Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Why Conspiracy Theories Work" with Michael Shermer

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"Why Conspiracy Theories Work" with Michael Shermer · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, humans. Welcome to the same space with dangerous ideas.
• 0:05
  And what dangerous idea could be more dangerous than a conspiracy theory?
• 0:09
  A good conspiracy theory. Do you believe any? What do you think happened when JFK was assassinated?
• 0:16
  Do you have an opinion? Do you sometimes, what do you think about like UFOs and all these
• 0:21
  sightings and so on? How do we think about theories that are unconventional that you wouldn't
• 0:28
  necessarily regard as being totally crackpot, but that don't have the imprompture imprompture,
• 0:34
  imprompture, I should say, of officialdom that like, you know, scientists and rationalists would
• 0:39
  poo poo. One person who does much such poo pooing and cops some flack for it is Michael Shermer.
• 0:45
  He spent his life as a skeptic for nearly 20 years from 2001 to 2019. He wrote the skeptic column
• 0:52
  in Scientific American, the prestigious magazine. He's contributed to Time magazine.
• 0:58
  He is the publisher of skeptic magazine and has a podcast called the Michael Shermer show.
• 1:03
  He has all kinds of academic credentials and very important things. He's been on the Joe
• 1:07
  Rogan podcast a number of times, which you might have heard him on. His latest book is called
• 1:11
  Conspiracy. Why the rational believe the irrational, which is a bit of a must read for understanding
• 1:18
  conspiracy theories and the people who believe them and how to counter them and what you should
• 1:22
  believe and shouldn't believe. So I wanted to pick his brain about what it's okay to believe,
• 1:25
  what it's not okay to believe, what it's rational to believe, what it's irrational to believe,
• 1:30
  and whether we're seeing a rise in irrationalism in the world, and if so, how to counter it.
• 1:35
  This is a wonderful rambling conversation that goes all the way across COVID to lockdowns,
• 1:41
  to wokeism, to religiosity, to Jordan Peterson, to whatever else. I really hope you enjoy it as much
• 1:48
  as I did. This is the one I'm only, Michael Shermer.
• 2:00
  I'm in Santa Barbara. My office is in Santa Barbara and I'm just doing my usual stuff,
• 2:07
  cranking out issues of skeptic magazine every three months or quarterly. So we're always in a cycle
• 2:14
  of preparation of articles, editing, soliciting, producing, finalizing, fact checking, editing,
• 2:21
  and proofing, and all that stuff. Have you always been in Santa Barbara? Or is this the last one?
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  No, well, I've lived here now seven years. My office has been in Althadena all the way up until
• 2:31
  last year when my business partner, Pat Lindsay died. She lived down near the office, so I kept it
• 2:37
  down there for her and I just drove down one day a week when I was teaching her. Because so much can
• 2:42
  be done remotely now. I mean, I have won an editor in Scotland, another one in Canada,
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  you know, and authors are all over the world and you know, you can I'll be done remotely. So it's
• 2:53
  not. I mean, it doesn't make one wonder why anyone doesn't live in Santa Barbara or some such
• 2:57
  local. You know what I mean? It's like I sometimes wonder why. I mean, I kind of can't be
• 3:01
  remote because I have a radio show on the public broadcaster in Sydney. But you know, if you're not
• 3:07
  literally tied down to some place where the action has to be happening, why is anybody
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  bothering to live in Los Angeles anymore? Yeah, exactly. I'm never going back.
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  Did you spend time there? Did you live there? Yeah, well, the Pasadena area is where I moved up
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  to Santa Barbara from. And whether or not that technically qualifies as Los Angeles is going to be
• 3:26
  a long philosophical bone of contention. Well, it's a suburb, you know, well, this is the problem.
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  Where is Los Angeles? There is an actual city, but it's not that big. But if you fly over it,
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  it's like, well, where does it stop? It's a country. Yeah, 100 miles, you know, long. Yeah, that's
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  right. The bottom of it kind of just turns into San Diego and then Mexico and then you're off to
• 3:48
  the races. Then you're in Central America. That's fine. Exactly. Well, it's great to talk to you. What's
• 3:53
  the, I mean, I was talking to a friend of mine about an episode of Joe Rogan that they'd say,
• 3:59
  not one of yours, about the ancient Egyptian pyramids. And this friend of mine who's very smart
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  was saying, I hadn't realized that there were all these things that the Egyptians were doing with
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  the pyramids that they couldn't possibly have done with the technology of the time and the
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  mathematics and it was explaining about how there were these air vents that they couldn't have
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  had that were beyond the can of the ancient Egyptians and this and that. And I thought of you,
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  and I thought of this chat, and I thought, I want to get Michael's answer to this that's better
• 4:29
  than mine about what level of credence can we give to things that might be whack a doodle if they're
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  not, if there's no evidence for the thing the person's putting forward, like, well, this probably
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  suggests that there was some kind of extraterrestrial involvement or, you know, supernatural involvement
• 4:48
  in the construction of the pyramids. Are we allowed to count on us that without actually giving
• 4:52
  it our full credence? Well, you should give it, well, this is called Cromwell's rule. Oliver
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  Cromwell famously said in the Bows of Christ, I think, me thinks you might be mistaken. And this
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  is in Bayesian reasoning known as Cromwell's rule, which is you never assign zero a probability of
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  zero to anything just in case. Nor should, on the other hand, you assign a probability of 100.
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  Nothing is certain. So, but that said, you can give degrees of likelihood or unlikely hood.
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  And in the case of the alternative archaeologies, let's call them, there's sort of two branches.
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  There's the ancient aliens version that these monumental architecture,
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  architectural structures around the world could be the Easter Island statues or the Nazca lines
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  or the Egyptian pyramids and, you know, there's hundreds of these. Could not have been built by the
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  people who lived there. So, they had to be, have been built by somebody else who was that, either
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  the ancient aliens is one version because of that TV show. I think, I think that's so unlikely,
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  merits almost no attention, although we've addressed it in skeptic and provided our explanations
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  for why they're probably wrong. The more reasonable one is sort of led by Graham Hancock,
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  who was on Joe Rogan's show, that's probably the reference you're making. He's much more
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  reasonable than the ancient alien guys. He's not claiming this was, you know, some miraculous
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  like nuclear power plant or anything like that, only that the people who built it were probably
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  more sophisticated than we gave them credit for, but he doesn't think it was the ancient Egyptians.
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  He thinks it was an advanced race of people or whoever, population of people, probably thousands,
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  if not tens of thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians. And he often says things
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  like on Twitter, you know, stuff keeps getting older. And he's largely right about that that,
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  you know, dates. What does that mean? Stuff just keeps getting older. Archaeological sites are
• 6:58
  dated older than early archaeologists thought they were. All right. Yeah, right, I see. We start
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  realizing that they were more sophisticated earlier than we thought. And his type specimen is
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  gobeckley-tepi in Turkey, which is a fairly sophisticated site with giant huge T-shaped stone
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  monuments that are like 40, 50 tons. But the problem is it's dated at almost 11,000 years ago.
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  Well, it is, yeah, 11,597, 9,500 BC. And there weren't any huge populations like an ancient Egypt
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  or Babylonia or ancient Greece or Rome or any of those huge civilizations with giant populations
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  in which you have largely cheap labor to haul stuff around, which has always been the explanation
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  for how they could have built all this stuff. These were, you know, mostly hunter-gatherers,
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  scavengers, you know, that kind of that may be the earliest farmers, but not much. Populations
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  pretty small. So how'd they do it? And the site was originally discovered by a German archaeologist
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  named Schmidt in the 1990s. And he was impressed. Like, wow, this is older than we thought it would be.
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  How did they do it? And his conclusion, as is that of most archaeologists is that, well, I guess we
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  need to rethink what hunter-gatherers were able to do. I guess they were more sophisticated than we
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  thought they were. But that's not the conclusion Graham Hancock and some of the alternative archaeologists
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  make they claim, no, they couldn't have done it. And therefore it had to been somebody else in
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  this advanced civilization. So I was on Rogan Show with Graham several years ago, I think it was
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  2018 or so. And, you know, we were there almost four hours going through all this stuff. And I
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  kept asking him, what do you mean by advance? Because if you mean by advance, you know, they had
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  metal tools or riding or, you know, pottery, advanced pottery or, you know, or even more sophisticated
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  technology, where is that stuff? I mean, if it's, you know, 20,000, 30,000 years old, we should find
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  some archaeological sites, you know, where their trash is, where you find these debris, these
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  toolkits. And there's nothing like that, absolutely nothing. And so his answer is that I mean
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  advanced in a different way. I mean, like spiritually advanced or, you know, I don't know, something like
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  that. And that somehow they were able to figure out how to do these large monumental architectural
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  sites without modern equipment, but also without large populations. And, you know, his answer at
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  that point just goes darker as well. It's a mystery. Okay. But then, I mean, at that point, Michael
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  doesn't become somewhat semantic. I mean, if you're saying one person, one person is saying it
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  must have been done by an advanced civilization, not advanced in the kind of way that they would
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  have tools that they would leave around, but advanced in their know-how. And the other person is
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  saying, well, it wasn't an advanced civilization. It was just a civilization that had the know-how
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  in order to pull off this feat. What's the difference? Yeah, exactly. What do you mean by advanced?
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  And so to me, you know, I just think it's good to keep an open mind about not so much of, you know,
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  who these alternative civilization people were, but that whoever built it, obviously we were
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  able to do more than we gave them credit for. So if there was, if there was a kind of a bigotry of
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  low expectations in any field, it would be that, well, I guess these hunter-gatherers were smarter
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  than we thought. Much like maybe the last 15, 20 years of archaeology study of Neanderthals,
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  you know, who are telling us that they were a lot smarter and more sophisticated than we've
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  ever given them credit for. And then they have a ton of examples of this. It's like, okay,
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  so I guess we need to upgrade, update our view of Neanderthals fine. And that's how science normally
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  works. So what Graham and the alternative people do, including the ancient alien people, is what's
• 10:47
  called anomaly hunting. That is no scientific theory explains 100% of the data. There's always
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  anomalies that just don't quite seem to fit the mainstream theory. And this is true in all fields
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  of science. So what do you do with those anomalies? And in science, you don't have to do anything
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  with them. You sign them to some grad student to figure it out. Or, you know, the next generation
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  we'll solve it, or we'll alter the theory a little bit, or maybe somebody will come along,
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  and there'll be a completely new revolutionary theory that explains not only all the old stuff,
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  but the new anomalies that we've discovered. And that's normal. But the anomalies by themselves
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  don't tell us anything about, they don't construct a whole new theory.
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  No, they don't construct a whole new scientific theory. But I guess what I'm pointing at that
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  what you're coaching on is epistemologically, just as for the layperson, in terms of
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  conditionalizing our credences as a philosopher would say, or tweaking the dial of how plausible we
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  regard a scenario as being or an explanation as being. I think there's a widespread perception
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  that people like you and people like Richard Dawkins and people who hue closely to a rationalist
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  line are kind of dogmatic and overly self-certain, which I don't think is true. But I think it comes
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  from some sort of a confusion between the scientific method, the rationalist method, and what the
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  layperson is allowing themselves to count on and says being possible if not probable. And, you know,
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  it's true when you say that if you have anomalies, then you do nothing with the anomalies in science.
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  But it wouldn't be rational for the layperson to do nothing with the anomalies in the way they
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  think about the world as they walk through every day life, would it? Right, sir, sure. So again,
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  keep an open mind. You never know, maybe the anomalies will add up to something. This would be
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  true for anything like conspiracy theories, 9-11 truthers. You know, this is what they do. They chase
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  anomalies and go, well, what about this and what about that? Like the JFK, my famous favorite example
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  of JFK assassination is the umbrella man. There was a guy across from the grassy knoll just
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  right close to where Kennedy was shot. The head shot that killed him was this guy with an umbrella.
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  What's he doing with an umbrella? It's a clear, sunny day. There's no forecast or rain.
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  Well, it turns out, you know, a decade later, he came forward after it became famous,
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  in which he said, well, the umbrella was a sign of protest. I didn't like Kennedy in it.
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  And this was kind of a protest against the Kennedy family back to-
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  Well, of course, the deep state would sound out of stooge to say such a thing.
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  Well, I mean, those are two good examples, though, because 9-11 is an example where there are so
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  many anomalies that someone who's a conspiracy theorist can throw at you about the melting point
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  of steel and this and, you know, building seven and all that sort of jazz, you can line them up
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  in one mental and one psychological column in one's head. The problem is, I mean, it's not a problem,
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  the benefit of being anti-skeptical, I mean, of being skeptical, I suppose, of all of those
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  alternative explanations of 9-11 is that in the counter-vailing column, there are so many
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  implausible things that they immediately extinguish my need to do any investigation into the anomalies,
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  because the alternative hypotheses are so incredibly unlikely and would require such an amazing
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  sophistication of human coordination and a lack of leaking if the whole thing was planned, for example,
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  or if the, you know, we're all the people on the planes, if it wasn't planes, that hit, I mean,
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  the whole thing, it's just a fun house of crazy mirrors if you go into an alternative. So I don't
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  really need to worry about the anomalies. With something like JFK, I think that's a good example
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  of something where me as a layperson, like, so I put on my scientist's hat, my rationalist's hat,
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  my Michael Sherman hat, and I go, I pretty much, I guess, believe the conventional story of
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  that we've been told about JFK's assassination, but the alternative column is also plausible that,
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  you know, so Lee Harvey Oswell, I don't know what the alternative column is, but let's give it the
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  most plausible version, let's give it the most plausible spin, which is just simply that Lee
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  Harvey Oswell wasn't acting alone and that there was some greater involvement of a larger number
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  of people, and there may have been people in positions of power in some government, maybe not the
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  US, but some government that knew about what was going on. It was a bigger plan than a lone
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  gunman. That strikes me as a column that's sufficiently plausible that I kind of just hold it
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  in my head at the same time with some level of credibility alongside the conventional narrative.
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  Is that rational? Sure it is. Yeah, absolutely. It's rational because sometimes the alternative
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  theories turn out to be true. That does happen occasionally. You know, the CIA really did plot to
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  assassinate foreign leaders and rigged foreign elections in foreign countries to favor the
• 15:37
  fascist dictator of the communist dictator, because it would be better for American businesses
• 15:42
  doing business with those countries and so on, or MK Ultra, you know, the CIA Mind Control program,
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  dosing you as- Can you just explain that not everyone will know it? Yeah, that's the MK Ultra
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  program was a CIA program in the 1950s to study Mind Control. The fear of, in addition to
• 15:58
  there being a missile gap with the communist countries, particularly the USSR, there was a Mind
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  Control gap. That is, we know that they were studying Mind Control, North Korean, North Korea,
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  China and the Soviet Union were all practicing Mind Control techniques with captured prisoners.
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  And so the American government is like, well, we better do something about this. What if they can
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  do it? We better be able to stay on top of this technology. So the CIA launched this project MK Ultra
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  to study this. And this was all done without congressional approval, without consent or knowledge
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  of the subjects who they dosed with LSD, for example. There's one guy Frank Olsen who died or jumped
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  out of a window or was pushed out of a window. There's one of these unsolved mysteries. And so
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  there's enough, so this is my argument in my conspiracy book. I call constructive conspiracies.
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  I'm enough conspiracy theories, try not to be true, that it's kind of rational to be a little
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  on the suspicious side, a little constructively paranoid, just in gaze. You know, just because
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  you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you, the line goes. And so, but again, we have to
• 17:02
  just kind of couch it and just probability. So, you know, take something like the UAP flaps,
• 17:08
  you know, all these kind of grainy videos and blurry photographs. What do you do with those?
• 17:11
  You mean the, the, the U.S.? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, and again, back to anomalies. Well,
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  we don't have to do anything with them. Just see if we can figure it out. And no theory explains
• 17:21
  everything. So, I take quotes from hardcore ufologists who absolutely believe we are being visited.
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  They say that 90 and 95% of all sightings are easily explainable by natural phenomena.
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  You know, flocks of birds or weather balloons or, or drones or kids balloons or
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  spy balloons, and, and so on. There's like a two dozen different commonly misperceived
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  totally natural mundane objects that people say are UFOs, but turn out to be IFO. They're
• 17:56
  unidentified. All, you just means unidentified. And eventually we identify them. So, what do you
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  do with the other five to ten percent? My answer is nothing. We just try to see if we can figure it
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  out. I mean, we may never know, you know, everything. You know, some guys drive it. Hang on. There's
• 18:11
  a contradiction here, I think. It's not true. So, when you say, what do we do with the other five to
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  ten percent? Nothing. That's a different answer to my question about JFK, then to say that it's
• 18:24
  okay to hold in my head the possibility of, and perhaps even probability of alternative
• 18:30
  explanations being likely. Like, it strikes me as there's something that I think to the layperson
• 18:36
  smells overly sanguine about the hand waving away of like the five to ten percent. In the sense
• 18:42
  that, you know, suppose you're afraid that your spouse is cheating on you, and there are little
• 18:47
  pieces of evidence that you start to notice. They smell a bit different. They're making excuses
• 18:52
  about why they're out. You know, you start to have your suspicions. The caricature of the
• 18:57
  Michael Shermer that I'm trying to get you to deconstruct is that you would say, well,
• 19:02
  until I have proof, until I have evidence that who is this other person that they're cheating
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  on me with, until I can construct a legally binding case, they're in a cemental proven guilty,
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  I've got nothing to worry about. Well, okay. That's a fair point. It's not that you don't
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  maintain doubts or maybe suspicions or maybe you check the email or phones or whatever,
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  but before you divorce your spouse, you might want to be much more confident that your accusation
• 19:34
  is true. But I don't need to divorce my spouse to start having more suspicions about what the
• 19:41
  hell's going on in the skies than I did previously. So I'm not doing nothing with the five to ten.
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  That's what I mean. Okay, let me clarify. When I say nothing, I don't mean just ignore it and
• 19:51
  don't think about it. I mean, don't construct a whole new world. This is what people do. I see.
• 19:56
  I see. It's like, okay, we know we're being visited by aliens. No, we don't say. Yes,
• 20:00
  we do because of these anomalies. No, that's not what that means. So we have this idea in philosophy
• 20:06
  of science, convergence of evidence. So what is the evidence lead us to believe is most likely? So
• 20:13
  Lee Harvey Oswald, there's just a massive amount of evidence, hundreds and hundreds of pieces of
• 20:18
  evidence pointing to him as the shooter. So most JFK conspiracy theorists agree, okay, he was at
• 20:25
  least involved because look at all this evidence, but, but he was a patsy. He was set up by the CIA
• 20:30
  to be the assassin or, or he was one of multiple assassins and so on and so on. But when you press them,
• 20:36
  okay, where's the convergence of evidence for who you think was also involved or who did it?
• 20:42
  You know, and someone like Oliver Stone says, well, I think it was the CIA, Alan Dulles in the CIA.
• 20:47
  Well, Alan Dulles himself orchestrated it. Do you have any paper trail for this?
• 20:52
  Any leaked memos from the Pentagon papers or WikiLeaks or any of the, you know, the Afghanistan
• 20:58
  papers, any of the, you know, the most recent one? Is there anything in those leaks that converges
• 21:04
  on appointing a finger to Alan Dulles or anyone in the CIA? And the answer is no, there isn't.
• 21:10
  Okay, so. Right. I mean, you can. But again, I mean, the conspiracy theorists can say, well,
• 21:15
  of course, there wouldn't be because they're good at what they do. That's why they have the deep stain.
• 21:19
  But so I, so just to clarify to put a button on this, is it true? Is it fair to characterize your
• 21:23
  position as saying that the, let's take the, the UFO case that it's rational for me to dial my
• 21:31
  suspicion that we're being visited by extraterrestrials up from 2% to 5% but not rational to take it
• 21:40
  up to 51%. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I would say that. And also, if you remember to separate that from the,
• 21:46
  are they out there somewhere question, which is a steady question. Yeah, I'm 99% sure they're
• 21:51
  going to be out there somewhere. I'm not saying nothing. Most said, scientists would agree with you
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  or else, why are they bothering to look? That's right. It's a waste of a lifetime. If you press them and
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  say, you know, well, whatever it is that they are out there, the answers will none. But we have
• 22:05
  good arguments. You know, there's a, you know, 100 billion stars in the galaxy's 100 billion
• 22:09
  galaxies. Every one of them has planets. You know, if only 10% of them have earth-like planets at
• 22:14
  the right distance and so on, you crunch the numbers, it has to be virtually certain. We're not
• 22:19
  the only one. Right. But there are so many things that can go wrong in those numbers that, I mean,
• 22:23
  that's actually a good example, isn't it, of a, of a field where you're really not dealing in
• 22:28
  numbers or facts or evidence, you're dealing in a set of arguments that could be completely
• 22:33
  flawed and nonetheless enough to motivate people to devote their entire lives to this to pursue.
• 22:39
  And we do not regard those people as cranks. That's right. Yeah. The SETI program is, is, is
• 22:45
  staffed by professional scientists. There's no cranks there. And, but it's a different community
• 22:50
  of people than the euphologists who most, to almost a person, absolutely or certain, we've already
• 22:56
  been visited or currently being visited. And, but the SETI scientists, again, they suspect that
• 23:02
  they're out there somewhere or else, why would they bother looking? But if you press them, they'll
• 23:06
  say, well, no, of course, we, we don't know that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it has to do with, I guess,
• 23:11
  a world view doesn't it? I mean, one interesting thing that I've seen in recent years is on the question
• 23:17
  of this kind of dialing up of our, of our suspicions from 2% to 5% about something fishy is that the,
• 23:24
  the past few years with the pandemic has sent such a large number of people, especially in the
• 23:30
  alternative media space and in the people who I kind of bump into. And I'm sure you bump into.
• 23:36
  I think they've lost their ability to dial, to accurately dial probabilities anymore. And so there's
• 23:46
  a lot of, I mean, I'm thinking of people who are, who look at the, at the pandemic, not necessarily
• 23:52
  as something that was planned and released as a bio weapon in order to, to start encouraging
• 23:59
  everybody in the world to get used to dictatorial restrictions on their freedom. I'm not talking about
• 24:04
  going necessarily that far, although that's an extraordinarily prevalent view in some circles.
• 24:09
  But just the, the extent to which they've gone from a three percent, a three to five percent
• 24:17
  level of distrust in institutions and distrust in the news media, all of a sudden, instead of
• 24:22
  dialing that up to six percent, it's gone up to 80%. Right. Not a main, I don't know why. I wonder if
• 24:31
  you have thoughts about why that's happening. And to give credit to the other side who are
• 24:35
  being skeptical of science, you know, the, the pandemic did reveal to what extent people,
• 24:40
  scientists and policymakers who claim that they are just following the science are a bit on the
• 24:47
  dogmatic side. They are drawing conclusions that probably they should not have been so
• 24:52
  dogmatically certain of like we know, masks don't work. We know, masks do work. Oh, maybe they
• 24:58
  don't work. Or you know, the mask will stop the spread or won't stop the spread. The vaccines will
• 25:02
  do this. Oh, no, they will, they'll do that. And it would have been far better, I think, for
• 25:06
  everybody. If somebody like Anthony Fauci or whoever would have, when they get up there before
• 25:10
  the microphone and said, well, look, you know, it's very early on. We really don't know. We just
• 25:15
  don't know. We're thinking maybe the masks are a good idea. We don't want to force people to
• 25:19
  do anything. We think you should probably wear them, but you make your own decision. We'll update
• 25:23
  you next week. And just, you know, do this every week, you know, just because, but instead they
• 25:28
  sound so definitive. And then the average person watching this goes, oh, well, they keep their flip
• 25:32
  floppers. They can't make up their mind or their liars or they're conspiring to do stuff to us.
• 25:38
  And, you know, it's like the lab leak hypothesis was never a conspiracy theory about intentional
• 25:43
  bio weapons concocted by the Chinese. It was always just, they just. Well, it was from some
• 25:47
  people. Yes, for some people, but the reasonable hypothesis was that that it was an accidental
• 25:54
  lab leak, which has happened in the past. And not just their labs, but Russian labs and American
• 25:58
  labs. So, and then all of a sudden, it goes dark. And you're not allowed to talk about that.
• 26:02
  It's a crazy conspiracy theory. No, it's not. It's totally reasonable. And then all of a sudden
• 26:07
  it becomes back to 50%. You know, it's like, oh, maybe it was. Then, you know, I don't know where
• 26:12
  it is now. I think it's maybe slightly more than 50% that it was came from a lab, but I've read
• 26:18
  it's very conflicting ideas. So, how about we just say we don't know. And then. So, do you have a
• 26:23
  kind of a, I mean, there's so much to explore there. Do you have firstly, like, a sociological
• 26:27
  explanation of what's going on when these levels of certainty are suddenly? Like, I understand the
• 26:35
  the motivation of people in positions of power, like Fauci, to think people need clarity,
• 26:40
  we don't want people to be confused. But then, I mean, and I felt this as working in, you know,
• 26:46
  a professional media organization, the public broadcaster, the kind of soup of consensus and group
• 26:52
  think that can come about in those scenarios against which I constantly found myself being,
• 27:00
  you know, having fingers pointed at me for excluding. I mean, I was one of the few people on
• 27:03
  the public broadcaster who was doing stories about possible side effects from vaccines or whether or
• 27:09
  not, you know, certain, I mean, I wrote a piece in the, in the main broadsheet newspaper in
• 27:15
  Sydney in December of 2021 saying these Australian restrictions have probably gone on for too long.
• 27:22
  We need a, we need a national conversation about how this, how this all ends. And, you know,
• 27:28
  at the time that was really edgy and contrary and then you look back on it and you slap your
• 27:32
  forehead and go, I mean, fuck, of course that, of course that was necessary. I mean, I should have
• 27:36
  written that four months earlier than I did. So how do you, do you have a kind of psychological idea
• 27:41
  about how this lack of rationality towards twisting the dials of probability propagates?
• 27:51
  I do, yes. I couch it in signal detection theory. So picture a two by two grid with four cells.
• 27:57
  Say the, so let's just apply this to the criminal justice system. So upper left cell,
• 28:03
  the person being accused really is guilty and you find them guilty and prison them. That's a hit.
• 28:09
  Or in the bottom right corner, the person is really innocent. They didn't do it and you
• 28:14
  acquit them. That's a correct rejection. That's good. Those are the two good cells. In the upper
• 28:18
  right, the person did not do it and you convict them. That's a, a false alarm. That's a false
• 28:26
  positive. And the bottom left corner, the person is really guilty and you acquit them. That's a,
• 28:34
  a type two error. You've missed a real event there. So obviously we want the hits and the correct
• 28:42
  projections. We want to avoid the type one and type two errors. And in a case of criminal justice,
• 28:47
  this is called blackstones ratio, 10 to 1. It better 10 guilty people go free than that one
• 28:53
  innocent person be convicted. And that's how most criminal justice systems in the West work.
• 28:59
  So now apply it to COVID-19. So upper left, upper left cell, the pandemic is really going to be
• 29:08
  catastrophic. This virus is horrible. It's going to be like AIDS or Ebola. It's going to kill 50%
• 29:13
  of everybody. And you decide to shut everything down and mask everybody, vaccinate everybody,
• 29:19
  close schools, the whole thing. That was the right decision because you saved tens of millions
• 29:24
  or hundreds of millions of people. And so in the upper right, on the other hand, it turns out it's
• 29:30
  not that bad and you shut everything down. Well, that's a false positive. You thought there was
• 29:36
  going to be a catastrophe where hundreds of millions would die and it was not. Now that's a bad
• 29:41
  error to make because the cost of shutting everything down is not trivial. And then the bottom left
• 29:47
  one, the bottom row then are just the opposite of those in our two by two cell. So again,
• 29:52
  you want to get it right. Just articulate the bottom. The bottom left is going to be it is really,
• 29:59
  really bad and we don't do any. Right. So that's bad also. That's probably the most catastrophic.
• 30:06
  Yes, that would be the catastrophic error. It does end up being like a Ebola, but we thought,
• 30:10
  oh, it's probably not going to be. So the bottom right is it's nothing and we do nothing.
• 30:16
  So here's my explanation for what happens when, you know, you're a public official policymaker,
• 30:21
  you're the governor, you're the mayor, you're the president and they stick a microphone in your
• 30:26
  face and go, what should we do? Do we close the schools or not? For the politician of the policymaker,
• 30:31
  it's black and white. You know, it's like, well, we don't know, but I have to make a decision,
• 30:34
  yes or no. And so they're going to air on the precautionary principle. They're going to air on
• 30:39
  the side of it being catastrophic and hope that responding accordingly is not too disastrous.
• 30:46
  If it's not catastrophic. And you know, that's what we did largely, you know,
• 30:51
  shutting down the world economy and unemployment at school. You know, now it's looking like
• 30:56
  school children are largely behind by two years. You know, they did not stay up with remote
• 31:03
  instruction and zoom and all that. And so, but still like I understand, you know, I try to be
• 31:08
  sympathetic. Look, if I was the president and then they, okay, what do we do? And I don't want
• 31:13
  that blood on my hands. I say, oh, this is carry on business as usual. And hope for the best.
• 31:18
  And it turns out it's like Ebola and 50% of my entire population of my country dies. That's on
• 31:23
  me. So I see why, you know, they, they respond that way. Yeah. The problem is there's a lot of
• 31:32
  different, there are a lot of different strategies and tactics that are embedded in that precautionary
• 31:36
  principle, which have varying degrees of success and varying degrees of harm. And what happened
• 31:44
  during the pandemic was a lot, I mean, certainly in the United States and the UK, I think was a,
• 31:48
  just a lot of sloppy thinking about what the actual benefits are. Like, I mean, you know,
• 31:53
  Australia has this reputation as having gone absolutely and that shit crazy during the pandemic
• 31:57
  because there was a, you know, it closed its borders to the entire world, didn't allow citizens
• 32:02
  to leave. And at least in Melbourne had prolonged periods of lockdowns. But the, I mean, the
• 32:08
  reality is that the schools were much less closed than they were in the United States. And life
• 32:13
  went on much more normally for most Australians, precisely because of this immediate closure of
• 32:19
  the borders. And then this massive mobilization of a contact tracing team where they hired staff
• 32:24
  from Qantas and other airlines and other places that were obviously no longer going to have jobs
• 32:28
  and put them to work tracking down the outbreaks. And that led to, I mean, in February of 2021,
• 32:35
  I went and saw Hamilton with thousands of other people and none of them were wearing masks
• 32:39
  in the theater at a time when the whole rest of the world had the delta wave and everything was
• 32:44
  was locked down. So, you know, you could probably have made a more judicious, and this is absolutely
• 32:49
  in no way to say that Australia did everything right. There were absolutely instances of overreach
• 32:53
  and, you know, it went on for too long and some of the state border closures were silly and there's
• 32:57
  always instances of police overreach. But, you know, any time you're trying to do anything big,
• 33:01
  there are going to be bad bits at the fringes. I think on the, on the whole,
• 33:07
  kind of assuming that it's going to be, it doesn't have to be a bowl of bad, right? It only has to,
• 33:12
  it only has to kill, you know, 5% of everyone over the age of 70 to be worth avoiding if the,
• 33:21
  it all depends on the cost of what the avoidance is. You know, if the cost is,
• 33:25
  really is that you're going to put every school child back by two years, maybe that's not a
• 33:30
  price worth paying. But when you then find out that you put all the school kids in America back
• 33:35
  by two years, and that didn't even have a payoff because children aren't very good at transmitting
• 33:40
  the disease, it's not very harmful to them, then you start to think, well, okay, then the Australian
• 33:44
  approach actually was more gentle in some ways because it always had at the, at the forefront,
• 33:52
  keep children in school and daycare as much as possible, pour huge amounts of money into the,
• 33:57
  not just the economy for big businesses, but to ordinary people's pockets, and just
• 34:01
  cling on for dear life until everyone can get vaccinated, and then open up. And we did have 90%
• 34:07
  fewer deaths per capita than the US did. So I think it, it kind of depends on the outcome,
• 34:14
  and it depends on the particulars of the, of the tactic. And I think a lot of people are,
• 34:19
  unfortunately, are taking lessons from the pandemic that are quite holistic and broad brush,
• 34:23
  and quite, you know, speaking of going from the 5% probability up to the 80% probability,
• 34:28
  they're looking at the thing in total, and they're taking a whole world view approach and going,
• 34:33
  well, this strategy worked, or that strategy didn't work, and then rather than sort of teasing out,
• 34:38
  okay, well, for next time, what bits would we keep and what bits would we not keep, and how would we,
• 34:42
  you know, be, be most rational about approaching it? How well do you think we are,
• 34:46
  we have done in learning about it, and what do you feel at that time? Not that very, not very well,
• 34:51
  I think. I guess the question is this, when did we know that, for example, it was not going to kill
• 34:58
  masses of children, and that it was primarily affecting older people and people that were overweight
• 35:04
  with, I mean, pretty early, a lot early, a lot early of them, the teachers unions in the United
• 35:10
  States were willing to consider. Exactly. So, you know, I think a lot of this became politicized,
• 35:15
  so, you know, whatever Trump is for, we're against, or whatever the Republicans want, we're against
• 35:21
  or vice versa, and then, yeah, I'm pretty cynical about the whole school closure thing with the
• 35:28
  teachers unions. I don't think they were fearing for their lives. I think they could follow the
• 35:33
  science and we knew they just didn't want to go back to work. And look, maybe some of them were
• 35:38
  afraid of their lives, but at the end of the day, you know, we're all, we're all in a pandemic,
• 35:42
  and we're all afraid of our lives a little bit, and we'll also have to still get up in the
• 35:45
  morning and do our duties. Yeah, yeah, sure, exactly. Well, you know, I mean, this way of
• 35:53
  characterizing things, this signal detection, it's a really useful tool. Just think about this,
• 35:59
  so I lecture on this to my students who are, you know, 18, 19 years old, you know, just like,
• 36:04
  who are you going to marry? You know, well, it's a signal detection problem, right? So,
• 36:08
  and the upper cell, you marry the person who is the love of your life and the perfectly
• 36:12
  matched person and you live happily ever after. That's a hit. That's good. But at, or, you know,
• 36:17
  you're dating somebody, you decide they're not right for me and you reject them and you start
• 36:21
  over. That's a correct rejection. That's also good. What you don't want is the type one air,
• 36:25
  right? Well, I married the wrong person because that's, and when you're 18, you think, oh, what's
• 36:30
  that? What difference does it make? Well, you know, the longer you're in the marriage, the more you
• 36:33
  own, you know, if you have children, all of a sudden, it's a pretty, it's a huge hit to get a divorce
• 36:38
  and go through that, right? So it, it matters collecting more data in our, you know, just, or cancer
• 36:44
  detection. That's a signal detection problem. And, you know, just like responding to all blips on the,
• 36:50
  on the radar, I mean, sorry, on the on the x-ray as cancer is not risk-free because radiation
• 36:58
  is costly to your body and surgery is risky and so on. So most things that, you know,
• 37:05
  are that we decide about in life or decide it under great uncertainty. We really don't know.
• 37:11
  Even medical, you know, decisions like that are made under great uncertainty. Even with all
• 37:18
  the sophisticated tests we have now, there's still a lot we just don't know. And we're not very
• 37:23
  good at thinking about those things. So I'd really like to see more education in things like,
• 37:28
  yeah, I like this. I like this, with this quadrant. And I encourage people to just write it out
• 37:32
  if it sounds confusing, you know, and just go back and listen to it and write it. I'm sure it's on
• 37:37
  your website somewhere. Is it my fault? Yes, yes, I've written quite a bit about that. And can you,
• 37:43
  can you generalize about which is better, the false positive or the false negative? Like, take the
• 37:47
  marriage scenario. I think most people would say you're probably better off letting the love of
• 37:53
  your life get away than marrying someone, marrying the wrong person. Yes, exactly because there's not
• 38:01
  just one right person for us out there, right? Although when you're 17, you think there is. Yeah,
• 38:06
  exactly, right. Do you know your country made their Tim mentioned song about this? He writes his
• 38:14
  love song about his wife. You know, I think it's, yes, if it weren't for you, you know, if I hadn't
• 38:19
  met you, I think that's the title. And you know, the first half of the song is all the wonderful things
• 38:24
  he discovered by marrying her. And she was the right one and all the, and then if I hadn't met you,
• 38:30
  then it shifts. Well, I would have met somebody else and maybe they were a little funnier than you,
• 38:34
  but not as smart. Maybe they were better looking, but not as athletic. And I would have thought the
• 38:40
  same thing. Like, oh, this is just incredible that I bet. Yeah.
• 38:44
  Your love is one and a million. You could buy it at any price.
• 38:52
  But of the 9.9999 hundred thousand are the possible, statistically, some of them would be equally nice.
• 39:01
  Or maybe not as nice but say smarter than you or or Dharma, but better at the sport or
• 39:09
  Tracing, I'm just saying that I probably have somebody else.
• 39:17
  Yeah, that's right. He's great at that. He's a good buddy of mine, actually Tim. We're catching up
• 39:22
  in a couple of weeks. And he, I mean, he has this similar, he has such a beautiful way of pointing
• 39:26
  out both the beauty and also the banality of of everyday life. There's also a song that opens
• 39:32
  his musical Matilda. I don't know if you've seen the, the movie Matilda or the Broadway show,
• 39:38
  but he wrote a musical of the Royal Doll book. And it starts with this song about how every baby
• 39:43
  who's born is a total miracle. And, you know, the miracle of life. And then makes a similar,
• 39:49
  an analogous point to the one that you're making in the other song, which is like,
• 39:52
  it's incredible that this miracle happens so often. And that every parent seems to think that
• 39:58
  this, that this very everyday occurrence is miraculous. And yet it is no less miraculous for that
• 40:03
  fact. It's, it's kind of cute. It reminds me of the money Python song, every sperm is sacred.
• 40:09
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, from the meaning of life, yes, exactly. Cancer detection is an interesting thing.
• 40:15
  I want to talk about about religion and about new secular religions, like, like,
• 40:20
  wokeness and whatever as well. But just before we get off this kind of rational way of,
• 40:24
  of avoiding false positives and false negatives, cancer detection is interesting,
• 40:28
  the you mentioned, because last week the Australian government increased, changed the policy
• 40:33
  about the detection of lung cancer. And basically said that the, the scans are now good enough,
• 40:40
  at low enough rates of radiation, that if you're between the age of 55 and 75 and you,
• 40:46
  you're a, you're an ex-smoker or a smoker, you'll be able to every two years get a free,
• 40:51
  you know, under our Medicare for, for all system free scan. And it got me thinking about like
• 40:58
  the balance of probabilities on one's health, you know, I've turned 40, I've got little kids now,
• 41:05
  I have to start thinking about all those things that you have to start worrying about when you
• 41:09
  get into your 50, 60s and 70s. And for me, it would be a no brainer for me to get basically as many,
• 41:19
  as many radioactive scans as I needed to, in order to avoid the outcome of perishing from one
• 41:26
  of the likeliest diseases that strike down people every day. So like, the calculus seems to be
• 41:35
  on a population wide level. Don't submit people to screening because that screening, if you,
• 41:44
  if you take all the 25 million Australians and you, or let's say the 10 million Australians who
• 41:48
  are over the age of 45 or whatever and you screen them all, some co, some proportion of that cohort,
• 41:55
  some fraction is going to get cancer as a result of the screening. That's bad from a public health
• 42:01
  point of view. It's bad for the government's bottom line and it's bad for those people. On the other
• 42:07
  hand, if you could tell me that I will get cancer as a result of a scan, but we'll catch it
• 42:16
  early because I keep getting scans to catch the cancer and I'll survive it and I'll have to
• 42:21
  endure a terrible three to six months of chemo and radiotherapy, but I'll live and that's the price
• 42:26
  that I'll pay for being certain that I'm not going to die of cancer. Well, I would take that bit
• 42:32
  in which case is my individual risk tolerance different from the aggregate of the populations at
• 42:39
  large or is the government being irrational and misally and they actually should be happy with
• 42:46
  giving more people cancer in the interests of reducing the number of fatal cancers?
• 42:51
  I know the problem is not that you'll get cancer from the screening test. That's pretty rare.
• 42:58
  It's the false positives and no test is 100 percent certain. They're usually like 90 percent,
• 43:04
  you know, a positive test. If you really have the cancer and you test positive, you know,
• 43:10
  there's a 90 percent chance that it got it right. The problem is the opposite one. If you,
• 43:17
  the false positive rate is low, even if it's 5 percent, that 5 percent is on everyone who takes
• 43:23
  the test, not on just those who have the cancer or don't have the, sorry, don't have the cancer
• 43:29
  but get tested. If everybody gets tested at a certain age, that 5 percent is a pretty huge number.
• 43:35
  And if it's a low rate base rate of the cancer, say it's only 1 percent, you're going to get quite a
• 43:41
  few, I mean, just raw numbers of people who have a false positive. What do you do with the false
• 43:46
  positive? Well, that's where the risk comes in. Well, if you get surgery, if you get radiation,
• 43:52
  even a biopsy is not risk-free. I mean, they use the biopsies. They stick some massive needle
• 43:57
  in you and suck out some of the cells and, you know, it's not risk-free, okay? So this is the problem.
• 44:03
  And it's a little bit, well, okay, so it's, again, it's a signal detection problem. We don't know
• 44:11
  for sure is the little blip on the x-ray cancer or not. So your thought experiment at the very
• 44:19
  beginning, well, why not just scan everything, you know, like every month or something, just in case.
• 44:23
  Well, because your body is probably full of little bumps, little blips on the x-ray,
• 44:28
  they're probably just harmless little, whatever, nodules of muscle or tendon or just who knows what
• 44:35
  they are. They might even be little tumors, but the tumors encapsulated and they're not spreading,
• 44:40
  they're not growing. And so it's better to what's called watchful weighting in medical circles,
• 44:46
  just watching weight and see if it grows, if it doesn't, then don't worry about it, because it's
• 44:51
  not going to kill you. Well, I mean, the problem is with that works with some cancers, and you know,
• 44:56
  it doesn't work with lung cancer and pancreatic cancer and some of the deadliest cancers,
• 45:01
  because by the time you've watched and waited, it's too late. That's right. So it depends on the
• 45:06
  cancer, correct? Like the AMA yesterday, American Medical Association here released a statement that
• 45:11
  they think women should get breast cancer mammograms after the age of 40, not 50. So they've
• 45:18
  lowered it, and the test is a little bit better. And so therefore, earlier screening, catch it early,
• 45:25
  then it won't kill you and so on. Okay. But again, the false positives, this is why, you know,
• 45:34
  a second opinion, additional scans, just to make sure, because the intervention is not
• 45:41
  zero risk. Right. It's not zero risk, but it's pretty much zero risk that it's going to kill you.
• 45:48
  If it's low, yeah, right. So again, again, it depends what we're like, it depends how I guess what
• 45:55
  I'm sort of groping towards is maybe I, as the father of young children at this phase in my life,
• 46:04
  have a lower tolerance for death and a higher tolerance for invasive procedures than another
• 46:10
  person might. And the government is trying to do a balancing act about everybody's preferences.
• 46:16
  But I personally would take a false positive, would take an almost unlimited number of false
• 46:22
  positives if it was a guarantee that I was not going to die. You know what I mean? Like I take
• 46:27
  your point about the larger, the larger denominator. So, yeah, if you're going to screen 10 million
• 46:33
  people and then there's, you know, and 5% of those false positives, well, that's half a million
• 46:40
  people. And if it were the case that 5% of the false positives died as a result of the biopsy,
• 46:48
  that's 25,000 deaths out of 10 million people. So you wouldn't tolerate that. But if the,
• 46:54
  if the rate of death from a false positive from the biopsy as a result of a false positive is
• 47:00
  so vanishingly small as to be a rounding error, then I live in the cost and the hassle wears the harm.
• 47:07
  Well, but, but the cost in the hassle is not trivial. You know, this is one of the things that
• 47:12
  drives up health care costs. And remember back in the 90s, I think it was when cat scans started
• 47:18
  becoming much more popular than people started getting whole body cat scans. You know, I'm just
• 47:22
  going to, I'm going to look for everything. And they were pretty expensive and health company,
• 47:28
  health care companies started covering it. And then they realized almost everybody has some
• 47:32
  little blip on the cat scan somewhere. But they don't have any symptoms. So then what are you
• 47:39
  doing? Why, why worry about it? Of course, some cancers are symptom-free, you know, like,
• 47:45
  like I guess I kidney, prostate cancer. No, sorry. The pancreatic cancer, the one that killed
• 47:51
  Steve Jobs, that's pretty symptom-free until it's too late, right? So the ones that are,
• 47:58
  yeah, they'll kill you and that they're hard to diagnose. Maybe you should pay it more attention
• 48:03
  to those, right? So colon cancer, you can't, there's almost no symptoms until it's too late,
• 48:08
  right? So I'm 68. So I get, you know, every five years, I get the, I think I'm supposed to do it,
• 48:13
  every five years. You know, you're complaining about hitting your 40s. Oh, man, come on, dude,
• 48:18
  to be 40 again. You got nothing to complain about. And I have a seven, and I have a seven-year-old now.
• 48:27
  Right. Yeah, right. So I got to stay healthy. I, anybody should be worried. It's me. In fact,
• 48:32
  for his seventh birthday, this last weekend, he blew out the candles on his cake and we said,
• 48:37
  you get to have a birthday wish. He was okay. And well, what was it? He goes, I hope I wish that we
• 48:43
  get to live forever and that I get the new series five, Akita Warrior toys. It's like, okay.
• 48:50
  I can help you with option two. Yes, exactly. I'm not sure. Give me a, give me a little time. I'm up
• 48:56
  in one, Alan. It's a little more work. In Australia, the government sends you a little bag to
• 49:01
  shit in once you have hit 50 or 55. When you say that colon cancer is hard to catch, you get a free,
• 49:06
  you know, you get a free thing. It's supposed to scoop you. This is one of those, yes, one of those
• 49:10
  public health things that is actually very cost effective. It saves a lot of money in the long run.
• 49:14
  Just send it out to people automatically and this, you know, do a little scoop. You put it in,
• 49:18
  it tests for, it's a fecal occult test, I think, you know, just testing. Well, this is microscopic
• 49:22
  blood particles. Right. This is one of the things that AI is supposed to be able to do for a soon,
• 49:27
  is it a personalized medicine. So your toilet is actually a medical test every day. Every time
• 49:32
  you pee and poop into the thing, it's doing a test. It's looking for the conspiracy theorist
• 49:36
  going to love that. We're sending your private information back up the chain to the state so
• 49:41
  that the CIA can snoop on your own. They know what I'm doing. They know and they're going to,
• 49:47
  they're going to start forcing me to eat better from nothing like fiber in my diet by examining my
• 49:52
  shit. Let's talk about religion. I saw you tweeting about this. There are new slippery definitions
• 50:02
  of spirituality, religion and God that are being popularized, specifically by Jordan Peterson,
• 50:08
  who's great at dodging concrete questions about such things. You know, I have a lot of time for,
• 50:14
  I did have a lot of time for Jordan, but it, gee, it can be infuriating when people just redefine
• 50:19
  the question away by saying something, something like, you know, well, instead of me summarizing
• 50:27
  his point of view, why don't you summarize what you understand. Paterson's understanding of
• 50:32
  religion to be, and then let's see if we can converge. Well, I, of course, I don't know what's
• 50:36
  actually in his heart, but I think he thinks there's some sort of higher power, whether he thinks
• 50:41
  it's Yahweh and the Christian religions, the right one, is maybe another thing. But, you know,
• 50:46
  I think for Jordan and people like him, religion provides a kind of structure for organizing your
• 50:56
  life or having morals and values and principles and goals, you know, wherever you get them from,
• 51:02
  a little bit like AA, alcoholics, anonymous, you're supposed to believe in a higher power. They
• 51:06
  don't care what religion you are. Just, the idea is just, you know, there's, there's something bigger
• 51:10
  than you and that puts your problems into context and it gives you goals to aim at and, you know,
• 51:16
  that kind of thing. So, you know, metaphorically, mythically, psychologically, you know, these kind
• 51:21
  of truths are different from empirical truths. Of course, people like Richard Buckens and myself,
• 51:26
  we want to know. But, you know, was Jesus really resurrected? I mean, I mean, he was really dead,
• 51:32
  not just in a coma or, you know, whatever. He was actually dead for three days and they roll away
• 51:37
  the tombstone and he's gone and then he comes back. You know, did that really happen? That's
• 51:43
  what, you know, so some of like Jordan's as well, you know, should bury your own cross or forgive
• 51:48
  people or it's mythically true. No, no, you know, when you press him or anybody like that, you
• 51:53
  know, someone like Richard or myself, I say, but do you think it really happened? And I understand
• 51:58
  the mythical truths or whatever and, you know, these things are, you know, literary truths,
• 52:04
  they carry value. But, you know, in the realm of empirical truths that it really happened,
• 52:10
  that's hard to say what Jordan thinks about that. I suspect. Yes. And then what you encounter is
• 52:16
  a word salad of, well, it's true because it's been functionally useful for so many cultures
• 52:23
  to believe in God, right? So what does it even mean to say that it's not true if so many
• 52:28
  different cultures and civilizations around the world have held that there are deities? Like,
• 52:34
  it's obviously a kind of essential component to the human experience. So it's true in the sense
• 52:39
  that it has utility. Right. Right. And that I've never quite understood that like that say just
• 52:45
  seem to like an invalid chess move to me. Me too. I mean, it's like saying, well, people get value
• 52:50
  out of Star Wars and the chronicles of Narnia or the, you know, whatever the trilogy that you're
• 52:58
  into. Okay. Yeah. Obviously, you know, or, you know, I like Shakespeare plays. Okay. I get value
• 53:05
  fine. But so what? I mean, it's a little anodine. You know, you wouldn't ask, you know,
• 53:12
  the brothers Karamazov, were there really brothers Karamazov? Well, it's an air relic. Was
• 53:17
  it really a Harry Potter? What you're at? This is an idiotic question. You know, did it really happen?
• 53:22
  No, but that's you're missing the point. You know, the value of the story carries a different
• 53:28
  kind of truth, you know, about human nature, human relationships, people lie or cheat or
• 53:33
  fall in love, you know, deceive each other. These kinds of things are all, you know, kind of
• 53:38
  truths about human nature that novels tease out and good novels do it really well and sophisticated.
• 53:44
  You know, that's a different kind of truth though. Then, you know, what's the age of the earth or,
• 53:48
  you know, something empirical like that? And so there were all sort of, I mean, all of these
• 53:53
  things, the Peterson case, I think would be like, like there are these kind of Jungian archetypes
• 53:58
  that all of these things are pointing to which, which may be true. I mean, I don't want to put
• 54:02
  words in this mouth. So let me just articulate this as a non-Jordan Peterson idea in case I'm
• 54:06
  getting it wrong. But there is an idea that it could be a little bit like the truthfulness of numbers
• 54:11
  or something. You know, there is a, pie is a real phenomenon in the real world regardless of
• 54:16
  whether or not people had stumbled across it. And maybe there are sort of archetypes of the
• 54:23
  fables that are kind of woven into the fabric of human civilization that are not of our creation
• 54:29
  exactly. But the, the we're sort of stumbling upon. And that is, that is what all religions
• 54:34
  are a kind of shimmering reflection of and that we're grasping something that's out there
• 54:40
  imperfectly. But it doesn't mean that it's not there just because we don't, you know, have
• 54:45
  absolute certainty about the literal truth of the Gospels. Yes, it could be that religions
• 54:50
  discovered certain truths about human nature, human societies. Early on by accident,
• 54:55
  just trial and error, trying different things. You know, what kind of commandment should we have
• 54:58
  with sort of moral rules and principles? Prescriptions and proscriptions should we give our people.
• 55:04
  And, you know, through trial and error, you get it, you get it largely right. You know, for the
• 55:09
  most part, it's good not to lie. Too much deception ruins human relationships and the fabric of
• 55:17
  society. We need to have kind of a default to truth. Most people tell the truth most of the time,
• 55:22
  roughly speaking. And that works pretty well as a principle. And, and okay, so we have a command
• 55:27
  that'll shout not lie, you know, except for, you know, if you're hiding hiding Anne Frank and the
• 55:33
  Nazis come to your door. Yeah, you should lie. Yeah. Okay, there's exceptions. Right. So I think
• 55:38
  religions have done a lot of that, you know, like you should get married, don't have kids at a
• 55:42
  wedlock, you know, he's kind of basic conservative Christian type. Principles, some of them are
• 55:46
  pretty good on average. So, you know, when Jordan says, you know, you should make your bed,
• 55:51
  clean your room, get your life together, have some goals, you know, work out every day, you know,
• 55:56
  and have relationships and be honest. You know, it's, there's, you know, they're kind of anodyne,
• 56:02
  but they're true by, I guess, trial and error. This is the way people are. And on average,
• 56:08
  it's better if you do those things than not. So his 12 rules and 12 more rules. Yeah, okay.
• 56:14
  I mean, they're not deep truths. I mean, they're the kinds of things, religious people and
• 56:18
  spiritual leaders or whatever have been saying forever or self-help gurus. You know, it's, it's
• 56:23
  basically Tony Robbins or Norman Vincent Peale, you know, these kind of, you know, it's really basic
• 56:29
  stuff. And why is Jordan so popular? It could be that the generation that he appeals to Gen Z
• 56:36
  and millennials, maybe a little bit, you know, they just didn't get that growing up, maybe because
• 56:42
  of the decline of religion, the decline of families, you know, maybe a lot of these guys just don't
• 56:48
  have male figures, father figures or whatever, grandfather figures, who set them down and go, okay,
• 56:54
  here's the deal, here's how life works, here's what you should do, you know, and, you know, like my,
• 56:59
  you know, my father, I had two fathers, a stepfather and a bio dad, you know, they both did this with
• 57:03
  me. He's like, oh, okay, whatever. And then later I go, oh, yeah, that was pretty good idea, I guess.
• 57:08
  You know, maybe some people, you know, they go to a Jordan Peterson talk, they've never heard
• 57:12
  this. Make my bed, work out, have goals, write them down. Wow, that's unbelievable. I've never heard
• 57:19
  that. It's like, really? You never heard that? I mean, it's interesting though, like that, that is
• 57:25
  a slightly unkind caricature to his followers, I think, in the sense that there's a, that we have
• 57:29
  done some sort of a disservice to, and I wouldn't say it's just millennials, we always talk about
• 57:34
  millennials and Gen Z, as if they're young kids now, you know, they're, they're middle aged.
• 57:40
  It's the next generation is, yeah, it's the next generation, yes, sorry, Gen Y, not Gen Z.
• 57:46
  It's the, it's the Gen Z and younger who are being brought up in an environment, I mean,
• 57:51
  I wonder what you think about this, where there is, it is confusing, like gender roles are confusing,
• 57:57
  the expectations around how we're supposed to treat each other are confusing, the
• 58:03
  expectation as to whether or not you should regard yourself as being an upstanding, rational
• 58:10
  human being who does not treat other people with kid gloves, but is rolling with the punches,
• 58:16
  or whether you should be an extremely sensitive training on eggshells person who tries to go with
• 58:21
  the flow, is confusing the desire to not be interpreted as a bigger, or as being, as punching down,
• 58:30
  or as being blind to the concerns of historically disadvantaged communities, is confusing when it comes
• 58:37
  in conflict with what you regard as being common sense, or justice, or fairness, or egalitarianism,
• 58:44
  equality, or whatever, like there's just a lot that's swirling around, and in that context,
• 58:50
  it's understandable to me that someone who brings back the traditional conception of what it
• 58:57
  means to take responsibility for yourself finds a, you know, a willing ear.
• 59:04
  Yeah, okay, so, I mean, I wrote an essay on this, have archetype will travel about Jordan
• 59:11
  Peterson, and you know, some of the archetypes are useful, you know, the kind of things we've
• 59:18
  been talking about, and the reason is, is because the world is a harsh place, it doesn't, the
• 59:23
  universe doesn't care about us, you know, entropy in the second law, and things are just running
• 59:27
  down, and if you don't take care of things, they will fall apart, you know, and that's kind of his
• 59:32
  larger message, which is, you know, your job in life is to do something extropic against entropy,
• 59:38
  you know, just carve out a little niche of order in the universe of chaos, and that's a good thing,
• 59:45
  and you know, I think there's value in that, and yeah, I didn't mean to oversimplify, I guess,
• 59:50
  his followers or whatever, I mean, I've been to a couple of his talks, it's like, yeah, okay,
• 59:53
  but I've also been to Tony Robbins talks, it's like, okay, it's inspirational, you know, and so I
• 1:00:00
  get that, and it could be that people need to be reminded of this pretty regularly, like daily,
• 1:00:05
  like we did an issue of skeptic on the self-help movement. Steve Sellerna wrote this book,
• 1:00:11
  Shem, self-help and actualization movement, SHAM, he was skeptical of this, he was the
• 1:00:17
  Rodeo Press editor for their self-help books, and he noticed that the number one predictor of who
• 1:00:23
  would buy one of these books was people who already bought those books, those kind of books,
• 1:00:28
  well, if they worked, talk to me, you need to keep buying new self-help books, and you know,
• 1:00:32
  what do you need the posters for in the tapes that listen to every day? Right, isn't that a bit
• 1:00:37
  like saying, you know, you've already been to a therapist, why do you need to get them back every
• 1:00:41
  two weeks? Yeah, wait, we are flawed human beings, we need to, we need constant reminders about
• 1:00:47
  how to get that right. Yeah, so that's my current take on this, is that because every day is a
• 1:00:51
  new day, and the universe, again, is not going to care about you tomorrow, so it's up to you,
• 1:00:55
  and you get up and you go, okay, and there's the poster on the wall, oh, yeah, that's right,
• 1:00:59
  and also there are, I mean, there are a bunch of different ideas in there, you know, I've done
• 1:01:03
  some Tony Robbins as well, and I would say that Robbins is much more focused on tools, on specific
• 1:01:07
  practices and practical tools and practical ways of approaching things, whereas Jordan Peterson
• 1:01:12
  is much more about grand arm waving, like philosophical cosmic interpretations of what it means to be
• 1:01:19
  human being, and maybe you only need the latter every so often, but a reminder of, oh yeah, I should
• 1:01:25
  probably, you know, structure my time management in this particular way is, you know, that can be
• 1:01:31
  as simple as, as the getting things done process or something like that, which to me is closer to
• 1:01:37
  the Robbins philosophy than Peterson's philosophizing. Yeah, that's a good distinction to make. I
• 1:01:43
  think any, any why question like that is likely to have an over-determined answer, but, you know,
• 1:01:49
  another thing I think that appeals to people about Jordan is, you know, he's taken a stand against
• 1:01:56
  a lot of the ambiguity you talked about, you know, what about trans people or the, you know, the
• 1:02:01
  critical race theory and the woe progressive agenda, you know, and he's kind of gone to the right,
• 1:02:08
  you know, he now works with Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro's group, and, you know, he's large, he's
• 1:02:13
  pretty much a conservative, whether he calls himself that or not, I don't know, but that's kind of
• 1:02:17
  the stance he's taken. And I think it's the same thing for the appeal of Trump, you know, he's
• 1:02:22
  willing to stand up there and stick it to the lib tards and really say what I'd love to say at work,
• 1:02:26
  but I can't, right? And I think there's some, I think there's some value in that for people.
• 1:02:31
  But with, there's, there's a difference. Like with Trump, there's, Trump is a troll, right? I mean,
• 1:02:36
  Trump will say whatever, Trump is a master sort of stand up comic who goes out before crowds for
• 1:02:45
  four hours and AB tests material and gauges the reaction and whatever gets the biggest roar
• 1:02:51
  becomes his new stick and that becomes policy, right? I mean, that was the wall. That was a whole
• 1:02:56
  lot of his policies were just him kind of throwing things out there and seeing what worked in the
• 1:03:01
  same way that a stand up does and sees what see what's what gets the laughs. With Jordan, there's,
• 1:03:06
  there was something so refreshingly brazen about his impoliteness around culture war issues
• 1:03:15
  that I think shocked people into a sort of grudging admiration for, you know, his, his bluntness.
• 1:03:23
  I mean, even today, I was interviewing Coleman Hughes on this show the other day and we were talking
• 1:03:28
  about gender disparity in boardrooms and CEOs and things like that. And I found myself shocked and
• 1:03:37
  taken a back when someone as rational and polite and mild managers, Coleman said,
• 1:03:43
  wait, are you talking about the disparity between the number of the absolute number of women
• 1:03:49
  in CEOs positions or the disparity between the number of women who want to be CEOs and the number
• 1:03:56
  who are in CEO positions? And that's a distinction that is never made that sounds immediately to me
• 1:04:05
  like it's sexist, but it's not, right? It would get accused of being sexist because it's
• 1:04:11
  implying that there is some fundamental, maybe even biological difference between the aspirations
• 1:04:17
  of the sexes and that maybe it's aligning a whole bunch of cultural, you know, culturally sexist
• 1:04:24
  explanations about women not being raised to aspire the same way that men are or something.
• 1:04:29
  Well, this is the leaky pipeline theory for, you know, why there aren't more women CEOs
• 1:04:36
  of Fortune 500 companies because there's fewer of them applying because by the time you apply,
• 1:04:40
  you've already had to work, you know, 80 hour weeks or 20 years to get to that place where you
• 1:04:46
  could even do that and more women than men are choosing to become mothers or whatever and do
• 1:04:51
  something different because who they all wants that job anyway? Well, not many people.
• 1:04:55
  That's true. I mean, even if you're even if you're removed motherhood from it, you know, at one point
• 1:05:00
  that Jordan Peterson makes is that there are that the sort of bell curve distribution of males
• 1:05:06
  is wider than females. There are a lot more men in prison. There are a lot more homeless men and
• 1:05:11
  there are also a lot more Nobel prize-winning men like the tales along with men where where a lot
• 1:05:17
  there are a lot dumber and in some respects, we're actually smarter. Like the, you know, smarter
• 1:05:22
  and quotation marks, you have to be a little bit of a psychopath to want to be a world-leading CEO.
• 1:05:28
  Like it's not a coincidence that he'll on mask and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are some males.
• 1:05:33
  Like these are just a particular type that it does map onto. Not all, you know, you can't say 100%,
• 1:05:39
  you can't say there are no women like that at all, but that it maps onto sex. And that's become
• 1:05:45
  something quite taboo, I think. Yes, exactly. Well, that's what got Larry Summers at Harvard
• 1:05:51
  into trouble. And that's all he was saying. Why aren't there more women in stand at the high end,
• 1:05:55
  like a Caltech MIT Harvard and so on in physics and cosmology and so on? Well, because it's not
• 1:06:03
  because there are a bunch of misogynists behind closed doors refusing to hire women,
• 1:06:07
  there just aren't as many women applying. Why not? Well, because there aren't as many PhDs in those
• 1:06:13
  fields by women. Well, why not? Because there aren't as many graduates undergraduates in the
• 1:06:19
  well, why not? Because they're dropping out early. I mean, they're not going in those fields much
• 1:06:23
  really. Well, why not? You know, so you end up at some what's loosely called a systemic
• 1:06:28
  explanation. Well, you know, is it back in sixth grade when, you know, the math teacher discourages
• 1:06:34
  the girls from continuing? Or is it just they're not that interested? So, you know, Jordan's explanation,
• 1:06:39
  not just his, but that, you know, there's a difference between men and women boys and girls
• 1:06:45
  on interesting things versus people. So nobody says, well, how come there's so many women
• 1:06:50
  pediatricians? And why aren't men going into, you know, pediatrics? Well, because women are more
• 1:06:56
  interested in people and men are more interested in things. That's the explanation for that. That's
• 1:07:01
  the leaky pipeline. And so pulling out, you know, and taking the kind of big anthropological and
• 1:07:09
  spiritual look at all of these debates because we don't have time to go over them individually.
• 1:07:16
  The, you know, it's been remarked upon that the decline of religion has led to some sort of
• 1:07:22
  emptiness, which may be partly the emptiness that Tony Robbins and Jordan Peterson are filling.
• 1:07:29
  But that emptiness may also be finding sucker in the new religion of social justice, right? This
• 1:07:36
  is, you know, John McWater wrote a book about, you know, the sort of the religiosity of this
• 1:07:42
  current moment. I'm trying to avoid the word woke because it's such a horrid cliche. But, you know,
• 1:07:47
  there are the idea of the confessional of the public, the public shaming, the exclusion of the
• 1:07:56
  of the apostate, the, the piety, the professions of piety, the in-groupism and out-groupism.
• 1:08:04
  These are very classic kind of witch-hunting religious identity-driven habits of the human
• 1:08:14
  condition that we're seeing exemplified in various ways. So I wonder what you, I wonder what you
• 1:08:20
  as a sort of rationalist think about that. Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's not just recent. I mean,
• 1:08:25
  Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, you know, those are all secular religions where, you
• 1:08:32
  know, they had the purity tests and witch hunts and trials, show trials and so on. And on the right,
• 1:08:39
  McCarthyism and Christian extremist evangelism. I love the story about Ayn Rand and the objectivist
• 1:08:47
  versus the libertarians and, you know, that they had these invites of like, who was the true,
• 1:08:52
  true economic libertarian freedom person, you know, and, you know, so I think we should have like a
• 1:08:56
  1% tax. Oh, you're a communist. Yeah, yeah, right. And then you're right. It's interesting. I
• 1:09:02
  hadn't realized that. So the, so the Randians, the objectivists were in a battle where they
• 1:09:06
  with the libertarians. Oh, yeah. Yeah, who was the purest, right? But feminists, you know,
• 1:09:10
  feminist movements also went, you know, who's the purest feminist? And even atheism went through that
• 1:09:15
  after, really, it was nothing until the kind of the 1990s that started to pick up with the science
• 1:09:21
  wars and creationism. And then in Richard's book was published, Duckins in 2006, the God
• 1:09:27
  Delusion, you know, that was a massive bestseller. And that kind of brought atheism onto the map,
• 1:09:31
  along with, you know, the new atheists and Sam Harris and Richard and Chris Richards and so forth.
• 1:09:38
  And then it became like, who's militant enough? Are you really militant? Are you like Hitch? You
• 1:09:43
  got to be like Hitch. You got to just stick it to the morons who believe this bullshit. You
• 1:09:49
  know, and then it's like, well, but I don't really want it. I don't think that's a good strategy.
• 1:09:52
  I don't really feel like insulting people like that. Then you're not a true atheist.
• 1:09:56
  Right. And then there was another cut with the atheist plus movement, the plus being social
• 1:10:01
  justice. It's not enough to be an atheist. You got to be a far left woke progressive atheist
• 1:10:05
  because that's where they're real. Oh, okay. So, you know, then they cut, you know, you just got
• 1:10:09
  even more like that. And I, you know, I actually think this is probably true of all social groups.
• 1:10:16
  I think they splinter, you know, before I'd call that the, the, what is the bigotry of small,
• 1:10:20
  was the darsisism of small differences. Yeah. Something like that, you know, all groups seem to go
• 1:10:26
  through this. And I don't know, it's, you know, it's not good for society and social media only
• 1:10:31
  feeds on that on a larger scale, you know. I mean, it's not, the problem though is not just the
• 1:10:36
  narcissism of small differences. It's the, it's the rise in, I guess, tribal intolerance. The
• 1:10:43
  characterization of, of different, I guess, the narrowing of the scope of what ideas are permissible
• 1:10:51
  in polite conversation. And, you know, the, the dogmatism with which certain ideas that don't
• 1:10:57
  conform to a conventional, and, you know, let's just say what those ideas are, for example, that
• 1:11:01
  there might be genuine biological differences between males and females, that, that there might be
• 1:11:09
  what I'm just blanking on, what, on one of the other. Oh, so, you know, that there might be
• 1:11:15
  something that was good about colonialism, that there might be an exaggeration of, of police
• 1:11:22
  violence against people of colour in the United States, that there, there could be any differences,
• 1:11:28
  any cultural explanations for differences in outcomes between different races in the United
• 1:11:33
  States. I mean, there are all these hot button things without even going into the, into the world
• 1:11:38
  of whether or not trans women are the same as cisgender women. The, the, all the, there are a whole
• 1:11:44
  bunch of ideas that you could throw around here in a boisterous, rembunctious society that people
• 1:11:49
  could test and push back on and disprove that are not being tested and pushed back on and disproven
• 1:11:54
  because they're not even allowed to be here in the first place without the person who's
• 1:11:58
  airing them being excommunicated from the conversation. And, and it's that, I don't know whether or
• 1:12:03
  not I'm only perceiving that as being new because I'm a fatty-duty now middle-aged cis-white male
• 1:12:10
  or whether there actually is a curtailing of the conversation or maybe the curtailing was just
• 1:12:14
  different in the past and if you're a trans woman of colour then you definitely felt excluded
• 1:12:17
  from the conversation when you tried to pipe out. Well, it depends on a time scale. I'm in the
• 1:12:21
  over-to window. Yeah, it's shrinking, but, but really, I mean, maybe you're just, it's on that
• 1:12:26
  particular topic at this particular time, but there's always been taboos in society of what you're
• 1:12:31
  allowed to talk about or not. That's, that's not new. Maybe you don't think that there are more taboos
• 1:12:36
  now. They're just different. I think they're mostly just different and also, but also amplified.
• 1:12:41
  I can't tell you how many, like, conservatives I've had on my podcast who ramble on about how
• 1:12:46
  we're never allowed to speak about this and like we're talking about it right now. Yeah. And I
• 1:12:51
  see you on Fox News like 20 times. What do you mean you're not allowed to talk about it? Yeah,
• 1:12:57
  apparently you are. No, I mean on these other shows. Well, okay.
• 1:13:01
  Yeah. And yet they're pointing at something that's not completely fictitious. I mean, I know what
• 1:13:06
  they, it depends on, it's a case by case basis, but I sort of know what they mean that there's
• 1:13:12
  like, you know, someone was talking about, someone was talking about Louis CK to me because I went
• 1:13:16
  to Louis when he was in Sydney and, you know, that was a conflicted thing and so someone was
• 1:13:20
  saying, how could you give him money? And I was saying, well, I mean, he's paid a price.
• 1:13:27
  None of his shows are available anymore on streaming. He hasn't, he's not hired anywhere to do
• 1:13:33
  anything. And this person said, he's just sold out Madison Square Garden. And I said, well,
• 1:13:38
  yeah, he sold out Madison Square Garden by hiring out Madison Square Garden and then selling
• 1:13:42
  tickets on his website and making a profit. And so this person was saying, he hasn't been cancelled.
• 1:13:47
  And I said, well, what would cancellation constitute like you chop his head off? Like how, you know,
• 1:13:52
  he's been cancelled and he has, he has been excluded from all of the engines of, of the entertainment
• 1:13:59
  industry. He was dropped by everyone and everything and then he went on the web and started selling
• 1:14:04
  stuff for himself. So yeah, he still has hands, you know, he still has a, you have a son is mouth
• 1:14:10
  shut. Yeah. But to say that that means that there was no penalty is ridiculous. And so yeah,
• 1:14:16
  these people are still going on Fox News and they're still saying all of their, you know,
• 1:14:19
  hateful bullshit about trans kids. But that doesn't mean that they're not pointing at something
• 1:14:24
  about the institutions of media and polite society that they're pointing at something at some
• 1:14:30
  kind of dynamic that's going on at places like the New York Times and at Brooklyn Cocktail parties
• 1:14:36
  that is a little bit McCarthy-like. Sure. Yeah. I recognize. If I was in my 30s and, you know,
• 1:14:44
  just an assistant professor and, you know, I'd probably just keep my mouth shut. It's, you know,
• 1:14:48
  it's, yeah, for sure. Yeah, there are risks. I want to ask you some first date questions,
• 1:14:54
  which is for premium subscribers. These are like raw shark questions that just off the top of your
• 1:14:58
  head about completely random things just so people get to know you a little bit better. Is that okay?
• 1:15:02
  Yeah, sure. What's the best cuisine? Well, in Southern California,
• 1:15:08
  Mexican food. Man, there's nothing better than guacamole and chips and tacos and burritos. Yeah,
• 1:15:13
  I like that. Okay. We'll have to agree to disagree about that. Even having lived in Southern
• 1:15:18
  California. I still... What do you like? How many ways can you mix together beans and rice and,
• 1:15:23
  you know, corn? I would say Thai, probably. Oh, I do. We have a good Indian food place here. I love
• 1:15:32
  Indian food. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Can't you have multiple bests? Why does it have to be the best?
• 1:15:38
  On this show, there's one best, Michael. That's it. Although, it's funny that you say that, because
• 1:15:43
  I have a running joke with my husband about exactly whether or not it's appropriate to have
• 1:15:48
  favorites of everything. He loves having like, you know, he still has a favorite color. I'm like,
• 1:15:52
  you're a grown man. You don't know my favorite color. I mean, your favorite color when you were
• 1:15:56
  child. But he always asked me my favorite something and I'm always like, I don't have a favorite,
• 1:16:01
  you know, I'll give him five things. What's your favorite country? I'll say, well, Switzerland's
• 1:16:06
  the prettiest, but then, you know, I really like, and he's like, just tell me your favorite. I'm like,
• 1:16:09
  I can't. There's no one in me. So talking about countries, though, why don't we go there as well?
• 1:16:14
  What's the, what's the loveliest country you've been to? If you'd like to hear the rest of my
• 1:16:20
  conversation with Michael Schumer, including an unexpected and entertaining anecdote about an
• 1:16:25
  evening he spent with Christopher Hitchens, please become part of the community uncomfortable
• 1:16:29
  conversations.substac.com where you'll get your own personalized, odd-pass.