay anymore. 0.99

02:00:39.000 Where'd the lesbians go? 1.00

02:00:40.000 Right? 0.99

02:00:41.000 There's no more lesbians. 1.00

02:00:42.000 They're all gone. 0.69

02:00:44.000 And he makes the point, and since he's a gay guy, he could do this, you know, that when he was a teenage boy, 13, 14, 15, he finds himself attracted to other guys and not women.

02:00:53.000 And what if he was told at that time, you're not gay.

02:00:57.000 You're actually a woman. 1.00

02:00:59.000 You're just in the wrong body.

02:01:01.000 And then that's kind of, in a way, he says it's kind of homophobic.

02:01:05.000 Yes.

02:01:05.000 Yeah, my friend Tim says that.

02:01:07.000 He's gay. 0.99

02:01:08.000 He has that argument about it, that a lot of it is homophobic.

02:01:13.000 Whether it's really homophobic in their hearts, I don't know.

02:01:15.000 But it has that taint to it.

02:01:17.000 Yes.

02:01:18.000 That's also the argument that it's anti-women. 1.00

02:01:25.000 You're changing what it means to be a woman. 0.99

02:01:28.000 And that's the film.

02:01:31.000 What is a woman? 1.00

02:01:32.000 When you watch that film, you see the argument.

02:01:35.000 When Matt Walsh has these deadpan questions to these people, and he lets them...

02:01:40.000 Just speak their thoughts about it.

02:01:43.000 It's like, whoa, who thought this was where we're at right now?

02:01:48.000 Very strange.

02:01:49.000 Right.

02:01:50.000 Well, there's a lot of confusion there between gender and sex.

02:01:53.000 What do you mean?

02:01:53.000 How do you define this stuff?

02:01:55.000 I wrote about this, you know, fuzzy sets.

02:01:56.000 It's kind of a family resemblance.

02:01:58.000 You know, what is a game?

02:01:59.000 What is a chair?

02:02:00.000 Well, chair is, you know, it's got legs, four legs.

02:02:03.000 Well, this one has five.

02:02:04.000 It's got a back.

02:02:04.000 What about a bar stool?

02:02:06.000 It doesn't have a back.

02:02:07.000 What about a beanbag chair?

02:02:08.000 That doesn't have legs or a back. 0.98

02:02:10.000 Yeah, but I know when I see one, right?

02:02:13.000 So we know what a man is.

02:02:14.000 We know what a woman is. 1.00

02:02:15.000 For the most part, we can identify them.

02:02:17.000 But there's going to be a little fuzzy around the fuzzy edges.

02:02:21.000 Yeah.

02:02:21.000 It's like, okay...

02:02:22.000 Right.

02:02:23.000 But is it really a whole other category, right?

02:02:25.000 So from an evolutionary biology perspective, if we really had more than two sexes, there would be like a billion, you know, of the third sex.

02:02:34.000 Yeah.

02:02:35.000 If that was a real thing, rather than as an anomaly.

02:02:39.000 Well, that's one of the weirder things about homosexuality in general, is that there's not really like an evolutionary... 1.00

02:02:51.000 If you thought about, like, the reproduction of whatever it means to be homosexual, well, it sort of, like, eliminates that.

02:03:00.000 Like, how is it that homosexuality has always maintained a certain percentage of our society? 0.92

02:03:06.000 It's really interesting, just from an objective perspective of looking at what it is, like, in terms of natural selection.

02:03:15.000 There was a comedian that had a joke about that, Otto and George.

02:03:18.000 Otto and George was a puppet act from New York, hilarious comedian. 0.99

02:03:23.000 And the puppet would say, crazy shit, and he would go, what are you saying? 1.00

02:03:27.000 You know, like, that's outrageous. 1.00

02:03:29.000 How could you say that? 1.00

02:03:30.000 And his thing was like, about the gays, he goes, from a bunch of people that can't reproduce, where the fuck are they all coming from? 1.00

02:03:39.000 It was very funny. 1.00

02:03:40.000 It is funny.

02:03:41.000 Funny because it has kind of an element of a true question.

02:03:44.000 Right.

02:03:44.000 Why is there homosexuality in a sexually reproducing species like ours?

02:03:48.000 Yeah.

02:03:48.000 So evolutionary theorists have debates about this.

02:03:50.000 Maybe they're kind of surrogate parents or pseudo-parents or faux-parents to their siblings' offspring, their uncles and aunts.

02:03:58.000 And that gets their genes for homosexuality in the next generation or something because they're not reproducing. 0.99

02:04:06.000 Directly.

02:04:07.000 Okay, maybe, but, you know, it's not clear if it's that or if...

02:04:11.000 Maybe there's no adaptive purpose to it at all.

02:04:13.000 It's just a byproduct.

02:04:14.000 It's just things happen.

02:04:16.000 There's just kind of randomness in sexual preferences.

02:04:19.000 It seems like that, because I've heard, well, there's a spectrum of, like, masculine females and feminine men. 0.98

02:04:26.000 The problem with that theory is there's a lot of very masculine gay men. 0.92

02:04:31.000 Right.

02:04:32.000 So that's like, well, what is that?

02:04:35.000 That's like a giant monkey wrench into your equation.

02:04:38.000 That doesn't make any sense.

02:04:39.000 It seems to be just an aspect of human beings.

02:04:43.000 But again, going to moral progress, it is a clear sign of moral progress, the difference between when I was 11, my friend's dad, who was so angry that people were gay and they were getting married, versus today, where it's very accepted.

02:04:57.000 For the most part.

02:04:58.000 A tiny percentage of people, I'm sure, still have a problem with it, like really extreme religious fundamentalists.

02:05:03.000 But for the most part, society has kind of accepted that.

02:05:06.000 Well, because religion endorsed a marriage initially, and then the state got involved.

02:05:12.000 Its original purpose was reproduction.

02:05:14.000 And so that was why there was resistance by the church all the way up until really 2010s against it, because you're not making babies.

02:05:23.000 Well, what about older couples or couples that are infertile, that are heterosexual but infertile? 0.53

02:05:29.000 And there's always exceptions to this, but that's kind of how it started.

02:05:32.000 The purpose of marriage initially was to increase the population of either your religion or your government.

02:05:38.000 I mean, even today, if you're married, as you know, you get a tax break.

02:05:42.000 I assume you do here in Texas, too.

02:05:43.000 But the federal government gives you a tax break.

02:05:45.000 If you're married, if you have kids, you get another tax break.

02:05:47.000 In a way, the government's saying, we want you to be married, and we want you to have kids, and we want you to be a homeowner, by the way.

02:05:52.000 We'll let you deduct your interest on your mortgage.

02:05:55.000 And so the government does these sort of things, as religion did. 0.96

02:05:59.000 You know, the whole primogeniture and the inheritance of wealth to the first son and so on.

02:06:04.000 All these rules were based on, how can we grow our numbers?

02:06:09.000 And compete with the other religions. 0.53

02:06:11.000 So fecundity is a proxy for religious success.

02:06:14.000 You just have a lot of babies.

02:06:15.000 There's only two ways to grow a religion.

02:06:17.000 You have babies or you have converts. 0.97

02:06:18.000 And it's hard to convert people.

02:06:20.000 It was one of the things that people were really worried about with the reversal of Roe v.

02:06:24.000 Wade is that gay marriage was going to be next on the chopping block. 0.67

02:06:28.000 And there was discussions about that, which is...

02:06:31.000 You know, that's a clear anti-progressive position.

02:06:36.000 It is.

02:06:36.000 I'm worried about that.

02:06:37.000 I'm hoping that this is just a couple of far-out GOP candidates that are trying to appeal to their base by saying, you know, we're going to take away gay marriage, and by the way, we're going to get rid of contraception, too.

02:06:47.000 We want women to just be in the bedroom making babies. 1.00

02:06:50.000 I'm hoping that the GOP en masse says, no, no, that's not what we're about.

02:06:55.000 But it is wild that in 2022 that's still up for discussion.

02:06:58.000 Unbelievable.

02:06:59.000 That people are literally talking about getting rid of contraception.

02:07:02.000 Yeah, I know.

02:07:04.000 Getting rid of gay marriage, getting rid of contraception, like, hey, hey, hey, hey. 1.00

02:07:07.000 But isn't that the pendulum, though?

02:07:09.000 Like what we were talking about.

02:07:11.000 With moral progress, there's going to be an overcorrection.

02:07:15.000 And that some people, you know, the outliers of the religious fundamentalists who don't want any progress, they basically want things to go back to like a religious fundamentalist version of what a Christian society should be.

02:07:33.000 And there's some people that are out there, and it's not a small number.

02:07:35.000 That's what's spooky.

02:07:36.000 Christian nationalism is a thing.

02:07:38.000 It's getting big.

02:07:39.000 It's getting bigger.

02:07:40.000 Michael Flynn, you know, the general.

02:07:42.000 There's a new documentary out of, oh, a CNN film about him, in which this is a, he's got huge crowds, in which he's basically saying we need to return America, make America great again, but make America Christian again, is what he's saying.

02:07:54.000 Well, he's one of those QAnon guys, too.

02:07:56.000 Oh, yeah.

02:07:57.000 Which is, if you've watched the documentary, Into the Storm, have you seen the HBO? Of course, yeah.

02:08:01.000 That's amazing.

02:08:02.000 That's so good. 0.57

02:08:04.000 And I had the gentleman on who created that and it just, what a fucking wild thing it is to see the actual people that created it and to see what a scam they pulled off and how weird it is that people just hopped on board and they really did think that there was some people working behind the scenes that were working for God and country and they were going to expose all these pedophiles and Satanists and... 0.82

02:08:29.000 The deep state. 0.97

02:08:30.000 Oh, my God.

02:08:31.000 It's amazing.

02:08:32.000 Do you think when...

02:08:33.000 I talk about this in the book.

02:08:34.000 Do you think when people say, you know, they tell a poster, yeah, I think there could be something to the QAnon or Pizzagate or whatever, do they really believe it?

02:08:41.000 I mean, the one guy did, Edgar Welch, who went to that Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria with his AR-15 and shot up the place.

02:08:48.000 But most people don't do that.

02:08:50.000 You know, if you really thought there was a pedophile ring, a crime going on, and the police wouldn't do anything about it, wouldn't you go there?

02:08:58.000 Wouldn't you want to do something?

02:08:59.000 So I'm thinking – I'm wondering, do these people really believe it or are they just kind of like, well, I don't know.

02:09:04.000 It seems like the kind of thing those Democrats would do and I don't like them.

02:09:08.000 There's a little bit of that.

02:09:10.000 Tribalism.

02:09:10.000 I think there's also a little bit of like what we were talking about earlier about conspiracy theories.

02:09:16.000 They're exciting.

02:09:17.000 And for you to have secret information that's not available to everybody else that could expose.

02:09:24.000 That's a big thing always.

02:09:26.000 We're going to expose these people. 0.89

02:09:28.000 We're going to expose the evil, expose the Satanists and expose the pedophiles.

02:09:32.000 There's a lot of people that don't have real excitement in their actual life.

02:09:40.000 And through online activities and message boards and social media groups and the like, they find purpose.

02:09:49.000 And one of the purposes is to take down the evil empire, to take down the deep state.

02:09:56.000 There's a real inclination towards that.

02:09:59.000 It's like the hero's journey, right?

02:10:00.000 The Joseph Campbell, you go out and conquer the beast and come back, and it kind of makes your life meaningful.

02:10:08.000 I worked on this Netflix documentary on brainwashing, and the producers found this woman in Texas.

02:10:14.000 Yeah.

02:10:39.000 And she actually had the phone.

02:10:41.000 She goes, here's the message he left me.

02:10:43.000 Wow.

02:10:44.000 And initially she said, this is the most important thing I'll ever do.

02:10:49.000 I am going to expose this crime.

02:10:52.000 I'm changing the world.

02:10:53.000 I am a warrior.

02:10:56.000 I'm out of here. 0.99

02:10:57.000 And then a couple months later, I guess she woke up and went, what the fuck did I do? 0.99

02:11:01.000 My husband's leaving me? 0.99

02:11:02.000 I'm losing my kids and house?

02:11:04.000 What?

02:11:04.000 How did she get so wrapped up in it?

02:11:06.000 Did she ever talk about it afterwards?

02:11:07.000 Yeah, just, again, the daily kind of feed online, which you can find websites on anything.

02:11:13.000 Yeah, but that one in particular was like particularly engrossing for some people.

02:11:18.000 It became their whole life, and that was documented in that Into the Storm.

02:11:22.000 Right.

02:11:23.000 With those poor people, and some of them that were Obama supporters, that just flipped over to, you know, now I realize they're the bad ones, and we're the good ones, and we're patriots, and it's crazy.

02:11:34.000 Well, yeah, and there's entertainment value.

02:11:37.000 These things are really interesting and fun to read about.

02:11:41.000 Well, that goes along with all the other conspiracy theories.

02:11:44.000 I went into, unfortunately, last night, I went down a rabbit hole of Bigfoot.

02:11:49.000 You did?

02:11:50.000 Yes, yes, yes.

02:11:51.000 I went down the Bigfoot rabbit hole last night.

02:11:53.000 Boy, that's an old one.

02:11:54.000 It's an old one.

02:11:55.000 There was a video that showed up in my YouTube feed, and I clicked on it, and then you know how YouTube on the right-hand side gives you, maybe you want to watch this?

02:12:04.000 Oh, yes, of course.

02:12:05.000 And so I forget what the initial video was, but I went three or four videos down the hole, and I got to a professor out of Oregon, and I've actually meldred him.

02:12:16.000 Meldrum.

02:12:17.000 Yes, I know that guy.

02:12:18.000 I've actually had him on the podcast before when I was doing that Joe Rogan questions everything thing.

02:12:22.000 He was a guy that said that he would cut off one of his fingers if he could find out that Bigfoot was real.

02:12:28.000 I'm like, oh my god, dude.

02:12:30.000 So I went down and I watched him being interviewed and then...

02:12:37.000 Oh, now I remember what it was.

02:12:38.000 When I was in England, I was watching a show on television that was like one of those discovery shows about monsters. 0.96

02:12:45.000 And it was like just a clearly bullshit show where they're like, you know, we're going to go find them. 0.85

02:12:51.000 We're going to use night vision and we're going to the woods. 0.98

02:12:53.000 And these people all believe it. 0.99

02:12:54.000 And so I'm like, how many episodes are there of this fucking thing? 0.99

02:12:57.000 And then I start... 0.99

02:12:59.000 There's so many.

02:13:00.000 But this professor who, I think he's a professor of anthropology.

02:13:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:13:05.000 He's like a legitimate professor.

02:13:06.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:13:07.000 I think it's University of Oregon.

02:13:08.000 Yeah.

02:13:09.000 Well, this is, again, my argument why the rational believe the irrational. 1.00

02:13:12.000 These are not uneducated, stupid people wearing tinfoil hat. 1.00

02:13:15.000 No, they're not. 1.00

02:13:16.000 They're smart people.

02:13:18.000 But smart people and educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs they hold for non-smart reasons, right?

02:13:23.000 So Dino Reinhold Mesner, the great alpinist that summited Everest, I think seven times without oxygen, considered the greatest climber of all time, a German alpinist.

02:13:33.000 He wrote a book about Bigfoot, a Yeti, you know, because he's heard all about Yeti in the Himalayas, and he had told all the Sherpas, okay, look, if you see this thing, you know, just wake me up out of the tent.

02:13:43.000 Right.

02:13:43.000 So one day they're like, boss, boss, it's there, it's there, Yeti!

02:13:47.000 He's like, oh my god, oh my god.

02:13:48.000 So they go, they're hiking, hiking around the corner and there's this big bear.

02:13:51.000 And he's like, that's Yeti?

02:13:53.000 Yeah, that's Yeti!

02:13:54.000 It's like, oh, okay.

02:13:56.000 Yeah, that's certainly a lot of it.

02:13:59.000 And bears do walk upright all the time.

02:14:02.000 Especially if they get an injured front paw, they're capable of walking upright.

02:14:04.000 I've seen in the wild, I've seen bears walk upright.

02:14:07.000 Oh my god, wow.

02:14:08.000 Black bears, from very close, from 20 yards away.

02:14:11.000 I've seen them walk multiple steps on their back feet.

02:14:15.000 Now, if you were looking at that through the forest, like a deep forest, I don't think it's a coincidence that the Pacific Northwest is where they sight a lot of them, because there's a rainforest out there that are so dense.

02:14:27.000 The way I describe it, it's like a box of Q-tips.

02:14:30.000 Like, seeing through the Q-tips, you can't possibly see.

02:14:32.000 So if you saw a bear walking on two legs, Through like a couple of trees and then your mind starts going, oh my god, did I just see a gorilla or some sort of an ape creature?

02:14:43.000 It's Bigfoot!

02:14:44.000 And then you have it in your head that you saw a Bigfoot because you saw a bear.

02:14:47.000 You know, a bear, a big black bear is a seven foot animal.

02:14:51.000 It's a big creature.

02:14:52.000 They're walking upright like that.

02:14:54.000 You would assume that that is a giant Sasquatch that you just saw.

02:14:57.000 And then your mind starts working on it. 0.93

02:15:00.000 Your memory sucks anyway, especially with chaotic, extremely novel events like that.

02:15:06.000 And so then you get it in your head that you saw a Sasquatch. 0.98

02:15:09.000 Well, this is how illusions work.

02:15:10.000 You know, those auditory illusions where they put the words on the top of the screen and they play the voice.

02:15:17.000 You can't quite make out what it is, but when you see the words, and it flips back and forth, back and forth.

02:15:22.000 So this works because when you can't quite tell what it is, then a cue, a prime, it's called priming, will direct your brain to hear one thing or the other thing, or see things.

02:15:33.000 This is how these visual illusions work, right?

02:15:35.000 So it's always degraded information, right?

02:15:37.000 The shadow, I can't quite see if you squint and use your imagination.

02:15:40.000 I can sort of see the two legs and maybe an arm.

02:15:45.000 But for biologists, it's pretty simple.

02:15:48.000 Just show me the body and I'll accept it.

02:15:49.000 Yeah.

02:15:50.000 You know who doesn't believe in Bigfoot?

02:15:52.000 The people that are in the woods all the time.

02:15:54.000 All of my friends that are hunters, like the most extreme hardcore guys who backpack and go deep into the mountains for weeks at a time.

02:16:05.000 None of them.

02:16:06.000 Zero sightings.

02:16:07.000 Really?

02:16:07.000 Right.

02:16:08.000 The people that are in the sightings are the casuals.

02:16:11.000 The people that don't spend any time in the woods.

02:16:13.000 Well, you know, cryptozologists say, well, we didn't know about the mountain gorilla until 1903. But we know.

02:16:19.000 But we would know by now. 0.96

02:16:21.000 Yeah, that's not a good example because there's fucking really clear video of the mountain gorilla. 0.94

02:16:25.000 Right. 0.78

02:16:25.000 The thing about the Bigfoot thing that is, you know, there's always an element of something in there. 0.78

02:16:31.000 The thing about Bigfoot that's fascinating is the Gigantopithecus, is that it did coincide with the human beings of 100,000 years ago.

02:16:40.000 So we know for sure then.

02:16:42.000 So you would imagine that maybe 50,000 years ago there were some of them still, and maybe it's legend and folklore.

02:16:49.000 There's many things that are passed on through myth and discussions and stories, and that's probably what it was.

02:16:57.000 At one point in time, there was a gigantic bipedal hominid that was 8 to 10 feet tall.

02:17:03.000 We know they're real.

02:17:04.000 But it's just an animal that existed, just like an orangutan, just like a gorilla.

02:17:10.000 A chimpanzee.

02:17:11.000 There was a hominid, a large sort of primate creature that was really enormous but died out.

02:17:19.000 Given our propensity to stereotype things, imagine if Neanderthals had not gone extinct and they were still around, right?

02:17:26.000 And they were somehow different from us or whatever.

02:17:28.000 Would we enslave them? 1.00

02:17:30.000 Would we kill them off? 1.00

02:17:31.000 Would we... 1.00

02:17:32.000 Treat them equally.

02:17:34.000 That's probably what the humans, the Homo sapiens, did to them, right?

02:17:38.000 There's different theories about that.

02:17:39.000 Well, so 2% of our genome is Neanderthal.

02:17:43.000 I call this the Stephen Stills explanation.

02:17:45.000 You know, Stephen Stills, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

02:17:51.000 Right?

02:17:52.000 Well, I'm alone in the cave tonight, and there's no Homo sapiens around, but hey, here's a Neanderthal.

02:17:58.000 Yeah.

02:17:59.000 It makes you wonder, like, was it Homo sapien females that bred with the Neanderthal males, or was it Neanderthal females that Homo sapien males?

02:18:09.000 I wonder what was the predominant.

02:18:11.000 Hmm.

02:18:12.000 Well, given human sexual psychology and the differences between men and women and how indiscriminate men are compared to women, women are much more risk-averse about that.

02:18:21.000 They have fewer partners.

02:18:22.000 They want fewer partners.

02:18:24.000 Probably male to female, I'm guessing.

02:18:27.000 Yeah.

02:18:27.000 Makes sense.

02:18:28.000 But also then, you know, who knows?

02:18:31.000 I mean, we're talking about an incredibly aggressive time.

02:18:34.000 You know, how much of that was rape?

02:18:36.000 Yes. 0.97

02:18:37.000 You know, like a lot of animal breeding is, Basically rape. 0.97

02:18:42.000 You ever see koala bears, mate?

02:18:45.000 The cute little fellas? 1.00

02:18:46.000 No, I haven't seen it.

02:18:47.000 It's disturbing.

02:18:50.000 They're pretty ruthless and violent.

02:18:52.000 And cats, when you see cats, it's horrific.

02:18:57.000 The human species is so fascinating, too, because they're always finding Denisovans.

02:19:03.000 They're always finding these new branches of humans.

02:19:06.000 How many of them were there?

02:19:08.000 And then there's the hobbit people. 1.00

02:19:09.000 Yeah, the hobbits, right?

02:19:10.000 Probably at least a dozen bipedal primates.

02:19:13.000 Probably, right?

02:19:14.000 At the same time.

02:19:15.000 The island of Flora is hobbit people. 1.00

02:19:17.000 That is fascinating.

02:19:18.000 Because I think they boiled that one down to, what was it, like 15, 20,000 years ago?

02:19:23.000 Right, not that long ago.

02:19:24.000 Crazy.

02:19:25.000 After Neanderthals. 0.80

02:19:26.000 Yes, that there was these little three-foot-tall, and they don't really know what they looked like other than guesswork, but they think they were hairy.

02:19:33.000 These hairy little three-foot-tall bipedal people-like things that were a separate branch of the evolutionary chain of primates.

02:19:43.000 I remember when that story broke.

02:19:44.000 It's a pretty dense forested island.

02:19:46.000 It was like, maybe they're still there.

02:19:48.000 Yes.

02:19:49.000 They're holed up in some cave.

02:19:50.000 Well, there's a belief that there's a thing called an Orang Pendek.

02:19:55.000 You ever heard of that one?

02:19:56.000 Orang Pendek is very similar in stature and description.

02:20:01.000 And I think they believe they're in Vietnam.

02:20:05.000 I think it's maybe Cambodia or Vietnam.

02:20:08.000 See if you can find that.

02:20:09.000 But that is one of those mythological creatures that until they found the Flores people, I think they found them in, I want to say it's the 2000s.

02:20:22.000 Hmm.

02:20:27.000 Hmm.

02:20:40.000 Interesting.

02:20:41.000 It describes last month an expedition in the jungles of Sumatra.

02:20:44.000 Interesting.

02:20:45.000 So, even the age of satellite mapping, global positioning, there remains lost worlds where few humans tread, where species of animals unrecognized by science live.

02:20:57.000 I'll say this name.

02:20:59.000 Karensi Seblat National Park in West Sumatra is one such place.

02:21:04.000 The size of a small country, its dim, steamy interior has never been explored properly, and last month I returned to these jungles for the fourth time to track an elusive and yet unrecorded species of ape known to the locals as the Orang Pendek or Short Man.

02:21:21.000 We're good to go.

02:21:42.000 I'm just guessing there.

02:21:44.000 The second team consistent of Dr. Ba-ba [...]-ba.

02:21:47.000 Okay.

02:21:47.000 What does it say?

02:21:48.000 Before team left, one guide, Sahar, introduced us to an eyewitness called Pak Entis, who claimed to have seen an orang pendek in the garden area in April.

02:21:59.000 He described it as around three feet tall, but with massive shoulders and chest.

02:22:03.000 We're good to go.

02:22:14.000 Huh.

02:22:15.000 Who knows?

02:22:16.000 Well, you need a breeding population.

02:22:19.000 If they last centuries or thousands of years, you can't just have one or two.

02:22:22.000 Right.

02:22:22.000 But if this thing is living in an unexplored area the size of a small country...

02:22:27.000 Right.

02:22:27.000 Yeah.

02:22:27.000 That's enough.

02:22:28.000 Yeah.

02:22:28.000 That would be amazing.

02:22:30.000 Could you imagine?

02:22:31.000 I mean, now with that, we know that it exists.

02:22:32.000 We have plenty of fossil evidence and bone evidence and DNA that points to that.

02:22:38.000 Homo floresiensis.

02:22:40.000 Right.

02:22:40.000 Given how many of these species went extinct, we're the only ones still around.

02:22:45.000 Imagine if we had gone extinct and Neanderthals survived, would they be making spaceships and internet and computers? 1.00

02:22:54.000 So it's a question of progress, evolutionary and cultural progress.

02:22:58.000 Is there a certain inevitability to it?

02:23:01.000 Which brings us back to the SETI question.

02:23:03.000 You could have a planet in which life gets all the way up to the level of Neanderthal complexity with big brains and hands and art and so on.

02:23:11.000 And maybe you never detect them because they never get to a stage where they make radio technology and space ships and things like that.

02:23:21.000 Is that possible?

02:23:23.000 I'm just kind of asking rhetorically.

02:23:25.000 It seems like it could be.

02:23:26.000 I don't know.

02:23:26.000 I mean, we probably would have never gotten to where we were if it wasn't for the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.

02:23:32.000 Right.

02:23:32.000 Yes, right.

02:23:33.000 So so much of it is kind of chance.

02:23:34.000 Yeah.

02:23:35.000 And, you know, Neanderthal, it looks like they had language based on the skull size back here and some other things here and their genome.

02:23:43.000 It looks like they had the genes for language, maybe.

02:23:46.000 Something like, not ours totally conceptually, but maybe something like that.

02:23:51.000 Were they held back by us?

02:23:53.000 You know, because they had Europe to themselves for about 300,000 years.

02:23:57.000 But their toolkits don't get progressively more complex and their art doesn't get more complex like ours does.

02:24:04.000 When we got to Europe and they went extinct and then you see that kind of progress. 0.63

02:24:07.000 So it's an open question that no one knows the answer to.

02:24:10.000 But it touches on the SETI thing because...

02:24:13.000 Is there kind of a directionality to evolution where you end up with communicating technologically sophisticated civilizations or is it pretty random and you could get pretty far and then we'd never know that they were there?

02:24:25.000 Well, I think if you think about the absolutely enormous numbers of possibilities, you probably have all of them.

02:24:32.000 You probably have places where dinosaurs just rule and that's it, and shrews, stage shrews. 1.00

02:24:39.000 Right, the impact never happened on that planet.

02:24:41.000 Or you get to something where you have a completely different sort of an environment and things progress far more rapidly.

02:24:49.000 And they also don't have the concern with asteroidal impacts or natural disasters.

02:24:54.000 It's a much more stable environment on these planets.

02:24:57.000 I mean, you think of the variability would be endless.

02:25:00.000 Just the sheer numbers of planets you're dealing with.

02:25:04.000 The question is, like, once we find life somewhere else, then it all becomes open-ended, right?

02:25:09.000 Once we find absolute evidence that there is a life form on this other spinning body that's...

02:25:16.000 Circling around a star, we got one.

02:25:18.000 Okay, now we have some moving creatures that exist on this planet.

02:25:22.000 Holy cow, now we know for sure.

02:25:24.000 I had an interesting discussion with Richard Dawkins one time about to what extent that aliens would look anything like us.

02:25:33.000 Like the alien abduction stories, it's always this bipedal primate with the big eyes and the bulbous head and no ears and so forth.

02:25:40.000 But one of the chances they'd look anything like us evolved on some other planet, right?

02:25:45.000 They could be like octopuses or something.

02:25:48.000 But Richard points out it may not be as random as I'm describing because Simon Conway Morris, who studies convergent evolution, Shows that based on physics of water, air, and land, to move around on the land, you've got to have something like legs.

02:26:03.000 To move through the water, you have to have kind of a smooth, fusiform body to slide through such a dense medium.

02:26:08.000 If you're in the air, you've got to have something like wings, right?

02:26:11.000 And so you're going to have probably creatures with most of the sensory apparatus and brains on one end, waste disposal system on the other end, some arms and legs to move around on the land.

02:26:20.000 You could get something like a bipedal primate.

02:26:23.000 It may not be a mammal or whatever.

02:26:25.000 It could be a dinosaur that was bipedal.

02:26:26.000 And if you have a big enough brain, they could make tools and so on.

02:26:29.000 So it could be something like that.

02:26:31.000 Could be, but then you also have the intelligent life that we know exists on Earth that doesn't have the ability to manipulate its environment like orcas and dolphins, which is fascinating because orca and dolphin have enormous brains.

02:26:45.000 They have complex languages that we can't decipher.

02:26:47.000 They have very sophisticated social systems.

02:26:50.000 Right.

02:26:51.000 But they don't possess the ability to manipulate their environment like we do.

02:26:56.000 They never needed it.

02:26:56.000 They can move through 3D space.

02:26:58.000 Right.

02:26:58.000 They're inside the water.

02:27:00.000 They're the apex predators, particularly orcas.

02:27:02.000 They have no threat.

02:27:03.000 Right.

02:27:03.000 That is really fascinating.

02:27:05.000 Again, you could have a planet with that and we never know they're there.

02:27:08.000 Right.

02:27:08.000 Unless we go there and see them.

02:27:10.000 Is there any evidence that there were any dinosaurs that had any sort of advanced larger brains?

02:27:19.000 No, not that I know of.

02:27:22.000 Although people like Jack Horner, the paleontologist, he thinks they're much more social and communicating in a social way than we've given them credit for. 0.72

02:27:32.000 They weren't dumb. 0.98

02:27:33.000 Not big brains like you're thinking of like the cetaceans. 0.99

02:27:36.000 Cetaceans have big brains to their body size.

02:27:39.000 There you would expect more intelligence.

02:27:41.000 But yeah, well, I don't know.

02:27:45.000 Probably not.

02:27:46.000 They never had tools, for example.

02:27:49.000 But they don't really need them.

02:27:51.000 But it seems like super intelligent life forms, they're either like us or they're like a dolphin and an orca on this planet.

02:28:01.000 Or crows. 0.74

02:28:02.000 Yes, crows, right.

02:28:03.000 Sagan was always careful about this, anthropomorphizing what the aliens would be like.

02:28:08.000 You know, just kind of the chauvinism of it.

02:28:11.000 They're going to be like us.

02:28:12.000 Well, how many species on Earth are like us?

02:28:14.000 Right.

02:28:15.000 None!

02:28:16.000 Right.

02:28:16.000 You know, we can't even talk to an octopus or a dolphin.

02:28:20.000 We don't know what they're saying.

02:28:21.000 Right.

02:28:21.000 And if we can't talk to them, and they grew up, they're mammals.

02:28:24.000 Right.

02:28:25.000 And they're on the same planet as us.

02:28:27.000 How are we going to communicate with aliens?

02:28:29.000 This was an interesting group that said it was part of this dolphin.

02:28:33.000 It was called the Dolphin Society or something.

02:28:37.000 John C. Lilly was this.

02:28:38.000 Oh, yeah.

02:28:39.000 Sure.

02:28:39.000 I forget the name of it, but, you know, because then he started giving dolphins LSD and stuff.

02:28:43.000 Yeah.

02:28:44.000 Yeah, we also had that experiment where he had the woman living in the home with a dolphin and she had to masturbate the dolphin to get it to pay attention.

02:28:52.000 And so they killed the study once that came out.

02:28:55.000 Which is unfortunate.

02:28:57.000 But he was also like, he invented the sensory deprivation tank.

02:29:02.000 He was a really out there guy.

02:29:05.000 And he was into ketamine for whatever weird reason.

02:29:09.000 He would take intramuscular ketamine and then get in the sensory deprivation tank.

02:29:14.000 I've heard you talk about this.

02:29:15.000 I just want to ask you directly, you know, when somebody takes LSD or one of the others and they feel like it's a door opening doors of perception into some other reality, is there really a reality or is it just brain chemistry?

02:29:31.000 It's a good question.

02:29:32.000 I think you're thinking of dimethyltryptamine.

02:29:34.000 The reason why dimethyltryptamine is so interesting is because it's endogenous.

02:29:38.000 The human brain produces it.

02:29:40.000 It's trackable.

02:29:42.000 You can find it.

02:29:43.000 And now through the Cottonwood Research Foundation, they've found that the brain...

02:29:48.000 They used to think it was the pineal gland.

02:29:50.000 But I had...

02:29:53.000 Dr. Rick Strassman on, who conducted the first FDA-approved studies on psychedelics with dimethyltryptamine, where they were IV dosing these people with it.

02:30:05.000 And I actually had a conversation with Graham Hancock when I was in London this weekend, and he said that they're doing some at the University of London now, too, that are very fascinating.

02:30:14.000 Where they're doing the same sort of thing, where they're using IV drips so they can prolong the DMT state for very long periods of time and then come back with these very similar descriptions of what's going on. 0.95

02:30:26.000 Who fucking knows? 0.94

02:30:28.000 Who knows what is happening? 0.98

02:30:31.000 If that is a doorway that opens up in the mind that leads you to another dimension or whether it's the human consciousness, the imagination, And the visual cortex interacting with these incredibly powerful psychoactive compounds that give a similar visual hallucination to everyone.

02:30:50.000 You know, I don't think there's a way to know right now.

02:30:53.000 Right.

02:30:54.000 So this is kind of an epistemological problem.

02:30:56.000 You know, what should I believe is true?

02:30:58.000 I don't know about that because what if...

02:31:00.000 So Richard Dawkins and I have this kind of standing invitation to go to this ayahuasca place in Costa Rica.

02:31:07.000 And, you know, Richard had a stroke.

02:31:08.000 He said, I don't know, I think I better do this.

02:31:09.000 And I think I probably won't do it, but I'm curious to know, what if I did it?

02:31:14.000 And I came back, I said, oh my God, Joe, I've been a skeptic and a materialist, and I've discovered that there's this other reality.

02:31:21.000 And you go, well, how do you know it's true?

02:31:23.000 I said, because I experienced it.

02:31:25.000 And then you go, well, how can I know it's true?

02:31:28.000 Here, you try it.

02:31:29.000 And then you go, yeah, I went.

02:31:30.000 I did it.

02:31:31.000 You're right.

02:31:31.000 But how does Jamie know?

02:31:33.000 Well, he has to try it.

02:31:35.000 How do we get out of the loop that it may just be brain chemistry and nothing more than that, or you're actually going somewhere?

02:31:41.000 Have we hit an epistemological wall we can't know?

02:31:44.000 I don't know what the answer to that is, but I do think that it would benefit you to try it just so that you could experience something that's so profoundly unique that it throws into question what reality is Because we think of reality as only being things that we can measure,

02:32:04.000 things that we can touch, things that we can put on a scale.

02:32:07.000 And you, as the editor of Skeptic Magazine in particular, you're very skeptical about things.

02:32:12.000 But what you experience with the most potent of hallucinogens, whether it's mushrooms, whether it's psilocybin, or whether it's dimethyltryptamine, or any of these really, really potent ones...

02:32:22.000 You experience something that seems so much more vivid than reality itself.

02:32:27.000 It's very confusing.

02:32:29.000 It's like, what is happening here?

02:32:30.000 Am I actually interacting with entities, or are there thoughts that I have in my mind that are so potent and profound, like things like creativity and love and emotions, that if you attach them to this psychedelic compound,

02:32:46.000 they dance for you in a way that seems like they're an actual entity.

02:32:51.000 Who knows?

02:32:51.000 But I would like you to do it.

02:32:53.000 I'd like you to do it just because I respect your opinion and I'd like to see what your thought is when you come back from it.

02:32:59.000 I would imagine I would have a profound experience because most people do, right?

02:33:03.000 I don't think I've talked to anybody who hasn't had a profound experience or at least an interesting one.

02:33:07.000 And I read Oliver Sacks' memoir, his autobiography, where he did this stuff.

02:33:13.000 And he decided it was just all brain chemistry.

02:33:15.000 But it was super profound.

02:33:18.000 Like he's in a restaurant and the people all have these fly-like heads.

02:33:21.000 Which one did he do?

02:33:23.000 I think...

02:33:25.000 I think he did LSD or maybe—I actually can't remember now.

02:33:28.000 But, you know, he writes about the brain.

02:33:29.000 He's a neurologist and so on.

02:33:31.000 And it's like, okay.

02:33:33.000 So what does this mean?

02:33:34.000 What is he saying?

02:33:35.000 And how would it be different when I—so, like, I read about people who have near-death experiences.

02:33:39.000 Then I read, you know, Oliver Sacks' experience.

02:33:41.000 Or you talk about in the opening of one of Sam Harris' books, he talks about taking—was it— What did he take?

02:33:48.000 I think it was LSD. Maybe Graham.

02:34:08.000 Oh, there's this whole other world out there that I didn't know about.

02:34:11.000 And here's what I'm worried about, Joe. 0.98

02:34:13.000 If we were having this conversation 500 years ago, and somebody's telling us about dark energy and dark matter and quantum physics, and we'd be going, this is bullshit. 0.95

02:34:20.000 And then I don't want to miss. 0.96

02:34:22.000 Like, oh my god, there is this other...

02:34:24.000 I don't think there's a danger in you doing it.

02:34:26.000 So I think you should do it.

02:34:27.000 Okay.

02:34:28.000 Because I don't think, you know, it's...

02:34:30.000 The thing about dimethyltryptamine in particular, which is what ayahuasca, that's the psychoactive compound, is that it's endogenous to the human body, and it's one of the most transient drugs ever observed.

02:34:45.000 It's really...

02:34:45.000 Your body brings you back to baseline very quickly, especially with the smoked version of DMT. The oral one is different, the ayahuasca, you know, because you're...

02:34:55.000 Orally, it's broken down in the gut by monoamine oxidase.

02:34:58.000 And so with ayahuasca is a combinatory medication where you're taking DMT from one plant and MOA inhibitors from another plant.

02:35:09.000 And that's what allows you to take it orally.

02:35:11.000 So it's a longer acting but less profound version in terms of like the flash of DMT is so much more vibrant apparently.

02:35:23.000 But it doesn't seem to be dangerous.

02:35:25.000 It seems like everybody who takes it comes back.

02:35:28.000 You've done this.

02:35:29.000 Yes.

02:35:29.000 I've only done DMT, which is the more potent version of it.

02:35:33.000 The ayahuasca version I haven't done yet, but I'm doing it soon.

02:35:36.000 And that is supposed to be the long term.

02:35:40.000 And the thing about the benefit of the long one seems to be that the more you can interact with that state, the more you come back with life lessons.

02:35:49.000 So we'll see.

02:35:50.000 Well, there was something about the ayahuasca where you revisit dark memories and bad things in your life, and I'm not sure I want to go through that again.

02:35:59.000 I don't know if that's inevitable.

02:36:00.000 Some people haven't.

02:36:01.000 My friend Tom just did, and he said it was all good.

02:36:03.000 There was no bad thoughts and bad memories at all.

02:36:05.000 It was all beautiful.

02:36:06.000 I think you can kind of prime your mind and prepare yourself with meditation and sort of...

02:36:12.000 Put yourself in a good state of mind when you enter into that experience.

02:36:16.000 Right.

02:36:17.000 So you do this with somebody, a guide or somebody?

02:36:20.000 Yes.

02:36:20.000 Generally.

02:36:21.000 Yeah.

02:36:22.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:36:22.000 Yeah.

02:36:23.000 So here this, you know, getting back, what is truth?

02:36:26.000 So if you channel your inner Jordan Peterson, you say, well, it doesn't matter if it affects the person's life, then it's true.

02:36:34.000 Right.

02:36:34.000 Whatever that means, that word.

02:36:37.000 See, I'm kind of locked into the kind of empiricist scientific view of truth.

02:36:40.000 You know, it's out there.

02:36:41.000 It's an actual physical reality of some kind.

02:36:42.000 It's measurable and so on.

02:36:43.000 But what if it's not that?

02:36:45.000 What if truth is just, well, it matters for me.

02:36:48.000 Like, I believe I have free will.

02:36:50.000 Maybe you're a determinist, but I don't care.

02:36:53.000 I feel like I'm making free choices.

02:36:55.000 It matters to me.

02:36:56.000 It's my truth.

02:36:58.000 I don't mean this in that kind of postmodern way, but just maybe it is a postmodern way.

02:37:03.000 Yeah, the way I've described it is imagine if you could have a conversation with God, absolutely real conversation with God, where you could go to a place and have a conversation with this Loving,

02:37:19.000 knowing entity that knows all and sees through you and explains to you that we're all connected in this unseen cosmic way.

02:37:31.000 And if you just address that in your life and treat people that way, you will live a better life.

02:37:36.000 And you have this brief meeting with God and it's very profound.

02:37:39.000 And then you come back and you have to sort of come to grips with what you've experienced.

02:37:48.000 That you wouldn't be able to measure either.

02:37:51.000 That feeling, that experience, how would you be able to prove to people that you had a conversation with God?

02:37:57.000 You would just have to, like, learn from that experience yourself and somehow or another try not to slip back into the human folly and all the bad behavior and thought patterns that we've all existed with.

02:38:14.000 Well, psychedelics in the most profound breakthrough way are like that.

02:38:19.000 They are like having a conversation with God.

02:38:22.000 And whether or not it's a hallucination or whether or not it's actually meeting and interacting with all knowing entities, the experience is the same.

02:38:32.000 So whether it's real or whether it's an imagination or a hallucination, the profundity, the profound nature of the experience is the same.

02:38:42.000 Right.

02:38:42.000 So I don't know if it's real or not real.

02:38:44.000 Maybe that's not even the right question.

02:38:46.000 Right.

02:38:47.000 We do have a problem with wanting things to be measurable.

02:38:50.000 Right.

02:38:50.000 Because that's how we've gotten this far.

02:38:52.000 Right.

02:38:52.000 We've gotten this far.

02:38:53.000 It works.

02:38:54.000 If you take 20 Tylenols, you'll be dead.

02:38:56.000 But if you take one, it'll fix your headache.

02:38:59.000 Right.

02:38:59.000 Right?

02:39:00.000 Yeah.

02:39:00.000 So we're big on measuring things, which is important.

02:39:05.000 This is a heavy table.

02:39:07.000 You don't want to put it on your back.

02:39:09.000 It's measurably heavy.

02:39:10.000 Yes, but these things are not measurable, and that's one of the more interesting things about them, that these psychedelic experiences are not measurable, and they're very personal, and they're very profound.

02:39:21.000 And I don't think it would hurt you at all.

02:39:24.000 I think it would help you.

02:39:25.000 All right, I'll do it.

02:39:26.000 All right, we're in.

02:39:27.000 Where is it?

02:39:28.000 Right here.

02:39:28.000 We're going to shut the camera off right now.

02:39:30.000 What if that is God?

02:39:31.000 What if somebody had one of these trips way back 5,000, 10,000 years ago and said, I talked to God, and they did in their head.

02:39:37.000 And other people, you know, like that Ricky Gervais movie, The Invention of Lying, where he comes out and they think he talked to God and he knows.

02:39:46.000 And it's like, oh, because he can't lie, right?

02:39:48.000 Maybe it's like that.

02:39:49.000 That's what these scholars out of the University of Jerusalem felt was the source of the burning bush in Moses.

02:39:57.000 They think it's the acacia tree and that the acacia tree is rich in DMT. What if that triggered the whole thing?

02:40:05.000 Well, you know, that is also John Marco Allegro's thoughts.

02:40:09.000 Oh, right.

02:40:09.000 The sacred mushroom and the cross.

02:40:11.000 That's right.

02:40:11.000 I forgot about that.

02:40:12.000 Yeah.

02:40:13.000 Right.

02:40:14.000 And he was a scholar who was assigned to be one of the people to deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.

02:40:19.000 And after 14 years of working on it, it was his belief that the Christian religion was really initially about consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.

02:40:31.000 But, you know, good luck trying to decipher that and find out if it's right.

02:40:36.000 Yeah.

02:40:37.000 Yeah, so when someone like myself or Richard Dawkins says, you know, did the resurrection actually happen?

02:40:43.000 Did Jesus really come back from the dead?

02:40:45.000 And then you have someone like Jordan say, well, it's metaphorically true, or it's mythically true.

02:40:50.000 And people like Richard and I are like, what?

02:40:52.000 What does that mean?

02:40:53.000 Right, what does that mean?

02:40:54.000 But to somebody who says, I believe it, and it makes my life better, that's my truth.

02:41:01.000 Who am I to say, no, but it's not true.

02:41:04.000 You see where I'm going with that?

02:41:06.000 These are kind of conflicting conversations I have with myself.

02:41:08.000 I've changed my stance on religion over the years in that I think that the real benefit is that it acts as a moral scaffolding for a lot of people.

02:41:17.000 And whether or not those things are true, that clearly, whether they're true or not, whether the origin was actually the Word of God, Clearly they've been affected by human beings.

02:41:28.000 When you read things in the Bible that treat women as second-class citizens and condone slavery and talk about murdering people for disobeying, clearly the work of man is involved in there somewhere. 0.99

02:41:43.000 We know people are full of shit and we know that they lie in order to To prop up their better interests. 1.00

02:41:54.000 And there's clearly some of that in religion. 1.00

02:41:57.000 But there's also a moral scaffolding involved in religion that seems to be very beneficial to some people because it allows them to live their life with a structure that they think is for the greater good.

02:42:08.000 And a meaning structure too.

02:42:09.000 Yeah.

02:42:10.000 And that helps them get by in life.

02:42:12.000 Right.

02:42:13.000 Yes, if you think, well, what's the meaning of all, in 14 billion years, there'll be no universe or whatever it is, then what's the point, right?

02:42:21.000 Existential angst.

02:42:22.000 Yeah, that's what people feel.

02:42:23.000 But to me, I call that, you know, what do I call it?

02:42:29.000 Who was the Woody Allen character in Annie Hall, where he goes back as a child?

02:42:35.000 He won't do his homework, so his mom takes him to the psychiatrist.

02:42:38.000 Why won't you do your homework?

02:42:39.000 The universe is expanding.

02:42:41.000 Right.

02:42:42.000 What has that got to do?

02:42:43.000 Well, one day the universe is going to all blow up because it's expanding.

02:42:45.000 There's no point in doing my homework.

02:42:47.000 And she says, what has that got to do with it?

02:42:49.000 You live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn's not expanding.

02:42:53.000 Yeah.

02:42:55.000 Yeah, that was a great scene.

02:42:56.000 I forgot about that.

02:42:57.000 In other words, it's the wrong level of analysis.

02:43:00.000 You shouldn't think about your meaning of life.

02:43:02.000 14 billion years, it won't have mattered what you do today.

02:43:06.000 But it matters today to the people that you affect.

02:43:09.000 Yes.

02:43:09.000 It was interesting, too, that you were talking about this earlier.

02:43:12.000 Alvy Singer, that was his character.

02:43:13.000 Oh, there you go.

02:43:14.000 Yeah.

02:43:14.000 You were talking about this earlier that a lot of the, like, even, like, the woke attitudes that people have and a lot of the progressive dogma that people talk about...

02:43:28.000 It seems to be religious in nature.

02:43:30.000 Mm-hmm.

02:43:47.000 Right.

02:43:48.000 Right.

02:43:48.000 So it's back to that question.

02:43:49.000 Why do we have to punish people who don't accept the dogma?

02:43:52.000 I mean, why would that make a difference?

02:43:54.000 What do I care what you think?

02:43:55.000 Well, it does matter because we're social.

02:43:57.000 And if you challenge me, that may undermine my worldview.

02:44:03.000 So I need to stomp on that.

02:44:05.000 And I need you to be in agreement with me because it gives me comfort.

02:44:09.000 Right.

02:44:10.000 It's like there's certain people out there that you could get that with.

02:44:13.000 There's people that don't like if you have an Android phone.

02:44:16.000 Right.

02:44:16.000 You should have Apple.

02:44:17.000 I am Apple.

02:44:18.000 You should be Apple.

02:44:19.000 Why don't you switch over to Apple?

02:44:20.000 They'll try to convince you.

02:44:21.000 There's people that'll convince you to go to AT&T. Verizon sucks. 0.99

02:44:24.000 Why are you at the Verizon? 0.99

02:44:26.000 People want you to be on the same page as them with everything because it affirms that their choices were good.

02:44:32.000 Right.

02:44:32.000 You know?

02:44:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:44:34.000 Right.

02:44:35.000 Because we get our truths in part socially, like other people guide us in our youth and professors and our teachers and books and experts, and we determine what's true in part by what other people believe.

02:44:48.000 So you do depend on that.

02:44:50.000 Because none of us are smart enough to figure out the world on our own, so we have to have other people.

02:44:54.000 That's why we need communication like that.

02:44:56.000 But the other people are sometimes wrong, right?

02:44:58.000 And so if our tribe believes, I call this tribal conspiracy, this is what our tribe believes.

02:45:03.000 This is what we do.

02:45:08.000 To challenge that may make me feel like I'm not part of my tribe anymore.

02:45:13.000 Where's my moorings?

02:45:14.000 This is my group.

02:45:16.000 And so, if you're Catholic, you believe this.

02:45:20.000 If you're Mormon, you believe that. 0.99

02:45:21.000 If you're Jewish, you believe this. 0.99

02:45:24.000 I always point out to Christians, the theologians that I debate on, the resurrection really happened, here's the arguments, here's the six best arguments, the empty tomb, Mary was there, and then the body was gone, and this and that, and this finger in the side, and whatnot.

02:45:38.000 If these arguments are so good, why don't Jews accept Jesus as the Messiah who was crucified and resurrected? 0.92

02:45:44.000 Well, if they understood the arguments, they would know—it's like, they understand the arguments.

02:45:49.000 These are smart rabbis that know a lot, right? 0.87

02:45:52.000 It's that just not—that's not their truth.

02:45:55.000 That's not their religion.

02:45:57.000 That's not it.

02:45:58.000 Yeah, that's the real problem with religion, that there's so much variety.

02:46:01.000 Right, so there's no way to run the experiment, which is the right one.

02:46:05.000 There's no experiment you can run.

02:46:07.000 If a Martian came here and said, okay, what's the right religion? 1.00

02:46:10.000 Yeah.

02:46:12.000 Probably there'd be a world war to claim the proper religion to express to the Martians.

02:46:17.000 Yeah.

02:46:18.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:46:19.000 Right.

02:46:19.000 So I do think, again, if you were chronically frozen and came back a thousand years from now, and you found out all this stuff that we're talking about, oh, this was this, that's the explanation, oh...

02:46:31.000 I thought that was bullshit, right?

02:46:33.000 So I don't want to do that, but there may be these, you know, Mysterian mysteries, you know, about the Mysterians. 0.98

02:46:37.000 These are the philosophers who think our brains are just not structured or big enough to solve certain problems.

02:46:43.000 We just can't know, like, where the universe come from, ultimately, before the Big Bang.

02:46:48.000 You know, why is there something rather than nothing?

02:46:50.000 God's existence or free will.

02:46:52.000 You know, there's just certain things that are conceptually kind of don't make sense for our brains.

02:46:58.000 Like consciousness, you know, this is why it's the hard problem of consciousness.

02:47:02.000 It may be the wrong question.

02:47:04.000 Yeah.

02:47:04.000 It may just, it just is.

02:47:06.000 Full stop.

02:47:07.000 You know, why is there a universe?

02:47:08.000 I don't know.

02:47:09.000 It just is.

02:47:11.000 Well, it's also, if you think about this stage of evolution that we currently exist in, we think of this as the pinnacle.

02:47:17.000 But if you went back to the early hominids and you tried to express any of the thoughts that we have today or looked at the civilization that we've created, the cities, the flying airships and the satellite images and the fucking video flying through your cell phone to someone in New Zealand instantaneously, 0.96

02:47:36.000 all of it is witchcraft and voodoo and chaos. 0.99

02:47:39.000 If you keep going, if we keep going in whatever...

02:47:43.000 Capacity. 0.94

02:47:43.000 If we evolve to a million years from now, we're going to look back on this as like, what a bunch of goofs. 0.94

02:47:50.000 What a bunch of silly, primitive people that couldn't even read each other's minds. 0.99

02:47:54.000 They're just lying to each other and pretending polygraph tests are real and using hypnotic regression to try to uncover past truths. 1.00

02:48:03.000 God.

02:48:04.000 I know.

02:48:04.000 I don't want to be that guy.

02:48:05.000 No. 1.00

02:48:05.000 But I don't want to be a sucker, too, and believe bullshit. 1.00

02:48:07.000 They go, oh, you fell for that one. 1.00

02:48:10.000 They're in your book.

02:48:12.000 It's a good way to end this.

02:48:13.000 So it's available right now, Michael Shermer, Conspiracy, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

02:48:20.000 Did we come to any conclusions here?

02:48:22.000 I think the conclusion was you have to read the book.

02:48:25.000 You have to read the book.

02:48:25.000 To get the answer.

02:48:26.000 Did you do the audio book?

02:48:28.000 I did.

02:48:28.000 I read it.

02:48:28.000 Oh, excellent.

02:48:29.000 I sent you the audio file.

02:48:30.000 But I wanted to make sure that you read it.

02:48:33.000 I like it when authors read their own books.

02:48:35.000 I do, too.

02:48:36.000 I do, too.

02:48:37.000 It's so much better.

02:48:37.000 So much better.

02:48:38.000 Even if they don't have a great voice, I don't like my voice.

02:48:40.000 At least I know it's coming from them.

02:48:41.000 Right.

02:48:42.000 Except when Stephen King reads his books.

02:48:44.000 You shouldn't do that.

02:48:44.000 Oh, I haven't heard...

02:48:45.000 Some other people do that.

02:48:46.000 Yeah, he's terrible at it.

02:48:47.000 He's a great author, but not so good at the...

02:48:50.000 For novels, I think a voice actor would be good.

02:48:53.000 I think so, too.

02:48:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:48:54.000 All right.

02:48:54.000 Well, thank you, Michael.

02:48:55.000 Appreciate you.

02:48:56.000 Nice to see you again.

02:48:57.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 26, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1888 - Michael Shermer

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