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- [00:00]
A
Hey, folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast, Inside Rail. I am very excited to have with me returning guest to Dark Horse, Michael Schernimer, who is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and the executive director of the Skeptic Society. Welcome back to Dark Horse.
- [00:17]
B
Nice to be back. Nice to see you. Brett, where are you? Aren't you on some island somewhere now?
- [00:23]
A
I am on a deserted island.
- [00:26]
B
Did you buy your own island or. You're not like Epstein with all that secret money, are you?
- [00:30]
A
Oh, my God, no. I live on an island. There are thousands of other people on it, too. But anyway, it's lovely and very inconvenient, so.
- [00:42]
B
Were we able to get you a copy of the book?
- [00:45]
A
I have it right here.
- [00:47]
B
Okay.
- [00:48]
A
Though I will say I was struck by the fact that your publisher, who sent me the book, has taken a very aggressive stance on free will in the book that is somewhat in contradiction to your own perspective. I am assured that this copy is one I cannot sell, which implies that I obviously could sell it.
- [01:09]
B
Wait, they sent you a bound galley? Well, that's weird because. Well, maybe they just didn't get it in time because the hard copies are now just. I just got mine last couple days ago.
- [01:17]
A
Oh, is that right?
- [01:19]
B
Yeah.
- [01:19]
A
Well, anyway, I've been enjoying looking through it. There's a ton for us to talk about here. I don't know how you want to set things in motion, tell people what your book is about, but I'm interested in talking about, of course, religion, free will, and, you know, the central thesis of your book about truth and why it still matters and how to grapple with it. I think those are all good topics. Our first sponsor on this episode of the Dark Horse, Inside Rail is Crowd Health. Crowd health isn't health insurance. It's better. It's nearly open enrollment. The season when health insurance companies hope you will once again blindly sign up for overpriced premiums and confusing fine prints. We used to do that, but not anymore. Not since. Finding crowd health. Crowd health is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly. No middlemen, no networks, no nonsense. After we left our salary jobs as college professors, we spent years buying health insurance in the marketplace. 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You get access to a team of health bill negotiators, low cost prescription and lab testing tools, and a database of low cost, high quality Doctors vetted by CrowdHealth. With CrowdHealth you pay for the little stuff out of pocket. But for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy or an accident, you pay the first 500 and they pay the rest. The system is betting you'll stay stuck in the same overpriced, overcomplicated mess. This year it's even more complicated because most of the Affordable Care act subsidies expire, which means your prices are going to be even higher. So far, Crowd Health members have saved over $40 million in healthcare expenses because they refuse to overpay for healthcare. This open enrollment Take your power back. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using the code darkhorse@joincrowdhealth.com that's joincrowdhealth.com code darkhorse important reminder CrowdHealth is not insurance. Opt out. Take your power back. This is how we win. Join CrowdHealth.com Our second sponsor is Helix, which makes truly fantastic mattresses. We've had our Helix mattress for well over four years now, and it continues to provide amazing sleep just as much as it did when we first got it. It's firm, which we like, but if you want a soft mattress, they make those too. It's cooling, it's quiet, and it's just lovely in every regard. Everyone has had bad sleep. Sometimes that's attributable to modernity. Light shining in your window, the noises of humanity that you can't shut out, the turning of your brain, your physiology that's been mangled by fake food and pharmaceuticals. All of that contributes to bad sleep. But so does a bad mattress. 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- [06:46]
B
Yeah, sure. Thanks. So the idea of the book came from as sort of a sequel to the conspiracy book, which is my previous book, as more of a general theory of how we know anything is true with conspiracies. It was the question is, you know, there really are conspiracies. So how do you know which conspiracy theories you should believe or not believe, which then takes you into epistemology and how do we know what's true? How do we decide who we should believe or not? And so on. So this is really kind of an outline of how science works, you know, through peer review and you know, the norms and standards of of fact checking and journalism or, you know, the judicial system and how it determines truth through an adversarial legal system where you have two confronting lawyers and the judge or the jury or the peer review and so on. So, and kind of my general starting point is, as you know, I'm an atheist, but whether or not there's a. Is a omniscient, omnipotent God, I know for one thing for sure it's not me. And I also know it's not you. So all of us, all of us are beginning with, you know, what's called fallibilism. You know, I could be wrong, you know, so I have a whole chapter on Bayesian reasoning. And so we start with saying, you know, it's somewhere between 1 and 99%. You never, you know, Cromwell's rule and Bayesian reasoning. You Never assign a 0 or a 1 to any proposition just in case, you know, so, you know, aliens are here, probably 1%, you know there's a God, maybe 2%, you know, are just, you know, plate tectonics is the best explanation for the current position of the continents. You know, 99%, Big Bang Theory, 99%, you know, and then a bunch in between. So that, you know, the fallibilism, that there is a role for expertise and authority, not that you base it entirely on that. But one of the things I discuss in the book that I've kind of learned over the last couple decades really of doing skeptic, is how much we don't really know directly ourselves and how much we take it on not faith, but confidence, that, you know, the authorities we trust usually get it right. So here's an example. My cognitive psychologist friend at Occidental College, Andrew Stulman, did a famous study in which he asked mostly college students, do you accept Darwin's theory of evolution? Oh, yeah, yeah. Almost all of them say, yeah, explain it. Oh, well, the giraffe stretches its neck and the baby giraffes have longer neck. No, that's not it at all. Or then other studies similar to this, you know, are you in favor of natural NAFTA or against it? I'm for it or I'm against it. What is it? Oh, it's that North American something trade. I'm not even sure which countries are in it or what the policies are, but I'm for it or against it or, you know, so most of what we proclaim publicly this is what I believe is we don't really understand it. You know, we're just sort of signaling, in the case of Darwin's theory, yeah, those scientists usually get it right. So, yeah, I'll just say, you know, I think it's right.
- [09:54]
A
So I, I Want to pause you here because one of the subjects that we talk about frequently on Dark Horse is what I call the Cartesian crisis, which is named after Descartes, who famously came to understand that almost everything he thought that he knew as a fact was in fact taken on someone's authority. Maybe justifiably so, but that what one can do in life, you know, rerunning famous experiments in order to establish for yourself that they in fact said what we believe they said never happens, you just don't have enough time. So all of us are forced, in order to function, to accept almost everything on a kind of authority, which then, you know, if you live in an era where the quality of that authority is high, it's a very effective thing to do. If the quality of that authority for some reason is not high, it's a very dangerous thing to do. And so at one level I would ask, you know, I am very much in favor of a world in which we have systems that allow us to rely on actual experts to give us the most well grounded explanation for what we observe and to help us understand what the implications of it are for our behavior. But I don't think we live in that era. I think we live in an era where the quality of the expertise is actually appalling. And so let me just say I probably should have said at the top. One of the things I greatly appreciate about you, Michael, is that although you and I, I'm sure we agree on more than we disagree on, but we disagree on some very substantial issues. And I find you disagreeing with me honorably. It never gets personal. And that is a rare characteristic. It should be common, but it's rare. So anyway, I appreciate you doing that. I think the fundamental thing that we disagree over is are the experts in general doing their job in our era, or are they falling down on that job and leaving us with pseudoscience dressed up as if it were the real thing. So anyway, maybe we'll get into that more later, but I'll let you continue with your.
- [12:22]
B
Well, yeah, that's all. That's all. Yeah, we can get into the details of that. You know, with Descartes, he famously then hit the foundation rock bottom. Well, somebody's asking the question, what is reality? So there's a mind here, you know that. So I know that exists. And then from there you can build an epistemological system that's reasonable, that there is a reality out there. It's not all an illusion. We're not living in the matrix and so on. And we can know something about it with some degree of confidence or, or lack thereof, depending on the idea.
- [12:54]
A
Well, wait, wait. I don't want to be pedantic, but I do want to point out that what you just said by my epistemology is in no way secure.
- [13:05]
B
Which part?
- [13:06]
A
I believe that we do not live in the Matrix, that we are able to observe the universe, that it's not out to deceive us, and that we therefore can proceed rationally to unpack its rules. But that is an assumption. Well, it is an assumption that in.
- [13:26]
B
My opinion, same way there's an assumption that I. I'm alive and, and I'm cognitively, yes, unimpaired, and I can reasonably ask questions 100 that.
- [13:36]
A
Well, that's two assumptions. You make an assumption. I assume that you make an assumption that you are alive and capable of observing the universe. And I would regard the likelihood that you are correct in that as extremely high. But from my perspective, I don't know for sure that you do that. And this is one of the funny things about Descartes. Proof is that assuming that there was a guy named Descartes and that he did in fact go through this line of logic and conclude that you have to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure I exist, because if I didn't, I wouldn't be thinking these thoughts. He could establish to himself that he existed, but I have to take it on authority that he did. I don't know that there was a person named Descartes. I never met him. I don't know that he had these thoughts. So anyway, I'm not arguing that we should be doubting the existence of Descartes. I'm not arguing that I should be doubting your existence. And I would be even more foolish to doubt my own existence, which I can run the same proof that Descartes did. But a truly properly grounded epistemology has to. I mean, as you say, the Probabilities range from 0 to 100, and you should never assign a perfect 0 or a perfect 100. You know, and I, I counseled my kids that way when, when they were growing up. I said, what do you think the chances of that are? And they'd say it's 100% certain. And I say, you just screwed up.
- [15:14]
B
Yeah.
- [15:14]
A
But anyway, go ahead. You look like.
- [15:16]
B
Well, so maybe that's where I'll just define what I mean by truth in this case. A scientific truth is a claim for which the evidence is so substantial that it is rational to offer one's provisional assent so provisional is the key word there. Yes, of course, you might be right. None of us exist. Or. So there's. It's not zero that we're living in the matrix, but. Okay. And I got that from Gould, Steve Gould, who wrote a famous essay, evolution as Fact and Theory, in which he said facts and theories are different things, not rungs on a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data, theories or structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. And he. Then he goes on to say, scientists make no claim for perpetual truth, because in science, fact can only mean confirmed to such a degree, it would be perverse to withhold provisional ascent. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms now. So it's a bit of a practical definition there.
- [16:13]
A
Okay, so I'm no fan of Gould. Gould, in my opinion, is a villain in evolutionary biology because for reasons that many take to have been ideological, he created roadblocks to adaptive thinking and in my opinion, set the field back quite a bit. But never mind. I would argue that the taxonomy provided there by Gould is actually missing a rung, that there are rungs, your provisional ascent that can apply to a hypothesis that you believe is more strongly favored by the evidence as it is understood than the competing hypotheses. Would you agree that that would count as provisional ascent?
- [17:10]
B
Yep.
- [17:11]
A
Okay, so that is lower than a theory where all competing hypotheses have fallen and what we are left with is one hypothesis that then matures into a theory. And the fact that it is a theory, which is as close as we ever get to calling a model a fact, does not mean that it can't be displaced by a superior explanation that arises later. But it means that at the point that something is a theory properly, there is no competing hypothesis that remains valid in light of the evidence. You consider that fair?
- [17:55]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So let's. Well, let's just use some examples, like how do we know the Big Bang theory is right? Okay, well, there's a preponderance of evidence or convergence of evidence toward a single conclusion that out competes the steady state theory. And that was all resolved from, like, say, the 1940s through the 1960s. And by the time I started college, I took an astronomy course in 1972, the Big Bang theory had largely won out. Now by one out. Well, so it is. It's kind of a social process. You have professional astronomers and cosmologists. This is what they do, and they mostly agree this is the better explanation than this one. And you know, the expansion, the redshift of almost all galaxies moving away from one another looks like an explosion preponderance of fundamental elements like hydrogen and helium. The, you know, the background radiation of 3 degrees Kelvin looks like the remnants of an explosion. Now we know that the accelerating, the expansion is accelerating again as if it's an explosion and so on. So, you know, astronomers have largely worked this out. There are still a few Big Bang skeptics. I encounter them periodically, but they don't, you know, they don't publish in peer reviewed scientific journals. They just, you know, have these alternative theories. They can't seem to get a grasp to challenge the mainstream theory and, and they really just lack that kind of convergence of evidence to a single conclusion.
- [19:18]
A
Well, so let us, this is obviously not my area of expertise, but let's put some other things on the table so we know that this isn't just simply a matter, that when we look through a telescope, what we see is obviously the product of an explosion, however many billion years it was ago. 13.8 14 is what I was going to say. So let's. I am not a believer that we live in a simulation, but we can understand that if we live in a simulation, if this is a computer program in which reality is rendered in order to leave the impression that when we look through a telescope we see distant stars, but that isn't what they are, they are renderings in data, then that would invalidate the Big Bang because the sum total of all of the evidence would match the simulation hypothesis rather than the Big Bang theory. And I would argue that the reason that we do not have the Big Bang as a hypothesis and the simulation as a competing hypothesis is that the simulation does not make distinguishing predictions. It's not a hypothesis because it's not testable. But that does not mean that the Big Bang theory is certain. I mean, I'm reiterating your point here.
- [21:04]
B
It is only true the small T. Yeah, right. For now, this is what we think happened. I mean, it's possible it could be greatly revised. Apparently the James Webb telescope is finding galaxies that are fully formed like 100 million years after the Big Bang, which is not possible according to current theories of galaxy formation. All right, but that doesn't mean the creationists are right and that we should devote time to them who think the Universe was created 10,000 years ago. And the tired light that comes into the telescopes of astronomers is just a deception. It's not really 13.8 billion, it's 10,000 years.
- [21:38]
A
So you would expect just to build up the taxonomy properly, you would expect that science has likely discovered the correct fundamental explanation. An explosion cooling happens, heavier elements are formed by processes, gravitation being the key one that drives things together in early stars and when they go nova produce heavy elements. All of that that that explanation is correct. But you could see a revision of the date, right? If superior evidence came to light, that wouldn't invalidate the theory of the Big Bang, but it would modify it. And so that's the general pattern aspect is we get it right broad brush, our precision gets better over time. Every so often something that we were pretty darn sure about gets overthrown. That is also a natural part of the process. And it's in fact the best argument in favor of science that there is is that it's the one process that's built to self correct. Our final sponsor is Timeline. Timeline makes Mita pure, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone, Urolithin A. Found primarily in pomegranates, urolithin A has been the subject of hundreds of scientific or clinical studies, many of which find that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance. But how does it work? Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells, but like everything living, they can decay or get damaged. The older we get, the more likely we are to have damaged mitochondria, which accumulate in joints and other tissues. This is in part because mitophagy, the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells, becomes less efficient the older we get. The age related decline in mitophagy not only inhibits removal of damaged or excess mitochondria, but also impairs the creation of new mitochondria, which results in an overall decline in cell function. Mitopure from timeline works by triggering mitophagy, Quoting a research article published in Cell reports medicine in 2022, targeting mitophagy to activate the recycling of faulty mitochondria during aging is a strategy to mitigate muscle decline. We present results from a randomized placebo controlled trial in middle aged adults where we administer a postbiotic compound, urolithin A, a known mitophagy activator. At two doses for four months. The data show significant improvements in muscle strength 12% with intake of urolithin A. We observe clinically meaningful improvements with urolithin A on aerobic endurance and physical performance, but do not notice significant improvement on power output. Furthermore, research published in nature medicine in 2016 found that in mice the beneficial effects of urolithin A on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age. Take two soft gels of mitopure a day for two months and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance. Mitopure enhances your cell's ability to clean themselves up and regenerate new healthy mitochondria. In combination with regular physical activity, mitopure can help you stay strong and healthy into old age. Timeline is now offering 20 off your first order of might appear. Go to timeline.com darkhorse and use the code DARKHORSE to get 20 off your order. That's T I M e l I n e.com darkhorse yeah, well, like ulcers.
- [25:00]
B
Are caused by stress. Well, actually, no, that was wrong. We now know it was a virus or a bacteria, whatever it was bacteria, you know, and that took a while to overcome. I mean that guy, I forget his name now, who proposed that, you know, he, he met a lot of resistance, but he, he chugged through it and now that's the acceptance. So the idea that scientists are dogmatic and closed minded and live in flatland and can't see space land and so on, it's not true. How else would we get these sometimes true? Well, I would say, Brett, that, that usually, okay, it probably takes longer than we would like, but usually scientists, well, okay, they either die or the graduate students get the jobs and then they are more open to the new ideas and so on. Yes, but it does happen.
- [25:41]
A
Yep.
- [25:41]
B
And as you know, and, and usually the errors in science, like in the case of evolutionary biology where creations would say, oh look, they got that fossil wrong or they fell for Piltdown man or whatever. So how can we trust anything the scientists say? Yeah, but it's usually the scientists that found out that Piltdown man was a hoax and that that fossil was misidentified and so on, not the creationists.
- [26:03]
A
Well, I do think we have a new crop of creationists who have actually leveled up the quality of their science.
- [26:13]
B
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
- [26:15]
A
So, you know, I'm intelligent.
- [26:18]
B
Intelligent design theorists. Yeah, they're, they're better than the, the Dwayne Gish young earth creationist crowd for sure.
- [26:23]
A
Right. To be sure.
- [26:24]
B
But they're still. Okay, so, but this is interesting case study. Okay. Because I know all those guys. I've read all the books and so on. There's still a move they make where they, they exit methodological naturalism and they end up, you know, with the God of the gaps type argument. It always Comes down to that. And then a miracle happened. And then this. We can't explain the mind or, you know, the rise of complex systems. Eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic cells. There's a RNA to DNA. There's a gap there. And, you know, they have a laundry list of these things. So, you know, I offer the best explanation we have, and they go, yeah, I'm not buying it. So I go, okay, then what's your explanation? Well, and it just comes down to, well, God did it. It's like. But that's not really an explanation. I mean, how did God do it? How did God take RNA and mush it into DNA? Or, you know, how did the designer do this? So it's not an explanation that's useful.
- [27:19]
A
Well, to the extent that they offer that explanation, it is a violation of a philosophical principle that we require in order to do science, which is. It just. It takes that which cannot be explained and offers to solve it with a much greater mystery. If God did all these things, then God has to be explained or you haven't explained anything. So I would hold their feet to the fire on that. But I also see. I see a. Because these folks are motivated to search for errors in the Darwinian story, I believe they actually are doing a more honest job of finding genuinely difficult puzzles than modern evolutionary biologists, who, in my opinion, are so afraid of opening the door to challenges to Darwinism that they pretend the story is far more complete and convincing than it is. And I say this as an evolutionary biologist who believes Darwin was not only right, but right at a level that is hard to imagine, given how primitive his evidence set was. He did spectacularly well. And I see no major challenge to Darwin. But I do see modern Darwinists failing to recognize the holes in the model that they've got because effectively, they're fighting an ideological battle with religious folks that is blinding them. So that's an uncomfortable position for me to sit in. I'd love to. I'd love to be just rooting for Team Darwin.
- [29:12]
B
It's a fair point. Why are they excluded? Well, in part, they don't publish in the scientific journals where you would challenge the Darwinian paradigm. Let's take, by way of contrast, Lynn Margulis, you know, who was pushing her theory of. What was it? Angiogenesis? No, symbiogenesis, I think it was called. You know, how prokaryotic cells, you know, merged into prokaryotic cells, Mitochondria being the most famous example. They were themselves once an independent organism. And so on. Well, you know more about this than I do do, but you know, she, she plugged away for decades and now her theories are largely accepted. How did she do that? She published in peer reviewed journals, she went to conferences. I spent a week with her in the Galapagos with a bunch of evolutionary biologists and she was quite the, the, you know, bellicose. I'm going to challenge the paradigm and I'm not a Darwinian, I'm not even a neo Darwinian. I'm, I forget what she called herself. But, but you know, but she's in the room, she's one of them and they, so she gets a hearing because she's playing the game of science the way it's designed be played.
- [30:16]
A
I'm with you, Michael. I think that these intelligent design folks should be publishing in all of the evolutionary journals that courageously stood up and said there are exactly two sexes and you can't change from one to the other by deciding to do it. Yes, that's where they should publish. Right? Yeah, yeah, because those journals don't exist, Michael.
- [30:37]
B
Okay, I see your point. Yeah, well, okay, well, so, yeah, but enough of us are standing up on that particular issue. I think we're winning that battle.
- [30:45]
A
Right, right. But, but hold second, you have an entire field. Every single person in evolutionary biology knows not only that sex is binary, but knows why it is binary and knows that it has been binary for hundreds of millions of years. And yet the field did not stand up, not even en masse. There's not one department in the country that stood up and said we're compassionate about people who have persistent gender dysphoria, but you can't switch sexes as a human being. Not one, not one medical school said it. So there's something rotten in the land of science. And as much as I would like there to be a level playing field where the intelligent design folks could bring their evidence and everybody else could bring their evidence and may the better model win. That playing field does not exist.
- [31:49]
B
Well, okay, but what's the alternative? So it's rough. Well, we all stand up and say no, that's wrong. And again, I think there it's so politicized, the trans issue. Let's just use that example that scientists ideologies and their desire for social change and acceptance and so on. And you know, we had the civil rights and the women's rights and the gay rights and so the trans rights, well that's got to be, be the next thing I got to be behind. Okay, I'm support That. And now then they make the other mistake. Well, then the biology's got to match my ideology, even though that's completely wrong. Because, I mean, it's back, back in the days when, you know, well, blacks are less intelligent than whites. Well, we can't say that because then they could be mistreated. So you mean if it turned out that. That blacks are less intelligent than whites, then it's okay to discriminate? No. Okay. Or that gays are this or women are that. You know, we should hold moral values regardless of whatever the science says, because if we don't do that, then we're going to push the science in an incorrect direction. So that's the mistake that they make. And okay, so the fact that most of these biologists who know that sex is binary were. Did not stand up for that or, you know, what's in their hearts. Do they really know? Probably. They really know. They're afraid to say something.
- [33:13]
A
I don't know which is more damning.
- [33:15]
B
I know, it's worse. Yeah, I know they're both worse.
- [33:17]
A
If they do know, then they're cowards, which I can tell you, almost. Does that mean academics are.
- [33:22]
B
But does that mean all other areas in the biological sciences? Let's say, you know, some of your, your issues, like with vaccines or, or Covid or alternative models. But I think you have a lineage.
- [33:36]
A
Lineage?
- [33:38]
B
Yeah, lineage selection. That, that doesn't mean you're being discriminated against because of. For ideological reasons. It may be.
- [33:47]
A
Oh, I didn't, I didn't say I was.
- [33:48]
B
No, I know. I'm just using as an example. So how should you introduce your ideas into the community? Like your lineage?
- [33:57]
A
Look, I think you're starting with an assumption which is that there must be a mechanism for doing this correctly in 2026.
- [34:07]
B
Well, I would hope so.
- [34:09]
A
Look, you and I would agree that we must have such a system because we have a very dangerous civilization that needs to be carefully governed based on sound scientific principles and to discover that the academy is unreliable in generating evidence or models to account for it because it's ideologically driven at best and financially corrupted in the more common case. That's a very dangerous statement. I don't relish making it because frankly, I've got kids who have to live in this world, so I'm not. I, I sometimes think I get misunderstood because I rail against the system consistently. I want the system to work, and I'm not asking for perfection. I just want it to work well. I want the signal to noise ratio to be Good. So that we can make progress over time. And what I see is a system that. Well, frankly. Let's talk about the food pyramid. How do you feel about the new food pyramid?
- [35:21]
B
Oh, I like it mostly I think it's right. But I thought that for many years.
- [35:25]
A
You were already eating that way.
- [35:27]
B
Right, I was already eating that way.
- [35:28]
A
Me too. It wasn't that hard. And yet what we find is that it was not a major revision of the pyramid. It was a flipping. Yeah, they had it upside down.
- [35:40]
B
Let's look at that as an example of science working slowly but toward the truth. Right. The early skeptics in the 90s, Gary Taubes in particular, who was publishing everywhere he could in major newspapers, not journals, because he's a journalist, but his books were published by major publishers and so on. And then Nina Teicholtz and others picked up the mantle and here we are. Okay. It should have happened in the 90s at the. @ the latest. But that's how it goes. Because, you know, the ideology was so. It wasn't really political ideology, just. Just this. I don't know, this entrenched idea of what nutrition.
- [36:20]
A
Properly. It was corruption. It was corruption.
- [36:23]
B
Overwhelming. Oh, because of the food companies. Okay. All right. Yes. So, all right. Like the tobacco companies.
- [36:28]
A
Influence. I think you're skipping a.
- [36:30]
B
Step. Okay.
- [36:31]
A
Okay. Let's suppose that the food pyramid that we had grown up with was arbitrary. That it was generated by a random number generator. Either somebody sitting at a desk with some dice or a computer and they just slapped stuff on the pyramid willy nilly. And then suddenly in 2026, somebody decides to actually look into nutrition and discovers what you and I figured out, even though it's neither of our fields. Right. Okay. Suddenly we get a proper food pyramid. That's not what happened. The food pyramid was literally upside down. What we were being told about what to eat was an inversion of what we should eat. My point to you would be anytime you see that pattern, what that means is that the right answer was calculated by the system and then somebody took the reciprocal. That is, incidentally, I know you will disagree with me on this. Years from now, my expectation is you'll have a food pyramid inversion moment. But that is the exact pattern we saw with the CDC and Covid. The CDC had the correct formula for how we should address Covid and they flipped it on its head. It was the inverse of what you should do. That is not an accident. I don't know what it.
- [38:01]
B
Is. I don't know. I think I tend to go with the Incompetence over conspiracy explanation for most things. Well, I mean, I think like in the, in the nutrition thing, you know, this goes back to the 1950s, post World War II, and, you know, the baby boomers and what are we going to eat? And then Eisenhower has a heart attack. What does he do? He eats a lot of meat. Oh, yeah, but he smoked. Yeah, but, you know, smoking's fine because the tobacco company said. All right, so you're right. Tobacco companies corrupted the research on, on tobacco and the food company. But I don't think that. See, to me, the food companies followed suit. Like, okay, so this is what the government's recommending. This is what people are going to want when they come in the supermarket. These foods that they're recommending taste like crap. So we got to put, put sugar in it to make it taste good. They're just kind of following a market trend rather than we need to buy off the politicians, maybe they did something later.
- [38:56]
A
With. I don't think that's the case. Now, this is, of course, speculative, but my sense is when a policy is actually in everybody's interest, it easily passes. Right. It doesn't matter whether you're a corrupt, cynical politician or an honorable one. You have every reason to pass things that are good for everybody. Which leaves a remainder. Things where what's good for the public is actually not good for some other power structure. In those cases, a power structure that has resources at its disposal corrupts the system in order that the system will dispense the advice that would lead people to whatever products are being sold that you shouldn't be.
- [39:46]
B
Eating.
- [39:47]
A
Yeah. And away from the public interest and what we are finding out. In fact, I would flip the presumption on its head. I know that your bias is against conspiracy. I believe that that is should be the starting point. We should always assume a straightforward explanation and then require some sort of indication that something else may have happened before leaping to such a conclusion. But here's the question. How good do you imagine the protections are against corruption in the area of, let's say, public health and.
- [40:27]
B
Nutrition? About childhood education at the learning center in Minneapolis. Yeah. Corruption is pretty, pretty. A pretty big problem. Yeah. Okay, so what do you do about it? Well, you have corruption busters, you bring in the Elon Musk, the Doge, you bring in. Now they just hired somebody new to be a fraud buster for the U.S. government. Okay, back to the peer review. Okay, so. Oh, it's corrupted. There's problems. Yeah. Okay. What, what, what do you propose.
- [41:00]
A
As the alternative Peer review, I mean, but not peer review in the way that we do it. I would do peer reviewed. So let me just say for those who heard that and thought, what Brett's advocating for peer review. I am advocating for review by peers, not the system that goes under that name. If I was building that system, I would change a number of things. Things. One, anonymity has no place because, for one thing, it doesn't work right. Reciprocity networks break out. People in general know who's reviewed their work because the circles that these things are published in are small. So, yeah, anonymity has to.
- [41:39]
B
Go. And they even ask you to recommend reviewers. When I review papers, I always know who the author is because you just look at the bibliography and there's one name that appears like 27 times, like, oh, that's the author.
- [41:51]
A
Yep. It's all too easy to figure out. So I would have open review. I would have no. No bar to publishing things because they sound outlandish. At one time, it was necessary to do some sort of quality control because ink and paper were expensive, but pixels are not expensive. And there is no reason that just because somebody is too far ahead of the curve and therefore their idea sounds outlandish, to bar them from lodging it. I would. The fact of peer review being de anonymized would also force people who run down their competitors in peer review to actually risk reputational harm if they have done so and done so wrongly. So I want people to have skin in the game where if they say this paper is of low quality and here are the problems with it, and it turns out to be correct, that the people who reviewed it badly have their reputations decremented, and the person who saw it well ahead has their reputation elevated. And maybe most crucially, I would have review done not by the people in your immediate quadrant of the field. I would have peer review done by people in some sort of adjacent quadrant, people who are in a position to understand what you're saying, but not part of a reciprocity network in your little corner of the field. And that has two advantages. One, it breaks up the temptation to give somebody a positive review, so they'll give you a positive review on your next paper. And it also forces you to explain stuff in English. Far too much poor work is disguised by jargon. And if you have to explain it so somebody who's not in your immediate field understands what you're talking about, it will weed out some of the people who are basically distributing word salad in the guise of science. And it will elevate those who actually have a point that's sufficiently good that it can be.
- [44:17]
B
Stated. Mm. Okay, so let me just use a personal example for you. You, you've been on Rogan a lot, as has your brother. That seems to be the place where you introduce new ideas, as if that's the peer review platform and you're hoping, who's watching? So let's say you present your, your. Sorry to get it wrong. Lineage selection. Lineage selection. Okay. Now, Joe, he's not going to know any of that. He doesn't know this and that. Okay, so are you hoping that somebody. Listen, watching is an evolutionary biologist goes, oh, that's a great idea. I'm gonna put that to the test, or something like that. In other words, how can you reach the people, the professionals that will know what you're talking about? That. So you're, you're skeptical of the journals. Okay.
- [45:03]
A
But. So I've just done what? I've just done this. My, my most recent Rogan.
- [45:09]
B
Appearance. I know. I, I, I watched.
- [45:11]
A
Yeah. I, I put forward an idea that I think is pretty interesting. And what I was hoping was I wasn't really expecting professors to be listening to Rogan, though I would bet some secretly do. But I was imagining that graduate students might spot it and have. I mean, look, if this had happened back when I was in graduate school, we would have had some intense discussions over lunch about whether this idea was valid, whether there were things that I got wrong, whether there were things that I didn't yet spot that argue in favor of it. I was expecting a certain amount of that. And I did get one bit of feedback from somebody who studies the exact genetic phenomenon at the core of my idea, Variable number tandem repeats, who was very favorable to what I had said, said interested in further discussion. So anyway. But the thing, I think the right answer to your question, Michael, is I wasn't really expecting Joe Rogan to be the substitute for a proper journal or biology department. And in fact, I think I said that I don't expect that to be the case. It's a lousy substitute, but it's at least not constrained by corrupted cowards who are, frankly, so arrogant they don't even realize they're making an error. And, you know, again, I'm sure you hear in that too much of a dismissal of an entire field. But I lived in that field.
- [46:55]
B
And maybe a contrasting example would be, I watched your public event with Richard Dawkins. I think it was in.
- [47:03]
A
Seattle. No, no, it was in.
- [47:05]
B
Chicago. Ought was that a Pang burn event. I think you were the, you were the. But it was an. In conversation. You weren't just interviewing him. Right. You guys could have. Yeah. So I, if I recall, you floated past him your idea of, of an example of a extended phenotype, which he then said, no, that's incorrect and here's why. And then you moved, I think you moved on to another topic and I, I just. As an example, if you think there is an example of the extended phenotype that Richard's gotten wrong, you should publish that. I mean, you should write it up and, and say, I'm challenging Richard Dawkins theory here. And here's my theory. A book, peer review journal, I don't know, popular magazine article, something, because it's Dawkins, you would certainly get some attention. Right. Well, but where do you go from public event to now I'm going to move on to some other topic. How can we resolve.
- [47:57]
A
This? So the problem here, Michael, is that my interaction with the published literature began with my work on telomeres, senescence and cancer. And I believe that what I attempted to publish, ultimately did publish in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. But I believe that what I intended to publish. Sent to Nature, sent to Nature with a strong recommendation from George Williams, the author of the Evolutionary Theory of Senescence, which still stands to this day, they rejected without review. And my then collaborator, Carol Grider, appears to have attempted to thwart its publication anywhere because it contained an explosive discovery on which she and I collaborated that she went on to profit by, by not telling the world. She kept it what she called in house so that she could predict the result of experiments that others would not be able to. And basically, instead of sharing this vital piece of information which had implications for human health and well being, in other words, keeping dangerous drugs off the market, instead of sharing that piece of information, she kept it to herself in order to elevate her own career. So that experience watching my work silenced by a competitor at a major journal, in spite of the fact that one of the leading evolutionary biologists of his generation recommended that they take it very seriously, left me with very little respect for the institution of peer review. You're asking, well, what do you want to do instead? And my point to you is, look, you want to put me in charge of building a system that works, I'll take that question and I'll run with it. But I'm not in that position. So what will I do instead? Will I waste my life talking to a tiny number of peers who have the ability to shut down what I say, true, false or otherwise. Why would I do.
- [50:28]
B
That? Okay, just, just a point, point of clarification, because I don't know this story. If she was listening to this, what would, what would her response be? Something like, no, I never did that, or he misinterpreted what I was doing.
- [50:40]
A
Or. Well, first of all, at the point that. But I went to publish my work and I discovered that she was secretly publishing our collaboration without my name anywhere on it. She pretended that the conversations had not happened. Now, you will note she's welcome to sue me. We will find out exactly what happened in discovery. And as is always the case, as extraordinary as the story I'm telling you is, I'm telling it like it happened happened. I have the.
- [51:14]
B
Evidence, but usually these things are played out in, you know, letters to the editor at some other journal. Whatever this journal was, they must have competitive competing journals who would love this.
- [51:27]
A
Story. Yes, but I, this is why I said ultimately I did publish this work and there's a story to how it got published. Because when Nature turned this work down, I, I do not know for sure because he is now dead. But I believe George Williams approached the Journal of Experimental Gerontology, told them what had happened, they solicited the paper. I, trying to be the scientist, I was told I was supposed to be recommended reviewers, including Carol Greider, my collaborator. They sent it to her. She wrote a scathing review of my paper, just point after point after point. And they were preposterous. At the point, I finally worked up the courage to call out this leading light of the field and to tell the editors of the journal, carol or whoever has reviewed this paper. I didn't name her because I didn't officially know who it had been. Whoever reviewed this paper does not understand the material. The review. The editors are welcome to point to any point she makes and I will send back the proper response, but there are too many preposterous claims here to address them all. I sent that back and within minutes the journal published. They sent back an email and they said they didn't. It was not electronic at the time, but they sent back an email that says accepted for publication. So the editors of that journal actually overrode peer review because they understood the deeper story. Now, strangely, I thought that that was a one off experience until Eric later pointed me to the book, the Emperor of Scent. Have you read this.
- [53:30]
B
Book? I, I haven't read. Let's see. I read parts of it. I know, I think I just saw A lecture by the guy. He was the New York Times reviewer of Perfumes or whatever, I.
- [53:42]
A
Think. Luca.
- [53:43]
B
Turin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, so interesting. Yeah.
- [53:46]
A
Okay. I highly recommend this book. You'll love it. But he tells a story in his own case that mirrors the story that I lived. When Eric read it, he's. He called me up, he said, brett, you've got to read this. This happened to somebody else. So anyway, the idea of editors overriding peer review, because what's going on in peer review is that competitors are snuffing each other out is apparently not all that rare. And in the case of my work, what was on the line? Human health. Right. Dangerous drugs. Mice that were being raised to test drug safety that were incapable of telling you that a drug was toxic. So, anyway, I don't know why we focused on this story.
- [54:30]
B
Except. And when was that? How long ago was.
- [54:33]
A
This? My paper was ultimately published in 2002. The work was completed in.
- [54:44]
B
1999. Wow. Okay, so a long time ago. Well, you know, there's journalists that cover these kind of scientific disputes. You know, you go back to Leibniz and Newton over the calculus and Wallace and Darwin over natural selection and, I don't know, Crick and Watson and. And. And the other, you know, founders of that field and so on. But these things get played out. I mean, you know, it just. It gets resolved at some.
- [55:09]
A
Point. I hate to be the guy to do this to you because, as I say, I really appreciate the role that you play in the world. Holding people like me, holding our feet to the fire. However. Do you think. I didn't go to.
- [55:22]
B
Journalists. I don't know what you.
- [55:24]
A
Did. I went. I went to numerous journalists. I had the same experience over and over again. Okay. I would tell them my story. I would show them the evidence. They would be flabbergasted, fascinated. They would say, who can I call to find out if this is really true? And I would say, I don't know who you can call, because reciprocity networks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They would call some friends somewhere, and the next thing I know, they would ghost me. It happened so many times. So what I'm telling you is the process that we believe exists is a cargo cult. It is embedded within a network of people who are largely cynical and careerist, who have an interest in shutting down interlopers who are not under anyone's control. I don't like saying that. It doesn't feel comfortable because, hey, I trained as a scientist. I want to believe in the system. I want to say, ah, they screwed up there. But here's a place where, you know, the light shined through. I can't say it because I've seen too much. And you keep asking me, well, why don't you do this? Or, you know, what should we be doing instead? And the answer is, well, I can answer those questions. Why am I not doing it? Because I did it. And I saw a shocking story of what happens when an evolutionary biologist stumbles into a realm where there's actually money at stake. Right. That's what I think happened. So that's why.
- [57:15]
B
I'm. Money that she, your co author, could make. Say again, the. The money that your co author made or could make from.
- [57:23]
A
This. Well, she. She has a Nobel Prize now, so. And.
- [57:30]
B
During. What's her name.
- [57:31]
A
Again? Carol.
- [57:32]
B
Greider. Oh, okay. All.
- [57:34]
A
Right. Yeah. And, you know, she got her Nobel Prize for work that she and her advisor did. They discovered the enzyme telomerase that allows cells to add extra repeats to the end of a telomere. That work had nothing to do with me. It was long before she and I knew each other. But during her Nobel lecture, she presented the work that emerged from our collaboration without mentioning me, and presented it upside down. Interestingly, she presented as if the ultra long telomeres that exist in captive mice colonies are a useful feature that allows us to discover all kinds of wonderful things about mice, rather than an embarrassing product of the captive breeding protocols which puts human life in.
- [58:20]
B
Jeopardy. Okay, I have an.
- [58:22]
A
Idea. All.
- [58:23]
B
Right. Rogan should have her and you on the show the.
- [58:26]
A
Same. Go. I would gladly.
- [58:28]
B
Go. Okay, well, in other words, how do we get to resolution? All right, so by way of another example. So your brother has gone on Rogan a bunch of times talking about his theory of geometric unity. Yeah. And so, you know, again, what does Joe know about these things? And he's just a great conversationalist. But, you know, how about a physicist that does this, you know, that's in this area. So I see that Piers Morgan had on Eric with Sean Carroll. So I thought, oh, okay, here we go. So I watched the whole thing, and it got a little testy, for sure. But I thought, Sean, you know, made a good faith effort. Like, I read the paper, here's what. I have some problems with it. And, you know, Eric wasn't particularly vibing that too much, although he made some responses. But again, why is this happening on Piers Morgan and Joe Rogan? How come? Why doesn't Eric publish it, his theory in a journal? And then there's a Peer review, open peer commentary. Here's our target article, Eric Weinstein's article. Here's like 10 different responses to it. I mean, that's how it normally works. And although yes, there are, all the problems you identified are true, but as opposed to.
- [59:37]
A
What? Well, hold on, hold on. Let me ask you a question. Theoretical physics is dominated today by string theorists.
- [59:52]
B
Okay. Yeah, but there's, you know, there was that book like 10 years ago saying not even wrong about string.
- [59:59]
A
Theory.
- [59:59]
B
Right. By one of the major. Okay, so there are people in the.
- [60:03]
A
Field. Here's my question. How is it possible for string theory to dominate theoretical physics in light of the fact that it does not make make predictions that render it.
- [60:17]
B
Testable? I don't know. Yeah, it seems to me it's way past its sell by date.
- [60:22]
A
But. So I don't know. Yeah, I hear you struggling against a red pill that I think you should take. The fact that you have. Look, if we policed our language correctly, string theory isn't a theory. It's not even a hypothesis. It's a notion. Right. It becomes a hypothesis at the point that it makes predictions. So it's been boosted two rungs past where it actually lives. Not only has it been boosted two rungs to the level of theory, our highest category, but that does not leave room for some second school of thought to be ascending inside of the academy. That's bizarre. Would you.
- [61:20]
B
Agree? You mean in terms of why does the funding keep pouring into string theory research even though everything what you just said is true? Don't they know? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's a, you know, an autocatalytic feedback system there where they, they, they scratch each other's back and, you know, I'll fund your project if you fund my.
- [61:39]
A
Project. Great. Where in the scientific method or the description of how peer review is supposed to maintain quality is that reciprocity network that you're.
- [61:51]
B
Describing? Yeah, well, maybe we need some of those graduate students you're reaching out to, to get in there and say we're not going to fund this.
- [61:57]
A
Anymore. Yeah, but what happens? What happens? Look, I've been, I've been the graduate student who didn't go along to get a of lot long. I almost didn't get my degree over. Caused my department to polarize. I was very popular in one side of it and very unpopular in the other. And believe me, there are stories at the point that I went to file my dissertation and defend it to get my degree. I saw emails I wasn't supposed to in which the department is constructing rules that didn't exist in order to make it impossible. So look, I want to live in the world that you think we live in. You know what I'm.
- [62:44]
B
Saying? Let's. Let me use another example. The replication crisis, which began in 2010, roughly with the publication of Daryl Bem's experiment on backward causality on esp. Okay, so this was of obvious interest to skeptics, and we followed that pretty closely. And then when it was found that, you know, these methodological flaws, how did all of this get past the peer reviews? Peer reviewers. And then it was like, oh, well, what about this study here? Like, if you stand at the top of the escalator, you're more likely to give a bigger donation at the bottom of the escalator. Or if you put a pen in your mouth this way versus this way, you'll find the joke funnier or not funny. Or if you hold a cup of warm coffee and you meet somebody, you'll interpret them as being warm. Vers is a cold cut. None of these replicated. Okay, this is all bullshit. And so it turns out something like 50, 60% of all psychology peer reviewed papers should have probably never been published. And then that got spilled over into some of the medical research, which is way more complicated than the psych experiments and open to corruption and mistakes and errors and so on. But the response over the last 15 years has been to clean it up, right? So no more data snooping, no more file draw problems. You know, you. You tell us before you run the experiments, everything you're going to do, and then you publish every single thing you found. And so there's no, none of this. You're only reporting the one experiment of the nine that was significant and so on, that supposedly I'm being, I'm told by people that follow this is that you know that that's been a big improvement over what it was before the replication.
- [64:27]
A
Crisis. Right, but how could the replication crisis. Look, first of all, I should just tell you as a matter of. In the interest of full disclosure, I was ranting about the problem and game ability of P values long before the term replication crisis.
- [64:45]
B
Existed. P.
- [64:46]
A
Hacking. Yeah, yeah, P hacking. It's obvious. If you have been through statistics and you've looked at the way the academy functions on the inside, that people who take liberties, I mean the whole system functions on the honor system and people who take liberties. And it's not just P hacking. P hacking is one thing you can do to make your results look important. That will result in Things that aren't even true being regarded as facts. But another thing you can do is you can collect data that you don't have a hypothesis about. That's nothing wrong with that. It's observational data. But if you see a pattern in that data and then you report the pattern that you saw as a hypothesis, and then claim that you collected the data looking to see if the hypothesis was true, and eureka, it is. The prediction is visible in the data. There's no way for outsiders to know that you just committed fraud. So anyway, the basic point is if you don't punish people who are engaged in these everyday run of the mill frauds, they will out compete everyone else because they will publish more. They will publish things that seem significant in ways that they, they really aren't. So I think what I would say is the enforcement mechanism doesn't exist. The prosecutions of scientific fraud are rare. That predicts the system will be overrun by competitors who avail themselves of this tool. If you want to understand why people like me are, are skeptical of the entire academy, it comes down to things like this. The academy is structured in such a way, such that unscrupulous people will rise to the top of it. And what do unscrupulous people do when an honorable person shows up? Well, they either corrupt them or kick them out. So you know, I, I'm not describing a conspiracy, I'm describing a selective regime that causes the academy to be be feeble, clannish, unreliable and full of.
- [67:22]
B
Cowards. Okay, another alternative idea. You have a mainstream New York publishing house, right, that published your, your previous book, 21st Century. I forget which, who your publisher was, but it was one of the big ones, right Penguin? Yeah, Penguin, Yeah. Okay, that's right, Penguin. It doesn't get any bigger than that. Okay, so you, and you have a platform. I mean, you have millions of followers and you're a famous guy. Why not publish a book about, I don't know, scientific fraud or the whole issue and have a chapter on your particular one? Why not? Surely they would be interested in.
- [67:58]
A
That. The real answer to that question is where does outing scientific fraud fall in the spectrum of things I should be spending my time on? And I'm not arguing that it would not be, be a good investment of time if time were unlimited. The question is how many things fall above it? And it's quite a number.
- [68:24]
B
So. Well, but, but it's important to you first. And, and also your core message here is that there's a massive problem with all of science, particularly as it influences Public policy. That's huge. I mean. Yes, but so, so what's more important than.
- [68:41]
A
That? Well, no, that's not. I mean, the calculation is a little more complex than that, because the question is, as I've stated publicly many times, I don't believe that you can reform the academy to the point of functionality. I would call the problems with the academy three generation problems. Those are problems that if you. You started fixing it today, it would be three generations before you had a functional academy. It would get better almost immediately, but it wouldn't be the thing that I think you imagine it is for three generations. And that's because the number of people who know how to do the job correctly and are just simply not doing it because the incentives don't support it is small. It's actually a training ground for a kind of corrupted thinking. And, you know, I don't. No part of me is happy saying that.
- [69:44]
B
It'S. Yeah, yeah, okay. But here's what I'm after. What? How can we resolve this and. And kind of put it out there to see if what you're saying is true? Well, the only way to do it is to publish it. I mean, you can't. Podcasts are not the same. They're great. I love podcasts, but, you know, put it in print, you know, so again, Penguin. Surely your agent would shop that around if they didn't want it, One of the other big houses would want it. The famous Bret Weinstein has this idea, and look what happened to him. And so on. And there's all these other areas of fraud and corruption. The cdc, the tobacco, the food companies. That would make a spectacular book. So do.
- [70:23]
A
It. Well, I mean, why not? You're imagining that I'm not writing other books that are of higher.
- [70:28]
B
Priority. Okay, all right, well, then tell.
- [70:30]
A
Me. Tell you that I am. Yeah, I. I am. And unfortunately, my. My time is divided between projects that I think are blinking red light.
- [70:42]
B
Projects. So anyway, to some people, Brad, it feels like you're doing an end run around the.
- [70:50]
A
System.
- [70:50]
B
Yes. That you don't want to play in it. And all the other. I mean, how many evolutionary biologists are there? Thousands. You know, they all have to publish in journals to get tenure to have their jobs. They look at you and they go, how come I'm not on Rogan? I do all this work and it seems like this guy is just trying to cut to the front of the line, and that doesn't feel.
- [71:09]
A
Right. Oh, look, I don't even take them seriously. Again, where were they when medical science was surgically destroying the reproductive capacity of innocent young people on the basis that they were born in a body of the wrong sex. Where were.
- [71:31]
B
They? Yeah, I'm right there with you. Good.
- [71:35]
A
Question. So. So my point is any evolutionary biologist who wonders why I'm on Rogan but didn't stand up to the mutilation of healthy.
- [71:44]
B
Children. All right, fair.
- [71:44]
A
Enough. Right.
- [71:45]
B
Off. Fair enough. All right. Can I ask you about another Rogan statement you made in your recent episode? Again, back to. So here's the general none of us know much about anything, so we have to rely on authorities and so on. Okay, so vaccines and COVID 19. All this is not my area. Right. So you've told Rogan that 17 million people died because of the MRNA.
- [72:09]
A
Vaccines. No, I.
- [72:10]
B
Didn'T. So you.
- [72:12]
A
Didn'T?
- [72:12]
B
No. What did you.
- [72:13]
A
Say? I said at 17 million.
- [72:17]
B
People. All right, anyway, so I.
- [72:19]
A
Just. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't get to do.
- [72:20]
B
That. That.
- [72:21]
A
What. What I said was careful and true. I've seen a credible estimate. I'm not saying one way or the other as to whether or not that estimate is high or low or what will happen to it over time, but the difference between portraying me as having said 17 million people died, as if that was some fact that I knew rather than. I saw Denny Rancourt's paper in which he estimated the excess mortality at the moment that the vaccine campaign showed.
- [72:50]
B
Up.
- [72:51]
A
Up. I'm pointing to work, published work that says exactly this. I didn't misrepresent.
- [72:57]
B
Anything. Yeah, okay, good. Here's. So I just typed into Super Grok, did 17 million people die because of COVID 19 mRNA vaccines? Super Grok's response is no. There is no credible evidence that 17 million people die because of COVID 19 mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna. This claim is false and originates from a flawed non peer reviewed analysis that misrepresented excess mortality data by attributing it to vaccines. Vaccines while ignoring surges in COVID 19 infections and deaths. The 17 million figure stems from a 2023 report by Denny Rancour and colleagues which analyzed all cause mortality in 17 Southern Hemisphere countries and extrapolated a vaccine fatality rate globally. Fact checks from sources like AFP, Reuters, FactCheck.org and Science Feedback have debunked it, noting that excess death spikes aligned with COVID 19 waves, for example Omicron, not vaccination rollouts, and that the analysis failed to account for confounding factors like infection rates. Large scale studies through 2025 consistently show no increase long term. All cause mortality from MRNA vaccines and often lower mortality among vaccinated people. And then it has a bunch of sources and so on. All right, so.
- [74:16]
A
Yeah. Do you know how an LLM.
- [74:18]
B
Works? Yeah, it scrapes all the sources. It has a whole pile of sources.
- [74:22]
A
There. Yeah, it has a whole pile of sources. And so to the extent that corruption results in those sources being biased in a direction, it regurgitates it. And now you're regurgitating.
- [74:32]
B
It. Yes. Well, but what are my.
- [74:34]
A
Alternatives? Well, you could think for.
- [74:36]
B
Yourself. Well, I know, but this is not my.
- [74:38]
A
Area. Oh, no, no, don't do that. That's a mistake. Let me ask you a question. Are you still getting Covid.
- [74:44]
B
Boosters?
- [74:45]
A
No. You're not? Why.
- [74:47]
B
Not? Well, I've already had Covid a couple times, so I have natural.
- [74:53]
A
Immunity. So you believe in natural.
- [74:54]
B
Immunity? Well, after the entire public health.
- [74:58]
A
Apparatus assured us that natural immunity was not good enough and that you still got a benefit from.
- [75:03]
B
Them. Oh, they got it. Look, look, Brett, they got many.
- [75:06]
A
Things. Do you remember that moment in time? I do remember people like me shouting about.
- [75:11]
B
This. Yes, I.
- [75:12]
A
Do. Okay, so now we find out out from Paul Offit that all of the major players gathered together and privately understood the very same thing that they were gaslighting us over. They understood that natural immunity was the best immunity, that you were going to come by, and that a vaccine wasn't going to augment it. And they decided to keep that to themselves. In spite of the fact that these vaccines are built on a novel technology they didn't know the hazards of, at best. So how is it it that these people can privately meet and decide? There's a whole swath, millions of people, hundreds of millions of people who'd already had Covid, who didn't need to take any risk whatsoever from a novel vaccine. How is it that they get to privately decide to keep that information to.
- [76:00]
B
Themselves? Okay, and why, given that they did that, given that you remember the.
- [76:06]
A
Moment in history at which they.
- [76:09]
B
Were.
- [76:09]
A
Were. Not only were they disagreeing with us, which was a lie, they were gaslighting us. They were telling people like you that people like me were crazy. Well, I don't understand how you don't learn that lesson. Or maybe you did, and that's why you're not getting any more Covid.
- [76:26]
B
Boosters. No, I just think again, it's more of a changing information landscape. We think this is what, you know, we think masks work. Masks don't work. Yeah, we should have masks, distancing. Close the schools. Open the.
- [76:40]
A
Schools. Why do you think information landscape.
- [76:42]
B
Changed? Well, because the information was low at to begin with. And then we got more information. I'm less conspiratorial that. That Paul Offit and his buddies all.
- [76:51]
A
Met. According to Paul.
- [76:53]
B
Offit. I don't, I don't remember him saying.
- [76:57]
A
That. He's talked about it twice on video. He's described the meeting where he and Foushee and Collins and Walensky got together and they talked about the fact that natural immunity was superior and they decided not to tell the public. Public. That's from Paul.
- [77:11]
B
Offit. You can go look at that. I don't remember that. But. But they, they're going to lie to the public. They can't. I can't. I can't believe Paul Offit would say, yeah, we agreed we would lie.
- [77:20]
A
To the public, that he represents himself as having been.
- [77:23]
B
Outvoted. Okay.
- [77:26]
A
Okay. All right.
- [77:27]
B
So. But.
- [77:29]
A
Why? Here's the important point. And look, I'm sorry to be hard on you, Michael. I really do like you. But my point is you've switched team. Teams. You're now on team. Don't get your Covid booster. Okay? And I think that's wise. I think you were in error to ever get one. But why the information landscape changed is because I went on Rogan and Malone went on Rogan and McCullough went on Rogan and Pierre Corey went on Rogan. And we talked about these things in public. Bypassing the system that was set up to shut us down.
- [78:05]
B
Down. See, I don't think that's what it was because that's very top down conspiratorial. We know. We know what, what Brett says is true, but we're going to lie.
- [78:16]
A
Anyway because you don't know what I say is true. And frankly, one of the things that you should hear me saying is that Brett Weinstein does not believe that podcasts are a proper substitute for functioning institutions. But he also believes the institutions aren't functioning. And you can tell. Well, because instead of giving you noisy good advice, instead of giving you random advice, they give you upside down pyramids. They give you the inverse of the right advice. And that is an alarming fact. It tells you that there is a process in there that knows what to do and tells you the.
- [78:53]
B
Opposite. But, Brett, why are you going with this guy, Denny Rancour, and against all the other authorities that say that's.
- [79:01]
A
Wrong? I didn't. I said I'd seen a credible estimate.
- [79:04]
B
Estimate. Okay. But but the way it comes off, Brett, is like, you're going with this one guy here and. And just saying, I don't know about the.
- [79:12]
A
Authorities. Later on. I asked Ed Dowd about that estimate because I'm interested in having a good estimate. And Ed Dowd, who has done a calculation based on entirely different data, says his estimate has 17 million at the top end. He thinks the number is lower, but 17 million is a credible estimate. It's within the realm of possibility. Further, the damage from these things is not stopping. If the number isn't 17 million, it's heading in that direction. Now, we were told these things were safe. Safe means they do not carry a risk. They are so obviously not safe. Not only do we have empirical evidence that people were harmed, lots of it, but we also have the perfectly obvious fact, which you and I have talked about before, that if you look at what the manufacturer says about how these vaccines work, it will inevitably result in whatever tissues do the heavy lifting, whatever tissues transcribe that gene into spike protein being destroyed by your T cell cells. Now, you tell me. I know you're not a biologist, and I know that you don't want to be asked this question, but if they can't tell you that the shot stays in your arm, how can they tell you that if it's taken up in your heart, your heart will not be damaged when your own cells turn on it and destroy the cells that are doing the transcribing because they appear to be virally infected.
- [80:50]
B
Affected? Are you talking about.
- [80:51]
A
Myocarditis? Well, you want the real answer? Myocarditis is a limited hangout. Myocarditis means inflammation of heart tissue. Inflammation of heart tissue is downstream of a real pathology, and the pathology that is causing that. Myocarditis is the destruction of heart cells. It is the wounding of the heart by your immune.
- [81:16]
B
System. Now, if I recall, Offit's explanation for that was COVID 19 virus itself causes.
- [81:23]
A
Myocarditis. Yes, that is what they say. And I'm sure if you query an LLM, it will tell you that very same thing. On the other hand, the evidence that Covid causes myocarditis is extremely weak. This is a case where you have a categorization error, where lots of people who were vaccinated and then had myocarditis are filed as unvaccinated. Vaccinated. It's a false signal. And Michael, the important thing is you have detected the truth enough that you have stopped getting these shots.
- [81:59]
B
Okay? Oh, I never got any. I only just got the initial vaccine. I didn't get boosters and stuff because I'm pretty healthy and so.
- [82:07]
A
On. That's great. You should have gotten.
- [82:10]
B
None. But back to the, kind of, back to the larger epistemological question. How do you change the system? Well, you know, I'm sure, you know Jay Bhattachary, I spent a week with him at one of Peter Thiel's gigs. And this is just the nicest guy in the world, super smart, very wise about these things. And now he's, you know, in the system, reforming it from within. And, you know, he's at Stanford. He's a published, you know, figure and so on. So in other words, he's not doing an end run around the system, saying, hey, listen to me. He's like, you guys got it wrong and here's why. And I'm going to publish this. I'm going to state it, I'm going to go to conferences, I'm going to speak about it. Now I'm in government, right? To reform it from within. To me, that's the system.
- [82:52]
A
Working. It is. On the other hand, how did this.
- [82:59]
B
Happen? How did this happen? Well, okay, and then another.
- [83:03]
A
Example. No, no, hold.
- [83:04]
B
On. You know, I've had lots of.
- [83:06]
A
It have happened because we did an end run around the.
- [83:10]
B
System. Well, I don't know. I, you know, there's quite a few books out now about how disastrous it was to close the schools, to close the beaches, to close restaurants and so on, and that they knew. Okay, so like, I just, I forget the author's name now. Damn. But that. It's a journalist who tracked all this down. That, let's see, what was it? In March of 2020, they decided, okay, we're gonna. No, I think they decided we're going to keep the schools open in the fall. And then Trump said in June, I want to open the schools. So they said in that case, because they had Trump derangement syndrome, we're going to close the schools because Trump wants them open. This was kind of, he had the kind of, the paperwork, the receipts for this, which looked pretty damning, and that it was not just. So from my perspective, that's just incompetence. That, you know, doesn't look like it was just incompetence. It looked like there was something more. So I'll give you, I'll give you that one. But that doesn't mean every single thing that, you know, turned out to be wrong means everything that they say is wrong. Right? I mean, so the system's working in that now we're finding out they lied about this or they were wrong about that. Some of the stuff you said. But that's the system working from within. You know, we.
- [84:21]
A
Have. No, no, no, no.
- [84:22]
B
No. It's not journalists writing books and writing.
- [84:24]
A
Articles. It's not the system working from within. Something very unusual happened with Maha. People who were derided as crazy are now running the system because they rode the Trump wave into office. That happened because of the end run that you're claiming is not effective. Bobby Kennedy was treated as a loony anti vaxxer and he is in office because an awful lot of us figured out that that story was wildly inaccurate. And his popularity coupled with Trump's popularity put them in the winner's circle. And now he has ascended to an office with an immense amount of power. That is the reason that the food pyramid has fallen. That is the reason that our childhood vaccine schedule is being revised to match the rest of the civilized world. That is the reason that we are not recommending Covid boosters to pregnant women, to healthy children. This is the rebels in the hills, the rare case where they have ascended to a level of power and are actually instituting reasonable reforms that frankly should have been done in most cases decades.
- [86:11]
B
Ago. Okay, a couple things on that. So, you know, RFKJ has pushed this idea that vaccines cause autism, which has been around since the, that paper in 1996 in the Lancet. They got retracted for fraud. And there's still been no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. We don't know what causes autism. So that kind of opens up the, the field for.
- [86:32]
A
Just. No, you say no credible evidence. That is not true. There is a battle over evidence. There is evidence for, there is evidence against. And I.
- [86:42]
B
Happen. Yeah, but this is like there's evidence against the big bang. Yeah, right. Like the 1% guy, the 1 guy that says, I don't think the big bang happened. Yeah, but the vast majority say it did, and here's their.
- [86:54]
A
Evidence. No, no, no. That, that is not how this works. That is not how this works. When science functions, it doesn't matter that everybody says one thing and one person says the other. It doesn't matter. Frankly, even if no person says the other, you have competing ideas and you have, have a body of evidence. And over time, if the system is actually functioning in a scientific way, you will end up with the model that more closely matches the evidence, that assumes less, and that predicts future.
- [87:27]
B
Experiments. Okay, so you think there's still some link between vaccines and.
- [87:31]
A
Autism? Well, I Didn't say.
- [87:33]
B
That. If you're okay. Yeah.
- [87:36]
A
Yeah. I believe it is highly likely that there is an.
- [87:43]
B
Association. Okay. I don't see it. I mean, the whole thing got started on a fraudulent.
- [87:48]
A
Study. Fraudulent was. Well, okay, but let's say that you a. I don't believe that that is as clear as you think it is. But if the idea is Michael Shermer is against fraudulent studies, then then I would ask you to look into the work that established the safety of aluminum adjuvants in.
- [88:11]
B
Vaccines. Well, weren't those taken out? I don't know. What am I thinking of? Was it like 1999? No. Mercury. You're talking about.
- [88:23]
A
Mercury. Yeah, which wasn't fully taken out, but was taken out of most vaccines and replaced with aluminum on the basis that aluminum was sent safe. Aluminum was tested on four rabbits. The data for one of the rabbits was lost and two of the rabbits came up pathological. So obviously it's safe. This is.
- [88:45]
B
Not. I don't know. Yeah, I don't.
- [88:47]
A
Know. Well, but you know. No, the point is you want to go after Wakefield for a fraudulent study. I'm telling you, you should look into the studies that establish the safety of these vaccines. All the work that you and I assume. I assumed. You know, I think as I've mentioned to you before in Heather and my book, which we published in 2020, we said that vaccines were one of the three great triumphs of modern medicine, the other two being antibiotics and surgery. We have been schooled in the COVID era, first about the MRNA vaccines, which we came to understand in detail and from there were reluctantly dragged into looking at all of the vaccines that we gave our own children. And it's a horror show. The work that you as a normal believer in science imagine must have been done where these things were tested against an inert placebo. SIBO wasn't done. And that's.
- [89:52]
B
Fraud. Another example. So RFKJ's latest explanation for autism is Tylenol Ibuprofen in the third trimester of pregnant women. Okay, Is there a connection? Maybe. But as our doc Skeptoc wrote in Skeptic not taking, why were women in the third trimester taking Tylenol? Because they had massive fevers. Why did they have massive. Because they are having issues in their pregnancy. What happens to those women who didn't take Tylenol Tylenol and just let the fever burn itself out? Well, we don't know. Right, so you have. You don't have exactly a controlled experiment there. You're. You're picking out the hits and forgetting all the misses. What about the people that didn't take Tylenol? And they had worse consequences for not reducing their fever on their pregnancy. Anyway, that's just an example of, you know, plucking out of the air. Here's something weird. Tylenol, the third trimester. There might be something to.
- [90:46]
A
It. I don't know, Maybe. I don't know what it's an example of. Frankly, Heather and I have looked into Tylenol. Tylenol. I've been aware of the dangers of Tylenol for decades. It's an extremely dangerous drug. You'd be hard pressed to find another easily available drug that's as dangerous as Tylenol. And yet you'll find it.
- [91:02]
B
Everywhere. What about Aleve? I take a leave from my bum shoulder. Should I.
- [91:07]
A
Stop?
- [91:07]
B
Yes. How about aspirin? I like.
- [91:10]
A
Aspirin. Aspirin is the one I take. And it's not perfectly safe, but I believe it's way safer than any of the.
- [91:16]
B
NSAIDs.
- [91:18]
A
Okay. Take it with plenty of.
- [91:20]
B
Water. All.
- [91:20]
A
Right. Well, no, look, I'm just. Look, I try to live a consistent life. I try to tell the truth. I try to live as well as I can according to the truths I believe in. To be honest about my uncertainties, I'm telling you, Tylenol is a dangerous drug. The idea of giving it to pregnant women is alarming. Are there cases in which it's better than not giving it? Maybe. But I am alarmed at the level of first principles of administering a drug that dangerous to a woman with a developing child inside of her. Does it cause autism? I don't know. And I don't know that the vaccines do either, but. But if you want to actually investigate that question, maybe he would be a good candidate for writing something for Skeptic. You should talk to Toby.
- [92:23]
B
Rogers. Okay. I don't know.
- [92:26]
A
Toby. But you don't.
- [92:27]
B
Know. I don't know yet, but I'll give you a standing invitation, like I did your brother, to publish in Skeptic. And we could do a target article and have people comment on it to me, that's still working in the.
- [92:40]
A
System. All right, well, I would argue it's kind of an end run, but.
- [92:44]
B
I'm. Maybe. Okay, maybe. Maybe I'm an end runner.
- [92:47]
A
Also. Look, I think you are. And maybe it's why, in spite of my yelling at you a few minutes ago, we get along. So, anyway, where should we go from.
- [92:58]
B
Here? Oh, well, okay. That's right. I wrote a book on truth. Yes. You actually we've kind of done a deep dive on, on epistemology there, which is super interesting. I just should note I gu in the. As a historian of science, much of what you say is true. But, but on the other hand, things do change. I mean maybe it's the Planck principle that for new theories to be accepted, the old guard has to die. You know, it could be that. But the change does happen, right? Or else we wouldn't know the things that we know today, you know, about whatever. I mean the age of the universe and when dinosaurs went extinct and all that stuff. So I think maybe an interesting topic in which share some overlap on religion. I've taken a different tact in this book sort of against what a lot of atheists atheists approach. Religion is just a bunch of bullshit and it's just wrong that I'm taking more of a sort of a Joseph Campbell, Jordan Peterson, if you will, mythical truth or psychological truth. And my analogy is like, like, so people send me articles skeptic about. Here's the actual explanation for the party in the Red Sea. A earthquake or these, you know, plague of locusts and frogs. You know, it was actually caused by this ecological change and there was a drought or, you know, whatever. Or the, you know, the swoon theory that, you know, when Jesus was on the cross, you know, they gave him this, this drug through his side or something and then he went into a coma and then he was asleep for three days in the coma in the tomb and then they whisked him off. And if you want to go full Dan Brown, he went to France and married Mary Magdalene and, and they had babies and so on. But to me this would be like going in search of, of what is it? The railroad station nine and three quarters in. In J.K. rowling's Harry Potter. And when I made a joke about that, there actually is one, some fans built, built a nine and three quarter railroad station there. But. Or, you know, is there a middle Earth in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings? Well, by asking those questions, you're missing the point of the story. You know, it's not a true story. It's a fictional story that has deeper truths, you know, like the Brothers Karamazov and Dostoevsky's novel. There are no brothers Karamazov. He's just made up a story. But it's deeper truth about, you know, deeper truths about this. What makes great literature great. It's, you know, it's touching things that are true about the human condition. Jealousy and Anger and love and power and deception and. And so on, and that's what, you know, know. So to me, biblical stories are narratives. They're literature that carry some other message for people. And I go so far as to say that that includes the resurrection. Didn't literally happen. No one could come back from the dead after three days. But you're. You're missing the deeper point of, you know, being born again. Starting over. Redemption, forgiveness, you know, that kind of redemption. Oppression, redemption. We're going to start over and we're going to overthrow our oppressed. This is what to me, Jesus meant when he, you know, he said, heaven's within you and there are those standing here who will not taste death before you see the Son of Man come again. He's talking about the people, the Jewish people oppressed by the Romans. Now, you know, we have to make change now. You know, heaven is here and now, and we're going to overthrow our oppressors and start over that anyway. So that's my approach, and I think you share some of that. Right. Mythological truths about religion carry some.
- [96:43]
A
Value. Metaphorical truth. Metaphorical truths are truths in which those who act as if they are true outcompete those who act according to the fact that they're false. Let me ask you a question. So I. When I got to that section of your book, I did wonder. You and I had a. Had lunch in Memphis at Freedom Fest a couple years ago ago. Was that three years ago? Must have been three years.
- [97:10]
B
Ago.
- [97:10]
A
Yeah. And I understood your position to be different than the one that you take in this book. Is that.
- [97:19]
B
Right? I'm trying. I'm trying out something.
- [97:21]
A
New. Okay. So that's.
- [97:23]
B
Good. I have to. Yeah. Okay, go.
- [97:24]
A
Ahead. All right. I'm glad. It seems to me that you're moving in my direction and I agree with you about the important. Important won't be important to religious people. But the most important thing from those of us who are not religious, who are trying to understand this phenomenon, is the fact that there is value, or at least has been value in these stories to those who believed in them. And, you know, you. You point to some important kinds of value, but I wonder if there are not some things that need to be added to your list. Principally, these stories aren't just literature. They are actually the solutions to game theory problems. And crucially, they only work if you actually believe them. So that, I think, is a bitter pill for people of the Richard Dawkins mind mindset. Because. So let's just give an example. If we Take the idea which you talk about of the afterlife of heaven, and we think of it in Darwinian terms. A person who lives a life that is justifying of their entry into heaven, it just so happens with will have endeared themselves to their community, will have built up a positive reputation, the kinds of things that put your children and your grandchildren in a much better position to endure hard times and profit in good times, you will build a platform from which they can profit prosper. And interestingly, you do live on after your death in their minds. So in a sense, the story, I would say is literally false as far as we know, but not so far from an actual truth, which is you live on after death in a genetic sense, your progeny.
- [99:49]
B
And your memories and your impact on the world and so.
- [99:56]
A
Forth. Right? And so the point is, if you don't believe that heaven's a real place, and more importantly maybe that hell is the alternative to it, then it may not modify your behavior substantially and you may end up living closer to the naive atheist perspective, which is, well, I don't really care about what happens after I'm gone, I. Because I ain't going to be here, right? So a believer has an advantage. And one of the things I've given Dawkins and others a hard time about is by deriding these stories as mind viruses, which is very much not the perspective you put forward in your book. You rock, Rob those who have been more correct than you, right, that these stories have a value and that actually belief in them is a good thing of their proper position. You rob them of the recognition that in fact they were correct in a sense. So anyway, my basic point there, I didn't mean to divert us, is that the, the, the solution to the game theory problem is an important way. You know, I don't believe that the Brothers Karamazov will do that. It may tell you many things about the way people are, but it doesn't solve a difficult to solve problem like a collective action.
- [101:28]
B
Issue. Interesting. That may explain the response I've been getting so far from Christians when I float this idea with great respect. I really respect the story, it carries deep truths and so on. But Jesus was not literally. Literally, you know, raised from the dead. And their response is what? No, no, no, not mythologically, metaphorically, psychologically true? No, it literally happened. And Paul himself said, if Christ has not risen, then there's no reason to be a Christian. And so they really insist that as respectable and honorable it is to have these deep truths. No, it had to Literally happen or world. And then to this I respond, then why don't Jews believe it? You know, Because. Because they don't. They just did. The Old Testament doesn't say that's what the Messiah is going to be like, a carpenter from that Nazareth who gets himself crucified. That's not what the Messiah was supposed to be. Supposed to be. Our rescuer is going to overthrow the Roman Empire and. And we're going to start again with this new empire with our great leader. That's not what Jesus was like at all. So they reject it. And so maybe your explanation here goes a long ways to saying why they're not buying my. My idea.
- [102:40]
A
Here. Well, look, I mean, I. If you think carefully about the argument that I'm making, the game theory argument, it raises the question of why. Yes, it makes it quite clear why you would resist in the. In no uncertain terms this interpretation, but that in fact you would deeply believe that what you, Michael, are saying is wrong and that actually this literally did happen. And the question is, I'm not inclined to try to persuade anybody of anything. I don't misrepresent my own perspective. If people ask me, I say, look, I don't rule out the possibility of the supernatural, but I've seen no evidence of it and I don't expect to. I think that's very clear what I believe. But I also am not inclined to push people towards a modification of beliefs that have apparently been very effective at getting them into the present if I don't have a proper substitute. And I don't believe we have anything like a proper substitute. In fact, I'm watching civilization wreck itself because of the vacuum left by the metaphorical beliefs that we have so recently.
- [104:21]
B
Abandoned. The substitution hypothesis. Yeah. As religion declines, we substitute Marxism or Wokeism or trans or whatever. Yeah. Maybe back to your previous point, though. Let's look at some specific examples. I have a slew of these new books from formerly atheists or secular people that said, you know, religion is not such a bad thing. In fact, it's a great thing. And you know, Charles Murray was just on. I don't know if you know Charles, but I've known him for a long time, you know, lifelong atheist, and now he's found God. Okay. And we know Ayaan Hirsi. Ally's got her book coming out this year at some point about her conversion experience. I think you know Ayaan and you know her story. Mary. You know, it's. It's not that she laid out all the evidence and Said, you know, I've been weighing the evidence of foreign against the resurrection, and I think the evidence. It wasn't that at all. You know, it's very personal. She had a lot of personal issues. She found Jesus as her savior, and it saved her life. Literally saved her life. And it's like, okay, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna argue with her. I'm not gonna say, well, but, you know, it's all right. You know, it's like, I don't want to do that to anybody. It's like, whatever helps you get through the night. I mean, life is hard and, you know, maybe. And I'll give her, you know, it's metaphorically true or mythically true, whatever. Okay? If that works pragmatically to make your life better, all right, fine. You know, my only objection would be trying to convert other people. And so far, you know, the books I've had here, they're not trying to convert anybody. They're just saying it's. It's. It's not so bad to believe. Like Charles Murray. He's not trying to convince anybody. He's just saying, this is what we're doing. For me, what was the other. Oh, Ross Douth that believe. He's Catholic. And. But. But he doesn't insist you be Catholic. He said, just believe something, you know, one of the big three or just something. Right. And. But that then merges into this kind of cultural religiosity, like, well, it's better than Islam. Islamism, let's say. Or it's better than the crazy Marxism Woke. Wokeism, you know, for. For civilizational values that we all agree are good for human flourishing. Those. Certain religions are better for that than others. Okay, I'll. I'll go along with.
- [106:35]
A
That. Well, hold on. This is another place where I think you could add to your model. Different religions are just like species adapted to different times and places in history. I think we need to. To be very concerned about what our religious traditions are adapted to. That it's not, one is not as good as another, and it isn't that one is less valid than another. But a religion adapted to a time of rampant lineage against lineage violence, for example, is a very poor match for the world we want to live in. If you want to live in Game of Thrones, you could embrace such a tradition. But if you want to live in an enlightened, tolerant society, then those are not the traditions to. To base it on. Further, there's a question about how the different traditions are to get along with These each other, because all of the long standing traditions go back to a world in which the intermingling was not nearly at the level that it is now. And so I, by and large, have a very hospitable relationship with religious folks. I think I'm doing something the hard way that is much easier done through religious belief. And I think that there's a reason as an evolutionary biologist that I have to do it the hard way, even if it's worse. I think it's important for me to retain rigor in this way. But one of the things that I find difficult to convey to religious people, even though I have good relations with lots of religious people, is because they are adapted to past environments, they do not have the solutions to many puzzles that are important in our time. In other words, let's look at kosher laws, right? We have kosher laws that warn us off of pork, presumably because of trichinosis or because of something about the ecology of the animal that renders pork not a good deal. We don't need to worry about that anymore. We do need to worry about glyphosate. It's not mentioned in any of these.
- [109:28]
B
Texts. Wait, what is.
- [109:29]
A
That? Glyphosate. It's the core ingredient of.
- [109:34]
B
Roundup. Oh, okay. All right. So.
- [109:38]
A
Yum. Our kosher laws are not up to date. We need new kosher laws. Our new kosher laws look a lot more like the, you know, brand new food pyramid. And you should buy your stuff organic because of the toxic compounds that are sprayed on the stuff that isn't organic. And so, but anyway, the point is, is it is one thing to say that these texts contain a great deal of wisdom and that because the code is not like computer code where there are comments that say, this section accomplishes this goal. We don't know what section does, which we don't know how it works. And so it's Chesterton's fence all the way down. But all of that wisdom does not tell us that it is sufficient for modern problems that are not covered.
- [110:30]
B
There.
- [110:31]
A
Right? The enrichment of uranium isn't covered. The pesticides are not covered. What to think about, AI isn't covered. None of these things are addressed and that means that the work isn't.
- [110:44]
B
Done. Are you familiar with David Sloan Wilson's work on group selection and religion? Yeah, of course, yeah. So I don't think, I mean, you're an evolutionary biologist. What is your thoughts on group selection as a general theory? And does it apply to.
- [110:59]
A
Religion? Okay, I'm going to do this as carefully as I can. Group selection is a logical dead end. Lineage selection is the rigorous version of this. Ultimately, David and I will have to have that. That out. But group selection allowed the group selectionists to reach a responsible theory of the evolution of culture that properly deals with religion. So my point would be David Sloan Wilson is correct about the stuff the other side of group selection. He is not correct about the mechanism in question question, but the adaptive. The kin selectionists, which is my tribe, does not under. It's my tribe and it's Dawkins tribe. They do not understand religion because they don't have anything to jump them into the realm of culture at the proper level to understand how these things function. So the group selectionists, even though they are wrong about this mechanism, in my opinion, are right about the consequences, the evolutionary consequences. The right mechanism is lineage selection, which has yet to. I have yet to present it in a way that it will get a proper hearing and it has yet to get that proper.
- [112:26]
B
Hearing. Okay, Brett, there's your next book. If you're not going to write about the scientific fraud, you can write about religion and group selection and linear suggestion. Maybe that's it. Is that your next.
- [112:36]
A
Book? Well, unfortunately, my attention is divided between two, but one of them contains that.
- [112:43]
B
Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, my point of bringing this up was that, you know, maybe there's been kind of an evolution of Christianity, you know, going through the scientific revolution and the enlightenment and coming out the other end much more tolerant and enlightened, as it were, by Western values of freedom and bodily autonomy and that sort of thing. The kind of things that work well with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and all that. So whereas Islam has not gone through in a life enlightenment. And so that's why we're getting these conversations now of, you know, even Dawkins said, I'm a cultural.
- [113:17]
A
Christian.
- [113:18]
B
Yep. You know, even though I'm an atheist. Right. So that, you know, that kind of theme, maybe that is along these same lines of a pragmatic game theoretic explanation for the evolution of religions in a certain.
- [113:29]
A
Direction. Well, there's one thing that you have to add to that I believe let's just say Christianity in its modern form is actually a pretty good basis for the west as we understand it. Right. Far better than Islam as we find it, but also better than biblical Judaism. And what I think the distinction between Quran era Islam and biblical Judaism is the willingness to culturally update. So the way culture works, it is adaptive and evolutionary and it is also quite capable of hybridizing so what we have. Modern Jews have embraced many pieces of Christian wisdom. The Christian update to the Old Testament has been largely embraced by modern Jews, but not acknowledged. So to give one example, modern Jews believe in Montana monogamy. That's not an Old Testament concept, that's a New Testament.
- [115:00]
B
Concept.
- [115:01]
A
Yes. So I would argue that this is actually the roadmap. If we're to have a world in which we actually do get along with each other, we have to be willing to make our different belief structures compatible. And that is not going to be a simple process. But. But I believe the Western cosmopolitan world in which we don't stop competing with each other, but we stop fighting with each other. We compete by trying to outdo each other in terms of creating wealth, but we stop bludgeoning each other over different skin colors, ideologies, nose shapes, whatever it might be. That world is superior, it is safer, it is fairer, it is more rewarding to live in. Does all of the things that are on the best side of what it is to be human. And because of that, we should be welcoming the world to embrace, trace the parts of that worldview that make the whole place function. And that what we are in fact watching is a battle of civilizations in which we have people who wish to adhere to ancient texts that are based on lineage against lineage violence. And you have got other people who want to modernize and get along. And unfortunately, those of us who want to get along are going to have to win that battle. Battle because there's. The weaponry is too ferocious and the number of us on this planet is too large and we're too interconnected to fight each other. Lineage against lineage. We will drive ourselves extinct if that's what we.
- [116:53]
B
Do. All right, let's see where, where we fall on this issue. People like myself and Steven Pinker and Dawkins Harris and so on, you know, we, we kind of adhere to secular humanism or as I prefer, Enlightenment humanism. It has a little more gravitas to it. And also the secular humanists, I'm too political. They're, you know, pretty far left progressives and. And I'm not. Neither is Pinker and so on. So it's. But we're after something like, what are we going to replace religion with? Okay, when I got into this business and well, we started Skeptic 92 and I was, you know, sort of following Randy and Kurtz and those guys in the late 80s where, where like Paul Kurtz had this, you know, he was the founder of center for Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazine, so on. So his vision, you know, he once gave me his, you know, I have a dream, you know, so, you know, one day, you know, in every city we will have a secular church, but people will go to, you know, and there'll be no more religion. We'll just have this whole worldview. It's replaced. And so they have, you know, weddings and funerals and coming of age and it's all secular. Right. We're going to replace it all. That hasn't really happened, at least as I envisioned it would happen back.
- [118:05]
A
In. The closest thing we have is Star.
- [118:06]
B
Starbucks. Yeah, Starbucks. Yeah. And I've, I've gone to these, you know, ethical society meetings and, and the, you know, the atheist Sunday gatherings and you know, they sing hymns to Newton and people get up to give their testimonials. This is how I lost my religion. I mean, it's kind of funny, but I'm just sitting there thinking, God, I feel like I'm back in church. And I, I was never vibing it really. It wasn't my thing to sit in church. But maybe a lot of people, well, this is the, their idea that people need ceremony like that. So we're going to create a fake one essentially. And I don't my senses and what do you think? You know, this is not really.
- [118:46]
A
Happening. No, it's going to work about as well as.
- [118:48]
B
Esperanto. Esperanto, yes, that's a good example.
- [118:52]
A
And for the same reason. But I do think, you know, Heather and I talk about this with respect to, to male female dynamics. Male female dynamics need a renegotiation. We can't go back. Even the trad people aren't really going back as far as they think they are. And that's not going to work. The liberation of women has actually been a tremendous victory for liberalism. It's a wonderful thing. But it has.
- [119:33]
B
Not. Although you should be free to be a trad woman, if you want.
- [119:38]
A
Individually, you should be free to be anything you want to be. And then the rules should be whatever they are, not the rules that you would like them to be. But the point I usually make is it's wonderful that women are now, now throughout the sciences and equally represented in most of them, if not ahead. That's wonderful. The problem, however, is that instead of realizing that the rules of science were inherently more masculine because science is a competitive endeavor in which you hold each other's feet to the fire. So what should have happened happened is women should have been brought in on the culture of science, irrespective of the fact that it was masculine in nature, because those are the right rules if you want science to work. Instead, we've had a kind of a overthrow of those rules because they were masculine. And it results in a science that doesn't work. So with that model in mind, the sexes need a renegotiation. We can't go back. There's nowhere to go back to that will work in the modern world. So we need to figure out what rules actually allow us to get along and to make each other stronger. And we can broaden that to the rest of civilization, too. We're not going to have secular churches. It's a preposterous idea. But we do need to have something that does that job. Whether that involves. I mean, one of the things that I truly appreciate about Judy Judaism is that it is highly tolerant of you making your own peace with the religious realm. Now, not every version of Judaism is this way, but in general, say you're a Jew doesn't mean that you do believe in the supernatural or don't believe in the supernatural. You're free to figure out your own relationship to the universe and not be nitpicked over it. I think that's a very positive thing. And so at some level, we're going to have to build traditions that can evolve and improve and serve us. And maybe those are religious traditions. And we have to be flexible about what it means to believe in this or that. But we do need something, because the free for all that has emerged in the absence of people being religious is not.
- [122:11]
B
Better. Yeah, I've had, I've had theists that I debate tell me, yeah, I know you're an atheist, but at least you know what a woman is. Yeah, okay. We have common ground.
- [122:23]
A
There. You're apparently ahead of most evolutionary.
- [122:26]
B
Biologists. Apparently so. By the way, I just thought of another example of the system of science reforming from within. Thinking of Naomi Oresky's book why Science? Where she has whole chapters devoted to the crazy science about women in the, like, early 1900s, 1890s, early 1900s at Harvard. Like one of her case studies was this. I think it was a biologist who published papers on why women should not go to college. And the reason is, is because during their menstruation they have the blood flow. There's not enough blood in their brains for them to process higher mathematics and philosophical ideas. And this was like peer reviewed journal articles. Hard science. This is it. These are the facts. And the moment you. So the. My point is her Solution is you bring women into the department and that changes everything. So that's reforming it from within. We're going to have a diversity of viewpoint diversity, in this case, gender diversity, I guess. And. But viewpoint diversity, that, you know, that's a.
- [123:30]
A
Solution. Well, let's just say that's obviously a preposterous critique of why women should or shouldn't be in science. In my field, you know, I train as a field biologist. Biologist. And at the point I got to field biology, of course, women were equally represented. But a couple generations back, there was literally the idea that women couldn't do field biology because where would they pee? Right. I mean, it's as bad as the example you deliver. But I would point out. I'm, I'm sorry that I never got to talk to Jane Goodall. She's one of the people I really wanted to talk to. The example of Jane Goodall is a powerful testament. I am not in general adherent to the idea that diversity is our strength. I do think there are kinds of diversity that matter a great deal in general. Meritocracy and perspective diversity are a good match for each other. But for reasons that may be obvious in a physics lab, if you do the science correctly, it doesn't much matter whether you're male or female. The work may appeal more to males or not. But what you're going to find out is not highly sensitive to who you are in biology, especially if you're studying animal behavior. I do think there was kind of an epidemic of male myopia and that Jane Goodall is the best example where a woman. And in fact, Leakey, Heather and I have been trying to figure out to what extent this was intentional. But Jane Goodall was not highly paid, trained, and it appears to have potentially been a choice on Leakey's part.
- [125:39]
B
With Diane Fosse and, and, and then the. There was three of them. There was. And then there was the orangutan.
- [125:45]
A
Gas. Is the orangutan. So anyway, what Jane Goodall did was she basically made the breakthrough that allowed us to understand the great apes in a way that males had felt. Failed to. Right. George Schaller had tried and had failed the great lion biologist. But Goodall actually broke the male rules in order to make progress. And the key thing that she did was, you know, men had decided it's very important to be objective about these creatures. You know, you shouldn't give them names because it'll blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which, you know, it's true. You can even easily start anthropomorphizing animals. But when you're talking about chimps, your best tool is to understand what they must be based on what you know from yourself, because they're not so distant. So she did name them, and she watched them and thought about them as individuals and imagined that they had these emotional drives as we do, and it allowed her to see what was really going on on in a way that men had not figured out. So, anyway, it's a counterpoint. In general, my feeling is meritocracy overall, and, you know, if you want to do the job, you know, figure out how to be good at it and.
- [127:12]
B
Compete. By the way, I met Jane at a party a few years ago in Calabasas. There's maybe a dozen people there. And she drank whiskey. She had a. Somebody gave her a gift of a, you know, super expensive whiskey. So we all drank whiskey. And she had little stuffed animal, the little stuffed chimpanzee. And it was very cute. What a sweetheart. She was something special. I presume you saw the Netflix special they released after her.
- [127:35]
A
Death. No, I've heard about.
- [127:37]
B
It. Oh, my God. It's very moving. Oh, it's just really. It's something else. And. But at the end, she says, I have reason to believe there is an afterlife. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but that's where I'm going. And she. Whatever she said, it was like, very kind of like, oh, okay.
- [127:52]
A
Interesting. Hell, yeah. Well, I hope she's there and I hope it's great. And I hope that all her favorite chimps who have passed on are there with.
- [128:02]
B
Her. By the way, on the trans issue of Men and Women Sports and peen. Okay, so as you recall, I used to be a bike racer in the 1980s, race across America. And then in the 90s, I was the race director. And so we. We had women's division and men's division, and then we had eight ages and relay teams and so on. But in 1995 and six, there were two women that were better than almost all of the men. Shauna Hogan and Muffy Ritz. And like, the one year all the way into Colorado, Shauna was leading the entire field. She was ahead of, like, 25 men. And these were. A lot of. Some of these guys were really good. And so then the issue came up about peeing on the bike. So you have to kind of picture how this goes. You know, you're wearing these Lycra shorts, and for a guy, if you have, like a long, slow downhill, you just Kind of turn and you just sort of pull it down and take care, take care of your business. It sort of splashes on the road, whatever, no problem. But women can't do that. So Porshana has to get off the bike, go into the motorhome or into the bushes or whatever and, you know, do her thing and that. She's losing like three, four minutes every two or three hours because you're drinking a lot, right? So at some point she said, you know, it's really not fair and, you know, I should get it like a time bonus or something. And I said, shauna, you're in the women's division and you have your own PR money and so on. The men have. It's all equal. Do you want to just race against the men? You're like, there's no gender divisions, just one division. She goes, no. And it turned out even though she led the first thousand miles, you know, she was. She lost the guy. The top two or three guys beat her by like 24 hours by the three end of 3,000 miles. There's just a massive difference between men and women. And I don't know if you see. Saw the, the. Also the, the special on tennis where the women's number one tennis player, Irina Sabalenka, who is just massive. She is so good. She just hits so hard and so on. She, she did a match against Nick Garag, Garry Ogos, I forget his last name. Rated 670, first in the world, hasn't played in two years because of an injury, and, and he just, Just totally dominated. I mean, it could have been six love, six love. You know, he just started goofing around, and she ended up being 6, 3, 6, 4, something like that. But it was just. And her, her court was shorter, narrower. So he had a narrower field to hit on, and they made it as much as they could to her advantage, and it still wasn't even close. So the idea that letting men into women's sports is so absurd. I can't believe I'm ranting now, but it's one of my pet.
- [130:44]
A
Issues. Well, maybe, maybe we science types should come up with. With some term that explains this distinction that you and I both intuit exists between men and women. How about sexual.
- [130:56]
B
Dimorphism? There we go. That's right. That's a reality. Yeah. Or it.
- [131:02]
A
Was. It was back when I was in graduate school. We believed in sexual dimorphism, but now we know that you can become shorter just by declaring yourself.
- [131:11]
B
Female. Do you think that's over? Now or on its way out in the next year or.
- [131:16]
A
So. I think it's on its way out too much. Many of us are onto.
- [131:19]
B
Them. Yeah, I have a chapter in the truth book on free will and determinism. Decided to take this on. I'm a compatibilist and so my worker, I'll just tell you my workaround on this. And you know I use Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris as the, you know, kind of stereotypical determinists although there are, their arguments are not, not that original. There's been around for a long time as you know and that, you know, they asked the question could you have done otherwise? So here's how I think about it. I got thinking about Steve Gould's idea of the, you know, rewind the tape of life and play it back from the Cambrian, pre Cambrian, whatever would we still be here? Okay. And as Dan Dennett pointed out to Gould, well if it's a read only memory tape then no, because that's just a recording of what actually happened. So that, that's where I start there, you know, if I go back a week or a month or 10 years in my life and play the tape back, if it's a 10 tape of recording, then no, I can't have done different because that's what actually happened. Right? So the past is determined, once it happens, that's it, you can't redo it. But the future is not predetermined and that, you know, the Heraclitus principle, you can't step into the same river twice because the river is not the same and you're not the same. Or you know, Jorge Borges, you know, Garden of forking paths. Each fork path you take has a different outcome than had you gone this way or that way. And that future is not determined. So we are free to in a sense influence our future conditions for our present self. So the example I use is, is you know, my current self knows that Tomorrow morning at 6am When I'm supposed to get up and go for my workout, I'm really not going to be vibing and I'm going to be groggy. So I'm going to put my workout clothes today. I'm going to have my bike ready and I'm going to have the food ready and so on. I'll do that tonight because future Shermer, you know, I know what he's like, right? So in that sense we have some volitional choice over shaping the future. So I call that self determinism in a way we help shape the future going forward. So anyway, that's my. That's my standing on one foot.
- [133:26]
A
Explanation. All right. Well, here's my perspective. I believe the facts of the universe as we understand them strongly suggest. Suggest we have a degree of freedom, that this is not a perfectly deterministic universe. I think the amount of free will that we have is far lower than it feels like we have. That free will is a struggle. But I do not agree with Harris and Sapolsky that we have no free will. And in Harris's case, I see him cheating that basically there are two versions of free will. One, the Mott of the Mott and Bailey, is that whatever you decide to do is the result of whatever you've experienced. Experienced which you didn't choose. So you don't get credit. That's the low bar. And then the high bar is you don't have the ability to choose anything at all. Now, what I would argue is that the facts of evolution. It's not impossible that the world that we experience would be the product of a perfectly deterministic universe. But it wouldn't make any sense. What evolution is wouldn't make any sense. Having a consciousness would be completely pointless if it was trapped and unable to do anything that changed anything. So the punchline is, I believe it is highly likely that we have a degree of free will. That a life well lived is one in which you take the small amount of free will that you have and you use it to increase the degree of the freedom of your will. Right. That you are trying to accumulate the power to alter your course more. More so that you can do something useful and good with it. But I don't believe we have any mechanistic understanding of how we could have free will. That that's the sticking point. The fact that we don't have a good. You know, ultimately it has to derive from Heisenberg. But it's an awfully long way from Heisenbergian uncertainty to I have the capacity to lift this glass up at will or not to do so. But somewhere there must be a mechanism that explains this, because otherwise, if you think about, you know, the coyote chasing the rabbit in a universe where the outcome was completely predetermined from the first.
- [136:25]
B
Instant. The.
- [136:27]
A
Roadrunner. Yeah. It's an insane paradox. Likewise, my own experience of this moment. Why would I have an experience of this moment if I'm a puppet whose actions were completely guaranteed from the first.
- [136:45]
B
Instant? Well, I like Dan Dennett's idea of degrees of freedom, right? So the Roadrunner and the coyote have fewer degrees of freedom than you and I have. And they have more degrees of freedom than the cockroach or whatever. So, you know, how many options are there, you know, going forward down the path of garden of forking paths and so on. And then I guess it depends on what you mean by will. I mean free will. I will it to happen. Now, this is an interesting problem for clinical psychologists. I've had a few on the podcast that wrote. Wrote books about this. You know, there. What is it? What's happening when they're clients who have, let's say, some kind of addiction and they actually overcome it. They really do. They really stop drinking or smoking or drugs or whatever the problem is. And there's techniques, you know, that clinical psychologists use. Here's the kind of. Here's some of the tools you could have when you feel the urges bubbling up. This is what I'd really like a drink or whatever. Here's like the three things you could do. You know, you repeat to yourself this, or you go in this other room or whatever it is. And so. But who's doing that? Well, you are, you know. And I guess the determinist would say, yeah, but that was all determined also. So. Yeah, but. But somebody. Me. There's a me. There's a will. There's a self, which is. It's sort of an illusion, I guess, but it's. It's a good illusion. And. And so, you know, the fact that. The fact that people are able to do that seems to be evidence of something like a will to.
- [138:08]
A
Choose. Yeah, I think. I think. Well, I mean, it. We could be a screensaver. Why we would have consciousness to be a will. Aware of any of this is a paradox. I don't think we can answer, but I think it is unlikely. This would be a very strange screensaver to build. It's a weird way of accomplishing whatever this is accomplishing. And so I wish I heard more. People acknowledging our will appears to be free, not as free as we would would like. We can increase the degree of our freedom as per Dennett's formulation, but mechanistically, we're at a loss for how that works. But there's nothing wrong with that, you know, I mean, Darwin was in the same position with evolution. He could see that evolution, that adaptive evolution took place, but he knew nothing of the underlying mechanism. And that didn't make the idea.
- [139:08]
B
Invalid. Right, here's Sapolsky. We're nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental l over which we had no control. That has brought us to any moment. But, you know, Robert's book opens with a story of him at a Stanford University graduation ceremony. And he's sitting there, one of the faculty and all the students are up there getting congratulated. The parents and grandparents are so proud of their accomplishments. And there in the background is a gardener, you know, just trimming the tree or whatever. That poor guy, he's never going to. To Stanford. Why is that? This is where he starts. How come that guy got to go to Stanford and get the degree and that guy's a gardener. Right. So that's. To me, some of this determinism feels like if. If determinism is not true, then, you know, then it's. It's not just bad luck, good luck. There's something else in how lives turn out. Anyway, that was my sense of that. You know, it's sort of a kind of. Kind of a more tolerant feeling. It feels like it's more tolerant of how lives come.
- [140:15]
A
Out. Well, let me say this. I'm a big fan of Sapolsky's. I really think very.
- [140:20]
B
Highly. Me too. Yeah. Oh.
- [140:22]
A
Yeah. I do not think his work on free will is high quality. And it is reflective of something that I think we all need to be aware of. I've known many great things, thinkers. There is often some quadrant where their thinking is not high quality. And I take it. Actually a contractor that Heather and I worked with many years ago said something interesting. He said, there's often one room in a house that makes no sense. And basically it's where all of the little errors have been pushed so they concentrate because it's better to have the one crazy laundry room or closet than to have those errors distributed throughout the design. And so I hear Ian McGilchrist talk about panpsychism, right? And the belief that consciousness is in the particles themselves. And I think here's another incredibly high quality thinker. And there's this one place where it just doesn't. It doesn't sound like their other.
- [141:35]
B
Work. Here's. Here's Sam from his book Free Will. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware, over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have. Okay, so here's my little humorous thought experiment. I'll use it on you, Brett. All right, so you and. You and Heather have a devoted, high fitness, fidelity, loving.
- [142:00]
A
Marriage. Quite.
- [142:01]
B
Right. But let's just say. Let's just say, hypothetically, you strayed one time, you're out at a conference, Freedom fest, whatever, and Heather finds out. How is she going to respond if you say, well, darling, my will is simply not of my own making. My thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which I'm unaware, over which I have no conscious control. Could you even finish the.
- [142:23]
A
Sentence? No, I do not intend to find out.
- [142:28]
B
What. No.
- [142:29]
A
Don'T.
- [142:29]
B
What? She would just keep that as a thought experiment. But yeah, I mean, the point is. Come on, really. I mean, is any. Are any determinists actually really determinists in their.
- [142:39]
A
Lives? They're not, obviously not. I mean, and you know, Sam Harris being the world's best example, right? He spends how much time in meditation. Meditation, which is presumably about liberating his mind from certain things and pointing it in a different direction and being super deliberate about it. Right? So, you know, and scientists used to give postmodernists a hard time, rightly so, over their postmodernism. And maybe it was even Dog Dawkins who invited some postmodern feminist, if she really believed what she was saying to. Instead of taking the stairs down from her office to walk out the window. And I feel like this with these hardcore determinists, right? It's like, what sense would it even mean? You're making an argument. To make an argument. Argument is effectively to accept that there is an argument to be made. And the idea that you have a, you know, it is so preposterous that your consciousness would be trapped under the false impression that it was shaping the world in some way, only to witness the screensaver from the inside. Like what, what universe are you even imagining?
- [144:10]
B
Imagining? Yeah. I think also there's some physics envy there. Free will is not to be found in the quarks or atoms. Right. It's like the analogy I use is, you know, where in your physics equations is inflation? I mean, inflation's a real economic phenomenon. People study it. It has huge consequences for our lives. And so where is it in. In the brain? In the, in the, in your quantum physics? It isn't anywhere. It's an emergent property of something.
- [144:39]
A
Else. Well, hold on. I was actually going to ask you about this. I had it written down in my list of questions. The. There's a dichotomy, I would imagine you're aware of it, between strong emergentists and weak emergentists. Strong emergentists believe that you cannot, even in principle, understand higher level phenomena from the levels below. Weak emergentists believe that we cannot explain higher level phenomena from the lower levels, but that they are explainable by what's at the lower levels. I find myself in that.
- [145:22]
B
Category. Yeah, me too. Yeah, yeah.
- [145:23]
A
Yeah. So if that is the case, then things like inflation are emergent properties that are not deducible from. From the particle interactions any more than a baseball game is described in particles. But you could, if you had enough computing power and the will to do it, calculate the baseball game as a result of it. Except for the Heisenbergian aspect, which we presume to be fundamentally introduced.
- [146:02]
B
Calculable. Here's how. Kevin Mitchell, he's a geneticist and neuroscientist. His book is called Free Agents. He says basic laws of physics that deal only with energy and matter and fundamental forces cannot explain what life is or its defining property. Living organisms do things for reasons, as causal agents in their own right. They're driven not by energy, but by information. And the meaning of that information is embodied in the structure of the system, system itself, based on its history. In short, there are fundamentally distinct types of causation at play in living organisms. By virtue of their organization, that extension through time generates a new kind of causation that is not seen in most physical processes, one based on a record of history in which information about past events continues to play a causal role in the present. So would that be strong emergency? I think.
- [146:57]
A
So. I believe.
- [147:03]
B
That. Well, different levels of causality. Right. There's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's pretty strong.
- [147:09]
A
Emergentism.
- [147:10]
B
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, so I don't know. So. So in my book, these are under the. That sort of third section of the book on known unknowables. The problem is, is in. Is definitional. You know, what do you mean by determined? What do you mean by will free and so on. And I have the same problem with consciousness. You know, what's it like to be something else? You know, what's it like to be you? Well, how the hell should I know? I'm not you. Right. Was it like to be a bad or whatever. I also struggle with that in a chapter. Basically, it's the wrong question. It's a different category of question. It's a conceptual problem, not a. Not a. If we just work a little harder, we're going to solve it. Like Christoph Cox just lost his bet with David Chalmers last year after 25 years. The hard problem of consciousness not been solved. I don't think it'll ever be solved. If that's the way you're phrasing.
- [148:05]
A
It. Yeah, I think it is. It is phrased to be.
- [148:09]
B
Insoluble.
- [148:10]
A
Yeah. But did you confront what is it like to be a bat in your.
- [148:17]
B
Book? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I also use what's it like to be a dolphin? I can sort of imagine it, you know, if I had. I had one of those big single flippers and I put on a wetsuit and. And I go out and I eat sushi. I don't know. But you know, at some point, well, this really gets down to Aristotle's law of identity. A is a. You know, I cannot be a dolphin or a bat. And if I was, I would just be that I would not be. This is a Cartesian dualism. We're picturing it like the little Michael Shermer homunculus transfers over into the brain of the bat and in there going, oh, so this is what, what it's like. That's not possible. Right. So yeah, that could never.
- [148:56]
A
Happen. I must say that essay, a colleague once inflicted that essay on me knowing that I had studied bats and had quite.
- [149:06]
B
Many. Yeah.
- [149:09]
A
Yeah. And I really dislike the essay because effectively I think it is built to derail a kind of productive work. And I'm not claiming that you can know what it is like to be a bat, but you can know a great many things about what it's like to be a bat. And so anyway, who is anyone to tell anyone else? Don't go down that road. You'll never get anywhere if it is as amenable to test as anything else further. And you know, Nagel in his essay, say, sort of pays lip service to these things. But the fact is a bat isn't all that distant evolutionarily from you. And there are certain things you can derive from that. For example, because a bat is a mammal and because all mammals meet their mother and their mother has to be self sacrificing on their behalf, it is reasonable to imagine, imagine that love of the maternal form is the primordial form, that all mammals experience it to one degree or another. That there are two versions. There's the giving parental version and the receiving childhood version. And that part of what it is like to be a bat is to experience that. So can I, can I prove it? No. But is it more likely than whatever drives the mother bat to obsessively clean the wings of her offspring has nothing to do with the love that a mother human feels for her child? No, logically speaking, it is much more likely to be the same property than different because of parsimony. It wouldn't make sense for evolution to have built that mechanism multiple times when you have a clear line of descent unbroken between you and every other mammal. Now.
- [151:12]
B
We. I agree. Yeah, no, I agree. This, this how I solve the other minds problem. You know, how do I know you're sentient or whatever? Well, I just apply the Copernican principle to myself, you know, Copernican principle. We're not special. I'm not special. You're a mammal. I'm a mammal. You're a primate. I'm a primate. You know, you're a human. I'm a human. Very likely. Your nervous system works mostly the same as mine. So if I see you angry or sad or cr. Laughing or whatever, there's a good, there's a pretty good chance I know what the inner feeling is that you're experiencing because I've had that. Right. So that's as good as we can get.
- [151:46]
A
Yeah. And there's also, you know, there's a, there's an evidentiary approach too. If I want to know if you're sentient, I can just simply try to ascertain how many drinks you've.
- [151:55]
B
Had. Yeah, yeah. Well, so apparently brain scans are going to be able to, you know, I know what your, your looking at. Right. Based on the neural.
- [152:04]
A
Firing. Right. And then that's an.
- [152:07]
B
Interesting. And then could I know what your memories are or what you're feeling. That that's going to be even harder. Oh, he's feeling sad. Look, there was a little burst of dopamine or whatever it.
- [152:18]
A
Is. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, let's take one that's a little more obvious though. If, if you're up on strength stage and somebody asks you a question and suddenly you turn red in the face and you begin to sweat. We don't know exactly why, but what we can say, I think with mechanistic near certainty is that your brain is suddenly worse working really hard to solve a problem such that the ability to dissipate heat is insufficient. And so it's not good from the point of view of your well being to reveal to the audience that you are feeling the heat. But it's better than your brain not processing on high. So it's creating a lot of heat and you're having trouble dissipating it. And that's unfortunately conveying something to the audience. Audience, it's reasonable to surmise that from the, the indirect.
- [153:26]
B
Evidence. Yeah. In fact, there's whole body research on the social implications of reading other people's emotions. You know, the whites of the eyes, you could tell if somebody's blushing. That. That's not just for the person. It's for the other people to know what that person is feeling they're thinking, which is why facial expressions are so important. All those micro expressions that people study, it's a social. These are social.
- [153:50]
A
Cues. They're social cues. Some of them, like blushing, are unavoidable downsides where you. You're not better off to convey that you're feeling pressure, but you don't have a choice. And other ones are for the benefit of your kin to pick up cues that will help you coordinate and things like that. Before we close out here, let me ask you this. You mentioned the hard problem of consciousness, and I'm wondering if you can tell me what it would mean for it to be.
- [154:29]
B
Solved. Yeah, well, this is the end of the chapter. I say it's insoluble the way it's asked. In other words, the easy problem is like, figuring out what the wiring does. Here's where language is processed or whatever. But the hard problem is asking what is it like to be the.
- [154:46]
A
Wiring?
- [154:47]
B
Right. And I just. I just. What? I mean, it's like. What are you talking about? I mean, that's not. That's conceptually.
- [154:55]
A
Problematic. How would you know if you had the. What was the substance of the.
- [154:59]
B
Bet? Yes. I actually. I forget what their criteria was for what would constitute a win for Kristoff, but. Yeah, I don't know. Well, you know, if you look at. It's really kind of funny. Back to epistemology. What do the experts think? If you look on Wikipedia, under hard problem consciousness, there's like 20 different theories and, you know, and none of them are. You know, there's like maybe four or five that are preferred by most. To me, this tells me, okay, this whole field is back to your string theory example. You know, we're not even.
- [155:31]
A
Close. Yeah, we're not even close enough to phrase the question.
- [155:33]
B
Correctly. Yeah, right. Yeah.
- [155:35]
A
Exactly. Yeah. All right, Michael Shermer, this has been delightful. A little heated at times.
- [155:42]
B
But. Oh, it's all.
- [155:43]
A
Good. No, I think it's.
- [155:44]
B
Productive. I like that. Yeah.
- [155:46]
A
Totally. As always, I appreciate your dedication to holding other people's feet to the fire. And I appreciate that you do it with me. Your book. I have the pre.
- [155:59]
B
Printed. Here's the actual. Here's the hardback edition. Look, it's got the little. Little North Star Light of truth. Yeah, that's the.
- [156:07]
A
Idea. Anyway. The reading that I have done in it, I haven't read the whole thing. But the reading that I've done in it, it's beautifully written as always. Thank you. And anyway, it will provoke many important thoughts. Some of them you will have had a taste of here on this podcast. But in any case, thank you for joining me.
- [156:25]
B
Today. You're welcome. And yeah, my philosophy on that, by the way, Brett, is let friends, friends be.
- [156:31]
A
Wrong.
- [156:32]
B
Yeah. For, for disagreeing. Of course, said friends think you're wrong, so you have to deal with that.
- [156:37]
A
Too. I mean, the process over which we argue about who is wrong is how we collectively get.
- [156:49]
B
Smarter. That's it. Yeah, exactly. That's the core of the truth. Right? It's a community process. All.
- [156:55]
A
Right. Hell.
- [156:56]
B
Yeah. All.
- [156:56]
A
Right. Thank you for joining me in this very tiny version of the community community process. And to everyone else, thanks for joining.