Michael Shermer - Why The Liberals Have Stopped Defending Free Speech In Donald Trump's America

Full transcript: Michael Shermer on London Real

0:48 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Michael Shermer, the American science writer, broadcaster, and founder of the Skeptic Society. You are the editor-in-chief of Skeptic Magazine and a presidential fellow at Chapman University where you teach Skepticism 101, how to think like a scientist. For 18 years, you were a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and you have appeared on television shows like The Colbert Report, Oprah, and Larry King Live.

1:23 Your books, Why People Believe Weird Things and The Moral Arc are New York Times bestsellers, and your new book, Giving the Devil His Due, is a powerful, defensive, free speech explaining why we must all be able to voice our beliefs. Michael, welcome to London Real. Thanks for having me, Brian. Great to see you. Great to have you here. I appreciate this. Before we get started, I just wanted to tell everybody that we are streaming now on our brand new digital freedom platform, which is a censorship-free, independent broadcasting system that is of the people, by the people, for the people.

1:53 And available exclusively through our website at londonreal.tv. Can everyone watching us please now share this via the sidebar to any and all of your social media channels? Again, let me repeat that. Please share this via the sidebar to your social media channels. Just simply ask your friends and family to give us 15 minutes, and then they can decide.

2:10 Michael, I pledge to you and everyone watching us that none of this conversation will be edited, censored, removed, or banned, and that anyone in the world can watch the full version of this episode free at londonreal.tv forward slash shermer. Thanks to the generous donations of over 30,000 people around the world that I affectionately call the London Real Army. For anyone wanting to become a founding member of the digital freedom platform, they can go to londonreal.tv forward slash freedom to donate and fight with us on the front lines to protect our human rights.

2:35 Here at London Real, we’ve been a platform for free speech since 2011. And Michael, I’m excited to have you here today. You probably heard we’ve been doing a little bit of battling for free speech here the last seven weeks with some episodes being banned and censored. I’ve been de-platformed, kind of at some point slandered a little bit. It’s been quite an exciting ride.

2:56 And I want to get your thoughts, but maybe we start with a simple question, and that is, why is free speech the foundational right to all other rights? If you can’t express your thoughts through your words, then all other rights are meaningless because that’s how you initiate moral progress in civil rights is first by expressing them by articulating the arguments for why other people should accept those rights. The right to protest against governments that suppress rights, arguments with private companies, or why they shouldn’t censor you, all that depends on you being able to articulate that.

3:36 So those words matter, and words are thoughts. So the moment you start to censor speech, you’re also censoring thoughts as people self-censor. For example, at Chapman University, my students are pretty young, they’re fairly liberal, but I ask them, do you self-censor on sensitive subjects like abortion or immigration or religion or whatever, and they all raise their hand. Yeah, we all self-censor. I’m so afraid to say something because I’m going to get canceled. So there’s really two different issues here. There’s sort of the private right to speech and public.

4:12 So when we’re talking about the First Amendment issues of free speech, we’re talking about the government censoring citizens. And so the First Amendment in the United States here protects your right to say whatever you want without the government censoring you. You can protest the government, you can argue against the administration’s policy, whatever you want. But that’s different from, say, what you’ve just recently gone through, which is a private company, Google, Alphabet slash Google slash YouTube, deciding they don’t want to have you on their platform anymore, or they’re going to censor individual episodes or whatever.

4:49 That is their right to do so. The government can’t come into a private company and say, you have to put so-and-so on the air. What if it’s being used as a public utility? What’s that? What if it’s being used as a public utility?

5:00 Yeah, so there’s a little gray area there, I admit. Now, first of all, I argue that they shouldn’t do this. Now, maybe it’s their right to do so. Okay. I argue they shouldn’t do that because then they become a gatekeeper for which ideas the public wants to hear.

5:19 So, first of all, it’s not just your right to speak, or in this case, your right to speak. It’s my right to listen. Maybe I want to hear what this guy has to say. Now, in my case, I disagree with Ike and his theories, but so what? Maybe somebody else comes to your platform, oh, I can’t wait to hear this guy. What’s he got to say?

5:41 And then, boom, it’s censored. It’s like, well, what about my right to listen, not just his right to speak? So there is that. And then, you know, so basically in the book, I argue from there, why should we listen to what other people have to say? And so it begins with that, that it’s my right to listen as well as it is your right to speak. But also, by listening to what other people have to say, even if I’m right and they’re wrong, or at least I think they’re wrong and I think I’m right, I strengthen my own arguments by listening to what other people have to say that disagree with me.

6:18 So, for example, again, back to my students, you know, they’re mostly pro-choice on the abortion issue because they’re fairly liberal. But I asked them, what’s the best arguments for pro-life? What are their best? Can you articulate them? And most of them can’t. They have no idea what the other side argues.

6:33 So I tell them, hey, John Stuart Mill, he who knows his own side of the argument, only his own side of the argument doesn’t even know that. You’re really not a pro-choice arguer if you don’t know what the pro-life arguments are. And saying something like, well, Republicans just hate women. No, that’s not their argument. You may think that’s their motive, but that’s not their argument. So, you know, go watch some of Ben Shapiro’s videos about pro-life or some essays by conservatives that are thoughtful on this issue.

7:03 And then come back and tell me what’s your counter to that. And that actually strengthens their pro-choice position by knowing, well, okay, these are the three best arguments they have. And these are my three rebuttals. And then, of course, you might be wrong. You might be partially wrong. You might be completely wrong. You’ve gone off the rails. You’re nuts.

7:24 But the only way to know that is to engage with somebody that thinks differently from you. So that’s kind of the core of the book. You know, the devil is whoever disagrees with you or who you disagree with or you think is uttering hate speech or whatever. And we want to give them their due for your own safety’s sake. Because the moment you sign off on any kind of censorship, what happens when you’re the voice, the lone voice in the wilderness, and you want to be heard, you want to push back against the establishment and the dogma.

7:57 And you’ve already said, well, it’s okay to censor people, so we’re going to censor you. But wait, wait, I have something to say. No, too bad. And you know, we kind of stumbled into this, to be honest, Michael. I mean, I’ve been doing this for nine years, having long-form conversations. You know, it’s no secret.

8:14 I was inspired by Joe Rogan nine years ago. I quit my job in banking. I started broadcasting. I was on his show about seven years ago. And everybody was leaving us alone until April 6th.

8:25 And I streamed, you know, the David Icke, you know, the second conversation of this year. It was the second biggest live stream on YouTube in the world that day, right behind President Trump. And so clearly, a lot of people wanted to watch it. And 30 minutes later, it was banned and deleted. And I got thrust into this fight. And my gut reaction, I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in America or not, was something’s wrong here.

8:48 We should be able to put these conversations out. I’ve had a lot of people on my show I don’t agree with a lot over the years. And what happened is a lot of them actually changed my mind over three, four, five years. And I know you’ve changed your mind a lot of times in your life from religious to not religious. And I watched myself changing over the years. And I just thought, wow, I really do need to have lots of different points of view in here because I’m a different person in the future.

9:16 And I would have definitely wanted that person earlier in my life to become the person I want to become. And now, like you said, now I’m the censored. So before, it was always the weirdos being censored, like the Ikes and the crazies and the Alex Joneses. And now it’s us. And now I know how they feel. And now I realize that I don’t think I’m crazy. I don’t think I’m radical.

9:41 And yet when I say one of three different words right now, I can be banned and deplatformed from YouTube. If I say Covid-19, 5G vaccine together, it’s over. And I’m literally one strike away from being off the platform. That’s a nine year relationship, quarter billion views, two million subscribers. I’m this close to being gone because of these policies.

10:04 So I really appreciate you articulating what you just said, because I’ve been bumping to people on the streets here in London and I pull out my camera and I say, what do you think about what’s been going on? And everyone tries to articulate what you’re trying to say. And they all say, Brian, we want to hear what they have to say. That’s what they said. We just want to hear what he has to say so we can make a decision.

10:23 So it’s that fundamental need as a human, I guess, to want to hear something different. Yeah. Well, let’s take that example. You know, I think the idea that 5G is associated with the Covid-19 pandemic is ridiculous. It’s wrong.

10:39 But so what? You know, if you can’t reason around that and think about that and recognize it for what it is, then that’s your problem, not the person articulating it. And again, the moment you set up a gatekeeper, so YouTube has, I don’t know what they’ve got, an army of employees that sit there and watch their videos or they have some algorithm that just looks for certain keywords or phrases that tags it. I’m not sure how it works. Maybe it’s both.

11:07 But so what happens if it’s not Alex Jones or David Ike, but it’s some medical researcher at Harvard that says, you know, I have some doubts about, you know, the CDC or Fauci’s interpretation of the data. And here’s my alternative to that. You know, what if he gets caught up in that censorship? I actually want to hear what he has to say. And I can think for myself, I can evaluate Alex Jones conspiracy theory as well as anybody.

11:33 So, you know, who are you to tell me who I shouldn’t listen to? So that’s the argument against that kind of censorship. Again, it’s their right. It’s a private company, but they shouldn’t do it. You know, it’s just it’s not good.

11:48 And and I don’t think it’s the equivalent of, say, ISIS recruiting, you know, people online through that form. I think maybe there’s some arguments to be made for that. But so here’s the problem goes back to 1919 with the U.S. Supreme Court decision and Shank versus the United States. So Shank, Charles Shank was this the head of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia, and he was protesting the draft.

12:21 So the United States instituted conscription in which they forced young men to go to war in Europe. This is the Great War. And he thought that’s really unconstitutional because the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees your 13th Amendment guarantees your right not to be enslaved. Fourteenth Amendment guarantees your right to bodily autonomy that somebody can’t take away your life or control your body. And and that’s what the draft is.

12:45 Basically, the government is saying for the next four years or whatever, we own you and we can send you to your death if we want. So now that’s a debatable thing. You know, maybe in the time of national crisis, we need that. Maybe we don’t. Maybe it’s overreach or not.

12:59 But but just the idea that he was protesting that by issuing flyers to young men who were in the line to register for the draft. And he said, you know, this is against your constitutional right. And so for this, he was charged with a form of treason and the government convicted him. And the US Supreme Court decided in this case and I’ll read you the famous passage on this because this is what is generated this this idea of hate speech that we’re talking about now, although they didn’t use that word.

13:33 So this is Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the Shank versus the United States 1919 case in his now famous off quoted lines, the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. So what were these clear and present danger words that he was using it was the draft is unconstitutional.

14:12 That is surely a debatable point. Now, maybe you think it’s not unconstitutional, but that’s beside the point that the idea that the government can say you can’t say that that’s, you know, so the moment you set up a category. Now we have a bin. This is dangerous speech that a clear and present danger. That’s the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater.

14:33 Okay, then the category expands like, you know, anything could be put in there that the government doesn’t like, or you don’t like, or I don’t like. And so by the time you get to say the 1970s, we start having this, you know, idea of political correctness and certain language and words matter and those are now phrase we use today is hate speech. Well, as I show in the book in the 1850s, southerners were very concerned about abolitionists coming to the south, northern abolitionists coming to the south to rail against slavery.

15:11 And they considered that hate speech, and they didn’t use that word hate speech, that’s a monitor, but they were saying this could rile up slaves and they may have a slave revolt. This could be very dangerous. It leads to violence. We can’t have these rabble rousers coming down here from the north to give speeches and print flyers and so on. And so they censor them. Now today we hear that and go, what? No, of course abolitionists should have the voice. Yeah, well, who’s the equivalent of that today?

15:37 You know, who are you to judge? You know, with hindsight, we can look back. Okay. In the 1950s, a century later, you know, again, the southern whites were very concerned about people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X coming down there to give speeches about their civil rights. And they consider that dangerous, a clear and present danger. So once you build the category of these are the kinds of things that could lead, that could be a clear and present danger to the public safety or whatever.

16:06 Anything anybody wants to throw in there, including David, I going on your show to talk about COVID-19 or whatever. Oh, that’s dangerous. Yeah. Wait a minute. We’ve come a long ways from from 1919 to that. It’s funny. I came to those both of those two examples just on my own the last couple of days where I said, I just proffered this idea.

16:24 If YouTube had been around in the 1850s, then surely the talking against against slavery would have been against community policy because it would have been against whatever the WHO equivalent or the government standard. So they would have censored that. And surely that would have been a wrong thing to do. And then again into the 50s or the 60s with Martin Luther King, they would have censored him. They would have censored Stonewall protests in New York City for the gay rights movement that would have all been clearly against community standards or three letter acronym organizations.

16:56 And therefore there’s no debate. There’s no advancement of ideas. So yeah, I mean, I kind of threw those out, but it’s great to hear you explain that and then put it in that bucket of clear and present danger. Because yeah, you could come on and say David saying something that would create a pandemic of clear and present danger. And then who makes the call?

17:19 Exactly. So let David Ike have his voice on your show. Let Alex Jones rant on Joe Rogan and drink whiskey and smoke marijuana and go on and on about the lizard aliens running the world or whatever the latest crazy conspiracy theory is. I find it rather entertaining. I find it hard to believe that people believe it, but I don’t want the government deciding what people should hear.

17:45 That’s moving toward tyranny and autocracy that’s the wrong direction. I’d rather teach people how to think critically about any claims. So, for example, here’s another example I use. So in the book, I talk about David Irving, who, as you know, resides in the UK. And, you know, he’s kind of a noted Holocaust denier. He calls himself a revisionist, but whatever. And that was a big lawsuit.

18:11 He filed against Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier and so on and so forth. Anyway, he was arrested when he went to Austria at the airport. He went there to give a speech. And not only did he not give the speech, he was just thinking about giving the speech. So in a way, it’s a thought crime because they had him flagged in the airport computer system when you scan the passport that, oh, this is that guy that rabble rouser Holocaust denier guy.

18:36 You know, we don’t want him in our country. OK, so I actually, you know, he was convicted and he was jailed. So I wrote a letter to the judge on his behalf. Now, I’m like one of the world’s leading debunkers of Holocaust denial. I can articulate 20 reasons why David Irving is wrong, wrong, wrong.

18:55 But on his behalf, you’re locking somebody up for just saying what they think about something that happened during the Second World War, even if he’s completely wrong. So my analogy is, let’s say I’m a historian of Native American history and there’s a debate about how many Native Americans died between the time Columbus arrived here and let’s say the late 20th century. And, you know, the numbers vary a lot. How many were here before? We don’t know exactly. Maybe it was 90 million. Maybe it was 50 million.

19:28 How many died? Maybe it was 90 percent, mostly of disease, but some of guns and so forth. But let’s say I’m a historian. I go, you know what, I think the numbers are way off. I think it’s more like 10 million and maybe only 7 million of those died at the hands of Europeans. Am I a denier? Am I a Holocaust denier for articulating that position?

19:47 That just can’t be right. You know, therefore I should be silenced. No, no, no. You know, it’s like I understand why in Germany they want to outlaw Holocaust denial and so forth for historical reasons, but it’s still wrong. Because it’s better to just, to me, it’s better to just give us your best arguments, David. What are the 10 things you think are the problem with the Holocaust story and let’s evaluate them and the story.

20:12 Right. That way, that way you can have a discussion and then you can solidify your own ideas. And like you said in the book, you quote, you know, John Stuart Mills, you know, which is what he who knows only his opinion doesn’t even know that. And so people walk around thinking, oh, I think this, but then they actually haven’t gone through the process in their brain and this would help with that. I mean, one of the first things that I said when this all started happening was, look, I might not agree with everything you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.

20:39 And, you know, that’s been articulated many times in history. Talk to me about hate speech because the last strike I got from YouTube was because of a violation of hate speech policy, which strangely enough was from a video clip of David talking about his 9 11 conspiracy that was from eight months previous, where he said the phone calls on the airline that crashed. The one that was hijacked and crashed were fake, is what he said. Now, again, you can argue that that’s inappropriate and disrespectful to the families.

21:12 But I remember having a conversation with my YouTube rep saying, I do not see how this is hate speech. And even having that conversation was probably pointless because hate speech is almost impossible to define. And you have a great way that you kind of try to explain it with different words that have now turned into these things you call microaggressions that might qualify as hate speech. So, I mean, what do you think about, I mean, I hate speech policy. I mean, again, these buckets that are just so subjective.

21:44 And like, I don’t know if we might show this first part on YouTube. And I’m curious what YouTube will think of this. I think they’re usually OK when I openly talk about their policies. But for me, I just feel like it’s a real subjective call on something very general. Yeah, YouTube, come on, chill out. You know, we’re adults, like children playing in the sandbox and we need them.

22:05 But you said that. But Ofcom, the regulator here in the UK, which can tell all radio stations and television stations not to say things, they said that the David Icke was actually censored on one of the TV stations. They rebroadcast my episode and said it because it was dangerous to those listening. So it literally was like coddling almost people that they couldn’t hear this. So, yeah.

22:31 Yeah. So the you know, the history of this idea of hate speech really goes back to the civil rights movement. And, you know, starting with the most offensive word in the English language, the N word. And, you know, that it’s hurtful. It’s hateful. And I agree, it is. I won’t use it.

22:50 But that’s kind of the easiest example. But I would still, even with that example, be against the state, outline the use of that word. Because what if an African-American comedian wants to use the word? Right. What if the comedian is half black? Yeah.

23:05 Then we’re going to have like racial laws about, you know, race mixing. And they sound like Goebbels and Himmler. Right. So you just can’t censor words like that. Now, I agree. You know, personally, I’m not going to use I’m not going to call women the C word.

23:20 I’m not going to call Jews kikes and so on. I agree. These these these are words. Don’t be a dick. Don’t use those words. And OK. But from there, you start to expand out the category where like I reprinted the book here, this list of microaggressions from the University of California system.

23:38 They gave out to everybody like if you ask somebody, where are you from or where were you born? It implies they’re not a true American, therefore it’s hate speech. Or if you say to somebody, you speak English very well, that’s now a microaggression because it implies you are a perpetual foreigner in your own country. Well, my wife is from Germany, from Cologne, Germany. Her English is impeccable. You would never know she’s from Germany with her perfect English.

24:04 So people always say you’re from Germany. Wow, you speak English so well. And she says, thank you. I paid attention in school instead of being offended. Just thank people for that.

24:14 When was this printed, the one you’re reading? Now, some of these are kind of cringe worthy, you know, like you’re a credit to your race or to an Asian. You know, you’re so good in math, you know, you expect to be so what? OK. But the problem with those kinds of lists is now students are walking around in this kind of state of like, oh, my God, which one can I say now ends up I’m just going to keep my mouth shut.

24:38 I’m just going to self censor because I don’t know what’s going to get me busted. And, you know, the cancel culture on social media is so corrosive that it puts fear into people and it stifles conversation. And this is no good, especially in college. This is the time you’re supposed to be articulating every crazy idea you ever had so that you can kind of navigate the waters and come out the other end with a set of ideas that are well argued and articulated.

25:06 And if you can’t do that, then then what are you going to do? Yeah, the self censorship is a big deal. And I again, I’m bumping into people on the streets and they kind of recognize me. They know the fight that we’ve had been having. And I bumped into a pair of musicians.

25:20 It was a couple. And they said, you know, we can’t talk about the stuff. We can’t talk about the doctors that you have on your show. And I thought you’re musicians. I assume you guys talked about everything and across the spectrum.

25:32 And they said, no, if we mention it, we just get shut down by everybody around us for these crazy theories. So they’re obviously self censoring. I now self censor whenever I record myself because I’m literally worried about, you know, everything being taken away. There’s a lot of people out there that worry about that. And it’s not healthy, is it?

25:56 Oh, no. And, you know, speaking of music and art, you know, back in the 70s and 80s and 90s, it was conservatives that were wanting to censor artists, you know, Madonna’s videos and, you know, rock lyrics that were allegedly corrosive to the youth. Right. You know, gangsta rap, right. The parental advisory for gangsta rap. That was all conservative.

26:19 So that that was more of a conservative supported form of censorship. So there’s been kind of this perverse reversal now because free speech was always a liberal cause. I mean, the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, that’s a liberal organization. They were defending Nazis marching in Skoggy, Illinois. That, you know, they truly believe it. Now that’s kind of gone in reverse.

26:39 Now it’s liberal saying we need to censor speech that’s hateful and it’s conservative saying, oh, no, no, no. We believe in free speech. I’m like, oh, my God. When did this happen? You know, and that’s one reason why I wrote this book was just to say, hey, wait a minute now, come on, my fellow liberals.

26:56 I’m kind of a classical liberal libertarian. I’m not progressive liberal. But, you know, come on, this is our cause. You know, the First Amendment, this is our cause. We need to own this thing like the conservatives own the Second Amendment and guns.

27:08 You know, we need to be just obsessed about this. So. And so what’s happening here? Why is that why is that massive shift in the last 10, 15 years? Well, this is debatable. Social scientists are now trying to study this a little bit like my colleague Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Coddling of the American Mind.

27:28 There’s different theories about this. One is that there’s kind of a culture of safety ism that arose during the crime wave of the 70s and 80s such that by the time we got to the 90s, these kids are now parents. And they’re having kids and being super, super protective of them. So-called helicopter parenting and playgrounds with padding everywhere. Playgrounds now are designed by lawyers.

27:53 It’s like, what do we do not to get sued? Well, we got to pad everything so no one has any chance of getting hurt or so on. So that kind of expands to the idea that we need to protect people from not just physical threats, but cognitive threats, verbal threats, words that are threatening. So that’s one theory. The other theory is, of course, the rise of social media and Facebook and Instagram and so on.

28:20 All these kind of instantly give you critical feedback, usually in the cancel culture mode that causes people to be more censorious. You know, the anonymity of social media allows you to just hammer on people just relentlessly. People you never even met. It’s a little bit the analogy I use is like I’m in L.A. So, you know, when you’re driving on the freeways, people flip each other off and so on and curse and scream.

28:49 They wouldn’t do that if you were on a sidewalk, you know, that anonymity in the car. It’s a little bit like that. And I get nasty letters once in a while, maybe once a week, I get a really nasty letter. Just for curse words and just so on. And I’ll occasionally write them back and say, you know, oh, gosh, I didn’t mean to offend you with my column or whatever.

29:09 Are you having a bad day or are you OK? And they always write back and go, oh, my God, I never thought you’d write back. I’m so sorry. I didn’t really mean to come off like that. And wow.

29:20 So just that kind of personal contact with somebody erases most of that kind of hateful response that people have. So that’s a factor. You know, politically, we’re more divisive. We have data on this showing that the percentage of people who identify as centrist, you know, just sort of barely to the left of center or to the right of center. That has shrunk.

29:43 And the two ends, people that self identify as far left or far right, have both gone up. So that kind of polarization driven in part, I think, by talk radio and all the cable shows and so on that just hammer. Each side causes people to drift further apart and therefore plug that into social media and you just get this kind of just hammering on each other. And then that makes people go, well, we need to start censoring the kind of language they’re using because this is getting out of hand.

30:15 No, that’s not the solution, but it may be part of the cause. And so what do you think this goes from here? I mean, like you said, it’s the conservative voices that seem to be pushing back. You know, I had Candace Owens on the show last week. She just, you know, kind of served Facebook with, you know, a legal action because it’s claiming false information for things that she’s putting out.

30:36 And again, you know, she goes on to say the company that does that is, you know, former CNN people, all that. And it’s just not it’s just not true. I’m making this argument that these private companies are acting as public utilities. And it’s actually true here. If you watch a video in on YouTube here about Covid-19, there’s literally an ad for the NHS underneath it.

30:55 And when we’re all locked down, you could argue they’re using we’re using these technologies for public information. If that’s the case, I will be making an illegal argument that they have to then abide by the laws of the land. But also, do you think the companies are going to get get get the message at some point and start to change some of their censorship policies? We just saw Joe Rogan. I know you were just on his show a couple of weeks ago moving to Spotify.

31:21 Some have argued that he’s moving his full video over there in the live stream because he had stopped live streaming on YouTube because there was potential copyright strikes and other things that he was worried about getting backlash from the censorship. Some say that’s one of the reasons he went over there. And maybe that’s maybe that’s a shot across YouTube’s bow that if you don’t change this policy, some of your your creators are going to go places where they feel more welcome.

31:47 Yeah, totally. That’s the solution to the problem is just more competition, just other platforms to compete with. Yeah, your public utility argument is good, especially when they essentially have a monopoly. The moment you have more competition, then that’s good so that people, content producers like yourself and Joe Rogan can make a choice. Therefore, the platforms that want to keep them have to listen to what they have to say, like, you know, don’t censor me or else I’m going to leave.

32:17 OK, Dave Rubin did the same thing. And so that’s good. I like that. Now, I know Joe personally, but I don’t I don’t know his motives from moving to Spotify. I didn’t even know he’s going to do that. You know, maybe it’s just pure financial business decision.

32:31 I don’t know. But I think it’s good for that for that very reason. And I wish there were half a dozen YouTube’s that were all about the same size. And I don’t want the government to force them to break up. And, you know, like they did the telephone industry in the 70s.

32:49 But but but why can’t there be more competition like that? I mean, we’re now seeing that with streaming services, you know, it’s not just a big network. In fact, they’re a little behind, you know, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu. You know, of course, now we’re seeing, you know, huge increases there because of social isolation in the pandemic. That we’re all like we’re all streaming and binge watching shows.

33:13 It’s fantastic. And they’re pretty cheap. You know, I think it’s 15 bucks a month or something for each of these. It adds up a little bit, but it’s still cheaper than my cable company. And so that kind of competition, I think, keeps the big three networks who once had a monopoly.

33:27 So they were essentially a public service on their toes. They, you know, they can’t be too censorious or else people are just going to leave. So that’s the market solution. I think there’s a lot. I think it’s a technology curve and maybe even Moore’s law that’s working there because, you know, a few years ago, maybe five years ago, you know, YouTube was probably one of the only platforms that had the cash reserves that could offer things like live streaming to people.

33:51 Whereas, you know, four weeks ago, we were able to live stream the rosyke three episode to a million people. It cost us a hundred thousand dollars, but we were still able to do it. Five years ago, it probably would have cost us, you know, 10 million dollars. So I think as that tech gets more democratized, I do think you’ll see more options. And like you said, with Netflix a few years ago, you know, even the big networks couldn’t compete with that streaming service.

34:16 And now there’s just more options. So, yeah, you’d like to think that that starts being more spread out. You have a million followers. That’s impressive. Well, we you know, we had one point. So so I called out that I wanted a million people on this live stream, which would make it the single largest live stream of human conversation in history.

34:37 And so we got one point three six six unique million unique people. But two thirds of that, Michael, was peer to peer sharing. So it was people telling other people and sharing that link. So I think it really spread out on the day we put the word out three weeks in advance. I mean, technically, we have three million subscribers across all our platforms.

34:57 But to get them all acting in unison is not necessarily easy. But on the day now, because it was banned, because also, let’s be honest, there was no sporting events that day. There was no other things to do. Everyone’s at home and everyone’s being told they can’t watch this guy because he’s got big bad evil messages. I mean, it’s a 68 year old man in a leather chair next to me.

35:19 We are not inciting violence. We are not inciting revolution. We’re not inciting destruction of property. And yet still, it’s dangerous. But yeah, this is another backfire effect of this kind of censorious culture.

35:32 How many people had never heard of David Ike until he got banned or me banned? I better watch this guy. Now, exactly. And that’s the flip side. And I use analogies like that with like Milo Yiannopoulos, who’s a bit of a professional provocateur.

35:49 And when he was kind of at the peak of his fame doing his college tour, and the college students are just going crazy and paroxysms of protest and out there with their signs and screaming at them. And even in some cases, inciting violence, because just for him showing up on college campuses, I was tweeting out, look, liberals, if you really want to hurt this guy, just ignore him. You know, because I’m a professional public speaker and there’s nothing worse than a half empty auditorium.

36:19 You know, you’re just sitting there going, oh, my God, no one cares what I have to say. This is so depressing. But even better than that is, you know, a room full of people packed in there with protesters outside. It’s like, I’m going to hear what this guy has to say. And, you know, so, you know, again, David Ike is now probably more well known to people who would have never had any interest simply because, you know, you talk to him.

36:42 And somebody said, you can’t listen to this guy. Oh, yeah. My other example of this is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who should be a champion of civil rights. She should be one of the great civil rights leaders of the 21st century, women’s rights and the right to push back against the state and a religion. But because it’s Islam, and now Islamophobia is, you know, hate speech.

37:10 And this is the sin that you are not allowed to commit. And by that, I mean criticizing Islam. You can criticize Christianity all you want and, you know, atheists do all the time. And then that’s perfectly okay for liberals. But for some reason, they’re super sensitive about Islam.

37:29 And so Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks out against what her former religion has done to women. And, you know, she had female general mutilation herself. She can speak with authority on the problems and what this does to grown women when they’re treated like this as young girls. And so she was invited to give the commencement speech at Columbia University, a couple of years ago. You know, honorary doctorate, you give the speech, it’s a great honor.

37:55 And the students went crazy. And faculty protested, and we can’t have her. She’s, you know, it’s hate speech. She’s criticizing Islam. That’s hate speech.

38:03 And she got canceled. They refused to give her the honorary doctorate. She was not allowed to give her speech. Okay, that’s bad enough. But the backfire effect is the Wall Street Journal printed her commencement speech, two and a half million readers.

38:17 So instead of a thousand parents and students listening to what she had to say, two and a half million people read what she had to say. Ah, so there you go. So much for censoring Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yeah, no, it’s true. You would think these big, smart, you know, trillion-dollar companies might know what they’re doing, but in some ways, what they’re doing magnifies it.

38:37 Because I think there’s… They’re caught up in this social movement that’s been going now for a couple of decades. And most of the tech companies are run by, you know, liberals. They’re fairly politically left, far left. You know, the sort of tech billionaires are left.

38:52 Industrial billionaires are more conservative here in America. And so caught up in that and sort of empowered with all the power they have and money. You know, they feel like, well, it’s our social duty to censor people because this is what liberals do. No, that isn’t what liberals do. At least they didn’t used to do that.

39:13 So I’m pushing back against that. And I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of people that… You know, the heterodox academy started by, again, Jonathan Haidt, my friend and colleague. You know, and I was one of the earliest supporters from Chapman University.

39:26 But now he has thousands and thousands of professors saying, you know what, this is gone too far. You know, we got to have viewpoint diversity, not just racial diversity and gender diversity and so forth, but viewpoint diversity. And, you know, most of the liberals are like, what? It’s like, no, no, you used to argue for viewpoint diversity when you were, you know, shouted out in the 1950s and crowded out by conservatives. You know, this was a liberal cause.

39:55 So again, you don’t have to invite Milo Yiannopoulos to your college campus. Maybe he’s too much of a provocateur, but maybe someone like George Will, you know, sort of a classical conservative in the kind of Barry Goldwater old school conservatism, you know, William F. Buckley kind of conservative who writes these brilliant books articulating these are the best arguments conservatives have. You know, students shouldn’t hear that. I mean, they have to know this is what the other side thinks.

40:24 And again, you don’t have to bring in the rabble-rousers that maybe incite students to go crazy or something, but at least they should hear those arguments. Yeah, most definitely. Michael, I want to get your thoughts on the world in the last couple of months. And, you know, you talk about liberty versus security. And I think you’ve said that the pandemic has raised the moral debate of the cost of freedom.

40:46 And I’m just curious, what have you witnessed happening? And what are some of the questions we have to ask ourselves lately? Yeah, well, I’ve been tweeting about this last couple of days, so-called freedom-loving conservatives who are refusing to wear masks. They’re going into stores where everyone has a mask on. But then there’s a video going around this morning of, you know, like these people purposely coughing in people’s faces, like right up, like just like this close, take that, you know, tell me what to do.

41:14 I love my freedom. I’m an American and constitution gives me the right to not wear a mask and so on. These people are deeply confused about what freedom means. So like my simple example is you’re not free to drive on the left side of the road. Maybe you would in England.

41:28 You know, there’s a reason we have that. So, you know, you don’t get killed by people just randomly driving down whatever lane they want to. You know, so we give up rights all the time. We give up freedoms for security. And conservatives don’t like to hear that.

41:43 But of course, they totally believe in that because conservatives believe in the rule of law and law and order and military and police. All that is based on people giving up their freedoms for security. You know, so the freedom for me to swing my arm ends at your nose. I’m not free to just to hit anybody I want because you should be free from my violence in the same way I should be free from your germs. So this is, you know, again, like the vaccination issue, which, you know, we’ve been tracking since I started Skeptic magazine 27 years ago because that’s when the anti-vaxxer movement started.

42:19 And they just changed the goalposts. You know, it was so predictable that the moment COVID-19 began that the anti-vaxxers would be all over the center. Of course, they were because they’re not really against anti-vaccination. It has something to do with their fear of big pharma, big government, and so on. That’s really what it’s about.

42:38 And but again, you know, yes, you could be you should be free to not vaccinate your kids. But my kids should be free from your, you know, your diseased kids. So you can’t take them to public parks, public libraries, public schools. You know, the public arena where we engage with each other, we have to be free from each other’s threats. Okay.

42:59 And COVID-19 is that for sure. And, you know, now it’s debatable about like, how long should we keep the economy shut down? You know, can we reopen restaurants and people are six feet apart? Whatever. You can have masks, but you don’t have to wear them all the time because you got to eat, whatever.

43:14 That’s all debatable. That’s fine. But this idea that, you know, freedom means I can do anything I want. No, that isn’t what freedom means at all. And I’m telling you, this is a classical liberal form of libertarian.

43:28 I’m a big freedom guy. But, you know, we got to have rules because, you know, we’re a collective. We, you know, social species, we live with each other. And there are threats that we have to protect each other from. Well, I’d never really gone down the whole vaccination narrative to be honest.

43:46 I mean, I, you know, I went to MIT. I trained in engineering. And for me, the science seemed to always make sense. So I was like, yeah, OK, I get my flu shot every year. And it wasn’t till I started having some different doctors on and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

44:00 And I started actually listening to some things they had to say and started realizing there are some flaws on how the industry is set up and some of the lack of liability, et cetera. And so I started at least listening to what they had to say. And now that it seems like we’re pushing this vaccination everywhere, there’s this question of will there be the mandatory vaccination? And I know there probably never has been in history. But mandatory is another funny word, Michael, because what if it’s if you want to fly, if you want to go to a ballgame, if you want to go to college, then it starts to get a little fuzzy.

44:30 What are your thoughts? Yeah. So actually, I don’t know if it’s for a podcast and it is constitutional to mandate vaccine. So you can I’m not a lawyer, but you can read his arguments. You can read his arguments about the conditionality of that.

44:47 The way the law is, you can get a religious exemption if you want. And so a lot of parents do that. But here’s the problem. You know, this idea of herd immunity, people are talking about now, what this means is that there are some people who want to get vaccinated, but they can’t for medical reasons or they’re too young or too old or whatever. And so having almost everybody around you vaccinated protects you, the person who can’t get vaccinated.

45:13 Now, you get a bunch of exemptors who say, oh, I’m not going to, you know, because it’s against my religion or against my political beliefs or whatever. Then then you breach this herd immunity. Once you reach a certain level where maybe 75 of the people around you are vaccinated, but 25 percent not, then that increases the risk of the person who wants to be vaccinated, but can’t, of getting some communicable disease. And they’re very probably immunocompromised or in some, you know, pre-existing conditions that makes those communicable diseases even more dangerous.

45:45 So there are the argument I think can be made reasonably from a, still a freedom loving perspective that the freedom for you to be free to not vaccinate, you know, infringes on my freedom. Yeah, I think theoretically. That’s a debatable point. Yeah, I think theoretically that’s good. It’s just when I start learning about some of these vaccines and I hear like on the high end, they’re 40 percent effective.

46:06 And on the other end, they’re potentially dangerous. There’s no placebo studies. There’s no liability whatsoever. And then I start to really wonder, I think we have this vision that you, it’s like from that movie Contagion or I think Contagion was the movie where you get this kind of like saline nasal spray in your nose and you’re done. 100 percent immunity, never to have it again.

46:26 I just don’t think that’s the reality of some of these vaccines. So here I would recommend your viewers go to sciencebasedmedicine.org. This is a group of professional scientists and skeptics who address those kinds of claims. They address, they have pages and pages of here are the anti-vaxxer arguments and here are the rebuttals to them. And it’s pretty solid.

46:48 I think the anti-vaxxers don’t have very good arguments. Again, that’s what I love about a healthy debate. A censorship free debate. But yeah, I encourage everyone to find out this information. I’ve had a lot of it in the last few weeks and I definitely have questions.

47:02 And I’ve been thinking about is how this is going to change society, which is kind of fun to speculate on. Yeah, tell me. The handshake may be gone. It may be hugs, which, you know, we’re a social primate species. We need to touch each other.

47:18 Yeah, that could change. But on the other hand, that could be a good thing in terms of spreading diseases. That is the number of communicable diseases may go down because we’re going to be more careful about our interactions with each other. And so maybe that’s a good thing. There was a study published just before the pandemic started.

47:36 I think it was a German study on the average body temperature is lower now than it was a century ago. You know, 98.6 Fahrenheit body temperature. It’s more like a full degree cooler than it used to be. Now, assuming that’s true, the theory is that we’re getting sick less often than people did in the 19th century when these standards were set. And so being sick a lot increases your inflammation and inflammation causes body temperature to go up.

48:03 And it’s bad for all sorts of long-term health reasons. So that’s a little bit of progress there, I think. And that may continue that if we’re sick less often because we’re all super careful, maybe body temperature will go down, which would be interesting. And what do you think about, like, communication and consensus when we can’t shake hands, we can’t see necessarily each other’s faces because we’re wearing masks. So you miss the communication or the, you know, the context or subtlety of communication.

48:33 And then we’re on a digital platform with a two dimensional screen or God forbid I’m communicating over a platform where I’m censored. Like, is this going to change progress for humanity? Yeah, it’s hard to say, I think, and higher education as well. Yeah. Thinking about that because, you know, I’ve been recording my lectures remotely and posting them online.

48:54 Anybody can watch them for free at skeptic.com. But I’d send them to my students with a quiz. But, you know, that Chapman, my class has, you know, 17 students this semester in a small seminar room with a lot of interactions with the students, the conversations ricocheting around the room. And I can look at their facial expressions and they can look at each other. Zoom is not the same as that.

49:15 So I think that’s not going to replace that form of higher education. But, you know, the like the professor standing up at the, at the lectern yamering away for an hour and a half, you know, and the students are just taking notes. Why do you need to pay $50,000 a year to sit in a brick and mortar building, you know, to get that? You can get that like what we’re doing right now or remotely on all these different platforms. And, you know, the amount of audio content, we were talking before the show started about, you know, audio books and teaching company courses and podcasts.

49:47 It’s just endless, high quality content. You can get knowledge for free. You know, my friend Steve Pinker at Harvard, you know, he made his course in rationality available to anybody to watch the lectures every week for free. It’s like, you don’t have to pay Harvard $50,000. You can get the great Steve Pinker professor at Harvard for free.

50:07 But then nobody watches it, right? They don’t, they don’t follow through on it, probably. Well, I don’t know what the numbers are, but, but the, so here’s what I’m thinking about here that, you know, the cost of a college education has gone up disproportionately over the last 50 years compared to any other basket of goods, you know, a carton of milk or a gallon of gas or, or a loaf of bread or, you know, whatever that is in the basket that economists use to sort of track the rate of inflation and control for inflation.

50:38 And you see the goods are about the same, or they’ve gone up 1% or 2%. College education is like just skyrocketed. Why? And if you look at the studies, it’s like the ratio of professors to students has been about the same. So it’s not like we’re hiring more teachers and making the classroom smaller so you get a more of an education.

50:56 No, it’s the bureaucracy, the administrators, the deans. This has gone way like 10, 10 fold. And they have to be paid, right? I mean, payroll is the biggest expense of any company or organization. So the moment you start hiring the dean of diversity and the, you know, the dean of political correctness or whatever, the dean of microaggressions and the dean of safe spaces, you know, they don’t use those labels, but you know what I mean.

51:20 Okay. These are paid employees. They’re, you know, they’re making six figure incomes and they have health and retirement and, you know, and insurance and on and on. And this is expensive. Somebody’s got to pay for that.

51:31 And in the United States, the government has is, is, is decreased the amount of federal funding for public universities. So they’ve had to go to private sources and they can only get so many donations. So they charge it in tuition. And that’s why tuition has gone up now. So what I’m getting at is that this could challenge universities that were right on the kind of financial edge of surviving.

51:56 And this is going to wipe out a lot of them, I think. And then the other big ones that do survive, they’re going to have to start cutting back. I think on, on all those administrative costs, just to get the tuition debt. There’s a lot of these parents who are, have been hit hard in the last three months. They’re not going to be able to pay that tuition in the fall.

52:16 So either the students aren’t coming or the universities are going to have to cut back somewhere else. So I think that, that could all shake out in the next few years. No, I think you’re right. I think it’s going to be interesting to watch. You know, I remember, so I graduated in 93 from MIT.

52:30 My first year of tuition in 89, I think was 14,500. And I know that because I had to pay for most of it with government loans. And but I, but I agree going to the lecture and listening to the professor and, you know, the physics, you know, freshmen physics, that, that wasn’t much different than a zoom, but being there and being held accountable. And I lived in a fraternity and having the guys around me who were in my class and could help me and teach me. And that’s where I got the most out of that education for sure.

53:01 Yeah. And yeah. So maybe we need to redefine what we’re talking about here. Yeah. Not just knowledge.

53:07 No, it isn’t. Social. And not just students and professors, but students and students. Yeah. That’s a big part of it.

53:14 Which is maybe hard to do now with distancing and we’ll have to see. So yeah, everything’s going to change there for sure. You’ve said before that there’s an opportunity from this coronavirus where it represents maybe a way we can learn about that. We’ve been getting away with some bad health and bad habits. I know you’re about to go on a four, four hour bike ride.

53:32 You participated in the very first Ironman race in Hawaii in 1981 on the big Island. I mean, you know, you’ve got a history of this, but we’re seeing that the comorbidity is the reason that, well, some doctors say a lot of these deaths are being attributed to the COVID-19 was because of these other issues, diabetes, et cetera. I don’t know. What do you see here, Michael? Yeah, I think probably it’s going to be people that were already immunocompromised or had preexisting conditions that are the most susceptible to the disease.

54:02 Although in the last few weeks, it looks more and more like, you know, a lot of younger, healthy people. There was a guy on the news last night. He was like a nurse and a massive bodybuilder. This guy was just huge. And then, you know, they show him three weeks later, he lost like 50 pounds and he’s a skeleton from COVID-19.

54:19 So it’s like, boy, this guy’s super healthy like me works out all the time and you know, but I don’t know, maybe he was doing steroids and it compromises. Who knows? You never know. And there’s this weird childhood disease that may be related to COVID-19 with the blotching and this, you know, the brain swelling and all this crazy leg swelling and so on. You’re watching too much mainstream media, Michael.

54:40 Yeah, I know. Well, I don’t know what that is. Well, I do. I watched. I just watch ABC and NBC News.

54:45 Yeah. Well, the problem is I try to watch a lot of because I know Fox News and CNN, you know, they both drifted further apart and, you know, they just hammer each other and I can’t, I can barely watch those shows anymore. So I’m trying to find more neutral content. It’s harder to do. So I read the wall street journal op-eds and then I read the New York times op-eds and add them up and divide by two.

55:05 No, I’m kidding. But it is hard. So I, again, I think the idea that you should eat healthy food and work out every day and get out in the sunshine and fresh air, this is good. Even if it has no effect than COVID-19, you should be doing that anyway. All of us should be doing that.

55:24 And I think more and more people are doing it or they’re allowed to. They, they should be doing it. They should not be disallowed from getting outside and exercising. The last study I saw yesterday was that it looks like joggers going past each other, cyclists going past each other, whatever people walking is a very low risk thing to do. It’s probably perfectly okay.

55:45 Even without face masks, it’s that kind of tight in a room with a lot of people where the, the droplets are kind of floating in the air. That’s a higher risk. So I think probably, you know, getting out is, is probably the best thing people could do. And then, you know, the stuff on vitamin D Joe Rogan just had somebody on talking about this, you know, you get that from the sun, you can take supplements, but you know, get out and get some sunshine and fresh air.

56:12 That’s a good thing anyway. Right. So that going forward, maybe, you know, people may be introduced to the idea of working out and, and they may enjoy it. And that’s a good thing. Yeah.

56:22 And I agree. What do you think about this looming economic recession we have and, and what do you see from some of the, the struggles people are having with their, you know, with their own economics and wealth and future employment? Yeah, I think, well, of course, the economy will bounce right back. This is not like the great depression. I mean, I’ve read quite a few books by economists over the years on, you know, what caused the great depression.

56:45 There’s no, there’s not much consensus. There’s some consensus, but you know, it’s a debatable point because it was something of a mystery of what happened. No mystery here. We know exactly what happened. And you know, the stock market is, is rebounded quite a bit already just on the news that there might be a vaccine that goes up a couple of percentage points in a day.

57:04 I’m not worried about that. I think the industries that they change are those that were kind of on the margin in, they were just kind of barely surviving. So a lot of restaurants that were barely making it, the restaurant business is very problematic anyway. I don’t, I forget what the number is, but it’s like 90% of restaurants go out of business within a decade. You know, it’s a tough, tough, tough business.

57:23 And the thing is, you know, the big thing is that the market is going to be a little bit more than a $10 million, because the margins are so thin for surviving that the moment you get a hit, you’re gone. And the theaters that they may be gone. Why do you need to go to a theater anymore? Other than, you know, it’s fun to be in a big room with a huge screen, but you can be in a living room now. The screens are, you know, these TV screens are unbelievably, they’re way better than a theater screen.

57:48 And you can have your friends over and you can have popcorn at home. It’s all right. Amazon video and Netflix is just endless streaming, great quality content. You know, all these professional Hollywood actors that used to just do films, they’re on TV now doing these series, right? Cause Netflix has the need to pay them.

58:06 And so the market is sort of pushing people into their homes anyway. So theater, a lot of huge theaters, one of my cycling buddies owns a theater is like, what am I going to do with this? Make condos out of it, right? The building is there. You could do something constructive with it.

58:22 You know, have a gym and a big part where the theater was in the store or the people live something like that. I think we’re going to see a lot of that kind of change. Yeah. I, I, I, I hope it bounces back, but it’s just hard to say with travel and tourism and like you said, with restaurants and social distance and yeah, we’re going to have to see what happens. And then.

58:42 Well, I mean, that’s, that’s another thing, you know, it’s like I was supposed to be on your show when I was in the, in the UK now I was supposed to be there. And of course that just seems like a distant dream, like city and airplane for 14 hours from California to get there. Oh my God. That, you know, it’s hard to say that I hope that doesn’t change too much because travel is a, it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a good thing for all kinds of reasons, just engaging with people that are different from you.

59:06 So their cultures is, is good for moral purpose. It’s also just good for it all, you know, so I hope that doesn’t change too much. Maybe the airlines are just more careful of cleaning the sea, whatever. And that, that has to be a good thing too. Yeah.

59:21 I think we’re going to find some way to get back to a lot of these things. I really believe it. You mentioned that it’s time to support our leaders and to rally around people like Trump and, and that kind of thing. And it’s not a time for divisive politics. A lot of people wouldn’t expect you to say that, Michael.

59:33 Why, why do you have that point? Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, Trump is easy to criticize. He’s hard to like, cause every time he opens his mouth, he says something idiotic, but he’s our president. I mean, come on, uh, you know, people hated Obama and people on the right.

59:48 I knew a lot of conservatives just could not stand them. And it’s like, come on, he’s our president. This is what we do. And, uh, you know, probably half the country, half the country hates him, of course. And then half of them think anything he does is wrong.

1:00:01 And so, but, but it’s so hard to know when’s the right time to close the economy, open economy, do this, do that. And so on. And he has advisors. He hasn’t fired Fauci, you know? So, I mean, you know, hopefully it’s still listening to them.

1:00:16 In any case, uh, it’s not helpful, um, to, to, to just exert all that negative energy. Um, because this is really a truly glow crisis. And, you know, so arguing whether Sweden was the right model or Germany’s the right model or whatever. And I think Americans think Germany had a great model, but my wife from Germany says Germans think it’s that they did it all wrong. Really?

1:00:41 Why? Everybody’s on me about something. Well, why did they think they did it wrong? Or what do you think it makes Germany different than the US and say Sweden? What?

1:00:51 Cause you have some thoughts on that too. Well, um, here I, uh, uh, I turned to this idea. Um, uh, Michael Gelfin’s research on tight versus loose cultures. So she’s a cultural psychologist that studies cultural norms. Now in some cultures, norms are very tight.

1:01:08 That is people are very rule bound. They obey the rules. They obey the laws. When the government says do this, they do it. And that’s certainly the case in Germany.

1:01:16 Yeah. America. We’re a pretty loose culture. Yeah. We’re freedom loving.

1:01:21 I don’t care what the government tells me to do. I’m not going to do it. And, uh, you know, so people are more likely here to run stop signs and cheat a little bit on the red lights. Um, and you know, not pay their taxes, whatever. Just, you know, just sort of flout the norms.

1:01:35 Whereas cultures like in Japan and Germany are much tighter culture. So that could be to their benefit when you hit something like a COVID-19 pandemic where the, you know, the, the, the medical experts say is what we recommend and, and you know, Germans are more likely to go, okay, we’re going to do that. Whereas Americans are more like, Oh, well, maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. Do what I damn well, please.

1:01:59 And so that could be part of the effect. So the homogeneity of a culture like Sweden is much more, much smaller and more homogeneity in America is so. Yeah. But, but also their numbers have gone up now. What we’re talking about here is they didn’t close their economy down like other countries.

1:02:16 And so their economy has not been hurt so much. Okay. That’s good. But on the other hand, their numbers are starting to go up a little bit last few days. So it’s like, well, we’ll see the problem here.

1:02:25 Um, is that we have so much uncertainty still about what the, what the right thing is to do. And it, which is in part why conspiracy theories, you know, flourish under levels of uncertainty. I think for years to come, pundits are going to be, you know, with the hindsight by a week, Monday morning quarterbacking to say, we should have done this. We should have done that. Yeah.

1:02:47 But you didn’t know that in February that you now know in say June. So. Well, I mean, and it’s interesting you say about Germany and I agree. I wasn’t surprised when they seem to have a handle on it and people did what they say, you know, you know, like Italy is maybe a little bit more like America where they don’t necessarily listen and kind of do their own thing. And, uh, you know, had those, those kinds of feelings.

1:03:07 Let’s talk about conspiracies really quick because I mean, you know, you run the skeptic society, you know, you’ve done some great appearances on Rogan where you go head to head with people. Um, you know, I’ve never really been a conspiracy theorist, but I’ve had people like Ike on the show who that that’s his bread and butter. Um, tell me, like from a bird’s eye view, how do you see conspiracy theorists? Why is there an interest in them and why did you create skeptic society?

1:03:32 Yeah. So conspiracy theories is certainly one of our, um, you know, targets that we address in part because there are real conspiracies. So, um, it’s the question becomes, how do you evaluate the evidence? And of course, this applies to anything, the evidence for the Bermuda triangle or Bigfoot or aliens or UFOs, whatever, um, this would apply how, how any person should evaluate the evidence to determine if this claim is, should be considered reliable knowledge or not.

1:04:02 So it’s kind of an epistemological question. And, uh, so that’s what we do. This is my kind of my life’s work. What is true? Okay.

1:04:09 The problem with conspiracy theories is not like, you know, this guy claims he has a perpetual motion machine. I know he’s wrong because the second law of thermodynamics as there can be no perpetual motion machine or somebody says, I have psychic power. I know they don’t because there’s no such thing as psychic power. There’s no paranormal. There’s no supernatural.

1:04:25 They’re just normal, natural and stuff. We can’t explain it. Problem with conspiracies is there are conspiracies. They’re all over the place. Like what?

1:04:32 The way in Volkswagen conspiring to cheat the emissions standards in Europe. That’s a conspiracy. Watergate’s a conspiracy. Uh, Iran Contra during Reagan. That’s a conspiracy.

1:04:42 You know, all the Wiki leak stuff that showed even under Obama, you know, all the shenanigans that our government, uh, you know, was, was doing monitoring Angela Merkel’s phone calls. What? Uh, you know, you know, you know,

1:05:07 All the stuff with Kissinger and the Nixon administration manipulating elections in South American countries. Cause we favor the fascist dictator more than the communist dictator, because that’s better for American interests. It’s like, wait, we were hacking elections. Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:19 We were doing that. So, uh, there’s enough of this going on that when someone like the David Kennedy administration, this came out in the nineties when these, a lot of these, um, assassination documents were released that, that his, some of his, uh, administration people, including McNamara brought to him this operation Northwoods. We’re going to, we’re going to commit these false flag operations over Cuba or over Florida and make these airplanes look like they’re Cuba and a Russian.

1:05:45 And that’ll be our pretense to invading Cuba or assassinating Castro. It’s like, you know, and he was, he was like, I think we should have said the same thing. But he said, but we can’t do that. Well, we can’t do that. That’s crazy.

1:06:02 Uh, but the fact that our government was even seriously considering that, including a whole list of things that they wanted to do, we’re going to make this jet look like a Russian may, you know, this. So when people like Alex Jones or David eight, I say these kinds of things like, yeah, okay. You know, Tuskegee, you know, against the native of these African Americans who were, you know, You know, so you have to evaluate each of them individually based on the evidence and a number of other criteria I use. So, for example, most conspiracies are very narrowly focused. You know, like Volkswagen is going to, they wanted to cheat the emission standards.

1:06:35 Why? Because they want to make more money, you know. So, you know, insider trading, that’s a kind of a conspiracy and we know why they do it to make more money. You know, the focus is usually pretty narrow. But the moment you expand it out to, you know, like global domination. We want to control the world. Bill Gates wants to chip everybody on the planet to control population. You know, it’s like, okay, you’ve gone off the rails.

1:07:00 That’s not what conspiracies do. You know, they’re much more narrowly focused. Because for several reasons, they can’t do global domination type. Nobody can run the economy. And this is this, when I was researching conspiracy theories, this was the scariest thing of all to most people, is that contrary to a cigarette demand behind the scenes running the world, nobody’s in control. Nobody is in charge. Randomness and chaos and sort of stochastic nature of the economy and society means that just shit happens and nobody can control it. The economy, the price of gas, you know, you see the moment gas goes up, they have all these economists on the news, you know, tell us why it’s going up. I don’t know.

1:07:46 If this guy doesn’t know, I mean, who knows, right? So that’s the thing with conspiracies. And so, in a way, it’s what I call constructive conspiracies. That is kind of a constructive paranoia. It pays to be a little paranoid about big government agencies, big corporations, because they have power and they can make things happen that may not be good for me.

1:08:11 So there’s a good reason to be careful and cautious and pay attention to those. Said by the skeptic himself. Yeah, that’s right. So, but again, this is what I, you know, like the baloney detection kit, I have a conspiracy detection kit, the more people that have to be involved, the less likely the theory is true, the more elements they have to come together just perfectly, the less likely it is to be true, the grander the theory that it’s supposed to be less likely it is to be true.

1:08:37 Just think about 9-11 truthism. Okay, the reason I’m skeptical of that is, well, first of all, Al-Qaeda said they did it. They were proud that they did it. They said they were going to try to do it again. They did try to do it again many times. But just kind of the simple elements of, you know, we know that the planes flew into the buildings. And so we know that happened.

1:08:57 So the idea that you have that and controlled explosive devices were planted in the buildings at the exact floors where the planes hit, because that’s where the collapse of the buildings started, you’d have to have an impossibly highly improbable coordination that that we just know people can’t do, they can’t pull that off, you’d have to be, you know, have the in the world trade center buildings break through drywall to put the explosive devices on the beams and what no one noticed. And you know, we know that conspiracy theories leak can’t keep their mouth shut, they want to go on your show or 60 minutes or whatever to talk about what they saw. You know, not one person has done this. And then there’s the absence of evidence where you would expect it. The WikiLeaks documents are very interesting because, you know, so that 911 truthers and ufologists have is, well, of course, I don’t direct evidence to governments keeping that a secret. Well, now we have WikiLeaks with, you know, millions of top secret classified documents leaked. There’s nothing in there about Bush knew about 11 or his operatives planted the devices, nothing about Roswell and UFOs, aliens in area 51. Nothing. So to me, that absence of evidence is evidence of absence of a conspiracy. Right. Now that’s helpful. That’s super helpful.

1:10:14 Tell me you talk in detail about this concept of tribal politics and, you know, where where we feel like we believe in something because it is combined with a bunch of other beliefs. And we feel like we can’t choose. We can’t really pick and choose these days. It’s funny, like I had Candace Owens on last week alongside of having like, you know, Dr. Judy Mikovitz and David Aiken, someone commented on one of my social feeds, like, what are you doing having her on? And then I didn’t even think like, oh, someone might have thought I was on one side of the spectrum. And now I’m having some from the other side of the spectrum. And like, talk about how we are kind of expected to stay in line with our beliefs.

1:10:54 Yeah, it’s good if your followers don’t know where you stand politically in a way, because then you can’t be accused of that, although it’s hard. I don’t think they do. Well, I think, you know, the fact that pollsters and political scientists can predict what your position is on a dozen different issues if they know just one. So if I know where you stand on the abortion issue, your pro choice or your pro life, I can predict where you’re going to be on immigration, guns, tax rate, you know, middle spending, police, and so on. How could that I mean, these are independent, purportedly independent beliefs, but they’re not, they’re all tightly linked to kind of drifting toward the left or drifting toward the right, or kind of these loose clusters, as it were. So if I know one of them, I know that you put all the others in that same basket. So that tells us that we’re not evaluating beliefs based on, dependently based on the evidence. That is, we kind of put them in a basket, that’s my try.

1:11:56 So for example, my favorite example, this is climate change, climate science, it’s just another science. But when Al Gore’s film, you know, won the Academy Award and Emmy, or whatever, you know, became so famous, it’s like, well, this guy was vice president for eight years under Clinton, he’s a Democrat, that makes climate science a liberal cause. So automatically conservatives have to, well, I have to be skeptical of that. Now, recent research by cognitive psychologists shows that the scientific knowledge of climate science is irrelevant for predicting whether you accept it or not. It is to say, liberals who accept climate science know nothing more about it than conservatives who reject it.

1:12:38 So knowing about it or not knowing about it, most of us know next to nothing about the science of climate. So we speak out as kind of a signal, a virtue signal that I’m against it, because that’s my tribal position, or I’m for it, because I’m supposed to accept it. And the same thing I discovered when I was researching creationism, and, you know, most evolutionary biologists, they can’t debate a creationist, because they don’t actually know what their arguments are.

1:13:02 And most people who say I, of course, I accept Darwin’s theory of evolution, then you ask them to articulate it, they really can’t, they’re very bad at it. So it’s not like I studied this, I learned a lot about it, and I decided it’s true. That isn’t what most of us do. We just accept stuff because that’s our group, and that’s what we accept. So that’s, it’s a very revealing bit of research about human cognition and how it works. That’s scary. I mean, that’ll shake you to the core if you buy into it, because it’s just like illusion that we make choices and we don’t.

1:13:36 So one approach I have is to try to do an end run around that problem. If I’m talking to, say, a climate skeptic or a creationist or something like that, and the analogy I use is, you know, if you give somebody a choice, somebody who’s a Christian, and you say you have to choose between Darwin and Jesus, they’re not picking Darwin, okay? Because their commitment to their religion is more deeply personal and important to their life, whereas the science is just the science, yeah, whatever that is. So, well, I would just say you can keep your religion. There’s no conflict. You don’t have to, you know, reject all of religion and your faith just to accept the theory of evolution. It was God’s way of creating life. I mean, a lot of religious people, including Francis Collins, who just won the Templeton Prize yesterday, you know, he’s a born-again evangelical Christian, head of the National Institutes of Hell, wrote this book called The Language of God. He fully accepts all of evolutionary biology, all of the science and DNA and so on, and he’s a Christian. So I always point to him and go, look, see, you can have both the science and your religion. And to a conservative, you know, hey, I’m a big pro free market capitalist guy too, but I accept the science because it’s, you know, real. And they’re like, oh, okay, so I don’t have to give up my beliefs in free markets and capitalism. No, in fact, here’s an opportunity to make a lot of money. You could be the next Elon Musk.

1:14:58 Well, speaking of Elon Musk, what’s your beef with his Mars project? Oh, I don’t have really a beef with him. I hope he does it. I just sort of for fun, got to thinking about, well, if we’re going to go there and colonize the place soon, we should start thinking about what kind of government we’re going to have there. Now, in my kind of utopian thinking, I’m thinking maybe Elon’s engineers, social engineers, or NASA, if they’re if they do it first, will come up with some other new way of governance.

1:15:29 That is to say, you know, although democracy is better, you know, as Churchill said, you know, it’s the worst of all governments, except for all the others that have been trying. Maybe there’s some other system of governance no one has thought of. Often thought about this, if we encountered extraterrestrial intelligences, and they came here and they said, you’re still doing democracy. Oh, my god, we gave up on democracy thousands of years ago. We’re doing this other thing now. It’s like, oh, never thought of that. You know, so it would be interesting to, to try something new Mars. And, and you could do that for a while, as long as the population numbers are small.

1:16:02 So Elon says, well, we’re just going to do direct, direct democracy. Everybody has a voice, same voice. So that works well, if there’s 10 people or 100 people or whatever, and you can sit in a common circle or in the common grounds there and discuss and vote about what you should do. The problem is when you get into the population numbers, the millions, you know, direct democracy doesn’t work, because then you get a mob mentality. And so in the founding fathers, the United States knew this. And that’s why they have this, they designed the system they did. So I do think we can take some lessons from the blue planet to the red planet in governance, certain things work better than others, right? But kind of a representative democracy, a constitutional republic, a relatively free market with certain, you know, guidelines and the soft touch of government of regulation. So it doesn’t get out of hand and so forth. These are things that we know work better. Just compare South Korea to North Korea, since they diverged in the 1970s and try different governance systems. North Korea’s famously, you know, under the Kim dynasty have turned into a dictatorship and a controlled economy, and they’re dirt poor. And you can see the difference from space, you know, there’s no lights, and there’s, you know, South Korea, it’s all lit up. You know, so those are experiments that we can take the data from and draw some

1:17:19 Conclusions about how we should live. And so that’s the I wrote that chapter in the book is for just for fun, because Elon was talking, he’s such an interesting character, I really like him. And I have no idea, you know, how many of his visionary ideas will pan out, but the car panned out. I have I have a Tesla sitting right here next to me. I’m in my garage here. And it’s the best car I’ve ever driven. I think I wish he would just focus all of his attention on electric cars, because that would eliminate a lot of pollution. Do you think you’ll see someone on Mars in your lifetime? I think possible. Yes. Well, let’s see, I’m 65. So let’s say I go another 25 years. That’s probably going to be an optimistic figure for when we get there.

1:18:06 And I mean, by get there, somebody stays there. You know, we NASA may send some astronauts and come back, but there’s a lot of astronauts who said I would go and not come back. Yeah. Personally, I don’t want to live on Mars, I live in Santa Barbara, I’m happy here. But you know, Mars would be like living at the top of Everest, you know, that doesn’t sound too appealing. But there’s a lot of people who would do it. And you know, they’ll geo engineer the planet and change it and make it warmer and, and get running water and bubbling Brooks and swirls running around and all this is possible centuries to come. I think we do have to do it in terms of big picture. Not not to escape Earth, because we can’t solve our problems here. That’s not the reason. It’s because this is what we do. We left Africa to explore all the other continents. We live everywhere now, except Antarctica, and even there we have stations there. So I think we should do that we should become a multi planetary species and eventually, you know, just span out over the galaxy, the entire Milky Way galaxy. Why not? This could happen. And I think the numbers are like about 10 million years it would take as the entire Milky Way galaxy, which sounds like a long time it is but in the in the span of 13.8 billion year age of the universe, that’s not much at all. Yeah, yeah, so true. Michael, what are the next 10 years look like and are you optimistic? Because if you look at, you know, the UCLA policies, it doesn’t

1:19:27 Seem like there’s anything that’s going to turn us around from going more and more to more micro aggressions. Yeah, what do you see coming? And what do you think is the solution to get us back to normal system just announced this morning that they’re last night that they’re eliminating all standardized testing for admissions into the UC system, they saw that at the ACT, what do you think of that test? And the reason for that, again, it’s back to this political correctness is that well, there are group differences between the scores and, and minority groups or people from poor communities don’t do as well, because they they don’t get the the test preparation courses and things like that, that richer parents can afford.

1:20:08 You know, I understand why they want to do that. But you know, giving up standards, these tests are actually pretty good proxies for predicting who’s going to succeed in college. So that’s why they’re used. So here, you know, I see politics overriding facts, and that worries me. But in terms of next 10 years, okay. Again, I think, economically, we will come out of this fine, some industries will be hit harder than others. This idea that we have to implement a UBI universal basic income, like Andrew Yang’s program, because AI is going to put out of work, you know, all these workers, and they can’t be retrained. I disagree. I think people can be retrained.

1:20:46 People can learn, you know, this was said about pretty much every industry for the past century, you know, what happened all those elevator operators, you know, the guy sitting there on his little stool in the elevator to punch the buttons for you and control the thing, you know, computers put all those people out of work. What did they do? They got other jobs, they learned to do new jobs. Now, I don’t know if truck drivers can be computer programmers and learn how to do that in a couple of months, probably not. But there are so many other things that people can do. And our, you know, the economy is so robust, that even this massive hit we’ve taken for the last couple of months, I think will be completely recovered within the year or two.

1:21:28 I’m slightly concerned about the printing of money, you know, the trillions of dollars that the Trump administration is sending everybody money. You can’t just do that forever. You know, I think, I think my friend Matt Ridley in England there was mentioned on a show the other day that England just finally paid off the Napoleonic wars expenses. It’s like, what? And you’re still paying off the first world war and the second world war is like, Oh, okay.

1:21:52 We don’t see that, you know, but the government, somebody has to do that accounting. You know, so we’re going to be paying off these trillions probably for decades. Yeah, is does Trump get reelected? I don’t know. You know, polls are, you know, pretty mixed. And in any case, the polls were worthless in 2016. So it’s hard to say it’s entirely possible he could get reelected for sure. I mean, back to our tribalness, I mean, his supporters, including the evangelical right, they, you know, famously white evangelicals, 81% voted for Trump.

1:22:24 And you know, this guy, this is on the heels of the, you know, Hollywood access tape, and all the stuff about him paying off these, you know, Playboy, Playboy Bunny and the hooker, or the porn star and all this stuff that is, you know, just the exact opposite of what you would think deeply religious people would care about. But they don’t care. What they want is somebody that’s going to get them the judges to overturn Roe v. Wade and other issues that they do care about. And Trump’s a fighter. And he’ll stand up to these people and get them what they want to the other side. And so evangelicals, okay, I’m going to hold my nose and pull the handle for him because he’s our man. You know, we’re kind of, I wish I had someone like a John McCain or, you know, but we don’t, we got Trump, so he’s going to get us the judges. So that’s what they care about. Yeah, it’s been fascinating to watch. Michael, tell me about you. If I were to ask five of your friends, what is, what is Mr. Shermer superpower? How are you able to get all the stuff done in your life? What would they say it is? How are you able to write these books and teach classes and have the society and everything? What is it?

1:23:33 Well, I suppose it would be that I enjoy what I do. That is to say, I call this a lottery test. If I won the lottery and you gave me a million dollars tomorrow or 10 million or whatever, I would just keep doing what I’m doing. Not much would change, although I would fly private, something like that. I already have a Tesla. I don’t need a better car. And I live in Santa Barbara. How bad could it be? But I’m not a rich guy. But to me, the money doesn’t matter.

1:23:56 I just do what I want to do. So I’m lucky that I stumbled into cycling and I really enjoy it because it’s a sport for health reasons. And I just do it even when there’s no competition. And I write my books because I like writing. In fact, the analogy I make is, if I don’t write every day or every week, work on some writing project, I get antsy in the same way I do when I can’t ride my bike. If I’m traveling or whatever, I can’t work out.

1:24:22 Within a couple of days, I’m scrancy. I’m just crawling out of my skin like I got to go work out. And the same thing with writing. So I’ve written a lot of books simply because that’s what I do. I enjoy it. And it’s not like, oh, I got to write another book and I have writer’s block and I’m hating this. No, I just the opposite. And then finally, I guess I care about what I’m writing about and what I’m doing. That is to say I care about not just science, but humanist values of moral progress, civil rights, as being driven by problem-solving technologies like science and political science, economic science, and so on. These are the fields that develop to solve particular problems that make human life better, medically better, health-wise, longevity, prosperity, but also moral progress. All this comes about, I argued in that book, art was due primarily to these enlightenment values of reason and rationality and science to solve not just physical problems, the steam engine or whatever that makes economic progress possible, but also moral progress. That is to say it’s an actual utilitarian argument that I should care about your rights and your freedoms and liberties, because I want you to care about mine and that we both benefit. I can’t make my case that you should be nice to me just because I’m me and you’re not, and therefore you should take me seriously. I have to appeal to you.

1:25:56 And that’s an actual intellectual enlightenment argument started by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill all the way up to modern philosophers. That’s a science-based or rationality-based argument. And so to theists who say you can’t be good without God or there can’t be some objective standard without an outside source, that’s baloney. The source is us. We’re the source, and we can create objective standards that way. So that’s kind of my life’s work.

1:26:24 Yeah, no, it’s powerful stuff. Michael, what scares you? What scares me? Well, irrationality is for sure. We have, it’s not a bug in the system, it’s a feature of our cognition that all these biases and heuristics lead us to be mistaken about a lot of things. And then also the tribalism. We’re a social primate species. We evolved not to discover truth so much as defend our position, our tribe, our group. And it’s easy to get people to go down that road. As Milgram and Zimbaro showed, you can manipulate undergraduates in America to do the equivalent of Nazi executions of people. You know, Milgram’s and Machock experiments and so on. That worries me that things can go south fairly quickly.

1:27:11 And as we’ve seen with the entire economy can be turned around in a matter of weeks. If you take a big hit like that, a pandemic didn’t cause, COVID-19 didn’t cause the economy collapse. We did, we turned it for reasons. So that kind of thing shows us that the negativity bias, that is losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good, as economists put it, tells us that our cognition is tuned to being super sensitive to bad things that could happen. And the truth is bad things do happen, and they can happen. As Gates warned at Ted Talk, I was at that Ted Talk when he gave that speech about, you know, the next pandemic is going to be a bad one and it’s coming. We’re all like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve heard this before and it’s like, oh crap, it can happen. So that’s the kind of thing that worries me.

1:28:00 What do you make of the Bill Gates backlash and how someone went from this reputation to this reputation? Do you think that will change? Do you think? Yeah, I don’t know. Just curious what you think. There’s always a thread of anti-medism and especially anti-wealth.

1:28:19 So anybody that has a lot of money is going to be a target for conspiracism. I’m predicting Jeff Bezos will replace Gates as the number one target of the evil cigarette smoking man or Voldemort or Darth Vader. There was a paper the other day, he might be the first trillionaire. Really? And, you know, people go, oh, this is just terrible what he’s doing. It’s terrible. It’s it is, you know, he’s hired hundreds, thousands of people in the last two months. I’m getting packages delivered to my house pretty much every day from Amazon because that’s the only way I get stuff because all the stores are closed and it’s like, that’s a good thing. All right. Well, but then he’s going to have all that power. He’s going to take over the world. I don’t know. I think if anything, there’s now going to be a huge market for more online retail delivery rather than brick and mortar buildings. I mean, I feel sorry for the small mom and pop stores here in Santa Barbara where I live, but, you know, it’s just that’s the way it goes, you know, and this could change that. But competition is the solution for the fear of Amazon or Gates or whatever. I mean, Gates is a good guy. I’ve met him and, you know, he does care. He is trying to do truly humanitarian things with all his money and he’s giving most of it away. He can’t give it away fast enough. He’s written than he was before. It’s crazy. It shows the power of investment. And, you know, other, there’s other billion, you know, George Soros is the enemy on

1:29:48 The other side, right? He’s the liberal evil cigarette smoking man. Yeah. What keeps you awake at night, Michael? Well, I have a four year old, so I always worry about something bad happening to him. Wow. You started late or you just kept going. I have a 29 year old daughter lives in New York City and I’m in California. I worry about her. Those are just personal things.

1:30:12 Of course, I always worry about waking up with cancer, heart disease or something. You know, my father died at 61 of a heart attack and I’m 75, so I’m thinking, oh boy, I feel like I’m in borrowed time. But that’s just personal. My life is pretty good that way so far. So, you know, it’s more like cultural things that worry me, you know, like the 2020 election and then, you know, just things south. I don’t think we’re going to have a massive reversal of civil rights and stuff. I don’t think anyone’s going to take away the rights for women to vote or we’re going to reinstitute slave or anything big like that. But those kind of the sort of tribal targeting of minority people, you know, that is me, this shooting in Georgia recently of that black man who was being chased by those two guys with guns. You know, guns worry me, you know, again, this idea of freedom. I should be free to carry my gun and shoot people. No, no, that’s what ethnic states do. That’s what Mexico turned to. You know, it’s like vigilante justice. It’s not good. That’s what New York City was in the 70s. Not good. You know, if you’re truly law abiding and believe in the Constitution, you know, you should be in favor of gun control because you don’t want the crazies to have their guns and people to take justice into their own hands. Anyway, those are the kinds of things I’m worried about. I am a supporter of women’s reproductive rights. I recognize the pro-life arguments. You know, the fetus

1:31:38 Is a human being, yes, and so forth. But, you know, I just in many great moral issues, we have moral values. It’s rarely obvious what’s the right and wrong thing. Most of it’s more gray and the abortion issue is like that. So I just, in a collision of rights between the rights of the fetus and the rights of the grown woman, I saw it in the rights of the grown woman over the fetus, but only barely. So, you know, that being reversed, which it could, you know, if one more justice goes, you know, like, you know, if Trump is still around, he appoints a conservative judge and an abortion rights issue made it to the Supreme Court, that could overturn Roe v. Wade. So that worries me a bit. By the way, you saw that the woman, so-called Roe, was bought off evangelical to be pro-life. She said, I was never pro-life. They gave me millions of dollars and I acted and pretended to be religious. Oh, boy. First of all, what does that say about her? And what does that say about them even worse? So, you know, if you have to pay somebody to support your moral position, you don’t have very good arguments. I missed that one. No, I appreciate those thoughts, Michael. I was finished with a few questions. I’ll just ask you those now. If you were to pick up a phone right now and ring up the 20-year-old Michael and give him some advice, what would you tell him based on everything?

1:33:01 Don’t get married too early. Get to know the woman you’re dating for longer than you did. That’s kind of a personal one, you know. But maybe that’s the trial and error of love is part of the game, I don’t know. And I guess, well, see, my career is kind of just sort of bounced around like a pinball game where there wasn’t a clear path. And sometimes I think I should have just taken a clear path. But on the other hand, I’ve had a pretty rich life by not just being a college professor. That’s all I wanted to be was a college professor. It just seems like a great gig. You get paid to read and learn and teach, which I loved and write books and so on. So I’m still doing that, but I’m doing all these other interesting things and going on shows like yours that I would have never done if I was just a boring old college professor somewhere.

1:33:54 So I don’t think I would have changed that. Maybe some health things, you know, I shouldn’t have done this or that or risk taking stuff, crashing on my bike, just a little craziness. But maybe that’s part of who I am and you can’t change that. So that’s probably about it. Okay. On that same note, best advice you ever received? Could it come from a professor or a parent or a peer? I don’t know. Does something come to mind or a skeptic?

1:34:25 Well, I think the best, there’s several sources. Of course, my parents were always pretty good about supporting whatever I wanted to do. So that kind of support your children, which I do with my children in an open way like that, that I don’t want them to be like me. And my parents didn’t want me to be like them. That’s good advice, I think.

1:34:47 My first couple professors I had were very influential on me that, you know, just try a lot of different things. Take all kinds of different courses because you have no idea what you’re interested in. And it’s like, yeah, you’re right. I don’t even know what these courses are. I don’t even know what these words mean, the titles of these courses. So, you know, just taking a, trying out a whole bunch of different things I think is really good.

1:35:05 This is what I tell my undergraduate students, you know, just don’t commit to a major yet. Just, you know, take a couple of years to figure it out. Take a bunch of different classes. So, I think that kind of experimentation of trying things is super important. Except for marriage, don’t try a bunch of different things.

1:35:19 Try that. And last question to that 20-year-old that’s watching us right now or listening to us. You know, advice to them, you know, they’ve grown up in this cancel culture. They’ve grown up with the microaggressions or the norm. And when you talk about it, you know, they probably don’t see the perspective. I don’t know, advice to them for navigating in this current world.

1:35:38 Yeah, my advice would be, yeah, that’s a really good question there. My advice would be, just be more tolerant of other people that differ from you. Don’t moralize and cancel people. Just, you know, consider lots of different positions, viewpoint diversity, and chill out. Be tough. Come on. Don’t be offended. You know, don’t be a snowflake, as people, you know, say, because, you know, you got to be strong. You have a tough skin.

1:36:07 You know, if someone says something offensive, just ignore it or say, you know, fuck off. It’s, you know, too bad. You know, being tougher that way, I think, is good. Resilience is good. Yeah. Now, that’s super good advice. Michael, thank you so much for being on. You really clarified a lot of things for me in this first 10 minutes, you know, and I hope people can really think about what you said as far as it’s really imperative to have different ideas around, even to convince you that your ideas are right and to help you even make sure that you’re maybe feel strong about those ideas or less strong. But it’s such an integral part of us advancing as humans is entertaining different ideas. Is that right?

1:36:53 Yep. Yeah. Sounds good to me. No, it’s super powerful. And also the right.

1:36:57 I love your show. I love what you’re doing. And I love your new platform. It’s, you know, right up what I’m talking about here. So I will support it.

1:37:04 Great. I appreciate that, Michael. And again, I really appreciate you. I appreciate your ideas a lot. And the book is giving the devil his due. I guess it can be available to buy from our favorite soon to be trillionaire. Is that the best place? Your website as well?

1:37:16 Amazon. You can get it the cheapest and fastest. Skeptic.com, you can get a signed copy through through my site. I went down to the office a couple of weeks ago and signed hundreds of thousands of copies. So there’s plenty there. Excellent. And again, like you said, you know, that that fundamental right to free speech seems to be what everything else is based on.

1:37:36 And it’s really great having this conversation with you because, you know, I feel strongly about what I’m doing, but sometimes it’s nice to just talk to someone who’s been thinking about this in detail for a long time. So I appreciate you. Thanks so much for coming on. The book is incredible. I love these ideas. So I want you to grab that. And next time, let’s do this in London. Yeah, that’s right. We’ll do it in person safely with a handshake and maybe a hug.

1:38:02 Okay. Thanks, Michael. I appreciate it. And thank you to everybody for watching this on the digital freedom platform. Again, please share this on the sidebar below here or on the side to all your friends. If you want to learn more about this platform, it’s London Real.tv forward slash freedom, but we will continue to stream uncensored, unedited, unscripted, undeleted, unbanned content. And that’s our plan. We’re going to build a platform that rivals these other big ones. And that’s it until next time. We’ll see you on London Real.