How to Spot Lies & Find Truth as Conspiracies Spread on Both Sides | Michael Shermer

Summary

Podcast Summary:

The Rubin Report
Episode: How to Spot Lies & Find Truth as Conspiracies Spread on Both Sides
Guest: Michael Shermer
Date: January 31, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, Dave Rubin welcomes Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine and author of the new book “Truth: What It Is, How to Find It and Why It Still Matters.” Their conversation dives into the complicated state of truth in 2026, how to discern fact from fiction in a media-saturated age, the revival of conspiracy theories on both sides of the political spectrum, the evolving relationship between science and religion, and the role of technology and independent journalism in shaping our perceptions of reality.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The State of Truth in 2026

• Truth Under Assault: Shermer argues that public trust in institutions and experts is at a low, especially following COVID. The inability or unwillingness of authorities to communicate probabilistically (“Bayesian” reasoning) fueled a collapse of trust.

  “Instead of saying at the moment we think… but we’re really actually not sure… they go, ‘Here’s what the science has settled.’ And then, a month later: ‘Never mind, now we’re going with this.’” — Michael Shermer [05:03]

• Bayesian Approach Recommended:
  Shermer urges a move away from absolute certainty and toward probabilistic assessments (e.g., “60% chance” instead of “definitely true/false”).

2. Distrust in Institutions and the Media

• Permanent Change in Trust: Rubin and Shermer discuss how the 2020 pandemic, politicization, and events like school closures eroded trust—possibly irreparably.

  “Maybe we’ll never get back to Walter Cronkite… Now, I don’t trust any of them anymore without some fact checking.” — Michael Shermer [09:13]

• Rise of Independent Journalists:
  Bari Weiss cited as an example of efforts to restore journalistic integrity. However, Shermer stresses the limitation: “Don’t trust any one of them either… sample multiple independent journalists.” [10:18]

3. The Information Overload & Quest for Truth

• Information Glut & Skepticism:
  In a world of infinite content creators and AI, how do people “pilfer” truth out of a mess of data?

  “Remember Steve Bannon’s line about throwing… just throw shit at the system and people won’t know what to believe and then we’ll tell them what the truth is.” — Michael Shermer [11:23]

• Defining Truth:
  Shermer’s definition:

  “Truth is something confirmed to such an extent it would be rational to offer our provisional assent… truth of the small t, provisional. I could change my mind tomorrow...” [11:32]

• Role of Fact-Checkers and AI:
  Tools like Politifact, Snopes, LLMs (e.g. Grok, Gemini) are helpful but not perfect. Shermer notes the practicality limitations: “Who has time to do all this for everything?” [14:21]

4. The Interplay of Secularism, Religion, and Deep Truths

• Changing Approach to Religion:
  Shermer shares a personal evolution, moving from debunking religious stories as mere “myths” to seeing value in their allegorical or existential truths.

  “I’ve taken a more respectful approach… biblical stories are a form of great literature… they carry deeper truths… psychological truths…” [16:46, 18:08]

• Stories & Culture:
  The pair discuss how the power of narrative (“memeification”) enables religions to scale in a way atheism does not. Cultural Christianity is on the rise even among prominent atheists as a buffer against ideological or societal threats.

5. Conspiracies, “Just Asking Questions,” and Historical Revisionism

• Rise of Conspiracies on Both Sides:
  Shermer notes the disturbing trend of popular media personalities (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, et al.) flirting with revisionist histories and Holocaust denial tropes.

  “I don’t know what’s worse. They know it’s bullshit and they’re doing it for clicks… or they don’t know and they’ve never read much. None of them are historians.” [27:01, 28:56]

• Weaponizing Skepticism:
  The phrase “just asking questions” is co-opted to sow doubt rather than sincerely pursue answers:

  “They’ve somehow perverted it though, to mean something else… there is no reality first. And if there’s no reality first, well, congratulations, you’ll be swimming in a pool of questions the rest of your life.” — Dave Rubin [29:12] “We actually call that jacking off. They already have an agenda. The questions are all moving in a particular direction.” — Michael Shermer [29:42]

6. Why People Fall for Conspiracies and Bad Information

• Cognitive Biases:
  Shermer references the psychological “default to truth” — most people believe what they’re told unless challenged, but most people don’t join cults, and the actual rate of gullibility is often exaggerated (base rate neglect).

• Media Amplifies Outliers:
  “Nobody covers schools that were not shot up today.” This selective coverage inflates perceived prevalence of rare, negative events. [33:30]

• Genetic Fallacy:
  Shermer stresses judging arguments by their merit, not by the person making them (“genetic fallacy”):

  “You can’t discount somebody’s argument because of who they are or where they came from or what the origin of the story is.” [35:00]

7. Technological Frontiers: Deepfakes, AI, and Trust

• Deepfake Concerns:
  Advances in AI-generated video prompt new fears—one viral, fake video could spark international crisis.

  “What if somebody makes a video of Putin saying ‘we’re going to launch the missiles in an hour,’ and then Trump goes, ‘oh my god, look at the video…’” — Michael Shermer [37:01]

• Institutional Trust Erosion:
  Universities and media suffer credibility loss as ideological uniformity and high-profile failures (e.g., COVID, “what is a woman?” debates) alienate broad audiences. [38:00–39:00]

8. UFOs, UAPs, and the Search for “The Ultimate Truth”

• Newfound Legitimacy:
  The transition from “UFOs” (fringe) to “UAPs” (Unidentified Aerial/Anomalous Phenomena) and mainstream political attention (e.g., Senators and pilots) has amplified the conversation—but Shermer remains highly skeptical:

  “I think they’re probably out there somewhere in the cosmos, but I think they just haven’t come here.” [41:25, 43:00]

• What Would Convince Shermer:
  Shermer draws a parallel to the Chinese spy balloon incident: real disclosure involves clear evidence available to all, not claims of classified secrets.

  “If Marco Rubio… said, ‘I looked into it, I went to Area 51… I did see it’… that would change my priors and up my credence…” [44:20]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On experts and humility:

  “Never assign a 0 or 100% to anything because we’re fallible.” — Michael Shermer [00:00, 05:03]

• On the evolution of the information landscape:

  “Now, we have independent journalists. So that’s good. I think many sources checking out stories is good. But I don’t trust any one of them either.” — Michael Shermer [10:18]

• On AI assistants:

  “I have a Tesla, so I just push the little button… ‘Hey Grok, what’s the—’ and then I get an answer. And she, it’s a female voice, has this conversation and… it’s kind of playful, it’s actually kind of fun.” — Michael Shermer [15:15]

• On religious stories:

  “You’re missing the point of the story by asking if it really happened. Right. It’s a story, an allegory that has other meanings.” — Michael Shermer [18:08]

• On the “just asking questions” tactic:

  “We actually call that jacking off. They already have an agenda. The questions are all moving in a particular direction…” — Michael Shermer [29:42]

---

Important Timestamps

• [05:03] — Shermer discusses the erosion of trust in experts and institutions post-COVID.
• [09:13] — The enduring loss of faith in legacy media.
• [11:23] — The “Steve Bannon” approach and the definition of truth.
• [16:46] — Shermer’s shift from ridiculing to respecting religious stories’ existential truths.
• [27:01] — The blitz of conspiracy theories and Holocaust revisionism in modern media.
• [29:42] — How the phrase “just asking questions” is weaponized to erode reality.
• [33:30] — Explanation of media amplification of negative outlier events.
• [37:01] — Deepfakes, institutional trust, and the risks of viral misinformation.
• [41:25] — The UFO/UAP craze and the rational threshold for belief.
• [44:20] — What would constitute proof of alien visitation for Shermer.

---

Conclusion

This episode is a nuanced, candid conversation about the modern struggle to discern truth in a deeply polarized, information-saturated culture. Shermer and Rubin challenge listeners to adopt provisional thinking, embrace complexity, consult multiple sources, and recognize the power (and pitfalls) of stories—while remaining vigilant against both technologically driven deception and the seductions of easy certainty from any ideological edge.

Transcript

[A]

If you're a policymaker, you're a politician and you're sitting there in front of the microphones with all the media and they go, okay, what should we do on Monday? Do we open the schools or keep them closed? They're not looking for, well, I'd say a 60%. The policymakers, politicians feel the need to say this is what we absolutely must do. So never assign a 0 or 100% to anything because we're fallible. Who knows? You can read biblical stories and religious literature and find some deeper truths in them. So instead of just saying these are just myths, fake stories, taking a more respectful approach that Democrats are now, they're all a bunch of atheist, seculars, you know, cat ladies, no babies, and we're going to be overrun by Islam. And even if I'm not a Christian, at least the Christians, you know, understand what Islam is up to and they even know what a woman is. Right. We have now independent journalists. So that's good. I think many sources checking out stories is good, but I don't trust any one of them either. I think you really need to sample multiple independent journals. What Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson Darrell Cooper are up to. I don't know. I don't know what's worse. They know it's bullshit and they're doing it for clicks and that's the financial model of their podcast. Or they don't know and they've never read much.

[B]

How concerned are you that truth will just be lost because we will be inundated with so much counter information constantly that nobody will be able to pilfer anything true out of anything. All right, I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the founder of Skeptic magazine and the author of the new book Truth, what It Is, how to Find it and why It Still Matters. My old friend and Reuben Report returning guest. Probably top five Rubin Report guests of all time, at least in appearances. Michael Shermer. How are you, my friend?

[A]

Nice to see you, Dave. Yeah, we go all the way back to where you had a studio from who was the Roseanne Barr Studio?

[B]

It's a little known fact that I used to borrow Roseanne Barr Studio outside the airport in Los Angeles. That was the first time we ever sat down in person. So that was about 2017. But I had had you on the show probably fall of 2015. You were one of the first guests of the show and we go way back. So I'm gonna ask you the question that I ask you every time we start a show because every time we start a show, you have a new book. I ask you the same question, which is how many books have you written? And let's see if you even know.

[A]

Okay, I think this is number 14, I think.

[B]

Think.

[A]

Well, see, back in the 80s, I did have a couple of cycling books. I don't count those. You know, how to. How to train and that kind of stuff. And my experiences doing Race Across America as a professional cyclist. But I don't count those. I don't count until why People Believe Weird Things. My first book in 1997.

[B]

So what do you consider yourself if someone said, what is on Michael Shermer's business card? I mean, obviously author, and you've run Skeptic magazine for years and everything else, and you're an incredible, incredible debater. And we've done some live events together over the years. But what do you consider yourself really? Like, what would be the tagline under your name?

[A]

Well, probably writer, editor, researcher. I mean, that's the basic thing. So I'm constantly editing and writing articles for Skeptic, mostly editing articles, and then I'm always working on another book, you know, whenever I'm done. Usually what happens is, is I cut material because the publisher says it's way too long. And I'm like, oh, no. But I love these, this material. Like, save it for the next book. Like, oh, the next book. Okay.

[B]

I'm trying to think the first book of yours that I read, it was when I interviewed the first. So what book would you have? Would have come out around 2015 and it was thick. I mean, it was. What was it?

[A]

Oh, the Moral Arc.

[B]

The moral Arc, yes, yes, yes, yes. So you've been doing this for a long time. First off, I love the title. And just to say truth in the title. How do you even get the title? How could that not have been taken before?

[A]

Well, one of my Scientific American columns that sort of introduced this topic was called what is Truth Anyway? And then Pinker's book Rationality, I thought, yeah, a one word title. And I've noticed many authors are going to one word titles now. Almost like restaurants are now all one word titles names. So I think that's the trend. So I thought, well, Rationality, yeah, I'm into that, but I want to be different. So Truth, you know, sort of the shortened version of what is Truth Anyway? And that is one of the chapter titles, what is Truth Anyway?

[B]

And one of the things that I love about you, and then we'll dive into the book and we'll do some current events and all that is that you're a great creditor to the people that you, that you get ideas from. I mean, you even did it right there with Pinker. And it's something that I've really tried to incorporate in the show. You know, I know so many people that kind of try to steal ideas or pretend everything popped out of thin air or they came up with it that morning. And I remember when I sat down with you the first time, you mentioned all of these people. And it's an homage to them and it's an honorable thing to do. So let's dive in. Shermer, Truth.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

What is the state of truth in 2026? I suspect not great, but not great.

[A]

No, I mean, it's not catastrophic. And one reason to write the book is to say let's get back to trust in our institutions and our experts and science and rationality and so on. This really come under assault because of, I think mainly because of COVID and the whole pandemic and the inability of professional scientists and public policymakers and politicians to, to be more Bayesian in how they make suggestions. But by Bayesian I mean you assign a probability of something being true with a small t between 1 and 99%. So never assign a 0 or 100% to anything because we're fallible. Who knows, you never know. You could be wrong. So do masks work or don't they? Does the vaccine stop the spread, slow the spread? What does it do? And so on. And instead of saying at the moment we think we should close the schools and have social distancing and wear masks, you know, but, but we're really actually not sure. So we're going to recommend this now and then maybe in a week or two we'll change our minds. But they don't say that. They go, okay, here's what the science has settled, here's what we know. And then, you know, a month later, up, never mind, now we're going to go with this, you know, and now we know that by the fall of 2020, let's say everything started, shut down in March of 2020. By the fall it was clear, you know, this is Jay Bhattacharya's Great Barrington declaration. You know, we really don't need to keep the schools closed anymore. I mean, this virus mainly affects older people, people with pre existing conditions, obesity and so on. These kids are going to be fine, you know, but they didn't do that. And now with the paper trail, it looks like they knew that they didn't need to keep the schools closed, not to mention businesses and so on. I'm in Santa Barbara. They closed the beach, Dave. The beach. I mean, it's sunny and warm and breezy, and it's like, really, I got to sit in my house where it's not warm and sunny and breezy?

[B]

So. So what? Well, what do you, what do you think that. Where does that come from? Is that. Is that hubris on the part of the scientists, or does that tell you a little bit more about just what the nature of power is and that when these people were given a certain power over other people, they simply just didn't want to give it up?

[A]

I think there's several factors, because they wouldn't act that way with other propositions. They'd be more Bayesian and careful and couch their recommendations more cautiously, I think, because it was a pandemic and we didn't know they wanted to err on the side, you know, the precautionary principle, just in case, you know, what if it turns out it's more like Ebola or AIDS or something, just, you know, super deadly. It didn't turn out to be that way, but they didn't know for sure at the time. But then also it now looks like the timing, although probably be people won't admit to this, but when, you know, they were looked like, like, for example, the teachers unions were thinking of reopening the schools in the fall of 2020. And then I think in June or July, Trump said, I want the schools open in the fall. And then immediately the teachers unions. Oh, no, in that case now, you know, I think really, Trump derangement syndrome is. It's a thing I've seen many of my friends and colleagues, they just cannot think clearly when that word comes into the conversation. And I think there's some of that. And then also, you know, if you're a policymaker, you're a politician, and you're sitting there in front of the microphones with all the media, and they go, okay, what should we do on Monday? Do we open the schools or keep them closed? And, you know, they're not looking for, well, I'd say a 60%. You know, I think the policymakers, politicians, feel the need to say this is what we absolutely must do, and we're going to do that. And they wouldn't do that for other things. But I think it's that because just the circumstances.

[B]

It's interesting because you said, get back to trusting our institutions. And I think so many people have so soured on our Institutions that I don't know how many can be gotten back to. You know, obviously, what Bobby Kennedy's doing at HHS and then bringing in Bhattacharya and some of these other people. There's some new faith, I would say, from where I sit, but I know that there's a lot of people on the other side that now trust those institutions even less.

[A]

Yeah, okay. So it's very politicized in those circumstances. Jay Bhattacharya, I know him fairly well, and, you know, he's a really good guy. And he's not a fringe epidemiologist, for God's sakes. He's got two PhDs. He's at Stanford University. PhD in economics, PhD in epidemiology. You know, how can you call this guy a fringe? You know, and so that's discouraging on that side. He has made changes within the system. So I think the system still works pretty well. You know, the inside peer review, open peer commentary and so on. Talk to your colleagues. But when I say get back, I mean, I guess maybe you're right. Maybe we'll never get back to, you know, Walter Cronkite. This is the way it is or 60 Minutes. You know, I've watched 60 Minutes for 40 years, every Sunday night, and I don't trust any of them anymore without some fact checking. And I think I'm encouraged that Bari Weiss is, you know, kind of trying to revamp things at cbs, I think. I hope.

[B]

Well, suddenly, suddenly the Variety's doing a hit piece on her, which to me, I was like, oh, that means she must be doing something good because now Variety is going after her. Yeah.

[A]

Yes. Yeah, yeah. You know, the new. The new anchor there, you know, this is how it works. You got to shake things up and start. Start anew. So. But, you know, no, we'll never go back to the Walter Cronkites because we have now independent journalists. So that's good. I think many sources checking this out, checking out stories is good, but I don't trust any one of them either. I think you really need to sample multiple independent journalists.

[B]

So how concerned are you that in a world that now offers independent journalists and anyone can open a YouTube channel and, you know, in essence, you can put a desk down and put on a nice jacket and do what I do. Anyone can do these things. Hopefully they don't do it. I guess if I do it.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Hopefully not as well as me, but, like. But in that world where we all can do this, how concerned are you that truth And I would like you to define truth, by the way. But how, how concerned are you that truth will just be lost because we will be inundated with so much counter information constantly that nobody will be able to pilfer anything true out of anything.

[A]

Yeah, I do worry about that. Remember Steve Bannon's line about throwing, just throw shit at the system and people won't know what to believe and then we'll tell them what the truth is. Yeah, that's not a good solution either. So. Well, truth is defined. I define truth as something confirmed to such an extent it would be rational to offer our provisional assent, that is to say, truth of the small T. Provisional. I could change my mind tomorrow in Bayesian language. My priors, what I know now about something lead me to a certain level of credence or confidence that it's true. 80% or 60% or whatever. But I may change my mind. I mean, so Bayesian reasoning is all about assessing new evidence and when you should change your mind, when the evidence changes. And that's an ongoing process that I think if more of us could adopt that that would be helpful to evaluate these particular claims. But I worry about like, you know, like the, just say the Somali fraud cases in Minneapolis. Apparently this has been known for Minnesota, been known for a long time. Okay, so why is it that that kid, that 23 year old, Shirley, what's his name?

[B]

Yeah, Nick Shirley. Nick Shirley.

[A]

Nick Shirley. You know, how come it took him to make this a national story and then when I posted it, you know, people said, oh, we've known about this for years. Like, well then that's not a good defense. I mean, why didn't you do something about it? Right? How come it takes his kid to do that? So do I trust him? You know, not really, because he's just going door to door. I don't know what he's looking at. I don't know what's actually in that building. I don't know what he left out. How many places did he go to? And it was a perfectly fine daycare center. We don't know. But I do think something like that is a good trigger. Like, yeah, okay, let's get some more journalists in there, let's get some more investigators and open up an investigation. The politicians go in and so on, or police even, you know, something that it would trigger that. And you know, that's just crazy that that's the, you know, environment we live in for journalism now as you get a 23 year old on YouTube.

[B]

No, he, he this kid, I, I'd met him once or twice before this and literally with this thing in his pocket, he did more journalism in a day than I think you could argue CNN has done in, in two decades almost. So. So, all right, if we have some of individuals that are out there that are looking for the truth, on the quest for truth, and we have institutions that are rattled at the moment, we're in an algorithmic warfare. There's AI coming and everything else. I mean one of the things that people say to me all the time, if I go to the supermarket, people say the same thing to me all the time. Dave, you're, they always say, Dave you're the only person I trust. Which I always think is hilarious. Cause it's like, man, we're in deep doo doo. If I'm, if I'm it, you know, I'm trying, but like that, it can't be. So how do you think in a modern world with this technology we can get out of this?

[A]

Well, I do think some of the fact checking sites are good like Politifact and Snopes. Skeptic.com also now the new LLMs. So I use Grok and Gemini, but there's others and I even checked multiple ones. I'll just ask a question, you know, how many people actually died from the COVID over and above, you know, and you know, here's the 27 articles that they scraped from the Internet and they're all pretty much the same. So I thought, okay, well maybe the LLM programs work pretty well. It's not perfect, but at least it's a good fact checking site. There one problem is that who has time to do all this for everything, right?

[B]

Right.

[A]

I mean there's like 20 different things that happen in a day. I don't know what I'm looking at. What should I believe I don't have?

[B]

Well, I think we're all going to have our own digital assistant that's just basically going to live with us. You know, right now it's our phone. But I think there's going to be something that's just going to be an automatic fact checking device kind of built into our system.

[A]

I do that in my car now I have a Tesla. So I just, I just push the little button and say, you know, hey, what's, hey Grok, what's the. And then I get an answer. And then, and she, it's a, it's a female voice, has this conversation and, and it's kind of playful, it's actually kind of fun.

[B]

Except that I keep. I. So I have a Tesla, too. And I. Every now and again, she just starts speaking out of nowhere, like I've somehow accidentally triggered it. And I go. And I go. And I go, are you listening to me right now? She goes, I won't listen if you don't want me to. And I was like, okay, stop listening. And then a minute later, I go, are you listening? And she goes, yeah. And I'm like, what?

[A]

One of my longtime buddies was in town, and I was driving him around Santa Barbara, and so we started having fun with that, and then we stopped. And then, you know, he and I are talking about personal stuff that goes back decades. Girls and politics and all this stuff. And all of a sudden the voice comes on, is there anything else you need? We're like, what? Oh, my God. You didn't just hear all that, did you?

[B]

Well, that's the thing. We're all just so deep in it. So putting aside the technological part, you know, obviously there's a sort of religious version of truth and a secular way to attain truth. You're obviously on the secular side of that. This is something we've discussed many, many times. And one of my favorite episodes of the show that I ever did was sitting down to debate God with you and our friend Dennis Prager. How do you approach the secular worldview of truth? Do you find it in conflict or in maybe some level of companionship with a religious worldview? And how do you constantly grapple with that?

[A]

Yeah, so I've had some change of heart on some of that relationship with science and religion in this book. I'm trying out some new things. So science, you know, just standard, as I said, Bayesian reasoning and rationality in the scientific method and testing hypotheses and the randomized controlled trials and determining causality, causality from correlation and what you got to do to do that. So I have chapters on that. But then to what extent does that apply to some of these bigger, more metaphysical type questions? Does God exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? What was there before the Big bang? What is consciousness? What about free will? And so, like, let's just take religion. So instead of just saying, these are just myths, false, fake stories. They're not true. It's all bullshit. Just don't believe it. I've given up on that. I don't think that works. And I've taken a more respectful approach that biblical stories, let's say, or any kind of religious literature is a form of great literature. And that just like in great Literature. Dostoyevsky or Jane Austen or JRR Tolkien? Is there really a Middle Earth that JRR Tolkien writes about in the Lord of the Rings? What are you talking about? He just made this up. It's a story.

[B]

Not according to my director, Connor. He loves those little guys with the hairy.

[A]

Where are they? Oh, they're in New Zealand, you know, but to even ask that question is ridiculous. Of course these are made up stories, but they carry deeper truths, you know, sort of mythological truths or psychological truths, a little bit along the lines of what Jordan Peterson talks about or who's the great mythologist from back in the 80s, anyway, so that whole thing, I think, says you can read biblical stories and religious literature and find some deeper truths in them. So was, you know, Jonah really swallowed by a great fish or whale and lived three days in there? No. You're missing the point of the story by asking if it really happened. Right. It's a story, an allegory that has other meanings. In this case, the three days is very similar to the three days Jesus in the tomb. So even that, I would say, let's not take that literally. I mean, there was probably somebody, a carpenter from Nazareth named Jesus. He probably was crucified. Romans did this routinely and he really was dead. But was he risen from the dead? The evidence is not very good for that. But I think just to ask that you're missing the point of the story, which has to do with redemption and starting over, being born again, forgiveness, overthrowing your oppressors, in this case the Romans and so on. And, and I think I can then engage with religious people in a more respectful, open way and learn something. What do these stories have to do.

[B]

With, you know, sorry, what caused your shift there? Because, you know, for when I first met you, that was sort of at the ascendancy, maybe it was the end of the ascendancy of the new atheist movement. And there was a real feeling like what I think a certain set of people liked about it was that it was a little more kind of aggressive atheism and sort of anti religion. And what some people didn't like was that it was too anti religious. What caused it? You mentioned there was a shift in you here that you're looking at a new way.

[A]

What was that really? Just engaging with believers and theists and just getting to know them and asking, what is it you believe? Why? Why do you believe these things? And it often had to do with deep personal reasons and deeper truths that they get out of these stories and these accounts and their beliefs that are not meant to be taken literally in a scientific sense. I'll give you a story where Richard Dawkins and I were on stage with Ken Miller, the great biologist who debunked all the intelligent design creationist arguments. But at the end of his book, he says, you know, I'm a Catholic and I accept Jesus as my savior. Right? So, you know, Dawkins is sharpening the knives up there on the stage, like, okay, Ken, and let's say we found a piece of the true cross, and on a piece of the true cross is a little bit of flesh, and that's Jesus flesh. We extract the DNA from that, and then we'll find out if he was really, truly born of a virgin or not. And Ken just stops him and says, richard, I'm not claiming this is true in some scientific sense, like, we're going to test the DNA. I'm a Catholic. This is what we believe. And Richard's like, oh, oh, okay, what do we do with that? Nothing. Okay. So, you know, and then I've gotten to know people like Charles Murray, who's recently found God and others. Jonathan Rauch is new respect for religion. And Ross Douthit from the New York Times has written a book about belief. And Ayaan Hirsi, ally, our friend, she found Jesus, she found God. Okay? So I know the backstory people find in religion really deep, important truths. For them personally, it's a kind of pragmatic truth. And as long as they're not trying to convince me or convert other people, then it doesn't really matter. It's a different kind of truth than an empirical truth.

[B]

What has that taught you about the story of powers? Sorry, the power of stories? Because it's interesting. Sort of what you're saying is, okay, there's empirical evidence that can lead us to scientific here and now, truth, but in some sense, it needs the memeification to scale. And maybe that's why, you know, an atheist movement, which at its best can't really scale, because there's not enough imagination to capture people, and that's just part of the human experience.

[A]

Yeah, There have been attempts over the years to build a, you know, like secular churches in every city. And. And there are these secular humanists, organizations that have wedding ceremonies and funerals and coming of age and whatever, you know, they've never really caught on. And, you know, I've been to some of these, you know, these Sunday morning gatherings where people give testimonies about how they lost God, they lost their religion, or they sing hymns to Newton and Darwin, you know, and it's like, ah, come on. I mean, I don't really.

[B]

The coffee is probably decent after. I feel like there's probably some good atheist baristas, so that, you know.

[A]

Yes, that's right. Bullet coffee. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so I do think religions have figured out some deeper emotional, pragmatic truths about what people need, what society needs. Whether or not they're literally true is beside the point that there's this recent movement now of cultural Christianity. Dawkins himself said, well, I guess I'm a cultural Christian. This is in part in response to the whole Islamic influence in the west now and immigration into Europe. And so people are going, hey, you know what? Those Christians, they had some pretty good ideas. At least they got incorporated with the establishment of Western democracies and free market capitalism and so on. They found ways to make Christianity work really well with that, whereas Islam has never gone through an enlightenment and come out the other side is a more rational worldview. So I think by that people are saying, I know maybe this story is not true, but there's value in some of their principles. It's like, okay, all right, I can respect that.

[B]

Right? And to me, putting aside my own beliefs for a second, that seems like enough of a reason to argue for a loosely, let's say Christian Western world. Because Dawkins himself has basically said he's thrilled to live in a Christian country because he knows that the purely secular version of it, there's no chance in hell they're going to stand up to radical Islam. And actually, ironically, the Christian west may not stand up to it either, which. That's a whole other topic, I suppose.

[A]

Yes. I'm also worried about that in terms of, like Democrats are now portrayed is they're all a bunch of atheist seculars, you know, cat ladies, no babies, and we're going to be overrun by Islam. And even if I'm not a Christian, at least the Christians, you know, understand what Islam is up to and they even know what a woman is. Right. I've actually had theists go, yeah, that Shermer guy, he's an atheist, but at least he knows what a woman is. It's like, yeah, I do. Okay, so, you know, there's certain kinds of truths there that I think some cultures are really better than others. And liberals have a hard time saying that. And I'm worried that they're not coming gonna come around. I thought after the last election things would change, but I don't know. I mean, you still had that gynecologist last week who could not answer Josh Hawley's question, can men get pregnant? I mean, it's so simple. You know, here's. Here was my answer to that, Senator. No, of course men cannot get pregnant. Now, I do encounter in my practice some women who identify as men.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You know, I want to be tolerant. I want to go along to get along. So I just go, yeah, okay, but is he literally. Is she literally a man? No, she's still a woman. So, yeah, she can get pregnant.

[B]

And it shows you how their ideology then gets put above truth because she. Basically, the next thing out of her mouth when she couldn't answer the question was, well, I want, you know, I wanted to know if you were asking me for political purposes. But that's separate. That's completely separate than what the truth is. Let me ask you something else. So you. For years and years, you have been debunking conspiracy theories, whether it's 9, 11 stuff, Holocaust stuff, aliens. We can do a long list of the stuff that you've really been on the forefront and done work on the ground and gone to places to get firsthand evidence and everything. One of the things that I'm seeing right now that you see online, I don't know how much of it's bubbled into the real world, is there seems to also be an upending of our history, particularly, I would say, starting in World War II. There now is just a group of people online that are just trying to rewrite everything. Churchill was the architect of evil during World War II, and Hitler was kind of a good guy. Like, just all of this stuff again, I mean, it's sort of connected to what we discussed earlier. But in an age of information where we're going to be slammed with everything, like, how are we going to. How are we going to preserve a true past?

[A]

I have a chapter in the book on historical truths. How do we know what happened in the past? Well, we can know. You know, you can actually test different hypotheses. Look what the evidence points to. Look for a convergence of evidence to one conclusion over another. Look at what the consensus of what professional historians say about this. Like in response to the 1619 Project, you know, a group of historians, all liberals, you know, almost progressive liberals, going, hey, hey, hey, wait a minute. This is not what actually happened. We have to stand up against. You have to stand for truth. Okay, so there's that. Now, when I wrote the chapter, this was before, you know, the Daryl Cooper going on, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens going around the bend on all this stuff, just asking questions. You know, when I heard all this, I thought, okay, I've heard all of this. This is David Irving from the late 80s and early 90s that we debunked back then. And then I wrote that book denying history about, you know what, here's their arguments, here's why they're wrong. Here's what David Irvine is actually up to. What Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson Darrell Cooper are up to. I don't know. I suspect, you know, I don't know what's worse. They know it's bullshit and they're doing it for clicks and that's the financial model of their podcast. Or they don't know and they've never read much. I mean, none of them are. They're not historians at all. And you know, I could just picked up my book, they go, oh, okay, nevermind. This is. I was wrong about that because I have all those arguments right there. So I don't know what's worse there. And you know, it has contaminated the environment. I mean, there's people, apparently millions of people watch their shows. Astonishingly, you know Darrell Cooper, he's called America's Great Historian Working Today by Tucker Carlson. It's like no one's even heard of him. He's not a historian, he's nothing. It's like, you know, how that happens? I don't know. But that's the landscape we live in, I guess. What? You know, my free speech Puritanism in essence says, no, I don't want the government to come in and ban Tucker Carlson.

[B]

Of course, of course they can say whatever they want.

[A]

Yeah, but, but I can come on your show and go, you know what, what they're saying is a bunch of bullshit. And here's why, you know, you know, Hitler was the bad guy, Churchill was not the bad guy, you know, and here's how we know all the things he said are wrong.

[B]

What do you think about the way they've used the phrase just asking questions? Because you, as a skeptic, everything I know about you is to tell people ask questions. And I mean, you've several times you're mentioned test hypotheses and all these things. So the idea of asking questions is obviously positive. They've somehow perverted it though, to mean something else in some sense, that there is no reality first. And if there's no reality first, well, congratulations, you will be swimming in a pool of questions the rest of your life.

[A]

That's right, yeah. Of course asking questions is good, but what are they really up to. Are they really just asking questions? We actually call that jacking off. They're just jacking off. You know, they already have an agenda. The questions are all moving in a particular direction. You know, how many people could have really been incinerated in the crematory at Auschwitz Birkenau Crema II per 24 hour period to get to those numbers? I'm not saying they didn't do it. I'm just wondering how is it possible? Okay, they're not historians looking to understand what happened in the Holocaust. They're asking this for a particular reason. Usually when you dig down, there's some antisemitism there, there's some anti Israel there, and it has nothing to do with the Holocaust. So you don't have to dig very deep for that. Creationists did the same thing. You know, how do you explain the, you know, whatever the, the origin of DNA or the bacteria, flagellum or the eye or whatever. They're not just curious because they can just pick up a textbook and read it. They're asking because they want to move the conversation in a different direction, therefore the biblical story is true and so on. So it's a religious agenda. In the case of Candace Owens and Tucker, probably a political, some, some kind of political ideology agenda.

[B]

What do you make of sort of the psychological makeup of the people who can be swayed by these things? I've sort of, in the last two years, as we've seen, kind of more of this, just asking questions, craziness and conspiracy theories that never go anywhere. And stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting episode which never gets to the conclusion. One of the things that I've sort of started to think is, well, there's just a certain type of person that is willing or not willing that is in some sense preconditioned to that kind of thinking. And another type of person just somehow inherently has some defenses against that. There may be a religious reason for some of this. I don't know exactly, but what do you make of that?

[A]

Well, there's a theory in cognitive psychology called default to truth. That is to say, most of us most of the time just default to believing what we're told because who has time to fact check everything? That's true in some cases. But if it's something important, people actually are reasonably rational and cautious and skeptical or else everybody would join cults, for example. Cults is a good example. We can name them Scientology or Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones or whatever. And people point to that, go, look how gullible and stupid people are to join those things and just believe whatever they're told. But what we don't have is called base rate neglect in Bayesian reasoning. What's the base rate? How many people, you know, join the group and never sent Scientology their, their more second mortgage or, or never, you know, committed suicide or whatever. Most of them don't. You know, my other example is that on Netflix doc on the Tinder swindler and how this guy got away by getting these women to fall in love with them. And then, you know, you know, months down the line, he's on this business trip in Switzerland and he needs her to wire him $50,000 before Monday to close the $200 million deal. That's the moment. And they, you know, they found four women that did it. And you know, they're like, we feel like idiots, but what we don't know is how many women did he try this out on? And they told me to go fuck off. Right. And, or how many never even got to the second date, you know, and so it could be, you know, it's, you know, one out of a hundred fall for cults, not one out of ten.

[B]

So do you think that's also why. So do you think that's why so many people can be black pilled so easily, that, that the default setting is we only hear of sort of the negative outcomes of things in some sense. Right. We didn't hear about the hundred women that said no to him. I'm not gonna send you the 50,000. So because you don't hear about it, it artificially inflates the bad cases. And then most of us are walking around going, man, horrible stuff is happening all the time, no matter how out of whack that is with your own reality.

[A]

Yeah. Nobody covers schools that were not shot up today. Right, right. Or you know, how many ICE activities go unprotested. Who knows? Nobody covers those, you know, and so again, you have to have that base rate. You know, the outraged of the ICE agents are pulling some grandpa out of his house half dressed or whatever. Okay, that looks pretty bad. But how many of the bad hombres you know that they got that are sexual offenders? How come people don't film those? Or if they do, why don't they post those? So even video, you know, oh, it's on video. I can see it with my own eyes. Well, not really, because what's the angle? What are the other videos we're not seeing? You know, every news network has only a limited amount of time, so they're going to show some videos, but not others. I notice a lot of them. All of them do this. Fox News, cnn, they all do it where they'll just put some clip on it, just keep cycling through as the host is talking. And kind of the impact is like, wow, look at how many cars were on the sidewalk or whatever. No, that's the same car. They're just running the tape over and over and over. Right. And so even that's deceptive. So when the whole Renee Goode incident happened, I thought, okay, I better not comment here for at least 24 hours, because I know there's gonna be more videos, there's more angles and more analyses. And, you know, I didn't know who this guy Tim Pool was, and he posted one that was pretty interesting about how the tire was pointed left and then it spun as she tried to back up, then it pointed right. And I'm like, oh, okay. So I post that. Actually, it wasn't even a post from him. It was somebody else who posted his video. And people went apeshit against me. Like, don't you know who he is? You know, he's a Russian agent, and he got paid by the Russians. Like, what has that got to do with the tires? I'm just looking at the tires. What's wrong with his argument? Oh, you can't trust him. Okay, so this is the genetic fallacy. You can't discount somebody's argument because of who they are or where they came from or what the origin of the story is. Just what does it show? That's all I want to know. Anyway, so that was astonishing.

[B]

Well, that sort of brings me to the next part of this, which is we kind of discuss the text version of the truth when it comes to AI meaning will you get honest answers as it pertains to history or medical advice or whatever? But, you know, the next frontier of this, of course, is video. And we are getting pretty damn close, maybe by the time I finish this sentence, to the point where AI video will be completely. Will be completely inseparable from real video. So what are we going to do about that, my friend?

[A]

Oh, yeah. If I could find this video of me and Steven Pinker last September, he was in town in LA on his book tour. And so we did a public event together. And then somebody took a picture of us just sitting on stage. And then she said, let's see if I can find it here. Make them dance. So the video has us just getting up and dancing. I may not be able to find it here.

[B]

Yeah, well, you can send it to me after and we'll. We'll throw it and be right here.

[A]

No, I got it, I got it, I got it. So, all right. So, okay, so here's the photo. Okay. We're just sitting there. All right? And then she puts it into Grok and says, make them dance.

[B]

Yep. Look, Shermer's got the moves.

[A]

I mean, you know, I have to point out to people this never happened. You know, we did not get up on stage.

[B]

I've seen Pinker dance because, you know, he danced when Trump lost the election. Lost the election. And it's not very impressive.

[A]

I know, I know, I know. So, yeah, if. If somebody sends me a UFO video. Oh, look, Shermer, you've been asking for a clear Focus video, high definition. There it is. Well, I don't know if I could trust that anymore. I do worry about that, too, Dave, politically. What if somebody makes a video of Putin saying that we're going to launch the missiles in an hour, and then Trump goes, oh, my God, look at the video. Maybe there's digital watermarks they can put in videos that somebody can look at it go, hey, hang on. That's fake.

[B]

Right? But the amount of people who can be fake, it always reminds me, I know you know the story, but when War of the Worlds came out on radio, what year was that? 1929 or something, and people literally thought that aliens were invading New Jersey and a one woman jumped out of her window and died. So now we're doing that on steroids a hundred years later.

[A]

Yes. Yeah. Well, because if you trust the institutions and then they show you something again, that's a reasonable default to truth, because you have a history of trusting. It's Walter Cronkite. And so that's famously when he turned against the Vietnam War. Nixon's like, oh. Because everybody trusts this guy. And anyway, so, yeah, so if we get back to that, you know, I'm also worried about universities, the academy. They have a history of, you know, being a reliable institution and source of knowledge of what we should believe about the real world, about the physical world, biological world, social world, and so on. But again, since COVID and also the, you know, the whole trans thing, the woke stuff, and then the political orientation. You know, when I was in college, it was maybe 60, 40, a Democrat, Republican by the 80s is maybe 70, 30. By the 90s, it's like 80, 20. And now it's like 99:1. And there's just no possible way, first, that students are going to get a balanced Take on anything, and then two, whatever they recommend for policymakers. Here's our findings, here's our recommendations, here's our white papers, here's what you should trust. Why would anybody trust that? I mean, again, they can't even answer the question, what is a woman? Or in the case of the Harvard and MIT and Penn professors, does threatening to kill Jews constitute hate speech on your campus? Well, it depends. Okay. The moment people hear this, it's like, okay, why would I believe these guys when they tell me climate change is going to do this or that vaccines are going to do that? I don't trust them. And that's a big problem. Problem.

[B]

Let's, let's finish up with something that is huge in a certain corner of the Internet that I've touched on a little bit. But you just referenced right there, which is UFOs and life outside of our universe. You know, if you. I've gone down some of the Instagram rabbit holes and followed some of these accounts, and I've, I've had some interesting conversations. And, you know, Rogan does a ton of this stuff with UFOs. There are, I would say, probably more people than ever that right now believe that aliens have been here, that the government's been working with them. I mean, there's 10 versions of all of that. We're using technology now, and that's sort of the. How we got into modernity was redoing some of the stuff that crashed here. Like, there's a gajillion of these. Where are you at with all of that stuff? And what. And then. Wait, I'll, I'll hold the second question. Where are you at with all that?

[A]

Well, there was a phase transition and between. From UFOs to UAPs In 2017, when the new York Times ran that front page story about the Pentagon secret program to investigate what these things are because they're flying over military bases and US Airspace and so on. Okay, now, they weren't saying that we think it's aliens. They were just going, hey, you know, this is our job to keep track of this stuff, so let's look into it. But it's really taken off since, since then. And even the, the linguistic transition from ufo, which was always tin foil hat wearing kooks, to uap, ooh, that sounds, you know, what is that? Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Then it morphed into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, even more technical. And then you have people like Navy pilots like Graves and Grush and Senator Reid. These are not Fringers. Right. Marco Rubio is on there going, yeah, we're going to look into this. There's something weird happening here. Okay? So that tells me mostly it's probably something like drones or DARPA projects. If it's anything, once you discount all the 95% that are explained as balloons and birds and things like that, that even the ufologists admit are mostly just prosaic explanations. But if it's anything, it could be something like a DARPA project. Remember, I mean, there were reports in the. I think it was the early 70s of commercial airline pilots, you know, saying, oh, my God, dude, what is that up there? You know? And it was the SR71 Blackbird. It's going, you know, like 4,000 miles an hour at 90,000ft. Feet. And you're at 30,000ft going 600 miles an hour, going, holy shit, you know, Turns out it's SR71 Blackbird, right? The U2 spy plane. Also the same thing, you know, so it could be something like that. If it's anything, I do think the impulse to know it has a deeper. This is what I talk about at the end of the book, a deeper religious kind of impulse. The idea that we're not alone, that there's something out there that's far more advanced and intelligent and moral than us. They know we're here and they're going to come and rescue us. Because that's the underlying current with the UAP people is they have this technology, they can do all this stuff that we can't do that means free energy. We don't have to have oil anymore, energy too cheap to meter. It's going to save civilization, the whole thing. And so I was encouraged by Elon saying, you know, I would totally be into this. This would be great. I would adopt this for my cars. I looked into it. I just can't find anything. So I think there's probably. They're not here. I think they're probably out there somewhere in the cosmos, but I think they just haven't come here.

[B]

And what would it take? I mean, what would it take that could happen tomorrow that you'd be like, you know what? They are here. I mean, if there was a report and the government was like, yes, we actually. An alien craft did crash here. We had it at Area 51, the bodies being embalmed over there. I mean, what would you need to say, okay, now we've got something concrete.

[A]

Well, so my answer to that is the. The Chinese spy balloon, remember from the spring of 23, it just floated right over the United States, you know, Everybody's, what the hell is that? Well, within hours we got high definition photographs of it, video. They scrambled jets up there. There the jet is right there. It's right, you know, just 100 meters away. And then, you know, it's reported by all the media. The President, the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon. Everybody goes, yep, that's what happened. Here it is. We shot it down here. Here we are shooting it down. There it is, the debris, the ocean. We have this stuff. We know exactly. That would do it because that would be true disclosure. But what we get instead from all these people is, well, we have all that. It's just like that. Okay, can we see it? No, it's classified. And I, you know, I'll lose my job or I'll, you know, whatever. I'll have to tell you in some other, A skiff, one of these super private meanings. And even Marco Rubio, he's quoted in that film Age of Disclosure. I know there's something. But afterwards he said, you know, after they interviewed him, he went on Hannity and he said, you know, do you really think this? He goes, well, they kind of cut it in a way that made it look like I was more confident than I actually am. I really don't know. And I would like to know. Okay, so part of their answer is, well, even the President doesn't need to know. So the presidents don't know. But so if it's something along those lines, if Marco Rubio, I do trust him, he seems like a stand up guy. If he said, all right, I looked into it, I went to Area 51 or Wright Patterson or whatever, I went to the warehouse where they told me it was. I did see it, and it's whatever. And then he says what it is. You know, I think that would up my prior, that would change my priors and up my credence into being much more confident that, yeah, okay, there must be something there. But ultimately, you know, we, we all have to be able to see it, just like the Chinese Bible. And that's. And I have that thousand dollar bet with Avi Loeb from Harvard, you know, that by December 31, 2030, disclosure will not happen. So if it does, he wins. And I hope he wins because.

[B]

Yeah, right, that would be pretty cool. Although, Michael, let's not forget that President Bill Pullman in Independence Day did not know about the aliens because of plausible deniability. So, you know, you just never know with these things.

[A]

And that is possible. I mean, there is something like a deep state. I mean, there are, there are things the CIA does that the President doesn't know about and it's better doesn't so that he can deny it. So I didn't know anything about it. You know, arms for hostages? No. Oh, well, maybe Reagan didn't know about that anyway, but yeah. So of course nobody can know everything, so it's possible. But at some point, we got to see it. Come on, show us.

[B]

The book is Truth, what It Is, how to Find it, and why It Still Matters. Michael Shermer, when you write your 872nd book, you can come right on back. Good to see you, my friend.

[A]

Okay, Dave. All right. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L, I B S Y N Ads. Com. Today.