Michael Shermer (4:22)

Good morning. Nice to see you again. I saw you last time in person in England, I think it was.

Yasha Munk (4:27)

That's right. We're at a very interesting conference together and had some nice conversations. I'm really interested in learning all about the truth which you expound upon in your new book. But there was something that's interested me about you, which is that you spent an enormous amount of time looking into conspiracy theories, arguing with conspiracy theorists. You know, you're kind of, you know, the self appointed Batman. If somebody comes up with a terrible conspiracy theory somewhere, you sort of rush in to put them right.

Michael Shermer (4:55)

Yeah, there's the old, there's the previous book. That's the, it's sort of a two book project here. Conspiracies, the specific, you know, why the rational believe the irrational. The truth is basically why anybody believes anything at all and what we should believe. So yeah, well, so conspiracies have always been in the kind of wheelhouse of skeptics and scientists and so on. That study, fringe ideas is because they're, they're always right on the margins. You can't quite make out what's going on. If it's obviously a government operation or a corporate scam, then it's not really a conspiracy theory. It's just a scam or a operation. So conspiracy theories are always like, I can't quite make out what's going on here's. What I think might be going on. It's a little bit like the UAP UFO phenomenon. The pictures are always blurry and grainy. You can't quite make out. It's always on the margins on the borderlands. And you know, many conspiracies theories are like that. You can't quite figure out what's going on. Therefore that opens the door for, you know, any, anybody and everybody with their personal opinions. And so I just took undertook to exploring, you know, why that is. And since we started skeptic back in 1992, you know, we've been covering JFK and moon landing, conspiracy theories, all that stuff ever since because it's super popular.

Yasha Munk (6:14)

And what drew you to that? I mean, what made you think, hey, you know, these theories are out there, you know, it'll be tempting for, you know, a smart person to ignore them and to say, you know, these just crazies going around making up all of these stories. And certainly back in the day, they probably felt less central to the political discourse than unfortunately they do now. So why doesn't it make more sense just ignore them and actually focus on the stuff that's true and that matters in the world. What's the case for actually going to battle with conspiracy theorists and trying to engage them in the details, often in the weeds, of the claims they make about the world?

Michael Shermer (6:51)

Yeah, well, I mean, it matters what's true. I mean that, that, you know, we, I embrace universal realism. There is a reality, we can figure out what it is more or less small t truth. And that's true with conspiracies. I mean, so conspiracy theories are theories about actual conspiracies, whether they're true or not, whether the theory is true or not. And there are real conspiracies. I mean, Watergate was a conspiracy, Iran Contra, all The, you know, MK Ultra and all the CIA shenanigans in third world countries in the 50s and 60s and 70, these are all true and they were covered up. I mean, these were not approved by Congress or the President maybe didn't even know a lot of these things. So the question then is not so one of the things I'm debunking in conspiracy is that calling it a crazy conspiracy theory or you're a crazy conspiracy nut is not an answer. I mean, the question is, but what if he's right? I mean, he may be a nut, but what if he's right? Right. So what's the actual truth? And you know, when we started Skeptic, I was initially debunking the creationists, you know, sort of evolution den. But then the Holocaust deniers came on the scene and they were making the rounds. They were on major talk shows. And I thought, well, okay, so maybe that's something we can look at and skeptic. So I went around to some Holocaust scholars and historians with a list of here are the things that these Holocaust deniers are saying are not true. How many bodies can you burn in 24 hours in crematory at Auschwitz? Or why does the door not lock at the gas chamber at Mauthausen? They had a list of like 39 unanswered mysteries and anomalies about the Holocaust. And a lot of these historians would just tell me, well, they're just a bunch of anti Semites. It's like, yeah, that may be, but what's the answer? And most of them didn't know the answer. And it reminded me a little bit about biologists that would debate creationists. They would lose because they didn't realize the creationists are doing something different. And the Holocaust deniers are not actually studying the Holocaust. They're doing something different. They're challenging the narrative that because it's based on Israel and American and foreign policy, and that's really what it's about. You know, the Jews are up to something. It has nothing to do with, you know, how do you calculate how many Jews exactly died? How many were alive in 1939, how many were alive in 1945? You just sum up each village and town and so on. This is how they do it. But that actually isn't what they're interested in, you know, so. But I wanted to, in addition to exploring their motives, like, well, what is the answer exactly? What do we know? And so for me, conspiracy theories like that, I mean, that the Holocaust didn't happen or didn't happen the way we think it is, is a kind of conspiracy theory. That is, the Jews made up this story more or less to gain some sympathy or funding from Germany or, you know, whatever the theory is. And so, you know, is it true or not? In addition to what are their motives? And I just apply that to everything, you know, what actually happened with JFK or, you know, what happened in 9 11. How come? Why do people think the Bush administration pulled it off? Not just that, well, they're anti Bush, they're anti Republicans or whatever, but what is the explanation for why Building 7 crashed? You know, what do we know about these early purchases in the stock market of these airlines?

Yasha Munk (10:13)

So I have two competing responses to this right One response is that they're making factual claims. Right. And one of the interesting things about conspiracy theorists is that often they know a lot of details, they've studied a lot of elements of this, and so they're able to make all of these claims about the world. And as somebody who is generally motivated to understand the truth about the world, when somebody makes a factual claim, that's something that is worth responding to, and it's worth looking into the claim that it would take much greater heed to make the World Trade center collapse. Presumably, if you go and talk to physicists and material scientists, they can help give you answers to those questions, and those answers are either convincing or not. And that seems like a sensible response. There is, though, a question, and that's a competing instinct of, like, what is actually the purpose of this? I mean, do you find that some of the time you're able to convince people in these discussions that these conspiracy theorists end up saying, oh, well, you know, now that I've heard from professor so and so at the Department for Material Science at Caltech that the point at which a steel beam melts is actually this degree of Fahrenheit rather than that degree of Fahrenheit? I fold. You're right. Or do they just make up the next claim of saying, obviously Caltech is bought and paid for and this professor is a liar and so on and so forth? What is actually the kind of purpose of this conversation? Is it just to have some counter speech in there so that people who have not yet made up their mind can see? Oh, there are responses to that. Is it that you think sort of the people with whom you're engaging there are going to change their mind? Sort of. What is the end goal for you?

Michael Shermer (11:48)

Yeah, the end goal is to convince the undecided voters, as it were. Yeah, the hardcore conspiracy theorists are not going to change their mind. They never do. I mean, I had Oliver Stone on the podcast. He basically just hung up on me, almost hung up on me when I challenged him with specific facts. He's not going to change his mind, the hardcore ones. But the average person who is aware of the JFK conspiracy theories or 911 was an inside job or whatever you know, they might be thinking, hey, yeah, so what is the explanation for that? Oh, go to Skeptic magazine, you know, just like they go to Snopes or, or Politifact or any of these fact checking sites. I mean, that's what we do. As opposed to what? Like, I'm a big free speech advocate, so I Don't want the government to censor David Irving and his claims about Auschwitz. I defend him, you know, and he was actually arrested back in the. I think it was the early 2000s. He was arrested in Austria at the airport for going there to give a speech to a group of kind of right wing, you know, neo Nazi types about the Holocaust. And I thought, well, that's not right. I mean, he should be free to speak his mind and I should be free to debunk him. And I have debunked it many times. So I would rather have people, you know, go online and see, okay, here's David Irving's claims and here's why he's wrong, as opposed to, I can't even find David Irving online because he's been censored. And the reason for that is because, well, just to kind of defend free speech absolutism, like in America, there's a debate about how many Native Americans died after Columbus. Right. Well, how many were here when Columbus arrived? How many died, you know, two centuries later or whatever from guns, germs and steel, as it were. And, you know, so if, you know, the extreme claims are like it's 100 million, the moderate, much more moderate claims are more like 10 million. Well, what if I side on the side of like, I think it was only 15 or 20 million, so it wasn't that bad. Am I a Holocaust denier? But that's a legitimate debate. I mean, we should be able to have those debates. And I don't want people labeled a denier just because they don't go with the mainstream, just in case the mainstream's wrong.

Yasha Munk (13:53)

So let's think a little bit more systematically. You were saying earlier that a conspiracy theory in the natural sense is just a theory that some kind of conspiracy happened. And of course, there have been conspiracies in the history of the world. So just because something is a conspiracy theory doesn't mean that we can debunk it. Now, part of the answer is to look into each conspiracy theory in detail and actually go call up all of the experts and try and research all factual claims that people on the Internet make about them for the ordinary citizens. That's not going to be possible. Right? It's just we're busy people, we have jobs, we have families to raise. We're not going to be able to go and look after every conspiracy theory that's out there. So one thing we can do is to outsource our judgment to institutions that we might trust, like Skeptic magazine. But of Course, the people who are quite inclined to believe in conspiracy theories are going to think, well, places like Skeptic magazine are just CIA ops to occlude the truth of all these conspiracy theories. Is there a kind of principled way of distinguishing between allegations of conspiracy that are worth taking seriously and allegations of conspiracy where without even looking into the details of them, you immediately say, that smells kind of off. I mean, one obvious point to make that I kind of apply when I think about the world is just who is the collective agent who is supposed to have committed this conspiracy? Right. The idea is this company suddenly had a bunch of money missing in its accounts. To say, well, perhaps there was a conspiracy by the CFO and some kind of accountant to steal a bunch of that money doesn't seem crazy because it only takes a few people and they have a very clear self interest. And it's easy to imagine that they could solve a collective action problem of actually acting in concert. When you're saying all journalists are going along with some kind of crazy lie about the 2020 election, I say, well, a lot of journalists hate Donald Trump. And I can imagine that a lot of them kind of would go along with that, perhaps stretching it a little bit. But if you break the story that US Presidential election really was stolen, I mean, you go into the annals of journalism as one of the greatest investigative reporters ever, and out of the thousands of journalists in the United States, not a single one is going to break rank. Not a single one is going to pursue the very clear self interest to break the story over whatever political preference they have or over whatever fear they have. They're going to be looked at weirdly at a dinner party. That's a conspiracy theory that's much harder to sustain. Because how do these thousands of journalists coordinate? Why does nobody break ranks? Do they all actually share the same interests? That seems much less plausible to me. Is that how you think about it a little bit as well? Or how do you sort of eyeball a conspiracy theory before you've looked into all of the specific detailed claims? To think this is the kind of circumstance under which a conspiracy might happen in the world. This is the kind of circumstance in which it's very, very unlikely that people could carry off conspiracy. So that just seems off the wall.

Michael Shermer (17:04)

Yeah, that's a. It's a really good point. I do make a distinction between realistic conspiracy theories and, you know, quite fringe and lunatic or grandiose conspiracy theories. You know, that Bill Gates is trying to control the world, that there's A group of 12 people in London called the Illuminati, running the world's economy, that sort of thing, you know, that doesn't, that doesn't merit our attention as much as more realistic conspiracy theories. You know that Big Pharma makes money off of drugs? Yeah, they do. And they've captured the regulatory state, like in the opioid crisis. Yeah, that actually happened. And now we know, just like Big Tobacco, we know that they knew that these drugs were addictive and they lied. And then they hired the regulators themselves to work for the company. We know all this now. That's a real conspiracy. So the conspiracy theory that had happened turned out to be true. And the government then did something about it through the regulatory state and lawsuits against the Sackler family and so on, just like with Big Tobacco. So those are important because they matter to millions of people. Now, on the offloading question, yes, we, all of us offload most of what we believe about things because who has time to fact check everything? You don't. So in the case of the 2020 rigged election conspiracy theory, for me, what convinced it was that Attorney General Bill Barr, lifelong Republican, voted for Trump twice, said, you know what? You know, head of the Department of Justice, we're going to look into this. We have the resources to do it. I looked into it. We spent, you know, months, you know, examining all this stuff, and we didn't find any significant fraud at all. The election is over. To me. I don't have to go myself to Atlanta or to Phoenix to look at that building that I saw that grainy video on YouTube. But the truck that pulls up and at 2 in the morning behind pulling boxes out, oh, what is that? You know, the Department of Justice has the resources to do that. I don't have to worry about it. And so to me, it's like Christopher Hitchens once famously said, you know, when the Pope says he believes in God today, you think, well, that's the Pope, he's doing his job. You know, if the Pope says, you know, I'm beginning to doubt God's existence, you think, oh, well, he might be onto something because he's supposed to believe in God, right? So the Attorney General Bill Barr says, I looked into it, didn't find anything. He's like, yeah, okay, he's doing his job. You know, if he said, you know, hey, there are some questionable things here that would get my attention, right? All that's offloading. And, and that's mostly what, what all of us do. And, you know, so to me, the, the ones how we Decide what we're going to cover in skeptics say.

Yasha Munk (19:29)

But tell me more about this. Tell me more about the structural features of these different kinds of conspiracy theories. So you said you, you, you distinguish between realistic and unrealistic conspiracy theories. And we probably each have an instinct for what is a potentially realistic one and what is one that just seems, you know, off a bat. But. But you have a more systematic way of sort of thinking about the criteria you apply to determine what is a potentially realistic conspiracy theory and what is an obviously unrealistic one.

Michael Shermer (19:53)

Yeah, I do. So, like, how many people would have to be involved? You know, real conspiracy theories don't involve that many people. The more people that are involved, the more likely they are to screw up or tell somebody or whatever. I mean, you know, all the people say the jfk, all the people that would have to be involved or accused of being involved, you know, the CIA and the FBI and the KGB and the mafia and the Russians and the Cubans and, you know, and so on. Well, well, you know, not one of them wants to go on 60 minutes to tell their story what they saw. Not one of these women that slept with one of the guys that told about the assassination of jfk, not one wants to tell the story, you know, say, you know, it's the same thing with all these uf, ufo, UAP whistleblowers, you know, I saw the spacecraft, or I know somebody. Not one of them wants to go on 60 minutes ago or tell a journalist, you know, like. Like this is the breaking story of the century or the millennia here. It is not one.

Yasha Munk (20:48)

And even if you think that they're so afraid that they're gonna be killed, you know, what about one of them who doesn't have killed children, who's on his deathbed, right? And it's been 60 years. I mean, it's like, you know.

Michael Shermer (20:57)

Yeah, that's the funny thing, Yasha. I mean, they always say this. I can't. But they go online and they post all these videos and articles, and they freely speak to podcasters all the time about this. Why aren't they afraid of being killed for saying this? Right? You know, because they're not. That's not actually going on, you know. So back to your original question, though, Yasha, because I think this will interest you. You know, I originally got interested in this when I was in college. I went to Pepperdine University in Malibu. Remember the first graduating class of Malibu campus, 1976. And it was fairly conservative. I was a Christian at the time. It's A Republican leadership, President Ford came to speak there, and so on. Everybody was reading Atlas Shrugged, and I got into Objectivism and all that stuff, and I kind of became a libertarian. And then I started going to, like, libertarian type meetings and reading a lot of their literature. And it's like, you know, a lot of this is just bullshit. Like, my roommate and I went to one of these you don't have to pay income tax seminars. Like, the whole thing is a fake, it's a fraud. The IRS never actually has the legal right to tax your income. And this was all, isn't it like

Yasha Munk (22:00)

a proto version of a kind of sovereign citizen stuff?

Michael Shermer (22:02)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a sovereign citizen kind of thing. It may have even been that I didn't even know what it was at the time. And I just remember getting back to the dorm room going, you know, if this was actually tr, nobody would pay their taxes, and that there's no way the government's going to allow this. But my roommate did. He said, I'm not paying it. He didn't file for like 15 years. And they caught up with him and, you know, he got penalized pretty heavily. So, you know, it's like, that can't be. And then I started reading stuff like, you know, all the, you know, climate change is a hoax and, you know, the big pharma and all the doctors want you to be sick and. And there's a carburetor that'll get, you know, 200 miles to the gallon, but the oil companies is keeping it secret and, you know, all these kinds of things. I thought, well, I mean, it could be true, but it's like, oh, come on, you know, this is too big, too grandiose, and, you know, there's never anything to it again. No one goes on 60 Minutes to say, I found the carburetor, here it is. That gets 200 miles to the gallon, you know, and so on. And so a lot of the stuff I discovered as a libertarian was not serving me well. Like, you know, there's a lot of nonsense in this for a political agenda. And, you know, I still am a, you know, small government kind of guy, but, you know, I mean, you have to temper this with reality.

Yasha Munk (23:13)

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Michael Shermer (26:23)

Yeah. One of the favorite quotes I have in the book is I couldn't find it at the moment, but it was about, you know, the idea that 12 guys are running the economy or whatever is a little scary. But at least I've identified the enemy. But what's scarier to most people is no one is running the economy, no one's in charge. It's like, what? That's even worse than, you know, I've identified the enemy. Right. So I mean, there's a lot of motives. I was on G. Gordon Liddy's podcast, you know, in the 90s, and you know, Mr. Watergate. Right. He was the guy. And so I asked him why do this question? And he basically said, people are incompetent and they can't keep their mouth shut. That and most, once you work at government, you realize, you know, most people can't do much of anything. But in terms of the motives of why people believe it, well, there's several. You know, those out of. They call it conspiracy theories are for losers. That is, the losing party usually thinks the other party cheated. That's very common. Trump is not unusual that way. Hillary thought something like that happened.

Yasha Munk (27:20)

Well, the unusual thing about Trump is that he thinks people cheated. Even if he wins. Right. In 2016.

Michael Shermer (27:25)

Right. It's like Trump, you won. Don't you know the playbook here for conspiracy theories? So those out of power, I think people that are in power have more power than they actually have, both in government and in corporations. And you know, people that are low in status think that the people higher in status are pulling things off. People that are more anxious, just personality, temperament wise people are more anxious or risk averse or, you know, think that something's going on. They need a more predictable future. The future is largely not predictable. So those that need higher structure are more likely to think conspiracy theories are true. There's a big power thing like I don't trust authorities. There's a lack of trust in authority. So my favorite paper on this is called Dead and Alive. So people that tick the box to surveyors that they think Princess Diana was murdered. Murdered are also more likely to tick the box that says she faked her death and she's still alive. Well, she can't be both dead and alive. She's living in South America with Elvis.

Yasha Munk (28:27)

Right, but what's going on is that if you have a general inclination to believe in conspiracy theories, then you're just more likely to say things aren't as they're telling us, things aren't as they appear. And even if those two things are mutually exclusive, you're gonna be more likely. Well, who knows? All I know is they're lying to us now. Perhaps they're lying to us because she was murdered. Perhaps they're lying to us because she's still al life. But something's got to be different from what the official story is.

Michael Shermer (28:51)

Yeah, I wrote about the Deep State and QAnon and the Pizzagate business with that ping pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. you know, do Democrat or do Republicans really think Hillary and Tom Hanks and Beyonce are running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria? I don't know if they really believe it. One guy did, Edgar Welch, he went there with his gun to shoot up the, break up the pedophile ring. And he got to the pizza place and, you know, there was no bay found. There's no basement. He's like, there's no basement. But that's where the pedophile ring is. They're like, what are you talking about? It's just people in there eating pizza. Right. And he shot up the place. No one was hurt. He went to prison for a couple years and apologized later. I suspect the average Republican voter didn't really believe it, but more along the lines of what I call proxy conspiracism. It's a, it's a stand in. It's like, well, maybe Hillary didn't do that one. But it's the kind of thing the Democrats would do, you know, and so that's why I don't like them. And a lot of conspiracy theories are like that. My type Specimen is the O.J. trump trial. You know, O.J. was acquitted based on a conspiracy theory that the LAPD planted the bloody glove in the blood evidence on the car and so forth. But if you look at the history of the LAPD's interaction with African Americans post World War II in the 1950s and 60s, it's pretty bad. They did do things like that. So when a black jury in the 90s hears this conspiracy theory It's a stand in, in the sense that now I don't know what's going through their mind, but it's like, well, I don't know if OJ did it or not. He probably did. But planting evidence against blacks by the white lapd, that is the kind of thing they have done and they probably could have done it. So I'm going to stick it to them. That's a kind of proxy conspiracism, footing

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Yasha Munk (31:00)

The interesting thing about the Pizzagate controversy, as is realize, is that it has a remarkable similarity to one of my favorite news stories over last weeks, which I just realized also involves a kind of conspiracy, which is when the police force in I believe it's Adams County, Ohio, I may be wrong about that, was told that a well known local resident, an artist by the name of Aframan, had kidnapped women and hid them in their basement and they raided his home in ridiculous fashion only to find that there was no basement in which he was holding the supposedly kidnapped women. And this of course set off first a hilarious set of responses by Afroman, including the wonderful lemon pound cake describing the moment on the video surveillance footage of the raid on his home that he captured in which the sheriff of this county does a double take towards the lemon pound cake sitting on the table in the kitchen, which he clearly has a desire to eat. It's a wonderful song. I recommend you to YouTube it after listening to this episode. And then the police sued him for defamation and for emotional damages. And Afroman held a wonderful impassioned speech in defense of the American right to free speech and won all counts. So it's really one of the inspiring little stories over the last few last few weeks.

Michael Shermer (32:20)

I forgot about the Afroman example. But that's one more motive on the left and the right. I mean the left, left thinks the government is up to no good with, you know, they're, gonna, you know they're gonna do this or that against our causes and the right thinks, you know, the government's gonna, well, what were some of them during Obama? That they're making concentration camps in Texas for gun owners, that Obama's doing this or that, you know, they're gonna take our guns away or you know, whatever your political cause is, you think the other side is up to no good to take that away from us. And both sides are equally conspiratorial that way.

Yasha Munk (32:54)

Let me ask you one last question about conspiracies. And then I want to get into I guess, the obverse of conspiracy theories or wrong conspiracy theories, which is the truth, the subject of a new book. But you know, I have, I think, a very sophisticated audience, a highly educated audience, an audience that really seeks out in depth conversations about pretty demanding topics. I'm sure that nobody in this audience thinks of themselves as being particularly drawn to conspiracy theories, but the temptation of it, I think is always there. So, you know, what do you think are the warning signs for smart people who are usually responsive to evidence that something is just so tempting that they may themselves be giving it a pass, that they may be falling foul of a conspiracy theory? Even though on most days about most subjects, the thoughtful, rational thinkers.

Michael Shermer (33:49)

Well, it's. I have a chapter on this, the conspiracy detection kit. Basically it's a signal detection problem. So you have a two by two matrix. You know, the conspiracy is true or false and I believe it's true or false. So that gives you, you know, four options. So obviously if there, there are conspiracies and you want to get it right, the problem is we, you know, there's fallibilism, we're often wrong about these things. So it depends on the facts and the evidence in each particular one. Some might be true, some might not be true. As I said, the more realistic ones, like my type specimen there is, you know, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe. You know, it's obvious it's targeted. They do it for an obvious reason, to make money, you know, and companies often try to cheat the regulatory state in all countries. It's pretty common to big tobacco, big pharma and so on, as I mentioned.

Yasha Munk (34:33)

But that presumably actually involved a lot of people being on the Inn. I mean, I haven't looked into that in detail, but it's kind of striking that by the way, the number of people involved is one kind of criterion. Presumably another criterion is how organized are they. Right? It's easier for a lot of people within a secret service agency to be in on it. Right? Sort of 50 people who are all employees of the CIA find it easier to coordinate in part because there may be crimes involved if they tell somebody else, etc. Than 50 people who are just randomly drawn from the population. And it's somewhat easier to convince 50 employees of a company to go along with some kind of conspiracy. Then again, 50 journalists who are all working for competing outlets and so on. But still, again, I haven't looked into details of this, but presumably actually a lot of people were involved in building the machinery that was needed in order to fool these regulators into understating the amount of emissions in this Volkswagen case.

Michael Shermer (35:32)

Well, yeah, a lot. Well, a lot of these employees of both corporations and government agencies are siloed and they may not know what's going on. I mean, you don't have to have that many people involved to, you know, pull off a conspiracy. Usually what happens when we find out about them is some insider whistleblower. I mean, that's how we know about scientific fraud, for example. It's always some grad student that works in the lab. It's not an outsider examining the data sets. Right. So it's usually not the regulatory state that discovers that corporations cheating. It's usually some insider, a whistleblower. Which is why we need whistleblower laws, which is why I don't think the UAP UFO thing is going to pan out because again, we have whistleblower laws. There's, you know, lots of opportunities for these people to come forward. And no matter how siloed some government agencies will be, there's surely somebody who will come forward. And that usually is how we find out about it. So, you know, so it's always a matter of, you know, what's the paper trail? Is there some evidence? So here we have what's called the problem of anomalies, anomaly hunting. If you don't have positive evidence in favor of your conspiracy theories theory, then it's like, well then how do you explain X? You know, and there's always, you know, half a dozen dozen different weird things that about JFK or 911 or the moon landing or whatever. And so you just point those out as if that's evidence. But anomalies are not evidence, they're just anomalies. And no theory of anything, no scientific theory of any or any kind of theory explains every, every last thing. And so there's always going to be some weird things that you can point out, but those aren't positive evidence in favor of your theory theory. Those are, you know, negative evidence against the accepted theory. But then you have to ask okay, if your theory is right and the paradigm accepted theory is wrong, can you explain all the specs that the mainstream theory explains in addition to the anomalies that your theory explains? And the answer is usually no. Right. So there's a reason you know science and you know, it's fairly conservative, because most alternative theories, to the exception accepted one, they don't have much evidence in their support, so we just reject them.

Yasha Munk (37:37)

All right, we've talked a lot about conspiracy theories. Let's talk about the truth. You know, truth is strange because it's such a simple concept, it's such a fundamental concept to how we talk about the world. It's true that. Is this true, you know, our words that we use without deep reflection in everyday conversation all of the time, and yet the moment you think about it from a philosophical point of view, it turns out to be much more complicated in the philosophical literature. What is truth? What is the right definition of truth? How do we know what is truth? Are all questions that have deeply shaped the study of philosophical fields, from epistemology to ontology and so on. And more broadly, once you raise it to that level, suddenly a lot of ordinary people who may not be doing a lot of academic philosophy and perhaps don't think of themselves as particularly philosophically inclined in general, start to say, well, is there really such a thing as the truth? And. And isn't more of this like my truth and your truth? And all of these kind of popularized forms of postmodernism suddenly become a big part of how people think and talk about this. And I think a lot of people, therefore, end up being somewhat incoherent, where on the one hand, they take for granted relatively straightforward conceptions of truth. And then in certain contexts they suddenly say, well, nobody can really know the truth. There's really only such a thing as my truth and your truth. How should we think in a more systematic, rational way about what truth is and what kind of role truth claims should play in our political discourse?

Michael Shermer (39:15)

Yeah. So I define truth as something confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent. So provisional is key. You know, it's truth of the small. T could be wrong. I do endorse universal realism. There is a reality out there. There is a truth to be known. But we also embrace fallibilism. We could be wrong about what we think is true. Therefore, we need a system in place by which we can all agree this is going to be the route we take to get to the truth as best as we can. And so from there you could start building evidence. So in epistemology, it's the study of knowledge. What is knowledge? Justified true belief. What is justified evidence? Evidence. What should I believe that's true evidence? The more evidence you have, the more likely it is you should believe it. The less evidence, the less likely. So this is sometimes called the ecree principle. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and ordinary claims require ordinary evidence. This goes back to David Hume. And so I take a Bayesian approach that is to say, never put a 1 or 0 on any proposition. Never 100%, never 0%, somewhere in between, I don't know, 0.01% and 99.9% likely to be true. And most propositions are somewhere in between there. And that allows you some epistemic humility to say, well at the moment, you know, I believe with 60% probability X is true, but you know, I'll change my mind. Show me, you know, just show me some counter evidence and I'll make it a 50% or a 40%. So in other words, it allows you to be flexible instead of being so, so committed in your identity to that particular true thing being true. And if it's not, then this is going to shatter your self identity and, and so on. So you have to defend it. And so most of the, the cognitive biases, you know, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, hindsight bias, mind side by all of this is based on this Unbayesian approach to truth. That my truth is, you know, I'm going to defend it to the death. Now another distinction between internal stuff, subjective truths, my truth versus external, objective truths. It's actually true, right? So you know, when, when I say I like dark chocolate and you say I like milk chocolate or whatever, you know, these are just internal preferences, subjective tastes or whatever, there's no way to determine what's the right answer versus what, what all of us want, which is objective, external truth, what's actually true, right? So my example is if you say, well, meditation makes me feel better, better, that's an internal subjective truth. Okay, good for you. I tried it, I don't like it. But my people like Deepak Chopra and others, you know, they think, well, meditation is actually true. It actually works, you know, under these conditions, you know, 20 minutes a day, six days a week, if you do this and this and this kind of chant for whatever, these are the effects it'll have on your health, it'll lower your stress hormones and blood pressure. So there, the attempt is to move it from meditation makes me feel better too. It actually works for Most people under these conditions, that's an attempt to make that transition. And so I've been applying this idea, like to the trans movement recently. You know, when somebody says, you know, I feel like I was born in the wrong body, I feel, you know, guy, I feel like I'm a woman now. Okay, let's leave minors out of it because they, they shouldn't be dealing with this. A man, you know, an adult man in their 30s. Let's, you know. And I know some, they say, I just feel like I'm woman inside and I'm going to transition and I'm going to live my life that way. Way. Okay, fine. That's an internal subjective feeling or truth. This is who I feel like I am. Okay, fine. The problem that's happened in the last decade or so is people have attempted to make that an external, objective truth. You can actually change sex. It's a real thing. And that's why science people like me go, hang on, that's not the case. Here's what the, you know, the biologists tell us, and here's what we actually know. So you can't make that transition from internal subjective truth to external objective truth and. Or all the business about consciousness and altered states that people take ayahuasca or magic mushrooms or whatever, and they go, boy, I went to this other place, I had this completely other experience. You know, my sense is, well, good for you. If it makes your life better, that's fine. That's still an internal subjective truth, as they say. But it's really there. Shermer, you got to try this. It's like, but how do I know that this other world exists out that the doors of perception have been opened and I see all these spirit beings or whatever, and they go, well, here, if you take the ayahuasca, you'll see I'm right. It's like, but if I take the ayahuasca, I'm still in my head. It's still an internal subjective truth. So, you know, this is the problem we all face. We want to know what's externally really true and point to it and you can see it and I can see it. And here's the methods we're going to use versus these other things that, you know, people get confused about. I feel like my truth is, okay, that's nice, but what. How can we tell if it's really true?

Yasha Munk (44:08)

So there's a lot of really interesting things in there. And I think I broadly agree with you on the philosophical approach here, but let me try and Steal men, the other side of this, Right. So you're saying there's an objective reality that doesn't depend on my truth or your truth or on the way that we sort of look at the world. Let me make two arguments that I think are right insofar as they go. And then people draw from that the inference that objective reality doesn't exist in the way you're saying. I think the inference is perhaps going a little bit too far, but you'll have to explain to us why. So first is that it seems like I perceive the world in a very clear way, unless I'm really drunk or on drugs or something like that. I look around my room and I see that there's a lamp to my left and my glass is lying to my right and so on, and there's an objective reality. And I seem pretty able to recognize that. And that seems like a pretty immediate and reliable and perhaps completely neat guide to what's going on in the world. But we know from scientific studies that there's lots of things that we don't perceive about the world, right? For example, the room seems relatively quiet to me right now. But there are sounds that are too high pitch for humans to hear that a dog, for example, would absolutely hear, right? So if I'm saying, you know, my dog is going crazy, acting weird, like there's a weird sound, but I know there's no sound. Well, in fact, I don't know there's no sound because there may be a sound that's audible to my dog that's absolutely to do real out there, but my kind of sensory apparatus doesn't allow me access to that. So that's an old Fortune philosophy predating Immanuel Kant. But a lot of Immanuel Kant's sort of ideas about the world are based in this distinction between the phenomenal realm that I have access to, the nouminal realm, the way in which it really is, right? So perhaps there is a reality out there. But are we humans actually able in any meaningful sense to get access to it? And if not, then what follows from that? So that's one question kind of objection you might have. The other kind of objection you might have is to say that perhaps there really is such a thing as an atom out there. And perhaps that starts to be more complicated. There's really such a thing as a rock out there or a tree out there. But a lot of the time when we talk about truth, we talk about social entities which are somewhat more complicated. Is this a democratic institution? Is the way in which this politician is acting democratic or not democratic? Well, what kind of democracy? Right. When the ancient Athenians talked about democracy, they had something very different in mind than we have in mind today. When people in Germany have democratic elections, the way in which they organize these elections are very different from the way we organize them in the United States. And so if a Chinese Communist Party wants to go around saying, actually our country and our system is democratic as they do, well, how can I say no, I understand objective reality and that is just objectively real.

Michael Shermer (47:03)

Wrong.

Yasha Munk (47:04)

How do you take these two points which I think are true insofar as they go and resist the inference that a lot of people draw from them, which is actually the world is a lot fuzzier than we realize and we can't ever really know what's going on. And the moment that we get into any kind of interesting social political question, we're just in the world of social constructs where my truth is as good as your truth and we can just kind of throw up our hands and collapse into vulgar postmodernism.

Michael Shermer (47:34)

Yes, well, the problem with vulgar postmodernism and we just throw our hands up is if I say so, then you're telling me the Holocaust deniers theory, the Holocaust didn't happen, is just as good as mine, that it did. Most post, even most postmodernists will go, well, no, let's not go that far. Right? You know, they'll find a place to draw the line. And as I point out at the beginning of the book, even the claim that we cannot know the truth is a truth claim, claim. Okay, make your argument. And the moment you open your mouth to make your argument, you've lost the argument because you're saying, well, there is a truth that is there's no truth to be known. Okay, you know, this liar's paradox problem, you know, these are old problems, you know, so that's why I like the Bayesian approach, because everything you said could be true. You know, maybe atoms don't actually exist, although I think they do now. At this point it's pretty common. Same thing with the Big Bang theory. You know, we're pretty confident about that. Since I was in, in high school, you know, and this has all been settled, and then now the James Webb telescope is finding these galaxies that are fully developed, you know, like hundreds of millions of years, even like a billion years too early for what the Big Bang theory says, according to inflation theory, how long it takes elements to form into stars and planets and then galaxies form and so on. And now they're saying, well, maybe the Big Bang theory is not, not correct. Like, okay, wow, all right. And that's just like in my lifetime. So, you know, 500 years from now, who knows, you know, that, you know, what, what we think is obviously true, the theory of evolution or something, you know, the germ theory of disease, whatever the big ones are. So that's why, again, it's always safe to say at the moment, this is what we think is true. This could all be changed, you know, and again in 500 years. If you go back 500 years, pre new Newton and Copernicus, Galileo, pre scientific Revolution, pre Enlightenment, you know, the medieval worldview was very different from ours. I mean, just radically different. It's just the way people thought about the world is just so wholly different from ours that it's like I can't even imagine what they were thinking. And so maybe our ancestors, you know, centuries from now will look back at us. Right. So that's why it's good to acknowledge fallibilism, recognize there is a reality. We could be wrong, wrong. This is what we think at the moment. Now, you've also touched upon some other. So there's the, you know, kind of the physical sciences, the biological sciences. Those are much easier, I really think, you know, the, the hard sciences or the social sciences. You talk about something like iq, you know, people immediately equate that with intelligence. And then they cite like the Flynn effect. IQ scores are going up three points every decade for almost a century. That's now stopped, actually. It's going back a little bit. But what do you mean by iq? Well, it's a score on a test. Well, what is. Well, you know, it's a, it's a constructed social, you know, human thing that we, we call or, you know, reify as intelligence in the brain. It may not be that. So there's legitimate challenges there. And to those kind of social constructs, I suppose, gender and sex and some of these other things would be like that as well. And democracy. Okay, so, but, but here's how I hear. I'll just, I'll just, I, I think I push it as far as I can. In the book, what's the right answer on immigration? What percentage should a nation allow foreigners to come in and become citizens? There's no right answer, per se. In a way, a democracy is a kind of experiment. We're going to put these people in power for the next four years, and they're going to run their agenda that they told us they want to have. And we're going to see how it goes. And then if we don't like it, we'll throw them out. We'll bring in this other party. It's a kind of experiment. We'll see how it goes. You know, there's 50 different states in the United States. Each has different gun control laws. Okay, let's look at those. And social scientists use the comparative method and the natural experiments. We can't force people to buy guns or not buy guns, but we can look at, to see which counties have more guns, which has left guns, which have more crime, which have less crime. You got to control for all the socioeconomic variables and other things. And this is what social scientists do. It's an attempt. It's better than saying, saying beats the hell out of me. I don't know. Nobody knows. So we don't want that. And so as far as I can tell, I do think there's centuries long moral progress toward more democracy and less autocracy for a reason. So here, I'll just read to you how I put it here in the book. It is my hypothesis that in the same way Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, there so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist. Just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits, given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else. Scientists studying political, economic, social and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of interview inquiry. For example, that democracies are better than autocracies, that market economies are superior to command economies, that torture and the death penalty do not curb crime, that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea, that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries. And most poignantly here, that blacks do not like being enslaved and that Jews do not want to be exterminated. So then I from there I go, well, why don't blacks want to be enslaved? Why don't Jews want to be exterminated? Maybe there's some society, some non western society society in which blacks want to be slaves. Are women want to be lorded over by men or Jews want to be shoved into gas chambers? Yeah, maybe, but I doubt it because look at history. Look at what people actually do. Look at what people, how people vote and vote with their feet. Would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in east or West Germany before the unification, everybody knows the answer. How do they know? Because it's in our nature to want to be satiated rather than hungry, to be free rather than enslaved, to be healthy rather than diseased, and so on. That's in our human nature that we evolve. So I'm claiming that we can actually discover things about the social world that are really true based on human nature. And anyway, that's my argument.

Yasha Munk (53:56)

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this episode, we go a little bit deeper into how people like Michael, who believe in the objective reality of an outside world that is independent of the human mind, can defend that position against some of the most philosophically sophisticated objections to it. And I ask him a slightly surprising question, which is, what is a conspiracy theory that he doesn't dismiss out of hand? What is the most ambitious, most consequential conspiracy theory about the world that he things might have some truth to it? If you want to hear the answer to that question, if you want to support this podcast, if you want to make it possible for us to do the work we do, go to writing.yashamon.com and today I'm throwing in a special discount. If you go to writing.yashamon.com thegoodfight, you get 25% off your first year of subscription, bringing this down to a cost of just about a dollar a week for two full episodes. Writing.hashemonk.com the Good Fight.