Michael Shermer

00:05and we're live hello michael sherman hello thank you good to see you pile of your writing look what you got there yeah the moral arc uh heavens on earth look at you skeptic magazine that's the latest issue why is there something rather than nothing we like to tackle the little questions that's a deep one you've dealt with this on the show yeah too much it's uh that's one that just you know when you're in traffic and you know what is this when you have someone like neil or or uh sean carroll or lawrence krauss talking about this it's like whoa i mean i'm not a physicist i'm a social scientist so for me i i come at it like what do you mean by this word nothing because most of us have this idea of what i mean oh no in physics it means this other thing like okay yeah well i think our limited understanding of what they're talking about like when i see those guys writing down

00:53on legal papers with all that scritchity scratchity crazy looking very fake alien language mathematics like thank god you guys are out there well i opened heavens on earth with imagine yourself dead and you know most people go well you know i see myself in the casket and my friends and family are around and hopefully they're mourning no you wouldn't see anything of course you're dead i mean to imagine anything you have to be conscious and alive so you can't even picture being dead so you can't picture not existing and it would be the same thing imagine there's no universe okay i see blackness no there's no blackness i mean nothing would literally be not just no light but no no perception of darkness nothing not even nothing i was going through instagram the other day and there was this one uh person who was talking about the purpose of life and when you die what's going to happen

01:47and uh i immediately just started laughing i'm like you don't know right how are you saying this like when you die what happens it was like one of them spiritual type characters is just kind of a huckster there's a lot of spiritual hucksters out there these days there are yes the in the 90s we debunked all those the psychics talking to the dead that was a that hasn't been too popular in recent years but that was a big thing people caught on to that little earpiece thing yeah the earpiece or just the cold reading yeah i see a a father figure is this a grandfather father uncle friend of the family you know you can yeah and uh he's saying something about um you know it's okay for you to forgive yourself oh okay how about like well where was the will yeah he hid his will somewhere where is that because that's what we want to know is you know that ring he had where is that if you're just

02:37vague enough i mean like uh horoscopes if you're just vague enough people are like oh my god it's right all the time it's always right like that's not even a real horoscope if you really want to pay attention to actual astrology that you they have to know the date you were born the time you were born it's not just the month of august right you know it's like they gotta they want to know morning or evening yeah you know what do you think about all that stuff it's all bunk is it yeah yeah yeah why has it been around so long uh well because the uh well it's called the barnum effect where you know pt barnum you just offer something for everybody so if you make it general enough you know i i sense you're an intelligent uh wise person that people really enjoy your company and and you like going to parties and being with other people and yet you like the quiet

03:23solitude of a walk on the beach you know people going yep that is so me well i pretty much described every scenario you can have you're alone you're with people but it's one of those things where if you talk to someone who is an actual believer in astrology like they they are so convinced i got a friend of mine who's trying to tell me that he makes all of his decisions based on consulting with his astrologer well reagan well nancy reagan yeah for his travel after he was shot she got real paranoid about that well so part of the problem is these astrologers and psychics are themselves remembering their hits and forgetting their misses the confirmation so i knew a psychic or a magician uh who was working the uh psychic friends network um back in the 90s when it's hard to make a living as a magician doing kids parties they all want to have their own vegas show but only a few

04:14people get that so you got to do something on the side so this guy was doing psychic friends network and uh he told me all about it they gave him a book a three-ring binder here's the kinds of things you should say and you know people are calling for love health money career questions so you can spend 20 30 minutes at 3.95 a minute just going through there you know i sent you in a relationship right now and one of you is more committed than the other tell me about that 10 minutes later you know they're still talking and you're thinking about travel you're not happy with your job there's some financial stress in your life right now and then he told me about stuff like now go get a crystal and then a candle i want you to set it up here on your desk and this would go on and on for hours and they charge by the hour and they charge what they are so one of the

04:57problems that psychic friend networks had was people were not paying their phone bills because they you know come back on eight hundred dollar phone number so they would just not pay it so the phone companies crack down on the psychic friends network company going hey this is getting out of hand that people aren't paying their bills so they had to ratchet and pack a little bit oh that's right they would do it through the phone that's interesting yeah they wouldn't get a credit card from you they would just stay on the line with you right so he told me that when he first started he got like 60 cents on the minute uh uh for the 395 at that per minute but then they they bumped it up as he got more experience and kept him on the line longer they gave him bonuses now you get a dollar per minute or whatever how is that not illegal i mean he's not even a psychic

05:39shouldn't you have to like if you want to be a doctor you have to go and you got to you know go to medical school you got to get a degree you shouldn't there's a interesting history there because in new york city for example it was difficult to outlaw like the three card monty guys on the sidewalk with the cardboard because it's just kind of a game right now now it would be illegal to sell fraudulent stocks or something like that or sell a product that's advertised as a health product when it's not but if say in that case it's under food rather than drugs or say no health products like vitamins are under different standards than say medical drugs a psychic is more like an entertainer so this is for entertainment purposes only so we can do whatever we want as opposed to a medical doctor that's dispensing advice so maybe a doctor's a bad example maybe i should have said engineer

06:31but the point is like if you're going to work as a psychic like on a psychic network if you have a business of selling psychics yeah like you should be able to you have to exhibit some sort of psychic something yeah well they can't uh you know under controlled conditions they always fail there's nothing that's ever been done no no what about the one thing that i've read that uh statistically more people can recognize that people are staring at them yeah like when they're looking at you from behind that horseshit well it's not been it's not been consistently replicated um so is it possible that some people with a certain sensitivity can detect well we okay so one explanation the skeptic's explanation is that if i'm in a say a starbucks or something and i kind of have a sense that people are talking about maybe looking at me and and and i look and that catches somebody's eye and they

07:22turn to me and i think oh that person is looking at me or vice versa i'm looking at them and then they send something or whatever so there could be some element of chance to that now um the guy that does this rupert sheldrake um you know he believes that it's actually some kind of like psychic power through the medium like when i'm looking at you something's coming out of my eyes and tickling your neck so that's his morphic resonance morphic resonance now richard wiseman a british experimental psychologist he's tried to replicate that and he always fails and then this other woman marilyn schlitz she also tried to replicate it and she was able to replicate some of it so there may be an experiment or bias it's not clear if it's the skeptics that are biased or the believers that are biased but in that case it's best to just say you know we don't know it so the default position the null

08:11hypothesis is that it's not true until you prove otherwise and that's a that's a difficult one to prove now if if they say if i say well why is the effect so subtle why can't you go to vegas and become a millionaire gambling or play the stock market you know we know traders just need a tiny you know 1.01 percent advantage over the other traders or whatever they can make in terms of just psychic ability yeah so if the psychic ability is a very broad term right it's almost like saying drugs because like yeah there are certain drugs that put you to sleep and certain drugs that make you hyper they have very different effects so saying psychic ability like maybe you have the ability to see if someone's looking at you but you don't have the ability to pick the lottery right so the hard part in testing psychics is to pin down what exactly are you saying you could do

08:54right and that that's where it gets pretty fuzzy so these like why is it legal for the phone psychics because that you can't pin them down if somebody says look i'm just giving relationship advice why is that illegal if i say like the tony robbins netflix documentary i'm not your guru which is basically i am your guru he has that moment in this huge auditorium there's like 3 000 people there and he gets this woman up on stage and she's got relationship problems he says do you have your phone she goes yeah take out your phone and call him right now and she he talks her through dumping this guy on stage on the phone and he's at work or something he's like what and then she hangs up and everybody's happy that she did this now is that a good thing or a bad thing i have no idea it's great for show business but what if you know so how the i mean that seems crazy like how do you know what

09:44kind of relationship they really have now somebody had talked to both of them right wouldn't you somebody that i brought this up at an event recently a party and somebody said oh i know the back story his staff had been working the audience and they they knew all about her and the relationship and it was about to go sour anyway so we brought her up it's like okay so this is the thing with you see the psychics on tv there's a lot of stuff you don't see they work the audience they know people fill out like the psych the faith healers they fill out prayer cards yeah they put their name and address and their ailment and then you know the faith healers have a little earbud in there and they're listening to the person in the back reading okay here's the person they have you know glaucoma or whatever and you hear them calling this out so uh so there's a lot of that that we don't see

10:29but anthony robbins is not claiming any kind of psychic ability he's just he's just trying to provide positive paths for improving your life and if you're in a bad relationship that would be a positive path let's get out of that relationship and just like move forward with it with emotion and power and love and he'd probably throw a karate kick and get everybody pumped up and jump around his little bobby brown headphones on you know it's like but he's he's a showman too yeah that's right so this but but my point is that the psychic could say the same thing look i'm just dishing out you know i don't know but he's not i mean it's weird to put him in that category right because he's just trying to get people excited he i think he does some good i really do because he did me some good when i was uh 21 years old i used to listen to his i think it was called unlimited power i

11:19think that was the name of the book and i listened to it on audio cassette by the pools shitty apartment that i was living in when i was trying to be a stand-up comedian yeah and uh it helped me he had some really good advice in terms of setting goals and in terms of like the way you approach things and look at things but i i agree all of that you know any of these self-help books you know jocko's books or amy alcon there's a lot of stuff that very similar to what tony robbins issues and okay that makes sense set goals and and be motivated and think positive maybe air a little bit on the side of over optimism so you can push through the failures but don't be blind because maybe it's certain times to cut and run and change of course in your life something like that the the hard part is getting is studying that which you know experimentally which are the best techniques

12:07versus others and um there was a guy wrote a book called sham s-h-a-m self-help actualization movement and he was the head book guy for rodale press that publishes these self-help books um and so his takeaway on in this book was that the number one predictor of people who will buy self-help books are people who already bought self-help books and they continue buying them yeah so if you say does it work well it works if you work it sort of consistently like you got to listen to the tapes like every weekend or every every low moment it's not like taking the pill and your cancer is gone uh you have to kind of keep practicing it as a lifestyle change for it to work yeah that's uh and also what do you mean by work like so tony goes into a corporation and they get a bump uh this is an example in this book they get a bump in sales so they get the salesmen all motivated

12:59they hit the phones on monday morning you know within two weeks their their sales are kind of back to where they were so you get so they got to bring the self-help guy back in every month or so to keep them super motivated well you got to give them some sort of incentive to stay stay pumped right i mean some financial incentives like it's one of those um old-school phrases inspiration is like bathing it works but you have to do it regularly in order for it to be effective i like that yeah i mean bathing works but it doesn't mean you're like hey two months later i smell like yeah yeah it works yeah daily yeah you have to do it all the time before it's like saying why can't the nfl teams play the whole game like the last two minutes because it's so exciting the two-minute drill because they can't do it physically yeah keep that up yeah yeah well i think you could physically keep up

13:50that enthusiasm that anthony robbins provides but you have to be either you have to have some sort of an office environment that is in incredibly enthusiastic to the point where you guys have engineered this environment where everybody's pumped up but that's going to be it i mean that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for the individual to be themselves i feel like that would be terrible to work at a place like that where everywhere you go there's motivational sayings and people are you know chanting things in the hallway and everybody's just got energy at 10. let's go you know that's that's what a guy like anthony robbins will provide you for with a short burst yeah we just hope that some of it sticks right well this is you know in amy alcon's book unfuckology it's great but yeah she calls these small wins or whoever calls them small wins like make your bed in the morning

14:38or shave or whatever or like jocko's little twitter post at 4 30 a.m yes no i'm never getting up at 4 30. but when i get up at 6 30 will occasionally right like like this morning for the morning ride that leaves at 7 am i get about 5 30 so i'm not happy getting up at 5 30 but i think okay jocko has been up an hour he's already worked out he's already done working out okay i can't really complain come on shermer get going that that that kind of little thing this is jordan's jordan peterson's point of the you know make get your life in order what is he talking about just stand up straight make your bed or clean your room what's he talking about he's talking about these little wins like if you can do that then the next thing that's a little harder becomes a little easier and so it's also those things that are in the background if you know that your your life is a mess your car is filled

15:25with fast food wrappers you're you know you're you're you've got that thing that you haven't taken care of in the back your head that that will that's going to disrupt it's going to be flowing in your thoughts for the most part it'll be a distraction right so those little things apparently do matter there's a theory of crime called the broken windows theory that is favored by criminologists to explain the decline the crime decline in the 90s what happened in new york city they started cleaning up the graffiti they started catching the turnstile jumpers they started cleaning up the streets they started you know boarding up windows there's no broken windows or replacing the windows the theory is that if there's a signal in society that no one's paying attention there is no law and order here there are no rules or norms do whatever the you want you're gonna get more crime

16:17if you send the signal through little things like we're not gonna allow graffiti on this wall anymore and no more turnstile jumpers in the subways and so on and so when when that happened then there was a trickle-down effect and then crime declined so that's the most popular theory for that and i think there's something to that yeah that makes a lot of sense and what they did with new york city is really kind of fantastic if you if you go back to when i was a kid and i traveled to new york city the first time and i saw times square i guess i was probably like 18 or 19. i was like look at this crazy place like this is madness and you know you see it in movies and it's just always this horrific scene it's always peep shows and hookers and pimps and thugs and drug dealers and you go there now and it's like a mall threw up you know it's like a giant neon mall of america like times square

17:10if you took a person if you grabbed a guy from like 1988 and you put him in a time machine and said hey man i'm going to bring you 30 years in the future and you're going to see new york city the way it looks then like what do you expect like oh my god it's going to be like like blade runner are people going to be shooting people and selling body parts and now you get there it's like guy fieri's restaurant huge gigantic lcd screens and there's there's some people that would long for the old days the dirty seediness that lenny bruce talked about you know when he lived there it's like i mean well that has a certain charm i guess if you're going into the nightclubs or whatever but the surrounding daytime neighborhood or something you this is isn't where you want to rather live in the vomited mall well i'm not crazy about that either but but so there's a reason why cities have

18:00certain restrictions on those kinds of uh stores coming in but like in a crappy neighborhood like um you know downtown old town pasadena now is kind of a hep place to go yeah but in the 70s when i mean i went to the ice house you know back in the day in the 70s uh just as as a spectator and but it was terrible down there and was it really oh yeah it was a dump i mean there was pasadena oh terrible yeah it was horrible the word was according to my friend bob fisher who owns the ice house he said that what it was was in the early days of hollywood the producers would all buy homes in pasadena these they have these beautiful old estates in pasadena but the stars would all live in the hollywood hills right so they would all be just boozing it up and partying down in the hollywood hills and the producers like let those crazy animals go have at it in the hills we're gonna

18:52back out a little bit and they they establish that community out there in pasadena right right so to turn it around like one of the key things uh a mall can do is get in what they call an anchor store someone like a sax fifth avenue somebody that's really respectable big and then you can call the other guys go look we got saks fifth avenue oh you got saks fifth avenue then i can be next to him and then it you know starts going and then little by little each of them cleans up their neighborhood a little bit more and pretty soon you end up with old town pasadena now well i was telling you guys before uh i had an issue today where my credit card got robbed and uh you know whatever credit card fraud someone got a hold of my number which is really that's the one thing that people worry about the most about shopping online right but i guess that could kind of happen everywhere yeah but

19:42you got to think that if there's anything that has changed malls more than anything it's got to be the ability to just shop online on your phone like amazon that the fact that they figured that out yeah i remember when amazon came out and it was just a bookstore i was like who the is going to buy books online you could just go to the bookstore this is ridiculous what a stupid business meanwhile that guy has more money than any human on the planet that's right yeah and poor bastard's getting divorced too i heard last night that there's a rule in wash washington that everything that you make as a couple you have to split so they've been together for over 25 years well california california law is yes 50 50. uh well long-term marriage is 20 years or 10 years or more it's 50 50. and that includes downstream income you know from anything you did that you're still getting paid for say 10

20:30years ago you wrote a book or whatever well mrs bezos is getting paid he's worth a hundred plus billion dollars 37. they said wow so she's gonna get half of that they're probably gonna because it's a lot of stock they said they're gonna have to just be stay friends because oh they better stay friends she should be super nice to him even if he only gives her a quarter if she's like i got rolling i got wrong the richest people in the world now but after all these bookstores went out of business there's some irony that amazon now wants to start opening physical brick and mortar stores that is kind of ironic but it does make sense though because there are some brick and mortar stores and i think that guy's a conker i think he just wants to take over everything well why else would he buy whole foods you know i was like oh the supermarket business i can this up too

21:18yeah well automate it you could i don't know maybe you could order whole foods delivered to your house i think i don't know if that's available yet but i think it is right yes i say now most grocery stores even like all the ralphs have home delivery within two hours to compete with amazon prime yeah wow and if they don't do that you can just order it online and pick it up and they'll bring out too yeah i went to pavilions the other day and they had a bunch of delivery trucks parked in the parking lot i was like look at this like they got these cool delivery trucks i have to wow they have that one right there you can walk in and there's no cashiers they just trust that everyone's not stealing and i think they just are uh comfortable with a certain amount of theft oh wow yeah hmm that's interesting well they probably have cameras everywhere too you know

22:05but it's um the online purchasing like that has got to put that must be putting the most as far as like the most impact on stores brick and mortar stores it's like the ability to purchase online has got to be devastating for them right totally and up in santa barbara where i live now just riding up state street this morning at the end of the ride you know it's like the third maybe a quarter of the stores are closed out of business wow empty and you know state street santa barbara this was like the happening place to be and i and a real estate friend of mine says oh well let's see that story there that's you know twenty two thousand dollars a month to lease like whoa okay so you have to you have to have a retail outlet that's really turning over the customers and there's a lot that just can't do that you can't have an antique store that's going to do that or a little knickknack store

22:49santa barbara is one of my favorite places and it's it's really interesting because it's uh it's a small area like i don't think there's a hundred and fifty thousand people less than that it's about ninety thousand is it yeah montecito included or with montecito included goleto galeta is like another thirty thousand or so and then below that you have carpenteria that's like another 20 000 or so so yeah it's and it's beautiful that's great you've got the right spot man but it's also i feel like it needs to be that close to los angeles yeah like you get a little bit of trickle i can zip down there 75 miles from my house to your studio here my office in altadena for skeptic magazine that's 105 miles so it's doable yeah yeah yeah but it's it's i think that human beings when they're living in these gigantic communities whether it's los angeles or new york or something like that

23:42there's just a certain amount of people become less valuable you know there's just too many of them and you you lose that sort of appreciation for people and there's like a tension around like you you don't mind if a few people drop off you know what i mean yeah there's a balance in size my wife's from cologne germany which is about 1 million people and that's that's about as big as you want to get it's a big enough city there's lots of action you could do all sorts of things uh but it's not you know 6 million or 10 million which is just like l.a it's just too many have you ever seen that study that they did where they set up a camera on one end of the street and the camera on the other end of the street and they timed people walking through and in those in the the the footage of those people walking through they were able to determine by how fast these people walked

24:34they got an average uh which was really accurate of how many people lived in the city yeah yeah yeah yeah scale yes yeah there's that book that physicist west jeff g-e-o-f-f west i think is his name wrote that book and and the bigger the city the more efficient and faster things become yeah including dialogue the way people communicate talk a little faster they walk a little faster and he had us a formula showing how many restaurants per hundred thousand gas stations per hundred thousand you'll get as you scale up you don't need as many restaurants and and gas stations as populations increase because there's more efficiency in the flow of traffic and people uh throughout the city whereas smaller towns are less efficient that was the theory but it's just fascinating that human beings adjust because of all of these other human beings around them they change the way

25:27they walk they walk faster they talk faster is this it right here yeah scale scale universal laws of life death in organisms cities and companies listening to it right now actually are you really yeah like coincidentally cowinky dinky um that's that's i mean you feel it you know when i lived in uh boulder for a short amount of time one of the things you know bold or small as well i think it's a hundred thousand people when i came back here the first thing i realized is how fast everyone's driving right everyone's just cutting everybody off and zooming ahead and and people are like really in a rush everywhere they go and that has to be in some way shape or form it has to be influenced by all the other people around them and their energy right what is that that's right what do you think that is though well first of all it's all unconscious i think it's it's just mostly the kind of overall

26:18pace you get that pushes everybody along or slows them down i just started this book called rule makers and rule breakers uh it's a by a woman who is a cultural psychologist sorry i forget her name maybe look at it so rule makers rule breakers so she talks about tight cultures versus so she talks about tight versus loose cultures so like again my wife from germany it's a tighter culture than people are more likely to obey norms and rules and there's a little more uncomfortableness in violating them california we're a little loosey-goosey about rules and and so my wife's always giving me a hard time about you know my idea of traffic laws is i'll just do whatever you know i feel like pretty much if as long as it's safe and i kind of know uh you know i'm driving up the 101. if i stay at uh 79 or below i'm fine and she's like but that's 65. yeah so what i mean i know where the

27:18cops park i know everybody else is going and the left turn into our our street is a is a left arrow so of course my wife she's just like well we gotta wait it's like but it's midnight i'm just gonna go you can't go it's like yeah this is california i'm going there's no one there there's no hair yeah yeah so that's a tight culture versus loose culture so she i guess she's going to talk about how norms then affect laws and how then people change their behavior you're not even aware you're doing this you're just kind of unconsciously absorbing the cultures but what do you think i mean there but there's a difference between west coast tight culture like or large groups rather and east coast large groups do you think that's influenced by weather it's one of the things that i've been thinking about a lot the aggression of east coasters is very different than the aggression of west coasters

28:06and i always wonder it's like how much of that is because they have to deal with weather for five months out of the year it could be i don't that i don't know um uh and the influence of immigrants as well like because uh like my my parents my grandparents were immigrants they all came over from england and ireland and italy and they were all savages they were all people that were willing to get on a boat and cross the ocean right you know those are aggressive people they're like i'm getting out of here you and then they landed where else hundreds they're higher risk takers yes yes yeah yeah yeah so it's not a random population that came to america nor with australia you know you send all these uh conversations there it's it's not going to be a typical gene pool there yeah but meanwhile how good did that work out those are the nicest things well same thing in you know germans you

28:53know here after world war one and world war ii oh these are bellicose people but they're this international character now they're the nicest people in the world they don't want to fight anybody yeah that is that's one generation right right and if more than that i mean they have massive war guilt and and holocaust guilt uh yeah i mean they are all raised in in taking tons of classes in school about what happened why we're never going to do this again here's what we did at the jew you know they're still paying israel reparations for that there are these little stumbling stones that are these sort of brass uh square cubes in in all over uh germany of the name and year that the person was murdered these are all jews in front of the house where they used to live they're all over the place yeah i have a picture of him in the marlar care i'll show you it's it's really dramatic it's

29:42and when you and these you literally stumble across them i mean they're just there in the street um you might if you google stumbling stones you can see that they're better in four color another interesting thing about germany is they won't let scientology in they're very sensitive about cults and cult behavior that's right well there's another reason for that and that is i can't find the pictures now um in germany most people don't know this there's a religious there it is jamie's got another yeah there they go oh so that's what they so they're actually above ground yeah so you're just walking along and you look down and some of them those are not they're not like that right they're not like little bricks on the ground yeah they're like that you just saw they're in the ground yeah they're in the ground so it's the person's flesh and and they're in front of the house

30:24where they used to live the date that they were departed and the date that they were murdered and where they were murdered auschwitz or treblinka or mydonik and so on yeah there you go so it's pretty moving it's and it's it's kind of a reminder this is what we did and we we're not going to do this again remember so so that's that's changing norms how does this happen really it's you can do it through the law from the top down but really it's more culture from the bottom up you were saying that there's another reason besides that besides the holocaust that they're sensitive to scientology oh yeah uh because in germany they have a religious withholding tax so when you get your first job they do a withholding for your religion and they give a percentage of your paycheck to your religion the religion you were born into baptized whatever it's mostly catholic and protestant but others

31:17want to get in on that because that's cumulative you know you can make some money doing this as a religion the humanists of germany get a little piece of this action it's considered a religion so scientology when they saw that they went oh okay free government money tax money and the germans go uh no you're not a real religion and you're not getting in on this and uh yeah so i again when when my uh wife came here before she came here she quit church and you literally have to go down to the courthouse fill out a form and say i am leaving the church please don't take my money anymore out of my paycheck so you have to opt out you will be giving money to your religion unless you fill out the form and opt out wow and uh in in this case uh it's kind of a funny story they go okay so just to make sure you know now if you sign this you can't get married in the

32:05catholic church you can't get buried in catholic church you can't go to this you know the ceremonies and so on you're done and she goes yep that's the way i want it she went down there with her four horsemen t-shirts said dawkins danette harris and hitchens and they're like who's this anyway so they said oh but now okay the moment you sign it starts effective today but there's a three-month lag for us to not take the money out of your paycheck what my wife is like yeah like wait a minute when a bus in a business when a contract ends it ends for both parties they go uh no they're just gonna steal money for three months three more months yeah what a weird thing that you have to opt out like that that it has to be so definitive that you have to sign papers and go someplace what a shady law it is it's no good i know that's got to change so a lot of us are trying to

32:53like talk people into opting out quit church well it is amazing that in this country i mean i would like to know what the number is if the churches in this country had to pay taxes i mean clearly especially when you look at the televangelists that are driving rolls royces and flying around in private jets i mean there's profit there's extreme amount of profit and it's discretionary income they can do whatever they want with it and you're dealing with massive massive sums of money and they don't contribute so these people are clearly personally benefiting from the contributions of these people and then they don't pay taxes on it and in the case of like ministers who live in a church-owned home they don't have to pay property tax uh you know so there's a lot of hidden benefits there it's dirty yeah it is dirty it's amazing that it's still here i mean especially when you deal with

33:42something like scientology well you know the guy who wrote it right like it's this is not some ancient text that we're handing down from yeah this is you know the guy and the guy was a terrible writer yeah i mean he was a terrible science fiction author he just wrote every thing he wrote was a first draft just just boom gone i mean it's just the most nonsensical nonsense writing and yet they don't have to pay taxes because it's considered a legitimate religion harlan ellison the great science fiction writer died this year uh told me the story of what the famous story where l ron hubbard allegedly said you know i'm going to go start a religion yeah he said it was it's real it's a true story they were but but it was just a bunch of science fiction writers sitting around like this chatting and complaining about how poorly paid they are they have to crank out by the word you

34:30know kenny a word kind of thing and somebody said you know we should just start a religion and make up like that and you know ron hubbard goes yeah you know that's a good idea i think i think i might do that and then he went out and wrote dianetics and that became the founding document of scientology did you watch the um the hbo series on it the the documentary yeah the going clear yeah unbelievable that's the best documentary on it of course i've seen all leah's show she's got uh big guts to to go after i don't know if she's got good lawyers or a e has good lawyers or whatever maybe they've stopped suing people i don't know i think the climate has shifted and i think people are more first of all for the longest time all we thought of when you thought about scientology you thought about positive thinking and john travolta and tom cruise they're all super positive

35:19you know and they're getting things done and there's auditing and they're really taking care of their mind and you know and thinking clearly and eliminating all the negative influences but then once um there's a bunch of factors i think but once the internet opened up these the the doctrines and you got a chance to read it and people got a chance to mock it and then you know south park did that whole series on it where they this is what they actually believe and you see like you see when south park did that everybody was like holy wait a minute is that real and then people started googling it and then looking into it and then it started to unravel slowly but surely people started leaving the church lawrence wright wrote the book all these things are happening and now leah is coming in and leah was you know i knew her but i mean i'm friends with kevin james from the king and queen

36:04so i've known leah for 20 plus years and when i first met her she was just like this hard ass beautiful woman who's just like driven and like she's a scientologist like oh get the out of her way you know it was like that she's just like super active and just getting things done and just being productive i mean that's what you thought about when you thought about scientology but now what you think about it is like nonsense and it's just foolishness and and once going clear air and you got to see l ron hubbard and listen to him talk and you you see the captain's outfit he had on with the medals that he gave himself you're like what who would buy this that's right it's so dumb it's just it's amazing that it it's so effective and so financially successful uh yeah i think their membership roles are pretty low but their property holdings i think are pretty

36:59extensive yeah i mean they're the second biggest real estate owner in los angeles is that right yeah oh wow at least they were there's some uh japanese folks that were number one and then it was uh number two was scientology maybe that's not true anymore might be uh oil barons now yeah well back in the 90s when the internet first got cranked up we were doing issues articles on scientology is when some of these ex-members started posting the secret doctrines the z-news story and the going clear you know at level eight or whatever when you find out the the the inside story and they got raided i mean the scientologists went to court to court to judges and said uh this is copyrighted material and it's like wait you're a religion how can you copyright a religious well and they somehow got around that i mean this would be like the catholic church not telling you about jesus and the

37:51resurrection until level eight after you've paid a hundred thousand dollars or something like that it's just insane well what's amazing is that the irs caved and turned unbelievable when that happened i remember when that happened i thought oh my god i don't want to with these guys i mean they beat the irs i'm a nobody how am i going to defend myself again but maybe they've stopped suing people maybe they're not going after leo la real estate here goes portfolio properties reported at 400 million dollars in hollywood alone paid for in cash no less the church of scientology is undeniably a formidable player in the real estate game that's what you got they have some beautiful properties too yeah it's just really amazing it's amazing so you know my my skeptic friends oh they're going to go out of business anytime soon it's like i don't know i think they could have practically no members and

38:38still they have all this real estate here's the thing even though it's nonsense just so is most religion let's just be honest i mean if you want to talk about guys coming back from the dead after being buried for three days or adam and eve being the only two people and they have kids and their kids just started having sex with each other and that makes all the people in the world or moses parting the red sea and jesus walking on water i mean you're looking at horseshit everywhere it's just older horseshit it's you know whether or not it's based on some real events or some real people who knows who knows you know but it's all nonsense have you ever heard julia sweeney's monologue letting go of god no do you know julia from saturday night live i know who she is i do not know her yeah she just moved back to la so you should have her on the show she's terrified

39:26so um she was born and raised catholic loved being a catholic the whole culture and you know that was great and then she started reading dawkins and me and harris and so on and then kind of let all that go and then she wrote a monologue it's very moving so the monologue opens she's in her house in hollywood and the mormon boys come by and she invites them in and they want to you know tell the story and she's thinking this is like a hollywood pitch story you're going to pitch the story and i'll get back to you later until you know how i like it no no they wanted to you know to actually you know press to see if she could join right then and there you know they're on their two-year mission that they do you know so you picture these two 18 year olds with their white start shirts and their bicycles and so julia starts pressing him a little bit so so what's the story here well see um

40:10this guy joseph smith he he found these gold plates in his backyard and he translated them from ancient uh hieroglyphics into english and with these magic stones and they're going on and then jesus came to america and there was the good indians and the bad indians and julia's like i just want to tell them okay don't start with this story this is a bad pitch story even the scientologists know don't tell them about xenu until way down the line yeah but then she says reflecting on it you know if if i told somebody my catholic story who never heard of it it would sound just as wacky because it's virgin and the resurrection what yeah all of it's wacky 100 i mean it's like we were talking about earlier when you die what's going to happen is you don't know you don't know and the the reality is look maybe there is an afterlife maybe when we stop living something happens and our

41:04essential energy goes into another dimension it's possible but you don't know look being alive is so titanically bizarre just being a human being looking through eyeballs at each other across from this wooden table that was cut down from living organisms that turn into hearts surfaces and sand them and some and then you put it in a building and it's got electricities rolling through the walls and if you stuck a fork in there you die all of it is crazy the fact that we're on a planet i mean the the fact that the universe is at least as far as we can tell infinite all that stuff is crazy the idea that your essential energy doesn't transfer into some other state why not yeah like the whole thing's crazy but you don't know that's right you don't know until you whenever you say something that you're not sure of and you say this is what's going to happen but you don't really know

41:59you're a huckster that's right yep absolutely no one knows no one knows and that's the conclusion of heavens on earth i don't know and you don't either i saw a bumper sticker that said militant agnostic i don't know you don't either uh so i mean we have to okay so here's my bottom line on this yeah i don't know you don't no one knows for sure i'm happy to wake up in some great place and there's all my friends it would be awesome unless unless god was mad that you didn't follow the rules well that that's right christopher hitchens called the christian heaven celestial north korea it's like here's this dictator that knows everything you do and controls everything forever that's hilarious celestial north korea but he doesn't tell you anymore i told you already i told you 2 000 years ago this dude wrote it down pay attention to that right but then it's not even that right

42:47it's like one guy might have write it down a long time ago but then a bunch of other dudes got together and had to revise it they had like a new draft and the new draft they get to decide people got to decide what goes in and what doesn't go in and some of the stories are based on accounts from hundreds of years after jesus's death like the bible is a wiki it is like a wiki yeah it's just the people contributed to over the years and so on hitchens uh had a great analogy with uh when he was dying he wrote a series of essays for vanity fair his column uh which you can get as a book now i think it's called mortality or something like that anyway um one of them was people think dying is like you're at a party and someone taps you on the shoulder and says you have to leave now and worse the party's going to go on without you oh no he goes okay so let's play this out

43:37you're at the party and you get tapped on the shoulder and said uh you can never leave the party you have to stay here forever with these people like one of julia's funny lines is the mormon boys were telling her like in heaven it's going to be great um you you get you're made whole again like the blind shall see and the death shall hear again and the crippled she'll be hold again and she said well um i had uterine cancer and i had my uterus taken out do i get my uterus back and they're like you can imagine these 18 year old like what's a uterus again and they're like yeah you get your uterus back she goes i don't want it back and then she said what if you had a nose job and you liked it do i have to have my old nose back in heaven that's a good point yeah so and then they said uh and you get to spend the rest of eternity with your family and she went oh

44:25no that would not be good in my case maybe they'll be cured though they'll realize the errors of their way so you'll they'll be all enlightened well here's the problem so this is called the problem of identity who are you and you know the you know that theseus's ship you know the greek minotaur slayer theseus comes back and is a hero and they and they preserve his ship in the museum forever but the wood rots and they replace the ship and over the centuries there's no wood left from the original but it's still cherished as so i call this shermer's mustang because my first car was a 66 ford mustang classic and i had it for 19 years i love those cars it's a it was a great car but i banged it up so much i replaced this and that you know ever pretty much by the time i sold it as a classic and made it a nice little chunk of change on it there was very little of the original left

45:10right but it's the pattern not the material that counts so this whole debate about when you're resurrected in heaven with jesus what's up there is it your physical body if because some christian sex say yeah it's like okay how old are you when you're in heaven 30 this is the year they came up with because that's the year age jesus was when he was crucified okay but if joe i don't know how 40 something 51. you're 51. okay so if if you're resurrected at 30 year old joe rogan what happened to the last 21 years of joe rogan's body memories i don't want to go back to that dude that was dumb dude you don't no you're happy where you are in your life for sure yeah yeah yeah well that means you a well-lived life so what's up there with jesus uh or i wouldn't mind having that body 30 year old body had like less problems yeah i've been beating on it for 21 years since then right

46:04like when i was 30s when i got hardcore into jiu jitsu so that's uh 20 years of getting choked but of course the christian would say well god makes you whole again you'll have no injuries yeah but that's not really part of you part of you is your injuries your muscles what i was going to say though is but all those the all the stuff that i did that hurt me i also learned from that's right made you stronger well not just that like learn the the i think through incremental struggle whether it's like rigorous exercise or learning something or i think everything that i do that's difficult makes me just a little bit more aware a little bit better at other things just a little bit a little bit better to talk to a little bit easier to deal with a little more friendly and all those things i think i wouldn't give up for anything i think that's more important than

46:56whatever injuries i've got with i think you know i i wonder how you're going to feel when you're 80. i wonder if you feel like that like there's got to be a point of diminishing returns like i'd rather be stupid and 40 than to be enlightened and can't get out of bed very well my older athletic friends tell me it's about about mid 80s when things drop off fairly quickly you know they can stay pretty fit into their 70s maybe still racing bike racing at 80 but 85 or so things drop off pretty quick that's where you got to go to hormone replacement or or whatever yeah or the ice plunges or the yeah the young person's blood or something okay so i deal with you know there's no breakthrough miracles yet uh but again i'm not against any of these things happening you know when when someone like jeff bezos puts 100 million dollars into an aging company i hope he's successful does he have a

47:45hundred million dollars in an aging company uh he and peter thiel and the google guys through calico and a few others have invested many hundreds of millions of dollars into cup like calico for example um these are companies that are trying to their big goal is to defeat aging through re-engineering cells okay and um that's the sort of philosophical goal behind it is we have to defeat aging so people can live for centuries or forever to which i say let's not worry about living 500 years let's let's worry about like get kick prostate cancer and breast cancer and alzheimer's and dementia and so on just the little incremental medical problems quality of life things what about things that take people out young yeah right so that you can live a longer higher quality life but you imagine michael shermer at 300 years old if you can keep this body if you can keep the body that you have

48:37now you're moving around great everything's well you look really healthy how smart would you be how much how much more enlightened or wise maybe i'm not against that i'm happy to live as long as i possibly can there are what if there are people that go well that's not right it's not natural it's like okay what what's natural there's surveys on this people and people's answer is whatever the current average lifespan is so well 80 seems about right okay fast forward to your the day before your 80th birthday tomorrow you're going to go you want another week yeah i'll take another week okay fast forward six days uh would you like another month i'll take another month thank you and and that would never end so of course if you're healthy and happy and you don't want to off yourself or whatever because you're super depressed or something like that yes you're just going to want to keep

49:23going nothing wrong with that if we can do that but what if you die and it's way better what if you die and you really do you leave your physical body there's no need for emotions and all of the entanglements of human existence and you go to this beautiful place of bliss and life and yeah and love and it's just pure love without a body yeah unembodied yeah unhindered i don't know would that be fun i don't know what's is that what we're here for we're here for fun we're doing a shitty job we should be going crazy right now we should be in a like a party van on the way to vegas i had a college professor when i was in my christian days who asked me when i was pitching him the christian story he says are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven because i like physical challenges i want to get out there and push myself right like i don't know yeah so i mean would heaven be

50:15no challenges no working out no physical you know tensions true right yeah maybe you don't need it so so you'd have to remove that part of humanity that we'd no longer want challenges and to be pushed to better ourselves do they play chess in heaven that's right yeah right do you get to win right do you get to win in heaven or is everybody a winner everybody gets a gold medal and a nobel prize and whatever that's that is a problem what the things that we're attracted to the things we enjoy accomplishments and achievements and all these things that they exist only inside of the civilization inside of this uh this realm that we've created the significance of them is entirely based on our own agreements that you know it's important when you take the king it's right it's important when the ball goes into the net these we've agreed you know when someone shoots a

51:06three-pointer it's really not that big a deal you're just throwing a ball into a hole nothing really significant happens but because we've attached all this meaning to that then it's something that we really want to see and everybody score the goal went in the puck went in the net yes it becomes this giant thing if they just have no good answer for this when you say well what's heaven like well the psychics will tell you it's a bliss and lover but what does that mean it sounds again back to hitch it sounds boring i have to stay at this party forever that sounds boring did you ever see the guy who took a photo of himself in heaven no you never saw that yeah he used a samsung galaxy phone yeah to take uh to take a picture of himself in heaven are there what clouds it's just white it's just him like smiling it is one of the funniest photos you're ever going to find

51:54on the internet just because of the context of it it's funny yeah i believe he's an african gentleman who was uh either he's telling the truth or he's you know hilariously full of i mean imagine if he really did go to heaven and he took a picture and we're just mocking him really we should be going to him for advice that's right so what does it really have you found it you see the picture you only find the mocking the memes of making fun of them afterwards oh there's no the actual picture i'm trying to find the original um just google man takes i did this that's what they get everyone wants to make the internet the internet is so overwhelmingly mocking it's so good oh that's gotta be playing a large part you got it i think this is everyone's saying this is this one yeah no it was all white it wasn't like that it wasn't that it was it was just it was that

52:44picture of him holding his hand up like that but it was just the background wasn't rainbows and like that you could find it man i have faith in you i found it the other day um it's uh you know it's just hilarious that someone would be so confident to put that picture online knowing full well that the world is going to see that picture and start remember the guy who sold his soul on ebay i forget what he got for it but and then a lot of religious people are offended by this you can't sell yourself why not you sold your soul to your religion did you get a good price i don't know i think it was a few hundred bucks or something like that i forget he wanted to go to dinner with that yeah that's right nice but my concern about all of this obsession with the afterlife that's not it that's what this is from his page it says woke up this morning and saw this had to take a picture

53:38oh okay that's not the actual photo the photo of him in heaven is what's hilarious it's that picture with him that far left far left that's it that's it that's the photo that is him that is the photo went to heaven that's it that's the exact photo he took i don't know who took the puddle he's like hey angel do me a solid yeah it's not a selfie no his one hand is down so he's not he's not taking it with that hand the other hand is up lets him in heaven love it the internet is so good for mocking things though it's so good it's one of the best things ever in terms of like there's so many people that are paying attention and so many people that are funny that aren't comedians per se they just might work in an office somewhere and they've got a little bit of free time and they'll make a hilarious meme about something and then everybody runs with it and things just get mocked mercilessly

54:31remember the video of the guy he was having an interview and his kids started walking in behind him and he's trying to talk about foreign relations in poland or something and the little kid is back here and then somebody the wife rushes in and so yeah anyway there's a bunch of funny spoof videos on that where so some woman is sitting there talking about nuclear strategy or whatever and then the kid comes in and she's ironing the shirt and then she defuses a bomb and then she cleans up the socks or whatever it's really funny yeah there's it's just we we were always all of our information was distributed to us through these very controlled networks whether it's cbs or nbc or abc and everything was very cut and dry and very professional in the way people talk the way information was presented but now it's just it's open and like as soon as i find out about something something

55:22happened in the world i google it i go what is it what happened what happened i google it and then i'll go to twitter and then when i go to twitter it's all pictures and memes and and it's the dude with the question marks you know that guy's like you know there's like so many memes that people will throw up when anything crazy happens in the world it becomes so interesting to hear the news and hear commentary on the news from this just gigantic mass of humans and it's what's most funny or most interesting or most succinct or poignant that rises to the top yep yeah there's endless content to entertain uh also just high quality content i mean i'm a content producer i write and so on and but i am a huge consumer i go most of the people i follow on twitter post articles most of them i want to read and so in the course of a couple hours my little window pop-ups

56:14just spread across the top of the screen i want to read all of these articles and i plow through as many as i can they're pretty much like the atlantic or vanity fair time whatever they're pretty high quality well-written articles the problem is as a content producer myself is that the half-life of these articles is so short like when i post one of my scientific american columns you know i put a lot of work into it and then you know like a couple hours later or maybe a day later gone no one's talking about it done like yeah well i put a lot of work into that yeah uh but it takes me out of the equation like the new york times did that huge new york times sunday magazine article on trump's business going all the way back to the 70s right right they spent like a year working on this like 10 journalists this would have been a pulitzer prize winning piece

57:04this would have done in anybody else but trump right i mean they had his old you know business contracts and lawsuits and you know all the shady stuff going on and and this got huge media attention for about a day and a half and by two you know sunday morning by tuesday no one's talking about this anymore it's like these guys spent a year working on this i mean what did it take to get that lawsuit paperwork from the courthouse you know and they had hundreds of things like that and it's like gone like whoa well in trump in particular there's so many scandals that i think we've all become numb yeah there is that too yeah there's so many that you just you get numb to it and it doesn't it doesn't affect you you're just like oh we picked it off he paid off a woman whatever yeah those are the tiny ones the big ones are the lawsuits the businesses you know the construction

57:53businesses where he didn't pay small companies he didn't pay him like sumi and then these companies went under like there's a lot of those right there's a lot of the the unethical business practices that's all in that article yeah again anybody else would be done in by something like that any politician except him it's just amazing well it's also what he represents to those people it doesn't necessarily have to be what he really is it's what he represents what he represents is like the american flag and eagles and like they have this like really juvenile sense some folks do of what he is and what he represents right you know and this despite all the evidence to the contrary they they have him in this category that he's going to drain the swamp and these liberals are just going to cry and he's going to make america better right you know that's just that's that's

58:42the side that they're on they're on the make america better side yeah yeah do you think it's also people don't have the time to really look into this stuff who could fact check these things it's not just that it's like if you work eight hours a day and you have children and hobbies and how much time you really paying attention to trump's ethics right are you really really looking into it are you really considering it before you vote are you really taking into consideration what kind of a person he is and what what ripple effect it would have would any of his policies take place i think you're right people vote by their team this is my team i'm sticking okay so he won the primary all right that's my that's our guy we're sticking with him no matter what i think there's a huge element of that for sure yeah there's also people love to argue online too and as soon as they find someone who's

59:22opposed to something that they believe in they stick to their guns and they just hold strong despite all let me it would take so much for people to turn on trump the real hardcore trump believers would take so much for them to decide enough is enough yeah well be interesting to see if members of his own party do something in 2020 probably not doesn't it seem like with fox that fox is slowly starting to shift their their coverage a little bit they're criticizing him a little bit they're pushing back a little bit shepard smith is pretty good on that he's always been that way yeah yeah he's always been great at that kennedy will probably be last to go he's never going he's never gone he's never gone but they had the same lawyer yeah that's right i mean the fact that that didn't saint hannity right you know that he had michael cohen was his lawyer like whoa

60:07yep yeah the only thing we count on with the media is that there's lots of sources and you just have to just cross check as many as you can don't stick on any one channel well i wish there was a really truly objective service like it would be wonderful if there was people that were dedicated to no editorial slant whatsoever just 100 percent fact this is how we know the facts regardless left right no ideological curve to it at all wouldn't that be that there's got to be a market to that yeah real news well of course they all say that that's what they do yeah yeah politifact is pretty good they they're the fact-checking organization that i mean they're not reporting news they're reporting on politics on the facts said by politicians so that's useful and i think there's a market competition amongst those people to get more hits yeah like we're fact checking more than

61:00the other guys are fact-checking although there is two different uh there was aim accuracy in media and then there was another one i forget the name and one was left leaning and one was right leaning it's like can i have one without a wing you know no no right wing no left wing yeah it it seems like that i mean i'm reading jonathan hates book the the two books that uh i've been reading recently uh one of them we discussed on the podcast we did on monday but the other one is the cobbling of the american mine i'm into that now and it's it's fantastic and he goes he covers this quite a bit yeah yeah yeah you know jonathan's on to something good there with the heterodox academy which i'm a member i'm a professor at chapman university and so i was the first member there and our university is pretty centrist we don't get a lot of these protests and microaggressions and safe space

61:54stuff it's it's pretty quiet and jonathan's point is that it's more of a sort of east coast west coast public university thing or maybe harvard that kind of thing middle of the country you don't see as much of that um but the you know the polarization thing has gotten worse you can see the the polls since like 1990 to 2018 of uh you know you ask people how how evil are the democrats or republicans and yeah you know it used to be you know tiny little differences and then they you know they diverge like that now but the other side is not just wrong but they're immoral they are evil i do i do think uh talk radio and television feeds into that you know if you just or now social media in the bubble there so but on the other hand the again the heterodox academy has like 2 000 members now professors that said yep i'm going to stand up against this censorship

62:45on college campuses you you were talking to jonathan about pete pagosian you had pete on and i've known pete for many years before the hoax papers and i think they've had it in for him long before the hoax paper well let's explain that to people so this could be um pete bogosian uh james lindsey and what is the woman's ellen plecos and she wasn't on the podcast i didn't get to meet her but they um she's in england i believe right um they published a bunch of preposterous papers like really ridiculous uh like on you know uh homo what is it the dog park one yeah dog park culture and dog park and and the retranslation of a chapter from mineconf replacing fem it was males with jews yes eliminate the males that kind of thing yeah so they did one before they actually pete uh and james lindsay did one two years ago on the conceptual penis it was called and that the penis is a concept it's not

63:43a it's not a real thing you know it's just anyway it's a hilarious paper and the same month that came out it was published in a kind of a third tier feminist studies journal so they got criticized like yeah that's not one of the big ones so you didn't really hoax anything but the same week that came out there was another paper published on feminist glaciology and i thought oh someone beat pete to the hoax oh my god this is totally and i read it i thought this better what is glaciology you know the study of glaciers oh god yeah and that you know feminist glaciers are very hard and and erect and you know it's so masculine and yeah anyway so i called the university that was affiliated with the lead author and i said this is a hoax right come on just before i say anything i don't want to be embarrassed this is a hoax right no no this is real it's like i can't tell the difference between the

64:34conceptual penis paper which i know is a hoax because pete wrote it and the feminist glaciology paper that's the problem well let's explain what's happening to pete now because pete was brought before uh portland state university um they they're what it would be charging him with uh with uh with faking data fraudulent data fraudulent research faking data that he didn't go through the institutional um research board which approves experiments that professors want to run like for example you could not do milgram shock experiments where you hook people up and tell them that you're going to give electric shocks to somebody they wouldn't approve that or or phil zimbardo's fake jail where you randomly assign students to be prisoners or guards and they end up beating each other up they would never approve that okay so since those sort of guerilla theater experiments of the 60s

65:27the universities have tightened up the kind of research you're allowed to do even like the kinds of questions you would ask in a survey they have to approve all of that so of course pete and james and helen didn't do that because but first first of all you know james was the primary director of this thing he's not affiliated with the university he doesn't have to answer to anybody right pete was affiliated with it so they're getting them on that um and that he didn't go through the irb and get approval well of course if you're going to tell people if you're going to fake something you can't tell them ahead of time and then we're going to fake of course because it's going to get out and then the gig is up the analogy i made the other day was in 1971 a stanford psychologist named david rosenhan a clinical psychologist sent a bunch of his graduate students into mental hospitals all over the

66:15country and said just tell them you're feeling kind of blue and that you're you kind of hear this inner voice and that it's just you just kind of don't feel right and you need some help so they did they all got themselves checked in and then from there on out they acted perfectly normal and and then the goal was let's see how long it takes you to get out and so it was a study in how mental hospitals treat people who are completely sane so the title of his famous paper is called being sane in insane places so first of all the grad students report it's incredibly boring so one of them would sit there and write essays and take notes and and so in the psychiatrist evaluation of this patient is you know patient exhibits excessive writing behavior this is clearly an example of his erupting er ebitdal libidinal impulses from his childhood blah blah blah another one was a painter

67:11so she's doing paintings with landscapes and so on oh patient you can see in the paintings the erupting emotions and the conflicts in her personality they're just acting normal right so the point of this hoax was that there's something wrong with our mental institutions that they can't tell the difference between a sane and an insane person what are they doing so of course the the the industry got pretty upset about being hoaxed so rosen came back and said okay in the next year i'm gonna send in some more let's see if you can find him and he didn't send anybody oh wow so they're like okay we think this guy's fake again they couldn't tell the difference in their own patience and no one was even faking so in a way this is kind of what pete and james and helen did it's like if they're sending these papers out if you can't tell then what are you doing in this field well people

68:02are for whatever reason people are some people i should say are drawn to these nonsense ideas and one of the papers the dog park paper got it got lauded for its excellent scholarship yeah i mean it got praised right it's it's one of the weirder ones that they hoaxed i mean because it's so obviously preposterous when you're reading it like that i think it was the fat bodybuilding one that got that one another one i think it won an award this is the best paper we've ever had oh okay yeah and really pete and james and helen they they are like professional scholars in the grievance studies yeah because it's if you read those things it's hard to write like that i mean it takes it took them a lot of practice to get the jargon and the style down well what do you think is the what are the options for someone like pete because if he does get fired from the university what what

68:56could he possibly do i mean what jordan has done is pretty extraordinary he's essentially left teaching at because of the controversies that he went through he became famous he became famous for doing podcasts and writing things and and then his youtube videos are they're so insightful and and wonderful that people just got drawn to him then they go to see him speak live they've made him into a monster but by censoring him right by attacking him they've essentially turned him into a global international star that's right this is the one one of the best arguments against censorship is it it's going to have the opposite effect you want it to if someone is of the quality of jordan peterson that's pretty rare it's pretty rare uh i've talked to pete about this as well as brett weinstein because he suffered the same thing at evergreen and he's out at least he and his wife uh heather got

69:48a payout so they have a little cushion but this model like you know sam on patreon or dave rubin especially jordan peterson very rare it's very rare to be able to make a living as a public intellectual on your own most public intellectuals that are not in academia they're with a think tank uh you know the cato institute or reason magazine or you know any of these there's left wing right wing they're all over the board uh you know it's possible they could get jobs there where you actually have a paycheck and those uh groups are usually funded by wealthy um supporters that just we like the cause and here's a pile of money not through patreon it's possible that pete say brett could do this but it's a tough road to oh i mean jordan is very rare i've you know watched this through my whole life and you know this idea of making ten thousand dollars a talk fifty thousand dollars a talk hundred

70:44thousand dollars a talk almost nobody gets that kind of money right you know maybe neil degrasse tyson uh richard dawkins maybe carl sagan back in the day whatever the equivalent of that would have been in the 80s but that's pretty much it uh you know and there's thousands of scientists that would love to do that like yeah i want to go to that well they're not entertaining the thing about jordan is he's very engaging yeah like he's in his words are it's it's not just their why's it's not just he's very articulate there's something engaging about the style in which he presents these things it's it's very captivating it's very charismatic i agree uh you know people discount that or you know i know a lot of scientists who are kind of jealous of neil degrasse tyson or say bill nye it's like oh i could do that no i doubt that you can i mean neil and bill are really

71:33entertaining they are funny they are engaging you can't take your eyes off them they're so much fun to watch well perfect most people are not like that sean carroll's brilliant he's really brilliant and i'm glad that he's doing a podcast now and but when you listen to him talk and you listen to neil talk neil just has this booming presence right and this sense of drama and energy and entertainment he knows how to be he he knows how to deliver it in a way that just it catches you it's fun to listen to yeah that's a lot he and i did a public event in australia in melbourne sydney and i uh unfortunately i went before him or maybe that's actually good uh and i'm a pretty good public speaker i have a sense of you know my value as a public speaker i'm pretty good but and i never seen him speak and i and i did my talk like it's pretty much like my ted talk you can watch online it's pretty

72:27entertaining okay so i get and i'm done i get a nice applause i'm feeling pretty good and then neil gets up and he starts i'm like oh crap this guy is good you don't want to follow that i know i'm so glad i already went he got so much energy yeah and and yeah but he also has i don't know that sort of connection with the audience yeah it captures them and yeah i could tell afterwards you know throngs of people around him and yeah it's it's there and not very many people have that and i don't think it's something you can just learn i think it's a temperament you know i mean you can hone it and refine it but you can't just sort of naturally be funny and engaging i think it's personality that comes out you i think you could certainly improve but i think you're right i think whatever personality you have like he has that kind of engaging fun personality and it's it translates very well

73:16to doing those public speeches since i was here a year ago i saw jordan's um event at uh in thousand oaks at the cavali theater there 2000 seats sold out standing room only and it was good he was like different than neil of course but just as engaging yeah it wasn't political a lot of people there i you know recognized me and i could see you know these aren't like right wing nuts these aren't young male angry males this isn't like this at all and his message was you know pretty straightforward get your life in order you know this is the way life is it's hard and he kind of went through his thing and it's like all right that makes sense and people loved it very almost no politics in it and dave rubin tells me he doesn't really get political on stage so that's not the motive and uh i think you know life is hard enough for most people that they they like back to the self-help thing

74:12it's nice to be reminded here are a few simple things you could do yeah get your life in order it's like yeah yeah i kind of knew that i'm going to go back out and do that again well his principles are very effective too they're very straightforward as you said but for the guy like people goes you know to bring it back to that what what could he do if he does get fired it's gonna be very difficult for him to get a job at another university right he's obviously got roots in portland he lives there now it's uh the whole thing is he's pretty liberal it's not like he's a closeted conservative and they're after him he's definitely more liberal than me and i could tell even years ago that they're gonna they're gonna go after him i can tell mainly because he's so he puts truth and free speech ahead of political positions he might say i'm a liberal and these are my political

74:59positions but more important to me is the truth yes okay well that's not as jonathan make point points out in in his book universities are now at this divide between are we here for social justice or are we here for truth and they're having to make a decision and too many of them are going for we're here for social justice well then just be honest about it because that's not you can't bury it well not just that i don't think that's an effective way to pursue social justice if you're ignoring the truth you'd undermine your message because then it's it's not like it's hidden somewhere it's not like people can't read into it and see exactly what you've said and how you supported certain causes and denied the reality of others right look the the the google memo thing yeah the google memo thing was a gigantic disaster because ideologically people jumped on a side and argued and i heard the

75:53the ceo of youtube talk about how damaging it was to women i'm like what are you talking about like what are you saying like what did he say he's just talking about preferences that are described by tests that this is this has all been peer-reviewed studied papers on the differences between the preferences of males versus females it's not it's not like a value assessment at all and in fact not only that he put into his paper a page and a half of recommendations of how to get certain women interested in tech and perhaps you could recruit certain and make it more palatable or exciting to them and it's not a it's not a sexist screen at all no no no there's if online there's a really good debate with steve stephen pinker and a feminist scholar at harvard and steve has all his slides up there and he just goes all through all the different things that are in that google

76:46memo this is before the google memo maybe james moore got some of that from pinker's lecture but it's it's it's pretty solid stuff there's nothing in inflammatory about the debate this is kind of normal scientific debates you know here's a study that shows this well but there's this other study and then they go at it okay end of story we're not saying women are better men are better that doesn't happen well unfortunately so here if i was pete's boss here's what i would do because a lot of us have written letters and supported pete and you can kind of see what's about to happen let's just drop this whole thing let him keep his job keep our mouth shut because this is going to backfire on us big time like it did with evergreen state university yeah exactly yeah or with the google maps yes that's what i would do did it backfire in the google memo i mean we realized

77:33that they've got a preposterous ideology over there now we know that maybe their stock price hasn't gone down no i don't think it affected them very much and and many more people support it many more people who it's it's one of those things where you hear one version of it and that version sticks you know it's like you know uh this is the the version is he's a sexist you know the sexist google memo and then that's all i need the google memo is very sexist it's very anti-female and the being there's many many people who support the idea that something that was sexist was removed from google they've made it a safer environment for women right yep but did they i don't you know i don't know what they doesn't seem like they did it seems like they made it an environment where you have to be careful about facts right again it's not a value assessment of women if women choose to go into

78:28the medical fields more women are physicians more women there's many fields that like disproportionately attract women that's not a negative value assessment that's just people are different you know i don't i don't want to do what certain people do because i'm different than them i don't i'm not attracted to those fields right it's fascinating to find out why people are attracted and when you see that there's actual there's just actual statistics in terms of what fields men are more attracted to or what fields women are more attracted to now on the other hand if there's a reason why women aren't attracted to those fields because they get harassed when they go into them well that should be demonstrated and that's obviously a bad thing and that should be addressed yeah absolutely totally that's not what he's talking about no and james damore is like a very kind soft-spoken

79:19he's great he's a nice guy he's very introverted he's a kind guy and he's on the spectrum somewhere there was no way you'd look at james the more you go there's the patriarchy yeah he's a nice guy and they said to him if you have any input on these things and if you feel like you can help please contribute he's like okay so he's that's what he is he's a he's a software engineer right he's right he sat down and looked at all the data and compiled it and he's saying well actually it seems like this is the reason why women are more attracted to other jobs and this is the reason why men are more attracted to these fields and they're like sexist and he's like no no no no these are the studies this is what you're asking me to do the the concern that if the science doesn't come out a certain way then people won't be treated equally is a bad idea because then you're going

80:06to force the science to be distorted if it doesn't match your political ideology and that's so whether trans is natural or how whatever percentage is or how old you have to be before you get trans surgery and the hormones or whatever oh that that's a raging debate right now but under under underlying that debate is like we have to make it come out in a way that trans people are treated equally it's like no no they should be treated equally anyway regardless of what the science says right but um that that's that's a problem now now the problem for people like pete and brett like joining a think tank is almost all these think tanks are politically affiliated left or right you have to that and therefore you have to kind of toe the political line this is our ideology in this think tank and you're going to write white papers and op-eds and send them out with our kind of slant

80:57the problem with that is well but what if i disagree with this and this and this here well then you can't work here something like that so that's the problem with those right but it's not the only option today when you see that i mean i know he's not jordan and you know there's very few people like jordan but sam harris is also able to do this speech he's very compelling as well he's doing a lot of public speeches and doing these big big events there's more opportunity to do alternative things now than than have ever been before and i would hope that that becomes available to look i hope pete just keeps his job but if he can't keep his job at portland state i would hope that some other avenue some other some other path is possible yep it might be you know you never know but you know you put a date on the calendar and you tell the world do they come do they pay

81:4710 bucks a ticket 50 bucks a ticket hundred dollars a ticket not many people can fill a 3000 seat auditorium or a 500 seat auditorium one thing he could do is do a lecture series on the grievance studies and have the three of them on stage talk about how silly these things were if they could put that together as a presentation yeah it would really be funny because there's some hilarious subjects totally all they have to do is read when george lindsay and bogosian were in here and we were talking about these things we were crying laughing it was really really funny stuff yeah that's actually probably the best path for him yeah is to put together some sort of a a public show they should do a book and then have a book a show yeah and then maybe even a tv uh documentary about it well they have somebody's making a documentary that's a good start yeah when i was in college at pepperdine um

82:39g gordon liddy and timothy leary did a stage show wow and they were and they were touring the country doing this yeah and it was at ucla so i drove down and saw it and it was so entertaining i mean g gordon liddy you know he's the g-man there with his three-piece suit and he's got his gun and timothy leary comes out his boat shoes and his flower shirt and and but they had it kind of scripted but it was well scripted in a way that seemed kind of spontaneous but it was really funny and educational about how the government works and freedom versus security and rights and uh i thought that was brilliant and i think they did i don't know like a 50 city tour of that g gordon liddy was on fear factor he was yeah oh i didn't know that it's an interesting guy did he hold his hand above a flame no he didn't but we did hang him by his ankles and slam him into a pool like over and over and

83:30over again he was i forget what the stunt was but i was like jesus this guy's old to be doing this but uh he did uh some physical challenges i remember thinking like this guy is more fit and more active than most young people and he was deep into his 60s at the time yeah when we had him on fear factor the only thing that screwed him up was in the end the final stunt was a driving stunt and it was at night and unfortunately his eyes are not that good and he just couldn't see well without glasses so as he was driving the car he slammed into something or something forget what it was what do you got him there no it's all right but uh he hadn't had a chance to talk to him for a few days he did hang out with him very interesting guy yeah strong mind yep that's right he had a talk show back in the 90s i was on when uh my first book came out white people believe were things and i talked about

84:20conspiracies there and so he asked me well tell me about conspiracies well you tell me about conspiracy you know more than i do he knows about real ones the real ones yeah that that is my number one beef with conspiracy theories is that when you you know some of them that are so preposterous like whether it's flat earth or whatever what were the really dumb ones there's a base on the opposite side of the moon and nasa knows about all the aliens are living in new mexico the lizard people the problem with those is they undermine actual conspiracies right when you when you hear about preposterous things and they they get fought they get categorized as conspiracy theories then when someone says well there's a conspiracy about this well it's already a tainted idea because the word conspiracy is connected to nonsense right because there's so many nonsense conspiracy theories it's hard to

85:09recognize oh something like enron that really did happen yeah like there is the northwoods papers there's a bunch of like legitimate conspiracies you're like wow you know you found out the gulf of tonkin you're like well they they really did that yep that's right yeah i'm writing a paper now on why people believe conspiracies and so i go through the whole list of all the psychological things but i end with the whole second half is because a lot of them are true and yeah and there are reasons we should be suspicious yeah just think of the the wikileaks or the panama papers you know like the panama papers here's all these billionaires opening these shell corporations keeping their money they're not paying tax that's a conspiracy you know by definition two or more people meeting in secret to conspire to benefit themselves that harms the public good or other people this happens a lot

85:55in the u.s government in corporations yeah there's a reason we should be suspicious there is but what is it about people that want to look for a conspiracy in everything even if it's you know that they want to see they want to see contrails behind jets as evidence of the government spraying things in the sky to control our minds right so the sort of baloney detection uh tools are not too finely tuned the problem is is that where the tendency is to look for some global simple explanation for complex systems so while we all kind of recognize yes we know corporations cheat and stock traders trade with inside information but that's kind of small and mundane it's not very interesting global domination of the world you know this is who's doing that you know so then it becomes like a dan brown novel it's more compelling as a narrative story about how the world works it's

86:50super simple there's these 12 guys in london called the illuminati and they're calling the shots and they're they're you know they're controlling the bilderberger the bilderbergers the rockefellers the rothschilds the illuminati the cfr the new world order yeah george soros is doing it he's a part of it oh totally that's what i hear he's number 13 in the illuminati there's so many different competing theories too so so so a couple of criteria the more people that have to be involved the less likely it is to be true and it was gordon liddy that told me this that you know it was that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead you know people can't keep their mouth shut and also he would know because he worked in government most people are pretty incompetent so the idea that you could orchestrate a thousand people to and each of them is going to go out and do this one thing at

87:36nine o'clock tuesday and it's all going to come together just perfect because impossible yeah and he should no i mean they couldn't even break into the watergate hotel room to get these papers what's also who is getting into government the first place is are they the geniuses of the world the heads of their field or are they people that just like decided to get into a job you know and this is this is a good percentage of the people that are involved in government if those people know as well these unexceptional folks that are just like uninspired they're also there like do they it's they that's right that's the air quotes they do they really have the kind of wherewithal to control the whole world mind control that's my favorite right mind control psyops i mean this idea that um you know operatives went into the world trade center buildings both of them the two of the most uh

88:25tightly controlled and secure buildings in the world and under the pretense of working on the elevators managed to get into and break through the drywall to get into the main beams to wrap them up in explosive devices this thermite stuff and this would you know we know how long it takes to demolish a stadium or a big building you know that they work they're there for weeks or months preparing all the explosive devices somehow they did this in the world trade center building without anyone noticing not to mention all the people that worked on this they never told their spouses or friends or buddies or you know what they were doing or they didn't mention it to anybody they don't want to go on cnn or 60 minutes and go i saw something and here's what happened nobody well anytime you have a gigantic catastrophe like that just a gigantic horrific event there's so many emotions

89:16there's so much chaos there's so much going on that you're going to get a bunch of really wacky eyewitness accounts because people just aren't good at remembering things when when they're under extreme duress it's just the fact they hear things they remember explosions they see things that might aren't necessarily what was really in front of them this is the human memory is one of the most flawed ways of gathering information right it's terrible we have terrible memories right and everything once something happens then you back up and look for all the sort of pregnant moments leading up to it that otherwise would have been unnoticeable like uh with the jfk assassination there's a famous story about the umbrella man yes yeah okay so there he is it's a clear sunny day why does he have an umbrella and for decades there you go online you can see these uh like

90:07examples of how the umbrella could have been turned into a rifle and then he shot like that and and anyway somebody finally tracked this guy down decades later and he said i was out there protesting kennedy the umbrella was a protest uh and that stems back to uh neville chamberlain coming back after meeting with hitler before hitler annexed i think it was the sudetenland and he came back and said you know holding his umbrella here i had you know here hitler signed this paper and promised he wouldn't do anything more bad and so the umbrella became a symbol of um you know sort of caving into evil people or you know what's the word for it uh you know appeasement how convoluted do you think people are going to get that i don't know he's out so this is what he said i had my umbrella because i didn't like what kennedy was doing with castro and the cubans okay so in other words the umbrella

90:58meant nothing uh in terms of the assassination right and this is true so like 911 oh there was this little puff of smoke or somebody found this passport over here this little thing all those little things really it's just randomness well the other thing is the the people that want to think that the windows blowing out are indicative of some sort of controlled demolition or the building's caving in it's a floor pancake yeah it pushes the air out yeah that's it yeah well it's there's never been a controlled demolition that went from the top down either like the way they did it the the prince they all go from the bottom up right yeah it's the one that looks crazy is uh building seven tower seven that one looks crazy it does but it burned for like eight hours or something and yeah that one's just slightly fuzzier but explosive experts tell me that it's

91:48fully explicable by burning all day well also when you see the images of it collapsing what you don't see is the interior structure had collapsed previously and there's video of that where you watched the interior cave-in and that as this fire was burning because apparently there was obviously i don't know what really would happen but there was diesel tanks apparently in the basement and the diesel fuel would burn incredibly hot and the whole inside of it all the structure had been completely weakened and and then as it collapsed it just all gave out it just happened to be a design if i was the guy who owned that building i would sue everybody i mean that's i mean he got his money back i guess because there's some insurance money but that what a terrible design there was some uh issue with the legal insurance payout to the owner of the world trade center buildings whether this was

92:40like one one event or two events or one building or two you know what is it was it the difference was between like eight billion and sixteen billion dollar payout or something wow how do they get people to get into that new building i'd be like you i'm not i'm not renting an office in this building this building they blew it up in 93 they blew it up again in 2001 get out of here with this i'm not taking a chance with this new ass building what is it the freedom tower or something like that this is a big old bullseye yeah yeah i haven't been in it yet i've been around it but it's not even that big well it's i think it's just i think it's taller than the it's not it's not it's not as big as the original towers right i think it is tall i think is it yeah i think i think so yeah i thought it was shorter it's definitely not as big as the one in dubai the dubai one's like a half a mile

93:28right isn't something crazy like that i don't know how tall is the tallest building it is i just went to their the one world trade center leasing page it says at 1776 feet one world trade center is the tallest l-e-e-e-d gold certified building in the western hemisphere that's not good enough whatever that i don't know this is america we need to be number one number one we need to go straight to the moon in the solar system yeah we need to take an elevator right to the moon right outside of space is that possible can they build a building that's so high that it goes into space why not i don't think so because structurally it wouldn't hold why not make it the shape of a pyramid well it's like why aren't trees you know a thousand feet tall because the material would just collapse and i don't i don't think you could have it strong it'd have to be so fat

94:15oh that's right japan was going to build that space elevator oh look at it you got jacked with the pop-ups japan takes tiny first steps towards space elevator yeah you could off i'm not getting in that thing it would take a few years before i'm willing to climb into that sucker but um so the other problem with conspiracy is just get back there for a moment is the problem of anomalies what do you do with anomalies this is true in all science no theory explains every single thing that's out there that we want to study there's always going to be some like quirky thing that the main theory here that explains all these things here it doesn't account for that okay what did we do with that well my joke is you assign it to a grad student they let them figure it out but what outsiders mistake is that well my theory explains this little anomaly so therefore it should replace this theory

95:04and so people like neil and sean carroll lawrence krauss michio kaku has like two web pages one he has a link on his web page if you have an alternative theory of physics go to this page so they go there and it is your theory has to explain all of these things over here that our theory currently explains and your whatever your set anomaly is and of course they can't so it's not that scientists are dogmatically close-minded to the anomalies it's that we can't explain everything and you don't have to do anything with that just just leave it there maybe eventually they'll pile up and there'll be a new theory like with einstein's relativity okay there's enough anomalies here uh like the orbit of mercury and a few other things and so we have to modify newtonian physics a little bit okay that happens but for the most part like and so conspiracies are filled with these things like

95:58the moment something big happens you go back and okay but there's this weird thing here how do you explain that i don't know we don't have to explain everything do you know that there's a growing movement that think that the the space is fake space is fake no this is different than the flat earth google hashtag space is fake hashtag spaces it's people that are so stupid the flat earthers kicked them out oh my god for real flat earthers kicked out the spacious fake people space's fake is they're the the most skeptical so what would be the upper atmosphere would be the edge of the world it's all fake it's the end and it's tied in some weird way to religion which is really interesting because even the flat earth people there's a tremendous amount of them that are extremely religious and they they talk about the firmament and the bible and the bible and that

96:47this is uh this is what's really going on is that they're trying to keep us from the knowledge that god has created this place is a very special place right and so by pretending that it's round they somehow or another are controlling us we're thinking that we're not exceptional and we're not lucky space is fake they're using a video from uh that ryan gosling's movie he just made about new armstrong the first man on the moon yeah just be like this is look look here's proof this is how they fake everything they're making a movie because the way they made the movie is that's evidence that it's fake because he's wearing it i don't know if maybe this person doesn't recognize that as being ryan gosling right there um he's got nasa suit on maybe it's just a troll account this is how nasa fakes everything this is the video i was talking about guys now you know it's all a big act hashtag

97:39click on space is fake though oh that's what i'm on i'm on the whole yeah but i mean click on it because there's a bunch of others i'm on that thread there's a tremendous amount of people that literally believe that space is not real google a video of uh how uh buzz aldrin and how he deals with the no moonies that we never went to the moon there's a video buzz aldrin punching a guy yeah have you seen that that guy i i had dinner with that guy you did the guy he punched yeah i was a firm believer that we never went to the moon yeah you know this is what happened i watched that uh fox documentary yep uh the moon conspiracy theory did we go and i was like holy because it was on television i was and this was um 96 97 i remember i went to work and i told everybody you got to see this documentary it's crazy we never went to the moon and uh i watched that one and i watched

98:29this guy's um what is his name so i had dinner with him he absolutely believes that we never went to the moon 100 believes it i don't know if he still believes it i think he's like a cab driver or something now he got he was involved in the news or local television or something like that back where he's from um then he released a documentary called the fun a funny thing happened on the way to the moon and in his documentary one of the things he did have is some really interesting footage of the lunar module where it looks like they're faking a shot of them being really far out but then when they remove this cover the covers from all the windows that were inside the the um the lunar not the lunar module what is the one that the the orbiter um it really looks like they're in low earth orbit and this is like the the main thing pointing to that like they couldn't get out of low earth orbit

99:26then there was also the fact that they lost all of the telemetry data which was the binary you know the ones and zeros that showed the position of the lunar module at every stage there was a bunch of different things the fact that no one wanted especially um neil armstrong he became a recluse never wanted to talk about it you go and watch the uh press conference the press conference they look very shady look like they're completely but not like that he talks to everybody he was drunk for a long time though he was uh he was very depressed and had when became an alcoholic after the moon landing and the idea is that in conspiracy circles from talking as them the idea is that he got over it after a while and needed to make a living and now he talks about it constantly but neil armstrong never did the thing that's compelling is that there was there were some

100:15there's some faking going on um if you look at gemini was it gemini 15 michael collins there's an image of michael collins when they were testing some of the space uh walking stuff and some of the some of the the things that they would do to to to walk outside of a spaceship um they they had them all strapped up with cables and they're just experimenting with these things they took that photograph and then blacked out the background probably some overzealous pr agent and they're like in the pool and right here so what it is is like so the the first one is clearly he's you know in a studio and they're working on things and just trying to understand how all this stuff works and the second one they took the exact same photo and just reversed it and blacked out the background and they but this just that doesn't mean that they didn't go to the moon that just means that

101:07someone got a hold of some photographs and faked it and it's way more likely that there was more of that going on than that people didn't actually go to the moon right yeah yeah yeah the thing about going to the moon that's really interesting is uh if they can go again and they do go again and they find all that stuff there you know then everybody has to just go oh yeah i guess we were wrong this stuff is there i mean there is there's instruments on there that we still monitor that the apollo astronauts left there well they'll be monitored we shoot a laser up there and it bounces off yeah but you know a laser will also bounce off the surface of the moon yeah but i don't think like that not as precise right right yeah but the russians did that too with lunga hood one and two i believe they left uh solar or fl or laser reflectors up there as well with an unmanned missile japan has a

101:59video footage as flash of like last week yeah the dark side people said that's all fake too of course well space is fake dude there's no space of course the moon is not even what is the moon if space is fake how do they explain that um the images what's interesting is the images of the dark side of the moon look exactly like even like the landing and the whole setup looks very similar to the apollo missions so they would have to either be in cahoots or have worked together with same sound studio yeah to figure they use the old stuff yeah look at it i mean this is the footage i mean god damn that looks eerily similar to uh what you saw when the apollo astronauts were there i think it is entirely possible that some of the um some of the practice film footage of them you know on the surface or doing things turned out to be pushed off as actual footage of moon landings i think

102:57there was no television well back then there was no internet there was no vcrs there was no ability to review things and watch them over again they projected something on television one time and that was it so when they released pressed releases and videos it's entirely possible that some of those videos that got through were actually just tests it's entirely possible that there was just like the michael collins photos that there was some going on you're dealing with so many human beings right you're dealing with so many people yeah see that an estimated 530 million people watched armstrong's televised image and heard his voice described okay what is that it was broadcasted live like six hours that day yes yeah it was actually broadcasted live on um a projection screen what they did was if they didn't get a straight feed they were filming uh the the footage

103:48that was on a projection screen that's how they did it and there's some wonky that looks like they fall down and then they get pulled back up by wires when they're on the surface of the moon but again i think how much of that is how much of that is actual footage of them being on the moon and how much of that is just test footage i mean i don't know i don't know i'm not sure about that but i think also uh i don't know jack about space travel right i don't know anything about astrophysics i don't know anything about like what it takes to land on the moon and come back and whether or not i'm and most of the people that talk about this don't know that but mythbusters did a nice episode on you know did we fake going to the moon and they showed a bunch of little things for example on the moon with its gravity when you go something like that into the dust you

104:36know the particles come up and they arc back down in a certain way that would be different than if you're on earth so the gravity is different causes the dust to settle very differently there was a bunch of things like that that proved we we were there well it certainly proved that what took place took place in a vacuum yeah not yeah and a gravitational pull the same as the moon right the only um you've probably seen the feather and the hammer drop but you know you can do that here well uh yes in a vacuum yes that's right yeah but but even a feather and a hammer even if it's it depends upon what kind of feather it is but a feather and a hammer even if you just held them here and dropped them on the ground they probably would land at a very similar pace there there's a spoof video about uh that we never went to the moon but a couple british comedians that that people thing is that

105:26with the kubrick one no appeal what's their name uh key and peel yeah so that the three of them are talking and you know okay we're gonna fake this whole thing and and and then they're troubleshooters she's like well um now you know people are gonna ask well how did we go to the moon and we're going to have to you know build a big rocket so we can say well we went in that big rocket and they're like well how much would it cost to build that big rocket well it would be really expensive i mean we might as well just go to the moon and then they'd start talking about the expenses well we only have to feed three of them if we go to the moon but if we shoot it as a shoot here in the studio we have to have catering for everybody to be super expensive and it kind of goes on like that it's very funny that is funny but the the conspiracy theorists would say well they couldn't send someone to the

106:09moon so they had to fake it that's why they haven't been back they went from 1969 to 1973 is that what it was six successful missions seven attempts apollo 13 being the one that didn't make it it's a it's a fun theory and what happened with me is i got way better at spotting and learning critical thinking skills and then paying attention to all sides i mean the the real issue with something like that is if someone could prove definitively beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is it impossible that no one ever went to the moon absolutely prove it that would be giant yeah i mean really would be yeah i mean it would be a huge story but can is it even possible to do that you know what the other analogy i use like with the wikileaks is there of all those tens of thou hundreds of thousands of memos and papers and letters and government documents there's not one mention anywhere of 911 as an

107:09inside job you know and we had to allocate these funds to go to this construction company who was then you know seen working at the world trade center but nothing like that so that in this case the absence of evidence is evidence of absence it didn't happen not an inside job and then 9 11 yeah and something like that would be true for the moon landing i mean all those people that worked on that not one of them saw anything and wanted to write a book go on 60 minutes the idea would be that it was compartmentalized and that everyone like say if you're working on the o-rings you don't have access to the people that are working on the thrusters if you have access to this you don't have access to that and that there was only a very small group of people that controlled everything also 1969 was a very different environment in terms of like what you get away with and not get away with what

107:55you could say it's just it was really fun it was really fun to believe that they had fake going to the moon and i spent an inordinate amount of time uh looking at it but i completely dropped it i completely dropped it after i i just i paid attention to what i actually know so but now you can kind of uh empathize with those who do believe crazy theories because oh yeah but you want to hear a dumber one yeah here's a dumber one uh for the longest time like months i believed in the thing called rods do you know what about the rods the little insects yes yeah well they what it this guy put out this duck this documentary that there was these things flying so fast we couldn't see them with the naked eye right and that they were like jellyfish-like creatures that lived amongst us and uh they had all this video footage of the especially these people that were

108:45jumping uh they were skydiving into this enormous cave in mexico and uh as they're skydiving into this cave you see those things flying back and forth and i was hook line and sinker i was like oh my god these things are around us all the time i was going outside looking up trying to spot them like imagine there's these beings that are flying so fast that we can't we can't see them the only way you capture is on camera and then a show called monster quest crack the riddle right they show that it's a video artifact and then if you have really high speed camera you just see the insect right but if you have low speeds standard definition video cameras it creates this artifact as these things pass by very close to the lens at a high rate of speed it elongates their video signal and it makes them look like like this jellyfish type thing right but it's really just a video

109:35artifact yeah again it's a good example of anomalies you know here's this weird video anomaly what is it how about just say i don't know well if you don't know anything about video it's it's way easier to say oh that's the capture that's right yeah you know take a camera put it outside you will capture these things i'm amazing right yeah that's right um the other aspect with conspiracy theories is cognitive dissonance that is we want the size of the event to be matched by a cause that's equally of that size so the analogy uses you know the holocaust the worst genocide in human history caused by the nazis the worst regime political regime in human history there's a match there right but if you say something like uh you know jfk the leader of the free world brought down by who lee harvey also just some nobody you know there's this mismatch or 911 this huge thing by 19 guys with box cutters

110:28do you think that doesn't harvey oswald acted alone yeah do you really what makes you think that all of the evidence and none of the evidence against anybody else and all of the evidence against particularly him the gerald posner's book case closed and then um the attorney what's his name that was the uh madison attorney yeah uh he his name he has a massive book where he lines up every single one of the arguments by the jfk conspiracy for example conspiracies make a big deal about how oswald got a job at the book depository building which just happened to be where the parade just happened to be where the parade route was going so you could have a clear shot so it was posner that tracked down when the white house determined even when kennedy was going to dallas let alone what the parade route would be and oswald already had the job there that's just chance

111:19so he knew in advance bro he was the three he knew that he knew do you think it's possible that oswald was in cahoots no no no why do you think that what about the magic bullet theory uh well that's been settled by the fact that the way it showed in in the videos is that the two seats are like this and that the bullet has to do this well in fact the seats were like that and that connolly was well you're explaining this um in audio form just when you're saying oh yeah so it's like stadium seating right one's elevated above the other one that's right so the bullet actually does when it passes through the neck through kennedy's neck and then hits connolly's shoulder it it is already moving down i think it hit his wrist it fractures his wrist right um the this has been tested and tested and tested well sort of here's here's my issue with it there's a couple issues one uh

112:07on the on the pro side uh the idea that bullets will take a straight path is ridiculous i've i've talked to hunters that have shot animals uh in the front and had a bullet come out the same side they shot it it ricocheted off bones and and came out like the front of the animal like bullets take weird paths when they hit things in particular uh so do arrows they take and as a person who's well-versed in firearms and shot animals and hunted this you don't sometimes the bullet goes straight through and sometimes it hits bones and wacky things happen things deflect but on the negative side they always distort bullets always distort particularly when they hit bone what bothered me was that they found that bullet in connelly's gurney when they brought him to the hospital they just conveniently found this bullet aha we have it this is the bullet it matches the

113:02the same rifle yeah and but it wasn't pristine it was flattened barely if you look at that bullet that bullet is nothing like a bullet that's hit bone when bullets hit bone they mushroom they balloon they bend they distort wildly they don't come out looking like that they come out looking like that when you shoot them into water or when you shoot them into like feathers they don't come out looking like that under normal circumstances when they shatter the bone of two different people well do you know that for sure no i do not know that for sure but um one thing i do know a lot about is i don't i know quite a bit about what bullets look like when they hit things i've looked into this pretty extensively and i've talked to a lot of people in law enforcement military hunters and none of them believed that that bullet hit bones shattered bones and came out looking like that

113:50is it possible that that bullet was the only bullet ever in the history of the world that did do that yeah it might be okay so we're getting kind of caught up in the weeds of the anomalies what about this just the bullet uh oswald himself had attempted to assassinate a general named walker six months before with his rifle and a handgun and he went over to the house he took a shot through the guys when he saw him at the desk took a shot missed him uh he told his wife about it he's i'm a revolutionary i'm trying to start so don't give me don't get me wrong i'm not saying that oswald was innocent i'm not i mean and i think it's very possible that oswald did shoot at the president he might have even hit the president it's also very possibly that some other people were involved as well who i don't know see this is the problem but wait a minute why is it a problem if

114:36you don't know who they are just because you don't know who they are doesn't mean it didn't exist okay but but why do we need to postulate extra people because of all the gunshots that happen in the short amount of time the fact the reason why they came up with the theory of the magic bullet in the first place because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb underneath the overpass do you know that right yeah okay there's three there's there's okay if you know why they came out with them yeah i've been there do you know why they came up with it but it's short i mean it's right there you could have stopped this point the point well it's not that's that's sort of true yeah it's not a far shot and he was a pretty good marksman a positive track down we're not talking about that we're talking about the reason why they came up with the magic bullet there in the

115:14first place do you know why well i thought it was because of the alignment of the seats no because they had to attribute three shots they had to figure out and one of them they were they were thinking well all these wounds came from three bullets but then they found a bullet that had hit the curb on the underside the guy checked into a hospital because he was hit with the ricochet so there's a curb that they proved was hit with a bullet there was a bullet hole in the the granite or whatever the the curb is made out of it hit this guy he went to the hospital so he was hit with a ricochet so they knew that one bullet had not hit the president and so they had to attribute all of these wounds to one bullet now they had one bullet that landed into his neck another bullet that hit him in the head right and what so what how do these three bullets cause a a wound on a commonly as well then they

116:04came up with the mount there's a there's the bullet look at that but you have to look at the at the end it's flattened if you look at it from the end uh no it's not look at this under no circumstances do i feel that this bullet could hit a wrist and still not be deformed we proved that by experiments as a chief consultant in wound ballistics for the u.s army who supervised tests for the warren commission here's the thing i don't i don't necessarily think that there was some grand conspiracy but i do think it's entirely possible that someone took that posthumously took that rifle and wanted to pin it on lee harvey oswald definitively look there's people that do things when they know someone's guilty and they plant evidence mark furman did that with o.j simpson they found his glove they they planted evidence and there was one of the reasons why o.j got off because there

116:50was some sort of conspiring to make it look like he was you know it was the evidence was a clear path they could have just taken that rifle and look could have been that oswald did it alone it's possible but also could have been that some other people were shooting at him too it could have been that they had decided to have oswald be a part of this and when jack ruby ran in and shot him that doesn't look a little suspicious that some guy with ties to the mob gets right up to this guy who just shot the president and shoots him like why he's never shot before do it publicly positive talks about ruby's character and who he was major kennedy supporter uh running with some bad dudes some br bad hombres there in texas and he was a gun owner uh security wasn't anything like it is now he really could just walk right in right like he did it's possible but it's also possible that that guy

117:41owed something to the mob and this is what they told him to do you're going to get rid of that guy no one's going to care they're going to be happy that guy he just shot the president who knows it seems so it seems like people want it to be one way or the other and they want they want this case closed it doesn't have to be that way i mean lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy and that was evident pretty quickly afterwards right and they rounded them up uh you know world war one was launched by a conspiracy with the assassination of franz ferdinand by a serbian group of uh called the black hand their group of nationalists well we already talked about the vietnam war too the gulf of tonkin incident that's a false flag so these things do happen they're all false flags there are conspiracies to assassinate foreign leaders uh you know hitch wrote this book on kissinger as a war

118:27criminal uh that you know all the shenanigans we were doing in south america with dictators there were back in this dictator because he's the son of a but he's our son of a versus this guy and we're gonna you know assassinate castro all the stuff that came out that johnson tried to cover up that came out in the pentagon papers about kennedy plotting to have castro assassinated that's a kind of conspiracy so yeah this absolutely this does happen the question is did it happen in that particular case or this one or here and the evidence in my opinion after reading particularly gerald prosner's book uh case closed it's there's a funny internet meme that went around last week of a guy who dies goes to heaven and god says you you've been such a good fellow your whole life i'll grant you one when she can ask me anything he said all right who killed kennedy and god said it was lee harvey

119:18oswald acting alone using his own carcana rifle and the guy goes this goes higher up than i thought that's funny man did you ever read david lifton's novel or a book about it rather yeah best evidence best evidence i i didn't read the whole book you know when i was researching this back in the 90s after the oliver stone film came out because after that when that came out i thought man if only half of this or 10 of this is true it's definitely a conspiracy but then there are websites dedicated to everything he got wrong there and well he made people up like the general donald sutherland character that guy doesn't even exist he just used him as a theatrical tool yeah a very distorting film and but film is such a powerful medium yeah it's hard to overcome that well that movie in particular you got kevin costner who's the good guy everybody's in there yeah i mean that is a jack lemmon and

120:14walter matthau mm-hmm it's a crazy movie yeah and it really has you believing that there's some sort of a concern to the left back and to the left people well here's the thing about that though well i've looked at that over and over again yes it is back into the left but the spray kind of comes out of the front yeah it is yeah yeah it kind of comes out the front and one thing that does happen when people or things get shot is you have nerves and nerves react and and things things do weird you know those weird results in your body when if you get hit by something it doesn't i mean well i get hit in the chest his hands come up like right well he's grabbing his neck apparently that was the other thing was there was a difference in the autopsy results from bethesda maryland versus in dallas texas dallas texas they attributed the throat wound to a frontal

121:04shot that something hit him in the front and then the bethesda maryland they said that it was a trach wound that they uh they opened him up to clear his breathing pathway and then the conspiracy theorists would say why would you clear the breathing pathway of a guy who doesn't have a brain his brain was shot out of his head right there's a lot of shenanigans i just don't like when people say they know one way or another yeah lee harvey oswald acted alone how the could you know there was a bunch of there was also bullet fragments in connolly's wrist that weren't missing from the the bullet itself the bullet itself whether you think it's pristine or not it's still it's not missing a lot of fragments and there's fragments in connolly's body that they you could detect on an x-ray there's x-rays in his wrist and you can see the little pieces of that i don't know what the explanation

121:49for that exactly but the fact that i don't know i'm not the world's expert on this stuff people want to clean it up that's what i don't like they want to clean it up or they want to muddy it up instead of like looking at it a hundred percent objectively they want one thing or another i think it's entirely possible that lee harvey oswald it's either to me they they want to say this is the these are the two narratives lee harvey oswald was a patsy he had nothing to do with the government set him up or he acted alone but why why couldn't he have been involved in it you know he obviously was involved in some shady characters the guy spent a ton of time in russia came back over here very easily even though the cold war was going on there's a lot of weird stuff he might have very well been some sort of a government informant or working in cahoots with the government if that's the case

122:34and he did shoot kennedy or shoot at kennedy who's to say that he wasn't with other people and they killed him because this guy was going to go to jail and he was going to start talking when they arrested him he said i'm a patsy i'm just a patsy and then blam he's dead oh we got him and that's it wrap it up tight it wasn't until there's a pruder film that people really started a question and i think that was it might have been 10 years later right we've talked about this you know the whole history of the zapruder film how it was released yeah the gerald rivera show right that crazy right dick gregory comedian brought the film footage to the geraldo rivera show and showed it on television magazine bought the rights today life magazine had the rights and didn't do anything with it they they kept it for more than a decade and dick gregory got a hold of the actual

123:22film footage and premiered it on the geraldo rivera show i want to say it was like 1971 or 72 or something like that so it was way way after the assassination that the american what was it 75 is 12 years oh that's crazy 75. so all those years later and then people got a chance to see the footage and they were like wow this is not how it was described to us at all and it made people skeptical there's a good nova show on ballistics in the head and testing the rifle and could you shoot that many times in that many seconds and so on and it's pretty to me it's pretty convincing the problem with me is i know too much about what happens when bullets hit bones i don't buy that that was the bullet i do look i think they could have just dropped that bullet off doesn't mean that lee harvey oswald didn't do it the thing about that bullet though is it like there might be some involved

124:12and the david lifton book was that was the book that got me into conspiracies that book god damn it if i could go back and not read it i bombed on stage because of that book it did yeah well it was my fault but i've read that book the day i was performing and i was freaking out because i was like 24 or something like that i was like oh this is crazy they killed the president you know i was so naive and i was like really bummed out when i went on stage and then i i realized like oh you can't like i didn't know any better i only been doing comedy for three years like you can't go on stage bummed out like you got to get your head together you can't just say the jokes and not have some emotional attachment to him but that book highlights what it was was uh lifton was a bookkeeper and or an accountant i believe and uh he was hired to do something with the warren commission report

125:03and because he found some contradictions and he went over the entire warren commission report which is an enormous enormous publication and he found all of these problems all of these problems in the warren commission report and all these contradictions and it was his determination after reading everything and writing his book he thought that the conclusion they made they made before the fact and that they wrote all this stuff to sort of ver to back up their conclusion that it wasn't based entirely on an objective version of the facts and of the event itself and his his take was there was a conspiracy well it's launched a mini industry of books and it helps man think about all the money that's been made off of the kennedy assassination you could go down the the rabbit hole with this stuff do you ever see the um jesse ventura version of it uh he believes it

125:56everything he's ever seen he's the best yeah he's the best i was on his conspiracy show william yeah he's out there oh yeah he believed it yeah he was like no one could have made that shot they definitely could have made that yeah it's a rifle it's not that far and just because someone gets lucky doesn't mean they can't get lucky like people get lucky all the time people flip a coin and it lands on heads a mile away i mean you know you could throw a coin you could you could throw a coin out of a helicopter you know right you could say this is gonna be heads when it lands it can be heads you can get lucky right it really is possible well this assassination of franz ferdinand that triggered the first world war this yes but okay they they messed up i mean they had like seven of them and they met in secret and they got their weapons that morning and so on and

126:45it's a couple of them chickened out somebody else got lost there's like three of them there somebody threw a hand grenade missed rolled into the car behind the franz ferdinand and they got hurt and went to the hospital and he's like oh this i'm not giving my speech let's go to the hospital and visit see how he's doing so they double back like half an hour later they double back and come back down the same route and the guy who had missed he was just sitting there on the curb it's like oh here they are bam yeah pure luck pure luck yeah yeah that does happen yeah yeah i mean i think that history turns more on that kind of thing than on carefully orchestrated perfectly executed plots sure it certainly can but you know the the idea that uh i'm i've always found it offensive the idea that there's no way oswald could have hit him like that people say that like there's no way

127:34there's no way like you're out of you never shot anything right that's crazy i can make that shot hundred percent yeah i well look if you have a rifle with a scope and a guy is a hundred yards away you tell him you can't shoot him right that's crazy tommy that's crazy talk well the rifle was out of luck that was the other thing they said this the scope wasn't lined up correctly here's the thing folks if you have a rifle okay and this has happened to me before and you drop the rifle the scope gets damaged it gets moved it's it's a very sensitive thing like when you're talking about something that goes and it was faster than the speed of sound a bullet boom firing out of a rifle you have that that is going incredibly fast and to be able to get that reticle exactly on where you think that bullet's going to hit requires a lot of adjustments when you go to the range

128:21they set up a lead sled you put your rifle down on this sled so you're not holding the rifle and by the way oswald wasn't holding it either the idea was that he had it rested right which makes it much more steady and much more easier to make an accurate shot so you set up this rifle on the lead sled and it's usually 100 yards or 200 yards however far the distance is to the target you squeeze squeeze squeeze boom the trigger goes off and you see that the bullet is low and to the left by a couple inches you make an adjustment on the scope if you drop that rifle that scope gets knocked the adjustment's out the window right so the idea that there's like a perfect chain of command between lee harvey oswald pulling that trigger and that scope never got rattled at all no but the conspiracy theorists want you to think there's no way who could have made that shot that scope wasn't even lined up

129:09good how the do you know how do you know you don't know like anybody who knows anything about rifles knows there's no way you could know because if all you'd have to do is whack it here i'm going to bring you the rifle and just bump it with your elbow funny knock it into a wall when you're handing it to someone and that scope's going to be off right so then you take it to a range we're going to prove definitively that he could have never made this shot because this scope is off boom look it's six inches to the left wow case closed right no it's it's there's no way people know whether or not that scope was on when he was pulling that trigger there's no way you know when i went to d lee plaza it's so big in our public imagination it's not it's not you go there it's like this is it it's tiny it's so small and then you go up to the museum and you're on the sixth floor deposit

129:54the book depository and you look down they have an x the two x's in the street and you think that's just right there dude i could shoot that with an arrow i bet you could i can yeah i guarantee you if you give me some time you give me some time if you put a a target right where that thing was yeah right where that uh lincoln was yeah and and you put me in that window i guarantee you i hit that target with a bow right like the idea that you couldn't i'm holding it no rest right the idea that you couldn't do that with a with a rifle right you certainly could lee harvey oswald certainly could have done it he certainly could have shot at kennedy he was a crazy lee harvey oswald was involved in a lot of shady it wasn't like he was just some dentist somewhere and he scored the second according to pozner he scored the second highest marksmanship there it is right here to here right

130:41yeah dude that's so small that was such a short distance then the other question i had when you're coming up houston street and going left i always wondered why he didn't shoot him there when can the car's coming right at him what was in the other window he was in the window on the left-hand side he was over there no no no no it's uh it's over here yeah it's right there that's where he shot him from that window yeah yeah so i always wondered why he didn't shoot him when the car was coming right at him because that would have been a cleaner shot it seems to me head on you mean yeah yeah um maybe you want to shoot him in the back of the head does it have like a sniper maybe panic it's that upper right yeah it's cool look at that one yeah wow yeah when we drove through it when uh last time not last time i was in dallas a couple times ago but when we drove through it

131:26it's like it's eerie you're like wow yeah this is it all happened right here i've been twice there and there's always uh conspiracy people walking around they're looking for a tip so i gave this guy ten bucks they go all right give me the whole story and oh it was very entertaining okay here's the grassy knoll the pickety fans yeah and he had another one about this man he took the manhole cover off because there was somebody down here in the manhole oh oh popped up bam shot him went back down in the middle favorite dumb conspiracy is they believe that the driver turn around shotgun right that's that's the best one right yeah those are the spaces fake people you're always going to get a bunch of really wacky conspiracies whenever anything happens in the news whatever it is you know anything and everything particularly if it's big and famous again back to this

132:07cognitive dissonance like princess die you know a cause of death drunk driving speeding no seatbelt you know tens of thousands of people died the guy was drunk he was drunk yeah the driver of her car was drunk yeah i didn't know that well drunk he was partially drunk he was tipsy drunk wow i didn't i didn't know yeah that's right so drunk driving speeding and she wasn't wearing a seatbelt why wasn't she wearing a seat belt so i mean that's but but it doesn't feel like prince someone like princess di should die the way tens of thousands of americans die in automobiles every year it seems like there should be you know the mi5 and the royal family and the the arabs and the palestinians everybody was involved well here's an example of an absolute conspiracy that we know is was a conspiracy jamal khashoggi yes right yeah a good example this kind of stuff does happen this is a real conspiracy

132:59that guy was murdered he went to the saudi embassy in turkey they had him set up they flew in 15 people including a guy who was a um he was a forensics expert and he was an expert in in foreseen forensics evidence and they think that he was there to make sure that there was nothing left behind they this is the the official story is that they they strangled him cut him up yep and the there's even recordings apparently that goes oh the body double video yeah tim walking in and then it's the last time he was seen yeah he he entered into there and there was 15 different dudes that were waiting for him they killed him chopped him up and there's videos of those those guys leaving with suitcases and they say that the suitcases had his body in him yeah chopped up yeah it's um it's real but that's also you know saudi arabia they can get away with some pretty sketchy and it seems like

134:05nothing's gonna happen right like people few people got fired well i have to say on this that um it was michael moore's film on 9 11. he made the point it was the first i'd seen make the point that um the saudi arabia family got out of the united states on 912 when all flights were canceled yes and that bush let them you know and now here we see that you know trump doesn't want to condemn the saudis because they're our allies okay so much so there's a bunch of in there it goes all the way back to 911 you know and and we know the saudis support uh bankrolled most of the 19 hijackers yeah so that's the kind of conspiracy that we should be paying attention to not that bush was involved and made it happen in the secret you know this is the kind of that really happens in politics yeah you know people are are banking each other so we have to be nice to each other and over you know

134:59overlook it you know like when trump said you know putin you know you know putin murders people oh well everybody does that what yeah well we do some terrible things too yeah yeah and and that's true well it is true in in you know i guess he's got a point but the yeah it's it's just so there's so much money there's so much money involved with saudi arabia here in this article i was writing i cited criminologist manuel eisner in a study of 1500 monarchs in 45 monarchies across europe between a.d 600 and 1800 found that about 15 of them 227 were assassinated corresponding to a homicide rate of about a thousand per hundred thousand ruler years 10 times the background rate so in other words assassinations in history are pretty common this is how power often changes hands before liberal democracy spread in after 1970s this was not uncommon so so we shouldn't be surprised that

135:56people believe this kind of stuff because you know there's some truth to that the khashoggi thing is unsettling to folks because what he was killed for they think well there's there's two different versions of it right this can film he was killed for um criticizing the saudi arabian government but he was also there was also that he was criticized because he was aware or he was killed rather because he was aware of some spy software that's being utilized and that if he wrote a story about the spy software being utilized by the saudi arabian government it would be a huge uh disaster could be yeah yeah i mean there's probably more we i'm sure there's a lot we don't know so here's my uh my concession to conspiracy theories when you get elected president they take you in the back room they go okay here's what's actually going on right oh i can't close gitmo no i can't

136:48close skateboard because no one will take those bad dudes okay but but i'm gonna pull the troops out of afghanistan can't pull the troops out of afghanistan if we do that here's what happens oh but we don't know this we know this and i think that something like that does go on maybe not quite so secretly but just that you know you and i don't need to know these things yeah need to know basis and and the president does when they're candidates they say oh whatever they say to get elected and then they get in there and go okay i didn't realize the saudis are doing this and this and this and we need them for these six reasons over here okay they did this bad thing and if we condemn them then they're not going to do these things over here so i better lay off the condemnation that kind of stuff i suspect does happen a lot yeah i think you're correct i think i suspect the same thing but

137:33what's fascinating to me about trump is that he doesn't seem to care at all about violating protocol or about releasing information that he probably should i mean he's already accidentally released top secret information i would just feel like if he knew for sure some some stuff like he would be the last guy you would want to trust with that right i know but you know this thing about him wanting to pull the troops out of syria there's got to be another story behind there like you know putin maybe said look we got to take care of our business here in syria we're gonna take care of americans over here and you get your trump tower in red square when when i'm gone whatever you know there's some kind of that kind of stuff is the sort of thing that will come out in a equivalent of a wikileaks in 20 years we'll go oh like the gulf of tonkin oh okay that's what happened what do you

138:27think in conspiracy theory that says that trump has there's some video of trump getting peed on people wasn't that that was published in like some serious newspapers yeah yeah there's so much of this stuff that i just can't keep track of it i mean don't you think with him though too they're like more than willing to put stuff like that out there because they don't like them so they'll pull that trigger a little bit quicker maybe yeah but you know during the bush ministry and people hated george w bush do you think they hated him as much as they hate trump no i think now they're going oh we would love to have george w bush back yeah i feel like they just thought he was incompetent oh that's directly putin does not deny possessing compromising material on trump uh but but what did he actually say yeah i don't know yes this is about the p-tape says matthew was it iglesias

139:21what is it from oh it's vox that doesn't mean anything he probably didn't understand what they were saying he speaks russian right yeah i don't know um do you find it odd that the the these conspiracies not only did it seems like it's a part of our our mind the way our our brains work our collective mindset is that we tend to uh be attracted to conspiracies and we tend to hope that those are true more than we hope a simple explanation exists yeah it well it depends it depends on who your group is and do they have power or not so we know from studies that people that are out of power tend to cons can concoct conspiracy theories about those in power yes and the moment they get empowered they drop the conspiracy theories and the ones that are out so you're going to get more conspiracy theories about republicans when the democrats are out of power from left-leaning people and vice versa

140:24blacks are more likely to think that the c.i.a planted crack cocaine in the inner cities and and those sorts of things conservatives are more likely to fear big government conspiracies liberals are more likely to fear big corporate conspiracies there may be elements of truth in all of these things but the ones you latch on to have to do with how much power you perceive the other guy has that you don't have and therefore they must be doing something to get that that i can't do i'm on the outside and so we tend to misperceive how much control and power people really have in positions of power ceos politicians and so on usually they don't have as much control and power as we think they do and people that get in there they go oh i can't i can't i don't have this kind of controller power i thought i would when i got here but obviously i don't it's too many things that have to to

141:15checks and balances that are in place so also you can't do these things on your own you really need a group of people to conspire along with you so you need to have these frank discussions with some sort of an understanding that you have to keep this a secret right more yeah in other words like 12 guys in london are going to control the world's economy how are they going to do that i mean who do you call to start a war and or cause inflation or whatever more likely it's like in the cuban missile crisis where you have jockeying back and forth back and forth back and forth okay look uh we're gonna give you the missiles in turkey if you take the missiles out of cuba and it just ends up being some boring little thing that dissolves the tension that could have been world war three it's like wow just this little thing yeah so much of history turns on those little you know so in a way

142:07we got lucky there but not just luck i mean kennedy and khrushchev both wanted to untie the knot you know khrushchev sent a memo to kennedy saying you know you have pulled on this rope and i have pulled on this rope and i don't know if either of us can untie it but here's an idea that's when he floated the you take the missiles out of turkey and and i was just watching this netflix documentary on this and there was a thing about castro sent a memo to khrushchev saying light them up you know comrade we are ready to die for the cause you can just nuke all of cuba and nuke america i don't care we're ready to die and crucified yeah and khrushchev apparently was like holy this guy's a madman we're not gonna do that and uh so that's castro he's ready to nuke cuba yeah jesus where's that memo uh they they talked about this in this uh uh netflix no yeah anyway so this was during the

143:02times of operation northwood when they were going to blow up a drone jetliner and blame it on the cubans arm cuban friendlies to attack guantanamo bay and use it as a motivation to get us into war the castro was a fascinating case because that guy kept that place 90 miles away from miami he kept that place running on his own until he died right that is crazy really it's crazy that he was able to pull that off well he had a lot of support economic support from russia otherwise and that would not have succeeded but still it's it's so nuts that he was so close he was running a military dictatorship essentially a boat ride away yeah i was just in moscow a few months ago for a conference and so i went to visit their world war ii museum what we would call a world war ii museum just massive building and they call it the great patriotic war museum and the whole thing is

143:57kind of a tribute to russia liberated europe from the nazis what yep this is current oh yeah yeah i mean this is their from their perspective they lost 27 million people you americans you know 500 000 nothing right and from their perspective and you go to berlin right next to um the victory museum look at that yeah it's called the victory museum well there it is the museum of the great patriotic war is a history museum located in moscow yet and they have this room with these chains hanging down with little crystal balls at the end of them that represent the 27 million people and it's it's it's very moving go back to that that right there is good look how beautiful that place is it's quite stunning and each of those rooms that you go into it's like a diorama of some battle that they fought wow you know so we have we i think you know it's good for us to know this to recognize

144:52from their perspective they they they won the war not the british american and french we did a little bit from their perspective uh but the fact that they lost so many people 27 million what's going on with that picture i don't know i don't remember up looking trees that's a weird picture um i i mean they have a point in terms of their contribution in terms of the loss of lives yeah that's uh i mean every country has its perspectives in that regard which is why it's good to know some history so you know what other people are thinking and what they went through well it's again though it's what very similar to what we were talking about earlier in terms of the distribution of the news it would be very nice if there was one absolute news source you can trust with no slant on it whatsoever when it comes to the distribution of history it's of course always written right in a way that

145:45favors the people that are writing it yeah i was just uh talking to rachel kleinfeld you know i have a podcast now uh how long have you been uh a few months about six months now science salon podcast yeah well it's sort of sort of an extension of our old caltech lecture series but instead of lectures we're now doing dialogue what's it called so people can see science salon science salon yep so just skeptic.com it's okay so i'm interviewing or dialoguing with uh rachel kleinfeld she has this a new book called a savage order and it's about failed states and what happens to them and why corruption spread so quickly and then how to basically squelch that so like after the soviet union fell apart you know all these mobs basically took over and it's like the russian mafia the republic of georgia fell apart fairly quickly and then you know so one of the reasons

146:36people apparently like putin is he kind of came in and squelched all that and and maybe one of his points of popularity is that at least we have one bad guy who's kind of keeping order instead of all these little mafioso type gangs and uh and i said so so if he actually held an election he might win it's like hard to say because we don't have a good source of what the russian people really like right we have the russian media saying the russian people love putin okay yeah right do we know that's an accurate survey it is pretty astonishing what kind of a control he has over that country though yeah it's it's powerful i went to visit uh well i saw lennon's tomb and the mausoleum there he's still still he's looking pretty waxy uh to me oh that's right you can actually see his body or what's left of his body yeah yeah what's left of it yeah another netflix series i just binge

147:30watched trotsky it's called trotsky and this is a russian-made film it's a drama and um it's really good and it really shows it's interesting because he he trotsky was on the outs all the way until just recently you know because stalin had him assassinated and then stalin had him literally airbrushed out of photographs because for a while it was lennon stalin and and trotsky is the big three and then when lennon had a stroke it was like okay so stalin and trotsky who's gonna take over when the boss is gone and uh so they kind of showed how that happened and again conspiracy it's all conspiracy no one knows what you know really going on here you've been in this business this debunking conspiracy conspiracies in the skeptic business for quite a long time do you feel like there is any improvement in the critical thinking skills of people and their ability to recognize

148:22the fallacies and the the flaws and the way they're approaching these things hard to say confirmation bias yeah they're less of that now than before i like to think we're having an influence um there is some studies that show you know fewer people believe in these pseudosciences and quackery and paranormal but it's not the the declines are not that dramatic over say the last few decades there are deprogramming bias deprogramming studies and programs in which you can teach people about the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and so on the problem with those is they work really well to teach people how to spot the biases in other people they're really good at that but then you say well what about you oh you know fortunately i'm above all that so there's a blind that's called the blind spot bias you can't see your own bias but you can see it in other people

149:14um so the reason these studies are done is because like we have a problem with climate change we have climate deniers how do we get people who don't know anything about it to shift from i'm a skeptic to i'm a believer and it show it turns out just piling on facts isn't going to do it no people's identity are trapped in their initial their initial statements if they think that 911 was a conspiracy their their identity is somehow inexorably connected to this conspiracy being a fact and then you argue it as if you're arguing your own value it's it's a really weird thing that happens when people start talking about ideas if the you you you very rarely find people that are disconnected from their ideas the point where you could point out that something's incorrect and they go oh thank you i didn't know that like most people aren't that confident or aren't they just look at it at the wrong

150:10it feels like a personal attack on them also if it's a belief or claim or theory or whatever affiliated with a political or moral or religious value the people auto correct in their brains when they hear global warming they hear liberalism communism anti-capitalism control of the market big government and i'm against those things so that global warming thing has got to be false yeah that is one of the weirder aspects of tribal thinking right pinker makes the point that uh al gore's film and inconvenient truth was a terrible thing for the environmental movement because it associated global climate change with liberalism the democrats and all that it's like okay i see what's going on it's that al gore left liberal stuff yeah that's right yeah well in in a sense he's right and then in another sense it was also the amount of profit that al gore made both from that and from some other

151:03endeavors that he has like they said that he's one of the first green billionaires right it's like oh jesus what's his carbon footprint with that he's talking about the world yeah it's like it's screwy yeah it's but that's you know there's everything's messy people are messy right so we're very tribal uh we commit to political parties and religious beliefs and we stick by them pretty closely pretty tightly and the facts get filtered through those understandably um you know what to do about it you know that's that's under debate it's same thing with the atheist debating how do we get people to leave religion well you just there's a hundred ways you know leah remini doing her show on scientology anyone watching that would think okay i'm not joining this church and and so if you had a thousand of those for bad beliefs hopefully we'd see that shift i would love it if there was some sort of a

152:00secular option a community driven ethics driven morality driven friendship driven thing where people could go and instead worship maybe just appreciate life and sort of confirm some of the best aspects of of community and culture and who we are and do it in a place where it makes you really conscious of it so because i think there's there's some some real benefit to people going to church and everyone in the community community dresses up nice and you're sort of agreeing hey we're committed to being civil and to being kind and worshipping and that this belief in a higher power if it it it empowers people to think this way and it gives people a motivation to be kind and it would be nice if there was a secular option like that that is decentralized it's not run by one person who ends up banging everybody's wife and taking all the money because that's what happens right always happens

153:00you can set your clock by these guys it's unbelievable well joe the humanist movement is something like that what is this i'm not aware secular humanists are just humanists there's groups all over the world they have churches well they have meeting places i don't call them churches uh more broadly the kind of universalist unitarian church is a church and it's a religion but they're pretty secular they're like secular jews you know they believe in the culture and the and the ceremony and the rituals i've been to a number of these humanist and universalist unitarian churches uh ceremonies they light candles they sing hymns to newton uh they have testimonials about how i lost my religion and to me i didn't really like it that much because i wasn't never crazy about church in the first place but a lot of people clearly get value out of this atheists um and humanists that don't believe in god

153:51the gathering together once a week and being with fellow like-minded people that has a lot of psychological value it connects people that's one of the great things about community centers in neighborhoods you know it just connects people and like hey we're all in this together all right bob see you tomorrow bye mary you know it's a social capital yeah there's something there's something great about that with church that uh i mean i was having this conversation with bill burr about this recently we were talking about it and he's like i don't i don't really want to go to church but i think there's some there's something to that to go into a place and and putting your faith in you know all the people around you and the the the higher values and morals and ethics that you're all agreeing to right yep right it's back to the self-help thing it's sort of a reminder every week

154:38be a good person don't forget to donate to charity here's some local charities here yeah these are our causes be a good you know be good be nice to your spouse and your children and so on and so people kind of leave a little charged up for the week on sunday back to monday and that's probably a draw of those big tony robbins things too there's a community of us together we're all trying to do better we're all trying to better ourselves and optimize our lives that's right there's nothing wrong with it same thing back to jordan peterson that's that's right he's he's given a message people like to hear that yeah and okay so what what why is that bad it's not bad yeah now of course people like richard dawkins will point out yeah but but can we decouple all the supernatural nonsense yeah from the social community yes we can but don't you think that there's

155:22less there's less of an acceptance to the supernatural nonsense than there was yes 50 years ago 100 years ago and it seems to be a trend those numbers are getting better secularism yeah the number the percentage of nuns people took the bucks for no religious affiliation uh that used to be in the single digits it's now 25 of all americans 33 of millennials those born after 1991 and it looks like probably with eye generators can be closer to 50 percent people born after 1995. now they're not necessarily atheist agnostic skeptics but they don't affiliate with any religion and that's good because in the sense that um you know it's it's religious behavior that causes some of these social problems that we are encountering now with islam for example um you know so somebody privately believes in god or whatever and they don't act on it okay i guess i don't care in that sense

156:12it's the acting on your beliefs that causes the problem well when you enforce those beliefs on other people that's right so when it spills over into politics science education particularly well that's one of the real problems they're having in europe when they're dealing with people that are coming over from other countries where they have a different set of values and they're seeing women in skirts and they're calling them and it's like oh bro you're in england right different set of rules over here you know california yeah you won't believe it right and they think that god has you know god has dictated these rules right in their eyes they're seeing some horrible sin they're seeing the the decay of the morbid fiber the moral fiber of their environment these are primitive beliefs having to do with men wanting to control women's reproductive uh rights yeah there's evolutionary

157:00reasons for this you had bret and heather on here and they explained that beautifully um but we have to overcome that just because it's an evolved tendency for men to want to control women's reproduction uh doesn't mean we should do that in fact the opposite yeah and uh so i make the case uh one of my scientific american columns that on abortion that you know if if our mutual goal between pro-lifers and pro-choicers is to reduce the amount of abortions we we know the formula educate women empower women birth control birth control access to birth control and so on it just happens automatically the pregnancy rates go down therefore abortion rates are going to go down we know how this how to do this but still people the pro lifers you know just start glom on it but it's a moral issue okay take the moral out of it i understand it's a human life or potential human whatever you want to

157:52argue i get all that take that out let's just work to the common goal of reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies my favorite one that still exists is abstinence the idea that they're trying to push this on these essentially when you especially talking about really young people that are just getting horny for the first time i mean they're on the horse to on no what are you talking about you take the average 17 18 year old kids and you try to they get them together and no one's in the room and they're raging raging with hormones and they're both supposed to keep their clothes on like look man it's not going to happen it's just not going to happen you got to let that go and this idea that you're going to tell them that god wants them to be absent like are you sure why did he give us these goddamn hormones like what's happening here there's studies on how effective

158:44abstinence-only programs or chastity pledges and these sorts of things how effective not only are they not effective they're worse because then people go into like a date or something unprepared and then the hormones kick in you know and they they start going at it and then they don't have protection well there's also the thing where catholic schools like when i was a kid we always knew and like this is we're talking about in the 80s everyone knew that girls who went to all girls catholic schools were freaks because they were never around boys because they're all in just a school with girls and their everything is suppression suppressed suppressed suppressed they just can't wait they get out they like they find a boy and they go crazy like everybody knew it i mean this is not something that i knew as a comedian or as a person who studies culture this is something i knew as a 14 year old

159:35right everyone knew that girls who went to all school all girl catholic schools were freaks right it just has the opposite intended effect there was a study a british study i found uh that found some small it was like one and a half percent or whatever of thousand uh women who said they got pregnant without having sex oh that happens how did that happen it does happen it's immaculate it's a conception that's right it's hilarious yeah or they do everything but or they have anal or whatever and say well we didn't actually have sex you know right like clinton you know well what do you mean by sex and right have and sexual relations yes yeah i did not have sexual relations to that woman landscape yeah sex is intercourse penis vagina that's it yeah everything else is just hanging out right yep well it's the the the need for belief systems is it's so i mean it it helps people to have belief

160:35systems if they're positive and they're objective and they're well reasoned and they're you know these are you know backed by facts and knowledge it helps but the need for belief systems is so strong that we'll take a belief system that's wonky it's because we we have the desire yeah yeah the brain abhors a vacuum of belief it's the way i put it and something's going to be in there so let's try to put in those brains rational science-based uh values and we have those i mean humanist values that you know the humanist movement is now about a cent almost a century-old um you know universal human rights uh the the universal human rights declaration just celebrated its 50th anniversary you can get diverse people to agree you don't have to have the the correct philosophical arguments to get there but you know just everybody should be treated equally under the law can we at least agree on that

161:30yes okay uh i mean if you start off with picker makes this point enlightenment now if you start off with jesus died for our sins that's the most important value built value to me you're not going to get agreement in a room full of you know u.n diversity you got to start with something super basic in general everybody's is deserves equal rights okay yeah and then you start to build from there and we can do that do you find you've been in this for a long time and you've done some really valuable work it's been it's it's so nice that there's someone like you that really has dedicated their life to really illuminating truth exposing all the flaws and people's thinking do you feel like the reception of this is you you're it's easier now or it's there's momentum behind this kind of thinking i do yeah for sure it's it's more open part of my i have a distorted view i'm

162:21from california i grew up in southern california we're pretty liberal society here so i'm empathetic to people that write me from like oklahoma or arkansas and i'm in this little town everybody the only question is which christian church do you go to you know the baptists or the presbyterians and you know everyone in his family everyone at work is a believer and and he's an atheist uh okay so i haven't faced anything like that you know and i'm a middle-aged white guy you know i don't i do have white privileges i know uh and so i i am sympathetic to others but i do think across the board things are more tolerant you know we know this from studies on interracial marriage for example that's not even an issue anymore the gay rights thing has changed very rapidly i mean that was stunning how quickly social attitudes changed after the summer well we have to remember in 2013

163:11hillary clinton was still saying that she didn't believe in gay marriage that's right because that was a political position that's right now obama in 2011. although you never know when a politician says something of course uh but now i so i predict you know like the gay marriage thing this no one will even be talking about in another year or two it'll change so quickly and so across the board the acceptance now of atheists humanist secularists agnostics whatever has become much much better in most places there's still some of course some islamic countries where not only would they burn me and you they'd burn catholics because they picked the wrong religion so there's still that but i wonder if there's some improvement there in those countries because the internet with younger people when they're being exposed to these new ideas yeah maybe i'm not sure on that data

163:56the last time i saw a big poll was on uh how supportive you would be of sharia law and these were pretty scary like a third to a half of muslims living in muslim countries said they would support sharia law and if you look at sharia law as you know it's it's pretty scary very anti-democratic illiberal attitudes about rights and women and things like that so there i think the prediction would be yes uh millennials and i jenners when they get into power then maybe not just political power but like controlling talk shows radio shows tv shows scripts things like that most i think most moral change happens in people's minds from inculcating it from culture pop culture of just how you talk about other people like if dawkins makes this point that you can tell pretty much down to the decade uh when a book was written by the way they talk about women like a novel talk about women or blacks or

164:52whatever going back say a century you could say well that was 1930s the way they're talking about jews you know and that's the kind of thing that shifts very slowly you hardly notice it but from people like you comedians just you tell certain jokes or you say certain things and it becomes more acceptable scripts for television shows and and films um and all of us kind of watch it and absorb it and just think yeah you know we shouldn't be saying those kinds of things about women and jews and blacks or whatever just stop doing that not consciously you just kind of soak it in so i think you still need laws we have to sometimes change the law and just say okay it's now illegal to discriminate against jews or whatever you can't do that now people may still want to do that how do we change their thinking well if that's the bottom-up thing that takes course of decades or maybe a century

165:40and it takes generations sometimes because the new young kids have to see the flaws and the way their parents are thinking and and and have access to this information and form their own opinions on these things hopefully bakes based on objective reasoning and reality and and all the awesome stuff that's available now my step dad was in the pacific war and the way he talked about japanese you know when i was a kid in the 60s like and then by the time i became an adult i'm like dad you don't don't say the stuff don't say it out loud well you think about 1947 to 1960 that's a tiny period of time right it's so short yeah i mean it's really like you know we're talking about the early 2000s right imagine if world war ii happened during the early 2000s right yeah yeah it's hard it's hard to remember it's it's hard to to put it into perspective i think pop culture the media social

166:32media and so on is is going to accelerate moral progress it'll happen faster like it happened faster for women than it did for blacks it happened faster for gays than it did for women you know maybe whatever's next animal rights or you know something like this will accelerate even more maybe trans rights or something what do you think about the pushback against this idea that we are living in the safest time ever and that there is an absolute trend like pinker gets criticized about this where people say no the world is still not safe for these people for this for this group for that group and for you saying that the world just shows your white privilege and this white male perspective and i'm on board with with steve across the board on these things he's got the data it depends on the question you're asking you know it's like if you say yeah but my life is

167:17not better okay we're not talking about your life the question is is society getting better okay of course there's ups and downs and this group is doing better than that group and yes there's still some racial discrimination and yes there's still clearly anti-semites as we've seen recently but across the board if we take like the last 200 years which direction are the trend lines going they're all going in the right direction so again it's scale the question is what's the scale we're talking about so it's it's a little unfair to pinker to say well you're blind to that thing over he's not talking about that one thing there he's talking about just across the board yeah i agree um listen man thanks for everything thanks for everything you do thanks for all your articles for saying your books and thanks for coming on here and please let people know your podcast once again is called

168:05skeptic salon yeah science science salon sorry science salon you can just go to skeptic.com and it's posted there and uh yeah so skeptic is still going and social media at michael shermer is my twitter feed you have instagram as well uh i don't i don't do that how dare you all right well i do instagram that's michael shurmur1 oh do you have enough i do i do i'm going to start posting as of today okay oh yeah take a photo i always click on yours because you always have interesting photographs from wherever you're at and it's fun it is kind of fun it's fun just take an extra minute or two giant waste of time though don't get sucked in i'm already wasting so much time on twitter well thank you michael appreciate it again thanks for having me bye everybody