Joe Rogan Experience #770 — Michael Shermer Transcript

Transcript

0:00 And we're live. Mr. Shermer, welcome. Yeah, well, I was a bike racer from 1980 to about 1990, about 10 years in between when I was first in college. I'm a college student, but I like to write. and Jonathan Boyer was the big star. And then soon after that were all those sort of long-distance mixed sport type things where you run and hike and swim. They are, yes.

2:50 You have skeptics because they're also skeptics. is a really fascinating sport Yeah. You know, I just got two left feet. Absolutely. It's all I did, you was a 40-hour a week, but They just stored it and packed it in. things like steroids, that's not going to do it for a cyclist. The miracle of EPO is that it packs This was 1976. cured. I'm a Kaiser patient and I did it 10 years ago and wiped it out within a month. And I did the

6:42 Martin Shurkelly. and charging ridiculous amount of money. Yep. Is it because just because you're in a sort of a trials and it's like, this is what we do. And so by the time Lance got into the sport, you know, he didn't invent doping. I like him a lot. Probably, yes. they all have been busted for doping or admitted that they doped. Anyway, with the Festina team that got busted in 98.

10:11 Let's just try anything. And then, of course, Ferrari wasn't available, so he hired this other guy Fuentes who screwed up So you do it in a way. You know, guys putting bags of blood on the hook in the hotel room on the wall where the painting is so it drips down. and the camaraderie with the guys, it's great. seven straight and then you retire and then what Yeah. It doesn't have the same intensity.

13:10 i mean they all have done it yeah sugar ray leonard ali down the line and a lot of mma fighters I mean, he was so beloved when he was doing the Livestrong Foundation and the whole deal of trying to help people with cancer and his own struggle overcoming cancer. And apparently Lance said no. Just what happened? but then we started in my garage, Skeptic Magazine and the lecture series at Caltech on science and pseudoscience and cults and science and religion and alternative medicine and quackery and all this stuff.

16:07 done the risky thing of, you know, just dropping everything and doing the Race Across America stuff. He, you know, his tiger blood and all that, you know. and then you adjust it for each person. So a goat that has arthritis. So he went down there to actually do this? But doesn't it knock it down to an undetectable? That's right. So, yeah. So skeptic is kind of a niche market for, you know, fringe claims, borderlands claims.

19:40 How do we know these things? there's so much confusion out there when it comes to trying to figure out what's real You're like, what the hell's going on? Yes, I'm in it. Some of the times the same people paid by these front groups. You never figure out anything. going to blow this. That isn't how it works. There's 10,000 climate scientists working in all

22:03 just debunking one of these arguments people are drawn to this idea of being a no-nonsense person. Right. Yeah, it's partly that. coordinating the flying of the planes into the buildings and, you know, what do they do with the passengers and how do they get the people into the World Trade Center buildings to break open the I get headaches. what have you ever seen that turns concrete into dust?

24:50 Okay, so then there were tests done on the thermite, I never heard of it. They had to cut some of them down. For that to have happened and explosive devices planted as G. Gordon Lindy or then tell their friends I don't know if Jesse Ventura really believes that. He believes a lot, but he gets a lot of things right. They're missing where the real action is.

27:51 But it's real and it's effective. And then there was a real one that was apparently being planned by Dick Cheney on the way out. So there have been real conspiracies. Right. So they look at 9-11, they go, this is the grand Well, that could happen naturally if we just educated women, made them economically empowered, 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 pro-life,

29:54 And Paul Ehrlich with the population bomb, wrong. And the reason is because You better have six or 10 just to make sure there's a couple left when you're old So already there's a number of countries that are below replacement level. And I forget how many countries, 20-something countries are below 2.1 replacement level. What? Down to one or two billion. What?

32:50 the problem. The Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, we have the technology Yeah, okay. What are the requirements and what you can do with veganism versus what... We are running out of food. We are running out of this the sky is falling Well, okay. Until he gets killed. In the Moral Archive, I have a chapter on animal rights in which I show that the numbers are still in single digits.

35:56 Happy Farm meat, you know, But, of course, that's what computers were in the 40s. It tastes great. And I would be okay if everybody went that way, but I'm not quite there yet myself. Okay. Yeah, I think there's a real possibility of headless animals that we've engineered in labs, Just design it with your designer genes. I mean, if they do create synthetic meat, will it have the same properties?

39:10 Yeah. That's kind of the case with every problem, right? And over many years and decades, all of a sudden, you've got a super smart car versus the jalopies of the 50s. You know, you got 2,400 bucks. essentially I've made the argument that if you leave cell phones alone, But, you know, that's not how companies work. It's in the cloud. when they update things,

41:49 and you see electric cars from the 1920s. It's like, we should be there now. I want to show you a video then because it's really fascinating. William Randolph Hearst the psychoactive aspect of it. Really? Oh, wow. It would bend like crazy. Really? Okay. Yeah. paper was far superior, but it would have cost him millions of dollars because he had forests.

45:30 Why is there no THC in the hemp? So when you're using it to make things. That looks like about 1930s or 40s. That's also what funded reefer madness. I'm sure you've seen of course all those those are real conspiracy The paper, if you ever had hemp paper in front of you, it feels like a regular piece So, well, and there was a documentary on about the public transportation system here in LA

47:48 You really don't need a car except for rare occasions. I think. And that's really what the war is on, the drugs that you can't control and tax. We've got enough in that back room to kill you. You know what I mean? It's not like, oh man, he did drugs Well, there's absolutely Global domination. people about a bunch of different subjects. and they're not being objective even remotely.

50:34 Well, have we considered this? We know from surveys that if you tick the box even when they contradict each other. But if you have like JFK, the leader of the free world, powerful, articulate, handsome, and so on, and he's brought down by who? Well, first of all, there's a ton of evidence that he did do it. And most of the JFA conspiracy No, no, no.

52:29 Like, why was there that guy in Dealey Plaza with the umbrella? And he said, no, this is a thing left over from World War II. Chamberlain and his umbrella, David Lifton's book, Best Evidence? Also a good book. He's got a turn right in front of it. which was this Serbian nationalist organization, and they wanted to assassinate the Archduke Franz The person wasn't there to give them their weapon.

55:14 Well, it was a little more complicated than that. The car stalled out. That definitely can happen. within days they got the whole thing where are the people that did this to kennedy or 9-11 who There was more than one. shot, and it's close. And he said that more people weren't involved in killing Kennedy? I started reading, you know, just here's the claim, here's the explanation, here's the—hundreds of them.

57:55 And the seats were not lined up. Sometimes you shoot someone in the front and it'll come out the top of their head. the, get a bullet to look like Yeah, but if you look at it on edge, it's bulging. Have you ever shot a bullet in the water? that's not something that hit anything, in my opinion. They found the bullet hole in the granite of the curbstone.

1:00:44 I've talked to like, is this shot anything? No theory explains everything. I mean, it's okay to say, okay, that's weird. But we also don't know that one bullet did all that damage. because it's not reliable. Well, not only that, there's so much chaos. When you're there and the That's one of the things that drives me crazy about 9-11. So I don't buy the eyewitness stuff.

1:03:50 Every president has enemies secret societies. I mean, that massive speech that he did about secret societies. He was a And remember, he had tried to assassinate General Walker just in April before that It's like the 9-11 pilots that were training to take off but not ever learn to land. orchestrated or knew it would happen, let it happen, to squelch the American Firsters Movement, which

1:05:46 But usually politicians act in response to something. from Condoleezza Rice, Osama bin Laden, back and go oh look there's the one right we should have known yeah same thing with pearl what codes it intercepted and what information they actually had back then. And there was a congressional investigation, Big corporations, CEOs, big government agencies, and the administrators that run them.

1:08:20 that you can't do it. Oh, all right. I think there's a lot of that that goes on that there was no conspiracy whatsoever. And then you get people that are trying to see conspiracy Exactly. And I think it's also know about, like we said, Operation But this is, I mean, we're talking about actual real events as opposed to, like, psychics then before you know it they're you know you're all you're filling in the blanks together and

1:11:14 And it became fairly lucrative. like with Dr. Laura's call-in talk show. You know, she has a rich database of problems that people connected Dr. Laura to it. Relationships, you know, love, health, money, career. So if you record them, you videotape them or tape record them, it's very enlightening. or say these things? And then we'd catch him cheating once in a while.

1:13:55 Now, don't tell me who you're here for, but I'm getting had this guy on the sci-fi show his name is banish aq he's a I know bandage yeah 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, right. It's amazing to watch, though. It is. God, he's so good at it. Banachek's one of the best, yeah.

1:15:40 Yep. Anyway, I was just stunned by this. But you can't tell us. No, I can't. she, she could tell the future or she could, she could some sort of psychic ability. But when you hear the explanation, you go, oh, God. boy, you can make a lot of money if you're an unethical person. Because the power of the sort of following his gaze or following the movement of the hand and this and that, it's done so well that you still miss it.

1:18:23 What's going to happen in the future? grass. Is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind? So if you assume that the rustle in the There's a higher cost for making a type 2 error a false negative. connections between events and the environment. And that's the basis of survival. So all of us Oh, boy. It's just so weird how people are drawn to trying to uncover mysteries.

1:21:33 Okay, astrology as far as like, you know, hey, you're a Leo, Nope. I don't understand what you're saying. And it could have also been like, you know, you always know someone who has a wacky husband or a wacky wife that believe in any shit. You know? You know, there was a study done in, I think it was a UFO report done in the late 50s. That's probably when I jumped in.

1:24:05 Remember when Chariots of the Gods was a film that was released in the theaters? But that's- Okay, so the government lied when they said it was a weather balloon. well, see, actually what we were doing is launching this project to listen to Soviet. But that's around the time that there was a lot of experimental aircraft. every January 1st, Well, I saw one when I was filming Fear Factor in 2002.

1:26:18 It's amazing. Yep. with a bunch of numbers that dims about 20 20% every period of time, whatever that is. So, but, you know, and I did some radio shows locally about this. The problem also with social media is it becomes clickbait. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. that have spent years and years of their life like about. Well, I think one of the appeals of the UFO alien thing is it's kind of a secular religion

1:30:07 We have to stop this. And then in the famous scene where Patricia Neal goes to Gort the robot, he's standing there, and the visor comes up, and he's going to zap her, His name in the movie was Mr. Carpenter, his earthly name, Mr. Carpenter. So they changed the line, and now he says something like, no, no one has the power over life and death. And if we encounter them, they're not going to be behind us technologically because we wouldn't encounter them otherwise.

1:32:25 I mean, if there are 100 years in advance of us, if we're thinking about colonizing every step along the way from bacterial grade life to big brains, if anything, it's probably It could have been shorter. And it'd be way ahead of us. like here on Earth. And they had Europe to themselves for about 300,000 years. difference. It may be brain modularity. Maybe they didn't have language, or if they did,

1:34:55 is that you could have three They think that had Homo sapiens not dominated Europe when they came in, Neanderthals might Well, it could be eternally cycling. Yes, that's what I'm saying. I mean, there should have been somebody who made it. And they never build it. We just don't know. It's pretty small. The Webb Space Telescope, I'm told. They're just getting it from a light spectrum now, right? generation, they'll be able to get the atmospheres. The Webb Space Telescope

1:37:59 to use something. Try to be like British? Yep, it works. Especially when it's time for food. the queen like look i know you're the one who is in charge of this so i'm going to talk to you and back-engineer their technology, I've been on that show many times. that was out of his fucking mind. Oh, my God. Well, did you ever pay attention to that Robert Lazar

1:41:28 For his Corvette Isn't that bizarre? well, there's no evidence that you ever went to these schools. No, you're still not coming in here. That one to me has been so strange that they will land somewhere and they have these meetings and these elected leaders make deals with the UFOs. They love investigating. You know, the real conspiracies are, you know, how come we can't get our drugs cheaper?

1:44:10 because then the money's in the treatment. I took pictures. Right. And so, I mean, if that's true, then all the people that were sick from polio and all the You know, they had, like, something wrong with them. I'm like, I'm telling you, man, it's barely uncomfortable. drugs it's they became friendly and they did nice things to them and it was almost understood that

1:46:36 of pain pills that they've Right. There's definitely not. Yes. It's like a disease. A, more people paying attention to it, and B, the category is much bigger than it used to be. Is that a word? Go to Caltech or MIT. You're on the spectrum, they always say. Ah, you have a disease. If they give that same medication to another person, there's going to be some issues. And when people say, well, you know, my child

1:50:44 you know they're horrible to people vaccinations and they're, you know, do you know how low that is? of you give kids vaccinations That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Let's look at the, oh, this is what we're dealing with. or the Bigfoot people or whatever, If you bring up these facts or these thoughts, And the more psychologically invested you are in a belief, the harder it is to change your mind.

1:54:17 Not only did they say, well, this was a dumb idea, let's go home. You know, they went home We know. It did end. He's like, it is undeniable. exist anymore. What is the type of language that they use but like where each each symbol symbol like a what these people were writing and how they wrote And that December 21st, 2012 was, to whatever extent it was coming to an end, was just a period of time.

1:57:20 I mean, almost no one ever says, you know what, I was wrong. I had a license plate. I think Terrence McKenna believed that's when people were going to come up with a time machine. It's the worst it's ever been now because of this guy. apocalypse. great. But there's always that tension between decline and progress. But there's also this And then we find this thing.

2:00:04 So, I mean, I'm not blaming Art Bell at all. I'm not cutting my dick off. And usually those ones get purged. But in the case of Scientology... the end of the Mormon church, but Brigham Young One of my favorite moments in all of comedy It's amazing. When he died, he was packed up with antidepressants and other drugs that he was allegedly against. He wrote more books than anyone who's ever lived.

2:03:02 that he said, if you really want to make money Yeah, oh, yeah, I've read Going Clear. Yeah, Lawrence Wright's a great journalist. And on top of that, the Internet has exposed it for what it really is. But you don't see those at all anymore. On the street? No, I didn't see that movie. Those people never stopped sending me shit. I was. Horrible story.

2:05:59 I was like, what? dollars fifty thousand dollars for like some ceremony and i go what does it involve well This distress and the worry and the negativity. All right, let's talk about your mother. hotlines everybody has problems love health money career everybody's got some issue and we're going To try to cure himself. I was like, God, I've got to get this fucking thing under wraps.

2:09:16 already bought a self-help book. Well, if they work, why do you need to keep buying the tapes Well, it's very difficult for people to change behavior patterns. used to and to shift it it's not gonna happen in weeks or months you really It's fat-based. So you don't worry about cholesterol? Yeah, he went vegan. That's just great for you, period. The mental clarity aspect of it is really interesting.

2:12:08 You avoid. Yeah. It's, um, it's, uh, from, um, a Rob Wolf invention. He figured out how to add grass fed Yeah, I eat meat. Junk foods, sugars, grains, stuff like that. heavily into ketogenic diets, For me, it was just wanting to try it. And I wasn't fat, but I definitely could have lost a little bit of weight. You go hunting out here? A lot of elk walking around.

2:15:36 I like buffalo and ostrich. Ostrich they say well in the paleolithic period, people ate a lot of bread. Especially back then. Yeah. I like milk with cookies, but since I'm not eating cookies, no milk. that's, and you can get sick. Eggs. Good. I'm glad to hear that. I like eggs. I have chickens. Yeah. Omega-3s. He was amazing. 2042. Yeah. who had developed some artificial,

2:19:31 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? I think the problem of identity is a serious one I mean, that's a real problem, right? Yeah. So I think that's really what copies, AI copies will be, is just like twins. And then also it's the environment that you surround yourself with as far as the unique individuals that you choose to associate with.

2:21:54 So you take this individual, you move them to Montreal, You know, you don't exist in a vacuum. It's still you as a person in there. But does it have to be you? It's one of his many lines about immortality. I don't feel like I'm still going. Then we can worry about uploading more intelligence into our cortex, say, for example. We fucked up tomatoes, but they last forever.

2:24:48 But if we colonize another planet, say we start a colony on Mars, in a way that's a founder population that can then begin to diverge away from the earthly population. Definitely not. So it's an archetype. the authorities. They all moved to Mexico when they couldn't have a hundred wives. And then he's like, oh, well. I'm supposed to, you know, have sex with so-and-so.

2:27:14 And this gets sold as a viable declaration of revelations, and it's written down. And suddenly they got a new revelation from God. Colorado City, Arizona, I think, or maybe it's in Utah. And it's like being in a Twilight Zone or X-Files episode, you know, where they drive somewhere and it's like everybody's a little weird. It's really odd. I don't go. Oh, it's really... I want to go right now. It's really... I don't think

2:29:00 Well, the way they do it is they marry one It's just you're writing something down. If you have a law that says this, but everybody in the town, including the police, captain, the courts, well, the judge. I agree. a young kid. know i was lost yeah you're too young you don't have enough information i would have definitely Why not? That becomes a problem with cults.

2:31:18 Well, if that's the case. It's tough. How old is that Bible? We're touching the past. Oh, okay. How unusual. Right. You know, that was the world of the Old Testament. and that Islam was the only religion that had not gone through the Enlightenment. Well, the law changed. made these remarks, you know. these guys, these black guys. He said, what he was saying was that you're sticking it in my face that you're fucking

2:35:01 Right. banging her because she's hot. Again, most old guys in the 50s would have thought nothing about saying that stuff publicly. They're like, look, we got him. It's frowned upon. It's one reason why I think all these campus protests have gotten so out of hand. You know, they're all fired up about what for you and I is just like safe spaces. Even bad ideas. even bad ideas like

2:37:43 Everywhere else, it's super slanted. on that side, just to see what... Listen to Larry Elder. I like Larry Elder. Yeah, he's a conservative, to at least be able to articulate why they're wrong. I follow this one guy. He's a young earth Christian who every day will talk about how That's what I did back in the 90s when the Holocaust denial movement started taking off.

2:40:07 here? And why were they making their arguments? the they? Because that's us, right? second world war was was was quite good but then he found he wasn't in the academy he's you know There's no single point. very good point because there's a massive attraction There is a movement that believes that all the ISSS pictures, those are all faked. It was a loosely based friend.

2:43:25 Yes. It's curved. That's the Earth on the moon. You know, lunar eclipse, there it is. It's curved. you know, why aren't all the continents located on the one side of the pizza? The hull goes first, and then you see the mass last because it's curved. from florida it arcs it's arcing because it's going into orbit and the earth is curved so you I wrote my biography on him.

2:45:45 that that that darwin cribbed from uh from wallace i don't think that's the case what it is not that that was getting big in England. mean come on uh but wallace oh no i'm going this is this might be true and uh so he was in it and and they put a mark on a bridge okay so you know and and so when i'm looking so there's one two There it is. There's the old Bedford Canal.

2:48:07 And this guy was sending crazy letters to his wife and to the National Geographical. But Darwin had to disown him eventually. just taking notes uh composing his ideas, running experiments. the populations increase in a Malthusian way. I mean, he sort of outlined, like, my book. and you know I've been working on this. Boom, simultaneous discovery. And Wallace wrote his own great book in the 1880s called Darwinism.

2:51:40 field, I was taking a shower and boom, the idea came to me. writers like to do that they like to write and then they go for a walk right and then after like the origins of creativity. of gravity and you let go of your pen or your coffee mug, it's just going to hover there floating because the whole frame is dropping. And so to do this in the space shuttle, for example,

2:54:16 sense of gravity uh oh i know what it was in 2001 where he was running along that curved How does someone come up with an amazing idea for an invention? And his father was a composer. Right. That's so, it's so poorly understood. Okay, how many people did this back in the 70s and we don't even know who they are because they failed. Right. Okay. How many people did this back in the seventies? And we don't even know

2:57:06 and then you write it down on a napkin, and your life changes. we don't have a cogent theory of consciousness which is why then people step in with you know But that doesn't mean they're related. I'm not sure. Oh, you're welcome. Yep, that's it. And if people want to get a hold of you on Twitter, it's Michael Shermer. All right, folks.