Joe Rogan Experience #1456 — Michael Shermer Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Okay, here we go. That was my last time I've been in a restaurant, actually. And I just upload them and share them with the students I mean, already tech companies like Zoom are having to ramp up their game because the systems are crashing because pretty much everybody's doing Zoom meetings now. Wow. I mean, it's a strange and trying multiply that by, you know, 10 million or a hundred million or something.

3:38 Yeah, well, of course, Well, but at some point, you know, there's an economic calculation, like how many people of somebody who died in their car. Well, there are people who do those calculations, And, you know, that's kind of a normal part of But again, people, we have this egalitarian mode, that doesn't sound right. They jumped on it right away. i think we have to do what do you think about what's going on in germany because germany is

7:19 I think they have a high, tight culture, a very tight culture. I'm going to the beach anyway. but, of course, money is just a proxy for something else, which has to do with the quality of the health care they get, the food that they eat, how healthy and exercise prone they are or not, diabetes, obesity, these sorts of things. eat, and take care of your body and take care of your

9:38 riding your bike today, right? Yeah, this morning. Actually, And, of course, he's much younger and faster than me. cycling, but I can understand your enthusiasm if he's the top guy. That's pretty cool. Not me, baby. Yeah, I do intermittent fasting. But you can order them on Amazon. But with the weights, you get, you know, extra upper body and it works the big muscles of your legs.

12:31 And I do think that has to help for response to the coronavirus. Who knows if that will make a difference for you or me personally. bioweapons lab in in china there is that at night and so on. And, you know, these wet markets in Wuhan, China, it's not that wet markets by themselves are bad, but, you know, say you have Yeah. my doc, who's also a good friend and a fellow cyclist, he's the guy that did my neck surgery.

15:46 And so I can understand why he was doing it as a precautionary thing, as a prophylactic against it. Unlike that guy in Arizona that found it in his fish tank cleaner. I'm like, ooh, okay, yeah. Symptom-free. huh i wonder if i had it in in December. And the reason this is I don't know how they do this genetically with mutations Is there a way to test whether or not you've had it for antibodies?

18:33 And that absolutely has to be done because we have to know what the number is. And Donald Trump Jr. tweeted today a compilation of CNN and all these other different networks giving out bad information way back in January. and everything at this point in time. It's like what they need to concentrate on now is just And Trump usually gets lumped in there.

21:03 not doing enough when it looks like we should have done more. not what an autocrat would do. An autocrat would say, yeah, I'm telling everybody what to do. Yeah. And what you're saying is totally correct. It seems like the polarization is even worse, Is that a Trump shift? The centers have been shrinking, and the polls have been increasing. wanted to talk to you about, Michael, is there's an article today in The Atlantic, which is really interesting. It's about technology.

24:42 they're using it in south korea and they're using it in South Korea and they're using it in Singapore. This is a very weird thing, and it gets us into a very gray area. i think there are times say national emergency like this of course there's always the risk that right but that's never happened we've never gotten back like what happened to nsa when edward snowden

27:02 Yes, and, you know, this program was started under Bush. And so supposedly when the Pentagon Papers came out. And then in the 90s, the Church Committee on Conspiracies from the 70s, a lot of those documents were released, Not just that, signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. what are we doing doing that anyway? Right. Well, that's what we do. It's like, wait a minute.

29:37 I'm still not sure about that one because after I posted something about the two cameras broke or whatever, Well, I think what he's got is probably more incriminating to him though you know I think what he's got is probably hey I had sex with all these starlets and turned them into big Yeah. the independents? But as a civil libertarian, I feel like, well, but I'm a free speech fundamentalist.

33:19 No. The problem is, well, what about the hundreds of millions of people what about the countries that don't have 5G? And, you know, The Exorcist and these other films where bad things happen to the actors that are in horror films. But something like The Shining, which is a super horror scary film, nothing bad happened to the actors. in there. Yeah. I don't know.

38:02 Well, in general, I've been kind of a civil libertarian most of my life in that respect. But to be honest, I was kind of inspired after the episode we did to somebody else, it strengthens your own arguments. So like, for example, I have my But more importantly still, if you silence people, don't think the Nazis had an intentional plan to exterminate European Jewry. Okay, that's now

40:51 Am I a Holocaust denier? You know, they scan the passport and boom, he's arrested. So I would apply that to pretty much anybody who's out there like that, because that's and they agree with each other, but they're all wrong. But they can find confirmation bias in whether I convince you that that's not true, you're very likely not going to vote for Hillary no matter what.

44:18 But in terms of getting Republicans to vote, say centrists or Republicans to vote Democrat, They're like some of the economic policies in the 30s that got Germany out of the Depression. Most German people did not want war. hover in midair even though no one really believes it and it's just think of like north korea where They just wanted compliance, right?

47:56 Everybody's going, oh, crap, please, somebody sit down. It's a signal. That's right. That's the chilling effect. If I want to be heard and I want you to take me seriously I'm going to override that impulse and do it anyway, if nothing else, selfishly, for my own safety's sake. He's the most misrepresented person I've ever met in my life. It's so disturbing, but it's a very strange left-wing characteristic. And again, this is coming from someone who's on the left, but it is a left-wing characteristic. This need to

51:39 on something, I would hope that we could just talk about these ideas as if they are They will willfully misrepresent you in order to strengthen their position. You know, writing something in text, as someone responds in text, I mean, this is one of the basic tenets of rational discourse is the ability to communicate And sometimes I'll write them back and go,

54:03 And the person's sort of like, well, I didn't mean it because it's just a shitty way to communicate. Sending someone book for me to blurb, given that an entire chapter is devoted to criticizing my claims about rod for hate from the left. And, you know, I mean, I don't even think he's really right wing. I mean, The impulse is, well, but if I give up on that one, then I'm going to lose all these other ones, and then I've given up my identity.

57:10 science. It's a technical science. The models are super complex. People send me these papers. I it's become something else that you identify yourself as. And if you're right-wing, you're supposed to have a certain amount of skepticism about climate change. The virtue signaling, the saying, I have loyalty to this position because of this is my tribe.

59:26 Let's just take them one by one. other. You know, I recognize and acknowledge your arguments are really good, Ben, or whoever is a Don't murder people, right? anything then well it will become a person though when when do we decide well that's such a messy Like, when do you back it off? And if we can't acknowledge that, then we're being tribal. But most of life is much more on a spectrum, a continuum.

1:03:34 There's different places to set the dial. Some are more homogeneous. want to put lines anywhere it's a it's a day by week, day by day, even hour by hour, the development of the connectome that creates thought and so on. And it's one of the real problems with only having two choices in this country when it comes to politics and when it comes to just styles of life, you know.

1:06:34 There's people that used to be atheists that become Muslims, and they wear the hijab, and they fully adhere to the Quran. It's really, really interesting. Because I've spent a lot of time watching religious scholars online talk. how you find other like-minded people that stick with you yeah i'm glad you do that because that's really the only way to figure out why people believe whatever it is they believe yeah you

1:08:41 I like that. But just in general, I mean, a good Hitler biography like by Ian Kershaw, the definitive biography, it's two massive volumes, each know, he discovered that they all had this perspective, like, well, this is why I did it. Now, there are some psychopaths or sadists that do that, but they're very small in number, very tiny percentage of the population. Most people in

1:10:25 Right. would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing and conscript young men into the army and send them off to war to potentially die. So the N-word to describe African-Americans, obviously, the one we'd all agree with. These are now considered hate speech, that they could trigger people's feelings of being hurt. My wife gets this all the time because she's from Germany and she speaks perfect English.

1:14:15 is that people realize what actually is important. one of the reasons why people can get upset about these things that many people consider to be not that And that was his take on things. so when they now say you know things are as bad as they've ever been or worse than they've ever because it's inaccurate you know i mean but we should reinforce the positive rather of course

1:17:43 like i want to promote what's right and i want to against evil, and I'm all fired up here with my We're in Southern California. Isn't that what happened? cultures that we all coexist with, especially here in America. I mean, this is such a legitimate He takes all these trips to Mexico to learn with the Mexican masters. You know, this is not really Mexican. No, he's saying this is from Mexico. He talks

1:21:07 and that's what makes culture rich. And again, I connect this to the fact that we didn't have as many real problems as we used to. it. It's just their brains haven't fully formed yet and they don't have a lot of life experience. And so I went to one of their meetings once just to see what it was all about. So well, then how do you know it's worse than it was, say, five years ago or it's the same or it's better?

1:24:05 So some guy in a pickup truck drove by and said something like fucking faggots. 1950s. But if you look at interracial marriage, that was illegal until 1967, and pretty much most Americans, including liberals, were against it. more years it'll just fall off our social radar well not totally though remember when pete buddha She didn't know. sad it's sad that someone would care it really is sad

1:27:58 I've been called homophobic because I've made fun of certain things that gay people do that I think are silly. Everyone's fine. I mean, it's a fucking fantastic place to be if you're a young gay guy looking to get laid. Not as many. And that's not, first of all, is very beneficial to your own personal growth. You can realize how, if you're there, when you

1:31:05 progress is this bottom up. Now, sometimes you have to pass laws to get people to change, like that. Don't do that. I don't like it when you say that, you know, and it began with the N word and point about you could pinpoint to the decade when a novel was written based on the words that are Thank God that didn't stick. okay, here's the new rule, we're all going to use this word.

1:34:00 But it's hard to pinpoint the day that that happened. who said, I've never had a drink I'm leaving. I'm leaving. And this guy was like a grand wizard of the KKK. He said, I'm stepping friends with him and to continue their friendship with him than it was for them to stay in the kkk different that's it right that's it that's right isn't that that movie kk clan or uh what the spike

1:36:53 He's just doing it like old school, door to door. There is some evidence, still preliminary, that reading novels makes you better at mind reading. of just this, where you can kind of see the way the corner of my eyes is squinting or not or But still the idea is that the rise of the novel since the Enlightenment said when he met her so you're the little woman that started this great war you know in a in a way

1:39:58 therefore we have to silence that. Yeah, that's a similar conversation I had with a friend who's very progressive. That's always a bad idea. And second of all, I've heard a lot of people called Nazis that I don't think are really Nazis. that's a nazi yeah, punch that guy. punched him now i have to admit you know people like richard spencer jared taylor you know these

1:42:51 Make him so he can't go anywhere. things, the sting of losing is very personal. And so you sort of built in these, people build in her. First of all, she's an attractive woman. So you see these guys are like, oh boy, this Right. We stereotype all kinds of things. and you had to be loyal to your group. and his buddy is like on that wall. You need me on that wall. And when you're at parties, enjoying your freedom, I'm on

1:47:09 So autocrats tend to jump on that and go, get a gun like what do you do how do you get a gun but you want a gun my wife says i should get a gun Some of them are insane. Yeah, there's a certain logic to hoarding. Like, okay, good. But we're all, but we also want to do the right thing. Therefore, there's more guns, more gun violence in the South. There's kind of a logic to it.

1:51:11 So anyway, they do all follow up surveys and they drew blood and all this stuff. And therefore, Southerners had to kind of take the law into their own hands. And anyway, I just thought of that when you mentioned that. It's like, oh, it's already for sale. The devil has due. Excellent. We will give you a big studio next time. Bye.