The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #770 - Michael Shermer

00:00:04.000 And we're live.

00:00:05.000 Mr. Sharma, welcome.

00:00:07.000 Thanks.

00:00:07.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:08.000 Thanks for being here, man.

00:00:09.000 I appreciate it.

00:00:09.000 I have been paying attention to your work for a long time.

00:00:13.000 Oh, you're the one.

00:00:14.000 Yeah, thanks.

00:00:14.000 Yes, I'm one of those guys.

00:00:16.000 I'm sure you've got a lot.

00:00:17.000 But I've got a bunch of your books here.

00:00:20.000 Thanks for bringing those in.

00:00:21.000 I really appreciate that.

00:00:22.000 Sure.

00:00:22.000 Got some stuff to read now.

00:00:24.000 How did you get involved in skepticism?

00:00:26.000 I know you started off as a cyclist, right?

00:00:29.000 Yeah, well, I was a bike racer from 1980 to about 1990, about 10 years.

00:00:35.000 In between, when I was first in college, I went to Pepperdine and then Cal State Fullerton.

00:00:40.000 And then I just was burnt out.

00:00:41.000 I had a master's degree, and I just decided I didn't want to do another six straight years of PhD work, so I quit.

00:00:48.000 And I went over to the placement office at Cal State Fullerton and said, well, I need a job.

00:00:52.000 They said, what can you do?

00:00:53.000 I said, nothing.

00:00:54.000 I have no skills.

00:00:55.000 I'm a college student.

00:00:56.000 But I like to write.

00:00:56.000 So I got a job at a bike magazine.

00:00:58.000 My first job out of college.

00:01:00.000 And it was a trade magazine for the bike industry.

00:01:05.000 But I got right into cycling right away.

00:01:07.000 I bought a bike the first week.

00:01:08.000 So you weren't a bike rider before this job?

00:01:10.000 Oh, that's interesting.

00:01:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:11.000 And I went to a big event at Griffith Park where they had a Yoplait Yogurt 50-kilometer bike race.

00:01:18.000 And Jonathan Boyer was the big star.

00:01:20.000 He was the first American to do the Tour de France.

00:01:22.000 And I saw him.

00:01:24.000 I was like, wow, this is a cool sport.

00:01:25.000 So I just got into it.

00:01:27.000 I just started riding and racing.

00:01:29.000 And then we started Race Across America in 1982. And so I quit my job and just did that for a decade.

00:01:37.000 I had corporate sponsors.

00:01:38.000 We had ABC Wide World of Sports contract with them to film it, and we turned it into a little mini-culture business.

00:01:46.000 But the ultra-endurance sports were just taking off.

00:01:49.000 The Ironman became famous in the early 80s.

00:01:52.000 John Howard, who won it, was one of the first to do the race across America with me and two other guys.

00:01:57.000 And I did a rod dog sled race.

00:02:00.000 And then soon after that were all those sort of long distance mixed sport type things where you run and hike and swim.

00:02:09.000 And anyway, so that was just part of that culture.

00:02:12.000 And I was young and single and didn't have a house or mortgage, you know, that stuff.

00:02:16.000 So you can do those kinds of things.

00:02:26.000 Oh, yeah.

00:02:41.000 I'm excited that all kind of social subcultures have a handful of real weirdos.

00:02:46.000 The people that show up at your door like, can I stay here this weekend?

00:02:49.000 What?

00:02:49.000 No.

00:02:50.000 You have skeptics that because they're also skeptics, they want to stay at your house?

00:02:54.000 Yeah, there's some oddballs there for sure.

00:02:56.000 That's always going to be the case.

00:02:57.000 I think you're absolutely right about that, about groups.

00:03:00.000 You're always going to have outliers or strange...

00:03:03.000 That's right.

00:03:04.000 But the endurance racing in and of itself, the idea of pushing your body to the limits, is a really fascinating sport.

00:03:11.000 Because pretty much everyone can ride a bike.

00:03:13.000 It's not like you're doing something like ballet, where I couldn't imagine doing...

00:03:18.000 I watch some people do flips and gymnastics and stuff.

00:03:21.000 Although I know the human body can do that, I'm like...

00:03:24.000 I can't see myself doing it, but I can get on a bike.

00:03:28.000 That's right.

00:03:28.000 The key is to find something you like to do and that you're good at.

00:03:31.000 My wife's a beautiful dancer. 1.00

00:03:33.000 I've tried.

00:03:34.000 We took dancing lessons with her.

00:03:35.000 I just can't do it.

00:03:35.000 I just got two left feet.

00:03:37.000 I can't do it.

00:03:37.000 What I meant is, though, that it's one of those things where a normal person can do it, but to do it the way a Lance Armstrong can do it or the way a Greg LeMond can do it, you get into that weird area where you're just tweaking every single aspect of your body.

00:03:53.000 The way you eat, the way you sleep, what you do, your mental attitude, your motivation.

00:03:59.000 Did you get down that rabbit hole?

00:04:01.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:04:02.000 It's all I did.

00:04:03.000 It was a 40-hour-a-week, but really more like a 60-hour-a-week job where you're training, but there's a lot of preparation before you go out on a ride, when you come back from a ride, and then you add weights or stretching, yoga, whatever.

00:04:16.000 It ends up being an all-day process.

00:04:19.000 How long did it take before you got into all those people that are into EPO and blood doping?

00:04:23.000 Well, when I was racing in the 80s, there was no EPO. Blood doping was legal, and it was done by people I knew on the 84 Olympic team.

00:04:32.000 I know some of the people that did it.

00:04:34.000 They used their own blood or a relative's blood.

00:04:36.000 They just stored it and packed it in.

00:04:38.000 It wasn't even banned until after the 84 Olympics when it was found out the American team did it.

00:04:43.000 And then the, whoever, not the UCI, the Olympic Committee said, okay, no blood doping.

00:04:49.000 But it works.

00:04:50.000 I didn't try it.

00:04:53.000 Race Across America is kind of a different sort of competition.

00:04:55.000 It's more of you against yourself and the clock.

00:04:58.000 You hardly ever see the other people out there on the road.

00:05:02.000 The idea of taking your blood out and packing it back in sort of creeped me out.

00:05:07.000 And there were no drugs that you could take.

00:05:09.000 I mean, things like steroids, that's not going to do it for a cyclist.

00:05:12.000 The miracle of EPO is that it packs in more red blood cells much faster than, say, training at high altitude.

00:05:19.000 And you don't have to do the creepy thing with storing bags of blood and then the blood cells die or the blood gets infected.

00:05:27.000 I mean, I got hep C when I was in college and I had a back surgery.

00:05:31.000 I had a tumor on my spine and I had to have it taken out.

00:05:34.000 And I'd been taking a lot of aspirin for pain.

00:05:36.000 I was in pain for years.

00:05:38.000 And so they had to do this blood transfusion.

00:05:41.000 This was 1976. And there was no test for this.

00:05:45.000 So I got Hep C. And so after that, I thought, oh, blood, you know, blood doping, packing, that just sort of creeped me out.

00:05:50.000 Yeah, I can only imagine.

00:05:51.000 And there were people that were getting sick from blood doping.

00:05:55.000 You know, you take the blood, you put it in a bag, you store it.

00:05:58.000 Maybe it's stored properly, maybe it's not.

00:06:00.000 And then you get blood infections, and that's not, that's dangerous.

00:06:03.000 Is Hep C the disease that was recently in the news because there was that young guy who owns some pharmaceutical company and they charged a ridiculous amount of money for...

00:06:15.000 Yes, correct.

00:06:16.000 Because you can get the...

00:06:17.000 I've been cured.

00:06:18.000 I'm a Kaiser patient and I did it 10 years ago.

00:06:21.000 And I wiped it out within a month, and I did the six-month treatment, and I've been clear ever since.

00:06:26.000 But the drugs aren't that expensive if you do it through an HMO. It's just built in.

00:06:31.000 It should be part of any healthcare system.

00:06:34.000 And so, yeah, somebody was doctoring this or cheating the system or something like that.

00:06:38.000 Yeah, there was...

00:06:39.000 Jamie, you know the story behind it, right?

00:06:41.000 It was that young...

00:06:42.000 Martin Scherkelli?

00:06:43.000 Yeah.

00:06:44.000 Is that Hep C? I think it was Hep C or HIV, I think maybe.

00:06:48.000 Different medications.

00:06:49.000 He's got a company that works for a lot of pharmaceuticals, so it could be both.

00:06:53.000 And the accusation was he was price gouging and charging ridiculous amount of money.

00:06:58.000 Yeah.

00:06:58.000 So it took you six months to get over it?

00:07:01.000 Well, my first blood test after a month of taking the antiviral and the interferon was the combination they used 10 years ago.

00:07:09.000 And within the first blood test, it was gone, undetectable.

00:07:12.000 They said, yeah, but you got to do the whole six-month treatment.

00:07:14.000 That's our program.

00:07:15.000 All right, so I did it.

00:07:17.000 I was one of the fortunate ones that didn't get sick from the drugs.

00:07:19.000 Some people just are laid out.

00:07:21.000 They can't do exercise or function, but I didn't have any problems.

00:07:25.000 So you tested negative, but they still made you continue the medication?

00:07:29.000 Yep.

00:07:29.000 Is it because...

00:07:30.000 Just because you're in sort of a trials, and it's like, this is what we do.

00:07:33.000 You've got to do the six months, so all right.

00:07:35.000 Oh, okay, but it didn't mess with you physically?

00:07:37.000 No, I was all right.

00:07:39.000 Yep.

00:07:40.000 So, you know, back then, that was the only thing you could do was blood doping.

00:07:45.000 When EPO was introduced in the early 90s, that really made a big difference.

00:07:49.000 And as you know, Greg first discovered this when his teammates came to him and said, you know, we found out these other guys are doing this stuff.

00:07:57.000 We got to get on the program.

00:07:58.000 And he didn't want to do it.

00:08:00.000 And so by the time Lance got into the sport, you know, he didn't invent doping.

00:08:03.000 I mean, it was already rampant and it was full on coal, you know, full coal.

00:08:08.000 The only thing Lance did was like, well, if everybody's doing it, we're going to do it.

00:08:11.000 We might as well do it at a really professional level.

00:08:14.000 And, you know, that's where he sort of took it to another level.

00:08:17.000 And who knows if it's still going on.

00:08:19.000 Yeah, I had him on the podcast.

00:08:21.000 I know, I watched it.

00:08:21.000 Yeah, it was very enlightening.

00:08:23.000 I like him a lot.

00:08:25.000 You know, he's an extreme winner.

00:08:26.000 And extreme winners are the type of people that they just push everything to the outmost edge.

00:08:34.000 And that guy, I firmly believe that if everybody was 100% natural, the same results probably would have happened.

00:08:41.000 Probably, yeah.

00:08:42.000 Probably would have been different numbers as far as the times achieved.

00:08:45.000 But I think he still probably would have won.

00:08:47.000 Probably.

00:08:48.000 Probably, yes.

00:08:48.000 Probably.

00:08:49.000 Probably.

00:08:49.000 That probably is a big word, right?

00:08:51.000 Well, and this is why it's still an immoral act, because there are people that don't do it, or they don't want to do it, and we'll never know how they would have done compared to the people that are doping.

00:09:02.000 But again, we know that all the other people that were on the podium with Lance for those seven years, they all have been busted for doping, or admitted that they doped.

00:09:13.000 So how far down do you go to give the jersey to 127th place guy or something?

00:09:18.000 Because we know how so many of them were doing it.

00:09:21.000 It's just so fascinating to me from a perspective of these guys are essentially experimenting with their bodies, trying to find the right levels, trying to find out what's the best method to do so.

00:09:32.000 And along the entire career that Lance had, you see all these adjustments that these people are making and everyone trying to...

00:09:40.000 Well, one of the early books out, before all this came out about Lance, was called Breaking the Chain by Willy Voigt, who was a soigneur, or, you know, one of the people who give massage therapies to, or no, I think it was one of the mechanics, anyway, with the Festina team that got busted in 98. And he said,

00:10:00.000 basically, these guys were just experimenting randomly.

00:10:03.000 No one knew what to do.

00:10:04.000 What's the dosage?

00:10:04.000 How many days every other day?

00:10:06.000 How do I incorporate the other things I'm doing?

00:10:08.000 What about food training?

00:10:10.000 It was just, you know, Katie bar the door.

00:10:11.000 Let's just try anything.

00:10:13.000 So again, one of the things Lance did was hire the best doctor, this Michele Ferrari, in the business.

00:10:18.000 The guy that knew the most about how to do it.

00:10:21.000 Properly.

00:10:22.000 And adjust it for each body, because everybody's body is different.

00:10:25.000 Okay, so we're going to try it.

00:10:26.000 And you do this for months before the big race, and you figure it out.

00:10:30.000 And other people weren't doing that.

00:10:32.000 And then by the time they scrambled to catch up...

00:10:34.000 Tyler talks about this in his book, you know, after he left the postal team and got his own team.

00:10:40.000 And then, of course, Ferrari wasn't available, so he hired this other guy, Fuentes, who screwed up and mixed the bags of blood and gave him the wrong drug.

00:10:48.000 So he got...

00:10:49.000 He got popped, he said, for—well, he was doping, but he got popped for somebody else's dope.

00:10:55.000 Oh, because somebody else's blood was in his system?

00:10:57.000 Correct.

00:10:58.000 Ooh, Jesus.

00:10:59.000 Right.

00:10:59.000 I think that's what it was.

00:11:01.000 Oh, my God.

00:11:01.000 Willie Vogt talks about this in Breaking the Chain, too.

00:11:04.000 One of the early guys that got busted, he used his mechanic's urine for the urine test. 0.99

00:11:12.000 Which he stored in a little condom that's held underneath this little fake penis called the Whizzer. 0.99

00:11:18.000 Oh, I've seen those. 0.99

00:11:19.000 Because in the drug test, you have to look and watch the guy pee just to make sure.

00:11:23.000 So you do it in a way.

00:11:25.000 But the problem was the mechanic had stayed up all night working on the bikes and took some stimulants.

00:11:30.000 Oh, God.

00:11:30.000 So the stimulants are in the urine.

00:11:31.000 So this poor guy gets busted for something he didn't take.

00:11:34.000 Of course, he was taking something else.

00:11:35.000 Oh, God.

00:11:37.000 Yeah, there's horror stories about this.

00:11:38.000 You know, guys putting bags of blood on the hook in the hotel room on the wall where the painting is, so it drips down.

00:11:44.000 It's like, you know, this is really a barbaric system in the early days when they were experimenting.

00:11:53.000 So again, what Lance did was just take it to another level.

00:11:56.000 Since it's going on anyway, we might as well do it professionally.

00:11:59.000 Okay.

00:12:00.000 And he would have gotten away with it because had he stayed retired.

00:12:04.000 But back to where you started, it's, you know, when you're at that level and you push your body every day and you get all the endorphins and the testosterone and the camaraderie with the guys, it's great.

00:12:14.000 It is so fun.

00:12:15.000 I still ride four or five days a week with the guys that I used to race with and Friends in the area here and I you know if I missed three or four days a week Traveling I'm just crawling out of my skin.

00:12:25.000 I just got to get back on Wow, that's interesting.

00:12:28.000 Yeah, and I'm 62 years old so imagine you're Lance and you have you know the highest competitive edge probably you know anybody and And you're a super athlete and super gifted and then you push push push and then you got those seven straight and then you retire and then what golf Yeah.

00:12:43.000 It doesn't have the same intensity.

00:12:45.000 And so I completely understand why, you know, so many of these guys come back.

00:12:48.000 Remember Brett Favre came back a couple of times?

00:12:51.000 And, you know, it's just hard to break that habit.

00:12:55.000 Yeah, I see it all the time with fighters, unfortunately, where the consequences are much graver.

00:13:00.000 You know, when you're older and your body doesn't respond the same way and you've already taken a lot of damage, but yet you still have this jonesing for the spotlight and you see them come back.

00:13:10.000 I mean, they all have done it.

00:13:11.000 Yeah.

00:13:12.000 Sugar Ray Leonard, Ali, down the line.

00:13:14.000 A lot of MMA fighters have done it as well.

00:13:16.000 It's just, it's so...

00:13:17.000 And it's the life you know.

00:13:18.000 You know, you go, okay, Monday morning, I'm going to do this workout.

00:13:21.000 I'm going to eat this.

00:13:22.000 It's just a great pattern to be in.

00:13:23.000 It feels great.

00:13:24.000 You're working toward this goal in six months where this is going to happen.

00:13:27.000 And then when that goal is gone, it's like, well, why am I getting up at six in the morning to do this?

00:13:31.000 I mean, I like doing that, but I got to have a reason.

00:13:34.000 Yeah.

00:13:34.000 I mean, Lance stayed retired, probably be governor of Texas by now.

00:13:38.000 Probably, right?

00:13:40.000 Yeah.

00:13:40.000 I mean, he was so beloved when he was doing the Livestrong Foundation and the whole deal of trying to help people with cancer and his own struggle overcoming cancer.

00:13:51.000 It's just such a crazy story.

00:13:52.000 Well, really, the meltdown was part of that Omerta rule. 0.51

00:13:58.000 It works if everyone has something to lose.

00:14:02.000 The problem was Floyd Landis, he got popped for his victory in the 2006 Tour de France for doping, which he was.

00:14:12.000 And so he served his two years after a long struggle of denial and so forth.

00:14:16.000 And then he wanted to come back, and he couldn't get hired.

00:14:20.000 And then he went to Lance and said, well, you know, can I be on the Radio Shack team?

00:14:24.000 And apparently Lance said no.

00:14:26.000 And so there he is standing there with nothing to lose.

00:14:29.000 So that's when he went to the press and said, you know, I know where the bodies are buried.

00:14:34.000 And, you know, that's where it got bad.

00:14:36.000 Remember when that happened and Lance held that press conference?

00:14:38.000 You know, we like our story.

00:14:41.000 Better than his story.

00:14:42.000 It's like, wait, stories?

00:14:43.000 He's got a story?

00:14:44.000 Just what happened?

00:14:45.000 And same thing with Tyler.

00:14:49.000 He had nothing left to lose, so he wrote that book, The Secret Race.

00:14:52.000 Here's what we did.

00:14:53.000 And that blew it all open.

00:14:55.000 Yeah.

00:14:56.000 So how do you get into skepticism from there?

00:14:58.000 Well, I was still teaching college at night while I was doing the bike racing stuff.

00:15:03.000 And then I got burnt out, you know, just the training and all that and decided, okay, I can't do this forever.

00:15:09.000 So I went back and got my PhD in the history of science.

00:15:12.000 And then I started, I was teaching at Occidental College.

00:15:15.000 And I was like, okay, I'm a college professor.

00:15:18.000 That's a great gig.

00:15:18.000 It's a good life.

00:15:20.000 But then we started in my garage, Skeptic Magazine and the lecture series at Caltech on science and pseudoscience and cults and science and religion and alternative medicine and quackery and all this stuff.

00:15:32.000 And I thought that's an interesting niche to have.

00:15:36.000 And so that just got bigger and bigger in my first book.

00:15:40.000 White People Believe Where Things came out in 97. And about that time, Occidental College was going through a financial crisis, and they were letting go their adjuncts, which at the time I was not on a tenure track.

00:15:51.000 I was a full-time adjunct.

00:15:52.000 And I could see the writing on the wall, okay, this may not end up being a tenure track job.

00:15:56.000 And the skeptic thing was getting big, and I got a big contract through my agent for my second book.

00:16:01.000 So I thought, okay, I'm just going to go for it.

00:16:03.000 I'm going to be a full-time writer.

00:16:06.000 It's a little risky, but I had already done the risky thing of just dropping everything and doing the Race Across America stuff, so I thought, okay, I can do it.

00:16:13.000 And this then became really my job.

00:16:15.000 I still teach one class a semester at Chapman, but my main job is writing books and running the society, publishing the magazine, Skeptic, and it's kind of a niche market.

00:16:27.000 It's like my column in Scientific American.

00:16:29.000 I cover the topics in there that aren't covered in the rest of the magazine.

00:16:33.000 You know, like cancer quackery, or like I'm working on one now on Charlie Sheen's quack cancer doctor, his AIDS doctor, I mean.

00:16:41.000 He's got a quack cancer doctor?

00:16:44.000 Is it cancer or AIDS? It's AIDS, sorry.

00:16:47.000 He, you know, is...

00:16:49.000 It's tiger blood and all that.

00:16:50.000 Well, there is no tiger blood, okay?

00:16:53.000 And he got HIV. And so he immediately went on the drug cocktail, which works.

00:16:57.000 This is a miracle of modern medicine that kind of just sort of slipped by without anybody making a big fuss about it.

00:17:04.000 Huge teams of medical researchers, and they figured out the right cocktail, and then you adjust it for each person.

00:17:09.000 And you can't get rid of the HIV virus, but you knock it down so much that it doesn't cause the AIDS symptoms.

00:17:18.000 You get pneumonia or whatever.

00:17:20.000 And so he did that.

00:17:24.000 But then, much to my amazement, Bill Maher on his show a couple weeks ago had this guy on, this guy from Mexico who has this cure for AIDS. And if you take this, the blood of an arthritic goat,

00:17:40.000 so a goat that has arthritis, how this is determined, I'm not sure.

00:17:45.000 And so allegedly, Charlie went to Mexico and did the arthritic goat blood treatment, and it cured his AIDS. Well, none of this is true.

00:17:55.000 He stopped the drug cocktail.

00:17:58.000 He went down there and stopped the normal drug cocktail for AIDS. HIV. And it came roaring back, of course.

00:18:05.000 If you don't keep taking the drugs, the virus starts multiplying and it roars back in your body.

00:18:10.000 The goat blood didn't work and then he came home and went back on the drug cocktail and he's fine now.

00:18:15.000 So he went down there to actually do this?

00:18:18.000 Yeah.

00:18:18.000 He went down there to do this.

00:18:19.000 Well, because he was probably told, well, he was probably scared.

00:18:21.000 I don't know.

00:18:23.000 That's what I understand.

00:18:24.000 If there's already a drug cocktail that absolutely works, why would you want to stick goat blood?

00:18:28.000 Well, it works just to prevent the AIDS symptoms from coming on, from getting the diseases.

00:18:32.000 You still have the HIV virus.

00:18:34.000 But doesn't it knock it down to an undetectable?

00:18:36.000 Almost undetectable level, yeah.

00:18:38.000 Yeah.

00:18:38.000 That's correct.

00:18:39.000 And that should be good enough.

00:18:40.000 Well, that's what Magic Johnson said.

00:18:42.000 That's right.

00:18:42.000 It doesn't even show up in his tests.

00:18:44.000 That's right, right.

00:18:44.000 Like, if he gets tested right now, he's HIV positive or negative, right?

00:18:47.000 Right.

00:18:47.000 That's right.

00:18:48.000 Even though they don't guarantee it, just in case it's hiding in the nooks and crannies of your nervous system or wherever.

00:18:55.000 So that's the kind of thing that Scientific American wouldn't normally cover, but we would cover.

00:19:02.000 Or conspiracy theories, like the 9-11 truthers.

00:19:05.000 What about the free fall of the buildings and the puffs of smoke and this and that?

00:19:10.000 Some of these are empirical questions we can get at, you know, that normal science journals wouldn't cover, that we cover.

00:19:17.000 So skeptic is kind of a niche market for, you know, fringe claims, borderlands claims.

00:19:22.000 Right.

00:19:27.000 Global warming deniers.

00:19:28.000 Who are these people?

00:19:29.000 What are their arguments?

00:19:30.000 We would take on that and go, okay, here's their ten arguments, the best arguments they have, and then here's the answers of how we know global warming is real.

00:19:39.000 How do you know it's human caused?

00:19:40.000 How do we know these things?

00:19:42.000 Normal science journals don't have to deal with that.

00:19:44.000 They're already down the path and like, okay, what are we going to do about it and that sort of thing.

00:19:48.000 So that's kind of our specialty.

00:19:49.000 Well, it's an important resource because whether it's global warming or 9-11 truth or anything, there's so much confusion out there when it comes to trying to figure out what's real and what's not real.

00:19:59.000 Someone sends you a link and you're like, what is this?

00:20:01.000 And it's a YouTube video.

00:20:02.000 You go to the YouTube, you are being lied to.

00:20:05.000 You watch it and you're like, what the hell's going on?

00:20:08.000 You don't know what's going on, and then you watch it. 0.99

00:20:11.000 Global warming is just one of the many ones that confuses shit out of people.

00:20:17.000 And then you find out that there's companies that actually have a vested interest in confusing people.

00:20:23.000 Have you ever seen that documentary, Merchants of Doubt?

00:20:25.000 I'm in it.

00:20:26.000 Oh, that's right, of course.

00:20:27.000 Yes, I'm in it, yeah.

00:20:28.000 Why am I asking you that?

00:20:29.000 I've seen too many documentaries, officially.

00:20:31.000 I forget who's in it.

00:20:32.000 The beauty of that film, made by Robbie Kenner, who's now a friend of mine, was very clever because he tracked down the same scientists who were hired by the tobacco companies.

00:20:43.000 Not just the same arguments, you know, planting a seed of doubt, sometimes the same people, you know, paid by these front groups.

00:20:51.000 And they know how to do it, too.

00:20:52.000 It's so theatrical, the way they present their arguments.

00:20:54.000 It's one of the reasons why I've always hated those television shows where you have, you know, a host, and then you have the split window, and one person talking over them on this side, and one person's on the left, one person's on the right, literally and figuratively.

00:21:09.000 They're yelling at each other, and you never get anything done.

00:21:12.000 You never figure out anything.

00:21:13.000 But the person who's better at expressing that opinion in a real quick, you know, three or four minute soundbite of an interview...

00:21:20.000 They get their argument across, and that's what these Merchants of Doubt guys were doing. 0.89

00:21:24.000 That's right.

00:21:24.000 Yep.

00:21:25.000 They got the sound bites.

00:21:26.000 The science is not all in.

00:21:28.000 The jury is still out.

00:21:30.000 What jury?

00:21:31.000 Where?

00:21:33.000 It's almost like there's a science czar that calls all the shots, and if we can just find out what's going on there, we're going to blow this whole thing.

00:21:40.000 That isn't how it works.

00:21:41.000 There's 10,000 climate scientists working in all these labs.

00:21:44.000 And their findings converge to this same conclusion.

00:21:47.000 So for there to be conspiracy, they'd all have to be meeting on the weekends going, okay, I'm going to say that the, you know, the parts per million of this particular gas is this.

00:21:55.000 What are you going to say?

00:21:56.000 This is not how it works.

00:21:57.000 It's a very competitive enterprise.

00:21:58.000 If you want to make a name for yourself and you're a young scientist, you know, just debunking one of these arguments about tree ring data or the ice core data would be huge, and they try.

00:22:11.000 It's like the people saying, you know, Einstein was wrong.

00:22:13.000 Okay, there's been a hundred years of scientists testing Einstein.

00:22:17.000 If he was wrong, we would know by now.

00:22:19.000 Oh no, they're all conspiring to cover the truth.

00:22:23.000 No, that isn't how it works.

00:22:24.000 Isn't there, there's also this appeal or this, for some reason, people are drawn to this idea of being a no-nonsense person.

00:22:34.000 The no-nonsense person is like, you believe in Al Gore?

00:22:38.000 You believe that if you've seen an inconvenient truth?

00:22:41.000 But I find that when I talk to these people that really dismiss global climate change or dismiss a lot of people's concerns about those things, they haven't really researched it that much.

00:22:52.000 They're so definitive on their ideas. 0.91

00:22:54.000 But they haven't really researched it that much, but they don't want to be a fool.

00:22:59.000 And that seems to be a lot of the appeal to them, to take this hard stance. 0.99

00:23:04.000 It's like they don't want to be one of those fools. 0.99

00:23:06.000 What are you, a hippie? 1.00

00:23:07.000 You buy into that nonsense? 0.89

00:23:10.000 Yeah, it's partly that.

00:23:12.000 One of the appeals of conspiracy theories is, you know, we're going to blow the lid off, and I'm not being fooled by the government.

00:23:19.000 I know the Bush administration lied, and we're going to...

00:23:23.000 So, I mean, that's one of the appeals of the 9-11 truth movement, is that, you know, we know what really happened, and...

00:23:29.000 And, you know, Bush lied.

00:23:31.000 Okay, well, maybe he lied about this little thing or maybe it was misdirection or bad information, but the idea of orchestrating an entire event like 9-11 and coordinating the flying of the planes into the buildings and, you know, what do they do with the passengers and how do they get the people into the World Trade Center buildings to break open the drywall and plant the explosive devices without anybody noticing how many thousands of people would have to be involved?

00:23:54.000 You think the federal government could pull off something like that?

00:23:58.000 When they couldn't even do Watergate.

00:24:00.000 It's just a hotel break-in.

00:24:02.000 I forgot to bring in a book for you. 0.99

00:24:03.000 Damn it. 0.99

00:24:04.000 I have a doctor. 1.00

00:24:05.000 He's sort of a doctor.

00:24:06.000 He's really a weed doctor.

00:24:08.000 He's a doctor that prescribes my medical marijuana.

00:24:10.000 I get headaches.

00:24:11.000 I'm getting one right now.

00:24:13.000 Anyway, he gave me this book when I went to visit him.

00:24:16.000 It was a book about Tesla technology that was used to take down the Twin Towers.

00:24:22.000 Oh, I don't know this one.

00:24:24.000 Sitting in the weed doctor's office.

00:24:25.000 Oh, boy. 0.98

00:24:26.000 He's fucking telling me about this technology that, what have you ever seen that turns concrete into dust? 0.99

00:24:35.000 Oh, yes. 0.98

00:24:35.000 Well, you know, concrete, it starts out as powder. 0.98

00:24:38.000 You're talking about millions of tons of building that's compressed and falling down.

00:24:44.000 Yeah, I would imagine it'd be a bunch of dust.

00:24:46.000 For a while, thermite was the big thing.

00:24:48.000 Yes.

00:24:48.000 Thermite will melt the...

00:24:49.000 Okay, so then there were tests done on the thermite, and it doesn't burn hot enough to get through a whole huge beam.

00:24:56.000 Okay, well, they have...

00:24:56.000 But they can cut through an engine block with that stuff, though, right?

00:24:58.000 Yeah, but these beams are like, you know, the size of this tail.

00:25:01.000 I mean, they're huge.

00:25:01.000 Right, but if they had a lot of thermite...

00:25:03.000 Well, but...

00:25:03.000 So then they said, well, it's super thermite.

00:25:06.000 Well, it's like, well, where is this super thermite?

00:25:08.000 I never heard of it.

00:25:09.000 Well, it's secret.

00:25:09.000 Super secret super thermite.

00:25:11.000 Well, part of the problem was some of the pieces of evidence they were using were like the cuts, the angular cuts on the beams.

00:25:19.000 Well, that was actually done after the buildings had collapsed.

00:25:23.000 They were trying to clean it up.

00:25:24.000 They had to cut some of them down.

00:25:26.000 And so they were using these photos.

00:25:28.000 So there was a lot of confusion.

00:25:30.000 Okay.

00:25:31.000 But the thing is, you don't need to know anything about thermite or Tesla technology.

00:25:35.000 We know that the planes hit the buildings.

00:25:37.000 You can see it on video.

00:25:38.000 You can see which floors they were at, the angle of the wings, and so forth.

00:25:41.000 For that to have happened and explosive devices planted...

00:25:46.000 At the exact floors, where they knew ahead of time what floors and what angle the plane...

00:25:52.000 Okay, right there.

00:25:53.000 Stop.

00:25:53.000 Full stop.

00:25:54.000 Yeah.

00:25:54.000 That can't be.

00:25:55.000 Well, it's very, very, very unlikely.

00:25:58.000 Super unlikely.

00:25:59.000 Not to mention, as G. Gordon Lindy once told me about Watergate, the incompetency problem and the people-can't-keep-their-mouths-shut problem.

00:26:08.000 The more people you have involved, the more they're going to screw up or chicken out or change their mind or then tell their friends and lovers and so forth.

00:26:19.000 I know the guy that did it, and pretty soon they're on your show telling about what they saw.

00:26:23.000 How come no one's come out to say, you know, I was sitting there in my office and I saw these guys breaking through the drywall and putting these things inside the...

00:26:31.000 You know, so, I mean, someone like Jesse Ventura thinks, oh, it was all done under the cover of fixing the elevators in the World Trade Center.

00:26:39.000 Fixing the elevators.

00:26:40.000 I mean, this would have had to go on for weeks and weeks and...

00:26:43.000 I don't know if Jesse Ventura really believes that.

00:26:46.000 He says this stuff, I don't know.

00:26:47.000 I think he's selling conspiracy now.

00:26:51.000 There's a bunch of people that conspiracy becomes a business.

00:26:55.000 Like Alex Jones? 1.00

00:26:56.000 Yeah, he's a friend of mine, and he's out of his fucking mind. 0.99

00:26:59.000 Does he believe this stuff, or does he just say stuff, just to see what comes out? 0.99

00:27:02.000 He believes a lot.

00:27:03.000 But he gets a lot of things right.

00:27:05.000 That's what's unfortunate.

00:27:06.000 The unfortunate thing about conspiracies is that it's not all cut and dry.

00:27:10.000 There was things like Operation Northwoods, where the government really did plan on orchestrating these artificial attacks, arming Cuban friendlies to attack Guantanamo Bay. 0.56

00:27:19.000 They were going to blow up a jetliner and blame it on Cuba.

00:27:22.000 There were real...

00:27:25.000 There's actual conspiracies that we can prove.

00:27:30.000 This is the problem with the 9-11 truthers or the extreme conspiracy theorists.

00:27:35.000 They're missing where the real action is.

00:27:37.000 All those third world dictators we were supporting in the 70s under Kissinger's, Nixon's...

00:27:43.000 All real.

00:27:44.000 This stuff happened and it's not as sexy as taking over the world or running the world economy.

00:27:51.000 But it's real and it's effective.

00:27:53.000 Well, Oliver North, remember that?

00:27:55.000 When that was going on with the- That's a conspiracy.

00:27:58.000 That's a real conspiracy.

00:27:59.000 There's real ones.

00:28:01.000 And then there was a real one that was apparently being planned by Dick Cheney on the way out.

00:28:05.000 They were planning on doing something with Iran.

00:28:08.000 They were planning on some sort of a false flag.

00:28:10.000 But when people look at Operation Northwoods and they look at that where it would have cost American lives, they had a real conspiracy that President Kennedy vetoed that was actually signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

00:28:20.000 Well, the Bay of Pigs, that was a conspiracy. 0.98

00:28:22.000 Yeah.

00:28:23.000 So there have been real conspiracies.

00:28:25.000 Right.

00:28:25.000 So they look at 9-11 and they go, this is the grand one.

00:28:28.000 Right.

00:28:28.000 This is the big one.

00:28:29.000 Right.

00:28:29.000 So how can we tell the difference between the real ones?

00:28:32.000 How can we?

00:28:33.000 Well, so there's certain criteria.

00:28:35.000 Again, the grander the theory is, the less likely it is a real conspiracy.

00:28:40.000 Right.

00:28:40.000 Global domination, running the world's economy, these sorts of things.

00:28:45.000 Well, how about the big Alex Jones one?

00:28:46.000 They want to cut the population down to like 500 million people worldwide.

00:28:50.000 Yeah.

00:28:51.000 Well, that could happen naturally if we just educated women, made them economically empowered, and had access to birth control. 1.00

00:29:00.000 You know, that's the solution to the overpopulation problem.

00:29:02.000 Do you really think that would work?

00:29:03.000 People still want babies. 1.00

00:29:04.000 Well, they do, yes, of course.

00:29:05.000 But the replacement level, there are a number of countries below the replacement level, and we know what the factors are, the things I just said.

00:29:12.000 You know, just being a prosperous democracy in which women have the franchise, and they're economically empowered and educated, and they have access to birth control, the family planning happens naturally. 1.00

00:29:23.000 You don't have to do the China one-child rule.

00:29:25.000 You don't have to do that.

00:29:26.000 It happens naturally.

00:29:27.000 So if you're pro-life, so-called pro-life, and you're against abortion, and you want to reduce the amount of abortions, just educate women, give them power, and give them choice and access to birth control, and it happens naturally. 0.89

00:29:39.000 Yeah, that's a weird statistic, isn't it?

00:29:42.000 That the more prosperous cities become, the more the civilization becomes advanced as far as, like, education and technology, you get less birth rate.

00:29:51.000 That's right.

00:29:52.000 So it's anti-Malthusian.

00:29:53.000 Malthus was wrong.

00:29:55.000 And Paul Ehrlich with the population bomb.

00:29:57.000 Wrong.

00:29:57.000 And there's still modern neo-Malthusians that are claiming this today.

00:30:01.000 You know, the Club of Rome, the limits of growth and all this stuff.

00:30:05.000 No, no, no.

00:30:07.000 If you want to get a population lower, just make the people super prosperous, especially the women. 0.99

00:30:12.000 And it just happens naturally.

00:30:14.000 And the reason is because one reason people have so many babies in poor countries is because they're not likely to survive.

00:30:22.000 Babies die, and so you've got to have lots of them to get your genes out there, so to speak.

00:30:26.000 So it's sort of a biological impulse.

00:30:28.000 And then also to take care of you when you're old.

00:30:31.000 You better have six or ten just to make sure there's a couple left when you're old to support you.

00:30:36.000 You don't need to do any of that when you have a prosperous economy.

00:30:41.000 Right.

00:30:41.000 The effect, though, is so scary as far as the overpopulation effect.

00:30:45.000 When we look at the raw numbers from like 1970 versus 2016 worldwide, it's not that long ago.

00:30:52.000 In our lifetime, while I was alive, the population has, you know, more than doubled.

00:30:57.000 And in the United States, just in the United States, and forget about poor countries, forget about China, forget about India, you know?

00:31:03.000 Yes, correct.

00:31:04.000 So there's, you know, as the population pig works its way through the python, demographic python, it's going to take a while to catch up.

00:31:13.000 So already country, there's a number of countries that are below replacement level.

00:31:17.000 What countries are below?

00:31:18.000 Well, Japan, Sweden, Russia, I don't know, there's at least a dozen, mostly northern European countries.

00:31:27.000 But their populations are still growing by the momentum of past decades.

00:31:31.000 But the current generation will have, you know, 1.9 children on average.

00:31:37.000 2.1 is the replacement level.

00:31:38.000 And I forget how many countries, 20-something countries are below 2.1 replacement level.

00:31:42.000 But it'll take until about 2050 before we see the topping off of the population growth and then start to go back down.

00:31:49.000 It's one reason you almost never see the curves after 2050. Because if you're a pro-environmentalist or pro-anti-population organization, you don't want to show the good news from 2050 to 2100. But the UN, two of the three UN projections, they have like a Conservative,

00:32:04.000 middle, and then more radical projections.

00:32:08.000 And that by 2100, the modest middle one shows us back down to around probably 6 or 7 billion.

00:32:16.000 We'll hit a peak of 9 or 10 billion in 2050, back down to where we are now in 2100. And then by 2200, maybe 1 or 2 billion.

00:32:24.000 What?

00:32:25.000 Down to 1 or 2 billion?

00:32:27.000 Yeah, this could happen just by...

00:32:29.000 I mean, there's so many variables, it's hard to predict.

00:32:31.000 But that could happen if everybody is prosperous, particularly Africa.

00:32:35.000 So one of the things the Gates Foundation is trying to do is just solve certain basic, simple problems.

00:32:41.000 And the UN is trying to, you know, get rid of these corrupt governments.

00:32:45.000 That's what's holding them back.

00:32:46.000 There's enough food to feed 7 billion people.

00:32:49.000 It's the distribution that's the problem.

00:32:51.000 The Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug.

00:32:53.000 In the Green Revolution, we have the technology to do it.

00:32:56.000 GMOs are good for feeding poor people. 1.00

00:33:00.000 But it's the corrupt dictatorships that prevent the distribution of the food.

00:33:05.000 And resources and keeps the population from being prosperous so they have more children.

00:33:09.000 So that, in my opinion, that's the long-term solution.

00:33:12.000 So there's two things there.

00:33:13.000 One, there's the conspiracy by the elites to hide the fact that we're going to get down to 2 billion people by 2100. We got that.

00:33:21.000 Well, it's the environmentalists.

00:33:23.000 They're hiding it.

00:33:25.000 We don't know for sure this is going to happen.

00:33:28.000 These are projections.

00:33:29.000 I'm joking, obviously.

00:33:30.000 But then there's also the food distribution conversation, which is a very fascinating one.

00:33:35.000 I had these guys on from the documentary Cow Spiracy, which is well intended, but apparently got a bunch of stuff wrong about how many acres it takes to have a cow graze, what are the requirements, and what you can do with veganism.

00:33:52.000 Essentially, they were really heavily biased in promoting a vegan lifestyle, which is their choice.

00:33:57.000 They can do that.

00:33:58.000 But that's the big argument today.

00:34:00.000 It's like, do we have enough land?

00:34:02.000 Do we have enough resources to feed all the people?

00:34:05.000 My conversation has always been like, okay, are we doing it right now?

00:34:10.000 Yes.

00:34:10.000 We're all eating, right?

00:34:11.000 Especially the United States.

00:34:13.000 We are running out of land.

00:34:14.000 We are running out of food.

00:34:15.000 We are running out of this.

00:34:16.000 The sky is falling.

00:34:17.000 But, okay, are we doing it right now?

00:34:20.000 Are we feeding ourselves right now?

00:34:22.000 We are, right?

00:34:23.000 We are.

00:34:23.000 Really easily, in fact.

00:34:25.000 Yeah, no problem.

00:34:26.000 We have a surplus of food, plenty of food.

00:34:28.000 Not to say that a lot of the methods we're using aren't disgusting, like factory farming.

00:34:32.000 Factory farming is terrible.

00:34:33.000 Horrible.

00:34:34.000 And then a lot of laws to protect them are disgusting, too, like the ag-gag laws. 0.95

00:34:38.000 Those are vile, right?

00:34:40.000 But why can't we keep doing it?

00:34:42.000 And then the argument kind of falls apart.

00:34:44.000 Well, we're going to run out of stuff.

00:34:48.000 Well, okay, so in the long run, we want to get off factory farming.

00:34:51.000 Of course.

00:34:51.000 It is a pretty disgusting habit.

00:34:53.000 And the poly farms, you know, the happy, I call them the happy farms, you know, where every cat... 0.98

00:34:56.000 Joel Salatin.

00:34:57.000 Yeah.

00:34:57.000 Every cow has a name, and there's the happy chicken running around.

00:35:01.000 Until he gets killed.

00:35:02.000 Yeah. 0.97

00:35:02.000 He has a great life until that last day. 0.97

00:35:05.000 That's a...

00:35:06.000 So those kinds of farms cannot support seven billion people.

00:35:11.000 So in the long run, we have to get the numbers down somewhat, and also the technology of synthetic meat, which is getting there.

00:35:19.000 I think we're not five years away.

00:35:21.000 I think we're maybe a couple decades away.

00:35:23.000 You don't think it's possible to get a significant number of the people in this country to go vegan?

00:35:28.000 No, I don't think that's going to happen.

00:35:30.000 In the Moral Archive, I have a chapter on animal rights in which I show that the numbers are still in single digits.

00:35:35.000 Even with all the environmental movement and all the, you know, vegetarian, pro-vegetarian, it's still less than 10%.

00:35:40.000 It's more like 6% or 7% of the population in the United States.

00:35:45.000 So I like the reducitarian movement.

00:35:47.000 It's a new word, reducitarian.

00:35:48.000 Let's just, you know, meatless Mondays, just cut it down, you know, and try to, you know, if you shop at Whole Foods, you know, get the Happy Farm meat, you know, that sort of thing.

00:36:00.000 Well, obviously, if you can afford Whole Foods.

00:36:02.000 I know, it's tricky, right?

00:36:04.000 Okay, so in the long run, you know, markets will drive down prices of, say, synthetic meat.

00:36:10.000 Right now, you know, a little patty made out of stem cells is, you know, thousands of dollars.

00:36:13.000 Quarter million dollars, yeah.

00:36:15.000 But, you know, of course, that's what computers were in the 40s.

00:36:19.000 And so now look.

00:36:20.000 And this will happen, but not in five years or 10 years.

00:36:24.000 And so the idea of like, well, in the meantime, let's get everybody to go vegan.

00:36:27.000 This also isn't going to happen.

00:36:29.000 Why don't you think it's going to happen?

00:36:32.000 I think, first of all, we have a habit of eating meat.

00:36:35.000 It tastes great.

00:36:36.000 Most people like it.

00:36:37.000 You can get your protein from other sources.

00:36:40.000 I don't think that's a viable argument anymore.

00:36:42.000 But most people, they just like it, and it culturally still has a lot of momentum.

00:36:47.000 I think it's one thing to get people to care about global warming or, you know, let's drive electric cars, whatever.

00:36:52.000 You don't have to give up something that you really, really like.

00:36:56.000 But food, people really like their meat.

00:36:58.000 And I would be okay if everybody went that way, but I'm not quite there yet myself.

00:37:04.000 I still have meat now and then, but I've reduced it considerably compared to before.

00:37:09.000 Well, the ethical considerations are the reason why people think that it's a good way to go.

00:37:14.000 Not necessarily protein-wise.

00:37:17.000 There's a bunch of people that argue that it's very difficult to get the same amount of protein, but then there's also people that argue that you really don't need the amount of protein that most people consume anyway.

00:37:27.000 Right.

00:37:28.000 Well, you can try to change behavior.

00:37:31.000 You nudge people with incentives.

00:37:33.000 But why not also go the path of the technological solutions?

00:37:37.000 Synthetic meat.

00:37:38.000 People are working on this.

00:37:39.000 There are companies doing it.

00:37:41.000 Funded by venture capitalists.

00:37:45.000 One of the Google X projects is to do this.

00:37:48.000 Again, I think maybe it's like self-driving cars.

00:37:51.000 It's going to take a few decades before everybody is there.

00:37:54.000 But I'm optimistic because we're at least moving in that direction.

00:37:58.000 Yeah, I think there's a real possibility of headless animals that we've engineered in labs, and that's where we get our food from.

00:38:05.000 But will it be as good for you?

00:38:08.000 Will it taste as good?

00:38:09.000 Well, in principle, that should just be a scientific question.

00:38:13.000 We know what's in meat, okay?

00:38:15.000 So just put it in there in your synthetic meat.

00:38:17.000 Just design it with your designer genes.

00:38:20.000 Yeah, I guess.

00:38:22.000 I mean, but there's a big difference between cows that eat certain diets versus cows that eat grass-fed cows versus even health-wise.

00:38:29.000 There was a study that was released recently showing the benefits of grass-fed beef versus corn-fed beef just health-wise.

00:38:38.000 Yep.

00:38:40.000 Yep.

00:38:40.000 So, you know, I don't know.

00:38:41.000 We'll see.

00:38:42.000 Yeah, because I'm curious.

00:38:43.000 I mean, if they do create synthetic meat, will it have the same properties?

00:38:49.000 I would imagine you could even build in marbling, just put fat cells in there to make it juicier or something, and maybe that won't be as healthy, but maybe you think, well, I don't care.

00:38:57.000 Yeah, but I would be, you know, I mean, there's a difference between the way it tastes, like a marble, like a fat from a grass-fed cow versus a fat from a corn-fed cow versus a fat from a lab-built cow.

00:39:09.000 It's going to be...

00:39:10.000 Yeah.

00:39:11.000 It's also, you know, just a habit of what you get used to.

00:39:13.000 I love red meat, but I almost never eat it anymore.

00:39:16.000 I really don't miss it.

00:39:18.000 You just kind of get into the pattern of changing your diet.

00:39:22.000 I think we could get there.

00:39:23.000 I just don't think that that's the only avenue to solving the factory farming problem.

00:39:28.000 I think lowering the population, synthetic meat, changing behavior, just come at it from a bunch of different angles.

00:39:35.000 That's kind of the case with every problem, right?

00:39:38.000 Absolutely.

00:39:38.000 Yeah.

00:39:39.000 So I call it, in the moral arc, I call that protopian solutions.

00:39:43.000 Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine, used this term protopia.

00:39:46.000 Small changes, tiny little bit of progress.

00:39:48.000 It's like last year's nav system and this year's nav system in your car.

00:39:53.000 This one's slightly better.

00:39:54.000 It has this little feature and this little thing.

00:39:55.000 And over many years and decades, all of a sudden, you've got a super smart car versus the jalopies of the 50s.

00:40:01.000 Not a flying car.

00:40:02.000 You don't go from the jalopy to the flying car in one year.

00:40:05.000 You go to what we have now, incrementally.

00:40:08.000 And that's true in all technologies.

00:40:10.000 It's like the Mac just keeps...

00:40:12.000 I've been buying Macs for 25 years, since the late 80s, and I pay the same price.

00:40:20.000 You've got $2,400, you get pretty much the same, double the computer for the same price every three years.

00:40:26.000 And that's what most technologies go through.

00:40:30.000 Yeah, well, I think that's one of the cool things about following it.

00:40:33.000 One of the things that's so fascinating to me about following technology is like, ooh, Samsung has the new Galaxy S9, and it's waterproof, and you can show the moon.

00:40:42.000 These things are so interesting to see where this innovation is going.

00:40:47.000 And when the innovation is, you know, when it's just things like, essentially, I've made the argument that if you leave cell phones alone, if everyone that's making cell phones right now said, let's just make the same cell phone forever, we're good.

00:40:58.000 Yeah.

00:40:59.000 iPhone 6s.

00:41:00.000 Leave it there.

00:41:01.000 We don't need any more innovation.

00:41:02.000 Let's use that for other things.

00:41:05.000 I mean, we'd probably be pretty happy.

00:41:06.000 We'd be all right.

00:41:07.000 But, you know, that's not how companies work.

00:41:10.000 No.

00:41:10.000 But we're fascinated by innovation.

00:41:13.000 Actually, I'm a little mad at Apple right now because the new OS system, I lost half my music.

00:41:17.000 I don't know where it went.

00:41:18.000 I haven't...

00:41:18.000 Taking the time to figure out how to get it back.

00:41:21.000 What do you mean?

00:41:21.000 Oh, it's not on your phone?

00:41:22.000 No.

00:41:22.000 It's in the cloud.

00:41:23.000 They're encouraging use of the cloud.

00:41:25.000 Yeah.

00:41:26.000 Most of it's still on your phone.

00:41:27.000 So sometimes I feel the same way.

00:41:28.000 Like, guys, the OS whatever was great.

00:41:31.000 Okay, but that doesn't happen.

00:41:33.000 Yeah.

00:41:33.000 There is a lot of nonsense that they do when they update things, but that's also because they're trying to build in new features, and they're planning several steps ahead for the future.

00:41:41.000 They want everything to be in the cloud, which is kind of weird.

00:41:45.000 Another thing, electric cars.

00:41:46.000 I think, you know, you go to the Peterson Car Museum here, and you see electric cars from the 1920s.

00:41:51.000 What happened?

00:41:52.000 Another conspiracy, kind of.

00:41:54.000 Sort of, yeah.

00:41:55.000 Oil companies, tire companies.

00:41:57.000 Did you ever see the documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?

00:41:59.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:41:59.000 It's like, we should be there now.

00:42:01.000 We should have been there decades ago.

00:42:03.000 How about the fact that Henry Ford's first car, the fenders, were made out of hemp?

00:42:07.000 Is that right?

00:42:08.000 I didn't know that.

00:42:09.000 You've never seen it?

00:42:10.000 No.

00:42:10.000 I want to show you a video then because it's really fascinating.

00:42:13.000 Pull up Henry Ford, first car, hemp.

00:42:16.000 They used hemp fibers.

00:42:19.000 By the way, it was legal back then.

00:42:21.000 It wasn't illegal until they came up with a thing called a decorticator, which allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber.

00:42:28.000 That's when William Randolph Hearst started his propaganda against hemp.

00:42:32.000 Oh, is that right?

00:42:33.000 Yeah, that's how marijuana became illegal.

00:42:34.000 It had nothing to do with the drug, the psychoactive aspect of it.

00:42:38.000 It had to do with the textiles and using it as paper and using it as a commodity.

00:42:43.000 That's when it became illegal.

00:42:45.000 And it was all Hearst. 1.00

00:42:46.000 William Randolph Hearst was a motherfucker. 1.00

00:42:48.000 Really? 1.00

00:42:48.000 Yeah, so this car is actually made out of hemp. 1.00

00:42:51.000 The fenders, and Lotus did one recently where they had an exposed hood, but what's interesting about this, when you see it, Henry Ford, I don't know if it's this video, but he hit it with a hammer.

00:43:02.000 I mean, incredibly durable.

00:43:04.000 Hemp is an amazing, amazing plant.

00:43:07.000 I don't know if you've ever picked up a hemp stalk.

00:43:09.000 But it's incredibly hard, but really light.

00:43:13.000 Like, very, very different than any other wood.

00:43:16.000 Like, it's hard like a walnut, but it's light like a balsa wood.

00:43:19.000 It's very, very strange.

00:43:21.000 It's a very unusual car.

00:43:22.000 Pull up the Lotus, because it was real recent, like last year.

00:43:25.000 I mean, I would not do that to my car.

00:43:26.000 Exactly.

00:43:27.000 It would bend like crazy.

00:43:28.000 It's lighter and stronger than steel, which is insane.

00:43:32.000 Right.

00:43:32.000 Well, the whole thing with how do drugs become illegal, that's sort of a conspiracy stuff going on.

00:43:38.000 Well, hemp is a real conspiracy because hemp is non-psychoactive.

00:43:41.000 The fact that it's still illegal.

00:43:43.000 I mean, they're just now starting to grow it in America.

00:43:46.000 We sell hemp.

00:43:47.000 My company, Onnit, sells hemp protein, which is legal, non-psychoactive, doesn't have any THC in it.

00:43:52.000 We had to buy it from Canada.

00:43:54.000 Really?

00:43:54.000 Yeah.

00:43:55.000 See this right here?

00:43:56.000 This is the new Lotus that is the entire roof.

00:44:00.000 If they show it, let's see if you can find a picture where they show the actual car itself, Jamie.

00:44:04.000 But all these panels are made out of hemp, and look how it's insanely light.

00:44:11.000 Yeah, but if you show the actual car itself, Jamie, you can see, maybe go to the front, the beginning of the video, you can see the actual hood of the car.

00:44:20.000 It's exposed.

00:44:22.000 Okay.

00:44:22.000 So they essentially made a giant percentage of the car out of hemp, including the seats.

00:44:29.000 That looks lighter than carbon fiber.

00:44:30.000 Yes.

00:44:31.000 Hey, I wonder if anyone's made a hemp bicycle.

00:44:33.000 That's a good question.

00:44:34.000 Because that, you know, that's the whole thing about carbon fiber.

00:44:36.000 It's so lightweight but strong.

00:44:38.000 Yeah.

00:44:38.000 So if what you're saying about hemp is true, there should be hemp bikes.

00:44:40.000 Yeah.

00:44:41.000 And a lot of other light things, like bows and things along those lines.

00:44:44.000 I think that that's a real conspiracy.

00:44:47.000 You know, that's a conspiracy back...

00:44:48.000 I mean, there's a reason why, you know, Orson Welles made that movie, Citizen Kane, about William Randolph Hearst.

00:44:54.000 Right.

00:44:55.000 An insanely, insanely powerful and influential man who didn't really use that influence in the best way for society.

00:45:01.000 He had paper mills, and he didn't want to convert his paper into hemp paper.

00:45:06.000 Hemp paper was far superior, but it would have cost him millions of dollars.

00:45:09.000 Oh, okay.

00:45:09.000 Because he had, you know, forests.

00:45:11.000 Right.

00:45:12.000 And so, Popular Science Magazine back then, see if you can find this cover.

00:45:15.000 It was Hemp the New Billion Dollar Crop.

00:45:18.000 Really?

00:45:19.000 Oh, Bicycle from Hemp.

00:45:20.000 Hey! 0.99

00:45:20.000 There you go. 0.99

00:45:20.000 Oh, wow. 0.99

00:45:21.000 It's already been done.

00:45:22.000 Bam.

00:45:22.000 Yeah.

00:45:23.000 That's a good looking bike.

00:45:24.000 Okay.

00:45:24.000 Yeah.

00:45:24.000 There you go.

00:45:25.000 I have a carbon fiber bike.

00:45:26.000 Maybe I'll have to start looking at that.

00:45:28.000 Yeah.

00:45:28.000 I don't know where you could buy one of those.

00:45:30.000 Why is there no THC in the hemp?

00:45:33.000 It's only in the leaves?

00:45:34.000 Because it's only in the female plants. 1.00

00:45:35.000 It's in the flower.

00:45:36.000 Oh, okay.

00:45:36.000 It's in the flower.

00:45:37.000 All right.

00:45:37.000 In the buds.

00:45:38.000 Okay.

00:45:39.000 The female is the one you get high off of. 1.00

00:45:42.000 The male.

00:45:43.000 But what you want is the stalk of it.

00:45:45.000 You're not looking for the flowers.

00:45:47.000 Right.

00:45:47.000 So when you're using it to make things, the seeds.

00:45:52.000 But hemp, it's on the cover of Popular Science from like way back then.

00:45:58.000 That looks like about 1930s or 40s.

00:46:00.000 Yeah.

00:46:00.000 Well, I believe it was, I want to say, it was 33 or something like that, or 35 when it was made illegal.

00:46:08.000 And they made it illegal and they were calling it marijuana, which is really interesting, which is a slang for a Mexican wild tobacco.

00:46:16.000 It's not even cannabis.

00:46:17.000 So when they were making marijuana illegal, they didn't even know that they were making hemp illegal.

00:46:22.000 It was very tricky the way they did it. 0.98

00:46:24.000 They made these articles, they printed all these articles about Mexicans and blacks raping white women because they were high on this new drug. 0.99

00:46:32.000 That's also what funded Reefer Madness, which I'm sure you've seen. 0.97

00:46:35.000 See, all those, those are real Yes, absolutely.

00:46:39.000 And that's people that had a vested financial interest in making something illegal, a commodity.

00:46:45.000 It's so crazy because the fact that marijuana or the cannabis plant is so versatile, it does so many different things, they figured out a way to attack one aspect of it and demonize the entire plant and then eliminate competition.

00:46:59.000 Right.

00:46:59.000 Because it makes a far superior paper, far superior cloth.

00:47:02.000 It's like incredibly durable.

00:47:04.000 Like the paper, if you ever had hemp paper in front of you, it feels like a regular piece of paper, but it's really hard to tear.

00:47:10.000 It's really interesting stuff.

00:47:11.000 They should make money out of that.

00:47:12.000 Exactly.

00:47:13.000 Well, what do they make money out of now?

00:47:15.000 Well, it's a cotton fiber, yeah.

00:47:17.000 Yeah.

00:47:17.000 So, well, and there's a documentary on about the public transportation system here in LA that was quite extensive in the 30s with the, you know, electric trolleys and all this stuff.

00:47:29.000 And they all got ripped out and torn down and the cars were burned and so on just because the automobile industry and the oil industry wanted it.

00:47:37.000 You know, it's like LA should be a car.

00:47:38.000 The entire country should be a car.

00:47:52.000 Yeah.

00:47:54.000 Yeah.

00:48:03.000 Right.

00:48:03.000 The war on drugs.

00:48:05.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:48:06.000 You call that a conspiracy, but it's over.

00:48:08.000 It's been over for decades.

00:48:10.000 Well, it's also so blatant that it's only the war on some drugs.

00:48:14.000 Yes.

00:48:14.000 It's not like we're trying to keep everyone sober.

00:48:17.000 We're just going to sell sanctioned drugs that have tax codes.

00:48:21.000 And that's really what the war is on, the drugs that you can't control and tax.

00:48:26.000 It's so blatant and obvious.

00:48:28.000 Right.

00:48:28.000 Why not treat it like an industry, like any alcohol industry?

00:48:32.000 Sure, sure.

00:48:32.000 Absolutely.

00:48:33.000 Like alcohol.

00:48:34.000 I mean, alcohol is an unbelievably devastating drug and readily available almost everywhere. 0.99

00:48:39.000 We've got enough in that back room to kill yourself. 1.00

00:48:40.000 If you want to kill yourself, you can drink right now while this show is going on. 1.00

00:48:45.000 In the next hour, you'll be dead. 1.00

00:48:47.000 Isn't that amazing? 0.97

00:48:48.000 Yeah.

00:48:49.000 That's amazing.

00:48:50.000 And that's legal.

00:48:51.000 And no one cares.

00:48:52.000 Everybody will go, wow, Michael Shermer drank himself to death.

00:48:54.000 Oh, poor guy.

00:48:55.000 Yeah.

00:48:55.000 You know what I mean?

00:48:56.000 It's not like, oh man, he did drugs and he had an OD. Wow, that's so tragic.

00:49:00.000 Drugs are awful.

00:49:01.000 Right.

00:49:02.000 Meanwhile, they're everywhere.

00:49:03.000 Every street you go down, you pass by liquor stores and restaurants that sell alcohol.

00:49:07.000 It's all just molecules in your brain, in your body.

00:49:10.000 So what's the difference?

00:49:12.000 Yeah.

00:49:12.000 Well, there's absolutely real, legitimate conspiracies, and I do agree with you that those are the ones to focus on, but they're not sexy.

00:49:21.000 Right.

00:49:21.000 The sexy ones are UFOs.

00:49:22.000 Right.

00:49:23.000 Bigfoot.

00:49:24.000 Yeah.

00:49:24.000 That kind of stuff.

00:49:25.000 Yeah.

00:49:25.000 Global domination.

00:49:26.000 Yes.

00:49:27.000 I did this show for the Sci-Fi Channel called Joe Rogan Questions Everything.

00:49:32.000 Oh, right.

00:49:32.000 I remember that.

00:49:33.000 Yes.

00:49:34.000 Yeah.

00:49:34.000 I went around and I talked to experts, believers, non-believers, scientists, all these different people about a bunch of different subjects.

00:49:42.000 And boy...

00:49:43.000 My desire to do that show before I started doing it was very high.

00:49:47.000 And my desire to completely avoid any of that nonsense towards the end of the show was...

00:49:53.000 It was almost like I couldn't do it anymore.

00:49:55.000 Really?

00:49:55.000 Because I had already recognized what was going on in so many of these cases.

00:50:00.000 It was like, this is just...

00:50:01.000 A bunch of people that want to believe.

00:50:04.000 They have these ideas in their head and they want to chase these ideas down, whether it's Bigfoot or whether it's UFOs, and they're not being objective even remotely.

00:50:12.000 The vast majority of the people that are a part of the movement or the community Yeah.

00:50:17.000 They're like researches ghosts or researches Bigfoot or researches nice people.

00:50:22.000 But the way they're looking at it is the same.

00:50:26.000 It's the same whether it's Bigfoot or chemtrails or UFOs.

00:50:30.000 They're not being objective.

00:50:32.000 They're going, well, maybe this.

00:50:33.000 What about that?

00:50:34.000 Well, have we considered this?

00:50:35.000 Nope.

00:50:36.000 They're just going, we know the evidence is out there.

00:50:38.000 The government has been hiding extraterrestrial life in this country.

00:50:41.000 Like where?

00:50:42.000 Where's the government doing this?

00:50:45.000 Where's the evidence?

00:50:45.000 We know from surveys that if you tick the box that you believe in aliens or whatever, you'll tick all the other boxes too.

00:50:51.000 Ghosts, psychics.

00:50:52.000 Exactly.

00:50:52.000 The whole thing.

00:50:53.000 So there's a certain personality that gravitates toward those kinds of beliefs and then buys the whole thing, even when they contradict each other.

00:51:01.000 Like people that believe that Princess Di was murdered also are more inclined to say she faked her death and is still alive somewhere.

00:51:09.000 She's hanging out with Tupac.

00:51:10.000 Yeah.

00:51:11.000 They can't both be true.

00:51:12.000 Yeah.

00:51:13.000 But again, there's some cognitive dissonance.

00:51:16.000 We want a balance between the size of the event and the size of the cause.

00:51:20.000 I think the Holocaust, one of the worst things that's ever happened, worst genocide ever, conducted by one of the worst political regimes in human history. 0.95

00:51:29.000 So there's kind of a balance there.

00:51:31.000 Right.

00:51:31.000 But if you have, like, JFK, you know, the leader of the free world, you know, powerful, articulate, handsome, and so on, and he's brought down by who?

00:51:39.000 Lee Harvey Oswald, some lone nut, this loser, you know, there's a...

00:51:42.000 So you've got to pile on, you know, the mafia and the CIA... Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? 0.89

00:51:48.000 Yeah, I do.

00:51:48.000 Absolutely.

00:51:49.000 Absolutely, no question about it.

00:51:50.000 Why do you think that?

00:51:51.000 Well, first of all, there's a ton of evidence that he did do it.

00:51:54.000 And most of the JFA conspiracy people also agree he was involved, that he was one of the shooters.

00:51:59.000 See, that's one that I'm...

00:52:00.000 They think there's more than one shooter.

00:52:02.000 So we have lots of evidence that he did it.

00:52:04.000 We have his rifle.

00:52:05.000 We have the paper trail of when he bought the rifle.

00:52:07.000 His fingerprints are on the rifle that was found in the...

00:52:10.000 Right, but weren't the fingerprints found several days after they found the rifle?

00:52:16.000 No, no, no.

00:52:16.000 They had it right away.

00:52:18.000 There's a lot of stuff with that conspiracy, though, that's really slippery.

00:52:22.000 Well, okay, so here's one of the things that happens.

00:52:24.000 The moment something takes on great significance, our mind focuses on little anomalies.

00:52:29.000 Like, why was there that guy in Dealey Plaza with the umbrella?

00:52:33.000 It's a sunny day.

00:52:34.000 It's not going to rain.

00:52:36.000 Okay, so he was out there protesting.

00:52:38.000 Decades later, they tracked this guy down.

00:52:40.000 He was called the Umbrella Man.

00:52:42.000 It's like the cigarette-smoking man on X-Files.

00:52:44.000 Like, ooh, who is the Umbrella Man?

00:52:45.000 And that the umbrella must have been a gun and so forth.

00:52:47.000 And he said, no, this is a thing left over from World War II. Chamberlain and his umbrella, and he sold out to Hitler.

00:52:55.000 And so the umbrella became a protest against government, whatever.

00:52:59.000 And so he was protesting Kennedy with his umbrella.

00:53:02.000 And so that's a typical thing.

00:53:05.000 Who cares if somebody has an umbrella or not, sunny day, whatever.

00:53:07.000 Yeah, that seems like a silly thing to concentrate on.

00:53:09.000 But the moment that something big happens, okay, what is the meaning of that?

00:53:12.000 Well, I've never even heard of that umbrella guy.

00:53:14.000 But did you ever read David Lifton's book, Best Evidence?

00:53:18.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:53:18.000 That's a pretty fascinating book.

00:53:19.000 Yeah, but Vincent Bugliosi, he addressed all of those claims.

00:53:23.000 One of his last books was...

00:53:24.000 Case Closed.

00:53:26.000 No, that was Gerald Posner.

00:53:28.000 Okay.

00:53:29.000 Also a good book.

00:53:30.000 Yeah.

00:53:30.000 What's Billy Ossie's book?

00:53:32.000 It was like Restoring History or something like that.

00:53:34.000 It's a big, massive thing.

00:53:36.000 He did a shorter version.

00:53:37.000 But he lined up all those claims.

00:53:39.000 One of them was, how did Oswald get a job at the book depository building that was right on the parade route?

00:53:46.000 He's got a turn right in front of it.

00:53:47.000 There's Kennedy.

00:53:48.000 He must have known he was planted there by operatives that knew this was going to happen.

00:53:51.000 No.

00:53:52.000 So I think it was Posner who tracked down when the White House determined that Kennedy was even going to go to Dallas.

00:53:59.000 And then, you know, months later, the parade route is determined just before he went.

00:54:03.000 And Oswald had that job there months before.

00:54:06.000 It was just pure chance, randomness.

00:54:08.000 So much of human history turns on random events.

00:54:27.000 And we know they went to this house to get the weapon and that house to get the grenade and the rifle.

00:54:32.000 You stand on this corner.

00:54:33.000 I'm going to be over there.

00:54:34.000 And this is typically how it goes.

00:54:36.000 A couple of them chickened out.

00:54:37.000 They went to the house.

00:54:38.000 The person wasn't there to give them their weapon.

00:54:42.000 There's like three of them left and then one of them threw the hand grenade and bounced off the car and went under another car and damaged that car but not the Archduke's car.

00:54:51.000 And so the whole thing was bungled.

00:54:53.000 And off he went and he gave his speech and then he decided to go back to the hospital to visit the people that were hurt in the trailing car.

00:55:03.000 And they took the parade route backwards on the course.

00:55:07.000 And there's this guy, Princeps, sitting there on the curb, despondent, like, well, that was a screw-up.

00:55:12.000 And here comes the Archduke.

00:55:13.000 BAM! Well, it was a little more complicated than that.

00:55:16.000 In fact, the car stalled out because the cars back then were really bad at going in reverse.

00:55:22.000 Right.

00:55:22.000 So he was trying to put the car in reverse.

00:55:24.000 The driver of the car was putting it in reverse.

00:55:25.000 It was a convertible, right?

00:55:26.000 Yep.

00:55:27.000 He was putting it in reverse.

00:55:28.000 The car stalled out.

00:55:29.000 And at that moment, a guy was coming out of a store or a restaurant where he had a sandwich.

00:55:33.000 Right.

00:55:33.000 Because they had something to eat after it was over.

00:55:35.000 Right.

00:55:35.000 Literally walked out.

00:55:36.000 He was right there and shot him and shot his wife.

00:55:39.000 So that's typically how conspiracies go.

00:55:42.000 That definitely can happen.

00:55:43.000 And obviously, if Oswald had that job, you know, long in advance, it shows before they ever planned that out, it showed that there's a lot of randomness involved.

00:55:52.000 Lincoln assassination, that was a conspiracy.

00:55:55.000 They were going to assassinate the president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of war.

00:56:00.000 And they had all the guys going to do this. 0.65

00:56:02.000 And they all screwed up.

00:56:03.000 And the only one that succeeded was Booth.

00:56:07.000 But we knew that there was a conspiracy within hours.

00:56:09.000 And then within days, they got the whole thing.

00:56:11.000 Where are the people that did this to Kennedy or 9-11?

00:56:14.000 Where are the other operatives?

00:56:15.000 Who is it?

00:56:16.000 Who did it?

00:56:16.000 Well, wasn't there some deathbed confessions from, what was his name, Hunt?

00:56:21.000 Was that the industrialist, that guy, there are photos of him that he was arrested at the scene of the crime?

00:56:27.000 You remember the hobos that were arrested that were behind the grassy knoll? 0.65

00:56:31.000 I mean, there were so many people that called that said that they had heard shots from the grassy knoll.

00:56:35.000 There was more than one.

00:56:36.000 Well, that's possible because there was an echoing effect.

00:56:38.000 Right.

00:56:39.000 If you go to Dealey Plaza, it's surprisingly small in our imagination.

00:56:42.000 It's weird when you go see it, yeah.

00:56:44.000 And, you know, there's a museum now on the sixth floor of the book.

00:56:47.000 You can look right out the window and you can see the X on the street, first shot, second shot, and it's close.

00:56:52.000 Yeah, there it is.

00:56:52.000 Howard Hunt.

00:56:53.000 Oh yeah, Howard Hunt.

00:56:53.000 Yeah, Confessions of Howard Hunt.

00:56:56.000 He had said that on his deathbed, he was a CIA spy, and on his deathbed, he obviously convicted Watergate conspirator, and he said that he was involved in the assassination.

00:57:07.000 He said that on his deathbed, he talked about how he's an active participator.

00:57:12.000 Yes, okay.

00:57:13.000 Well, then I don't know.

00:57:14.000 I don't know this particular one.

00:57:16.000 But why would you be so quick to think that more people weren't involved in killing Canada?

00:57:21.000 I was open to the possibility.

00:57:23.000 I mean, we did this issue of Skeptic 50 years later.

00:57:27.000 What closed it for you?

00:57:28.000 Well, what closed it was that bookcase closed.

00:57:30.000 Just one book?

00:57:31.000 Well, and then Boliosi's book.

00:57:33.000 I started reading, just here's the claim, here's the explanation, here's it.

00:57:37.000 Hundreds of them.

00:57:37.000 Did they cover Hunt?

00:57:39.000 I don't remember.

00:57:40.000 Probably.

00:57:41.000 How do they cover the fact that the magic bullet theory was concocted because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb under the overpass?

00:57:49.000 You know that, right?

00:57:50.000 Yeah, but, you know, Nova did a whole two-hour special on the magic bullet. 1.00

00:57:54.000 Yeah, I saw that.

00:57:55.000 And, you know, the seats were not lined up.

00:57:57.000 They're like this, so it didn't have to make a right turn, left turn kind of thing.

00:58:00.000 Yeah, that's...

00:58:00.000 I mean, look, I've...

00:58:01.000 I hunt and I shoot guns and bullets do weird things when they hit things.

00:58:06.000 They ricochet off stuff and they go left and they go right.

00:58:08.000 They go all over the place.

00:58:10.000 The idea that you're going to accurately determine when someone shoots someone and hits bone where that bullet's going to go next is crazy.

00:58:18.000 They do weird things.

00:58:20.000 They come out of people's heads. 0.98

00:58:21.000 Sometimes you shoot someone in the front and it'll come out the top of their head. 0.97

00:58:24.000 It doesn't make any sense. 0.98

00:58:26.000 Right.

00:58:28.000 What doesn't make sense more than that is the pristine condition of that bullet after shattering bone.

00:58:34.000 Well, it wasn't that pristine.

00:58:35.000 It was squished.

00:58:38.000 Compared to a bullet that's hit bone, there's like...

00:58:40.000 Yeah, but they've shot...

00:58:41.000 I'm pretty sure it was the Nova one that shot through the gel and then also a big bone.

00:58:46.000 Yeah, but when they shot bone, it was shattered.

00:58:49.000 They've never been able to recreate, get a bullet to look like that after a shattered bone.

00:58:53.000 Never.

00:58:53.000 When the bullet hit Connelly, it broke more than one bone in his body.

00:58:57.000 It broke three different bones, I believe, and dislodged or broke his wrist.

00:59:01.000 Like, there's the bullet.

00:59:02.000 Look at it.

00:59:03.000 That's not that damaged, man.

00:59:05.000 Yeah, but if you look at it on the edge, it's bulging.

00:59:08.000 We have a picture of it here.

00:59:09.000 By the way, if you shoot...

00:59:10.000 See, there it is. 0.83

00:59:10.000 There it is. 0.83

00:59:11.000 So it is compressed.

00:59:12.000 That's nothing, man.

00:59:13.000 But if you shoot a bullet into water, it looks like that.

00:59:15.000 Have you ever shot a bullet into water?

00:59:17.000 No, I haven't done that yet.

00:59:18.000 They don't...

00:59:19.000 Look, when the bullet is coming out and the gunpowder goes off and it's flying out...

00:59:25.000 Right.

00:59:25.000 You're going to have some distortion.

00:59:27.000 And when a bullet shoots into a pillow or it shoots into anything, you're going to have some distortion because there's just a sheer force and velocity of that bullet.

00:59:36.000 But when you shatter bone, they all get bent up and distorted.

00:59:40.000 They don't get like that.

00:59:42.000 That's not something that hit anything, in my opinion.

00:59:45.000 I think that if that, not only that, the way they found it on the gurney, on Connelly's gurney when he was in the hospital.

00:59:51.000 Oh, look, we found the bullet.

00:59:53.000 Here it is. 0.98

00:59:54.000 It's ridiculous. 0.99

00:59:55.000 That smacks of conspiracy, that bullet more than anything. 0.96

00:59:58.000 I'm not saying that I know what happened, but I know that the reason why they came up with the fact that one bullet did the damage, not just in Kennedy, but also in Connolly, was because they had an account for that bullet that hit the underpass.

01:00:10.000 It hit the underpass that ricocheted, hit some guy, and that guy went to the hospital.

01:00:14.000 They found the bullet hole in the granite of the curb stone, so they had to account for that, and that's why they came up with it.

01:00:21.000 Also, Arlen Specter was one of the guys who came up with that theory. 0.99

01:00:25.000 He was a notorious scumbag. 0.99

01:00:27.000 He was on the Watergate Commission. 1.00

01:00:29.000 Right. 0.87

01:00:30.000 There's a lot of funkiness, is what I'm saying, and I have been in the past inclined to gravitate towards some pretty ridiculous conspiracies, but that bullet is...

01:00:39.000 Anybody that knows anything about hunting or guns or any person that I know that I've talked to, like, is this shot anything?

01:00:47.000 Everyone says no.

01:00:48.000 Everyone says it hasn't hit bone.

01:00:50.000 Right.

01:00:50.000 One thing to remember is that in all investigations or fields of inquiry, there's always a residue of unexplained anomalies.

01:01:00.000 That any physics theory, evolution, whatever, there's always, yeah, but how do you explain this one little weird thing here that doesn't really get accounted for by your explanation over here?

01:01:10.000 And the answer is, I don't know.

01:01:12.000 No theory explains everything.

01:01:14.000 But if you have an alternative theory, you have to explain all the stuff over here that the mainstream theory explains and the anomalies, if you want to be taken seriously.

01:01:23.000 And usually the focus on the anomalies is to the exclusion of all the other stuff that is nicely explained by the mainstream theory.

01:01:30.000 So again, Lone Assassin explains a lot, not everything.

01:01:34.000 So what do you do with the anomalies?

01:01:35.000 Nothing.

01:01:36.000 You don't have to do anything with them.

01:01:37.000 I mean, it's okay to say, okay, that's weird.

01:01:40.000 Let's keep investigating.

01:01:42.000 But to then make the leap, well, we know there was a second shooter.

01:01:45.000 No, we just know there's anomalies.

01:01:47.000 We definitely don't know there was a second shooter.

01:01:49.000 There's no evidence whatsoever that we can say, look, here we know for a fact there was a second shooter.

01:01:53.000 We don't.

01:01:54.000 There's nothing, right?

01:01:55.000 But we also don't know that one bullet did all that damage, and the only reason why we believe that one bullet did all that damage is because that was what was presented, and that they had this one bullet that they said that they found in Connelly's gurney that caused all this damage.

01:02:09.000 That seems rather unlikely.

01:02:12.000 Yeah.

01:02:13.000 Very, very unlikely, in fact.

01:02:14.000 The other thing we...

01:02:15.000 Let's see, we had the...

01:02:17.000 The number of people that heard three shots, four shots, and so on.

01:02:21.000 Whenever you say the number of people, like, God, man.

01:02:24.000 I just don't buy eyewitness testimony in a murder like that.

01:02:28.000 It sounds so crazy.

01:02:29.000 That's good.

01:02:29.000 Well, that's right, because it's not reliable.

01:02:31.000 Well, not only that, there's so much chaos.

01:02:33.000 When you're there and the president gets shot, bang, bang, ah!

01:02:37.000 Everybody's adrenaline's flying.

01:02:38.000 They're running around.

01:02:39.000 I heard a hundred shots, you know?

01:02:41.000 You're gonna get outliers.

01:02:42.000 You're gonna get people that are caught.

01:02:44.000 You're gonna get some people that have served maybe in the military and are used to, like, chaotic events that can recall it clearly and soberly. 0.96

01:02:52.000 You're gonna get a few of those, but good luck sifting through all that shit. 0.85

01:02:55.000 Eyewitness evidence is, like, that's one of the things that drives me crazy about 9-11. 0.97

01:03:00.000 When people are really into the 9-11 story, they say, people heard explosions in the buildings.

01:03:04.000 This guy said that he saw this and he saw... 0.99

01:03:06.000 They don't know what the fuck they saw. 0.99

01:03:08.000 These giant buildings are falling down. 0.98

01:03:10.000 Everybody's freaking out.

01:03:12.000 I tell this story once.

01:03:14.000 I saw a squirrel in the woods once and I thought it was a wolf for like two seconds.

01:03:19.000 It's great. 0.99

01:03:20.000 I was in Canada, and I saw, I said, what's a fucking squirrel? 0.99

01:03:23.000 What's wrong with me? 0.99

01:03:24.000 You know, like, I was worried about wolves, so I thought I saw, for like, I mean, I'm in a legit solid two seconds, I thought this fucking squirrel was a wolf. 0.77

01:03:33.000 So I don't buy the eyewitness stuff, but I also don't buy these people that are trying to, like, neatly, like, case closed.

01:03:41.000 Not?

01:03:42.000 Really?

01:03:42.000 No.

01:03:43.000 No, there's a lot of weird shit with that Kennedy assassination thing. 0.99

01:03:46.000 There's also a lot of people that were mad at him. 0.97

01:03:48.000 There's absolutely...

01:03:50.000 Look, he wanted a close...

01:03:51.000 Well, every president has enemies he would like to see.

01:03:53.000 But he had a lot.

01:03:54.000 I mean, Kennedy was a very volatile human being.

01:03:58.000 More than Obama today?

01:03:58.000 Yes.

01:03:59.000 Oh, yeah, I think so.

01:04:00.000 Really?

01:04:00.000 I think what Kennedy was trying to do as far as close the Federal Reserve, he wanted to get rid of the CIA. He wanted to do a lot.

01:04:06.000 He was opposed to Secret Service or Secret Societies.

01:04:10.000 I mean, that massive speech that he did about secret societies, he was a very fascinating guy in a lot of ways.

01:04:17.000 And, you know, flawed in many as well.

01:04:19.000 And I'm sure if he was a president today, he would be involved in probably, he would be like one of the most scandalous presidents of all time.

01:04:25.000 Yes.

01:04:26.000 But I'm not buying this.

01:04:28.000 I mean, I definitely don't think that Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent guy. 0.98

01:04:33.000 It seems pretty obvious that he was involved in a lot of shady shit. 0.99

01:04:35.000 Totally. 0.99

01:04:36.000 And remember, he had tried to assassinate General Walker just in April before that and failed.

01:04:42.000 I just don't think that he was by himself.

01:04:44.000 I just don't.

01:04:46.000 I just really don't think that he was the only one involved in that.

01:04:49.000 And also...

01:04:51.000 The way a lone assassin could operate, that is the likeliest scenario.

01:04:55.000 In a free society, you can disappear into the nooks and crannies of big cities and no one will ever notice you.

01:05:02.000 It's like the 9-11 pilots that were training to take off but not ever learn to land.

01:05:08.000 Why didn't we notice that?

01:05:09.000 Well, we weren't looking for that.

01:05:11.000 Yeah, there's too many things going on.

01:05:13.000 After the fact, it's so easy to be an armchair quarterback and go, you know, I'll tell you what, they would have known, they should have known.

01:05:19.000 Well, after Pearl Harbor, there were conspiracy theories that Roosevelt either knew, either orchestrated or knew it would happen, let it happen, to squelch the American Firsters movement, which was supported by Lindbergh, and he had promised Churchill, you know, support,

01:05:34.000 but he could only do so much, the destroyers and all that, you know, we need to have...

01:05:38.000 And then something happens.

01:05:39.000 Okay, so it looks like, oh, he must have been involved because he is then able to act and get America into the Second World War.

01:05:45.000 Right.

01:05:46.000 But usually politicians act in response to something, now's my opportunity to take advantage of this thing that happened to get my way.

01:05:55.000 Well, all politicians do that.

01:05:57.000 It doesn't mean they're conspiring to make the thing happen to get their way.

01:06:01.000 Well, I don't think the argument was that he was conspiring.

01:06:02.000 The argument was that he knew and then pulled out some of the more major warships.

01:06:06.000 Okay, so...

01:06:07.000 So that they invited the attack.

01:06:09.000 It's like the August 9, 2001 memo from Condoleezza Rice, Osama Bin Laden to attack U.S. soil.

01:06:16.000 Right.

01:06:17.000 Okay, what about that?

01:06:19.000 Clearly, Bush must have known.

01:06:21.000 Okay, what we're forgetting is the tens of thousands of pieces of intel that come in every day.

01:06:27.000 This could happen, this could happen.

01:06:28.000 And after the fact, you go back and go, oh, look, there's the one we should have known.

01:06:32.000 Yeah.

01:06:33.000 Same thing with Pearl Harbor.

01:06:34.000 You know, Japanese might attack in Hawaii. 0.99

01:06:35.000 Yeah, but they might attack in the Philippines.

01:06:37.000 They might attack Alaska.

01:06:38.000 They may attack, you know, and so on and so on.

01:06:40.000 Which is the right one that we're supposed to then focus our resources on?

01:06:44.000 You don't know until it happens and then you go back and go, you're fired because you should have acted on that memo.

01:06:49.000 Well, but...

01:06:51.000 Well, I think you would have to be an expert in code as well.

01:06:54.000 You'd have to be an expert to be able to understand what they had intercepted, what codes had intercepted, and what information they actually had back then.

01:07:03.000 It's, again, one of those things that, after the fact, it's very easy to draw conclusions saying this had to be a conspiracy.

01:07:09.000 I mean, I think even the History Channel had something where they were saying that they knew that the attack was going to happen.

01:07:15.000 They had let it happen so that they could get into World War II. Right. 0.73

01:07:18.000 Well, that was a conspiracy theory at the time, and there was a congressional investigation, so the equivalent of the Warren Report, about that and concluded, no, that there was no conspiracy on the part of the U.S. government or any administration that should be held responsible.

01:07:34.000 I mean, a few people I think were fired for not having the planes in the right place or something like that.

01:07:38.000 But again, that's just...

01:07:40.000 And then the other thing we had, the other psychological effect is that we tend to, when you're on the outside, you tend to see big organizations as more powerful than they really are.

01:07:48.000 Big corporations, CEOs, big government agencies, and the administrators that run them.

01:07:53.000 From the outside, it looks like I know they have a lot of power and they can do a lot of things.

01:07:58.000 But when you get the job, then you find out, oh, there's a lot of things I can't do.

01:08:03.000 And here's another one of these conspiracy theories that might be true.

01:08:06.000 When you get elected president, they take you in the back room and they go, okay, here's what's actually going on at Gitmo.

01:08:11.000 Here's what's actually going on in Iraq.

01:08:13.000 No one knows, but you can't pull the troops out.

01:08:15.000 You can't close the base.

01:08:16.000 You can't.

01:08:16.000 Oh, well, I said I was going to do that.

01:08:19.000 Yeah, don't worry about it.

01:08:19.000 They all say that, that you can't do it.

01:08:21.000 Oh, all right.

01:08:22.000 I think there's a lot of act that goes on that you don't find out, that we just don't know until maybe later.

01:08:28.000 We couldn't.

01:08:28.000 It's all speculation.

01:08:28.000 But I think when you're dealing with something like these massive global events, after they occur, people are always trying to do some sort of investigative reporting.

01:08:37.000 They're trying to figure it out.

01:08:39.000 They're trying to go back over the pieces and connect things that make sense.

01:08:42.000 And the problem is you get confirmation bias on both sides.

01:08:46.000 You get confirmation bias where people are trying to show very clearly that there was no conspiracy whatsoever.

01:08:51.000 And then you get people that are trying to see conspiracy in everything.

01:08:54.000 And I think with a lot of these stories, a lot of these major events, like whether it's JFK's assassination or many other ones, there's a lot of weirdness to them that make it real hard to wrap up nice and tight.

01:09:06.000 And when people can't wrap them up nice and tight, they get very uneasy.

01:09:09.000 And it's okay to just say, I don't know, it could be a conspiracy.

01:09:13.000 Maybe not.

01:09:13.000 Let's just keep an open mind.

01:09:16.000 You don't have to construct a whole other worldview of operatives and agents and plots.

01:09:22.000 You can just say, that's a weird thing.

01:09:24.000 Exactly.

01:09:24.000 And I think it's also very important that we recognize that there have been conspiracies before.

01:09:29.000 Like 9-11 by itself is a conspiracy.

01:09:31.000 That's right.

01:09:31.000 Nineteen members of Al-Qaeda plotting to fly planes into buildings.

01:09:34.000 That's a conspiracy.

01:09:35.000 They conspired.

01:09:35.000 Yeah.

01:09:36.000 And that's one group that we don't know.

01:09:39.000 We also know about, like we said, Operation Northwoods.

01:09:43.000 And there's been some false flag events that happened.

01:09:45.000 I mean, the Gulf of Tonkin.

01:09:46.000 That's another one.

01:09:47.000 There's been some lies.

01:09:48.000 We know that.

01:09:49.000 So it makes the whole thing really weird.

01:09:52.000 Yeah.

01:09:54.000 We're talking about actual real events as opposed to psychics or tarot card readers. 0.99

01:10:01.000 My wife's friend went to a fucking psychic the other day and I had to listen to this nonsense. 0.98

01:10:07.000 They were talking to me about this psychic thing and oh, we went and she knew everything and she... 0.99

01:10:13.000 It was so amazing.

01:10:14.000 And she was asking me about my aunt and how could she have known? 0.99

01:10:17.000 I'm like, oh, fucking Christ. 0.99

01:10:18.000 First of all, I wish I was there. 0.99

01:10:20.000 I wish I was there to see what kind of questions she asked and how you answered.

01:10:24.000 Yeah, because usually they tell the psychics.

01:10:26.000 Yes.

01:10:27.000 They get fed back later.

01:10:28.000 Well, they have these leading questions, and then you give them partial answers, and then they fish for more, and then before you know it, you're filling in the blanks together, and they want to believe, you know?

01:10:39.000 And a lot of times, there's some weird social aspect to it, like hand-holding or something like that, which is an intimacy thing where you don't...

01:10:47.000 You don't want to be confrontational with this person, and so you sort of kind of help them.

01:10:52.000 You're both in each other's space because you're only like two feet away from each other.

01:10:56.000 It's odd.

01:10:57.000 There's a lot of oddness.

01:10:59.000 It's a real psychodrama.

01:11:00.000 I had a friend who worked the Psychic Friends Network line back in the 90s when Dionne Warwick owned that company.

01:11:07.000 And he was a magician that couldn't quite make a decent living doing magic stuff, so he did this on the side.

01:11:14.000 And it became fairly lucrative.

01:11:16.000 So he told me, you know, he operated from home, and you just have another phone line, and they send you the calls, and you get, I think he got 60 cents on the minute, and the company got, you know, it was $3.95 a minute, and he got 60 cents on the minute, but they rewarded you.

01:11:28.000 The longer you keep them on the subjects on the line, the more higher percentage you get of each minute.

01:11:34.000 And so he would do this by, you know, working through different categories.

01:11:38.000 And mostly people call it night and weekends.

01:11:40.000 They're lonely, need somebody to talk to.

01:11:42.000 You know, love, health, money, career, especially love, relationships, you know, jobs, your boss.

01:11:49.000 People would just yak, yak, yak, yak.

01:11:50.000 And then he got pretty good, sort of like...

01:11:53.000 The analogy I make is like with Dr. Laura's call-in talk show.

01:11:56.000 She has a rich database of problems that people have, why they call her. 1.00

01:12:02.000 So every call, she knows within 10 seconds, oh, it's problem number 7. It's number 16. You're the one with the guy.

01:12:08.000 And you just hone right in on it.

01:12:11.000 So these psychics, they have a deep database of human psychology.

01:12:15.000 I like how you connected Dr. Laura to it.

01:12:18.000 Well, she used to listen to that show.

01:12:22.000 Do you find similarities?

01:12:23.000 Absolutely.

01:12:24.000 Not that she's running a psychic scam.

01:12:26.000 Not at all.

01:12:26.000 But there's only so many variations of human psychology and human nature.

01:12:32.000 What do people care the most about?

01:12:35.000 Relationships, love, health, money, career.

01:12:36.000 So you just work your way through those four.

01:12:38.000 And then people just open up and pour stuff out, take a few notes.

01:12:41.000 And then like 45 minutes later, well, let's talk about your Uncle Bob.

01:12:45.000 Uncle Bob, how could he have known about Uncle Bob?

01:12:48.000 Well, you told them half an hour ago.

01:12:49.000 So people forget that.

01:12:51.000 Right.

01:12:51.000 So if you record them, you videotape them or tape record them, it's very enlightening.

01:12:56.000 I did a show with John Stossel when he was with ABC 2020 on James Van Praag.

01:13:03.000 And they didn't tell Van Praag I was involved, but they taped him all day.

01:13:10.000 Bringing people in to do readings and cameras and set up and stuff like this.

01:13:14.000 And when you sit there with a counter, like how many times has he asked this question or say these things?

01:13:19.000 And it's just hundreds.

01:13:21.000 And so his hit rate was maybe less than 10%.

01:13:24.000 But they only remembered the handful of the 10% and forgot the hundreds of names he would throw out.

01:13:31.000 And comments he would make.

01:13:33.000 And so there's a confirmation bias.

01:13:35.000 There's a high data rate.

01:13:37.000 You're just pouring stuff out.

01:13:38.000 And then people pick out the ones that they remember.

01:13:40.000 And then we'd catch him cheating once in a while.

01:13:42.000 Like, you know, well, let's take a break, everybody.

01:13:44.000 Break.

01:13:45.000 Then you leave the camera rolling.

01:13:46.000 And then he starts chatting with people.

01:13:48.000 You know, so who are you here for?

01:13:50.000 Oh, my aunt.

01:13:51.000 She passed over.

01:13:51.000 Oh, okay.

01:13:52.000 Yeah.

01:13:52.000 And then like half an hour later, I'd like to come to this woman here.

01:13:55.000 Now, don't tell me who you're here for, but I'm getting...

01:13:58.000 I see a woman over your left shoulder... 1.00

01:14:01.000 I don't want to say sister or mother.

01:14:03.000 Is it an ant?

01:14:04.000 Oh my god!

01:14:06.000 And it looks, you know, so it's edited and the way it looks, you know, like they're really getting something.

01:14:12.000 But when you really see it in operation, you can see the whole thing unfolds completely as a psychodrama.

01:14:18.000 We had this guy on the sci-fi show.

01:14:20.000 His name's Banachek.

01:14:22.000 Oh, I know Banachek. 1.00

01:14:23.000 He's great.

01:14:25.000 Banachek's very good at this.

01:14:25.000 He's fantastic because he's a magician and he does those psychic reading things, but he'll tell you right away, this is a trick.

01:14:33.000 I am really good at it.

01:14:35.000 I am not a psychic.

01:14:36.000 I have no psychic ability whatsoever, but I can't tell you how I'm doing this, but I know how to do this.

01:14:41.000 Right.

01:14:42.000 And he was bending spoons, doing all this craziness.

01:14:45.000 Yeah.

01:14:46.000 Did card tricks, all kinds of crazy stuff where you go, this is insane.

01:14:50.000 How is this possible?

01:14:51.000 But he was really adamant about letting you know, like, these people that are psychics, that are telling you about your future, your past, they're all con people.

01:15:00.000 They're doing terrible things.

01:15:02.000 They're trying to pretend that your dead relatives are communicating with you from the great beyond.

01:15:07.000 They're giving you this sense of hope.

01:15:09.000 But they're all scammers.

01:15:10.000 And, you know... 0.98

01:15:12.000 Having a guy like that who's very skilled at that style of, you know, I think he calls it, he's a mentalist. 0.97

01:15:19.000 He's a mentalist, right. 0.72

01:15:20.000 It's amazing to watch, though. 0.71

01:15:22.000 It is.

01:15:23.000 God, he's so good at it.

01:15:24.000 Banachek's one of the best, yeah.

01:15:25.000 But he's also one of the, he's sort of one of the leaders of the skeptical movement.

01:15:28.000 Yes.

01:15:29.000 Which is ethical magic.

01:15:30.000 Yes.

01:15:31.000 Well, he's an entertainer.

01:15:32.000 And an entertainer, yeah.

01:15:34.000 He's not ripping anybody off, and he's really adamant about it.

01:15:37.000 So I love him.

01:15:38.000 I love what he's doing.

01:15:40.000 I was on a cruise with him once, one of these cruise ship things with other skeptics.

01:15:45.000 So he did some of these mentalism stuff, and he told me how he did one of them.

01:15:49.000 He's pretty good about not telling the tricks, but I really pressed him on this particular thing where he would touch somebody on the shoulder here.

01:15:56.000 And then you're blindfolded, and then you would say, I felt like you touched me on the left shoulder or the right.

01:16:02.000 And he had a whole sequence of these things where the other person was picking up on the cue of where he was being touched.

01:16:08.000 Anyway, I was just stunned by this.

01:16:10.000 Like, how is he doing this?

01:16:12.000 I know he's not really psychic, you know.

01:16:14.000 And then he told me how he did it.

01:16:16.000 I'm like, oh, wow.

01:16:17.000 Oh, that is so good.

01:16:19.000 And it's so simple.

01:16:20.000 But you can't tell us.

01:16:24.000 And that's really probably the best reason why you don't want to know how the magicians do it, because it's almost always super simple and like, oh, I should have seen that, but you don't.

01:16:33.000 Penn and Teller was Penn Jillette.

01:16:35.000 Teller really doesn't talk that much, but there was an old show that was on television in Australia or radio.

01:16:42.000 I think it was on radio or television.

01:16:44.000 I don't remember, but there was this trick that they did and it was The way that Penn, like, goddammit, I'm trying to, I'm struggling to remember how exactly it worked.

01:16:57.000 But it was this woman who could, she could tell the future or she could, some sort of psychic ability.

01:17:06.000 And Penn explained it.

01:17:07.000 And the way he explained it, he didn't want to explain it.

01:17:11.000 They did it on the radio.

01:17:12.000 It's for Radio Lab, the Radio Lab podcast.

01:17:14.000 And they explained it on their web.

01:17:15.000 I'm doing a terrible job explaining this.

01:17:17.000 But when you hear the explanation, I won't give it out because I don't want to ruin it for anybody who hasn't heard it before.

01:17:22.000 But when you hear the explanation, you go, oh, God.

01:17:25.000 Yeah.

01:17:25.000 That's it.

01:17:26.000 Of course.

01:17:27.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:17:27.000 Oh, you fuckers. 1.00

01:17:29.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:17:29.000 Fuckers. 1.00

01:17:30.000 But having that, the ability to sneaky trick people like that, boy, you can make a lot of money if you're an unethical person. 1.00

01:17:37.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:17:37.000 And you can fool a lot of people and, you know.

01:17:40.000 But like one of the examples I use, you know, Penn and Teller do the cups and balls, but they use clear plastic cups.

01:17:46.000 So you can see where the ball is and how it's being done, but you still get fooled.

01:17:52.000 Yes.

01:17:52.000 Because the power of the, you know, the sort of, you know, following his gaze or following the movement of the hand and this and that, it's done so well that you still miss it, even though with the clear plastic.

01:18:03.000 So this is a good example where even knowing the trick, you might still be fooled.

01:18:08.000 What is it about people that want to fund?

01:18:10.000 Is it something about...

01:18:13.000 The search for human knowledge, like the thing that's always inside of people where they're trying to find out where is the food?

01:18:20.000 Where's the enemy coming from?

01:18:21.000 What's going to happen in the future?

01:18:23.000 It seems to be like some search for human knowledge that is a part of people's desire to uncover mystery.

01:18:30.000 You know, there's almost like a genetic calling to find...

01:18:35.000 Well, absolutely.

01:18:35.000 Yeah.

01:18:36.000 You know?

01:18:36.000 Well, what it is is just learning and survival.

01:18:39.000 So, you know, I call this patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.

01:18:44.000 And my thought experiment is imagine you're a hominid on the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago, small brain australopithecine, your name is Lucy. 0.98

01:18:51.000 And you hear a rustle in the grass.

01:18:53.000 Is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind?

01:18:56.000 So if you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, that's a type 1 error, false positive.

01:19:02.000 You thought A was connected to B, but no harm.

01:19:05.000 You just become skittish and cautious or whatever.

01:19:07.000 But if you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch.

01:19:14.000 You've just been given a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early before reproducing.

01:19:18.000 So, in other words, it's better to just assume that all things you think are connected, all rustles in the grass, are dangerous predators and not the wind, just in case.

01:19:29.000 There's not a big cost to pay for making a type 1 error, a false positive.

01:19:32.000 There's a higher cost for making a type 2 error, a false negative.

01:19:36.000 So we assume that this is the basis of superstition and magical thinking.

01:19:39.000 We just assume that this is connected to that.

01:19:42.000 You pull the slot.

01:19:43.000 You do this.

01:19:43.000 You pull the slot machine.

01:19:44.000 You win or whatever.

01:19:46.000 And this is what Skinner showed back in the 50s, where you just randomly give reinforcements to rats and pigeons.

01:19:51.000 And whatever they were doing just before they got rewarded, they'll just repeat that behavior, even if it's like twirling counterclockwise twice.

01:19:59.000 And that's the basis of superstition.

01:20:01.000 There's nothing wrong with their brains.

01:20:03.000 They're just trying to find causal connections between events and the environment.

01:20:08.000 And that's the basis of survival.

01:20:10.000 So all of us are subject to making those connections.

01:20:14.000 Some are more gullible than others, say, or more skeptical.

01:20:17.000 But for the most part, all of us can easily be fooled if it's done right.

01:20:22.000 That's the beauty of good cons, good scams, is that anybody could fall for them, even smart people.

01:20:28.000 And if anything, smart people are more likely to believe weird things in this sense, that once they believe it, they think they've drawn a connection, they're better at rationalizing the reasons why they believe than, say, less educated or less intelligent people.

01:20:41.000 And so, as people like Banachek will tell you, there's nothing better than an audience of scientists at MIT. Oh, boy!

01:20:48.000 I can really fool them because they think they're so smart.

01:20:51.000 I can't be fooled.

01:20:52.000 Wow, okay, he must be doing something really, really super psychic because, you know, I'm super smart.

01:20:59.000 Well, no, because all of our sensory apparatus works the same and magicians know how to manipulate your gaze, your attention, whatever, and how to fool you.

01:21:08.000 It's just so weird how people are drawn to trying to uncover mysteries, though.

01:21:13.000 You know, whether it's ghosts or whether it's... 0.97

01:21:15.000 Like, how many goddamn ghost shows do they have to have where no one ever sees a ghost before they stop having ghost shows? 0.98

01:21:21.000 I know. 0.99

01:21:22.000 Those things drive me crazy.

01:21:23.000 I know.

01:21:24.000 We don't do many, many issues like on astrology, is it real?

01:21:28.000 It's like...

01:21:29.000 We took care of this, you know, decades ago.

01:21:32.000 There's nothing new. 0.99

01:21:33.000 Okay, astrology as far as, like, you know, hey, you're a Leo, so you're inclined to be a leader, like that kind of bullshit. 0.60

01:21:40.000 But is there anything to those really complex astrological readings where they look for the time of day you were born and Mercury's and retrograde and all that? 0.54

01:21:52.000 Have you looked into that?

01:21:53.000 Yes, there's nothing to it.

01:21:54.000 I know nothing about it.

01:21:55.000 Nothing to it?

01:21:56.000 Nothing at all.

01:21:56.000 Nope.

01:21:57.000 Absolutely nothing.

01:21:57.000 It's all in the psychology of the reading.

01:21:59.000 So if you mix up somebody's reading for, you know, you're a Leo, but, you know, we give you the Virgo reading or whatever for that day, almost everybody will go, yep, boy, that's a perfect— So it's all total hustle.

01:22:10.000 Yeah, all of it.

01:22:11.000 But what about Nancy Reagan?

01:22:12.000 She believed—I don't understand what you're saying.

01:22:16.000 Yes, God rest her soul.

01:22:17.000 God rest her soul.

01:22:18.000 Didn't she use a psychic?

01:22:20.000 She did, yeah.

01:22:20.000 No, she consulted a little bit.

01:22:22.000 I mean, this got played up quite a bit for Ronnie's travel schedule, a little bit.

01:22:27.000 I don't think we can say that state decisions were being based on astrological readings. 0.99

01:22:32.000 And it could have also been like, you know, you always know someone who has a wacky husband or a wacky wife that believes in any shit, and then the person's sort of like, oh dear. 0.99

01:22:41.000 Yes. 0.99

01:22:41.000 You know, what did you say? 0.99

01:22:42.000 Okay, I'll listen.

01:22:43.000 Somehow I don't think President Reagan was paying much attention to astrology.

01:22:48.000 He wasn't paying much attention to anything towards the end.

01:22:50.000 No.

01:22:50.000 You know?

01:22:51.000 Yeah.

01:22:52.000 But this desire to uncover hidden mysteries has always been really confusing to me.

01:22:59.000 Because myself, personally, I felt the pull.

01:23:03.000 Especially aliens and UFOs.

01:23:05.000 I went deep, deep, deep into...

01:23:07.000 When I was really young, I got into the Roswell thing.

01:23:13.000 And there's a lot of different connections with the Roswell conspiracy about this crashed UFO in New Mexico in 1947 and all the eyewitness reports.

01:23:25.000 Boy, you go down the rabbit hole of that thing and you could waste years of your life.

01:23:29.000 You know, there was a study done, I think it was a UFO report done in the late 50s, I think it was 59, on the 500 most important UFO cases of the last 20 years.

01:23:41.000 Roswell wasn't even on the list.

01:23:43.000 What?

01:23:43.000 That's right.

01:23:44.000 How is it not on the list?

01:23:45.000 Roswell didn't become Roswell until 1980, when there was a made-for-TV movie and then a best-selling book.

01:23:50.000 That's probably when I jumped in.

01:23:51.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:23:52.000 Charles Berlitz, the language book publisher, he got into- They got me, those fucks. 0.96

01:23:57.000 Those books, you know, after Van Donik and, you know- Yes. 0.97

01:23:59.000 The Chariots of the Gods is a bestseller.

01:24:01.000 Then books started pouring out about aliens and UFOs and TV shows.

01:24:05.000 And then there was the movie.

01:24:05.000 Remember when Chariots of the Gods was a film that was released in the theaters?

01:24:09.000 Of course.

01:24:09.000 I remember Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of.

01:24:12.000 Oh, yeah, man.

01:24:13.000 Conjecture.

01:24:14.000 Search Of was great.

01:24:15.000 Yeah, it was a great show.

01:24:16.000 I loved that.

01:24:16.000 I used to watch that show.

01:24:18.000 That got me into Bigfoot.

01:24:19.000 But that's an example of how the popular media drives a lot of these things.

01:24:25.000 Sure.

01:24:25.000 What do we really know back then?

01:24:27.000 Nothing.

01:24:28.000 I mean, it was just a couple little anomalous things.

01:24:30.000 And here's an example, conspiracy.

01:24:32.000 Okay, so the government lied when they said it was a weather balloon.

01:24:35.000 Yes, they did.

01:24:36.000 You're surprised that governments lie?

01:24:37.000 Really?

01:24:37.000 Right.

01:24:38.000 Because, of course, it was a high-altitude surveillance balloon listening for the acoustic signatures of a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere by the Soviets.

01:24:48.000 So, of course, when this debris came down in the farmer's field there outside of Roswell, Mexico, of course they're not going to come out and hold a press conference and go, well, see, actually what we were doing is launching this project to listen to Soviet...

01:25:02.000 It was a weather balloon.

01:25:04.000 We're always suspicious, too, when something becomes not just a story, but it also becomes business.

01:25:09.000 And Roswell became a giant business.

01:25:11.000 But much later.

01:25:13.000 Again, there were a bunch of sightings in the 40s and 50s.

01:25:16.000 Of course.

01:25:18.000 But that's around the time that there was a lot of experimental aircraft.

01:25:21.000 Of course.

01:25:22.000 And so whenever anybody says, well, I saw this triangular-shaped black thing, are you near an Air Force base?

01:25:27.000 Have you looked at pictures of the B-2 bomber, the stealth bomber?

01:25:31.000 It's sort of a delta-shaped, wing-shaped.

01:25:34.000 And when it flies right over the Rose Parade every January 1st, comes right over my house in Altadena, circles around...

01:25:40.000 When it comes at you, it's silent, and it's this weird black, because they paint it that black paint that doesn't reflect.

01:25:46.000 And if you didn't know about it, and you're out in the desert, and it's dusk, and it's kind of spooky.

01:25:53.000 Like, what is that?

01:25:54.000 Well, I saw one when I was filming Fear Factor in 2002. So it was right after September 11th, not long afterwards.

01:26:02.000 And we were filming out there in...

01:26:08.000 Way out in the desert area.

01:26:10.000 Palmdale, I guess it was.

01:26:11.000 And it's real close to the Air Force Base out there.

01:26:14.000 And we saw a stealth bomber flying over, and it looks like an alien spaceship.

01:26:18.000 It's amazing.

01:26:19.000 When you see one, you're like, whoa!

01:26:22.000 If you didn't know, and you had never heard of one of those before, and you looked up in the sky, you'd be sure that that came from another planet.

01:26:28.000 I mean, it looks like it's right out of Star Wars.

01:26:30.000 In the 1890s, there were UFO sightings in America, and the UFOs looked strangely like blimps.

01:26:37.000 That's weird.

01:26:38.000 Yep.

01:26:38.000 So that's the kind of thing.

01:26:39.000 People see weird things.

01:26:40.000 And again, the propensity is not to just say, I saw an anomaly.

01:26:44.000 Wow.

01:26:45.000 I don't know.

01:26:45.000 That's weird.

01:26:46.000 And leave it at that.

01:26:47.000 Our mind immediately goes back to your, you know, we love the mystery.

01:26:50.000 Let's concoct this whole thing.

01:26:51.000 You know, the Martians are coming and it's the aliens and stuff. 0.73

01:26:54.000 Yeah.

01:26:54.000 And there's a whole other worldview.

01:26:56.000 And it's like there's this anomalous star, KIC with a bunch of numbers, that dims about 20% every period of time, whatever that is.

01:27:06.000 It's about 1,400 light years away.

01:27:09.000 So, and the astronomers studying this decide, okay, it's not planets, it's not comets coming around in front of us that dims the light.

01:27:18.000 So immediately people go to, it's a Dyson sphere.

01:27:20.000 It's a gigantic solar collecting array that circles around the planet that collects energy from the sun.

01:27:27.000 Oh, this is a recent story, right?

01:27:28.000 This is a recent story, yeah.

01:27:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:30.000 But, you know, I did some radio shows locally about this, and immediately the hosts go to, well, what are they like?

01:27:38.000 What is who like?

01:27:39.000 The aliens?

01:27:40.000 Like, no.

01:27:40.000 No, no.

01:27:41.000 All we have is just an anomaly in the light You know, signature of this star.

01:27:47.000 That's all we have.

01:27:48.000 The problem also with social media is it becomes clickbait.

01:27:50.000 It becomes someone writes a blog, or someone has a thing, and there's a video that's linked to it, and then everybody starts sending that out to their friends, and before you know it, that becomes the narrative, right?

01:28:00.000 Yep, that's right.

01:28:01.000 They found some sort of a gigantic satellite that's orbiting.

01:28:05.000 It's like a Death Star that's orbiting this planet.

01:28:07.000 It dims it because it comes between us and it.

01:28:10.000 Yep.

01:28:10.000 Yeah, that kind of stuff is very confusing to a lot of people because you don't have enough time to really research it.

01:28:16.000 Right.

01:28:16.000 Now, that's why something like what you do, like Skeptic Magazine or the entire skeptic community is a great resource.

01:28:22.000 And Snopes.

01:28:23.000 Snopes.com is also great.

01:28:24.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:28:24.000 Snopes is fantastic where it breaks down and goes, okay, here's what we absolutely know for a fact.

01:28:30.000 So look at that.

01:28:32.000 It's okay to just say, I don't know.

01:28:34.000 And it's hard to remember that.

01:28:36.000 I've always been so confused as to what it is about...

01:28:41.000 I mean, I've known grown adults that have spent years and years of their life...

01:28:47.000 I'm fascinated with Bigfoot, fascinated with UFOs, fascinated with these mysteries.

01:28:53.000 And when you look at the amount of resources that they actually expend chasing after these things, say, well, if you put that into something positive, something constructive, my God, you would do so well.

01:29:07.000 I often see that about certain scammers.

01:29:10.000 I'm like, my God, if these people just started a business with the same amount of enthusiasm, how good would they be doing it?

01:29:16.000 Right.

01:29:17.000 I mean, those guys running the internet scams and stuff, if they just did a legitimate company, they'd probably make more money.

01:29:24.000 What is it about mysteries?

01:29:26.000 That's one of the real important things that I wanted to talk to you about.

01:29:30.000 Well, I think one of the appeals of the UFO alien thing is it's kind of a secular religion.

01:29:35.000 Yes.

01:29:35.000 Because they're often portrayed as godlike figures.

01:29:38.000 And if you don't believe in the traditional god, then that is kind of – they're out there.

01:29:42.000 They're very powerful.

01:29:43.000 They know about us.

01:29:44.000 They're coming to rescue us, save us.

01:29:46.000 So much of science fiction is – you know, has these kinds of themes to it.

01:29:51.000 Like The Day the Earth Stood Still, that classic 1951 film.

01:29:55.000 Michael Rennie as Klaatu and the ship comes to Washington, D.C. It's a Christ allegory.

01:30:02.000 He's come to talk to the authorities.

01:30:05.000 Humans are sinning.

01:30:06.000 We have to stop this.

01:30:07.000 In this case, it was nuclear war.

01:30:08.000 In the remake with Keanu Reeves, it was global warming.

01:30:11.000 And the authorities won't see him, so he mingles among the common people, like Jesus did.

01:30:15.000 And then he takes up with the Patricia Neal character, who's the single mom in the town, and then he's killed by the authorities, and he's put in the morgue.

01:30:26.000 He's put in this morgue, which is sort of like the tomb.

01:30:29.000 And then in the famous scene where Patricia Neal goes to Gort the robot, he's standing there and the visor comes up and he's going to zap her.

01:30:36.000 And she gives him the famous message, you know, Gort Klaatu Barada Nikto, which basically says, go get Klaatu.

01:30:43.000 He's in the tomb.

01:30:45.000 So he marches over to the tomb and burns a hole in it, takes the body, returns it to the ship and resurrects him right there in the ship.

01:30:52.000 Yeah, it's Jesus.

01:30:53.000 It's like it's a Jesus.

01:30:54.000 His name in the movie was Mr. Carpenter, his earthly name.

01:30:57.000 Mr. Carpenter.

01:30:58.000 Isn't that interesting?

01:30:58.000 Yeah.

01:30:59.000 And in the original script, in the film, she says, wow, that's incredible.

01:31:05.000 You mean this is the power of science and technology in the future?

01:31:07.000 In the original script, he says, yeah, this is where it's going.

01:31:10.000 But the Breen censorship board in 1951 said, you can't say that.

01:31:15.000 Americans will be offended by this.

01:31:16.000 So they changed the line, and now he says something like, no, no one has the power over life and death.

01:31:22.000 Only the great spirit can determine.

01:31:24.000 It's just some baloney line.

01:31:27.000 But so much of the way we talk about aliens is that they are like, I call them deities for atheists.

01:31:35.000 You know, they're like gods, the chariots of the gods.

01:31:38.000 I mean, that's kind of that thesis.

01:31:40.000 But it's not so far-fetched in the sense that, not that they've come here, they probably haven't come here.

01:31:45.000 But if they're out there, and they probably are, there's good reasons to think there's extraterrestrials.

01:31:51.000 And if we encounter them, they're not going to be behind us, technologically, because we wouldn't encounter them otherwise.

01:31:57.000 So if we do find a signal or whatever, it's going to be from an advance.

01:32:02.000 How far advance?

01:32:03.000 Well, the chances of them being in parallel with us on an evolutionary timescale, virtually zero.

01:32:09.000 And if they're out of sync by just a little bit from when they started on their planet evolving...

01:32:13.000 It would be millions of years in advance.

01:32:15.000 And look what we've been able to accomplish just in, say, 100 years of technology, 50 years of computer technology.

01:32:22.000 Well, why would it have to be millions of years in advance?

01:32:24.000 Couldn't it just be 100?

01:32:25.000 I mean, if there are 100 years in advance of us, if we're thinking about colonizing Mars in the next few decades, you get some sort of an advanced civilization that has less conflict than us and more cooperation.

01:32:35.000 Because of how long it takes to get from bacterial-grade life to intelligent communicating life.

01:32:40.000 Right.

01:32:40.000 Probably three and a half billion years is how long it took here.

01:32:43.000 Right.

01:32:44.000 So whenever your planet starts, the chances of it going to be in a perfect synchrony of every step along the way from bacterial-grade life to big brains, if anything, it's probably going to be millions of years of difference in time scale.

01:32:57.000 Just on the biology.

01:32:59.000 So just randomly, even to get to where we are, it could be a million plus or minus just to reach this level.

01:33:07.000 Correct.

01:33:07.000 Like where we've reached, whatever billion years it was, didn't have to be that number.

01:33:13.000 It could have been much longer, it could have been shorter.

01:33:15.000 Or just started later, or started earlier.

01:33:18.000 Well, also, we have to deal with the impact that killed the dinosaurs.

01:33:22.000 They could be...

01:33:23.000 All the random events that happened.

01:33:25.000 Yeah, they could be on a planet that doesn't have any random events like that.

01:33:29.000 And it'd be way ahead of us.

01:33:30.000 Yeah, or they could be on one that has a lot of them, so...

01:33:33.000 The answer to the Fermi Paradox, where is everybody, because this should have happened already, is probably the universe is teeming with bacterial-grade life, but the number of steps to get from there all the way to a communicating, technological society is enormous, and so that winnows down the number of possibilities out there.

01:33:51.000 You could get all the way to Neanderthals, like here on Earth. 0.99

01:33:54.000 You know, their big brain, 1500 cc's, about the size of our brain, maybe a little bit larger.

01:33:59.000 And, you know, they had fire, they had tools.

01:34:04.000 Disco?

01:34:05.000 Yeah, everything but disco.

01:34:08.000 And they had Europe to themselves for about 300,000 years, and there's no advancement in their toolkits.

01:34:13.000 They're all pretty much the same.

01:34:15.000 They never had cave paintings.

01:34:17.000 It didn't look like they had symbolic art like Homo sapiens did.

01:34:21.000 We believe their brains were larger, though, to deal with their larger bodies, right?

01:34:25.000 Well, even when you correct for body size, their brains are slightly larger, but only slightly.

01:34:30.000 The brain size may not make any difference.

01:34:33.000 It may be brain modularity.

01:34:34.000 Maybe they didn't have language, or if they did, maybe they didn't have symbolic language.

01:34:41.000 We don't know why they went extinct, but when humans, Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe, within a few tens of thousands of years, there was no more Neanderthals.

01:34:50.000 Gone.

01:34:50.000 They went extinct.

01:34:51.000 And it's a big debate, paleoanthropology circles, why.

01:34:54.000 But my point is that you could have three and a half billion years of evolution on a planet and get all the way to Neanderthals who have stone tools, and it just stops.

01:35:03.000 For whatever reason, they never develop symbolic communication.

01:35:06.000 They have opposable thumbs so they can make stuff, they can make tools, but they never make Take the next step.

01:35:12.000 Right.

01:35:12.000 Now, some people disagree with that.

01:35:14.000 They think that had Homo sapiens not dominated Europe when they came in, Neanderthals might have gotten there within a few centuries more, maybe.

01:35:23.000 But, you know, we don't know that.

01:35:25.000 Well, there's also the thought that even though the universe is infinite, right, that it had some sort of a beginning, whether you buy that or don't buy that.

01:35:33.000 There's actually been some arguments.

01:35:34.000 Wasn't there some arguments recently that perhaps the universe didn't have a beginning or an end, but that it's been eternal?

01:35:40.000 Well, it could be eternally cycling.

01:35:43.000 Right.

01:35:43.000 There could be multiple Big Bangs.

01:35:44.000 So there was never...

01:35:45.000 Yeah.

01:35:46.000 So the idea could possibly be that if that is the case, right?

01:35:51.000 So if you have an event, and from that event...

01:35:55.000 Things become more and more complex, start getting single cell life, multicellular life like we have here on Earth.

01:36:00.000 There has to be a first like us.

01:36:03.000 A first.

01:36:04.000 Somebody has to be first and maybe we're first.

01:36:07.000 Yes, that's what I'm saying.

01:36:07.000 But we're multi-generational.

01:36:10.000 Our stars, and so there's been many, many generations of stars older than ours.

01:36:14.000 So this is the Fermi problem.

01:36:16.000 Where is everybody?

01:36:17.000 I mean, there should have been somebody who made it first.

01:36:19.000 But when you think about how complex life is on Earth, and how many different varieties of it, and there's only one human.

01:36:24.000 There's only one technologically communicating species, and we're it.

01:36:28.000 So is it possible?

01:36:29.000 That's right.

01:36:30.000 You could have a planet teeming with life, with dolphins, and chimpanzees, big brains, and lots of puppies, and they never build a...

01:36:41.000 No laptops.

01:36:42.000 Nothing.

01:36:42.000 So it is possible that we, since we exist, it is possible that we're the only ones that exist.

01:36:49.000 It's possible.

01:36:50.000 It's totally possible, right?

01:36:52.000 It's totally possible.

01:36:53.000 We just don't know.

01:36:54.000 That's terrifying to people, I think.

01:36:56.000 The SETI argument, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence scientists, these aren't the UFO people.

01:37:00.000 Their counterargument to that is, but there are so many planets now that we know about.

01:37:05.000 Virtually every star in a galaxy of 100 billion stars has planets.

01:37:09.000 So we're talking hundreds and hundreds of billions of planets.

01:37:13.000 The chances that it never happened anywhere...

01:37:16.000 Pretty small.

01:37:17.000 Pretty small.

01:37:18.000 So they're probably out there somewhere, but it's a vast, empty cosmos.

01:37:23.000 There's a lot that we know that doesn't have intelligent life.

01:37:28.000 There's a lot of planets.

01:37:29.000 That's right.

01:37:29.000 We have one planet that we know of that has intelligent life out of all the planets we've ever discovered.

01:37:35.000 And obviously there's some that we've discovered that are so far out there, we only get, like, glimpses of what their atmosphere contains.

01:37:40.000 Well, the next generation, they'll be able to get the atmospheres.

01:37:44.000 The Webb Space Telescope will, I'm told.

01:37:47.000 They're just getting it from a light spectrum now, right?

01:37:49.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:37:49.000 But in the spectrum, you could see if there's oxygen, for example, and methane, so they must have cows that are farting.

01:37:54.000 It's methane, not methane?

01:37:56.000 Methane.

01:37:56.000 Well, the British say methane.

01:37:58.000 Do they?

01:37:58.000 To sound intelligent, I try to use something.

01:38:00.000 Try to be, like, British? 0.98

01:38:01.000 Do you spell tires with a Y? No.

01:38:03.000 T-Y-R-E-S. See, one of the, you know, Hitchens and Dawkins, he's got, you know, it's that British accent. 0.98

01:38:10.000 It sounds so much better if you're selling things than late night TV. Oh, absolutely.

01:38:14.000 Yeah.

01:38:16.000 Yep, it works.

01:38:17.000 Yeah, anyway, the mystery.

01:38:19.000 You talked about the mystery.

01:38:20.000 Well, you know, we're not quite sure why our brains go toward that.

01:38:24.000 I mean, I'm sure my dog has a good life, but I don't think he contemplates the cosmos.

01:38:30.000 Mine does. 1.00

01:38:31.000 Your dog's a loser. 1.00

01:38:32.000 Especially when it's time for food. 1.00

01:38:34.000 But what I was trying to get at, though, is that...

01:38:38.000 There's a thing that we do where it's not just...

01:38:41.000 I mean, there's the longing for extraterrestrial life, you know, the search for the technological daddy, you know, the advanced alien daddy that's out there that's going to show us the error of our ways.

01:38:51.000 There's that pull.

01:38:53.000 But then there's also this weird pull where we want to believe that these intelligent beings from other planets can recognize who our elected leaders are and be in cahoots with them. 0.98

01:39:03.000 As if they give a shit about Obama or anything... 0.98

01:39:07.000 I mean, if you descended upon an ant colony, would you have a deal with the queen? 0.99

01:39:13.000 Like, look, I know you're the one who is in charge of this.

01:39:16.000 So I'm only going to talk to you.

01:39:18.000 I'm going to be super secretive.

01:39:20.000 And since you are so moral and ethical, and you don't lie to your people at all, I'm only going to communicate with you.

01:39:26.000 And in exchange for technological secrets, I would like some DNA. It's so preposterous.

01:39:33.000 It's such a stupid idea that they would come down and they would talk to the military leaders, especially military leaders from the 1940s, who knew almost nothing about technology. 0.99

01:39:44.000 Or this idea that at Roswell, we capture one of their spacecraft and back-engineer their technology, and that's where silicon chips and computers came from. 0.99

01:39:52.000 Do you know about the American Computer Company?

01:39:54.000 Did you ever hear about these people?

01:39:56.000 There was a company called the American Computer Company, and this is like back during the Art Bell days of Coast to Coast with Art Bell, which I loved.

01:40:05.000 I've been on that show many times.

01:40:06.000 I love that show!

01:40:07.000 I've been on it once too.

01:40:08.000 It was one of the highlights of my life.

01:40:10.000 It was recently when he came back on the radio or internet.

01:40:13.000 So I was driving home from the comedy store one night and they were talking about this American computer company and there's this guy that ran this American computer company that was... 1.00

01:40:23.000 He's out of his fucking mind.

01:40:25.000 And he, apparently, he had this theory and this whole website dedicated, I don't know if it's up anymore, they might have taken it down, but it's dedicated to showing the timeline of the creation of the transistor and all this came out of Bell Labs, which is where they had the Air Force base outside of Bell Labs to protect it from alien invasion. 0.99

01:40:47.000 Right.

01:40:47.000 Oh my god.

01:40:49.000 And that this is where all of our technology came from.

01:40:51.000 So we're supposed to believe that the aliens were only about five to ten years more advanced than us, from vacuum tubes to the silicon transistors.

01:41:01.000 I mean, really?

01:41:02.000 That's it?

01:41:03.000 Fiber optics, right?

01:41:05.000 They managed to traverse the vast instances of interstellar space with technology just barely better than vacuum tubes?

01:41:11.000 Well, did you ever pay attention to that Robert Lazar guy?

01:41:13.000 He's one of the most bizarre ones.

01:41:15.000 He's a bizarre one because he sounds so good.

01:41:17.000 I think there are some people that just make stuff up.

01:41:20.000 He's so good at it, though. 0.78

01:41:21.000 But he's also smart, which is fucking really scary because this guy came up with a hydrogen-powered engine for his Corvette.

01:41:30.000 Which people have done. 0.56

01:41:31.000 They're doing it now.

01:41:32.000 People are developing hydrogen power plants for cars.

01:41:36.000 But he had this decades ago.

01:41:38.000 So he's obviously a very smart guy.

01:41:40.000 Being smart doesn't protect you from believing in weird things.

01:41:44.000 Isn't that bizarre?

01:41:45.000 Not just believing in weird things, but bullshitting people, right? 0.87

01:41:48.000 Well, then somebody who's smart and educated is going to be better at bullshitting people. 0.90

01:41:52.000 Well, he bullshitted people about his education, too, though.

01:41:55.000 That was part of the problem.

01:41:57.000 I think some people went back and looked through his education and said, well, there's no evidence that you ever went to these schools.

01:42:02.000 And so that threw some monkey wrenches into it. 0.93

01:42:05.000 But he was one of the Area 51 guys, where he said he worked at Area 51. Well, Area 51 is a top secret military base.

01:42:13.000 So you and I aren't going to be able to drive there and go, well, we're doing a show.

01:42:17.000 We want to blow the lid off these crazy...

01:42:19.000 No, you're still not coming in here. 0.61

01:42:20.000 Oh, okay.

01:42:21.000 So what are you hiding?

01:42:22.000 Well, of course, it would be interesting to know now that we know about the B-2 stealth bomber, what are they doing now?

01:42:28.000 Right.

01:42:28.000 That we won't find out for 20 more years that people are seeing out in the desert in the middle of the night.

01:42:33.000 I saw this spooky weird thing.

01:42:34.000 Oh yeah, definitely.

01:42:35.000 And that's how it works.

01:42:36.000 Yeah.

01:42:37.000 You know, we find out eventually.

01:42:39.000 In the meantime, just say, I don't know, I saw a weird thing.

01:42:41.000 Well, yeah, the oddest part about it is this belief that they're in conspiracy with our elected leaders.

01:42:48.000 That one, to me, has been so strange, that they will land somewhere and they have these meetings and these elected leaders...

01:42:55.000 Make deals with the UFOs.

01:42:58.000 How amazing would that be, though, if that was true?

01:43:01.000 The reptilians are running the country from New Mexico.

01:43:06.000 People love this idea of blowing the lid off of it.

01:43:11.000 That's something that people love.

01:43:13.000 They love investigating.

01:43:15.000 They love the investigative journalism aspect of blowing the lid off, this global conspiracy.

01:43:21.000 Well, I think that's what drives some of the, you know, kind of anti-medical establishment, anti-big pharma, you know, anti-vaccination.

01:43:28.000 You know, those guys, they're behind closed doors, the big powerful people, corporations and government agents, the CDC and this company and the CEO and the politics, you know, they're all and they want to make money.

01:43:39.000 And, you know, and first, they think they're more powerful than they really are.

01:43:44.000 And second, that's not how the world works.

01:43:46.000 I mean, these people are not trying to keep us poisoned or keep us sick so they can make money.

01:43:52.000 The real conspiracies are, how come we can't get our drugs cheaper?

01:43:57.000 What sort of behind-the-door deals are being done that prevent healthcare from being cheaper?

01:44:03.000 That's where the real action is.

01:44:04.000 That's the real conspiracy.

01:44:05.000 I had a conversation with someone who was trying to tell me they already have a cure for cancer.

01:44:08.000 They just don't want you to have the cure because then the money's in the treatment.

01:44:13.000 I go, why do you think the same person has the cure?

01:44:17.000 As the same people that are selling the treatment.

01:44:20.000 Do you really think they're the same person?

01:44:21.000 Do you know how many people work in the field of creating new medicine?

01:44:26.000 I mean, that's so ridiculous that it would be the same thing.

01:44:28.000 I mean, and that one person of the tens of thousands of employees at Amgen or wherever is going to leave and go, oh, I found something out, and I'm coming on your show to tell you all.

01:44:36.000 I took pictures.

01:44:37.000 Here's the one.

01:44:38.000 Not one.

01:44:38.000 Well, it just doesn't make any sense that it would be the same person.

01:44:42.000 The odds of it being the same person or the same company, there's so many different people that work in the pharmaceutical industry, so many different people that are trying to do research on new medications, and there's so much money involved in it.

01:44:54.000 The idea that this one company would come up with a cure and they would keep it under wraps because they are in cahoots with the other company that's got the treatment.

01:45:03.000 Right.

01:45:03.000 And so, I mean, if that's true, then all the people that were sick from polio and all the businesses and companies that were making money from polio patients, how come they didn't stop the polio vaccine?

01:45:13.000 Right.

01:45:14.000 Or, you know, just pick any particular industry like that where we have made real progress.

01:45:19.000 But then there are some things where you go, okay, there's definitely too many people that are getting prescribed pain pills.

01:45:27.000 Like, what is going on, and what is the conspiracy?

01:45:30.000 I've had conversations with people that went to doctors, you know, they had something wrong with them, and the doctor wants to prescribe them. 0.98

01:45:36.000 I had a fucking nose operation. 0.94

01:45:38.000 I had a deviated septum repaired, and my doctor gave me not one, but two different opiates to take. 0.99

01:45:43.000 I didn't take anything.

01:45:44.000 I wasn't in pain.

01:45:46.000 Okay.

01:45:46.000 And he was like, you're going to be in pain.

01:45:47.000 I'm like, I'm telling you, man.

01:45:49.000 It's barely uncomfortable.

01:45:51.000 Well, so again, we know how some of this works.

01:45:53.000 You know, the drug companies take the doctors out on their golfing trips.

01:45:56.000 They give them free samples and this and that.

01:45:58.000 Well, my wife's mom was a nurse.

01:46:00.000 And they used to take them out to dinner.

01:46:03.000 And these pharmaceutical reps would talk to them.

01:46:05.000 And it wasn't like they said, hey, we want you to tell these people to take our drugs.

01:46:11.000 It's they became friendly and they did nothing.

01:46:14.000 Nice things to them, and it was almost understood that in exchange you would talk well about their drugs.

01:46:20.000 Of course.

01:46:20.000 The principle of reciprocity.

01:46:22.000 I did something for you, now you owe me.

01:46:24.000 You don't even have to say it.

01:46:25.000 They wanted those trips.

01:46:26.000 You don't have to say it.

01:46:28.000 That's where it's interesting.

01:46:29.000 You don't have to say it.

01:46:30.000 And so they're making money, and that's reality.

01:46:34.000 I mean, the sheer volume of pain pills that they've sold in this country since the 1980s, it's stunning.

01:46:41.000 But also, I saw this when my stepdad was ill for probably 10 years of just going through in his 80s, just melting down one thing after another.

01:46:50.000 And I was the one taking him around to all the different docs.

01:46:53.000 And, you know, I could sort of see how it works.

01:46:55.000 You know, the docs go, look, Dick, I don't know what the problem is.

01:46:59.000 Well, can you give me something?

01:47:00.000 I'm in pain.

01:47:01.000 Right.

01:47:01.000 There's definitely not.

01:47:02.000 I don't know.

01:47:03.000 Well...

01:47:03.000 Doc, come on, I just drove down here.

01:47:05.000 All right, here, take this.

01:47:07.000 Right.

01:47:07.000 You know, so they kind of feel like, well, I got to do something.

01:47:09.000 I don't know what it is.

01:47:11.000 I don't know what to do, but okay, he's asking me, all right, I'll give him some painkillers.

01:47:14.000 I'll give him this or that makes it feel better.

01:47:16.000 And my dad would take it and go, yeah, this is great.

01:47:18.000 There's certainly that.

01:47:20.000 There's also certainly incompetent doctors.

01:47:23.000 There's doctors that are really willing to prescribe SSRIs and antidepressants, like with Right.

01:47:29.000 Alarming.

01:47:30.000 Right.

01:47:31.000 Consistency.

01:47:32.000 So there you have the medicalization of what are really probably just social behavioral issues.

01:47:37.000 Yes.

01:47:37.000 So, you know, when we were kids in school and a little Johnny was super active and had high energy, whatever, okay?

01:47:44.000 And now he's a great athlete or he's doing this or that.

01:47:47.000 And now he's like, well, what's wrong with him?

01:47:49.000 Oh, well, he has this medical problem.

01:47:51.000 Oh, he's ADHD. Oh, that's a thing?

01:47:55.000 Yeah, it's a medical issue.

01:47:56.000 It's like a disease.

01:47:57.000 Well, what can we give him for it?

01:47:58.000 Well, we'll give him, you know, these drugs here.

01:48:01.000 And okay, so all of a sudden, you know, the hyperactive little kid who's just kind of fun and maybe a little disruptive is now medicalized.

01:48:09.000 Yeah.

01:48:09.000 It's the same thing with the autism spectrum.

01:48:12.000 People say, well, increase in vaccinations, there's been an increase in autism.

01:48:15.000 Not really.

01:48:16.000 The category got larger, and it became medicalized.

01:48:20.000 So there's no increase in autism cases?

01:48:23.000 It's the increase in the diagnoses of them.

01:48:25.000 A, more people paying attention to it, and B, the category is much bigger than it used to be.

01:48:31.000 So that's why it's called a spectrum.

01:48:33.000 So when people make the correlation between that and the increase in the amount of vaccinations that children get...

01:48:38.000 Right, it's a false correlation.

01:48:39.000 It's not true that autism rates have gone up.

01:48:43.000 It's that in the 90s, it suddenly started becoming a thing.

01:48:48.000 Autism, the spectrum, talking about it.

01:48:50.000 And so somebody that was like so-called Asperger-y, they're a little socially awkward. 1.00

01:48:55.000 Is that a word?

01:48:55.000 Asperger-y?

01:48:56.000 Yeah, well...

01:48:57.000 I use it too.

01:48:59.000 No, we all use that term.

01:49:00.000 I'm pretty sure I've heard that.

01:49:01.000 Dude's a little Asperger-y. 1.00

01:49:03.000 When someone's really smart but socially odd, I'm like, he's a little Asperger-y. 1.00

01:49:07.000 Go to Caltech or MIT. The Big Bang Theory is not so far off on the nerdy factor.

01:49:14.000 But again, what's wrong with being a little nerdy?

01:49:19.000 Well, now you're on the autism spectrum.

01:49:21.000 Yeah, you're on the spectrum.

01:49:23.000 I'm autistic, yeah.

01:49:24.000 You have a disease, and we have drugs for this, and before you know it, the category's bigger, and there's more people in the box.

01:49:31.000 So it looks like it got bigger, but it didn't.

01:49:33.000 If you're easily distracted, all of a sudden you have ADD. Yeah.

01:49:36.000 Ah, you have a disease. 1.00

01:49:38.000 You have ADD, sir. 0.97

01:49:40.000 Or they call it ADOS, Attention Deficit O-Shiny.

01:49:44.000 Yeah, right.

01:49:45.000 There's that.

01:49:46.000 But there's also the very real problem with human beings in that there's so much biological diversity that medication that affects one person is going to affect another person in a totally different way.

01:49:57.000 So if they give you a medication, your body has no problem with that medication whatsoever.

01:50:02.000 If they give that same medication to another person, there's going to be some issues. 0.58

01:50:05.000 And when people say, well, you know, my child got vaccinated and there was some adverse reaction to the vaccination, there's people that want to immediately dismiss that and say, well, that's malarkey, that's junk science.

01:50:18.000 But there is a very real situation that happens with human beings where they take medication where it does not agree with some of them.

01:50:24.000 Sort of how, like, some people have allergies to things that are completely innocuous to you or I. You give a certain type of nut to Jamie, and he might die.

01:50:34.000 You know, there's a reality to that.

01:50:36.000 And when you look at the...

01:50:38.000 This is what I try to explain to people that talk about vaccinations being dangerous, and, you know, we don't need vaccinations, and they're...

01:50:44.000 They're horrible to people.

01:50:47.000 Think about how many people you're talking about.

01:50:50.000 You're talking about 300 million in this country alone.

01:50:55.000 How many cases are people that have vaccinations where things go wrong?

01:51:01.000 Is it 1,000 a year?

01:51:03.000 Well, if it is 1,000 a year, do you know how low that is?

01:51:06.000 I know that's not low if it's your child.

01:51:08.000 It's awful.

01:51:09.000 I know it's not low if it's 10 a year if it's your child.

01:51:12.000 It's awful. 1.00

01:51:13.000 But there's a lot of fucking people that are being vaccinated. 1.00

01:51:16.000 If there really was this global epidemic of you give kids vaccinations and they turn into this decrepit, mentally disabled child, boy, it would be a lot bigger. 1.00

01:51:28.000 It would be a lot bigger than it is because so many people are getting vaccinated.

01:51:31.000 Exactly the right way to think about it.

01:51:33.000 A million to one odds happen 300 times a day in America.

01:51:35.000 Yeah, I can't think of that.

01:51:37.000 That's a lot of people.

01:51:38.000 Yeah, that's a lot of people. 1.00

01:51:39.000 This is what I try to explain to people when we talk about just the raw numbers of stupidity. 1.00

01:51:43.000 I think that it's really conservative and really kind to say that one out of a hundred people are fucking idiots, and there's not a damn thing you can do. 1.00

01:51:53.000 That's open-minded. 1.00

01:51:55.000 That's really looking at the bright side of things.

01:51:57.000 That's a glass-half-full perspective, right? 1.00

01:52:00.000 That means there's three million morons in this country. 1.00

01:52:04.000 And we know where they are. 1.00

01:52:05.000 There's a lot of them.

01:52:07.000 That's a lot of people.

01:52:08.000 That's a lot of people.

01:52:09.000 It's the sheer numbers that we deal with whenever, you know, when people started throwing these, you know, these theories around and they use this as their evidence, I always try to just try to put it into that perspective.

01:52:23.000 Just stop and think about the numbers. 0.99

01:52:25.000 If you could see it on a board, If you could see seven billion human beings just as little dots on a board, and then, you know, then let's find the morons. 1.00

01:52:36.000 Right, right. 0.99

01:52:36.000 You know, then let's look at the problems. 0.99

01:52:38.000 Let's look at the, oh, this is what we're dealing with.

01:52:40.000 What we're dealing with is almost just insurmountable numbers. 0.99

01:52:43.000 It'd be like a cancer cluster, except it'd be a stupidity cluster, because they're going to cluster in various places, usually cities probably. 0.83

01:52:49.000 Yeah, well, and they'll find each other, and then there's the confirmation bias that comes from the groups getting together and only sharing information that correlates to their beliefs, whether it's Bigfoot or UFOs or psychics or... 0.97

01:53:02.000 That's why it seems like, you know, any of these groups, the UFO people or the Bigfoot people or whatever, it seems like, well, there's a lot of people.

01:53:10.000 You know, there's maybe a hundred in that club or something like that, but it's a small number of people compared to the whole population.

01:53:16.000 Well, they get so mad.

01:53:18.000 They get so mad when you bring this up.

01:53:20.000 If you bring up these facts or these thoughts, these ideas, and you tell these people that you don't believe in UFOs or you don't believe that we have ever been visited, they get emotionally mad.

01:53:33.000 They are connected.

01:53:34.000 Yep.

01:53:35.000 Emotionally connected, yep.

01:53:36.000 They're connected, like who they are, is connected to these beliefs.

01:53:41.000 And the more psychologically invested you are in a belief, the harder it is to change your mind.

01:53:45.000 So this is, again, an example of cognitive dissonance, which was discovered by Leon Festinger in In December of 1954, on the 21st, he went to the top of a hill with a UFO cult who was waiting for the mothership to come.

01:54:01.000 And he wanted to see, well, presumably the mothership's not going to come, the world won't come to an end.

01:54:05.000 What will they do afterwards?

01:54:07.000 So he thought, well, I mean, will they just change their mind?

01:54:09.000 Will they go home?

01:54:09.000 Whatever.

01:54:10.000 So he recorded this and wrote a book about it called When Prophecy Fails.

01:54:14.000 And the answer is they doubled down on their belief. 0.98

01:54:17.000 Not only did they say, well, this was a dumb idea. 0.99

01:54:19.000 Let's go home. 0.96

01:54:20.000 You know, they went home and started recruiting more people and, well, we miscalculated.

01:54:24.000 It was Eastern Standard Time.

01:54:26.000 It was tomorrow night or it's next year.

01:54:28.000 We got to carry the one when we did our end-of-the-world calculations and so on.

01:54:31.000 And so they recruit more people to join the group.

01:54:34.000 So he called this cognitive dissonance that, you know, when you have a belief that conflicts with the facts, What gives?

01:54:42.000 Well, the facts have to give because the belief is right.

01:54:45.000 So we're going to spin doctor the facts.

01:54:47.000 We know.

01:54:48.000 And so the rationalizations are just, well, we prayed and therefore God saved us.

01:54:54.000 Or this was a test of our faith and God allowed us to live.

01:54:57.000 Or my favorite, the world did end and this is the new, it was a spiritual ending and we're in the new spiritual age now.

01:55:06.000 That's the loophole that the December 21st, 2012 people use.

01:55:09.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:55:11.000 Did you miss it?

01:55:13.000 It did end.

01:55:14.000 It's a spiritual ending.

01:55:16.000 There's a new beginning.

01:55:18.000 I had a guy that I had a conversation with who really was absolutely adamant that the world was going to change December 21st, 2012. He's like, it is undeniable.

01:55:28.000 It's going to happen.

01:55:30.000 I'm like, how can you say that?

01:55:31.000 How can anybody say that it's definitely going to happen?

01:55:34.000 Well, it did change.

01:55:35.000 The days started getting longer on December 22nd.

01:55:39.000 But it's also that the people that came up with this idea, their culture doesn't even exist anymore.

01:55:44.000 I mean, you're talking about the Mayan civilization.

01:55:46.000 A wonderful, spectacular, advanced civilization that did all this amazing architecture, and they had these really cool statues that they had built.

01:55:56.000 Really interesting language, sort of like hieroglyphic.

01:56:01.000 What is it called?

01:56:06.000 What is the type of language that they use?

01:56:08.000 Like a hieroglyphic.

01:56:13.000 Simpler.

01:56:13.000 But each symbol has a certain sound that's attached to it, so you can have those symbols connected in different ways.

01:56:21.000 It's really interesting when there was a, I believe it was a National Geographic documentary on trying to decode.

01:56:28.000 I think it was called Decoding the Mayan.

01:56:30.000 Yeah.

01:56:30.000 And these guys, where they were trying to figure out exactly what these people were writing and how they wrote it.

01:56:36.000 Amazing, amazing stuff.

01:56:37.000 Actually, one of my cycling training partners, Nick Coe, his father, Michael Coe, at Yale University, was the guy that first cracked the Mayan Code.

01:56:44.000 Oh.

01:56:44.000 So I blame his dad for all this Mayan end-of-the-world stuff.

01:56:49.000 Basically, it was a cyclical time cycle instead of a time zero.

01:56:53.000 That is, these ages repeat themselves in these long-form cycles.

01:56:59.000 And that December 21st, 2012, was to whatever extent it was coming to an end.

01:57:04.000 It was just a period of time, almost like our year comes to an end and a new year starts.

01:57:09.000 All it is is the calendars rolling over to the next phase.

01:57:13.000 The end of the long count.

01:57:15.000 The long count, yeah.

01:57:16.000 And what happens to those people?

01:57:18.000 Nothing.

01:57:18.000 They just quit talking about it.

01:57:19.000 I mean, almost no one ever says, you know what, I was wrong.

01:57:23.000 People just sort of drop it and go, well, I'm not into that anymore.

01:57:26.000 Well, it was an industry.

01:57:27.000 That December 21st thing was an industry for a while.

01:57:30.000 And I thought it was awesome.

01:57:32.000 I loved it.

01:57:33.000 I thought it was cool.

01:57:33.000 I even had a license plate that said December 2012. I had a license plate.

01:57:37.000 You did?

01:57:37.000 Yeah, because I thought it was hilarious.

01:57:39.000 It is hilarious.

01:57:40.000 But it's also cool.

01:57:41.000 It's kind of fun to think that it's really going to happen.

01:57:44.000 People have these ideas like, that's when the aliens are going to return.

01:57:47.000 That's when we're going to become self-aware.

01:57:49.000 I think Terrence McKenna believed that's when people were going to come up with a time machine.

01:57:53.000 There was a bunch of really fascinating ideas of what the hell was going to go down.

01:57:57.000 But there seems to be this longing that people have for an event, that we're building towards an event.

01:58:03.000 Well, the idea is – there's two dueling ideas.

01:58:05.000 It's the idea of progress in history and decline in history.

01:58:09.000 And so when people write about it, it's usually we're in a period of decline.

01:58:13.000 It's like Republicans right now. 0.98

01:58:16.000 America is the greatest nation ever, except it's in a shithole. 0.99

01:58:19.000 It's the worst it's ever been now because of this guy. 0.96

01:58:22.000 But before – we're going to return back to the way it used to be.

01:58:27.000 Every generation has this.

01:58:29.000 Ours is the special generation.

01:58:30.000 Either ours is culminating in this great thing that's going to happen, or things are terrible, but if we can get through that, then we're the ones that are going to come out the other side, the born-again, the left-behinders, the Christian apocalypse. 0.98

01:58:45.000 There's plenty of secular versions of this.

01:58:47.000 Marxists had this idea that the end of capitalism and the beginning of socialism and communism, this is a big stage thing.

01:58:55.000 A lot of science fiction is like this.

01:58:58.000 It makes a drama better when there's a beginning point, an end point.

01:59:03.000 We're at this crisis moment, and things are going to be great again, or they're going to come to an end, and then they'll be great.

01:59:09.000 But there's always that tension between decline and progress.

01:59:13.000 But there's also this realization that there will be an end for you.

01:59:16.000 That we are finite beings.

01:59:18.000 We have a beginning, we're born, we have an end, we die.

01:59:21.000 And it's gonna happen.

01:59:22.000 So when is it happening?

01:59:23.000 I don't know when it's... 0.96

01:59:23.000 I'm fucking scared. 0.96

01:59:24.000 Is something coming? 0.99

01:59:25.000 Oh, it's coming!

01:59:26.000 The apocalypse!

01:59:27.000 Oh Jesus, here it is.

01:59:28.000 And then we find this thing, and if you're really inclined to be gullible, you get sucked into the Heaven's Gate folks who think, well, the way it's going to happen is there's a UFO behind this meteor, and what we've got to do is, when the comet is near, we've got to kill ourselves and wear purple Nikes,

01:59:44.000 and then we'll live forever.

01:59:46.000 You know, Art Bell has a little bit of culpability in that, because he was promoting the Hale-Bopp Oh, 1.00

02:00:08.000 no!

02:00:10.000 So then when Marshall Applewhite said, you know, I think this is it.

02:00:15.000 It's all going to come with the Comet and Comet-Hailbot.

02:00:19.000 There's very little competition when it comes to cult leaders.

02:00:23.000 It seems like once a cult leader has that position, they very rarely get forced out of the board. 1.00

02:00:29.000 No one says, you know what, Marshall's out of his fucking mind. 1.00

02:00:31.000 I'm not cutting my dick off. 1.00

02:00:33.000 Because they were doing that. 1.00

02:00:34.000 They were castrating themselves. 0.98

02:00:36.000 And he was obviously so nutty.

02:00:39.000 It's like, did you not have one person in that group that you might have thought, like, well, maybe Mike's got some better ideas than Marshall.

02:00:45.000 We should listen to Mike for a little bit.

02:00:46.000 Doesn't work that way.

02:00:47.000 No, there's no competition.

02:00:47.000 Usually those ones get purged.

02:00:49.000 Like in the fundamentalist Mormons, they just purge anybody that wants to challenge the prophet.

02:00:56.000 Yes.

02:00:56.000 So there's a critical point in every cult when the leader dies.

02:01:01.000 Okay, what happens?

02:01:02.000 Usually the cults just die with him.

02:01:04.000 Right.

02:01:05.000 But in the case of Scientology...

02:01:07.000 Wait a minute.

02:01:08.000 What are you saying?

02:01:09.000 Scientology is a cult?

02:01:10.000 Yeah, sorry.

02:01:11.000 Whoa, dude.

02:01:12.000 Do you know we're in Hollywood?

02:01:13.000 I do.

02:01:14.000 I do know that. 1.00

02:01:14.000 What the fuck are you saying, man? 1.00

02:01:16.000 Why don't you watch your mouth? 1.00

02:01:17.000 You know, when Joseph Smith was killed, that could have been the end of the Mormon Church, but Brigham Young took over the reign.

02:01:25.000 So if there's another charismatic leader...

02:01:27.000 David Miscavige.

02:01:29.000 David Miscavige took over from L. Ron, and he was charismatic, and people turned their...

02:01:34.000 They acknowledged him as the new leader.

02:01:38.000 One of my favorite moments in all of comedy is when Miscavige and Tom Cruise are on stage, and they salute L. Ron Hubbard to L.R.H., And they salute him.

02:01:46.000 There was a lot of testosterone right there on that stage.

02:01:49.000 Like, oh boy, oh manly man.

02:01:51.000 Not only that, he's got a big gigantic metal on.

02:01:53.000 Oh, it's embarrassing.

02:01:55.000 It's amazing.

02:01:55.000 Oh, it's not embarrassing at all.

02:01:57.000 It's wonderful.

02:01:58.000 To me, the human folly of it all.

02:02:03.000 You know, the belief system of anybody that's an intelligent person.

02:02:07.000 By the way, massively successful.

02:02:10.000 Especially financially.

02:02:11.000 Both of them financially.

02:02:12.000 But Tom Cruise culturally, massively, massively successful.

02:02:15.000 Wearing a big gold plate on his neck and saluting one of the worst science fiction authors of all time.

02:02:24.000 I mean, it is amazing.

02:02:26.000 That's an amazing moment.

02:02:27.000 Not to mention when he died, he was packed up with antidepressants and other drugs that he was allegedly against.

02:02:33.000 Exactly, yeah.

02:02:34.000 Well, not only that, how about the fact that he lived for a long time on a boat off the shore because he owed so much taxes he couldn't land. 0.98

02:02:41.000 So that's where all the C Corps and all that crazy shit came from. 0.94

02:02:45.000 He wrote more books than anyone who's ever lived. 0.98

02:02:48.000 You know, he wrote more fiction than anyone ever.

02:02:50.000 Yep.

02:02:51.000 Amazing.

02:02:52.000 Bad fiction.

02:02:53.000 Horrible fiction.

02:02:54.000 Harlan Ellison, who I know is a science fiction writer, says he was there at the meeting when L. Ron...

02:03:00.000 Well, the meme is that he said, if you really want to make money writing science fiction, you can start your own religion.

02:03:06.000 What actually was, according to Harlan Ellison, is there was a group of them just sort of sitting around complaining about the fees that people paid writers, like all of us writers complain about.

02:03:17.000 We don't make enough money.

02:03:19.000 And so that's when somebody said, well, you know, if we started a religion, and then Elrond kind of jumped in and said, yeah, yeah, let's start a religion.

02:03:26.000 And then he actually went out and did it.

02:03:28.000 Whereas the rest of them, you know, they just kept writing science fiction.

02:03:31.000 Have you read Going Clear?

02:03:33.000 Yeah, I've read Going Clear.

02:03:34.000 I saw the film.

02:03:36.000 The film's good, but the book is bananas.

02:03:39.000 Because they have time to go into depth about his past and all the stuff that...

02:03:44.000 That transpired before he created Scientology.

02:03:48.000 That was Gibney's film, right?

02:03:49.000 Gibney's film and Lawrence Wright's book.

02:03:52.000 Yeah, Lawrence Wright's a great journalist.

02:03:55.000 Now that's real investigative journalism when you sink your teeth into those things in bold, right?

02:03:59.000 Yeah, and it's amazing he got away with it, you know, because there were people trying to do that back in the 80s.

02:04:03.000 There was a guy from Time Magazine that did the cover story with the volcano erupting on it.

02:04:07.000 And he was harassed and threatened, and people put stuff in his mailbox.

02:04:11.000 It's a different world now, though.

02:04:13.000 First of all, their numbers have drastically declined.

02:04:16.000 Scientology's numbers have declined.

02:04:18.000 And on top of that, the Internet has exposed it for what it really is.

02:04:21.000 Right.

02:04:21.000 Before, we didn't know.

02:04:23.000 I went to one of these things in San Diego a few years ago.

02:04:29.000 I think it was like seven years ago.

02:04:34.000 They had one of these things where you had the e-meter, and you sat down.

02:04:38.000 They were giving you free personality tests, and I sat down and talked to the guys.

02:04:41.000 They seemed kind of bored and disinterested and weird, but you don't see those at all anymore.

02:04:47.000 I don't think they even do that anymore.

02:04:50.000 Well, they do.

02:04:51.000 There's one on Hollywood Boulevard, right down there.

02:04:54.000 In the building.

02:04:55.000 No, I've seen E-Meters. 0.87

02:04:57.000 On the street?

02:04:58.000 On the street, yep.

02:04:59.000 They still do it?

02:04:59.000 Right in front of the Chinese theater.

02:05:02.000 After the Going Clear's been out there?

02:05:05.000 I asked the guy about that.

02:05:06.000 Have you seen this movie?

02:05:07.000 No, I didn't see that movie.

02:05:08.000 It's all propaganda.

02:05:10.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:05:11.000 I ordered a book, Late Night TV in 1994, Dianetics.

02:05:16.000 I was into Anthony Robbins' self-help stuff, just trying to get ahead in this life, you know?

02:05:21.000 Young man.

02:05:22.000 And I ordered that Dianetics book. 1.00

02:05:24.000 Those people never stopped sending me shit. 1.00

02:05:27.000 Never stopped sending me invites and pamphlets. 1.00

02:05:30.000 See, this is where they get the numbers, though.

02:05:31.000 We have millions of followers, because anybody that ever...

02:05:33.000 I guess I'm a follower.

02:05:34.000 You're on the list.

02:05:35.000 That's right.

02:05:35.000 I was.

02:05:37.000 They don't have my new address.

02:05:38.000 You can still go clear if you...

02:05:41.000 I'd like to.

02:05:41.000 I'd like to be clear.

02:05:42.000 I had a neighbor.

02:05:44.000 Horrible story.

02:05:45.000 Poor guy.

02:05:46.000 Nice guy.

02:05:47.000 But his...

02:05:48.000 I think he still lives down the street.

02:05:51.000 But anyway, there was a plot of land that he wanted to buy, and we were talking about it.

02:05:56.000 And he's like, well, we can't do it right now because Nancy's about to go clear.

02:05:59.000 I was like, what?

02:06:00.000 What does that mean?

02:06:01.000 I didn't know what it meant.

02:06:02.000 Oh, you didn't know what it meant.

02:06:03.000 Okay.

02:06:04.000 I only knew...

02:06:05.000 This was probably 98...

02:06:07.000 I only knew a little bit about Scientology.

02:06:09.000 I was like, what do you mean, going clear?

02:06:11.000 Well, we're Scientologists.

02:06:13.000 I go, going clear?

02:06:14.000 How much does that cost?

02:06:15.000 $50,000.

02:06:17.000 $50,000 for some ceremony.

02:06:20.000 And I go, well, what does it involve?

02:06:22.000 Well, she's no longer affected by external influence.

02:06:25.000 So once she goes clear, nothing will bother her.

02:06:29.000 You can say anything to her, you can insult her, and nothing will get in.

02:06:32.000 And she will...

02:06:34.000 Right.

02:06:34.000 But that's what everybody wants, right?

02:06:36.000 Everybody wants the ability to be autonomous, to be just completely free of any bullshit in this life.

02:06:45.000 This distress and the worry and the negativity.

02:06:48.000 But also they sell you on that.

02:06:49.000 Yes.

02:06:50.000 Like, these are the things you need to get rid of.

02:06:52.000 Oh, I didn't even know.

02:06:53.000 I mean, part of the e-meter thing, you know, it's just measuring the voltage between your hands.

02:06:59.000 Yeah.

02:06:59.000 Skin conductance.

02:07:01.000 But, you know, think about your mother.

02:07:03.000 Okay, I'm thinking about my...

02:07:04.000 Ooh, it spiked up because I squeezed this hand slightly more.

02:07:06.000 All right, let's talk about your mother.

02:07:07.000 Well, everybody has issues with parents, with ex-lovers and spouses and bosses.

02:07:13.000 You know, you can find something.

02:07:14.000 It's like, would you like to get rid of that bad...

02:07:16.000 Well, you know, if you go meditate, you know, you go to a Buddhist center, they'll tell you the same thing.

02:07:20.000 You're focusing on the negative of your past.

02:07:22.000 We're going to clear that out by meditating.

02:07:25.000 So they're all various forms of the same kind of thing.

02:07:28.000 Like the psychic hotlines.

02:07:30.000 Everybody has problems.

02:07:31.000 Love, health, money, career.

02:07:32.000 Everybody's got some issue.

02:07:33.000 And we're going to help you for a fee. 0.80

02:07:36.000 Well, what's fascinating about El Ron is it seems like El Ron was nuts.

02:07:40.000 I shouldn't use the word nuts. 0.97

02:07:41.000 I think he probably had some mental problems. 0.99

02:07:43.000 Definitely had some mental problems.

02:07:45.000 And it seems like part of what Scientology was, was his attempt at self-help.

02:07:50.000 And that was one of the things that Lawrence Wright went into, that it seems pretty clear that this guy used all these available psychological techniques at the time to try to cure himself.

02:08:01.000 It was like a self-diagnosis and self-help thing.

02:08:04.000 I think a lot of people go into psychotherapy because they themselves have issues that they're dealing with.

02:08:10.000 Well, when I was in college, that was the only thing that was interesting to me.

02:08:13.000 Psychology was interesting to me because I was trying to figure out my own brain. 0.99

02:08:16.000 I was like, God, I've got to get this fucking thing under wraps. 0.98

02:08:19.000 I've got to get this thing handled. 0.97

02:08:20.000 So people like Tony Robbins, they kind of have a tracking the line between Being a con artist, he's not.

02:08:31.000 But selling something that could maybe help people, maybe.

02:08:35.000 But if you follow his direction, I think he's more positive than negative.

02:08:40.000 I agree.

02:08:41.000 I mean, some of this stuff is pretty basic.

02:08:43.000 You know, set goals and write them down and don't get distracted from these things.

02:08:48.000 Stay focused.

02:08:49.000 You know, this is pretty basic stuff that actually is true.

02:08:51.000 It works if you work it.

02:08:53.000 And we did a story on the self-help movement in Skeptic by a guy who wrote a book called SHAM, The Self-Help and Actualization Movement.

02:09:03.000 And this guy, he used to work for Rodeo Press, which is one of the big publishers of self-help books.

02:09:10.000 And the marketing department said that the number one predictor of anybody who would buy one of these self-help books is somebody who had already bought a self-help book.

02:09:18.000 Well, if they work, why do you need to keep buying the tapes and the books and all that stuff?

02:09:23.000 And the answer is that they only work temporarily.

02:09:28.000 Like, if you bring Tony Robbins into your corporation, he is for sure going to get your sales force really motivated.

02:09:34.000 Man, I'm going to make 50 calls a day rather than 30 calls a day, and I'm going to...

02:09:39.000 Really do this.

02:09:39.000 And they see a spike for a while.

02:09:41.000 And then people go back to their baseline where they were.

02:09:45.000 And that's why you got to keep listening to the tapes and listening to the music and the books and all that stuff to kind of keep it up.

02:09:53.000 So it only works to a certain extent and for a limited period of time.

02:09:58.000 Well, it's very difficult for people to change behavior patterns.

02:10:00.000 You have this pattern.

02:10:01.000 They're very comfortable.

02:10:02.000 It's very hard to change.

02:10:04.000 Right.

02:10:04.000 Don't they say it's like 90 days of doing something all the time before it becomes a habit?

02:10:10.000 It's like you can kind of ingrain a new path.

02:10:12.000 Yeah, probably longer than that.

02:10:13.000 That's why diets are so difficult to work.

02:10:15.000 You have a lifetime of you have this fat level and you have this kind of food your body's used to, and to shift it, it's not going to happen in weeks or months.

02:10:23.000 It's a lifestyle change forever, really.

02:10:26.000 Yeah, if you turn into a diet, like you can commit to a diet for a long period of time, but a lot of people when they're committing to, like I'm on a diet right now, for 60 days, Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint, it's like a sort of a ketogenic diet.

02:10:39.000 Okay.

02:10:40.000 What do you eat?

02:10:41.000 It's fat-based. 1.00

02:10:42.000 Mostly, I ate a lot of fucking avocados, dude. 0.99

02:10:45.000 I love avocados. 0.99

02:10:46.000 That's good.

02:10:47.000 Avocados, MCT oil, a lot of coconut oil, almond butter, a lot of healthy fats.

02:10:52.000 Like what did you have for breakfast this morning?

02:10:53.000 I have five eggs and an avocado.

02:10:56.000 Five eggs?

02:10:56.000 You did?

02:10:56.000 Yeah.

02:10:57.000 So you don't worry about cholesterol?

02:10:58.000 No.

02:10:59.000 What am I, pussy? 1.00

02:11:00.000 Come on, bro. 1.00

02:11:04.000 What about the Clinton diet?

02:11:05.000 You know, Clinton lost all that weight.

02:11:06.000 Got rid of his cardiovascular plant diet.

02:11:08.000 Yeah, he went vegan.

02:11:09.000 And Penn did.

02:11:10.000 You know, Penn lost.

02:11:11.000 What did he do?

02:11:12.000 He's vegan.

02:11:13.000 Penn went vegan as well?

02:11:14.000 He's all plants.

02:11:15.000 He eats basically huge salads twice a day, I guess.

02:11:19.000 Well, that's just great for you, period.

02:11:21.000 That is great for you.

02:11:23.000 If you can eat more plants, the more the better.

02:11:25.000 But you're adding more than plants, though, if you eat coconut butter and...

02:11:29.000 No.

02:11:30.000 Sisson's idea is, and Sisson was a big ultra-endurance guy as well, the idea is that your body functions more efficiently on high-fat content than it does on high-carbohydrate content.

02:11:45.000 So it's very low-carbohydrate, no added sugar, no grains whatsoever, no pastas.

02:11:51.000 Here's what's interesting about it.

02:11:53.000 The mental clarity aspect of it is really interesting.

02:11:56.000 I had a few friends that had tried the same diet and that was one of the things they pointed out.

02:12:02.000 And I think there's a certain amount of brain fog that comes from heavy carbohydrate meals that you avoid.

02:12:08.000 And then once your body becomes into a state of ketosis, which I think takes like 20 something days, Or there's a bunch of different supplements.

02:12:16.000 See this stuff right here?

02:12:17.000 This is a ketogenic cream product that you can add to coffee.

02:12:23.000 There's a bunch of different...

02:12:24.000 Oh, that's what you're putting in your coffee.

02:12:25.000 Yeah, exogenous ketones.

02:12:26.000 No, that is actually just Stevia.

02:12:28.000 Because this stuff is coffee with MCT oil and grass-fed butter.

02:12:32.000 Have you ever had that stuff before?

02:12:34.000 I don't know.

02:12:34.000 Is that what's in this coffee I'm drinking?

02:12:36.000 It's from a Rob Wolf invention.

02:12:40.000 He figured out how to add grass-fed butter, MCT oil, which is medium-chain triglycerides, essentially the healthiest aspects of coconut oil.

02:12:49.000 My headache's gone.

02:12:50.000 Hey, you feel But it's just healthy fats and mixed in with coffee.

02:12:56.000 Okay, and no meat?

02:12:57.000 No, I eat meat.

02:12:58.000 Oh, you eat meat.

02:12:59.000 Yeah, I eat meat.

02:13:00.000 Okay, here's my theory on diets.

02:13:04.000 They work because you're doing something.

02:13:07.000 You're actively involved in keeping track of how many calories are going in.

02:13:10.000 You start cutting out the bad foods.

02:13:12.000 Definitely.

02:13:13.000 Junk foods, sugars, grains, stuff like that.

02:13:16.000 And they work.

02:13:17.000 It doesn't matter if it's this particular one here or this one here.

02:13:20.000 It's the doing something about a problem that is what really works it.

02:13:25.000 Well, I didn't even have a problem.

02:13:26.000 I did it just try it.

02:13:27.000 I did it just because I wanted to feel what it would be like to try this diet because I had read about Sisson and he's a really interesting guy.

02:13:33.000 And then I'd also listen to a Tim Ferriss podcast.

02:13:37.000 Tim Ferriss had this great podcast with this Dr. D'Augustino, I believe his name is, who is heavily into ketosis, heavily into ketogenic diets, and the science behind it.

02:13:47.000 He's a really, really brilliant guy and fascinating podcast.

02:13:51.000 We have to listen to it like 10 times in a row and take notes.

02:13:53.000 But one of the things that they brought up, which is really interesting, is the mental benefits of it and the fact that it helps children with epilepsy.

02:14:00.000 When they put them on a ketogenic diet, it stops epilepsy in its tracks.

02:14:05.000 Okay.

02:14:05.000 I don't know about that one.

02:14:07.000 Yeah, no.

02:14:09.000 I've researched it.

02:14:10.000 It's really, really fascinating.

02:14:11.000 It's one of the main things they do to children that have child's epilepsy.

02:14:15.000 The other thing that people do when they get on diets, they also start exercising, which has other benefits, tons of benefits.

02:14:22.000 Good point.

02:14:22.000 But I did that already, too.

02:14:23.000 So for me, it was just wanting to try it.

02:14:27.000 Wanting to try it for the athletic benefit.

02:14:29.000 Wanting to try it for the physical benefit.

02:14:30.000 But I lost a lot of body fat.

02:14:32.000 You did?

02:14:33.000 Yeah.

02:14:33.000 And I wasn't fat, but I definitely could have lost a little bit of weight.

02:14:37.000 I still had a six pack.

02:14:39.000 I could see my abs before I did it.

02:14:41.000 But I lost 10 pounds now.

02:14:44.000 I'm down to, I think it was 193 this morning, and I was somewhere around 204 before.

02:14:48.000 Okay.

02:14:48.000 It's kind of fascinating.

02:14:50.000 And what will you have for lunch?

02:14:52.000 It depends, but no grains.

02:14:55.000 That's the big one.

02:14:55.000 The big one is no grains.

02:14:58.000 No pasta, no, you know, just very low carbs.

02:15:02.000 Like, I'm getting my protein from mostly wild game, mostly elk and deer and things along those lines.

02:15:09.000 You go hunting out here?

02:15:11.000 Yeah.

02:15:11.000 Well, I don't necessarily do it all here.

02:15:13.000 It's hard.

02:15:15.000 Santa Monica Mountains.

02:15:16.000 Canoga Park.

02:15:17.000 There's not really a lot of meat to be had out here.

02:15:20.000 A lot of elk walking around.

02:15:21.000 But I do.

02:15:22.000 But when you shoot an elk, you get hundreds of pounds of meat.

02:15:25.000 I have two commercial freezers in the back.

02:15:27.000 You do?

02:15:27.000 Yeah, you live nearby.

02:15:28.000 I'll give you some.

02:15:28.000 Okay.

02:15:29.000 It's delicious.

02:15:30.000 It's great for you, too.

02:15:30.000 All right.

02:15:31.000 You know, it's organic.

02:15:32.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:15:32.000 100% free of any antibiotics or any bullshit. 0.98

02:15:35.000 Oh, I like buffalo and ostrich.

02:15:37.000 Ostrich meat is very very very good for you very lean and healthy and it's a rich dark red meat yeah it's filled with iron and nutrients but the idea behind it is that you get your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrates because that's primarily with human that's why it's not to be confused like the problem with the whole concept of paleo you know the paleo diet well The term can be debunked pretty easily because they say,

02:16:03.000 well, in the Paleolithic period, people ate a lot of bread.

02:16:06.000 They ate whatever they could find.

02:16:10.000 And most hunter-gatherers, most of their calories come from the gathering part, not the hunting part.

02:16:16.000 It's hard to hunt animals.

02:16:18.000 They don't want to be killed.

02:16:20.000 Yeah.

02:16:20.000 Well, especially back then.

02:16:22.000 They had shitty bows and arrows and they didn't have guns. 0.94

02:16:24.000 It was very difficult, unless you stumbled upon a herd of blind buffalo and you could throw a spear at them. 0.99

02:16:31.000 That's right.

02:16:33.000 It's not that easy.

02:16:34.000 No.

02:16:35.000 I mean, it's difficult today to find really healthy...

02:16:39.000 I mean, if you want to hunt it yourself, good luck.

02:16:43.000 It's a lot of effort.

02:16:44.000 And if you want to actually find really healthy meat, other than grass-fed beef, their options are pretty severely limited.

02:16:52.000 What about alcohol?

02:16:53.000 Do you drink?

02:16:53.000 Very little.

02:16:54.000 A little bit every now and then, but there's sugar in that.

02:16:57.000 It converts to sugar.

02:16:59.000 Well, the idea is that...

02:17:00.000 So no cookies and ice cream, because that's got sugar, right?

02:17:02.000 Gone.

02:17:03.000 So the dairy's okay.

02:17:04.000 Milk...

02:17:05.000 Yeah, you can have milk, but I'm not really a milk drinker.

02:17:07.000 I like milk with cookies, but since I'm not eating cookies, no milk.

02:17:11.000 I'm not like a milk guy.

02:17:13.000 I don't mind raw milk.

02:17:15.000 Raw milk I like.

02:17:17.000 I felt like homogenized and pasteurized milk Once you do that, I mean, it's great as far as you could store it in a store and it lasts for a long time, but you're cooking out all the enzymes.

02:17:28.000 Right.

02:17:29.000 It's just not the best thing for your body.

02:17:31.000 Yep.

02:17:32.000 The problem also is if you don't do that, then it's only good for a couple of days.

02:17:36.000 Right.

02:17:37.000 And you can get sick.

02:17:39.000 Yeah.

02:17:40.000 Eggs.

02:17:40.000 Good.

02:17:40.000 I'm glad to hear that.

02:17:41.000 I like eggs.

02:17:42.000 Eggs are good for you, man.

02:17:43.000 Eggs aren't bad.

02:17:44.000 A certain amount of cholesterol is actually important for your body to produce testosterone.

02:17:48.000 It's actually for cellular growth.

02:17:54.000 And eggs, the ones I get, are from my chickens.

02:17:57.000 I have chickens.

02:17:58.000 You do?

02:17:58.000 Yeah.

02:17:59.000 That's great.

02:18:00.000 That's good.

02:18:01.000 Good for you.

02:18:01.000 22 chickens.

02:18:02.000 What about supplements?

02:18:04.000 Yeah, I take supplements.

02:18:04.000 Fish oil, multivitamins, vitamin D, yeah, omega-6, omega-3s.

02:18:10.000 Yeah, I take a lot of that.

02:18:12.000 See, some of that can go too far.

02:18:13.000 Something like Ray Kurzweil takes 200 supplements a day.

02:18:17.000 Well, he's just trying to stand up.

02:18:19.000 I know, I know.

02:18:20.000 I interviewed him.

02:18:21.000 He was amazing.

02:18:21.000 Another example.

02:18:22.000 He's kind of a guru.

02:18:23.000 He's almost like a secular guru.

02:18:25.000 A little bit.

02:18:25.000 Because he's constructed this, you know, the second coming is coming.

02:18:29.000 The singularity, it's 2030, 2040. 2042. If you could make it till the end.

02:18:34.000 2047 or 2042?

02:18:36.000 I went to a conference for the same show for Joe Rogan Questions Everything.

02:18:42.000 We went to New York and they had this big conference.

02:18:45.000 I interviewed him in San Francisco.

02:18:46.000 Oh, the Singularity Summit?

02:18:47.000 Yeah, well, I don't remember. 0.99

02:18:48.000 I think it was 2040-something, whatever the fuck it is. 0.98

02:18:51.000 2040. They just pick a day. 0.99

02:18:53.000 Yeah.

02:18:53.000 When they think that it's all going to happen, but they had this Russian billionaire character who had developed some artificial, something that he was going to unveil that was like a robot of him that's going to be in artificial intelligence,

02:19:09.000 but it wasn't ready.

02:19:11.000 See, even if that will come eventually, I think, but even if they did accomplish that, would it be you?

02:19:18.000 Right.

02:19:18.000 Or just a copy of you.

02:19:20.000 Right.

02:19:20.000 See, like, when you go to sleep and you wake up, you're a little groggy, but there's a continuity.

02:19:24.000 It's still your memories and your personal...

02:19:26.000 Right.

02:19:26.000 When you go under general anesthesia, you're groggy after you wake up, but it's still, there's a continuity.

02:19:31.000 Yeah.

02:19:31.000 But if they shut off your brain and turn it back on inside a computer, Would you wake up and go, oh, okay, this is like waking up?

02:19:38.000 Or would it just be, you're gone, and it's just a copy?

02:19:41.000 And this copy is just functioning completely on its own, and it has no idea what it's doing, because it's not connected to biology, it's not connected to all those things.

02:19:50.000 Maybe there's like a leap of faith they have to make before they hit the switch.

02:19:53.000 I'm not sure that...

02:19:55.000 I think the problem of identity is a serious one for the AI people. 0.63

02:20:00.000 In terms of longevity, in terms of immortality.

02:20:02.000 Well, not only that, how about the fact that if I can make one Michael Shermer, if I can copy you, why don't I just spam you?

02:20:08.000 Why don't I spam you all over Europe of a million Michael Shermers all throughout India?

02:20:13.000 I mean, that's a real problem, right?

02:20:15.000 I mean, if you can make a copy, if you want to be immortal and you want a copy, what's to stop someone from making multiple copies?

02:20:22.000 What's to stop Donald Trump?

02:20:24.000 Right?

02:20:25.000 Well, so far, nobody.

02:20:26.000 But if he wants to make a bunch of Donald Trumps, some egomaniac was...

02:20:31.000 And of course, the moment you turn on the new copy, they start having different memories because they're in a different environment, in a different body, and they're having different interactions.

02:20:39.000 And so if it's a biological system, then there's new neural connections growing that are different than yours, than the Joe Rogan copy.

02:20:46.000 So that's no longer you.

02:20:48.000 You might have the same past memories, but you're now going to have different...

02:20:51.000 Just like twins.

02:20:52.000 Yes.

02:20:52.000 Nobody thinks twins are identical in personhood, and legally they're treated as separate entities, and of course that is right.

02:21:01.000 So I think that's really what copies, AI copies will be, is just like twins.

02:21:07.000 That's a good point.

02:21:08.000 That's a good point.

02:21:09.000 Also, the good point is from here on out, you're going to have different life experiences.

02:21:13.000 So if you made an exact duplicate of yourself at this day, but one went to New York and the other one moved to Miami, you have totally different lives, totally different experiences, totally different...

02:21:23.000 One's going to be liberal, one's going to be conservative.

02:21:25.000 Well, you're going to make different conclusions based on your life experiences.

02:21:29.000 And that's just a reality of being a person is that we're constantly accumulating data and processing it.

02:21:35.000 And then also, it's the environment that you surround yourself with as far as the unique individuals that you choose to associate with.

02:21:41.000 They flavor who you are so much.

02:21:43.000 Right.

02:21:44.000 It's almost inseparable.

02:21:45.000 It's so difficult to look at a person as an individual because every individual is profoundly influenced by all the other people around them.

02:21:54.000 Right.

02:21:54.000 So you take this individual, you move them to Montreal, and you surround them with a bunch of people that are totally different from them.

02:22:00.000 They learn French, they start speaking with the Quebecois, and next thing you know, that's a totally different human being.

02:22:07.000 Right.

02:22:07.000 You become different because of the people that you're around.

02:22:10.000 Exactly.

02:22:11.000 You don't exist in a vacuum.

02:22:12.000 Right.

02:22:13.000 So in terms of trying to achieve immortality, like the singulitarians or the transhumanists, or the extropians, they're against entropy.

02:22:22.000 Oh, really?

02:22:23.000 Oh, yeah.

02:22:24.000 What's their theory?

02:22:25.000 It's a little bit like the transhumanists, that we're going to slowly replace our body parts, and not just new joints, but if you replace your nerve cells... 1.00

02:22:36.000 But you still have to have the continuity.

02:22:38.000 It's still you as a person in there.

02:22:41.000 Just uploading it to another platform is, I don't think it's going to do it.

02:22:46.000 I think it's not you anymore.

02:22:47.000 The Johnny Depp inside the computer, turn it on, transcend it, there he is.

02:22:51.000 I don't think that can happen.

02:22:54.000 Now, I may be wrong.

02:22:55.000 There are people that do think this can happen.

02:22:57.000 But does it have to be you?

02:22:58.000 Can it be like something different that's kind of you?

02:23:01.000 But you personally want that.

02:23:02.000 Right.

02:23:02.000 You want it.

02:23:03.000 It's like Woody Allen said, I don't want to live on through my work.

02:23:05.000 I want to live on in my apartment.

02:23:07.000 Is that what he said?

02:23:09.000 It's one of his many lines about immortality.

02:23:12.000 Yes.

02:23:14.000 You inside the computer, the copy of you, a copy of you is just the extension of your work.

02:23:19.000 You know, it's like, this is a little bit of a copy of me, my books, and so on.

02:23:22.000 But it's not me.

02:23:23.000 Right.

02:23:24.000 And after I'm gone, the books are still around, but it's not really me.

02:23:27.000 I don't feel like I'm still going.

02:23:29.000 Also, isn't there a problem with...

02:23:31.000 If you believe in evolution, which I assume you do, and you assume that people are going to continue to change shape, we're going to continue...

02:23:41.000 I mean, if we used to be multi-celled organisms that are coming out of the muck, the primordial ooze, and now we're people...

02:23:48.000 What are we going to be a million years from now?

02:23:50.000 Are we going to stifle that and just lock ourselves into this form?

02:23:54.000 This is not a perfect form.

02:23:56.000 We're not done.

02:23:57.000 So one of the arguments is that we should take over evolution, and we are.

02:24:01.000 So genetic engineering, for example.

02:24:02.000 Now everybody's afraid of, oh, they're going to make Aryans or whatever.

02:24:05.000 Okay, let's just allow it to happen to solve Alzheimer's, cure cancer, things like that.

02:24:11.000 Then we can worry about uploading more intelligence into our cortex, say, for example.

02:24:16.000 But what if we do to people what we've done to tomatoes?

02:24:18.000 Make them boring and flavorless.

02:24:20.000 Flavorless.

02:24:21.000 That could happen.

02:24:24.000 That's actually a good point.

02:24:25.000 What if we do to people what we did to tomatoes? 0.91

02:24:28.000 We fucked up tomatoes, but they last forever. 0.70

02:24:30.000 Well, in a way, with international travel and the internet, the poorest borders in centuries or so, everyone will look like Tiger Woods or something like this. 0.97

02:24:39.000 You think so?

02:24:40.000 I think the racial barriers will eventually dissolve.

02:24:44.000 Well, then we'll find some new way to hate each other.

02:24:45.000 Oh, absolutely.

02:24:47.000 Humans are super good at that.

02:24:49.000 But if we colonize another planet, say we start a colony on Mars, in a way that's a founder population that can then begin to diverge away from the earthly population.

02:24:59.000 And in a million years you'd have two different species, say.

02:25:03.000 They'd probably still be able to interbreed because there's still connections. 0.79

02:25:08.000 You'd also have a problem in that you've got a whole civilization of people so fucking crazy they decided to move to Mars. 0.90

02:25:14.000 It's a self-selecting group. 0.95

02:25:16.000 They're probably not typical.

02:25:18.000 Definitely not.

02:25:18.000 I mean, and they're also going to have to do some crazy geoengineering, and we're going to have to hope that that keeps working.

02:25:24.000 A fun scenario would be, what kind of government would they set up?

02:25:27.000 What kind of economic system?

02:25:29.000 And, assuming none of them were religious, if you came back a thousand years from now, would they have a shrine to a god and a religion and all this...

02:25:38.000 It happened again!

02:25:39.000 How did this happen?

02:25:39.000 But we'd have the history of it.

02:25:41.000 So it's an archetype.

02:25:43.000 It's one of the interesting things about Scientology and the Mormon Church is that we have a clear recent history and a paper trail to see what happened.

02:25:51.000 Videos.

02:25:51.000 That's the most bizarre thing.

02:25:53.000 What we don't have for Christianity is that it's old enough that it's lost in the murkiness of time, so you can kind of fill in the blanks with miracles and things like that.

02:26:02.000 Here we know Joseph Smith was killed, and then Brigham Young moved to Utah to get away from the authorities, and we know exactly how it all unfolded, and so you can diagram how to start a religion.

02:26:13.000 Well, you know the whole Mitt Romney story, too, about his family in Mexico, right?

02:26:17.000 Oh, right.

02:26:17.000 That's right.

02:26:18.000 Yes, I forgot about that.

02:26:19.000 They all moved to Mexico when they couldn't have a hundred wives. 0.99

02:26:21.000 Right. 1.00

02:26:22.000 Like, fuck this, we're out of America. 1.00

02:26:24.000 You know, Brigham Young was originally against polygamy. 1.00

02:26:28.000 Really?

02:26:28.000 Yeah, until he tried it, and then he was like, oh!

02:26:32.000 Well, one of my favorite books is John Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.

02:26:37.000 He's a great writer.

02:26:38.000 But he kind of reconstructs the moment when Joseph Smith tells his wife, Emma, that he got this revelation from God about polygamy.

02:26:46.000 Celestial marriage, he called it.

02:26:48.000 Basically, he's already having an affair with this woman down the street, so basically he goes, well, honey, I was talking to God, and he told me that I'm supposed to have sex with so-and-so. 0.79

02:26:58.000 What? 0.86

02:26:59.000 I know.

02:26:59.000 I couldn't believe it either.

02:27:00.000 But my friends, they were all there.

02:27:01.000 They heard it too.

02:27:02.000 They're telling their wives right now.

02:27:05.000 So Emma says something like, well, in that case, I'm going to have extra husbands. 1.00

02:27:10.000 No, you know, God was really clear about this.

02:27:12.000 It's just for the guys.

02:27:14.000 And this gets sold as a viable declaration of revelations, and it's written down.

02:27:22.000 So if you look at the first page of the Book of Mormon, it's an affidavit.

02:27:26.000 You know, we are the people, we saw the gold tablets, and so on.

02:27:28.000 Same thing with the revelation about polygamy.

02:27:30.000 All the way until 1894, when the state of Utah wanted to become a state and the federal government said, not with polygamy.

02:27:38.000 And suddenly they got a new revelation from God.

02:27:40.000 Changed my mind about the polygamy thing.

02:27:43.000 Back to monogamy.

02:27:44.000 Okay, okay, you could be a state.

02:27:45.000 Not Mitt Romney's parents.

02:27:47.000 They're like, we're out of here.

02:27:48.000 So you go to the fringes.

02:27:49.000 Well, Colorado City, that was in the news yesterday.

02:27:53.000 Apparently the whole police force, the courts, everybody that lives in this town is fundamentalist Mormon.

02:27:58.000 They're the polygamists. 0.97

02:28:00.000 Where's Colorado City?

02:28:01.000 Is that in Utah?

02:28:01.000 That's right on the border of Utah and Arizona.

02:28:04.000 Colorado City, Arizona, I think, or maybe it's in Utah.

02:28:07.000 It's right on that road that goes to Kayab.

02:28:10.000 And we've been there.

02:28:12.000 We Race Across America used to go through on a route to get to New York.

02:28:15.000 We'd go through northern Arizona, southern Colorado, or Utah.

02:28:18.000 Do they believe in polygamy?

02:28:19.000 And it's a weird community.

02:28:22.000 You drive through there and people are looking at you.

02:28:25.000 It's like being in a Twilight Zone or X-Files episode, you know, where they drive somewhere and it's like everybody's a little weird.

02:28:31.000 And you can see the dress, clothing.

02:28:34.000 It's like everything is off a little bit.

02:28:36.000 Even like at the gas station at the Denny's, it's like there's something not quite right here.

02:28:40.000 That's awesome.

02:28:41.000 I want to go.

02:28:42.000 I want to go right now.

02:28:45.000 I don't think that polygamy should be illegal.

02:28:47.000 I really don't.

02:28:48.000 Because it's not illegal to live with 20 women. 0.95

02:28:50.000 If you just Hugh Hefner it, and you decide to have 20 women live with you, you're a king. 0.98

02:28:55.000 But if you sign paperwork with them, then all of a sudden it's a problem?

02:29:00.000 Well, the way they do it is they marry one of them legally, and then the rest are so-called sister wives.

02:29:05.000 And they're not actually married to them, so they're not breaking the law.

02:29:07.000 Okay.

02:29:08.000 And there's no law against having, you know, living with a bunch of women. 1.00

02:29:11.000 It's okay.

02:29:12.000 Well, the law only exists in terms of all the other people outside of their community or their neighborhood or their family recognizing it.

02:29:19.000 It's just you're writing something down.

02:29:21.000 If you have a law that says this, but everybody in the town, including the police, captain, the courts, well, the judge.

02:29:29.000 They're all in on it.

02:29:30.000 They're all in on it.

02:29:31.000 So, yeah.

02:29:32.000 How bizarre.

02:29:32.000 Now, I have conflicting feelings about my libertarian tendencies.

02:29:38.000 We go, well, adult people should do whatever they want.

02:29:40.000 Why is the government in the marriage business in the first place? 0.99

02:29:43.000 I agree.

02:29:44.000 But the problem is when you study the polygamist Mormons, you know, these are young girls. 0.95

02:29:49.000 This Warren Jeffs guy, he was marrying 12-year-olds. 0.97

02:29:51.000 He was having sex with 11-year-olds. 0.96

02:29:53.000 Okay, there is a problem with that. 0.97

02:29:55.000 That's absolutely a problem.

02:29:56.000 Yeah. 0.97

02:29:56.000 Well, that is just a problem, period, with someone who's a grown adult who's having sex with a young kid. 0.97

02:30:01.000 Right. 0.98

02:30:02.000 Obviously.

02:30:02.000 That goes without saying.

02:30:04.000 But as long as the person is 21 or whatever, I mean, I really think you should probably be 21 before you're even allowed to get married.

02:30:09.000 I probably would have got married if I was 18. My girlfriend when I was 18 at the time said, marry me or I'm breaking up with you.

02:30:15.000 I'd be like, fuck. 1.00

02:30:16.000 Let's do it. 1.00

02:30:17.000 I was lost.

02:30:19.000 You're too young.

02:30:20.000 You don't have enough information.

02:30:21.000 I would have definitely done it.

02:30:22.000 Mentioned me allowed to do anything until they're 30. Probably not even.

02:30:25.000 It might be 40. Yeah.

02:30:26.000 But the idea that you could tell some adult that they can't sign a piece of paper with another adult...

02:30:34.000 Yes, right.

02:30:35.000 I mean, it's just as preposterous to say the same-sex marriage should be illegal.

02:30:38.000 Right.

02:30:38.000 Why not?

02:30:39.000 Who cares?

02:30:40.000 As long as they're not brainwashed when they're little, that they should...

02:30:45.000 Yes.

02:30:46.000 Because then maybe you're 21, and are you really making a rational choice about your future, or are you...

02:30:52.000 Yeah, that becomes a problem with cults.

02:30:54.000 And that's also the problem.

02:30:55.000 I mean, and then it becomes, okay, where's the line get gray?

02:30:59.000 Okay, if a Mormon can't do it, if you can't take someone when they're really young, raise them as a Mormon, and then once they become of age and they become an adult, tell them, you know, well, now you can get married and you can be involved in this polygamous marriage. 0.86

02:31:12.000 And, well, they grew up in this religion.

02:31:15.000 Are they brainwashed?

02:31:16.000 Right.

02:31:16.000 Even though they're a grown adult.

02:31:18.000 Right.

02:31:18.000 Well, if that's the case...

02:31:19.000 Yep.

02:31:20.000 Catholicism or whatever.

02:31:21.000 Yes, there you go.

02:31:22.000 So the government can't be in the business of judging that.

02:31:25.000 Right.

02:31:25.000 So it's a fine line there.

02:31:28.000 It's tough. 1.00

02:31:29.000 I mean, you put your hand on the Bible when you swear in to be a fucking president. 1.00

02:31:32.000 Right. 1.00

02:31:32.000 Which is hilarious. 1.00

02:31:33.000 Lincoln's Bible.

02:31:34.000 Yeah.

02:31:34.000 Is it still Lincoln's Bible?

02:31:36.000 Well, that's who Obama used was Lincoln's Bible, yeah.

02:31:38.000 How old is that Bible?

02:31:40.000 Am I misremembering that?

02:31:42.000 Was it Martin Luther King's Bible?

02:31:43.000 No, I think it was MLK's Bible, yeah.

02:31:46.000 Anyway, yeah.

02:31:47.000 But yeah, that's very talismanic, isn't it?

02:31:49.000 Hilarious.

02:31:49.000 We're touching the past.

02:31:51.000 So dumb. 0.99

02:31:52.000 As if, you know, the Old Testament is a font of moral wisdom. 1.00

02:31:55.000 Is it the Old Testament they use?

02:31:57.000 Well, the whole thing.

02:31:59.000 But is it the New Testament or the Old Testament that he puts his hand on?

02:32:01.000 Oh, it's both.

02:32:02.000 It's the Bible that includes both.

02:32:03.000 Oh, okay.

02:32:04.000 But polygamy was, you know, all the great patriarchs.

02:32:07.000 There was a study by Helen Fisher.

02:32:09.000 No, it was a different anthropologist on...

02:32:12.000 The relationship between power and sex in the Old Testament.

02:32:16.000 And basically, the more power you had, the more women and wives and girlfriends and concubines and children you had.

02:32:22.000 How unusual.

02:32:23.000 And Solomon was the, you know, he was going for Will Chamberlain's record there.

02:32:27.000 He had 700 wives, 300 concubines, and thousands of kids, I guess.

02:32:33.000 Wow.

02:32:34.000 Allegedly.

02:32:35.000 But I mean, wasn't Noah 600 years old?

02:32:37.000 So it's hard.

02:32:38.000 Right.

02:32:39.000 I mean, most of this stuff probably didn't actually happen in the Old Testament.

02:32:42.000 Probably Moses never existed.

02:32:43.000 But the point is that that is the way men treated women.

02:32:47.000 That was the patriarchal society at the time.

02:32:49.000 Slavery was legal. 0.98

02:32:50.000 Polygamy was legal. 0.95

02:32:52.000 The more power you had, the more wealth you had, the more women you had, the more children you had. 0.90

02:32:57.000 That was the world of the Old Testament. 0.59

02:33:00.000 And that's not the world we live in now, so why are we still using this book?

02:33:04.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:33:06.000 I mean, nobody would embrace—no Christian today would embrace most of the stuff that's in the Bible. 0.56

02:33:11.000 They just wouldn't.

02:33:12.000 So when they say, I get my morals from the Bible, it's like, no, you don't, and that's a good thing. 0.90

02:33:16.000 You're getting your morals from the same place we nonbelievers get it, and, you know, we're inculcating it from culture, from the Enlightenment, secular values.

02:33:25.000 Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because that was an article that I'd read that you had written about Islam, and that Islam was the only religion that had not gone through the Enlightenment.

02:33:33.000 Yeah, right.

02:33:34.000 I think that was a really, really interesting article and a very important point. 0.89

02:33:37.000 You know, I mean, Christianity, they used to behead Jews and witches, burned them at the stake.

02:33:42.000 You know, I mean, the kinds of stuff ISIS does today, Christians used to do that centuries ago. 1.00

02:33:46.000 It's very common.

02:33:47.000 And they stopped.

02:33:48.000 Why?

02:33:49.000 Well, the law changed, the culture changed, and the Enlightenment ushered in secular values that all people should be treated equally under the law, that people are born with equal rights, and And so forth.

02:34:02.000 And that all changed.

02:34:04.000 Everything.

02:34:05.000 And everybody is incorporated.

02:34:06.000 Just think about, remember when the former owner of the Clippers, Donald Sterling, made these remarks.

02:34:13.000 But most old guys thought like that just 50 years ago and weren't particularly quiet about it.

02:34:18.000 Well, his remarks are pretty innocuous.

02:34:22.000 What he had said, he had a girlfriend.

02:34:24.000 This thing has been blown out of proportion so badly.

02:34:26.000 Totally out of proportion, yeah. 0.90

02:34:27.000 He had a girlfriend, and he asked her not to take pictures with these guys, these black guys. 1.00

02:34:33.000 He said, in the same sentence, you can fuck them. 1.00

02:34:36.000 I don't care if you fuck them. 1.00

02:34:38.000 Just don't take pictures with them. 1.00

02:34:39.000 Oh, is that what he said?

02:34:40.000 Yeah, but they didn't print any of that. 0.90

02:34:43.000 And everybody was talking about the don't take pictures with black guys. 1.00

02:34:47.000 He said, what he was saying was that you're sticking it in my face, that you're fucking all these guys. 1.00

02:34:52.000 I don't care if you fuck them. 1.00

02:34:53.000 Just don't take pictures of them. 1.00

02:34:54.000 I don't want to see it.

02:34:55.000 He's saying this to his girlfriend in the privacy of his house.

02:34:59.000 He didn't use any racial slurs.

02:35:01.000 He didn't say anything terrible.

02:35:02.000 All he said was, don't take pictures with these guys. 1.00

02:35:05.000 Because she was a slut. 1.00

02:35:07.000 I mean, allegedly. 1.00

02:35:08.000 She was banging a bunch of dudes. 1.00

02:35:09.000 And he didn't care, because he's like 80 years old. 0.99

02:35:12.000 He's buying her condos and Rolls Royces and shit. 0.99

02:35:15.000 He just wants to keep banging her because she's hot. 1.00

02:35:17.000 So he's like, I don't care.

02:35:18.000 I didn't think she was that hot. 1.00

02:35:20.000 For him!

02:35:20.000 Look, you still have higher standards.

02:35:23.000 He looks like Jabba the Hutt.

02:35:25.000 His face is falling off his bones, right?

02:35:27.000 So for that poor guy, that lost him his team, which is insane.

02:35:33.000 It shows you how far we've come.

02:35:35.000 Again, most old guys in the 50s would have thought nothing about saying that stuff publicly.

02:35:39.000 Yeah, but apparently he was pretty racist.

02:35:43.000 And what they caught him with was a small little slice of what he had done.

02:35:48.000 This is obviously allegedly blah, blah, blah.

02:35:50.000 But apparently he wasn't a nice guy, which is why this was so reinforced and why people went after him so hard.

02:35:56.000 They're like, look, we got him.

02:35:58.000 Let's just run with this.

02:35:59.000 And obviously it's a PR nightmare.

02:36:01.000 Yeah.

02:36:01.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:36:02.000 But yeah, people evolve.

02:36:03.000 And I think now, in today's day and age, that kind of thinking, like racist thinking, justifiably so, is gross.

02:36:12.000 It's frowned upon.

02:36:13.000 Absolutely.

02:36:14.000 We're learning.

02:36:14.000 We're growing.

02:36:15.000 We are learning, yeah.

02:36:16.000 So, I mean, the moral arc, that's what that's about, tracking how much moral progress we've made over the centuries, particularly just the last 50 years since.

02:36:22.000 The civil rights movement.

02:36:24.000 It's one reason why I think all these campus protests have gotten so out of hand.

02:36:28.000 They're so disproportionate because the students have a moral module.

02:36:32.000 They're still passionate about, you know, making the world a better place.

02:36:35.000 But all the big stuff's been taken.

02:36:37.000 It's all done.

02:36:39.000 They're down to Halloween costumes, Taco Tuesdays, he wore a sombrero, cultural appropriate, you know, they're all fired up about what you and I is just like, you know, Safe spaces.

02:36:50.000 It's where ideas go to die.

02:36:51.000 I mean, come on. 1.00

02:36:51.000 Safe spaces is such a stupid argument. 1.00

02:36:54.000 Any argument that's worth, it has to stand on its own merits. 1.00

02:36:59.000 You have to be able to discuss things.

02:37:00.000 Like having a university where you can't discuss ideas.

02:37:04.000 Even bad ideas.

02:37:05.000 Like, bad ideas should be debated.

02:37:07.000 You know, the idea that they won't let these conservatives perform or have these speeches at the universities, and they try to shut them down, they scream at people, they hit fire alarms.

02:37:17.000 I mean, it's madness.

02:37:19.000 It's everything that you're not supposed to do when you're defending and exploring ideas.

02:37:23.000 I think the deepest cause of this is the asymmetry between left and right in the academy.

02:37:31.000 In some of these departments, it's 20 to 1, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican.

02:37:39.000 Only in the economics department, the social sciences, do you get something like a balance.

02:37:43.000 Everywhere else, it's super slanted.

02:37:45.000 And so you're getting this attitude, well, we know what the truth is.

02:37:49.000 Well, maybe you don't know what the truth is, and you need to listen to the other side, because that's what It's driven science and reason and the Enlightenment is open debate, because I might not be right.

02:38:00.000 And so the only way to find out is if I ask you your opinion.

02:38:03.000 And so I tell my students, you've got to read the Wall Street Journal in addition to the New York Times.

02:38:08.000 You've got to listen to conservative talk radio in addition to NPR. You've got to listen to Rush Limbaugh.

02:38:15.000 Oh, I know, he's a knuckle-dragging mouth breather.

02:38:18.000 But somebody on that side, just to see what...

02:38:20.000 Listen to Larry Elder.

02:38:22.000 I like Larry Elder.

02:38:23.000 Yeah, he's a conservative, but he's a little bit more rational.

02:38:26.000 A lot more.

02:38:27.000 A little more libertarian, too.

02:38:28.000 Yeah.

02:38:29.000 But, you know, those arguments are interesting.

02:38:32.000 And the only way to know what the other side really thinks, because you think, well, why do they believe that?

02:38:37.000 Well, you have to listen to their arguments to at least be able to articulate why they're wrong.

02:38:42.000 If you can't do that, then you really don't know why they're wrong.

02:38:44.000 Exactly.

02:38:45.000 Yeah, and try to balance, look at things through their perspective.

02:38:50.000 Even if you don't agree with their perspective, just relax yourself.

02:38:53.000 Relax yourself and allow yourself to explore the way they think.

02:38:58.000 I follow a bunch of wackadoos on Twitter. 1.00

02:39:02.000 Just so I can listen to their arguments and read their stuff.

02:39:06.000 I follow this one guy.

02:39:07.000 He's a young earth Christian who every day will talk about how horrible Obama is and Obama's the death of this country. 1.00

02:39:14.000 And I'll follow this guy and follow people who retweet him and go to their links and go to their blogs and read their blogs and go, what the fuck? 0.99

02:39:21.000 Just because I'm just... 0.97

02:39:22.000 Trying to explore how their mind works, trying to piece together how much of it is just a blanket hatred of liberals, how much of it is racism, how much of it is this, how much of it is that, and just trying to objectively assess where their mindset is and what the root of their thinking is.

02:39:42.000 That's what I did back in the 90s when the Holocaust denial movement started taking off.

02:39:46.000 And these guys were appearing on Montel Williams and Donahue.

02:39:50.000 And it's like, okay, what is this about?

02:39:52.000 It turns out their offices are in Costa Mesa.

02:39:55.000 So I drove down there and I just sat down with, you know, they have a little journal of historical review.

02:40:01.000 And it's like, all right, who are these guys?

02:40:03.000 So we had beer and pizza, you know, I just sort of get them to open up, what is your story here?

02:40:08.000 Right.

02:40:08.000 That's the only way to find out what's really behind their arguments.

02:40:11.000 Okay, they have these arguments.

02:40:12.000 Okay, here's why they're wrong.

02:40:13.000 Okay, but why are they making these arguments?

02:40:15.000 Right.

02:40:16.000 The only way to find out is actually talk to them.

02:40:17.000 And why were they making their arguments?

02:40:19.000 Oh, some of it's pure anti-Semitism.

02:40:22.000 But also there's some conspiratorial thinking, you know, the Jews are doing this, but not just the Jews, you know, the media, the this and that.

02:40:28.000 Is it one of those exposing the mystery thing, too?

02:40:30.000 Yes, it's a little bit of that, you know, the government.

02:40:33.000 They don't want us to know.

02:40:35.000 Wait, who's the they?

02:40:36.000 Because that's us, right?

02:40:37.000 Well, no, they have this superpower.

02:40:40.000 So there's a lot of that behind there.

02:40:42.000 And then also, there's some, you know, basically, I can get attention.

02:40:46.000 By saying this wacko, the wackadoodle kind of stuff, and then people pay attention to me, and that feels good, and so I'll run with it.

02:40:54.000 David Irving was their big intellectual, and he was a self-trained historian, but also a pretty smart guy, good writer.

02:41:01.000 And he wrote some of his early stuff on Goebbels and some of the stuff on the Second World War was quite good.

02:41:08.000 But then he found he wasn't in the academy.

02:41:10.000 He was self-taught and just published his own books and kind of made a living doing that.

02:41:16.000 And he found that when he started migrating toward this, you know, maybe Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust.

02:41:21.000 And it was really Goebbels and Himmler, and they're the ones that did it.

02:41:24.000 And Hitler didn't know. 0.91

02:41:25.000 All of a sudden, he gets all this attention.

02:41:28.000 And then he concocts this idea of, I'll give $1,000 to anybody that can show me the order from Hitler to, you know, to orchestrate the Holocaust. 0.99

02:41:36.000 You know, I hereby command we exterminate the Jews. 1.00

02:41:39.000 Okay, there is no such order. 1.00

02:41:42.000 There's no single point.

02:41:43.000 It's a whole conglomerate of little steps along the way from sterilization of the feebly-minded in the early 30s all the way up to, you know, gassing them.

02:41:53.000 Okay, there's like a hundred steps in between.

02:41:54.000 So there is no single order.

02:41:56.000 But that got him all this attention, and all of a sudden he's a big star at these conferences where these people meet.

02:42:01.000 So I went to some of these, and it's like, whoa, okay, he is being worshipped as this great scholar who And you could sort of see how it fed the ego, get a lot of attention.

02:42:12.000 So I think that we can't discount just the pure psychology of getting some attention for your views as pushing people further than they would normally go.

02:42:20.000 Yeah, I think that's a very, very good point because there's a massive attraction to that.

02:42:26.000 People are massively attracted to anything that can get them a lot of attention, even for a ridiculously controversial idea.

02:42:34.000 Have you paid attention lately, and this is one of the most confusing things that's been going on, there's a gang of people that believe the earth is flat.

02:42:43.000 Oh yes, right.

02:42:44.000 You're paying attention to this?

02:42:45.000 I saw that, yes.

02:42:46.000 I can't believe that in 2016 this is really a thing.

02:42:51.000 There is a movement that believes that all the ISSS pictures, those are all faked.

02:42:57.000 I can't help but wonder if that's just getting attention and nothing more.

02:43:02.000 Do you think they really believe? 1.00

02:43:03.000 I've watched some videos and these fucking people believe. 1.00

02:43:06.000 I have a friend who believes. 1.00

02:43:07.000 A loosely based friend. 1.00

02:43:09.000 Max Eberle, you're out there, you fuck. 1.00

02:43:12.000 He's a fantastic pool player, but he's out of his fucking mind. 1.00

02:43:15.000 He posts things about it on Facebook. 0.99

02:43:17.000 I'm like, Max, last time I saw him, I had to have a conversation with him.

02:43:20.000 Here's a good example of why we need free speech.

02:43:23.000 These people should not be censored.

02:43:24.000 Let them say what they want to say.

02:43:26.000 And let's show how we do know the Earth is round.

02:43:29.000 Can you articulate five reasons why the Earth is round?

02:43:32.000 Okay, why don't you tell Max Eberle why the Earth is round?

02:43:34.000 Okay, Max, here's the deal.

02:43:36.000 All right, so first of all, when there's an eclipse, you can see the shadow of the Earth on the moon.

02:43:43.000 You know, lunar eclipse?

02:43:44.000 There it is.

02:43:44.000 It's curved.

02:43:45.000 That's the government with a projector.

02:43:48.000 But you can go out in your own backyard with no...

02:43:50.000 Okay, now what they'll say is, yeah, it's round like a pizza.

02:43:53.000 Right.

02:43:53.000 Flat, round.

02:43:54.000 Exactly.

02:43:54.000 That's what I've been thinking.

02:43:55.000 But of course, if that were true, then why are all the continents located on the one side of the pizza?

02:44:02.000 And if they're on the flip side, how do you get from one continent to another when you do a transcontinental flight?

02:44:08.000 Because you're curving around it.

02:44:10.000 You're not...

02:44:11.000 All of a sudden hitting an edge and then flipping around to the backside of the pizza.

02:44:14.000 And so there's a second reason.

02:44:17.000 If you're high up and you look out, you can see the mass of a ship sailing away.

02:44:22.000 The hull goes first and then you see the mass last because it's curved.

02:44:26.000 Right.

02:44:28.000 Anyway, if you put a stick here and 500 miles away, make it, I don't know, Tucumcari, New Mexico, that's 1,000 miles from L.A., you put a stick there at noon at the same time, they'll have different shadows.

02:44:42.000 Because the Earth is curved, so at 12 noon, it's actually 1 o'clock in New Mexico when it's 12 noon in LA, and that's why we have time zones, because it's curved.

02:44:52.000 And when you want to watch a rocket, a SpaceX rocket or NASA rocket launch from Florida, it arcs.

02:45:00.000 It's arcing because it's going into orbit and the Earth is curved, so you have to arc out.

02:45:05.000 Otherwise, it would just go straight up, and it doesn't do that.

02:45:08.000 Anyway, those are five different, you know, quick reasons. 0.99

02:45:10.000 Pretty good, but you sound like a shill for this round, bullshit government. 0.97

02:45:16.000 There was the guy that co-discovered Natural Selection with Darwin, a guy named Alfred Russell Wallace. 1.00

02:45:21.000 Oh, he was nuts, right?

02:45:22.000 He was way out there. 0.95

02:45:24.000 I wrote my biography on him.

02:45:26.000 He came up with a dream that connected Darwin's theories together.

02:45:32.000 Darwin's theories and his theories came together.

02:45:36.000 Darwin had a problem with Natural Selection.

02:45:38.000 He was trying to figure out how to piece it all together, his ideas.

02:45:43.000 Well, not quite.

02:45:43.000 There is a conspiracy theory about that, that Darwin cribbed from Wallace.

02:45:49.000 I don't think that's the case.

02:45:50.000 Not that he cribbed from him, but that they sort of combined their ideas.

02:45:52.000 It's more of a simultaneous thing, and they were in correspondence.

02:45:56.000 Wallace actually incorporated some of Darwin's work.

02:45:58.000 Darwin was older than him and had already done quite a bit more work than Wallace had.

02:46:02.000 And in any case, Wallace was super open-minded.

02:46:05.000 So here's an example of being too open-minded.

02:46:07.000 Darwin was open-minded and he came up with new ideas, but he was also very skeptical of the whole spiritualism seance movement that was getting big in England.

02:46:15.000 And Wallace was in it.

02:46:16.000 And Wallace, he would go to these seances and hold the hands and the table would levitate.

02:46:20.000 That's why people don't hear about him, right?

02:46:22.000 See, Darwin was just like, I'm not going to a seance. 0.98

02:46:24.000 Are you fucking kidding me? 0.99

02:46:26.000 I mean, this is insane. 0.99

02:46:27.000 And Thomas Henry Huxley, the other great scientist, said, you know, pay five shillings to talk twaddle to the dead.

02:46:34.000 I mean, come on.

02:46:34.000 But Wallace, oh no, I'm going.

02:46:36.000 This might be true.

02:46:38.000 And then he made the mistake of answering an ad in a magazine saying, One of these flat earthers who said, I give 5,000 pounds to anybody, or 500 pounds, I guess it was, anybody who can prove the earth is round.

02:46:52.000 What year was this?

02:46:53.000 This was the 1880s.

02:46:58.000 And so Wallace said, okay, I can do it.

02:47:00.000 So they went to the old Bedford Canal, which is like 20 miles straight, you know, without a bend.

02:47:06.000 So you could set up two little telescopes, you know, the little surveyor telescopes, and they put a mark on a bridge.

02:47:15.000 And so when I'm looking, so there's one, two, three marks.

02:47:19.000 If it's straight, then it should be all lined up.

02:47:22.000 If it's curved, then the one here that's exactly three feet above the ground like this one here that's five miles down the road, down the canal, it should be lined up, or if it's not, it's dropped a little bit.

02:47:32.000 And in five miles, you can actually measure a little bit of the Earth's curve by, I don't know, it's like a centimeter, half a centimeter or something.

02:47:38.000 Right.

02:47:38.000 There it is right there.

02:47:39.000 There it is.

02:47:39.000 There's the old Bedford Canal.

02:47:41.000 So Wallace did that, and they had a neutral judge who looked through the telescope and said, yep, it's curved, it's dropped.

02:47:48.000 And this guy, the flat earther, refused to look through the—I'm not going to look through there.

02:47:53.000 I know you're wrong.

02:47:54.000 That's voodoo. 0.99

02:47:54.000 And Wallace—so he had to sue this guy to collect the prize money. 0.99

02:48:00.000 This is why you shouldn't get involved with the wackadoodle people too far, because he spent 15 years— We're dealing with this guy, and this guy was sending crazy letters to his wife and to the National Geographical...

02:48:12.000 I actually found some of these letters at the National Geographical Society.

02:48:15.000 This guy threatening, you know, you've got this crazy man, Wallace, working for you, and so on. 1.00

02:48:20.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:48:21.000 You know, some of these people, they're a little mentally, as you know, deranged. 1.00

02:48:27.000 That's fascinating.

02:48:28.000 But Wallace, his ideas converged with Darwin's ideas, and it kind of helped Darwin's theory.

02:48:35.000 But Darwin had to disown him eventually.

02:48:37.000 No, no.

02:48:37.000 What really happened was it accelerated Darwin to get his work done, to get the book done.

02:48:42.000 He was just sort of lollygagging around, doing his research.

02:48:46.000 One reason for that is in 1844, there was a book on evolution published called The Vestiges of Creation.

02:48:53.000 It was published anonymously, and it was trashed by the scientific community.

02:48:57.000 So Darwin got back from the Galapagos in 1836. Throughout the 1840s, he was just taking notes, composing his ideas, running experiments.

02:49:06.000 He got married and had, you know, 10 kids, and he had a lot of money invested in the railroad.

02:49:11.000 So he was a pretty active independent scholar.

02:49:15.000 And so I just started taking his sweet time about developing his theory, and also he didn't want to be embarrassed and come out with a book that wasn't very solid, and then he would be criticized, so he was just compiling.

02:49:26.000 Anyway, one day he gets this letter from Wallace, from the other side of the world, who's in the Malay Archipelago, saying, I came up with a few ideas.

02:49:34.000 He had like a feverish nightmare from malaria, and he hatched this natural selection.

02:49:40.000 Some species compete with others.

02:49:42.000 The populations increase in a Malthusian way, and so not all of them can survive. 0.99

02:49:48.000 Some will survive.

02:49:49.000 Differential reproductive success, natural selection, boom. 0.87

02:49:51.000 So he outlines this to Darwin, and Darwin's reading this going, oh crap, this is my idea.

02:49:56.000 I mean, he sort of outlined, like, my book.

02:49:59.000 So then he rushed into print.

02:50:01.000 Oh, I see.

02:50:02.000 I've got to get this done.

02:50:03.000 So they weren't necessarily collaborating.

02:50:06.000 They weren't exactly collaborating, although they had communicated.

02:50:09.000 And also Darwin, not only was Wallace not upset about this, he was thrilled.

02:50:13.000 He wrote his mom and said, Oh my God, the great Charles Darwin wrote me back.

02:50:16.000 This is so cool.

02:50:17.000 And then Darwin went to Charles Lyell and some of the other big scientists at the time and said, I got this letter from this guy on the other side, and you know I've been working on this.

02:50:27.000 This is really similar, and what do I do?

02:50:31.000 So they said, all right, we'll publish both of them simultaneously, and they did on July 1st, 1858 at the Linnaean Society.

02:50:37.000 They presented both papers, some of Darwin's notes and essays he had written, and Wallace's letter to Darwin with a little handwritten paper.

02:50:46.000 And they entered them both into the record the same day, July 1st, 1858. Boom!

02:50:50.000 Simultaneous discovery.

02:50:52.000 Wallace, Darwin, then spent the next basically nine months just, you know, the pen moves mighty fast when you're afraid you're going to get scooped.

02:50:59.000 Right, right.

02:51:01.000 And he got his book done.

02:51:02.000 Boom! 0.99

02:51:02.000 November 1859, origin species, the rest is history. 0.99

02:51:06.000 And Wallace, he wrote, again, is, oh my god, this is so exciting.

02:51:09.000 You know, I'm part of this great movement.

02:51:11.000 Mm-hmm.

02:51:11.000 And then only later, much, much later, did other people start to think, you know, he ripped you off.

02:51:16.000 And he's like, no, no.

02:51:18.000 And Wallace wrote his own great book in the 1880s called Darwinism.

02:51:24.000 Ah, so he embraced it.

02:51:26.000 Well, it's really fascinating that he came up with that theory based on a dream from being in a fever state.

02:51:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:51:33.000 How amazing is that?

02:51:35.000 Well, but that often, you know, the spark of scientific genius or creativity in any field, I was taking a shower, and boom, the idea came to me.

02:51:43.000 I was on a walk.

02:51:44.000 So there's some theories about this, that if you think too hard and focused on a specific problem, you have to sort of relax your brain.

02:51:52.000 Hmm.

02:51:52.000 Whatever that means.

02:51:53.000 By doing something else that's non-focused.

02:51:57.000 Meditation, taking a shower, going for a walk, going for a bike ride in my case.

02:52:01.000 Anything that's just sort of not thinking about the problem.

02:52:03.000 And then we don't know what happens.

02:52:05.000 Maybe some neurons just start firing and interacting different neural networks.

02:52:09.000 This memory of that.

02:52:10.000 This memory of that.

02:52:11.000 This book you read.

02:52:12.000 This thing you saw on the internet.

02:52:14.000 Boom, boom, boom.

02:52:14.000 They come together.

02:52:16.000 We don't know how that happens.

02:52:17.000 A lot of writers like to do that.

02:52:19.000 They like to write, and then they go for a walk.

02:52:21.000 And then after they're done writing, they go walk, and they try not to think about anything, and then the ideas just pop into their head, or a correction in the idea, or a new revelation in the idea.

02:52:32.000 It's just always been amazing to me, ideas that come out of dreams, like the origins of creativity.

02:52:38.000 Like, where are these thoughts emanating from?

02:52:42.000 Like, Descartes.

02:52:43.000 Like, the idea of science came from a dream.

02:52:47.000 Einstein's dream of being in an elevator.

02:52:50.000 You know, if you're in an elevator and the elevator drops at, you know, just the speed of gravity and you let go of your pen or your coffee mug, it's just going to hover there like you're hovering inside the elevator as it drops.

02:53:02.000 So the acceleration of the elevator at the speed of gravity means there's no gravity.

02:53:08.000 And that's where he came up with this idea of relativity.

02:53:11.000 The elevator is the frame of reference that you and the cup are in.

02:53:15.000 And so this is what weightlessness is.

02:53:17.000 When you do the vomit comet, basically all you do is you go up high enough to drop.

02:53:21.000 And so the plane is plunging down for about a minute or two, I guess.

02:53:26.000 I've never done it.

02:53:26.000 And you and this camera and whatever else is in there is just floating because the whole frame is dropping.

02:53:32.000 Right.

02:53:33.000 And so to do this in the space shuttle, for example, it has to go, what, 17,500 miles an hour to maintain the same speed accelerating at which it would also drop.

02:53:46.000 So you're going straight forward and straight down.

02:53:48.000 The halfway in between is 17,500 miles an hour for our planet.

02:53:53.000 Basically, that creates zero gravity.

02:53:56.000 So if you want to go to Mars and have some gravity, you just spin the spaceship so that the floor is the outside wall.

02:54:04.000 And that's how you get your gravity?

02:54:06.000 That's how you get to gravity.

02:54:07.000 Like in 2001 or one of them.

02:54:11.000 Yeah, Space Odyssey.

02:54:11.000 They had the thing spinning.

02:54:12.000 The space station was spinning.

02:54:14.000 So by spinning, it creates a false sense of gravity.

02:54:18.000 Oh, I know what it was in 2001 where he was running along that curved...

02:54:22.000 Oh, right.

02:54:23.000 Interior.

02:54:23.000 So it's spinning like this, so it presses you against the floor.

02:54:29.000 Right.

02:54:29.000 It's like those old carnival things where you go and then you stand and the floor drops out as it spins.

02:54:35.000 And you spin on the outside.

02:54:36.000 That's right.

02:54:37.000 So that's the same principle there.

02:54:39.000 Oh.

02:54:39.000 Yeah.

02:54:39.000 It's just amazing that ideas can come out of nowhere, the origin of ideas.

02:54:44.000 That's a fascinating thing to me, like creativity.

02:54:47.000 How does one person come up with a great idea for a movie?

02:54:51.000 How does someone come up with an amazing idea for an invention?

02:54:54.000 Where are these ideas emanating from?

02:54:58.000 Well, first of all, you have to have some knowledge of what it is you're trying to create.

02:55:02.000 Did Wallace have a knowledge of evolution?

02:55:04.000 He did, yes.

02:55:05.000 He read quite a bit.

02:55:05.000 Yeah, he was totally into this for years, as was Darwin.

02:55:08.000 So the dream state...

02:55:09.000 Even Mozart, you know, he was composing since the age of four, and his father was a composer.

02:55:14.000 So it's not like this comes out of the vacuum.

02:55:16.000 There's not a muse that pops into your head.

02:55:19.000 You know, you and I aren't going to come up with an Einstein-type dream, because we're not Einstein, and we're not physicists.

02:55:26.000 So the balance seems to be being ensconced in a field to know what the problems are to be solved and what the details are and what's already been done.

02:55:35.000 They tried this, they tried this, this didn't work, and so on.

02:55:37.000 But not be so entrenched in it that you can't see outside the box.

02:55:41.000 Right.

02:55:42.000 And no one knows what that is.

02:55:44.000 We don't know.

02:55:45.000 It's so interesting.

02:55:48.000 Creativity in and of itself is so interesting because, boom, an idea.

02:55:52.000 How does that take place?

02:55:55.000 What's the birth of the idea?

02:55:57.000 What are the mechanisms that are going on inside the mind that allow the imagination to give birth to this idea?

02:56:04.000 It's so poorly understood.

02:56:07.000 And part of the problem of trying to understand it is what I call the biography bias.

02:56:11.000 We only know about the successful people.

02:56:13.000 So, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

02:56:15.000 Okay, so the thing is you go to college, you drop out, you move into your parents' house, you start a company in your garage, and boom!

02:56:21.000 Okay, how many people did this back in the 70s, and we don't even know who they are because they failed?

02:56:26.000 All those venture capital startup companies that went out of business, all these great ideas.

02:56:33.000 Okay, so we don't know what the formula is.

02:56:37.000 Well, not only that, what made you who you are right now?

02:56:40.000 At 12.07, what's today, March 7th or whatever the hell it is, what made you?

02:56:46.000 Your 60-plus years of life experiences?

02:56:50.000 Yeah.

02:56:50.000 You know, being awake for, you know, 18 hours plus a day, doing this, doing that.

02:56:55.000 Like, what chain of events, what foods did you eat?

02:56:59.000 How much sleep did you get?

02:57:01.000 What led these ideas to cross each other and bink, and a little fire gets lit, and then you write it down on a napkin, and your life changes.

02:57:09.000 Yep, yep.

02:57:10.000 Nobody knows.

02:57:11.000 Too many variables.

02:57:11.000 So fascinating, though.

02:57:13.000 So fascinating.

02:57:14.000 It's just that the mind and the way the mind works, it's such a mystery, and yet there's so much information about it at the same time.

02:57:23.000 Well, it is the hardest problem, I think, in all of science.

02:57:27.000 Consciousness, the brain, how does it work?

02:57:28.000 I mean, we know how it works, how the neurons communicate with each other neurochemically.

02:57:34.000 And how, say, your visual cortex sees stuff.

02:57:37.000 But what is it that you and I are doing now?

02:57:40.000 Just we're experiencing this process.

02:57:42.000 How does that happen?

02:57:44.000 And that no one knows.

02:57:46.000 We don't have a cogent theory of consciousness, which is why then people step in with quantum consciousness or whatever.

02:57:53.000 They have all these theories.

02:57:54.000 Because we don't know.

02:57:56.000 Those people, they get me baffled.

02:57:59.000 I've had a few of those people on, and I have a conversation with people about quantum consciousness, and they're like, I don't even know what you're saying.

02:58:05.000 I don't even know if you know what you're saying.

02:58:07.000 That's exactly right.

02:58:08.000 So, you know, quantum physics is difficult and spooky, and consciousness is difficult and spooky.

02:58:15.000 Yeah.

02:58:16.000 But that doesn't mean they're related.

02:58:18.000 You know, maybe they're related, but maybe they're not related.

02:58:20.000 Well, I'm glad someone's out there exploring, and I check in on them every now and then.

02:58:23.000 Absolutely.

02:58:23.000 How you doing over there?

02:58:25.000 Absolutely.

02:58:26.000 The theory is evolving.

02:58:28.000 What?

02:58:30.000 I'm not sure.

02:58:30.000 Yeah.

02:58:31.000 I'm not sure about any of it.

02:58:32.000 But listen, man, we're basically out of time.

02:58:34.000 Okay.

02:58:34.000 We just did three hours.

02:58:35.000 Wow.

02:58:36.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:58:36.000 That was crazy.

02:58:37.000 I really appreciate your time.

02:58:38.000 Oh, you're welcome.

02:58:39.000 I appreciate you doing this.

02:58:39.000 You're good, man.

02:58:40.000 I appreciate all your work over the years.

02:58:42.000 You're welcome.

02:58:42.000 It's really been wonderful to read and have you on here.

02:58:44.000 Thank you for saying so.

02:58:45.000 And is this your most recent?

02:58:47.000 Yep, that's it.

02:58:47.000 So you can take that with you on your vacation.

02:58:49.000 I will.

02:58:49.000 Thank you very, very much.

02:58:51.000 The Moral Arc.

02:58:51.000 The Consciousness.

02:58:52.000 Yeah, I'm going.

02:58:53.000 I'm going.

02:58:54.000 And if people want to get a hold of you on Twitter, it's Michael Shermer.

02:58:58.000 Yeah.

02:58:58.000 On Twitter, website.

02:59:00.000 Skeptic.com or MichaelShermer.com.

02:59:02.000 Thank you, sir.

02:59:03.000 Appreciate it very much.

02:59:04.000 You're welcome.

02:59:04.000 Thanks for having me.

02:59:04.000 All right, folks.

02:59:05.000 See ya.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 07, 2016

Joe Rogan Experience #770 - Michael Shermer

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