Joe Rogan Experience #1222 — Michael Shermer Transcript

Transcript

0:00 and we're live hello michael schirmer hello joe rogan i'm doing well thank you good to see with I mean, I'm not a physicist. When I see those guys writing down on legal papers with all that scritchety-scratchety, crazy-looking, fake alien language mathematics, like, thank God you guys are out there. person who was talking about the purpose of life There are, yes.

2:23 And he's saying something about, you know, it's okay for you to forgive yourself. If you're just vague enough, I mean, like horoscopes. What do you think about all that stuff? And yet you like the quiet solitude of a walk on the beach, you know, people going, yeah for his travel after he was shot she got real paranoid about that well so part of the problem is

4:23 They gave him a book, The Three Ring Binder. just going through there. And you're thinking about travel. So one of the problems that Psychic Friends Networks had was people were not paying their phone bills Now you get a dollar per minute or whatever. product when it's not. But if, say, in that case, it's under food rather than drugs, or say, no, that uh statistically more people can recognize that people are staring at them yeah like when

7:32 Now, the guy that does this, Rupert Sheldrake, he believes that it's actually some kind of psychic power through the medium. But in that case, it's best to just say, You mean in terms of just psychic ability? So the hard part in testing psychics is to pin down what exactly are you saying you could do. He has that moment in this huge auditorium. And he's at work or something.

9:48 You'd have to talk to both of them, right? there's a lot of stuff you don't see. They have glaucoma or whatever, and you hear him calling this out. this little bobby brown headphones on you know it's like but he's he's a showman too yeah that's He had some really good advice in terms of setting goals and in terms of the way you Maybe err a little bit on the side of over-optimism so you can push through the failures.

12:31 them. So if you say, does it work? Well, it works if you work it sort of consistently. Like, So they get the salesmen all motivated. I like that. You can't keep that up. I feel like that would be terrible great but yeah she calls these small wins or whoever calls them small wins like make your bed He's already done working out. know, you've got that thing that you haven't taken care of in the back of your head.

15:57 they started cleaning up the graffiti. They started catching the turnstile jumpers. They And I think there's something to that. And you go there now and it's like a mall threw up. talked about you know and he lived yeah it was a dump i mean there was pasadena oh terrible yeah it was terrible down there. Was it really? Oh, yeah. It was a dump. I mean, there was- Pasadena?

18:46 So they would all be just boozing it up and partying it down in the Hollywood Hills. Oh, you got Saks Fifth Avenue. Then I can be next to him. to just shop online on your phone, like Amazon. The fact that they figured that out. I remember So they've been together for over 25 years. Well, Mrs. Bezos is getting paid. Even if he only gives her a quarter.

21:14 Well, why else would he buy Whole Foods? with amazon prime like they have to yeah wow or and if they don't do that you can just order it They have that one store you can walk in, and there's no cashiers. brick and mortar stores, is like the ability to purchase online. outlet that's really you get a little bit of trickle. it's, It's no big, you know what I mean?

24:17 It's just too many. Yes. of all of these other human beings around them they change the way they walk they walk faster And that has to be So she talks about tight cultures versus loose cultures. And I kind of know, you know, I'm driving up the 101. go you can't go it's like yeah this is california i'm going there's no one there there's no one And I always wonder, it's like, how much of that is because they have to deal with shit weather for five months out of the year?

28:31 Those are aggressive people. You send all these convicts there. They don't want to fight anybody. These are all Jews in front of the house where they used to live. Another interesting thing about Germany is they won't let Scientology in. Oh, so they're actually above ground? So it's the person's name. but really it's more culture from the bottom up.

31:18 But others want to get in on that because that's cumulative. So you have to opt out. And they're like, who's this? Three more months, yeah. Well, it is amazing that in this country – I would like to know what the number is. and they don't contribute. wrote it. Just boom, gone. I i mean it's just the And L. Ron Hubbard goes, yeah, you know, that's a good idea.

34:55 And, of course, I've seen Aaliyah's show. they're really taking care of their mind and you know and thinking clearly and eliminating all the when I first met her she was just like this hard-ass beautiful woman who's just Who would buy this stuff, right? And they got raided. Well, what's amazing is that the IRS caved and turned them into tax exempt.

38:13 LA Real Estate. So, you know, my skeptic friends go, oh, they're going to go out of business anytime soon. I mean, you're looking at horse shit everywhere. Do you know Julia from Saturday Night Live? the whole culture and all that was great. And she's thinking, this is like a Hollywood pitch story. Indians. But then she says, Yeah. another dimension it's possible but you don't know look being alive is so titanically bizarre

41:39 as far as we can tell, infinite, all that stuff is crazy. to happen, but you don't really know, you're a huckster. Militant Agnostic. I don't know, and you don't either. heaven celestial north korea it's like here's this dictator that knows everything you do and They had like a new draft, and the Hitchens had a great analogy with when he was dying,

43:36 He goes, okay, so let's play this out. And she said, well, I had uterine cancer and I had my uterus taken out. Yeah. Who are you? But I banged it up so much. It's like, okay, how old are you when you're in heaven? That dude was dumber than me. Well, that means you've got a well-lived life. Right. That's right. I wonder if you'll feel like that. Or whatever, yeah.

47:52 through Calico and a few others Just the little incremental medical problems that people have. If you can keep this body. You want another week? Nothing wrong with that if we can do that. I don't know. He says, are there golf courses and tennis courts in heaven? Yeah. Right. inside of this realm that significant happens but because we've attached all this meaning to that then it's something that

51:34 It sounds boring. smiling it is one of the funniest fucking photos you're ever going to find on the internet just You see the picture? The internet is so overwhelmingly mocking. It wasn't that. I forget what he got for it. Oh, that's nice. It says, woke up this morning and saw this. That's the photo, that is him hand the other hand is up that's him in heaven love it the internet is so good for mocking

54:49 talking about nuclear strategy or whatever, and then the kid comes in, I google it and then I'll go to Twitter and then when I go to Twitter or most succinct or poignant that rises to the top. So in the course of a couple hours, my little window pop-ups just spread across the top of the screen. sunday magazine article on trump's business going all the way back to the 70s right right they spent

57:28 from the courthouse? and it doesn't affect you. Sue me. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they have him in this category that he's going to drain the swamp and these liberals are just going to cry and he's going to make America better. time are you really paying attention to Trump's ethics? I'm sticking – okay, so he won the primary. Despite all, I mean,

59:38 Well, it'd be interesting A little bit. He's never going. Just 100% fact. They're the fact-checking organization. Like we're fact-checking more than the other guys are fact-checking. And one was left leaning and one was right leaning. It, One of them we discussed on the podcast we did on Monday, but the other one is The Coddling of the American Mind.

1:01:49 And our university is pretty centrist. You ask people, how evil are the Democrats or Republicans? I've known Pete for many years before the hoax papers, and I think they've had it in for him long before the hoax papers. what is it, the dog park one? And the same month that came out, that you know glaciers are very hard and and erect and you know it's all masculine and you know

1:04:53 With faking data, fraudulent data, fraudulent research, faking data, They would never approve that. Pete was affiliated with it, so they're getting him on that. a clinical psychologist, sent a bunch of his graduate students into mental hospitals all over the country and said, just tell them you're feeling kind of blue and that you kind So the title of his famous paper is called Being Sane in Insane Places.

1:07:21 Oh, patient, you can see in the paintings the erupting emotions and the conflicts in her personality. Again, they couldn't tell the difference in their own patients, and no one was even faking. that was another one i think it won an award this is the best paper we've ever had oh okay He became famous. That's right. You know, the Cato Institute or Reason Magazine or, you know, any of these.

1:10:39 I've watched this through my whole life. And there's thousands of scientists It's very captivating. Or I know a lot of scientists who are kind of jealous of Neil deGrasse Tyson or, say, Bill Nye. Most people are not like that. And unfortunately, I went before him. It's pretty entertaining. I'm so glad I already went. And I don't think it's something you can just learn.

1:13:29 And it was good. Get your life in order. back to the self-help thing, it's nice to be reminded, here are a few simple things you could He lives there now. that i don't think that's an effective way to pursue social justice if you're ignoring the And I heard the CEO of YouTube talk about how damaging it was to women. And perhaps you could recruit certain women and make it more palatable or exciting to them.

1:16:50 Maybe James Damore got some of that from Pinker's lecture. We're not saying women are better, men are better. Like it did with Evergreen State University. Maybe their stock price hasn't gone down. The Google memo is very sexist. Yep. That's not a negative value assessment. And that should be addressed. He's a nice guy. please contribute. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

1:20:28 are treated equally. The problem with that is, well, but what if I disagree with this and this and this here? now than there have ever been before. Do they pay $10 a ticket, $50 a ticket, $100 a ticket? subjects that they covered about it. It was at UCLA, so I drove down and saw it, and it was so entertaining. G. Gordon Liddy was on Fear Factor. and he was deep into his 60s at the time yeah when we had him on fear factor the only thing

1:24:15 Strong mind. That is my number one beef with conspiracy theories is that when you – some of them that are so preposterous, like whether it's flat Earth or – what are the really dumb ones? get categorized as There is the Northwoods Papers. But I end with the whole second half is because a lot of them are true. Right. the Illuminati, and they're calling the shots, and they're controlling-

1:27:08 He's a part of it. mouth shut and also he would know because he worked in government most people are pretty these unexceptional folks that are just like uninspired, they're also there. Mind control. to get into the main beams to wrap them friends or buddies or, you know, what they were doing or they didn't mention it to anybody. They see things that aren't necessarily what was really in front of them.

1:29:56 Like with the JFK assassination, there's a famous story about the Umbrella Man. a protest uh and that stems back to neville Chamberlain coming back after meeting with I don't know. All those little things really is just randomness. Like the way they did it, the plane slammed in. Well, also when you see the images of it collapsing, what you don't see is the interior structure

1:32:28 sue everybody i mean that's i mean he got his money back i guess because there's some insurance I'm not renting an office in this building. i think so yeah i thought it was shorter it's definitely not as big as the original towers, right? I think it is this tall. Is it? Yeah, I think so. It says at 1,776 feet, One World Trade Center is the tallest LEED gold-certified building in the Western Hemisphere.

1:33:53 Yeah, we need to take an elevator right to the fucking moon. Well, it's like why aren't trees 1,000 feet tall? Japan takes tiny first steps towards space elevator. No theory explains every single thing that's out there that we want to study. There's If you have an alternative theory of physics, go to this page. theory like with Einstein's relativity.

1:36:07 We don't have to explain everything. Space is fake is Which is really interesting knowledge that God has created. Space is fake. This is how they fake everything. He's got a NASA suit on. This is what I'm on. Have you seen that? Yeah. It's crazy. I don't know if he still believes it. in low earth orbit and this is like the the main thing pointing to that

1:39:52 Yeah, but Buzz Aldrin's not like that. But Neil Armstrong never did. space walking stuff and some of the things that they would do to walk outside of a spaceship. working on things and just trying to understand how all this stuff works. Yeah. Right, yeah. The images. What's interesting is To figure that, use the old stuff. there was no VCRss there was no ability to

1:43:33 watched Armstrong's televised image That's how they did it. I don't know anything about astrophysics. yeah not yeah and a gravitational pull the same as the moon right the only um you've probably What's their name? really expensive i mean we might as well just go to the moon and then they start talking about the is if someone could prove definitively beyond a shadow of a doubt that

1:47:25 Not an inside job. Also, 1969 was a very different environment in terms of what you could get away with you know about the rods little insects yes yeah well they would it this guy put out this doc I was like, oh my God, They show that it's a video artifact. What is it? The other aspect with conspiracy theories is cognitive dissonance. Just some nobody?

1:50:38 And none of the evidence against anybody else. which just happened to be where the parade route was going, so he could have a clear shot. well that's been settled by the fact that the way it's shown in in the videos is that the two seats hits Connolly's shoulder, it is already moving down. it ricocheted off bones and came out like the front of the animal.

1:52:47 But on the negative side, they always distort. they balloon they bend they distort wildly they don't come out looking like that they come out Okay, so we're getting kind of caught up in the weeds of the anomalies. What about this? He told his wife about it. That Oswald did shoot at the president Why is it a problem? because they had to account for a bullet that hit a curb underneath the overpass.

1:55:04 You can hardly miss. We're talking about the reason why they came up with the magic bullet theory in the first place. checked into a hospital because he was hit with a ricochet. So they knew that one bullet had not hit the president. It's flattened if you look at it from the end. I don't necessarily think that there was some grand conspiracy, but I do think it's

1:56:58 They could have just taken that rifle, and look, it could have been that Oswald did it And he was a gun owner. Security wasn't anything like it is now. He really could just walk right in like he did. It seems like people want it to be one way or the other, and they want this case closed option. That's a kind of conspiracy. And God said, it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone using his own Carcano rifle.

1:59:39 When I was researching this back in the 90s, after the Oliver Stone film came out. He just used him as a I mean, that is a- Well, here's the thing about that, though. hands come up like that well he's grabbing his neck apparently that was the other thing was there There's a lot of shenanigans. And there's fragments in Connolly's body that you could detect on an x-ray.

2:01:56 That's what I don't like. The guy spent a ton of time in Russia, came back over here very that he wasn't with other people and they killed kept it for more than a decade and Dick Gregory got a hold of the actual film footage and premiered it on the Geraldo Rivera show. So all those years later. It doesn't mean that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't do it. I'd only been doing comedy for three years.

2:05:22 Determination after reading everything and writing his book that shot it's a rifle it's not that far and just because someone gets lucky doesn't mean they can't that triggered the First World War, this... Somebody threw a hand grenade, missed, rolled into the car behind Franz Ferdinand, and they got hurt and went to the hospital. Sure. Right. That's crazy talk.

2:08:03 It gets moved. The idea was that he had it rested, which makes it much more steady Right. know. Like anybody who knows anything about rifles Boom. There's no way you know. and you look down and they have an X, the two Xs in the street. could lee harvey oswald certainly could have done it he certainly could have shot at kennedy he was He was over there.

2:11:08 because that would have been a cleaner shot, it seems to me. Ooh, look at that. It all happened right here. He took the manhole cover off. You're always going to get a bunch of really wacky conspiracies whenever anything happens Yeah, that's right. Jamal Khashoggi. They had him set up. apparently, and then it's the last time pretty sketchy shit. There's so much money.

2:14:56 Yes. So in other words, assassinations in history are pretty common. that it would be a huge disaster. but i was to pull the troops out of afghanistan i can't pull the troops out of afghanistan if we do That kind of stuff, I suspect, does happen a lot. Oh, okay. There's so much of this stuff Bush. Do you think they hated him as much as they hate Trump?

2:19:22 Vox. Do you find it odd that It depends on who your group is and do they have power or not. control and power people really have in positions of power, CEOs, politicians, and so on. Usually, Okay, look, we're going to give you the missiles in Turkey if you take the missiles out of Cuba. and I don't know if either of us can untie it, but here's an idea.

2:22:44 And Khrushchev was like, yeah. And Khrushushchev was like, holy fuck, this guy's a madman. No. He kept that place running on his own until he died. That is crazy. museum and the whole thing is kind of a tribute to russia liberated europe from the Nazis. What? And from their perspective, and you go to Berlin right next to- The Victory Museum. And it's very moving.

2:25:00 We did a little bit from their perspective. I mean, they have a point in terms of their contribution, in terms of the loss of lives. How long have you had it? Science Salon. who's kind of keeping order instead of all these little mafioso-type gangs. It is pretty astonishing what kind of control he has over that country, though. You can see his body, yeah.

2:27:36 It's a drama And then when Lenin had a stroke, it was like, okay, so Stalin and Trotsky, who's going to take over when the boss is gone? There's less of that now than before? we have a problem with climate change we have climateiers. How do we get people who don't know anything about it to shift from I'm a skeptic to I'm a believer? that confident no or aren't they just look at it the wrong it feels like a personal attack on them

2:30:57 well in in a sense he's right and then in another sense it was also the amount of profit that al Yeah, it's like it's screwy. And the facts get filtered through those, understandably. I would love it if there was some sort of a secular option, a community-driven, ethics-driven, morality-driven, friendship-driven thing where people could go and instead worship, maybe just appreciate life and sort of confirm some of the best aspects of community and culture and who we are and do it in a place where it makes you really

2:33:08 What is this? they're pretty secular. that has a lot of psychological value it connects people that's one of the great things about I mean, I was having this conversation with Bill Burr about this recently. be nice to your spouse a big draw of those and optimize our lives And it seems to be a trend towards secularism. It's the acting on your beliefs that causes the problem.

2:36:42 Right. And they think that God has dictated these rules. that. In fact, it's the opposite. And so I make the case in one of my Scientific American columns We know how to do this. My favorite one that still exists is abstinence. these goddamn hormones like what's happening here there's studies on how They just can't wait. Right. It's hilarious. But the need for belief systems is so strong

2:41:23 You can get diverse people to agree. You're not going to get agreement in a room full of UN diversity. I do. Everybody – the only question is, which Christian church do you go to? We know this from studies on interracial marriage, for example, that's not even an issue anymore. Although you never know when a politician says something. burn me shows, TV shows, scripts, things like that.

2:45:03 You hardly notice it. You can't do that. and the way he talked about japanese you know when i was a kid in the 60s like And the way he talked about Japanese, you know, Yeah. It's hard to remember. What do you think about the pushback against this idea I'm on board with Steve across the board on these things. but across the board if we take like the last 200 years which direction are the trend lines going

2:48:10 You just go to skeptic.com, and it's posted there. That's MichaelShermer1. Giant waste of time though. Don't get sucked in.