Michael Shermer

00:04and we're live Mr Sher welcome thanks thanks for having me thanks for being here man I appreciate it I uh have been paying attention to your work for a long time it's uh oh you're the one okay thanks yes I'm one of those guys I I'm sure you've got a lot but uh um I got a bunch of your books here thanks for bringing those in I really appreciate that got some stuff to read now um how did you get involved in skepticism I know you started off as a cyclist right uh yeah well I was a a bike racer from uh 1980 to about 1990 about 10 years in between when I was uh first in college I went to Pepperdine and then Cal State Fullerton and then I just was burned out I had a master's degree and uh I I just decided I didn't want to do another six straight years of PhD work so I quit and I went over to the uh placement office at Cal State Fullerton and said well I need a job they said what can you do I

00:53said nothing I'm I have no skills I'm a college student but I like to write so I got a job at a bike magazine my first job out of college and it was a trade magazine for um for the bike industry uh but I got right into cycling right away bought a bike the first week and I went so you weren't a bike rider before this job oh that's interesting yeah and I went to um a big event at Griffith Park where they had a yl yogurt 50 kilometer bike race and Jonathan Boer was the big star he had the first American to do the T to France and I saw him it's like wow this is a cool sport so I just got into it just started uh you know riding and racing and and then I did we started Race Across America in 1992 in 1982 and so I quit my job and just did that for for a decade I had corporate sponsors and we had ABC Wide World of Sports that contract with them to film it and you

01:42know we turned it into a little little minic culture business and you know Ultra but the ultra Endurance Sports were just taking off the Iron Man became famous in the early 80s John Howard who won it uh was one of the first to do the Race Across America with me and two other guys and I did a rod dog sled race and there and then and then soon after that were all those um sort of longdistance mixed sport type things where you run and hike and swim and and uh anyway so that that was just part of that culture and and you know I was young and single and didn't have a house or mortgage you know that stuff so you can do do those kinds of things that's a fascinating thing to get into too because how I mean that that's a real rabbit hole you get into too when you start into cycling and endurance racing and you you understand the culture and you get into those people they're

02:31they're a bizarre group of people they are Yes actually uh the subculture of ultra endurance athletes has a number of weirdos but so does the sort of skeptical movement I've decided that all kind of social subcultures have a handful of real weirdos the people that show up at your door like can I stay here this weekend what no you have Skeptics that because they're also Skeptics they want to stay there there there's some oddballs there for sure that's always going to be the case I think you're absolutely right about that about groups you're always going to have like outliers or strange but but the endurance racing in and of itself like the idea of pushing your body to the limits is a really fascinating sport because pretty much everyone can ride a bike it's not like you're doing something like ballet where you I couldn't imagine doing you know I watch like some people do like flips and

03:20gymnastics and stuff and I although I know the human body can do that I'm like yeah I can't see myself doing it yeah but I can get on a bike that's right the key is to find something like to do and that you're good at you know my wife's a beautiful dancer I you know I've tried we took dancing lessons with her I just can't do it you I just got two left feet can't do it what I meant is though that like it's one of those things where a normal person can do it so to but to do it the way a Lance Armstrong can do it or the way Greg lemon can do it you get into that weird area where you're just tweaking every single aspect of your body yeah the way you eat the way you sleep what you do your mental attitude your you know your motivation and did you get down that rabbit hole absolutely it's all I did you know just Pro you know it was a 40 hour a week but really

04:05more like a 60h hour a week job where you're training but you know uh it it there's a lot of preparation before you go out on a ride when you come back from a ride and then you add weights or stretching yoga whatever it ends up being you know an all day process how long did it take before you got into all those people that are into EPO and blood doping well when I was raced in the 80s there was no EPO uh blood doping was legal and it was done by people I knew in the 84 Olympics uh on the 84 Olympic team I know some of the the people that did it they used their own blood or a relatives blood they just stored it and packed it in it wasn't even banned until after the 84 Olympics when it was found out the American team did it and then the uh the the you whoever not the UCI the Olympic Committee said okay no no blood doping but it works I didn't try it uh you know I Race Across America is

04:54kind of a different sort of competition it's more of you against yourself and the and the clock you know you hardly ever see the other people out there on the road so um and I wasn't into you know the idea of taking your blood out and packing it back in sort of creep me out and there were no drugs that you could take I mean things like steroids that's not going to do it for a cyclist it the the miracle of epo is that it it packs in more red blood cells much faster than say training at high altitude and uh and you don't have to do the creepy thing with storing bags of blood and right and and then the blood cells die or the blood gets infected uh I mean I got um heepsy when I was in college and I had a back surgery I had a tumor on my spine and I had to have it taken out and I'd been taking a lot of aspirin for pain I was in pain for years and so they had to do this uh blood

05:40transfusion in N this was 1976 and there was no test for this so I got HEC and so after that I thought oh blood you know blood doping packing that just sort of creep me out yeah I can only imagine and there were people that were getting sick from blood doping you know you take the blood you put in a bag you store it maybe it's stored properly maybe it's not and then you get blood infections and that's not that's that's dangerous is heepsy the the disease that was recently in the news because there was that young guy who owns some pharmaceutical company and they charged a ridiculous amount of money for yes correct because you can get the I've been cured um you know I'm a Kaiser patient and I I did it 10 years ago and wiped it out within a month and I did the six-month treatment and I've I've been clear ever since but the drugs aren't that expensive if you do it through an

06:30uh they just it's just built into it should be part of your any healthare system and so yeah somebody was doctoring this or cheating the system or something like that yeah there was you Jamie you know the story behind it right that it was that young Martin shell yeah is that I think it was hepsi or HIV I think maybe some different medications he's got a company that works for a lot of pharmaceuticals so it could be both and the the accusation was he was price gouging and charging ridiculous amount of money yeah see it took you months to get over it uh well with the my first blood test after a month of taking the anti the antiviral and the interferon was the combination they used 10 years ago and within the first blood test it was gone undetectable they said yeah but you got to do the whole six-month treatment that's our program all right so I did it uh I was one of the

07:17fortunate ones that didn't get sick from the drugs some people just are laid out they can't they can't uh you know do exercise or function but I didn't have any problems so you tested negative but they still made you continue the medication yep is it because just because you're in a sort of a trials and it's like this is what we do you got to do the six months so all right oh okay but it didn't mess with you no physically no I was all right yep so you know back then um that was the only thing you could do with with was blood doping when EPO was introduced in the early 90s that really made a big difference and as you know Greg uh first discovered this when his teammates came to him uh and said you know we found out these other guys are doing this stuff we got to get on the program and he didn't want to do it and so by the time Lance got into the sport you know he didn't

08:02invent doping I mean it was already rampant and it was fullon coal you know full coal only thing Lance did was like well well if everybody's doing it we're going to do it we might as well do it at a really professional level and uh you know that's that's where he sort of took it to another level and who knows if it's still going on yeah I I had him on the podcast I I watched it yeah was it was very enlightening um I like him a lot you know he's an extreme winner and extreme winners are they they are type of people that they just push everything to the outmost edge and that guy if everybody I firmly believe that if everybody was 100% natural the same results probably would have happened probably yeah probably would have been different numbers as far as like the times achieved but I think he still probably would have won that probably yes proba probably that probably is a b

08:50it's a big word right well and this is this is why it it's still an immoral act because there are people that don't do it or they don't want to do it and we'll never know how they would have done compared to the people that doping and um uh but again uh you know probably we know that all the other people that were on the podium with Lance for those seven years they all have been busted for doping or admitted that they doped uh so the outcome you know how far down do you go to give the Jersey you know 127th Place guy or something because we know so many of them were doing it it's just so fascinating to me from a perspective of these guys are essentially experimenting with their bodies trying to find the right level trying to find out what's the best method to do so and along the entire you know the career that Lance had you you see all these adjustments that these people are making

09:39and everyone trying to well one of the early books out uh before all this came out about Lance it was called Breaking the Chain by Willie Voit uh who is a um a swor or you know one of the people that give massage therapies to uh or no I think it was one of the mechanics anyway with with the uh Festina team that got busted in 98 and uh he said basically these guys were just experimenting randomly no one knew what to do what's the dosage how many days every other day how do I incorporate with the other things I'm doing what about food training it was just you know Katie Bar the Door let's just try anything so crazy so again one of the things Lance did was uh hire the best doctor this McKelly Ferrari in the business the guy that knew the most about how to do it properly and adjust it for each body because everybody's body is different okay so we're going to

10:26try and you you know you do this for months before the Big Race and figured out and other people weren't doing that and then by the time they scrambled to catch up uh Tyler talks about this in his book you know after he left um the postal team and got his own team and then of course Ferrari wasn't available so he hired this other guy Fuentes who screwed up and mixed the bags of blood and gave him the wrong drug and and so he got he got popped he said uh for uh well he was doping but he got popped for somebody else's dope oh because someone else's blood was in his system correct right I think that's what it was Willie vot talks about this in Breaking the Chain too about one of the guys that one of the early guys that got busted um he oh he used his mechanics urine for the urine test which he stored in a little condom uh that's held underneath this uh little fake uh penis called the the

11:18whizzer oh I've seen those because at the in the drug test you have to look and watch the guy pee because just to make sure so you you do it in a way you but the problem was is the mechanic had stayed up all night working on the bikes and took some stimulants God the stimulants are in the urine so this poor guy gets busted for something he didn't take of course he was taking something else but oh God yeah there's horror stories about this you know guys putting bags of Blood on the hook on the in the hotel room on the wall where the painting is so it drips down into your you know it's like you know this is this is you know really a barbaric system when they in the early days when they were experimenting uh so again what Lance did was just take it to another level since it's going on anyway you know we might as well do it profession okay and he would have gotten away with

12:01it U because had he stayed retired but back to where you started it's you know when you're at that level and you push your body every day and you get all the endorphins and the testosterone and the camaraderie with the guys it it's great it is so fun I still ride four or five days a week with the guys that I used to race with and friends in the area here and I you know if I miss three or four days or week traveling I'm just crawling out of my skin I just got to get back on wow that's interesting yeah and I'm 62 years old so imagine you're Lance and you have you know the highest Competitive Edge probably you know anybody and and you're a super athlete and super gifted and then you push push push and then you got those seven straight and then you retire and then what golf yeah it doesn't have the same intensity and so I completely understand why you know so many of these guys come

12:48back like remember Brett favv came back a couple of times and uh you know it's just hard to to to break that habit yeah I I see it all the time with Fighters unfortunately with the consequence are much Graver you know when you're older and your body doesn't respond the same way and you've already taken a lot of damage but yet you still have this jonesing for the spotlight and you see them come back I mean they all have done it yeah sugaray Leonard Ali down the line a lot of MMA fighters have done it as well it's just it's so and it's the life you know you know you get okay Monday morning I'm going to do this workout and eat this it's just a great pattern to be and it feels great you're working toward this goal in six months where this is going to happen and then when that goal is gone it's like well why why am I getting up at 6:00 in the morning to do this I mean I like doing

13:32that but I got to have a reason yeah so I mean Atlant stayed retired probably be governor of Texas by now probably right so uh yeah but uh and I mean he was so beloved when he was doing the Liv strong foundation and the whole deal of trying to help people with cancer and you know his own struggle overcoming cancer it's just such a crazy story well and it really the the Meltdown was uh part of that omera rule uh it it works if if everyone has something to lose the problem was was um Floyd Landis you know he he got popped for the his victory in the 2006 tour to France for doping which he was and so he served his two years after a long struggle of denial and so forth and then he wanted to come back and he and and he couldn't get hired and then he went to Lance and said well you know can I be on the radio shack team and apparently Lance said no and so there he is standing there with nothing

14:28nothing to lose so that's when he went to the press and said you know I know where the bodies are buried and uh you know that's where it got bad remember when that happened and Lance H that press conference you know we like our story better than his story it's like wait stories he's got a story what just what happened and uh you know so uh and same thing with Tyler you know he had nothing left to lose so he wrote that book The Secret race here's what we did and uh that blew it all open yeah so how do you get into skepticism from there well I I was still teaching college at night while I was doing the bike racing stuff and uh then I I got burned out you know just the training and all that and decide okay I I can't do this forever so I went back and got my PhD in the history of Science and uh and then I started I was teaching at ocidental college and I was like okay

15:16I'm a college professor that's a great gig uh it's a good life uh but but then we started in in my garage skeptic magazine and the lecture series at Caltech on um science and pseudo science and Cults and science and religion and alternative medicine and quackery and all this stuff and and I thought that's an interesting Niche to have and and so that just got bigger and bigger in my first book why people believe where things came out in 97 and about that time ocidental College was going through a financial crisis and they were letting go their adjuncts which at the time I was not on a tene track I was a full-time adjunct and I could see the writing on the wall Okay this may not end up being a 10e track job and the skeptic thing was getting big and I got a big contract through my agent for my second books I thought okay I'm just going to go for it I'm going to be a

16:04full-time writer and you know it's a little risky but I had already done the risky thing of you know just dropping everything and doing the Race Across America stuff so I thought okay I can do it and this then became really my job I still teach one class at a semester at Chapman but my main job is writing books and running the society uh publishing the magazine skeptic and it's kind of a niche market of uh it's like my column in scientific American I cover the topics in there that aren't covered in the rest of the magazine you know like cancer quackery or like I'm working on one now on Charlie Sheen's uh quack cancer doctor his AIDS doctor I mean what's he he's got a quack cancer doctor okay so the cancer or Aids uh it's Aid sorry yeah uh he you know it's is his tiger blood and all that you know well he doesn't have tiger there is no Tiger Blood okay so he and he got HIV and so

16:55he immediately went on the drug cocktail which works you know this is a modern medicine that kind of just sort of SLI by without anybody making a big fuss about it you know huge teams of medical researchers and they figured out the right cocktail and then you adjust it for each person and you can you can't get rid of the HIV virus but you knock it down so much that it can't uh it doesn't cause the AIDS um symptoms you get pneumonia or that whatever and and so um so he did that but then much to my amazement he uh Bill Maher on his show couple weeks ago had this guy on this guy from Mexico who has this cure for uh AIDS and uh if you take this um the blood of an arthritic goat so a goat that has arthritis how they how this is determined I'm not sure and so allegedly Charlie went to Mexico and and did the the arthritic goat blood treatment and it cured his

17:54AIDS well none of this is true uh he stopped the drug cocktail he he went down there and stopped the normal drug cocktail for Aids HIV and it came roaring back of course if you don't keep taking the drugs the virus starts multiplying and it Roars back in your body the goat the goat blood didn't work and then he came home and went back on the drug cocktail and he's fine now so he went down there to actually do this yeah he went down there to do this well because he was probably told well he's probably scared I don't know uh but uh this I want to understand if there's already a drug cocktail that absolutely works why would you want to stick it works just to prevent the AIDS symptoms from coming on from getting the diseases you still have the HIV virus doesn't it knock it down to detectable level yeah that's correct and that's should be good enough well

18:40that's what Magic Johnson said that it doesn't even show up in his test right like if he gets tested right now he's HIV positive or negative right right that's right yeah even though they don't guarantee it just in case it's hiding in the nooks and crannies of your nervous system or wherever um so um yeah so that's you know that's the kind of thing that Scientific American wouldn't normally cover but we would cover right or conspiracy theories like the 911 truthers you know what about the Free Fall of the buildings and the puffs of smoke and the this and that you know some of these are empirical questions we can get at you know how that that normal science journals wouldn't cover that we cover so skeptic is kind of a niche market for you know Fringe claims Borderlands claims right you know like like Scientific American deals a lot with global climate change but they

19:26don't deal with the global warming deniers who are these people what are arguments so we would take and go okay here's their 10 arguments the arguments they have and then here's the answers of how we know global warming is real how do you know it's human cause how do we know these things right okay normal science journals don't have to deal with that they're already down the path and like okay what are we going to do about it and that sort of thing so that's kind of our specialty well it's an important resource because whether it's global warming or 911 truth or there there's so much confusion out there when it comes to trying to figure out what's real and what's not real someone sends you a link you're like what is this and it's a YouTube video you go to the YouTube you are being lied to you watch it you're like what the hell's going on what you don't know what's going on and then you

20:10you you watch it like global warming is just one of the many ones that uh that confuse the out of people and then you know then you find out that there's companies that actually have a vested interest in confusing people like have you ever seen that documentary merchants of doubt I'm in it oh that's right of course yes I'm in it yeah am I asking I've seen too many documentaries officially I for the beauty of that uh film made by Robbie canner who's now A friend of mine uh was very clever because um he Tracked Down the same scientists who were hired by the tobacco companies not just the same arguments you know planting a seed at doubt some of times the same people yeah you know paid by these front groups and they know how to do it to it's so theatrical the way they present their arguments it's one of the reasons why I've always hated those those television shows where you

20:59have uh you know a host and then you have the split window one person talking over them on this side and one person's on the left one person's on the right literally and figuratively they're yelling at each other and you never get anything done you never figure out anything but the person who's better at expressing that opinion in a real quick you know three or four minute sound bite of an interview they they get their argument across and that's what these merchants and doubt guys were doing that's right yep they got the sound bites uh the science is not all in uh you know the jury is still out what jury where yeah you know there it's almost like there's a science Zar that calls all the shots and if we can just find out what's going on there we're going to put us you know we're going to blow this whole that isn't how it works there's 10,000 climate scientists working in all

21:43these labs and and their findings converge to the same conclusion so for there to be conspiracy they'd all have to be meeting on the weekends going okay I'm going to say that the you know the parts per million of this particular gas is this what are you going to say this is not how it works it's a very competitive Enterprise if you want to make a name for yourself um and you're a young scientist you know just debunking one of these arguments about tree ring dator the ice cord dator would would be huge and they try uh you know it's like the people saying you know Einstein was wrong you know okay there's been a hundred years of scientists testing Einstein if he was wrong we we would know by now oh no they all you know you know they're all conspiring to cover the truth no that isn't how it works isn't there there's also this appeal or this this this for some reason reason people

22:30are drawn to this idea of being a noons person you know the non-nonsense person is like you believe in Al Gore you believe that you if you seen An Inconvenient Truth we talk and then but but I find that when I talk to these people that like really dismiss global climate change or dismiss a lot of people's concerns about those things they they haven't really researched it that much they're so definitive on their ideas but they haven't really researched it that much but they don't want to be a fool and that seems to be a lot of what the appeal to them to take this hard stance it's like they don't want to be one of those fools what are you hippie you buy into that nonsense you know yeah yeah it's it's partly that like uh so one of the appeals of conspiracy theories is you know we're going to blow the lid off the thing that and I'm not being fooled by the government I know

23:20the Bush Administration lied and and we're going to yeah so I mean that's one of the appeals of the 911 truth movement is that you know we know what really happened and and you know Bush lied okay well you know maybe he lied about this little thing or maybe it was misdirection or you bad information but the idea of orchestrating an entire event like 911 and coordinating the flying of the planes into the buildings and you know what did they do with the passengers and how did they get the people into the World Trade Center buildings to break open the drywall and plant the explosive devices without anybody noticing how many thousands of people would have to be involved you think the federal government could pull off something like that when they couldn't even do Watergate I mean here it's just a hotel Breakin I forgot to bring in a book for you damn it I I have

24:04a doctor he's sort of a doctor he's really a weed doctor he's a doctor that prescribes my medical marijuana I get headaches oh I'm getting one right now um anyway uh he gave me this book when I went to visit him and uh it was a book about Tesla technology that was used to take down the Twin Towers I don't know this one sitting in the weed doctor's office boy he's telling me about this technology that what what what have you ever seen that turns concrete into dust oh yes like well you know concrete it starts out as powder you're talking about millions of tons of of of of building that's compressed and falling down yeah I would imagine it' be a bunch of dust for a while thermite was the big thing that you know thermite will melt it okay so then there were tests done on the thermite and it doesn't burn hot enough to get through a whole huge beam okay well they have they can cut through an

24:57engine block with that stuff though right yeah but these beams are like you know the size of this tail they're huge but if they had a lot of thermite well but but so then they said well it's super thermite well it's like well where is this super thermite never heard of it well it's secret super secret super thermite part of the problem was some the pieces of evidence they were using were like the cuts the angular cuts on the beams well that was actually done after the the the buildings had collapsed so they were trying to clean it up they had to cut some of them down and so they were using these photos so there there's a lot of confusion okay but the thing is you don't need to know anything about thermite or Tesla technology we know that the planes hit the buildings you can see it on video you can see which floors they were at the angle of the Wings and so forth for

25:41that to have happened and explosive devices planted at the exact floors where they knew ahead of time which floors and what angle the pl okay right there stop full stop yeah that can't be well it's very very very unlikely super unlikely not to mention um as G Gordon Lindy once told me about Watergate the uh you know the incompetency problem and the and the people can't keep their mouth shut problem you know uh the more people you have involved the more they're going to screw up or chicken out or change their mind or then tell their friends and lovers and so forth that you know I know the guy that did and pretty soon they're on your show telling about what they saw how come no one's come out to say you know I was sitting there in my office and I saw these guys breaking through the the drywall and and putting these things inside the you know so I mean Someone

26:32Like Jesse Ventura thinks oh it was all done under the cover of a of uh uh fixing the elevators in the World Trade Center fixing the elevators I mean this would have had to G on for weeks and weeks and I don't know if Jessie ventur really believes that he says this stuff I think he's selling this conspiracy now I have there's a bunch of people that conspiracy becomes a business and like Alex Jones yeah he's a friend of mine he's out of his mind I know does he believe stuff or does he just say stuff just to see what comes out he believes a lot but he gets a lot of things right that's what's unfortunate the unfortunate thing about conspiracies is that it's not all cut and dry there was things like operation Northwoods where the government really did plan on orchestrating these artificial attacks arming Cuban friendlies to attack onano Bay they were going to blow up a

27:21jetliner and blame it on Cuba there were real actual conspiring or conspiracies that we can prove you know this is this is the problem with like the 9/11 truther or the extreme conspiracy theorists they're missing where the real action is you know all those third world dictators we were supporting in the 70s under kingers Nixon all real yeah this stuff happened and that's it's not as sexy as you know taking over the world or running the world economy right but it's it's real and it's effective alliver North I mean remember that I mean when when that was going on with the that's a consp iracy that's a real conspiracy There's real There's real ones you know and then there was a real one that was apparently being planned by Dick Cheney on the way out you know they were planning on doing something with Iran they were planning on some sort of false flag right but when people look at

28:11operation Northwoods and they look at that where it would have cost American lives they had a real conspiracy that President Kennedy vetoed that was actually signed by The Joint Chiefs of Staff that gets it gets pigs was a conspiracy yeah so there there have been real conspiracies so they look at 9/11 and they go this is the grand one is the big one right you know so how can we tell the difference between the real ones well okay how can well so there's certain criteria again the the grander the theory is the less likely it it is a real conspiracy like global domination running the world's economy these sorts of things well how about the the big Alex Jones one they want to cut the population down to like 500 million people worldwide yeah well that that could that could happen naturally if we just uh educated women made them economically empowered and had access to

28:59birth control you know that's the solution to the overpopulation problem do you really think that would work people still want babies well they do yes of course but the replacement level it there are a number of countries below the replacement level and we know what the factors are the things I just said you know just being econ being a prosperous democracy in which women have the franchise and they're economically empowered and educated and they have access to birth control the the Family Planning happens naturally you don't have to do the China One child rule you don't have to do that it happens naturally so if you're if you're pro-life so call pro-life and you're against abortion that and you want to reduce the amount of abortions just educate women give them power and give them choice and access to birth control and it happens naturally yeah that's a

29:40weird statistic isn't it that the more prosperous cities become the more the civilization becomes Advanced as far as like education and Technology you get less birth rate that's right so it's anti- malthusian malus was wrong and and uh and Paul erck with the population bomb wrong and there's still modern Neo malthusians that that are claiming this today you know the club of Rome the you know limits of growth and all this stuff no no no uh if you want to get a population lower just make the people super prosperous especially the women and it just happens naturally and the reason is because one reason people have so many babies in poor countries is because they're not likely to survive uh the B you know babies die and so you got to have lots of them to get your genes out there so to speak so it's a sort of a bi olical impulse and then also to take care of you when you're old you

30:31better you better have six or 10 just to make sure there's a couple left when you're old to support you you don't need to do any of that when you have a prosperous economy the effect though is is so scary as far as the overpopulation effect when we look at the the raw numbers from like 1970 versus 2016 worldwide it's not that long ago in our lifetime while I was alive the population is you know more than doubled and in the United States just in the United States and forget about poor countries forget about China forget about India you know yes cor correct so there's you know as the um population Pig Works its way through the python demographic python it's going to take a while to catch up so already country there's a number of countries that are below replacement level but what countries are below well Japan Sweden Russia uh I don't know there's at least

31:24a dozen in mostly northern European countries and that means but but their populations are still growing by the momentum of past decades but the current generation will have you know 1.9 children on average 2.1 is the replacement level and I forget how many countries 20s something countries are below 2.1 replacement level but it'll take till about 2050 before we see the topping off of the population growth and then start to go back down it's one reason you almost never see the curves after 20150 because if you're a pro- environmentalist or pro- anti-pop organization you don't want to show the good news from 2050 to 2100 but the UN two of the three un projections they have like a conservative middle and and and then um more radical projections and that by 2100 the modest middle one uh shows us back down to around probably six or seven billion from we'll hit a

32:16peak of 9 or 10 billion in 2050 back down to where we are now in 2100 and then by 2200 maybe one or two billion if if what yep it could that's down to one or two billion could happen just by if I mean there's so many variables it's hard to predict but that could happen if everybody is prosperous particularly Africa so one of the things the Gates Foundation is trying to do is just solve certain basic simple problems and and the UN is trying to you know get rid of these corrupt governments that's what's holding them back there's enough food to feed s billion people it's the distribution that's the problem the Green Revolution Norman Boro and the Green Revolution so you know we have the technology to do it GMOs are good for feeding poor people um so but it's the corrupt dictatorships that prevent the distribution of the food and resources and keeps the population from being

33:07prosperous so they have more children so that in my opinion that's the long-term solution so there's two things there one there's the conspiracy by the elites to hide the fact that we're going to get down to two billion people by 2100 we got that well it's the environmentalists oh that okay yeah they're hiding it they conspiring we don't know for sure this is going to happen these are projections I'm joking obviously but then there's also the food distribution uh conversation which is a very fascinating one you know I had these guys on from uh the documentary cow spacy which is well- intended but apparently got a bunch of stuff wrong about how many acres it takes to have a cow you know graze like how much how what are the requirements and what you can do with veganism versus what it was essentially they were really heavily biased in promoting a vegan

33:55lifestyle which is their choice you know they can do that but that's the big argument today it's like do we have enough land do we have enough resources to feed all the people my conversation has always been like okay are we doing it right now yes we're all eating right especially the United States well you know we we are running out of land we are running out of food we are running out of this the sky is falling but are okay are we doing it right now are we we're feeding ourselves right now we are right we are really easily in fact no problem we have a surplus not not to say that a lot of the methods we're using aren't disgusting like factory farming horrible and and then a lot of laws to protect them are disgusting too like the a gag laws those are vile right but why can't we keep doing it and then then the argument kind of falls apart well we we're GNA we're

34:46going to run out of uh stuff well okay so in the long run we want to get off factory farming it is a pretty disgusting haveit and the poly Farms you know the happy I call them the Happy Farms you know where every Sal every cow has a name and there's the Happy Chicken running around until he gets killed that yeah he has a great life until that last day so yeah those kinds of farms cannot support 7 billion people right so in the long run we have to get the numbers down somewhat and also uh the technology of synthetic meat uh which is getting there it's you know I think we're not 5 years away I think you know we're we're maybe a couple decades away you don't think it's possible to get a significant number of the people in this country to go vegan no I don't think that's going to happen in the moral Arc I have a chapter on animal rights in which I show that the numbers are still in single

35:34digits uh even with all the environmental movement and all the you know vegetarian Pro vegetarian it's still less than 10% it's more like six or s% of the population of the population in the United States and so I like the reducetarian movement it's a new word reduc atarian let's just you know meatless Mondays just just cut it down you know just and try to you know if you shop at Whole Foods you know get the Happy Farm meat you know that sort of thing um you know well obviously if you can afford whole food I know it's not okay so in the long run you know markets will drive down prices of say synthetic meat right now you know a little Patty made out of stem cells is you know thousand yeah but you know that of course that's what computers were in the' 40s right and so now look uh and this will happen but not in 5 years or 10 years and so the idea of like well in

36:25the meantime let's get everybody to go vegan this is also isn't going to happen why do you why don't you think it's going to happen uh I think first of all we we have a habit of eating meat it tastes great most people like it uh you you can get your protein from other sources I don't think that's a viable argument anymore but but most people they just like it and it's culturally has still has a lot of momentum I think it's one thing to get people to care about global warming or you let's drive electric cars whatever you don't have to give up something that that that you really really like but food people really like their meat and uh I I I would be okay if you know if everybody went that way but I'm not quite there yet myself I still have meat now and then but I I've I've reduced it considerably compared to before well it's the ethical considerations are the

37:11reason why people think that it's a good way to go and not not necessarily protein wise or all I mean there's a there's a there's a bunch of people that argue that the it's very difficult to get the same amount of protein but then there's also people that argue that you really don't need the amount of protein that most people consume anyway right you know well you can try to change Behavior okay you nudge people with incentives but why not also go the path of the technological solutions synthetic meat you know people are working on this there are companies doing it you know funded by uh you know uh Venture capitalists you know Google one of the Google X projects is to do this again I think it's you know it's maybe it's like self-driving cars you know it's just it's going to take a few decades before everybody is there right but but we're I'm optimistic because we're moving in

37:58that direction yeah I think that there's a real possibility of headless animals that we've engineered in labs and that's where we get our food from but will will will it be as good for you will it taste as good well that that in principle that should just be a scientific question right we know what what's in meat okay so just put it in there in your synthetic meat just design it with your designer jeans yeah I I I guess I mean but there's a big difference between cows that eat certain diets versus cows that eat you know the grass-fed cow versus even healthwise as far as the uh there was a study that was released recently showing the benefits of grass-fed uh beef versus cornfed beef just healthwise yep yep so you know I don't know we'll see because I'm I'm curious I mean if they do create synthetic meat will it have the same properties I I would imagine you can

38:50even build in marbling just you put fat cells in there to make it juicy or something and maybe that won't be as healthy but maybe you think well I don't care yeah but I would be you know I mean there's a difference between the way it tastes like a marble like a fat from a grass-fed cow versus a fat from a cornfed cow versus a fat from a lab built cow it's going to be yeah it's also you know just habit of what you used to I love red meat but I have almost never eat it anymore I really don't miss it uh you just kind of get into the pattern of changing your diet and it I think I think we could get there I just don't think you know that that's the only Avenue to solve the factory farming problem I think that lowering the population synthetic meat changing Behavior just come at it from a bunch of different angles um that's kind of the case with every problem right

39:38absolutely yeah so I call that I call it in the moral Arc I call that protop Solutions Uh Kevin Kelly the founder Wired Magazine used this term protopia small changes tiny little bit of progress It's like last year's nav system uh and this year's nav system in your car this one's slightly better it has this little feature and this little you know and and over many years and decades all of a sudden you've got a super smart car yeah uh versus the jalopies of the ' 50s Not a flying car you don't go from you know the jalape to the flying car in one year you go you know to what we have now incrementally and that's true in all Technologies you know it's like the Mac just keeps you know I've been buying Mac for you know 25 years what are it's the late 80s and so 30 and uh it's the same I pay the same price you know you got 2400 bucks you get pretty much the same double the

40:23computer for the same price every three years yeah and and that's what most Technologies go through yeah well I think that's one of the cool things about following it you know one of the things it's so fascinating to people about following technology is like oo Samsung has the new Galaxy S9 and it's waterproof and it can you could show the moon you know like these things are they're they're so interesting to see where this Innovation is going and when the Innovation is you know when it's just things like I mean essentially I've made the argument that if you leave cell phones alone if everyone's that's making cell phones right now said let's just make the same cell phone for ever we're good you know you have an iPhone 6s leave it there we don't need any more Innovation let's use that for for other things I mean we'd probably be pretty happy we we'd be all right but you know

41:08that's not how companies work no but we're we're fascinated by Innovation we actually I'm a little mad at Apple right now because the new OS system I lost half my music I don't know where it went and I haven't taken the time to figure out how to get it back and what do you mean oh it's not on your phone anymore it's in the cloud they're encouraging use of the cloud yeah yeah you could most the same way like guys the OS whatever was great just okay but that that doesn't there is a lot of nonsense that they do when they update things but that's also because they're trying to build in new features and they're planning several steps ahead for the future they want everything to be in the cloud which is kind of weird another thing electric cars I think you know that you know you go to the Peterson car museum here uh and you see electric cars from 1920s what happened another

41:53conspiracy kind of you know oil companies tire companies see the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car absolutely yeah it's like we should have we should be there now we should have been there decades ago you how about the fact that Henry Ford's first car the fenders were made out of hemp and you get with a H I didn't know that you never seen it no I want to show you a video then because it's really fascinating and uh pull up Henry Ford first car hemp um they used hemp fibers to uh but by the way it was legal back then you know wasn't illegal until they came up with a thing called a decorticator which would allowed them to effectively process hemp fiber that's when William Randol H started his propaganda against hemp oh was that right yeah that's how marijuana became illegal it had nothing to do with the drug the psychoactive aspect of it it had to do with the the the textiles and

42:41using it as paper and using it as a commodity that's when it became illegal and it was all Hurst really off Hurst was a really yeah so this car is actually made out of hemp oh my God the fenders and Lotus did one recently where they had an exposed Hood but what's interesting thing about this well you see it like Henry Ford I don't it's this video but he hit it yeah he hit it with a hammer oh wow I mean incredibly durable hemp is an amazing amazing plant I don't know if you've ever picked up a Hemp stock but it's uh incredibly hard but really light like very very different than any other wood like it's hard like a walnut but it's light like a balsa wood it's very very strange it's a very unusual car pull up the Lotus cuz it was real recent like last year I would not do that to my car exactly it would B like crazy it's lighter and stronger than steel which is

43:31insane right well you know the whole thing with how to drugs become illegal that's a kind of a consp you know sort of a conspiracy stuff hemp is a real conspiracy because hemp is non psychoactive the fact that it's still illegal I mean they're just now starting to grow It in America we sell hemp my company on it sells hemp protein which is legal non psychoactive doesn't have any THC in it we had to buy it from Canada really yeah see this right here this is the new um Lotus that is the entire roof if they show it see if you can find a picture where they where they show the actual car itself Jamie but it's uh these all these panels are made out of hemp oh my gosh and look how like it's insanely light yeah but if you show the actual car itself Jamie you can see maybe go to the front the the beginning of the video you can see the actual hood of the car it's exposed okay so they

44:23made they essentially made a giant percentage of the car out of hemp including the seats that looks that looks lighter than carbon fiber yes hey I wonder if anyone's made a hemp bicycle that's a good question cuz that you know that's the whole thing about carbon fiber is so lightweight but strong so if what you're saying about hemp is true there should be hemp bikes yeah and a lot of other light things like bows and things along those lines I think that uh that's a real conspiracy you know that's a conspiracy back I mean there's a reason why you know Orson Wells made that movie Citizen Kane about William Randolph Hurst he's an insanely insanely powerful influential man who didn't really use that influence in the best way for society did it to his he had paper mills and he didn't want to convert his paper into hemp paper hemp paper was far superior but it would have

45:08cost him millions of dollars cuz he had you know forests right and so Popular Science magazine back then see if you could find this color it was uh hemp the new billion dooll crop really oh bicycle from hemp there you go oh wow it's already been done that's a good looking bike okay yeah there you go I have a carbon fiber bike Maybe to start looking at that yeah I don't I don't know where you would buy one of those um why is there no THC in the hemp in the it's only in the Le only female plant it's in the in the flower it's in the flower in the buds um that's uh the female is the one you get high off of the male it's it's but you what you want is the stock of it you're not you're not looking for the flowers so when you're uh using it to make things but uh the seeds but hemp if you it's on the cover of the uh of Popular Science from like way back then

45:58that looks like about 1930s or 40s yeah well I believe it was I want to say 30 it was 33 or something like that or 35 when it was made illegal and uh they made it illegal and they were calling it marijuana which is really interesting which is a slang for a Mexican wild tobacco it's not even cannabis so when they were making marijuana illegal they didn't even know that they were making hemp illegal it was very tricky the way they did it they they made these articles they printed all these articles about Mexicans and blacks raping white women because they were high on this new drug that's also what funded re for madness I'm sure you've seen see all those those are real conspiracies abely and that's people that had a vested financial interest in making something illegal a commodity it's so crazy because the fact that marijuana or the cannabis plant is so versal it does so

46:51many different things they figured out a way to attack one aspect of it and demonize the entire and then eliminate competition right you know CU it makes a far superior paper far superior cloth it's like incredibly durable like the paper if you ever had hemp paper in front of you it feels like a regular piece of paper but it's really hard to tear huh it's really interesting stuff make money out of that exactly well what do they make money out of now well it's it's a cotton fiber yeah yeah so well and there's there was a documentary on about the uh public transportation system here in La that was quite extensive in the 30s with the you know electric car electric trolleys and all this stuff and they all got ripped out and torn down and the cars were burned and so on just because the automobile industry and the oil industry wanted it you know it's like La should

47:37be a car the entire country should be a car culture rather than a public transportation culture my wife's from Cologne Germany public transportation in Europe is fantastic you really don't need a car for except for rare occasions here when she moved here to be with me it's like uh got to have a car you can't get anywhere yeah and uh again that's kind of a conspiracy yeah and that's those are the kinds of things we should be focusing on and talking about right I think are the War on Drugs I mean I don't know you call it a conspiracy but you know it's over it's been over you know for decades what well it's it's also so blatant that it's only the war on some drugs yes it's not like we're trying to keep everyone sober we're just going to sell sanctioned drugs that have tax codes you know and that's that's really what the war is on the drugs that you can't control and tax

48:26it's so blatant and obvious right why not treat it like an industry like any alcohol industry sure absolutely like alcohol I mean alcohol is an unbelievably devastating drug and readily available almost everywhere we've got enough in that back room to kill your if you want to kill yourself you can drink right now while this show is going on we can with in the next hour you'll be dead Bo is that amazing yeah that's amazing andal but no one cares like everybody would go wow Michael Shermer drank himself to death a poor guy you know what I mean it's like oh man he did drugs and he had an OD wow that's so tragic drugs are awful right mean well they're everywhere every street you go down you pass by liquor stores and restaurants that it's all just molecules in your brain in your body uh so what's the difference yeah well there's un there's absolutely real

49:15legitimate conspiracies and I do agree with you that those are the ones to focus on but they're not sexy right sexy ones are UFOs right Bigfoot that kind of stuff y global domination yes I did this show for the Sci-Fi channel uh called Joe Rogan questions everything remember that yes yeah I went around and I talked to uh experts Believers non-believers scientists all these different people about a bunch of different subjects and boy my desire to do that show before I started doing it was very high and my desire to completely avoid any any of that nonsense towards the end of the show was it was almost like I couldn't do it anymore like I cuz I already recognized what was going on in in so many of these cases that it was like this is just a bunch of people that want to believe they have these ideas in their head and they want to chase these ideas down whether it's Bigfoot or whether it's

50:08UFOs and they're not being objective even remotely the the vast majority of the people that are a part of the movement or the community that like researches ghosts or researches Bigfoot or researches nice people they're not but the way they're looking at it is is the same the same whether it's Bigfoot or chem trails or UFOs or they they're not they're not being objective they're going well maybe this what about that well have we considered this nope they're just going we know the evidence is out there the government has been hiding extraterrestrial life in this country like where where where's the government where's where's the government doing this where's the evidence we know from surveys that if you tick the box that you believe in aliens or whatever you'll tick all the other boxes Psy exactly the whole thing so there's a certain personality that gravitates toward those kinds of of

50:57beliefs yeah and then and then buys the whole thing even when they're Contra they contradict each other like people that were uh that believe that princess die was murdered also are more inclined to say she faked her death and is still alive somewhere she's hanging out with Tupac yeah they can't both be true yeah uh but again there's so with this there's some cognitive dissonance that there we want a balance between the size of the event and the size of the cause I think uh you know the Holocaust one of the worst thing that's ever happened worst genocide ever uh conducted by one of the worst regime political regimes in human history so there's kind of a balance there right but if you have like JFK you know the leader of the Free World you know powerful articulate handsome and so on and he's brought down by who Lee Harvey Oswald some lone nut this loser you know there's a a a so you

51:43got to pile on the you know the the mafia and the C you think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone yeah I do absolutely absolutely no question why do you think that well first of all there's a ton of evidence that he he did do it and most of the jfa conspiracy people also agree he was involved he that he was one of the shooters that's one that I'm they think there's more than one shooter but so we have lots of evidence that he did it you know we have his rifle we we have the paper trail of when he bought the rifle his fingerprints are on the rifle that was found in the right but weren't the fingerprints found several days after they found the rifle right they had it right away did they there's a lot of stuff with that also when you go to conspiracy though that's really slippery well okay so here's one of the things that happens the moment something takes on great significance

52:27our mind focuses on little anomalies like why was there that guy in D Plaza with the umbrella you know it's a sunny day it's not going to rain so okay so he was out there protesting you decades later they've tracked this guy down he was called the umbrella man it's like the cigarette smoking man on X Files like o who is the umbrella man and that the umbrella must have been a gun and so forth and he said no this is a thing left over from World War II Chamberlain and his umbrella and he sold out to Hitler and that so the umbrella became a protest against government whatever and so he was protesting Kennedy with his umbrella and uh so that that's but so that's a typical thing who cares if somebody has an umbrella or not sunny day whatever that seems like a silly thing to con but the moment that something big happens okay what is the meaning of that well

53:12I've never even heard of that umbrella guy but I've I've re did you ever read David lifton's book uh best evidence that's pretty fascinating book no but but Vincent bosi he dressed all of those claims his last one of his last books was um uh was no that was Gerald pner okay also a good book yeah bil's book it was like restoring history or something like that it's a big massive thing he did a shorter version and uh but he lined up all those claims you know like one of them was you know that how did oswal get a job at The Book Depository building that was right on the parade route he's got a turn right in front of it there's Kennedy he must have known he was planted there by operatives that knew this was no so I think it was pner who track Tracked Down uh when the White House determined that Kennedy was even going to go to Dallas and then you know months later the parade route is

54:01determined just you know just before he went and Oswell had that job there months before it was just pure chance Randomness so much of human history turns on random events it's like the assassination of fron Ferdinand that triggered the first world war this was a conspiracy there were seven operatives of the blackand which was this Serbian nationalist organization and they wanted to assassinate the arch Duke franford okay so and we know what you know they went to this house to get the weapon and that house to get the grenade and the rifle and they you know you stand on this corner I'm going to be over there and this is typically how it goes a couple of them chickened out somebody didn't they went to the house the person wasn't there to give them their weapon so there's like three of them left and then one of them threw the hand grenade and bounced off the car and went under

54:46another car and damaged that car but not the arch stk's car and then and so the whole thing was bungled and and off he went and uh and he gave a spe Beach and then he decided to go back to the hospital to visit the people that were hurt in the pre in the trailing car and they they took the parade route back backwards on the course and there's this guy prps sitting there on the curb despondent like well that was a screw up and here comes the arch Duke bam well it was a little more complicated than that in fact the car stalled out because the cars back then were really bad at going in reverse right so he was trying to put the car in reverse the driver of the car is putting in Reverse it was convertible right he was putting it in reverse the car stalled out and at that moment a guy was coming out of a store or a restaurant where he had a sandwich cuz they had something to eat after it was

55:35over literally walked out he was right there and shot him and shot his wife so that's typically how conspiracy can happen that definitely can happen and obviously if Oswald had that job you know long in advance it shows before they ever planned that out it showed that there's a lot of Randomness involved Lincoln assassination that that was a conspiracy they were going to Assassin the vice pres president vice president secretary of state Secretary of War and they had all the guys going to do this and and they all screwed up the only one that that succeeded was booth and but we knew that there was a conspiracy within hours and then within days they got the whole thing where are the people that did this to Kennedy or 911 who where are the other operatives who is it who did it well did wasn't there uh some deathbed confessions from what was his name hunt was that that

56:23industrialist that guy that there photos of him that he arrested at the scene of the crime you remember the the hobos that were arrested that were behind the grassy null I mean there was so many people that called that said that they had heard shots from the grassy null there's more than one well that's that's possible because there was an echoing effect right if you go to De Plaza it's surprisingly small and our imagination and you know there's a museum now on the sixth floor of the book you can look right out the window and you can see the X on the street first shot second shot and it's Howard hunt oh yeah Howard hunt yeah confessions of Howard hunt you that he had said that on his deathbed he was a CIA spy and on his deathbed he obviously conict convicted Watergate conspirator uh and he said that he was involved in the assassination he said that uh on his

57:09deathbed he talked about how he's an active participant yes okay well then I don't know I don't know this particular one why would you why would you like be so quick to think that more people weren't involved killing I was open to the possibility I mean we did this issue of skeptic you know on the 50 years later um what what closed well what closed it was that bookcase closed and then just one book well and then Bol 's book you know just just I started reading you know just here's the claim here's the explanation here's hundreds of them did they cover hunt I don't I don't remember probably how do they cover the fact that the the magic bullet theory was concocted because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb under the overpass you know that right yeah but you know Nova did a whole 2hour special on the Magic Bullet and you know seats were not lined

57:56up they're like this so it didn't have to make a right turn left turn kind of thing yeah that's I mean look I've I hunt and I shoot guns and bullets do weird things when they hit things they Ricochet off stuff and they go left and they go right they go all over the place it's you the idea that you're going to uh act accurately determine when someone shoots someone and hits bone where that bullet's going to go next is crazy they they do weird things right you know they come out of people's heads sometimes you shoot someone in the front and it'll come out the top of their head doesn't make any sense right um but what doesn't make sense more than that is the pristine condition of that bullet after shattering bone well it wasn't ostine it was squished it was and and compared to a bullet that's hit bone there's like but they've shot I'm pretty sure it was the Nova one that shot

58:43through the gel and then also Shone when they sh shot bone it was shattered they've never been able to recreate the get a bullet to look like that after it shattered bone never when the bullet hit Connelly it broke more than one bone in his body broke three different bones I believe and dislodged or broke his wrist like there's the bullet look at it that's not that damag but if you look at it it's it's bulging we have a picture of it here by the way if there it is there it is so it it is compressed nothing man but if you shoot a bullet into water it looks like that have you ever shot a bullet into water uh no I haven't done that they don't look when the bullet is coming out and it's you know there's the the the gunpowder goes off and it's flying out right going to have some Distortion and when a bullet shoots into a pillow or it shoots into anything you're going to have some

59:32Distortion because there just a sheer force and velocity of that bullet but when you shatter bone when they all get bent up and distorted they don't get like that that's not something that hit anything in my opinion I think that if that and not only that the way they found it on the gurnie on connell's gurnie when he was in the hospital oh look we found the bullet here it is it's ridiculous that smacks of conspiracy that buet bullet more than anything now I'm not saying that I know what happened but I know that the reason why they came up with the fact that one bullet did the damage not just in Kennedy but also in Connelly was because they had an account for that bullet that hit the underpass it hit the underpass the Ricochet it hit some guy and that guy went to the hospital they found the Bullet Hole in the uh the granite of the uh the the cstone so they had to account for that

60:20and that's why they came up with it also was arand Spectre was one of the guys who came up with that theory it was a notorious scumbag you know he's on the Watergate commission you know right there's a lot of funkiness is what I'm saying and I'm not I have been in the past inclined to gravitate towards some pretty ridiculous conspiracies but that bullet is anybody that knows anything about hunting or guns or any any person that I know that I've talked to like what do you is this shot anything everyone says no everyone says it hasn't hit bone right one thing to remember um is that in all investigations or fields of inquiry there's always an a residue of unexplained anomalies mhm that any the physics theory Evolution whatever that you know there's always yeah but how do you explain this one little weird thing here that doesn't really get accounted for by your explanation over

61:09here and the answer is I don't know right uh no Theory explains everything but if you have an alternative Theory you have to explain all the stuff over here that the mainstream Theory explains and the anomalies if you want to you know be taken seriously and usually the focus on the anomalies is to the exclusion of all the other stuff that is nicely explained by the mainstream Theory so again Lan assassin explains a lot not everything so what do you do with the anomalies nothing you don't have to do anything with them I mean that is it's okay to say okay that's weird uh let's keep investigating but to to then make the leap well we know there was a second shooter no we just know there's anomaly we definitely don't know there was a second shooter there's no evidence whatsoever that we can say look here we know for a fact there was a second shooter we don't there's nothing

61:54right but we we also don't know that one bullet did all that damage and the only reason why we believe that one bullet did all that damage is because that was what was presented and that they had this one bullet that they said that they found in Connelly's gurnie that caused all this damage that seems rather unlikely yeah very very unlikely in fact the other thing we uh let's see we had the the number of people that heard three shots I don't whenever you say the number of people like God man I just don't buy witness testimony in a murder like that it sounds so crazy that's good well that's right because it's not reliable well not only that there's so much chaos when you're there and the president gets shot bang bang everybody's adrenaline's flying they're running around I heard a hundred shots you know you're going to get outliers you're going to get people that are C

62:44you're going to get some people that have served maybe in the military and are used to like chaotic events that can recall it clearly and soberly you're going to get a few of those but good luck sifting through all that right I witnessed evidences like that's one of the things that drives me crazy about uh 911 when people are really into the 911 story they say people heard explosions in the buildings this guy said that he saw this and he saw they don't know what the they saw these giant buildings are falling down everybody's freaking out y I saw I I tell the story once I saw um a squirrel in the woods once and I thought it was a wolf for like two seconds like I was in Canada and I saw I said what a squirrel what's wrong with me you know like I was wored about wolves so I thought I saw for like I mean I mean legit Solid 2 seconds I thought this squirrel was a wolf

63:34so I don't buy the eyewitness stuff but I also don't buy these people that are trying to like neatly like Case Closed not really no no there's a lot of weird with that Kennedy assassination thing there's also a lot of people that were mad at him there's absolutely look he want every president has enemies he would like he had a lot I mean Kennedy was a very volatile human being more than Obama today oh yeah I think so I think what Kennedy was trying to do as far as close the Federal Reserve he wanted to get rid of uh the CIA he wanted to do a lot he was opposed to Secret Service or secret societies I mean that that massive speech that he did about secret societies he was a very fascinating guy in a lot of ways and you know flawed in many as well and I'm sure if he was a president today he would be involved in probably he would be like one of the most scandalous presidents of all time

64:26yes but but I'm I'm not buying this I mean I I definitely don't think that Lee Harvey Oswell was an innocent guy it seems pretty obvious that he was involved in a lot of totally sh and remember he had tried to assassinate General Walker just in April before that and and failed and you know we I just don't think that he was by himself I just don't I don't think I just really don't think that he was the only one involved in that it just and also the way a lone assassin could operate that that is the likeliest scenario in a free Society you can disappear into the nooks and crannies uh of big cities and no one will ever notice you it's like the 9/11 up you know Pilots that were training to to take off but not ever learn to land why didn't we notice that well you know we weren't looking for that there too many things going on yeah I mean after the fact it's so easy to be an armchair

65:15quarterback and go you know I'll tell you what they would have known they should have known well after Pearl Harbor there were conspiracy theories that Roosevelt either knew either orchestrated or knew it would happen let it happened to squelch the American firsters movement which was supported by um Lindberg and and and he promised Churchill you know support but he can only do so much the Destroyers and all that you know we need to have and then something happens okay so it looks like oh he must have been involved because he is then able to act and get America into the second world war yeah but usually politicians act in response to something now's my opportunity to take advantage of this thing that happened to get my way all politicians do that it doesn't mean they're conspiring to make the thing happen to get their way well I don't think the argument was that he was

66:02conspiring the argument was that he knew and then pulled out some of the more major warships so that they the attack it's like the the August 9th 2001 Memo from condalisa Rice Osama Bin Laden to attack us soil right okay what about that you know clearly Bush KN must have known and you know okay what what we're forgetting is the the tens of thousands of pieces of Intel that come in every day this could happen this and after the fact you go back and go oh look there's the one we should have known yeah same thing with Pearl Harbor you know Japanese might attack in Hawaii yeah but they might attack in the Philippines they might attack Alaska they may attack you know and so on and so on which is the right one that we're supposed to then focus our resources on you don't know until it happens then you go back and go you're fired because you should have acted on that memo well

66:50but that's problem I think you would have to be an expert in code as well you'd have to be an expert to be able understand what they had what they had intercepted what codes they had intercepted and what information they actually had back then it's it's again one of those things that after the fact it's very easy to draw conclusions saying this had to be a conspiracy I mean I think even the History Channel had some where they were saying that they knew that the attack was going to happen they let it happen so that they could get into World War II right that's a well that was a conspiracy theory at the time and there was a congressional investigation so the equivalent of the Warren report about that and concluded know that there was no conspiracy on the part of the US government or any Administration to you know that should be held responsible I mean a few people

67:34I think were fired for not having the planes in the right place or something like that but uh but again that's just and then the other thing we had the other psychological effect is that we tend to when you're on the outside you tend to see big organizations as more powerful than they really are big corporations CEOs big government agencies and the and administrators that run them from the outside it looks like I know they have a lot of power and they can do a lot of things but when you when you get the job then you find out oh I there's a lot of things I can't do mhm and uh here's you know another one of these conspiracy theories that might be true when you get elected president they take you in the back room and they go okay here here's what's actually going on at GMO here's what's actually going on in Iraq no one knows but you can't pull the troops out you can't close the

68:15base you can't oh well I said I was going to do that yeah don't worry about it they all say that that you can't do it all right you know I think there's a lot of that that goes on that you don't find out that we just don't know maybe later it's all speculation but I think when you when you're dealing with something like these these massive Global events after they occur every people are always trying to do some sort of investigative reporting they're trying to figure it out they're trying to go back over the pieces and and and connect things that make sense and the problem is you get confirmation bias on both sides you get confirmation bias where people are trying to show very clearly that there was no conspiracy whatsoever and then you get people that trying to see conspiracy and everything and I think with a lot of these stories a lot of these like major events like

68:57whether it's JFK's assassination or you know many other ones there's there's a lot of weirdness to them that make it real hard to wrap up nice and tight and when people can't wrap them up nice and tight they get very uneasy Y and it's it's okay to just say I don't know it could be a conspiracy maybe not let's just you know keep an open mind you don't have to conspire you don't have to construct a whole another worldview of operatives and agents and plots you can just say that's a weird thing exactly and I think it's also very important that we recognize that there have been conspiracies before like 911 by itself is a conspiracy that's right 19 members of ALC pling flly planes in the building that's a conspiracy they conspired yeah and that's one that's one group that we don't know we also know about like we said operation Northwoods and there's been some false flag events that

69:45happened I mean the Gulf of tonan that's another one there's there's been some lies you know we know that so it makes the whole thing like really weird but this is I mean these are we're talking about actual real events as opposed to like psychics or tarot card readers or you know my wife's friend went to a psychic the other day and I had to listen to this nonsense they were talking to me about this psychic thing and oh you know we went and she knew everything and she it was so amazing and she was asking me about my aunt and how could she have known I'm like oh Christ I first I wish I was there I wish I was there to see what kind of questions she asked and how you answered yeah because usually the they they tell the psychics things that get fed back later well they they have these leading questions and then you give them partial answers and then they fish for more and

70:33then before you know it they're you know you're all you're filling in the blanks together and they want to believe you know and a lot of times there's like some weird social aspect to it like handholding or something like that which like this an intimacy thing where you don't you don't want to be confrontational with this person and so you sort of kind of help them yeah you're both in each other's space cuz you're only like 2 feet away from each other it's odd there's a lot of oddness and a lot of it's a real Psycho Drama yeah I had a friend who worked the Psychic Friends Network line back in the 90s uh when Deon Warwick owned that company and uh he's he was a magician that you know couldn't quite make a you know good decent living doing magic stuff so he did this on the side and it became fairly lucrative so he told me you know he did operated from home and

71:19you just have another phone line and they send you the calls and you get I think he got 60 cents on the minute and the company got you know was 3.95 a minute and he got 60 cents on the minute but they rewarded you the longer you keep them on the the subjects on the line the more higher percentage you get of each minute and so he would do this by you know working through different categories and mostly people call it night and weekends they're lonely need somebody to talk to you know love Health money career especially love relationships you know jobs your boss you know so people would just Yu yak yak yak and and then he got pretty good sort of like the analogy I make is like with Dr Lura Callin talk show you know she's has a rich database of problems that people have why they call her and you know every so every call she knows within 10 seconds oh it's problem number

72:05seven it's number 16 you're the you the one with the guy and the you and you you just hone right in on it so these psychics they have a a deep database of human psychology I like how you connected Dr Laura to it well she was you know she used used to listen to that show you find similarities absolutely not not that she's running a psychic scam not at all but that but that the psych there's only so many variations on of human psychology and human nature what do people care the most about relationships you know love Health money career so you just work your way through those four and then people just open up and pour stuff out take a few notes and then like 45 minutes later well let's talk about your you know your Uncle Bob my Uncle Bob how could he have known about Uncle well you told him half an hour ago so people forget that right so if you record them you videotape them or tape

72:53record them it's very lightning um I did a a show with John stasel when he was with ABC 2020 on on John um on James Van prog and they got they didn't tell van prog I was involved but they taped him all day uh bringing you know people in to do readings and cameras and set up and stuff like this and when you sit there with a counter like how many times has he asked this question or say these things and it's just hundreds and so his hit rate was maybe less than 10% but but they only remembered that the you know the handful of the 10% and forgot the hundreds of names he would throw out and comments he would make and so there's a confirmation bias there's a you know a high dat a high data rate you're just pouring stuff out and then people pick out the ones that they remember and then we'd catch him cheating once in a while like you know well let's take a break everybody

73:44break then you leave the camera rolling and then he starts chatting with people you know so who who you here for oh my aunt she passed over oh okay yeah and then like half an hour later I'd like to come to this one woman here uh now don't tell me who who you're here for but I'm getting I see a woman on your over your left shoulder I don't want to say sister I'm mother is it an ant oh my God yeah and and it looks you know so it's edited and the way it looks you know like they they're really getting something but when you when you really see it in operation you can see the whole thing unfolds completely as a Psycho Drama we had this guy on the Sci-Fi show his name is banich he's a oh I know banich I know he's great fantastic because he's a magician and he does those psychic reading things but he'll tell you right away this is a trick I am really good at it I am not a

74:35psychic I have no psychic ability whatsoever but I can't tell you how I'm doing this but I know how to do this right and he was bending spoons like doing all this craziness and you know did card tricks all kinds of crazy stuff where you go this is insane how is this possible but he was really adamant about letting you know like these people that are psychics that are telling you about your future your past they're all con people they're all they're doing terrible things they're trying to pretend that your dead relatives are communicating with you from the great beyond they're giving you the sense of hope but they're all scammers and you know having a guy like that who's very skilled at that style of you know I think he calls it he's a mentalist I think he's a mentalist right yeah it's it's amazing to watch though God he's so good at it B of the best yeah but he's

75:26also one of the he's sort of one of the leaders of the skeptical movement which is ethical magic yes well he's an Entertainer and he's not doing anything horrible you know he's not ripping anybody off and he's really adamant about it so I I love him I love what he's doing yep yeah I was on a cruise with him once one of these cruise ship things with other Skeptics and uh so he did some of these mentalism stuff and he he told me how he did one of them now he's he's pretty good about not telling the truths but I really pressed him on this particular thing where he would touch somebody like on the shoulder here and then you're blindfolded and then and then you would say I felt like you touched me on the same you know the left shoulder or the right and he had a whole sequence of these things where the other person was picking up on the Queue of where he was being touched anyway I was

76:09just stunned by this it's like how is he doing this I know he's not really psychic you know but and then he told me how he did it I'm like oh oh that is so good and it's so simple but you can't tell us uh but and that's really probably the best reason why you don't want to know how The Magicians do it cuz it's almost always super simple and like oh I should have seen that well pen and Teller was pen Gillette teller really doesn't talk that much but there was uh an old show that was on television in Australia or radio I think it was on radio or television I don't remember but there was this trick that they did um and it was the way that Penn like God damn it I'm trying to I'm struggling to remember how exactly it worked but it was this woman who could uh she she could tell the future or she could she could some sort of psychic ability and Pen explained it and the way he explained it

77:09he didn't want to explain it like they they did it on the r is for Radio Lab the Radio Lab podcast and they explained it on their web I'm doing a terrible job explaining this but when you hear the explanation I won't give it out cuz I don't want to ruin it for anybody who hasn't heard it before but when you hear the explanation you go oh God yeah that's it of course oh you but but having that the ability to sneaky trick people like that boy you can make a lot of money if you're an unethical person and you could fool a lot of people and you know but like one of the examples I use you know pen and Teller do the cups and balls but they use clear plastic cups so you can see where the ball is and how it's being done but you still you still get fooled yes because the power of the you know the sort of you know following his gaze or following the movement of the hand

77:58and and this and that it's it's done so well that you still miss it even though with a clear plastic with so this is a good example where even knowing the trick you might still be fooled what is it about people that want to find is it is it something about the search for human knowledge like the the the thing that's always inside of people where they're trying to find out where is the food where's the enemy coming from what's going to happen in the future this seems to be like some search for human knowledge that is a part of people's desire to uncover mystery you know like there's almost like a genetic calling to find absolutely yeah yeah well what it is is just is just learning and survival so you know I call this patternicity the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise and my thought experiment is imagine you're a homed on

78:46the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago small brain austral epithesis and your name is Lucy and you hear a russle in the grass is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind right so if you assume that the russle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind that's a type one error false positive you thought a was connected to B but but no harm you just become skittish and cautious or whatever but if you assume that the Russell in the grass is just the win and it turns out it's a dangerous predator your lunch right you've just been given a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early before reproducing so in other words uh it's better to just assume that all things you think are connected all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wi just in case and there's not there's not a big cost

79:30to pay for making a type one error false positive there's a higher cost for making a type two error a false negative so we assume that this is the basis of superstition and magical thinking we just assume that this is connected to that you pull the slot you do this you pull the slot machine you win or whatever um and this is what Skinner showed back in the 50s where you just randomly give reinforcements to rats and pigeons and whatever they were doing just before they got rewarded they'll just repeat that behavior even if it's like twirling counterclockwise twice or and that's the basis of superstition there's nothing wrong with their brains they're just trying to find causal connections between events and the environment and that's the basis of survival so all of us are subject to making those connections some are more gullible than others say or more

80:17skeptical but for the most part all of us can easily be fooled if it's done right that's that's the beauty of good cons good dams is that anybody could fall for them even smart people and if anything smart people are more likely to believe weird things in this sense that once they believe it they think they've drawn a connection they're better at rationalizing the reasons why they believe than say less educated or less intelligent people and so as people like bich will tell you there's nothing better than an audience of scientists at MIT oh boy I can really fool them uh because they think they're so smart I can't be fooled to wow okay he must be doing something really really super psychic because you know I'm super smart but well no because all of our sensory apparatus works the same and magicians know how to manipulate your gaze your attention whatever and and how to fool you it's

81:09just so weird how people are drawn to trying to uncover Mysteries though you know whether it's ghosts or whether it's like how many goddamn ghost shows do they have to have where no one ever sees a ghost before they stop having ghost shows I know those things drive me crazy I know that's kind we don't do very many issues like on you astrology is it real it's like you know we we took care of this you know decades ago there's nothing new okay astrology as far as like you know hey you're a Leo so you're inclined to be a leader like that kind of but is there anything to those really complex astrological readings where they they look for the time of day were born and Mercury's and retrograde and all that have you looked into that yes there's nothing nothing about it nothing to it nothing at all nope absolutely nothing it's all in the psychology of the reading so if you mix

82:00up somebody's reading for you know you're a Leo but you know we give you the Virgo reading or whatever for that day almost everybody go yep boy that's that's a it's all total hustle yeah all of it but what about Nancy Reagan she believed I don't understand what you're saying yes God Rest her soul God Rest her soul didn't she use a psychic to yeah no she consulted a little bit I mean that this got played up quite a bit uh uh for Ronnie's travel schedule a little bit uh I don't think we can say that state decisions were being based on astrological readings and it could have also been like you know you always know someone who has a wacky husband or a wacky wife that believed nutty and then the person sort of like oh dear you know what what did you say okay I'll listen you somehow I don't think uh President Reagan was paying much attention to astrology he wasn't paying

82:48much attention to anything towards the end you know but but this desire to uncover um Hidden Mysteries it's always been really confusing to me uh because uh myself personally I felt the pull like especially like aliens and UFOs like I went deep deep deep into like uh when I was uh real young um I um got into the Roswell thing and uh there's a lot of different uh connections with the Roswell conspiracy about this crashed UFO in New Mexico in 1947 and all the eyewitness reports and boy you go down the rabbit hole of that thing and you could waste years of your life you know there was a study done in uh I think it was a a UFO report done in the late 50s I think it was 59 on the 500 most important UFO cases of the last you know 20 years yeah Roswell wasn't even on the list what that's right how was it not on the list Roswell didn't become Roswell until 1980 when they was made for TV

83:49movie and then a bestelling book yeah uh Charles britz the language uh book publisher he got into they got me those those uh books you know after van donin you know the Chariots of the G the bestseller then books started pouring out about aliens and UFOs and there was the movie remember when Chariots of the Gods was a film that was released in the theaters course and remember lonard nemoy and search of yeah man you know conjecture and search of was great yeah it was a great show I love that I used to watch that show but that's that got me into big foot but that's an example of of um you know how the popular media dries a lot of these things you know what do we really know back then nothing I mean it was just a couple little anomalous things and here's an example you know conspiracy okay so the government lied when they said it was a weather balloon yes they did you're

84:36surprised that governments lie really right because of course it was a national it was a it was a high altitude surveillance balloon listening for the acoustic signatures of a nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere by the Soviets so of course when this debris came down in you know the farmers field there outside of albuquer of Roswell the Mexico of course they're not going to come out and hold a press conference and go well see actually what we were doing is launching this you know project to listen to Soviet it was a weatherall suspicious too when something becomes not just a story but it also becomes business and Roswell became a giant business but much much later uh you know again there were a bunch of sightings in the 40s and 50s and but but that's around the time that there was a lot of experimental aircraft course and so whenever anybody says well saw this

85:24triangular shaped black thing you are you near an Air Force Base have you looked at pictures of the you know the B2 bomber the stealth bomber it's it's sort of a delta-shaped wing-shaped and when it you know it flies right over the Rose Parade every January 1st comes right over my house in elaa circles right when it comes at you it's silent and it's this weird black as they paint it that black paint that doesn't reflect and you know if you didn't know about it and you're out in the desert and it's Dusk and you it's like a PR kind of spooky like what is I saw one when I was uh filming Fear Factor in 2002 so it was right after September 11 not far not long afterwards and we were filming out there uh in um way out in like the desert area Palmdale I guess it was and it's real close to the the Air Force Base out there and we saw a stealth bomber flying over and it looks like an alien

86:18spaceship it's amazing when you see one you're like w like if you didn't know and you had never heard one of those before and you looked up in the sky you'd be sure that that came from another planet I mean it looks like it's right out of Star Wars in the 1890s there were UFO sightings in America and the UFOs look strangely like blimps that's weird yep so that that's the kind of thing people see weird things and again the the propensity is not to just say I saw an anomaly wow I don't know that's weird and leave it at that our mind immediately goes back to your we love the mystery let's concoct this whole thing you know martians are coming and it's the aliens and and there's a whole another worldview um and you it's like this um there's this anomalous star kic with a bunch of numbers that dims about 20% every period of time whatever that is it's about 1,400 light years away so uh

87:10and the astronomer studying this decide okay it's not planets it's not comets coming around in front of us that that dims the light um so so immediately people go to it's a Dyson Sphere it's a gigantic solar collecting array that circles around the planet they collects energy from the Sun oh this is a recent story right recent story yeah so but you know and I I did some radio shows uh locally about this and immediately the hosts go to well well what do they like what what does who like the aliens like no no no all we have is just an anomaly in in the light you know signature of this start that's all we have we don't the problem also with social media is it becomes clickbait it becomes someone writes a blog or someone has a thing and there's a video that's linked to it and everybody starts sending that out to their friends and before you know it that becomes a narrative right they

88:01found some sort of a gigantic satellite that's orbiting well it's like a death star that's orbiting this planet it dims it because it comes into you know between us and it yeah yeah that kind of stuff is very confusing to a lot of people because you don't have enough time to really research it right and that's why something like what you do like skeptic magazine or the the entire skeptic Community is a great resource and snop snopes.com is also yeah yeah SNES is fantastic where it breaks down and goes okay here's what we absolutely know for a fact so look at that it's okay to just say I don't know yeah but I've just always hard to remember that I've always been so uh confused as to what it is about what I mean I know I've known grown adults that have spent years and years of their life like fascinated with Bigfoot you know fascinated with UFOs fascinated with these Mysteries and

88:54you when you look at the amount of resources that they they actually expend chasing after these things say well if you put that into like something positive something constructive my God you know you you would you would do so well like I often say that thing that about like certain scammers you I'm like my God if these people just started a business with the same amount of enthusiasm how good would they be doing right I mean those guys running the the uh internet scams and stuff if they just did a legitimate company they'd probably make more money what is it about Mysteries that's one of the real important things that I wanted to talk to you about well I think one of the appeals of the UFO alien uh thing is it's kind of a a secular religion because they're often portrayed as Godlike figures and if you don't believe in the traditional God then that is kind

89:41of they're out there they're very powerful they know about us they're coming to rescue us save us so much of Science Fiction is you know has these kinds of themes to it uh like The Day the Earth Stood Still That classic 1951 film Michael reny as clat and the ship comes to Washington DC it's it's a Christ allegory you know that he's come to talk to the authorities you know the humans are sinning okay we have to stop this this case it was nuclear war and the remake with Ken Reeves it was global warming and uh and the authorities won't see him so he mingles among the common people like Jesus did and then uh he takes up with uh the Patricia Neil character who's the single mom in the town and uh and and then he's killed by the authorities and he's put in the morg he's put in this morg which is sort of like the tomb and then in the famous scene where Patricia Neil goes to Gort

90:32the robot he's standing there and the visor comes up and he's going to zap her and she gives him the famous message you know Gort clu barata nicto which basically says go get clu he's he's in the he's in the Tomb so he he marches over to the tomb and burns a hole in it takes the body returns it to the ship and resurrects him right there in the ship Jesus it's like it's a Jes his name in the in the movie was Mr Carpenter his Earthly name Mr Carpenter is that interesting and in the original script um uh in the film she says wow that's incredible you mean this is the power of Science and Technology in the future in the original script he says yeah this is where it's gone and but the Breen censorship board in 1951 said you can't say that that you know Americans will be offended by this so they changed the line and now he says something like no no no one has the power over life and

91:21death only the great spirit can deter you know it's just some baloney line and but but but so much of of the way we talk about aliens is that they are like I call them um deities for atheists you know they're like gods and the Chariots of the Gods I mean that's kind of that thesis but it's not so farfetched in the sense that if not that they've come here they probably haven't come here but if they're out there and they probably are there's good reasons to think there's extraterrestrials and if we encounter them they're not going to be behind us technologically because we wouldn't encounter them otherwise so that if we do find a signal or whatever it's going to be I'm an advance how far Advanced so the chances of them being in parallel with us on an evolutionary time scale virtually zero you know they're going to be if and if they're out of sync by just

92:10a little bit from when they started on their Planet evolving it would be millions of years in advance and look what we've been able to accomplish just in say a 100 Years of of Technology 50 years of computer technology why would it have to be millions of years Advance couldn't it just be 100 I mean if they're 100 years in advance of us if we're thinking about colonizing Mars within the next few decades you get some sort of an advanced civilization that has less conflict in us and more cooperation because of how long it takes to get from bacterial grade life to intelligent communicating life probably three and a half billion years is how long it took here right so that so wherever whenever your planet starts the chances of it going to be in perfect synchrony of every step along the way from bacterial grade life to big brains uh if it's probably going to be millions

92:55of years of difference in time scale just just on the biology so just randomly I mean even to get to where we are it could be a million plus or minus just to to reach this level correct like where we've reached just it's whatever billion years it was didn't have to be that number it could have been much longer it could have been shorter or just started later or started earlier you well also we have to deal with I mean the the the impact that kill the dinosaurs they could be the random events that happened it could be they could be on a planet that doesn't have any random events like that or could be way ahead of us yeah or they could be on one that has a lot of them so the answer to the fmy Paradox that where is everybody because this should have happened already is uh probably uh the universe is teaming with bacterial grade life but the number of steps to get from

93:44there all the way to a communicating technological Society is enormous and so that winnows down the number of possibilities out there you could get all the way to to NE anals like here on Earth you know their big brain 1500 cc's about the size of our brain maybe a little bit larger and you know they had fire they had tools um Disco yeah everything but disco uh and they had Europe to themselves for about 300,000 years and there's no advancement in their toolkits they're all pretty much the same uh they never had cave paintings they didn't look like they had symbolic art like Homo sapiens did we believe their brains were larger though to deal with their larer bodies right even when you correct for body size their brains are slightly larger but only slightly it the brain size may not make any difference it maybe brain modularity maybe they didn't have language or if they did maybe they

94:38didn't have communic symbolic language we don't know why they went extinct but when humans Homo sapiens arrived in Europe within a few tens of thousands of years there was no more uh neander tals gone they went extinct and there a big debate paleo anthropology circles why so but but my point is that you could have a three and a half billion years of evolution on a planet and get all the way to the anals who have stone tools and it just stops for whatever reason they never develop symbolic communication they have opposable thumbs so they can make stuff they can make tools but they never make the next step right uh now some people disagree with that they they they think that had Homo sapiens not dominated Europe when they came in the anals might have gotten there within a few centuries more maybe but we you know we don't know that ex well there's also the thought that even

95:26though the universe is infinite right that it it had some sort of a beginning whether you buy that or don't buy that there's actually been some arguments wasn't there some arguments recently that that the perhaps the universe didn't have a beginning or an end but that it's been Eternal that's always been it could be eternally cycling there could be multiple Big Bangs so there was never yeah so the idea could possibly be that if that is the case right so if you have an event and from that event Things become more and more complex start getting single cell life multicellular life like we have here on Earth there has to be a first like us a first it has to somebody has to be first and maybe we're first yes that's what I'm saying like if we exist we're multi-generational Our Stars and so there's been many many generations of stars older than ours right so this is

96:15the fmy where is everybody I mean there should have been somebody made it for but when you think about how complex life is on Earth and how many different varieties of it there's only one human there's only one technologically communicating species and we're it so so is it possible you that's right you could have a planet teaming with life with dolphins so and chimpanzees big brains and they and lots of puppies and they never yeah they never build it you know they no laptops nothing yeah so it is possible that we since we exist it is possible that we're the only ones that exist uh it's possible it's totally possible right it's totally possible we just don't know but that's terrifying to the seti argument that search for extraterrestrial intelligence scientists these aren't the UFO people there their counter argument to that is there but there are so many planets now that we

97:04know about virtually every Star in a galaxy of 100 billion stars has planets so we're talking hundreds and hundreds of billions of planets the chances that it never happened anywhere you know okay PR small it's pretty small so they're probably out there somewhere but it's you know it's it's a vast empty you know cos you know there's a lot that we know that doesn't have intelligent life there's a lot of planets we have one planet that we know of that has intelligent life out of all the planets we've ever discovered and obviously there's some that we've discovered that are so far out there we only get like glimpses of what their atmosphere contains well the Next Generation they'll they'll they'll be able to get the atmospheres the uh the web Space Telescope will I'm told be they're just getting it from a light spectrum now right that's right but in in the

97:50Spectrum you could see if there's oxygen for example and methane so they must have cows that are farting you know it's methane not methane methane well the British say methane so I to sound intelligent I try to use try to be like British do you spell tires with a y t y r s you know how they do that see one of the you know Hitchens and dockins he's got you know it's that British ACC no they're really it sounds so much better selling things in late night TV absolutely yeah yep it works so yeah anyway the mystery you talked about the mystery well you know there's not quite sure why aror brains go toward that I mean I'm sure my my dog has a good life but I don't think he contemplates the cosmos you mine does your dog's a loser especially when it's time for for food but what I was trying to get at though is that there's there's a thing that we do where it's not just I mean there's

98:42there's the longing for extraterrestrial life you know the search for the technological daddy you know the the advanced alien daddy that's out there that's going to show us the error of our ways there's there's that poll but then there's also this weird poll where we want to believe that these intelligent beings from other planet can recognize who are elected leaders are and being Cahoots with them as if they give a about Obama or anything I mean if you like descended upon an ant colony would you have a deal with the the queen like look I know you're the one who uh is in charge of this so only talk to you I want to be super secretive and since you are so moral and ethical you know and you don't lie to your people at all I'm only going to communicate with you and in exchange for technological Secrets I would like some DNA like it's so Preposterous it's such a stupid idea

99:34that they would come down and they would talk to uh the military leaders especially military leaders from the 1940s like who knew almost nothing about technology or this idea that they you know at Roswell uh you know we C capture one of their spacecraft and back engineer their technology and that's where silicon chips and computers came from do you know about American computer company did you ever hear about these people there was a company called the American computer company and this is like back during the um artbell days of uh Coast to Coast with artbell which I loved I'd be coming home many I love that show I've been on it once too was the one of the highlights of my life I was recently when he came back on the radio or Internet you know so I was driving home from The Comedy Store one night and they had this uh they were talking about this American computer

100:18company and there's this guy that ran this American computer company that was he's out of his mind and he apparently he had this Theory and this whole website dedicated I don't know if it's up anymore they might have taken it down but this dedicated to showing the timeline of the creation of the transistor and all this came out of bell Labs which is uh where they had the Air Force Base outside of bell labs to protect it from Alien Invasion oh my God and that this is where all of our technology came from the you know so we're supposed to believe that the aliens were only about 5 to 10 years more advanced than us from vacuum tubes to the Silicon uh transistors I mean really that's it that's fber they manag they managed to Traverse the vast inces of interstellar space with technology just barely better than vacuum tubes well did you ever pay attention to that

101:12Robert Lazar guy he's one of the most bizarre ones he's a bizarre one he sounds so good I think there are some people that just make stuff up he's so good at it though but he's also smart which is really scary because this guy came up with a hydrogen powered engine for his Corvette you know which people have done you know they're doing it now like people are developing hydrogen power plants for cars but he he had this like decades ago so he's obviously a very smart guy being smart doesn't uh doesn't protect you from believing in weird things isn't that bizarre not just believing in weird things but bullshitting people right yeah yeah well then somebody who's smart and educated is going to be better at at bullshitting people well he was he bullshitted people about his education too though that was part of the problem I think some people went back and looked

101:58through his education and said well there's no evidence that you ever went to these schools and so that that threw some monkey wrenches into it but he was one of the area 51 guys where you said he worked at Area 51 well Area 51 is a top secret uh you know military base where they and so you know you and I aren't going to be able to drive their go what we're doing a show we want to blow the lid up these crazy no you're still not coming in here oh okay so what are you hiding well you know of course they you know it'd be interesting to know now we know about the B2 stealth bomber what are they doing now right that we won't find out for 20 more years that people are seeing out in the desert in the middle of the night I saw this spooky weird oh yeah definitely and that's how it works yeah uh you know we find out eventually uh in the meantime just say I don't know saw a weird thing

102:41well the yeah the the oddest part about it is this belief that they're in in conspiracy with our elected leaders that's that that one to me has been so strange that they will land somewhere and they have these meetings and these elected leaders you know make deals with the UFOs like how amazing would that be though if that was true reptilians are running the country from New Mexico yeah this people love this idea of blowing the lid off of it you know that's that's something that people love they love investigating they love the investigative journalism aspect of blowing the lid off this Global conspiracy well I think that's what drives some of the you know kind of anti-ed establishment anti big Pharma you know anti vaccination you know those guys they're behind closed are the big powerful people corporations and government agents the CDC and this company and the CEO and the PO you know

103:37they're all and they want to make money and you know and and they first they think they're more powerful than they really are and second that's not how the world works I mean these people are not trying to keep us poisoned or keep us sick so they can make money you know it's the real conspiracies are you know how come we can't get our drugs cheaper right uh you know those are the you know what sort of behind the door deals are being done uh you know that prevent Health Care from being cheaper that's where the real that's the real conspiracy I had a conversation with someone who was trying to tell me they already have a cure for cancer they just don't want you to have the Cure because then they'll you know the money's in the treatment I go why do you think the same person has the Cure as the the same people that are selling the treatment you really think they're the same person

104:21do you have many people work in the field of creating new medicine I mean that's so ridiculous that it would be the same thing not one person of the tens of thousands of employees at AMJ or wherever is GNA you know leave and go oh I found something out and I'm coming on your show to tell you all I took pictures here's the not one it just doesn't make any sense that it would be the same person the odds of it being the same person or the same company the there's so many different people that work in the pharmaceutical industry so many different people that are trying to do research on new medications and there's so much money involved in it the idea that this one company would come up with a QR and they would like keep it under wraps because they In Cahoots with the other company that's got the treatment right and so I mean if that's true then then all the people that were

105:06sick from polio and all the businesses and companies that were making money from polio patients how come they didn't stop the polio vaccine right or you know just pick any any you know any particular industry like that where we have made real progress but then there are some things where you go okay there's definitely too many people that are getting prescribed pain pills like what what is going on and what is the conspiracy that I I've had conversations with people that went to doctors you know they had like something wrong with them and the doctor wants to prescribe them I I had a nose operation I had a deviated septum repaired and my doctor gave me not one but two different opiates to take I didn't take anything my I wasn't in pain okay and he was like you're going to be in pain I'm like I'm telling you man it's barely it's barely uncomfortable well so again we we know

105:52how some of this works you know the the drug companies take the doctors out on their golfing trips and they give them free samples and this and that well my wife's mom was a nurse and they used to take them out to dinner and these pharmaceutical reps would talk to them and they want they and it wasn't like they said hey we want you to tell these people to take our drugs it's they became friendly and they did nice things to them and it was almost understood that in exchange you would talk well about their drugs of course the principle of reciprocity I did something for you now you owe me you don't even have to say it they they wanted those trips they want you don't have to say it that's where it's interesting you don't have to say it right and so they're making money and that's that's reality I mean the the the sheer volume of pain pills that they've sold in this country

106:39since the 1980s it's it's stunning but also I I I saw this when my um my stepdad was ill for oh probably 10 years of just going through in his 80s just melting down one thing after another and I was the one taking him around all the docs and you know I could sort of see how it works he's like you know the docs go look uh dick I don't know I don't know what the problem is well can you give me something I'm in pain right there's definitely not I don't know well DOC come on I just drove down here all right here take this right you know so they kind of feel like well I got to do something I don't know what it is I don't know what to do but okay he's asking me all right I'll give him some painkillers I'll give him this or that makes it feel better and my dad would take it go yeah this is great there's there's certainly that there's also certainly incompetent doctors there's

107:23doctors that are really willing to prescribe ssris and anti-depressants like with alarming right consistency so there you have the medicalization of what are really probably just social behavioral issues yes so you know you know when we were kids in school then a little Johnny was super active and had high energy whatever okay and now he's a great athlete or he's doing this or that and now he's like well what's wrong with him uh oh well he has this Medical problem oh he's a DHD oh oh that's a thing yeah it's it's a medical issue it's a like a disease well what can we give them for it well we'll give them you know these drugs here and okay so all of a sudden you know the the hyperactive little kid who's just kind of fun and maybe a little disruptive is now medicalized yeah it's the same thing with the you know the autism spectrum you know people say well you know

108:13increase in vaccinations there's been an increase in autism not really the category got larger and it became medicalized you know so the so there's no increase in autism it's the increase in the diagnosis of them a more people paying attention to it and B the category is much bigger than it used to be so you that's why it's called a spectrum so when people make the correlation between that and the increase in the amount of vaccinations that children get a false correlation yeah it's not true that that autism rates have gone up it's that in in the in the '90s it suddenly started becoming a thing autism the Spectrum talking about it and so somebody that was like soal asbery they're a little socially awkward is that a word asbery yeah well I use it too no we all I use that term I'm pretty sure read dude's a little as Burgery when someone's like really smart but socially odd like's A

109:06little asbery yeah yeah go to Cel or MIT you know the Big Bang Theory is not so far off on how you know the nerdy Factor but but again what's wrong with being false correlation what's wrong with being a little nerdy well now it's you're on the autism spectrum yeah you're on the Spectrum I'm autistic yeah you're you have a disease and so we have drugs for this and before you know it the category is bigger and there's more people in the box so it looks like it got bigger but it didn't if you're easily distracted all of a sudden you have ADD yeah oh you have a disease you have ADD sir you need to take some or they call it a deficit oh shiny yeah right there's that so um but there have been there's also the very real problem with human beings in that there's so biological diversity that medication that affects one person is going to affect another person a totally

109:57different way so if they give you a medication your body has no problem with that medication whatsoever they give that same medication to another person there's going to be some issues and when people say well you know my child got vaccinated and some there was some adverse reaction to the vaccination there's there's people that want to immediately dismiss that and say oh that's Malarkey that's junk science but there is a very real situation that happens with human beings where they take medication where it does not agree with some of them sort of how like some people have allergies to things that are completely innocuous to you or I you give a you know certain type of nut to Jamie and he might die you know there's there's a reality to that and when you look at the this is what I try to explain to people that they talk about vaccinations being dangerous and you

110:43know we don't need vaccinations and they're you know they're horrible to people and all the all the people that have I'm like think about how many people you're talking about you're talking about 300 million in this country alone how many cases have are people that have vaccinations where things go wrong is it a thousand a year well if it is a thousand a year do you know how low that is y I know that's not low if it's your child right it's awful I know it's it's not low if it's 10 a year if it's your child it's awful but there's a lot of people that are being vaccinated If there really was this Global epidemic of you give kids vaccinations and they turn into you know like this decrepit you know mentally disabled child boy it would be a lot bigger be a lot bigger than it is because so many people are getting vaccinated exactly the right way to think about it million one odds

111:33happen 300 times a day in America yeah I can't think of that so and that's a lot of people it's a lot of people this what I try to explain to people when when we talk about just the raw numbers of stupidity right like I think that it's really conservative and really kind to say that one out of a hundred people are idiots and there's not damn thing you can do that's really that's open-minded that's like really looking at the bright side of things that's a glass half full perspective right that means there's three million morons in this country and we know where they are there's a lot of them that's a lot of people that's a lot of people it's it's it's the sheer numbers that we deal with whenever you know when when people started throwing these you know these theories around and they use this as their evidence I I always try to just try to put it into that perspective just

112:23just stop and think about the numbers if you could see it on a board if you could see 7 billion human beings just as little dots on a board and then you know then let's let's find the morons you know then let's let's look at the problems let's look at the oh this is what we're dealing with what we're dealing with is almost just insurmountable numbers be like a cancer cluster except it' be a stupidity cluster cuz they're going to Cluster in various places usually cities probably yeah well and they'll find each other and then there there's the confirmation bias that comes from the the groups getting together and only sharing information that correlates to their beliefs whether it's big photo UFOs or psychics or that's why it seems like so you know any of these groups the UFO people or the Bigfoot people or whatever it seems like well there's a lot of people yeah well you know there's maybe

113:11a hundred in that club or something like that but it's a small number of people compared to the whole population well they get so mad they get so mad when you bring this up if you bring up these facts or this these thoughts these ideas and you tell these people that you don't believe in UFOs or you don't believe that we've ever been visited they get emotionally mad they are connected they their personality they're connect they're they're they're connected like who they are is connected to these beliefs and the more psychologically invested you are in a belief the harder it is to change your mind so this was this is again example of cognitive dissonance which was discovered by Leon finger in uh December of 1954 on the 21st he went to the top of a a hill with a UFO cult uh who was waiting for the mothership to come and he wanted to see well presumably the mother ship's not

114:03going to come the world won't come to an end what will they do afterwards so he thought well I mean will they just change their mind will they go home whatever so he recorded this and wrote a book about it called when prophecy fails and the answer is they double down on their belief not only did they say well this was a dumb idea let's go home you know they went home and started recting more people and well we miscalculated it was Eastern Standard time it was tomorrow night or it's next year we got to carry the one when we did our end of the world calculations and so and so they recruit more people to join the group so he called this cognitive dissonance that you know when you have a belief that conflicts with the facts uh what gives well the facts have to give because the belief is right so we're going to going to spin doctor the facts we know we know and so their

114:49rationalizations were just while we prayed and and and therefore God saved us or this was a test of our faith and God allowed us to live or or my favorite the world did end and this is the new spir it was a spiritual ending and we're in the new spiritual age now that's the loophole that the December 21st 2012 people use y that's right yeah yeah that was that one was one of my it did end yeah it's a spiritual ending there's a new beginning yeah there's a new beginning yeah I I had a guy that I had a conversation with who really was absolutely adamant that the world was going to change December 21st 2012 he's like it is undeniable it's going to happen like how can you say that how can anybody say that it's definitely going to happen because well it did change the days started getting longer after on December 22nd but it's also that the people that came up with this idea their

115:42culture doesn't even exist anymore I mean you're talking about the Mayan civilization a wonderful spectacular Advanced civilization that did all this amazing architecture and they had these really cool statues that they had built and really interesting language that was sort of like hieroglyphic you know what what is it called like it's a re re what is the type of language that they use but like where each each symbol like a like a simpler but each symbol has a certain sound that's attached to it so you can have those symbols connected in in different ways it's it's really interesting when uh there was a um I believe it was a National Geographic documentary on trying to decode I think it was called decoding the mind yeah and these guys where they were trying to figure out exactly what these people were writing and how they wrote it amazing amazing one of my uh cycling training Partners

116:39Nick Co his father Michael Co at Yale University was the guy that first cracked the Mayan code W so I blame his dad for for all this may and end of the world stuff yeah basically it was a it was a cyclical uh time time cycle instead of a Time arrow that is these ages repeat themselves in these long long long form cycles and that December 21st 2012 uh was to whatever extent it was coming to an end was just a period of time like almost like our year comes to an end and a new year starts right alls it is is the calendars rolling over to the next the next phase it was the end of the long count for them the Long Count yeah yeah yeah so and what happens to those people nothing they just quit talking about it I mean no almost no one ever says you know what I was wrong uh people just sort of drop it and go oh I'm not into that anymore well it was an industry that December 21st thing was an

117:29industry for a while it's really and I thought it was awesome I loved it I thought it was cool I even had a license plate it said December 2012 I had a license plate you did yeah cuz I thought it was hilarious it is hilarious but it is also cool like it's kind of fun to think that it's really going to happen like you know people have these ideas like that's when the aliens are going to return that's when we're going to become self-aware I think teren McKenna believe that's when people are going to come up with a time machine there was there was a bunch of like really fascinating ideas of what the hell was going to go down but there seems to be this longing that people have for an event that we're building towards an event well the idea is there's two dueling ideas is the idea of progress in history and decline in history and so when people write about it it's usually we're in a period of

118:13decline it's like like Republicans right now you know America is the greatest nation ever except it's in a hole it's the worst it's ever been now because of this guy but before we're going to return back to the way it used to be great so every generation has this ours is the special generation either ours is you know culminating in this great thing that's going to happen or things are terrible but if we can get through that then we're the ones that are going to come out the other side the born again you know the left behers uh you know the you know the Christian apocalypse you know there's plenty of secular versions of this you know Marxist had this idea that you know the end of capitalism and the beginning of social soci ISM and communism this is a big stage thing um you know a lot of Science Fiction is like this you it it it makes a drama better when there's a a

119:01beginning point an end point we're at this crisis moment and things are going to be great again or or or they're going to come to an end and then they'll be great uh but there's always that tension between Decline and progress well there's also this realization that there will be an end for you we are finite beings we have a beginning we're born we have an end we die and it's going to happen so when is it happening I don't know when it's I'm scared is something coming oh it's coming the apocalypse oh Jesus here it is and then we find this thing and if you're really inclined to be gullible you know you get sucked into like the the Heaven's Gate folks who think well the way it's going to happen is there's a UFO behind this meteor and what we got to do is when the comet is near we got to kill ourselves and wear purple Nikes and then we'll yep you know art artbell has a little bit of

119:48of culpability in that because he was promoting the hail Bop Comet UFO theory for quite a while on his show and they used to listen to that show and that's when they bought they went down and bought a a telescope and to see if they could see it and and they and so I mean I'm not blaming they got into it by listening to that theory promoted on Rell yeah so then then when Marshall Apple White said you know I think this is it this this is the it's all going to come with the comet and Comet hilb and there's very little competition when it comes to cult leaders it seems like once a cult leader has like that position like they very rarely get forced out of the board you know no one says you know what Marshall's out of his mind I'm not cutting my dick off because cuz they were doing that they were castrating themselves and there was and you know and he was obviously so nutty it's like

120:39did you not have one person in that group that you might have thought like well maybe maybe Mike's got some better ideas than Marshall we should listen to mic for a little bit doesn't work that way no there's no comp usually those ones get purged like in the Mormon the fundamentalist Mormons they just Purge anybody that wants to challenge the the the Le the prophet yes um but so there's a critical point in every cult when the leader dies uh and okay what happens usually the Cults just die with him right uh but in the case of Scientology uh um um wait a minute what are you saying Scientology is a cult yeah sorry whoa dude do you know we're in Hollywood I do I what the you saying man why you watch your mouth you know when uh uh when Joseph Smith was killed uh that could have been the end of the Mormon church but bringham young took over the Reign so if there's another charismatic

121:26leader uh David misovich and David movich took over from elron and he was charismatic and people turned their you know they they acknowledged him as the as the you know the new leader and one of my favorite moments in all of Comedy is when movage and Tom Cruz are on stage and they salute elron Hub to lrh and they salute him there was a lot of testosterone right there on that stage like oh boy oh men got a big gigantic metal on oh it's it was embarrassing amazing oh it's not embarrassing at all it was wonderful to me when I this the the the the human Folly of it all you know the belief system of anybody that's an intelligent person by the way massively successful especially financially both of them financially but Tom Cruz culturally massively massively successful wearing a big gold plate on his on his neck and saluting one of the worst science fiction authors of all

122:23time I mean it is amazing not to mention when he died he was he was packed up with anti depressants and Other Drugs that he was allegedly against exactly yeah yeah well not only that how about the fact that he lived for a long time on a boat off the shore because he owed so much taxes he couldn't land right so that's that's where all the SE cor and all that crazy came from he wrote more books than anyone who's ever lived you know he wrote more fiction than anyone ever y amazing fiction horrible fiction Haron Ellison who I know is scence science fiction writer says he was there at the meeting when elron well the the the meme is that he said if if you really want to make money riding siid fiction and start your own religion what actually was according to Harland Ellison is there was a group of them just sort of sitting around uh complaining about the cost the the the

123:14fees that people paid writers like all of us writers complain about we don't make enough money and so that's when somebody said well you know if if we started a religion and then El Ron kind of jumped in and said yeah yeah let's start a relig and then he actually went out and did it whereas the rest of them you know they just kept writing science fiction have you read uh going clear yeah oh yeah I've read going clear I saw the film I mean the film's good really blown it up yeah the book the book is because they have time to go into depth about his past and all the the the stuff that like transpired before he created Scientology gi's film right Alex gibney's film and Lawrence Wright's book that's right y y yeah Lawrence R's a great J now that's real investigative journalism when you sink your teeth into those and bold right yeah and it's amazing he got away with

124:01it you know because there were people trying to do that back in the 80s there was a guy from Time magazine that did the cover story with the volcano erupting on it and he was harassed and threatened and people put stuff in his mailbox and people different world now though first of all their numbers have drastically declined Scientology numbers have declined and on top of that the internet has exposed it for what it really is right the before we didn't know like I um went to um one of these things in San Diego just a few years ago I think it was like I say like seven seven years ago they had one of these things where uh you had like the e- meter and you sat down they would give me a free personality test and I sat down and talked to the guys and they seem kind of like bored and disinterested and weird but you don't see those at all anymore right you don't see those I don't think

124:49they even do that anymore well they do there's one well on on Hollywood Boulevard right down there in building uh no you could I've seen emers the street on the street y do Jamie right right in front of uh the Chinese Theater after the going clear out I asked the guy about that uh have you seen this movie no I didn't see that movie all propaganda yeah that's right I ordered a book late night TV in like 1994 dynetics I was into like I was into Anthony Robbins self-help stuff trying to trying to get ahead in this life you know young man and uh I ordered that Dianetics book those people never stopped sending me never stopped sending me invites and this is where they get the numbers we have millions of followers CU anybody that ever got some follow you're on the list yeah yeah I was they don't have my new address you can still go clear if you I would like to i' like to be clear I had a

125:43neighbor horrible story poor guy nice guy but his um I think still I think he still loves down the street but anyway his um there was a plot of land that he wanted to buy and we were talking about it you know and he's like well we can't do it right now because uh nany's about to go clear I was like what what does that mean I didn't know what it meant oh you didn't know what it meant okay cuz I I I only knew this you know it's probably 98 I I only knew a little bit about scientology I was like what do you mean going clear like well we're scientologists I go going clear I go how much does that cost $50,000 $50,000 for like some ceremony and I go well what does it involve well she's no longer affected by external influence so uh once she goes clear nothing will bother her like you can say anything to her you can insult her and nothing will get in and she will right but that's what everybody

126:35wants right everybody wants this this the the ability to be autonomous to be just completely completely free of any in this life this this stress and the worry and the the negativity but also they sell you on that like like these are the things you need to get rid of oh I didn't even know I mean part of the eer thing you know it's just it's just measuring the voltage between your hands skin conductance um but you know think about your mother okay I'm thinking about My Wo spiked because I squeeze this hand slightly more all right let's talk about your mother well everybody has issues with parents with ex ex- lovers and spouses and bosses and you know you can find something it's like would you like to get rid of that bad well you know if you go meditate you know you go to a Buddhist center they'll tell you the same thing you're focusing on the negative of your past we're going

127:22to clear that out by meditating so they're all various forms of the same kind of thing like everybody has like the psychic hotlines everybody has problems love Health money everybody's got some issue and we're going to help you for you know a fee well what's fascinating about El Ron is it seems like El Ron was nuts I shouldn't use the word nuts he hadal problem mental problems definitely had some mental problems and it seems like part of what Scientology was was his attempt at self-help and that was one of the things that la right went into that it seems pretty clear that this guy used all these available psychological uh techniques at the time to try to cure himself it was like a self diagnosis and selfhelp thing y I think a lot of people go into Psychotherapy because they themselves oh yeah uh you know have issues that they're dealing with well when I was in college that was the only

128:12thing that was interesting to me it was Psychology was interesting to me because I was trying to figure out my own brain I was like God I got to get this thing under under wraps I got to get this thing handled so that was the you know that was the people like Tony Robbins uh you know they kind of they have a tracking the line between being a con artist he's not but selling something that could maybe help people maybe but you got but if you follow his Direction I think he he's more positive than negative I agree I agree I mean some of the stuff is pretty basic you know set goals and write them down and don't get distracted from these things stay focused you know this is pretty basic stuff that actually is true true it works if you work it and uh we did a story on um the self-help movement in skeptic by a guy wrote a book called sham the self-help and actualization

129:02movement and and the and this guy um he used to work for rodale press which is one of the big Publishers of self-help books and in the marketing department said that the number one predictor of anybody who would buy one of these self-help books is somebody who had already bought a self-help book well if they work why do you need to keep buying the tapes and the books and all that stuff and and the answer is is that it it they only work temporarily like if you bring Tony Robins into your corporation he is for sure going to get your Salesforce really motivated man I'm going to make some I'm going to make 50 calls a day rather than 30 calls a day and I'm going to really do this and they see a spike for a while and then people go back to their Baseline where they were and that's why you got to keep listening to the tapes and and and and the listening to the music and the book

129:51and all that stuff to kind of keep it up so they it only works to a certain extent and for a limited period of time well it's very difficult for people to change Behavior patterns you have this pattern they're very comfortable it's very hard to change to don't they say it's like 90 days of doing something all the time before it becomes a habit it's like you can kind of ingrain A New Path yeah probably longer on that that's why diets are so difficult to work you know you have a lifetime of you have this fat level and you have this kind of food your body's used to and to shift it it it's not going to happen in weeks or months you really it's a lifestyle change for forever really yeah if you sh you turn into a d like you can commit to a diet for a long period of time but a lot of people when they're committing to like I have a I'm on a diet right now for 60 days Mar siss Primal blueprint

130:38it's like a sort of a ketogenic diet okay you know it's fat based um mostly I atat a lot of avocados dude I love avocados avocados MCT oil a lot of coconut oil almond butter a lot of fats like what did you have for breakfast this morning I have five eggs andoc you did so you don't worry about cholesterol no my come on bro what about the Clinton diet you know Clinton lost all that weight got ready of his cardiovascular diet yeah he went vegan and Pen did you know pen pen lost what did he do he's he's vegan Heen went vegan as well he's all plants he eats uh basically huge salads twice a day well that's just great for you that is great for you if you can eat more plants more the better but um but you're adding more than plants though if you coconut butter and no well the idea Sis's idea is and Sison was a big Ultra endurance guy as well it's the idea is that your body functions more

131:39efficiently on high fat content than it does on uh High carbohydrate content so it's very low carbohydrate no added sugar no no grains whatsoever no pastas no here's what's interesting about it um the mental Clarity aspect of it is really interesting yeah and and that I had a few friends that had tried the same diet and that was one of the things they pointed out and I think there's a certain amount of brain fog that comes from heavy carbohydrate meals that you avoid totally of course you avoid and then once your body becomes into a state of ketosis which I think takes like 20 something days or there's there's a bunch of different supplements like see this stuff right here this is a ketogenic uh cream uh product that you can add to Coffee there's a bunch of different oh that's what you're putting exogenous ketones no that is actually just Stevia because this stuff is coffee

132:29with MCT oil and grass-fed butter have you ever had that stuff before I don't know is that what's in this coffee um all right it's uh from um a Rob wolf invention he uh figured out how to add grass-fed butter MCT oil which is uh medium chain triglyceride essentially the healthiest aspects of coconut oil my headache's gone hey you feel better but um it's just uh healthy fats and mixed in with coffee okay and no meat no I me I eat eat meat yeah me yeah all right but mostly um okay here's my theory on diets that um they work uh because you're doing something you're actively involved in keeping track of how many calories are going in you start cutting out the bad foods definitely junk Foods sugars grains stuff like that and and they work it doesn't matter if it's this particular one here or this one here it's it's it's the doing something about a problem that that is what really works

133:24it well I didn't even have a problem I did it just try it I did it just cuz I wanted to feel what it would be like to try this diet because I had read about sis and he's a really interesting guy and then I'd also listened to a Tim Ferris podcast Yeah Tim Ferris had this great podcast with this uh drct de austino I believe his name is who is um heavily into ketosis heav ketogenic diets and the science behind it he's a really really brilliant guy and fascinating podcast we have to listen to it like 10 times in a row and take notes but one of the things that they brought up which is really interesting is the the mental benefits of it and the fact that it helps children with epilepsy when they put them on a ketogenic diet they it it like stops epilepsy in its tracks okay I haven't check I don't know about that one yeah no it's this is a this is i' I've researched it it's

134:10really really fascinating that's one of the main things they do to children that have child's epilepsy the other thing that people do when they get on diet is they also start exercising which has other benefits tons of benefits good point but I did that already too so for me it was it was just wanting to try it want to try it for the athletic benefit want to try it for the physical benefit but I lost a lot of body fat you did yeah yeah and I wasn't fat but I definitely could have lost a little bit of weight you know but I mean not compared to like I still had a six-pack like you could see my abs before I did it but I lost 10 PBS now I'm down to one I think it was 193 this morning and I was somewhere around 204 before okay it's kind of kind of fascinating and what will you have for LUN lunch um it's depends but no grains that's the big one the big one is no

134:57grains no pasta no no you know just very low carbs it's like I'm getting my protein from Mostly Wild game mostly uh elk and uh deer and things along those lines you go hunting out here yeah shoot your well I don't necessarily do it all here it's hard you know s Koga Park it's not really a lot of meat to be had out here walk around but I do but when you shoot an elk you get hundreds of pounds of meat I have two commercial freezers in the back fill with yeah you live nearby I'll give you some okay it's delicious it's great for you too all right you know it's organic you 100% free of any antibiotics Buffalo and ostrich ostrich meat is good very very very good for you very lean and healthy and it's a rich dark red meat it's filled with iron and nutrients but um the idea behind it is that you get your body to burn fat instead of carbohyd with that's why it's not to be conf like

135:56the problem with the whole concept of paleo you know the paleo diet well this the term can be debunked pretty easily because they say well in the Paleolithic per period people ate a lot of bread they ate a lot of they a lot they ate whatever they could find yes and and and most hunter gatherers most of their calories come from the Gathering part not the hunting part it's hard to hunt animals they don't want to be killed yeah uh so so well especially back then they had shitty bows and arrows and they didn't have guns it's very difficult unless you stumbled Upon A A her a blind Buffalo you could throw a spear at them right it's not that easy no I mean it's it's difficult today to find really healthy I mean if you want to if you want to hunt it yourself good luck it's a lot of effort right you know and if you want to actually find really healthy meat other than grass-fed beef their

136:51options are pretty severely what about alcohol do you drink very little a little bit every now and then but there's sugar in that yeah yeah yeah it converts to Sugar well the idea is that you so no cookies and ice cream cuz that's got sugar right so the dairy is okay milk uh yeah you can have milk but I'm not really a milk Drinker I've never I like milk with cookies but since I'm not eating cookies no milk I'm not like a milk guy I I don't mind raw milk raw milk I like just I felt like homogenized and pasteurized milk once you do that I mean it's it's great as far as you could store it in a store and it lasts for a long time but you're cooking out all the enzymes right it's just not the best thing for your body yep the problem also is if you don't do that then it's only good for a couple of days so right that's and you can get sick and eggs good I'm glad to hear that I like eggs

137:42eggs are good for you man yeah eggs aren't bad and certain amount of cholesterol is actually important for your body to produce testosterone for it's actually you know for cellular growth it's like it's uh and eggs the ones I get are from my chickens I have chickens you do yeah that's great that's good good for you 22 chickens yeah what about supplements yeah I take supplements fish oil um multivitamins vitamin D yeah Omega 6 omega3 yeah yeah take a lot of that see some of that can go too far some like Ray Kur wild takes 200 200 supplements a day well he's just trying to stay alive until the machines take over I know I know another example he's kind of a guru he's almost like a secular Guru kind you know because he's constructed this you know the second coming is coming The Singularity it's 2030 2040 if you42 if you can make it till the end year 2047 or 2042 I think it's I went to a

138:37conference in it was the same for the same show for um Joe Rogan questions everything we went to to New York and they had this big conference I interviewed him in San The Singularity Summit yeah well I don't remember I think it was 2040 something the it is 2040 they just pick a day when they think that it's all going to happen but they had this uh Russian billionaire character who had developed some artificial some thing that you know he was uh going to unveil that was like a a robot of him it's going to be an artificial intelligence but it wasn't ready you know it's see even if that that will come eventually I think but even if that they did accomplish that would it be you right or just a copy of you right see like when you go to sleep and you wake up you're a little groggy but there's a continuity it's still your memories and your person when you go

139:27under general anesthesia you're groggy after you wake up but it's still there's a continuity but if they shut off your brain and turned it back on inside a computer would you wake up and go oh okay this is like waking up or would it just be you're gone and it's just a copy and this copy is just functioning completely on its own and has no idea what it's doing because it's not connected to biology it's not connected to all those it should you know maybe there's like a leap of faith they have to make before they hit the switch I'm not sure that um that I think the problem of identity is a serious one for the AI people in terms of longevity in terms of immortality well not only that how about the fact that if I can make one Michael Shermer if I can copy you how why don't I just Spam you why don't I spam you all over Europe I have a million Michael shers all throughout

140:12India I mean that's that's a real problem right I mean if you can make a copy if you want to be immortal and you want a copy what's the stop someone from making multiple copies what's to stop Donald Trump and right well so far nobody but but if he wants to make a bunch of Donald Trumps some ego Maniac of course the moment you turn on the new copy uh they start having different memories because they're in a different environment in a different body and they're having different interactions and so if it's a biological system then there's new neural connections growing that are different than yours than the Joe Rogan copy yes so that's no longer you you might have the same past memories but you're now going to have different just like twins nobody thinks twins are identical in person in personhood right and legally they're treated as separate entities and and of

141:00course that is right so I think that's really what what copies AI copies will be is just like twins that's a good point that's a good point also the good point is from here on out you're going to have different life experiences so if you made an exact duplicate of yourself at this day but one went to New York and the other one moved to Miami right you have tot different lives totally different experiences totally different one's going to be liberal one's going to be conservative different well you're going to make different conclusions based on your life experiences and that's that's just a reality of being a person is that we're constantly accumulating data and processing it and then also it's the environment that you surround yourself with as far as the unique in individuals that you choose to associate with they flavor who you are so much right it's almost Inseparable

141:45it's so it's so difficult to look at a person as an individual because every individual is profoundly influenced by all the other people around them right so you take this individual you move them to Montreal and you surround them with a bunch of people that are totally different from them they learn French they started speaking you know with the the quea and next thing you know they're they're that's a totally different human being right you become different because of the people that you're around exactly you know you don't exist in a vacuum right so so in terms of like a trying to achieve immortality like the singularitarians or the transhumanists um or the extropy they're against entropy oh really oh yeah what is what's their Theory uh it's a little bit like the transhumanist that we're going to slowly replace our body parts and not not just new joints but you know

142:33if you replace your nerve cells as long as but you still have to have the continuity it's still you as a person in there um just uploading it to another platform is is I don't think it's going to do it I think it's not you anymore the Johnny Depp inside the computer turn on Transcendence there he is I don't think that can happen right now I may be wrong there are people that do think this can happen uh but does it have to be you can it be like something different that's kind of but you you personally want that it's like Woody Allen said I don't want to live on through my work I want to live on in my apartment uh is that what he said it's one of his many lines about immortality yes um you inside the computer the copy of you a copy of you is just an extension of your work you know it's like this is a little bit of a copy of me my books and so on but it's not me

143:23right and after I'm Gone the books are still around but it's not really me I don't feel like I'm still going also isn't there a problem with if you believe in evolution which I assume you do and you you assume that people are going to continue to change shape we're going to continue I mean if we used to be multicell organisms that are coming out of the muck the primordial ooze and now we're people what what are we going to be a million years now are we going to stifle that and just lock ourselves into this form this is not a perfect form this is not we're not done so one of the arguments is that we should well we we should take over Evolution and we are so genetic engineering for example right now everybody's afraid of oh they're going to make arens or whatever okay let's just let's just allow it to happen to solve Alzheimer's cure cancer things like that then we can worry about

144:12uploading you know more intelligence into our cortex say for examp what if we do to people what we've done to tomatoes we make them boring and flavor flavorless as well they last longer that could happen that's actually a good point what we do to people we did to tomatoes we up Tomatoes but they last forever well in in a way with international travel and the internet now you know the the poorest borders you know in centuries or so you know everyone will look like Tiger Woods or something like this you know I think the racial barriers will eventually dissolve well then we'll find some new way to hate each other right oh absolutely you know humans are super good at that but it but if we colonize another planet say we started calling a Mars in in a way that's a Founder population that can then begin to diverge away from the Earthly population and in a million

145:00years you'd have two different species say yes they they could maybe well they'd probably still be able to interbreed because there's still connections you know you also have a problem in that you've got a whole civilization of people so crazy they decided to move to Mars like it's a self- selecting group they're probably not they're probably not typical definitely not I mean and they're also going to have to do some crazy geoengineering and we're going to have to hope that that keeps a fun scenario would be what kind of government would they set up what kind of economic system and assuming they were none of them were religious if you came back a thousand years from now would they have you a shrine to a God and and the religion and all this it happened again how did this Happ and then but but we'd have the history archetype uh it'd be it's one of the interesting things about scientology

145:45in the Mormon church is that we have a a clear recent history and a paper trail see what happen videos that's the what we don't have for Christianity is that it's old enough that it's lost in the murkiness of time and it so you can kind of fill in the blanks with Miracles and things like that here we know Joseph Smith was killed and then bringham young moov to Utah to get away from the authorities and you know and we know exactly how it all unfolded and so you can diagram how to start a religion well you know the whole Mitt Romney story too but his family in Mexico right oh right that's right yes for about that they all moved to me when they couldn't have 100 wives right like this we're out of America they all swear his dad was originally against polygamy until yeah until he tried it and then he's like oh well one of my favorite books is John CRA hours under the banner of Heaven

146:37he's a great writer uh but he has a he kind of reconstructs the moment when Joseph Smith tells his wife Emma that he got this Revelation from God about polygamy Celestial marriage he called it and basically he's already having an affair with this woman down the street so basically he goes well honey um you know I was talking to God and he told me that I'm supposed to you know have sex with so and so what I know I couldn't believe it either but my friends they were all there they heard it too they're telling their wives right now so Emma says something like well in that case I'm going to have extra husbands he said no you know God was really clear about this it's just for the guys and this gets sold as a viable you know Declaration of of Revelations and it's written down so if you look at the the first page of the Book of Mormon it's an affidavit you know we are the

147:26people we saw the gold tablets and so on same thing with the Revelation about polygamy all the way until 1894 when the state of Utah wanted to become a state and the federal government said not with polygamy and suddenly they got a new revelation from God changed my mind about the polygamy thing back to monogamy okay okay you could be a state not Mitt Romney's parents they're like we're out of here so you go to the fringes well Colorado city that was in the news yesterday um uh apparently the whole police force the courts everybody that lives in this town is fundamentalist Mormon they're the polygamist so where's Colorado city is that Utah that's right on the border of Utah and Arizona oh Colorado City Arizona I think or maybe it's in Utah it's right on that uh road that goes to cab and um and we've been there we Race Across America used to go through on our

148:14route to get to New York we'd go through Northern Arizona Southern Colorado pamy yeah and it's a it's a weird Community you drive through there and people are looking at you and it's it's like it's like being in a twilight zone or xfiles episode you know where they drive somewhere it's like everybody's a little weird and you can see the dress clothing it's like everything is off a little bit even like at the gas station at the Denny's it's like there's something not quite right here that's awesome I want to go oh it's it's I want to go right now it's really OD I don't think the polygamy should be illegal I really don't because it's not illegal to live with 20 women if you just you Hugh Hefner it and you decide to have like 20 women live with you you're a king you know but if you sign paperwork with them all sudden it's a problem well the way they do it is they marry one of them

149:02legally and then the rest are so-called Sister Wives and they're not actually married to them so they're not breaking the law okay and there's no law against having you know living with a bunch of women it's okay well the law only exists in terms of all the other people outside of their Community or their neighborhood or their family recognizing it it's just the problem if every if you have a law that says this but everybody in the town including the police captain courts well the judge they're all in on it they're all in on it so yeah how I have conflicting feelings about uh about because my libertarian Tendencies we go well adult people should do whatever they want why is the government in the marriage business in the first place I agree uh but the problem if when you study the polygamous Mormons you know these These are young girls this Warren Jeff he was marrying 12 year olds he was

149:51having sex with 11y olds okay there is a problem with that that's absolutely a problem yeah well that is just a problem period with someone who's a grown adult who's having sex with a young kid that's obviously that goes without saying but as long as a person's 21 or whatever I mean I really think he should probably be 21 before he even allowed to get married who I would I probably would have got married if I was 18 my girlfriend when I was 18 at the time said marry me I'm breaking up with you i' be like let's do it I was you know I was lost you're too young you don't have enough information mention be allowed to do anything till they're 30 probably not even might be 40 but the idea that you could tell some adult that they can't sign a piece of paper with another adult yes like right I mean it's just as Preposterous to say the same-sex marriage should be illegal why not yeah

150:40who cares as long as they're not brainwashed when they're little that they should you know cuz then maybe you're 21 and are you really making a rational choice about your future or you yeah that becomes a problem with Cults and that's also the problem I mean and then it becomes okay where's a line get gray okay if a Mormon can't do it if you can't take someone when they're really young raise them as a Mormon and they wants to become of age and they become an adult tell them you know well now you can get married and you can be involved in this polygamous marriage and well they grew up in this religion are they brainwashed even though they're a grown adult well if that's the case Catholicism or whatever you go the government can't be in the business of judging that right so it's a it's a you know it's a fine line there it's tough I mean you put your hand on the Bible when

151:30you swear in to be a president which is hilarious Lincoln's Bible yeah right is it still Lincoln's Bible well that's who Obama used was Lincoln's Bible yeah how old am I am I Mis remembering that was it Martin Luther King's Bible no I think it was MLK's Bible yeah anyway yeah so but yeah that's very talisma is we're touching the past so dumb as if you know the Old Testament is a font of moral wisdom is it the Old Testament they use well the the whole thing but is it the New Testament or the Old Testament that he puts his hand on oh it's both it's the Bible that includes both yeah but polygamy was you know all the great Patriarchs there was a study by Helen Fischer uh no it was a different Anthropologist on um uh the relationship between power and sex in the Old Testament and basically the more power you had the more uh women and wives and girlfriends and concubines and children

152:22you had how unusual and uh Solomon was the you know he was going for will Chamberlain's record there he had you know 700 wives 300 concubines and you know thousands of kids I guess wow allegedly allegedly but I mean wasn't Noah 600 years old so it's hard right I mean most of the stuff probably didn't actually happen in the Old Testament probably Moses never existed but the point is that that is the way men treated women that that was the patriarchal society at the time slavery was legal polygamy was legal the more power you had the more wealth you had the more women you had the more children you had you know that was the world of the Old Testament you know and that's not the world we live in now so why are we still using this book yeah exactly I mean it's nobody would Embrace no Christian today would Embrace most of the stuff that's in the Bible they just

153:11wouldn't so when they say I get my morals from the Bible it's like no no you don't and that's a good thing you're getting your morals from the same place we non-believers it uh and you know we we're inculcating it from culture from the enlightenment secular values well I'm glad you brought that up because that was an article that I'd read that you had written about Islam and that Islam was the only religion that had not gone through the enlightment yeah I think that was a really really interesting article and a very important point you know I mean Christianity they used to behead Jews uh and witches burned them at the stake you know I mean the kinds of stuff Isis does today Christians used to do that centuries ago it's very common and uh they stopped why well the law changed the culture changed and the enlightenment ushered in secular values that all people should be treated

153:57equally under the law that people are born with equal rights and and and so forth and and that all changed everything and everybody is incorpor just think about um uh remember when the owners of the former owner of the Clippers Donald Sterling made these remarks you know but most old guys thought like that just 50 years ago and weren't particularly marks are pretty pretty innocuous what what he has said he had a girlfriend this is this thing has been blown out of proportion so bortion yeah he had a girlfriend and he asked her not to take pictures with these guys these black guys he said in the same sentence you can them I don't care if you them just don't take pictures with them oh is that what he said I didn't hear that part they didn't print any of that right and everybody was talking about the the the don't take pictures with black guys he said he what he was

154:49saying was that you're sticking it in my face that you're all these guys I don't care if you them just don't take pictures of them I don't want to see it he's saying this to his girlfriend in the privacy of his house he didn't use any racial slurs he didn't say anything terrible all he said was don't take pictures of these guys cuz she was a I mean allegedly she's banging a bunch of dudes and he didn't care cuz he's like 80 years old he's like he's buying her condos and rolls-royces and he's just he just wants to keep banging her cuz she's hot right so he's like I don't care just I think she was that I for him look you still have higher standards that guy's he looks like job of the Hut he's like his face is falling off his bones right so for that poor guy I mean that lost him his his team which is insane that shows you how far we've come again most PE most old guys in the 50s would have

155:38thought nothing about saying that stuff publicly yeah but apparently he was pretty racist and that what they caught him with was just small little slice of what he had done this is obviously allegedly blah blah blah but apparently wasn't a nice guy which is why this was so reinforced and why people went after him so hard they're like look we got them let's just run with this and obviously it's a PR nightmare yeah yeah exactly yeah but yeah people evolve and I think now in today's day and age that kind of thinking like racist thinking justifiably so is is is gross it's it's frowned upon absolutely Lear y we are learning yeah so I mean the moral Arc that's what that's about tracking you know how much moral we've made over the centuries particularly just the last 50 years since the Civil Rights Movement it's one reason why I think all these campus protests have gotten so out of

156:27hand they're so disproportionate because the students have a moral uh module they're still passionate about you know making the world a better place but all the big stuff's been taken it's all done they're down to Halloween costumes taco Tuesdays he wore a somero cultural appropriate you know they're all fired up about what for you and I is just like you safe spaces it's where ideas go to die I mean come on safe spaces is such such a stupid argument any argument that's worth it has to stand on its own merits you have to be able to discuss things like having a university where you can't discuss ideas well even even bad ideas like bad ideas should be debated you know the idea that they won't let these conservatives perform or have these speeches at the universities and they try to shut them down they scream at people they they hit fire alarms I mean it's Madness it's it's everything that

157:20you're not supposed to do when you're defending and exploring ideas I think the deeper the deepest cause of this is is the asymmetry between uh left and right on in the academy yes it's so you know it's in some of these departments it's 20 to1 uh liberal conservative Democrat Republican uh only in the economics Department the social sciences do you get something like a balance everywhere else it's super slanted and so you're you're you're getting this attit well we know what the truth is maybe you don't know what the truth is and you need to listen to the other side because that's what has driven science and reason and the enlightenment is is open open debate yes because I might not be right and so the only way to find out is if I ask you your opinion and so I tell my students you know you gotta you got to read The Wall Street Journal in addition to the New York Times you got

158:08to listen to you know conservative talk radio in addition to NPR and you gotta you got to hear you know listen to Rush Limba oh God I know he's a knuckle draging mouth breather but somebody on that side just to see what listen to Larry Elder Larry I like Larry Elder yeah he's a conservative but he's a little bit more rational a lot more a little more libertarian too yeah but you know those arguments are interesting and the only way to know what the other side really thinks because you think well you know why do they believe that well you have to listen to their arguments to at least be able to articulate why they're wrong if you can't do that then you'd really don't know why they're wrong exactly yeah and find try to like balance like re look at things through their perspective even if you don't agree with their perspective just relax yourself relax yourself and allow you

158:55allow yourself to like explore the way they think you know I I I follow a bunch of wackadoos on Twitter just so I can listen to their arguments and read their stuff I follow this one guy he's a young Earth Christian who uh every day will talk about how horrible Obama is and Obama's the death of this country and I I will follow this guy and follow people who retweet him and go to their links and go to their blogs read their blogs what the just because I'm just trying to explore how their mind works trying to try to piece together how much of it is just a blanket hatred of liberals how much of it is racism how much of it is this how much of it is that and just trying to objectively assess where their mindset is and what the root of their thinking is that's what I did back in the 90s when the Holocaust denial movement started taking off and uh these guys were appearing on

159:47Montel Williams and and like what okay what is this about turns out they're in Co their offices in Costa Mesa so I drove down there and I just sat down with you know their they have a little Journal of historical review and it's like all right who are these guys so we had beer and pizza you know I just sort of get them to open up what is your story here right that's the only way to find out what they're what's really behind their arguments okay they have these arguments okay here's why they're wrong okay but why are they making these arguments right the only way to find out is actually talk to them and why were they making their arguments it's it's some of it's pure anti-Semitism uh but also there's some conspiratorial thinking you know the Jews are doing this but not just the Jews you know the media that this and that is it one of those exposing the

160:29mystery thing yes it's a little bit of that you know the the government you know they don't want us to know they wait who's the they because that's us right uh well no they you know have this superpower and you know so there there's a lot of that behind there and then also there's some you know basically I can get attention right by saying this wacko whack the wackadoodle kind of stuff and then people pay attention to me and that feels good and so I'll run with it you know David Irving was their big intellectual and uh he he was self-trained historian but also a pretty smart guy good writer and uh he wrote some his early stuff on on Geral and and some of the stuff on the second world war was was was quite good but then he found he wasn't in the academy he's you know self-taught and just published his own books and kind of made a living doing that and he found that when he

161:17started migrating toward this you know maybe Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust and it was really Geral and himler and they're the ones that did it and Hitler didn't know he all of a sudden he gets all this attention and then he he he he concocts this idea of I'll give $1,000 to anybody that can show me the order from Hitler to you know to orchestrate the Holocaust you know I hereby command we exterminate the Jews okay there is no such order there's no single point it's a whole conglomerate of Little Steps along the way from sterilization of the feebly minded in the the early 30s all the way up to you know you gassing them okay there's like a hundred steps in between so there is no single order but that got them all this attention and all of a sudden he's a big star at these conferences where these people meet so I went to some of these and it's like whoa

162:04okay he is being worshiped as this great scholar and and you could sort of see how it fed you know fed the ego get a lot of attention so I think that's we we can't discount just the pure psychology of getting some attention for your views as pushing people further than they would normally go yeah I think that's a very very good point because there's a there's a massive attraction to that there's people are massively attracted to anything that can get them a lot of attention even for a ridiculously controversial idea have you paid attention lately and this is one of the most confusing things that's been going on there's a gang of people that believe the Earth is flat oh yes right you're paying attention to this I saw that yes I can't believe that in 20 2016 this is really a thing and there is a movement that believes that all the isss pictures those are all faked and that all the

162:59pictures if that's just getting attention and nothing more do you think they really believe I've watched some videos these people believe I I have a friend who believes was a Loosely based friend Max Everly you're out there you he's a fantastic pool player but he's out of his mind he like post things about it on Facebook I'm like Max have a with here's a here's a good example of why we need free speech you know these people should not be censored let them say what they want to say and let's let's show how we do know the Earth is round let's you can you articulate five reasons why the Earth is why don't you tell Max Everly why the Earth is round okay okay Max here's the deal all right so first of all uh when there's an eclipse you can see the shadow of the Earth on the moon you know lunar eclipse there it is it's curv that's the government with a projector

163:47in their uh but but you can go out in your own backyard with no okay now what they'll say is yeah it's round like a pizza right flat round exactly that's what I've been thinking but of course if that were true then why are all the continents uh you know why aren't all the continents located on the one side of the pizza and if they're on the flip side how do you get from one continent to another when you do a transcontinental flight because it it's you're curving around it you're not all of a sudden hitting an edge and then flipping around to the back side of the pizza and so there's a second reason uh if you if you're high up and you look out you can see the the the mass of a ship sailing away the the hole goes first and then you see the mass last because it's curved right um and anyway so there's all you all all these if you put a stick here and 500 miles away make

164:34it I don't know uh tucum Cary New Mexico that's a th000 miles from La you put a stick there at noon at the same time they'll have different shadows because the Earth is curved so they're at 12:00 noon it's actually 1:00 in New Mexico when it's 1200 noon in LA and that's why we have time zones because it's curved okay and so and when you when you watch a watch a rocket a SpaceX rocket or NASA rocket launch from Florida it arcs it's arcing because it's going into orbit and the Earth is curved so you have to Arc out otherwise it would just go straight up and it doesn't do that anyway those are five different you know quick reasons pretty good but you sound like a shill for the for this round government there was a uh the guy that Cod natural selection with Darwin guy named Alfred Russell Wallace oh he was nuts right he was way out there I wrote my biography he he came up with a dream

165:28that connected Darwin's theories together like it his Darwin's theories and his theories came together like Darwin had a problem right with natural selection he was trying to figure out how to piece it all together his his ideas he he well not quite there is a conspiracy theory about that that that that that Darwin cribed from uh from Wallace I don't think that's the case what it is not they CRI from but that they sort of combin their IDE it's more of a simultaneous thing and they were in correspondence Wallace actually Incorporated some of Darwin's work Darwin was older than him and had already done quite a bit more work than Wallace had and in any case Wallace was super open-minded so here's an example of being too open-minded right Darwin was open-minded and he came up with new ideas but he was also very skeptical of the whole spiritualism Seance movement

166:13that was getting big in England Wallace was in and Wallace he would go to these sances and hold the hand hands and the table would levitate and Dar that's why people don't hear about him see Darwin would just like I'm not going to us SE are you kidding me I mean this is insane and Thomas Henry Huxley the other great scientist said you know you know pay pay five shillings to talk twaddle to the dead I mean come on uh but Wallace oh no I'm going this is this might be true and uh so he was in and then he made the mistake of answering an ad in in in a magazine uh for one of these flat earthers who said I give you know 5,000 to or 500 lb I guess it was anybody could prove the Earth is round what year was this this was 18 this was 18 1880s W and so Wallace said okay I can do it so they went to the Old Bedford Canal which is like 20 miles straight yeah you know without a Bend so

167:06you could set up two little um telescopes you know those the little uh surveyor telescopes and they put a mark on a bridge okay you know and and so when I'm looking so there's one two three marks if it's straight then it should be all lined up if it's curved then the one here that's exactly 3 ft above the ground like this one here that's 5 miles down the road down the canal it it should be lined up or if it's not it's dropped a little bit and in five miles you can actually measure a little bit of the earth curve by like like I don't know it's like a centimeter half a centimeter or something right there it is right there there it is there's the Old Bedford Canal so Wallace did that and they had a neutral um judge who looked through the telescope and said yep it's curved it's dropped and and this guy that the flat earther refused to look through the I'm not

167:52going to look through there I know you're wrong that's Voodoo and uh and Wallace so he had to Sue this guy to collect the prize money this is why you shouldn't get involved with the wackadoodle People Too Far because he spent 15 years dealing with this guy with and this guy was sending crazy letters to his wife and to the National geographical I actually found some of these letters at the national geographical Society of this guy threatening you know you've got this crazy Wallace working for and so on holy you know these some of these people are they're a little mentally uh as you know uh deranged that's fascinating but Wallace his ideas converged with Darwin's ideas and it kind of helped Darwin's theory but Darwin had to disown him eventually no no what what what what really happened was it it accelerated Darwin to get his work done to get the book done he was just sort of Lolly

168:43gagging around doing his research and one reason for that is um in 18 44 there was a book on Evolution published called the vestiges of creation it was it published anonymously and it was Trashed by the scientific community so so Darwin got back from the galpagos in 1836 throughout the 1840s he was just taking notes composing his ideas running experiments he got married and had you know 10 kids and he was he had a lot of money invested in the railroad so he was a pretty active independent scholar and uh and so just started taking his sweet time about developing his theory and also he didn't want to be embarrassed and come out with a book that wasn't very solid and then he would be criticized so he was just compiling anyway one day he gets this letter from Wallace from the other side of the world is's in the Malay archipelago saying I came up with a few ideas he he had like

169:35a feverish nightmare from from malaria and he hatches natural selection some species compete with others um the populations increase in a malthusian way and so not all of them can survive some Will Survive differential reproductive success natural selection boom so he outlines this to Darwin and Darwin's reading this going oh crap this is my idea I mean he sort of outlined like my book so then he rushed into print it's like I got to get I got to get this done so they weren't necessarily collaborating they weren't exactly collaborating although they had communicated and also Darwin Not only was Wallace not upset about this he was thrilled he wrote his mom and said oh my God the great Charles Darwin wrote me back this is so cool and then Darwin went to Charles LEL and some of the other big scientists at the time and said um I got this letter from from this

170:24guy on the other side and you know I've been working on this uh this is really similar and I yeah what do I do so they said all right we'll publish both of them simultaneously and they did on July 1st 1858 at the lenan society they both they presented both papers some of Darwin's notes and and essays he had written in wallis's not letter to Darwin with a little handwritten paper and they entered them both into the record the same day July 1st 1858 boom simultaneous Discovery Wallace Darwin then spent the next basically 9 months just you know the pen moves Mighty fast when you're afraid you're going to get scooped right right and he got his book done boom November 1859 the origin species the rest is history and Wallace he wrote again is oh my God this is so exciting you know I'm part of this great movement and then only later much much later did other people start to think you know he

171:15ripped you off and and he's like no no and race wrote his own great book uh in 18 80s called Darwinism so he recogniz yeah well it's really fascinating that he came up with that theory based on a Dream from being in a fever State yeah Y how amazing is that well but that often you know the spark of scientific genius or creativity in any field I was taken a shower and boom the idea came to her I was on a walk so there's some theories about this that if you think too hard and focused on a specific problem you can't you have to sort of relax your brain whatever that means by doing something else that's non focused meditation taking a shower going for a walk going for a bike ride in my case anything that's just sort of not thinking about the problem and then we don't know what happens maybe some neurons just sort of start firing and interacting different neural networks

172:09this memory of that this memory of that this book you read this thing you saw on the internet boom boom boom they come together poof yeah we don't know how that happens ERS like to do that they like to write and then they go for a walk right and then after they they're you know they're done writing they go walk and they try not to think about anything and then the ideas just pop into their head or a correction of the idea or a new revelation of the idea yeah it's it's just always been amazing to me ideas that come out of dreams like the origins of creativity like where are these thoughts emanating from what like dayart like the idea of science came from a dream the idea Einstein's dream of uh you know being in an elevator you know if you're in an elevator and the elevator drops at you know just the speed of gravity and you let go your pen or your coffee mug it's just going to

172:58hover there like you're hovering inside the elevator as it drops so that so the acceleration of the elevator at the speed of gravity means there's no gravity and that's where he came up with this idea of Relativity in the elevator is the frame of reference that you and the cup are in and so this is what weightlessness is when you're when you the vomit Comet basically all you do is you go up high enough to drop and so the plane is plunging down for about a minute or two I guess I've never done it and you and this camera and whatever else is in there is just floating because the whole frame is dropping right uh and so to do this in this on the in the space shuttle for example it has to go what 17,500 mil hour to maintain uh the same speed at which accelerating at which it would also drop so you're going straight forward and straight down the halfway in between is

173:5017,500 mph for our planet that's that's basically that creates zero gravity so if you want to go to Mars and and and have some gravity you just spin the spaceship so that you so that the floor is the outside wall That's why in uh and that's how you get your gravity that's how you get to gravity like in in 200 what 2001 or one of them they had the thing spinning the space station was spinning so by spinning it creates a false sense of gravity uh oh I know what it was in 2001 where he was running along that curved interior so it's it's it's spinning like this so it presses you against the floor right it's like those old Carnival um things where you go and then you stand and the floor drops out as it spins and you spin on the outside yeah that's right that's the same principle there yeah so it's just amazing that ideas can come out of nowhere the origin of ideas that's

174:45that's a fascinating thing to me like creativity like where how does one person come up with a great idea for a movie how does someone come up with an amazing idea for an invention like where are these ideas emanating from well first of all you have to have some knowledge of what it is you're trying to create you know you and I Wallace have a knowledge of EV he yes he read quite a bit Yeah he was totally into this for years as was Darwin so the dream even Mozart you know he was composing since the age of four and his father was a composer so it's not like this comes out of the vacuum there's not a muse that pops into your head um you know you and I aren't going to come up with an Einstein type dream because we're not Einstein and we're not physicists and uh you know so you have to have so the balance seems to be being ins sconed in a field to know what the

175:31problems are to be solved and what the details are and what's already been done you know they tried this they tried this this didn't work and so on but not be so entrenched in it that you can't see outside the box right and no one knows what what that is you know we don't know it's just it's so interesting create ity in and of itself is so interesting because boom an idea you know like where's how does that take place like what is what's the birth of the idea like what what are the mechanisms that are going on inside the mind that allow the imagination to give birth to this idea that's so it's so um poorly understood and part of the problem of trying to understand it is the what I call the biography bias we only know about the successful people you know so oh Steve Jobs and and Bill Gates okay so the thing is you go to college you drop out you move into your house you start a

176:19company in your garage and boom right okay how many people did this back in the 70s and we don't even know who they are cuz they failed right all those Venture Capital startup companies that went out of business you know all these great ideas you know yeah okay so we you know we don't know what the formula is uh um well not only that what made you who you are right now at 1207 on what's today March 7th or whatever the hell it is what made you you you you're 60 plus years of life experiences of you know being awake for you know 18 hours plus a day doing this doing that like what what chain of events what foods did you eat what how much sleep did you get what led these ideas to cross each other and and the little fire gets lit and then and then you write it down on a napkin and your life changes yeah yeah nobody knows too many variables so fascinating though

177:13so fascinating just that the mind and the way the mind works it's it's so it's such a a mystery and yet there's so much information about it at the same time yep well it is the hardest problem I think in all of science Consciousness the brain how does it work I mean not we know how it works how the neural neurons communicate with each other neurochemically and how say your visual cortex is you see stuff but but what is it that you and I are doing now just just we're experiencing this process how does that happen and that no one knows we don't have a cogent theory of Consciousness which is why then people step in with you know Quantum Consciousness or you know whatever they have all these theories well we because we don't know those people get they get me baffled I've had a few of those people on and have a conversations with people about Quantum Consciousness and

178:04like I I don't even know what you're saying I don't even know if you know what you're saying that's exactly right so you know quantum physics is is difficult and spooky and Consciousness is difficult and spooky yeah but that doesn't mean they Rel at you know maybe they're related but maybe they're not related well I'm glad someone's out there exploring it I check in on them every now and then how you doing over there absolutely the theory is evolving right I'm not sure I'm not sure about any of it but listen man we're we're basically out of time we just did three hours crazy that was crazy I really appreciate your time I appreciate doing this and appreciate all your work over the years it's really been uh wonderful to read and have you on here and thank you for saying so is this your most recent moral art can take that with you on your vacation very very much the

178:51moral AR yeah I'm I'm going I'm going and uh if people want to get a hold of you on Twitter it's Michael Shermer on Twitter website skeptic.com or Michael sherman.com thank you sir appreciate it very much thanks for having me all right folks see you that was a fast 3 hours you all right