Preventing Truth Decay: Michael Shermer on DarkHorse

Bret Weinstein speaks with Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, the executive director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of the popular podcast The Michael Shermer Show on the subject of truth.

Find Michael Shermer on X at https://x.com/MichaelShermer and “Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters” on Amazon at https://amzn.to/4qLfojC (commission earned).

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Sponsors:

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Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.

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Mentioned on this Episode:

Paul Offit on Covid immunity: https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/1891856265292169570

Reasonable Dowd: Ed Dowd on DarkHorse https://youtu.be/Trjv7-eUqt4

Unsafe at Any Speed: Dr. Toby Rogers on DarkHorse https://youtu.be/QQfIo75KHII

Chapters

• 0:00 What is Truth and Does it Still Exist?
• 1:47 Sponsor: Crowdhealth
• 4:15 Sponsor: Helix
• 6:40 Most of What We Accept, We Don’t Understand
• 15:15 Defining Truth: The Big Bang Example
• 22:40 Sponsor: Timeline
• 24:56 Creationists vs. Team Darwin
• 33:51 The State of Science: The Food Pyramid
• 40:38 Corruption in Science and What to Do About It
• 1:02:44 Fraud Must Be Punished (A Three-Generation Problem)
• 1:11:46 The COVID Vaccine Information Landscape
• 1:22:12 How Do You Change the System?
• 1:26:12 Vaccines, Tylenol, and Autism Claims
• 1:33:01 Mythical (Metaphorical) Truth & Religion
• 1:43:18 Bret Weinstein’s View on Religion
• 1:50:44 Group Selection and Religion
• 1:56:53 What Replaces Religion?
• 2:02:27 Science Reforming Within: Gender Roles
• 2:11:20 Do We Have Free Will?
• 2:22:34 Are Determinists Live as Determinists?
• 2:24:46 Strong vs. Weak Emergentists
• 2:31:12 How Do We Know You’re Conscious?
• 2:34:16 What if Consciousness Were Solved?

Transcript

0:00

Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail . I am very excited to have with me returning guests to DarkHorse, Michael Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and the executive director of the Skeptic Society. Welcome back to DarkHorse. Nice to be back. Nice to see you, bro. Where are you? Aren't you on some island somewhere now? I am on a deserted island. Did you buy your own island? Are you you're not like Epstein with all that secret money, are you? Oh my God, no, no, I live on an island. There are thousands of other people on it too. But anyway, it's lovely and very inconvenient. So were we able to get you a copy of the book? I have it right here. OK. Though I will say I was struck by the fact that your publisher who sent me the book has taken a very aggressive stance on free will in the book that is somewhat in contradiction to your own perspective. I am assured that this copy is one I cannot sell, which implies that I obviously could sell it. Wait, they said you a bound galley? Well, that's weird because well, maybe they just didn't get it in time because the hard copies are now just I just got mine last couple of days ago. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Well, anyway, I've been enjoying looking through it. There's a ton for us to talk about here. I don't know how you want to set things in motion, tell people what your book is about, but I'm interested in talking about, of course, religion, free will and, you know, the central thesis of your book about truth and why it still matters and how to grapple with it. I think those are all good topics. Our first sponsor on this episode of the DarkHorse Inside Rail is Crowdhealth. Crowdhealth isn't health insurance. It's better. It's nearly open enrollment, the season when health insurance companies hope you will once again blindly sign up for overpriced premiums and confusing fine print. We used to do that, but not anymore. Not since finding Crowdhealth. 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Make sure you enter our show name after checkout. So they know we sent you once again. That's helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse for a seriously comfortable mattress. So why don't you lay out the basic case and we'll go from there. Yeah, sure. Thanks. So the idea of the book came from as sort of a sequel to the conspiracy book, which is my previous book as more of a general theory of how we know anything is true with conspiracies. It was the question is, you know, there really are conspiracies. So how do you know which conspiracy theories you should believe or not believe, which then takes you into epistemology and how do we know what's true, how do we decide who we should believe or not? And so on. So, so this is really kind of an outline of how science works, you know, through peer review and, you know, the norms and standards of fact checking and journalism or, you know, the judicial system and how it determines truth through an adversarial legal system where you have to confronting lawyers and the judge or the jury or the peer review and so on. So and kind of my general starting point is, as you know, I'm an atheist, but whether or not there's a is a omniscient, omnipotent God, I know one thing for sure, it's not me. And I also know it's not you. So all of us are beginning with, you know, what's called fallible ism. You know, I could be wrong, you know, so I have a whole chapter on Bayesian reasoning. And so we start with saying, you know, it's somewhere between one and 99%. You never, you know, Cromwell's rule in Bayesian reasoning, you never assign a zero or a one to any proposition just in case, you know, so, you know, aliens are here probably 1%. You know, there's a God, maybe 2%, you know, or just, you know, plate tectonics is the best explanation for the current position of the continents. You know, 99% big bang theory, 99%. You know, and then a bunch in between. So that, you know, the fallible ism, that there is a role for expertise and authority. Not that you base it entirely on that. But one of the things I discuss in the book that I've kind of learned over the last couple of decades, really, of doing skeptic is how much we don't really know directly ourselves and how much we take it on not faith, but confidence that, you know, the authorities we trust usually get it right. So here's an example of my cognitive psychologist friend at Occidental College, Andrew Stuhlman, did a famous study in which he asked mostly college students, do you accept Darwin's theory of evolution? Oh, yeah, yeah, almost all of them say, yeah, explain it. Oh, well, the giraffe stretches its neck and the baby giraffes have longer neck. No, that's not it at all. Or then other studies similar to this. You know, are you in favor of NAFTA or against it? I'm for it or I'm against it. What is it? Oh, it's that North American something trade. I'm not even sure which countries are in it or what the policies are, but I'm for it or against it or, you know, so most of what we proclaim publicly, this is what I believe we don't really understand it. You know, we're just sort of signaling in the case of Darwin's theory. Yeah, those scientists usually get it right. So yeah, I'll just say, you know, I think it's right. So I want to pause you here because one of the subjects that we talk about frequently on DarkHorse is what I call the Cartesian crisis, which is named after Descartes, who famously came to understand that almost everything he thought that he knew as a fact was in fact taken on someone's authority, maybe justifiably so. But that what one can do in life, you know, rerunning famous experiments in order to establish for yourself that they in fact said what we believe they said never happens. You just don't have enough time. So all of us are forced in order to function to accept almost everything on a kind of authority, which then, you know, if you live in an era where the quality of that authority is high, it's a very effective thing to do if the quality of that authority for some reason is not high. It's a very dangerous thing to do. And so at one level, I would ask, you know, I am very much in favor of a world in which we have systems that allow us to rely on actual experts to give us the most well grounded explanation for what we observe and to help us understand what the implications of it are for our behavior. But I don't think we live in that era. I think we live in an era where the quality of the expertise is actually appalling. And so let me just say I probably should have said at the top. One of the things I greatly appreciate about you, Michael, is that although you and I I'm sure we agree on more than we disagree on, but we disagree on some very substantial issues and I find you disagreeing with me honorably. It never gets personal. And that is a rare characteristic. It should be common, but it's rare. So anyway, I appreciate you doing that. I think the fundamental thing that we disagree over is are the experts in general doing their job in our era or are they falling down on that job and leaving us with pseudoscience dressed up as if it were the real thing? So anyway, maybe we'll get into that more later, but I'll let you continue with your well, yeah, that's all that's all. I mean, yeah, we can get into the details of that. You know, with Descartes, he famously then hit the foundation rock bottom. Well, somebody's asking the question, what is reality? So there's a mind here, you know, that I know that exists. And then from there, you can build an epistemological system that's reasonable, that there is a reality out there. It's not all an illusion. We're not living in the matrix and so on. And we can know something about it with some degree of confidence or or lack thereof, depending on the idea. Well, wait, wait, I don't want to be pedantic, but I do want to point out that what you just said by my epistemology is in no way secure. Which part? I believe that we do not live in the matrix, that we are able to observe the universe, that it's not out to deceive us and that we therefore can proceed rationally to unpack its rules. But that is an assumption. Well, it is an assumption that in my opinion, there's an assumption that I'm alive and I'm cognitively unimpaired and I can reasonably ask questions. 100 percent. That well, that's two assumptions. You make an assumption. I assume that you make an assumption that you are alive and capable of observing the universe. And I would regard the likelihood that you are correct in that as extremely high. But from my perspective, I don't know for sure that you do that. And this is one of the funny things about Descartes proof is that assuming that there was a guy named Descartes and that he did, in fact, go through this line of logic and conclude that you have to start somewhere. I'm pretty sure I exist because if I didn't, I wouldn't be thinking these thoughts. He could establish to himself that he existed, but I have to take it on authority that he did. I don't know that there was a person named Descartes. I never met him. I don't know that he had these thoughts. So anyway, I'm not arguing that we should be doubting the existence of Descartes. I'm not arguing that I should be doubting your existence. And I would be even more foolish to doubt my own existence, which I can run the same proof that Descartes did. But a truly properly grounded epistemology has to I mean, as you say, the probabilities range from zero to 100 and you should never assign a perfect zero or a perfect 100. You know, and I counseled my kids that way when when they were growing up. I said, what do you think the chances of that are? And they'd say it's 100 percent certain. And I say you just screwed up. Yeah. But anyway, go ahead. You look like you. So maybe that's where I'll just define what I mean by truth. In this case, a scientific truth is a claim for which the evidence is so substantial that it is rational to offer one's provisional assent. So provisional is the key word there. Yes, of course, you might be right. None of us exist. Or so it's not zero that we're living in the matrix. But OK, and I got that from Gould. Steve Gould who wrote a famous essay, Evolution as Fact and Theory, in which he said facts and theories are different things, not rungs on a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data theories or structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. And then he goes on to say, scientists make no claim for perpetual truth because in science, fact can only mean confirmed to such a degree it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. Now, it's a bit of a practical definition there. OK, so I'm no fan of Gould. Gould, in my opinion, is a villain in evolutionary biology because for reasons that many take to have been ideological, he created roadblocks to adaptive thinking and, in my opinion, set the field back quite a bit. But never mind. I would argue that the taxonomy provided there by Gould is actually missing a wrong, that there are wrongs. Your provisional assent that can apply to a hypothesis that you believe is more strongly favored by the evidence as it is understood than the competing hypotheses, which you agree that that would count as provisional assent. Yeah. OK, so that is lower than a theory where all competing hypotheses have fallen. And what we are left with is one hypothesis that then matures into a theory. And the fact that it is a theory, which is as close as we ever get to calling a model, a fact, does not mean that it can't be displaced by a superior explanation that arises later. But it means that at the point that something is a theory properly, there is no competing hypothesis that remains valid in light of the evidence. You consider that fair? Yeah, yeah. So let's let's just use some examples like how do we know the Big Bang theory is right. OK, well, there's a preponderance of evidence or convergence of evidence toward a single conclusion that outcompetes the steady state theory. And that was all resolved from, like, say the 1940s through the 1960s. And by the time I started college, I took an astronomy course in 1972, the Big Bang theory had largely won out. Now, by won out, well, so it is kind of a social process. You have professional astronomers and cosmologists. This is what they do. And they mostly agree this is the better explanation than this one. And, you know, the expansion, the redshift of almost all galaxies move it away from one another. Looks like an explosion, preponderance of fundamental elements like hydrogen and helium. The, you know, the background radiation of three degrees Kelvin looks like the remnants of an explosion. Now we know that the accelerating expansion is accelerating again as if it's an explosion and so on. So, you know, astronomers have largely worked this out. There are still a few Big Bang skeptics. I encounter them periodically, but they don't, you know, they don't publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals. They just have these alternative theories. They can't seem to get a grasp to challenge the mainstream theory. And they really just lack that kind of convergence of evidence to a single conclusion. Well, so let us. This is obviously not my area of expertise, but let's put some other things on the table so we know that this isn't just simply a matter that when we look through a telescope, what we see is obviously the product of an explosion. However many billion years it was ago. Thirteen point eight. Fourteen is what I was going to say. So let's I am not a believer that we live in a simulation, but we can understand that if we live in a simulation, if this is a computer program in which reality is rendered in order to leave the impression that when we look through a telescope, we see distant stars, but that isn't what they are. They are renderings in data. Then that would invalidate the Big Bang. Because the sum total of all of the evidence would match the simulation hypothesis rather than the Big Bang theory. And I would argue that the reason that we do not have the Big Bang as a hypothesis and the simulation as a competing hypothesis is that the simulation does not make distinguishing predictions. It's not a hypothesis because it's not testable, but that does not mean that the Big Bang theory is certain. I mean, I'm reiterating your point here. It is not certainly true. This multi. Yeah. Right. For now, this is what we think happened. I mean, it's possible it could be greatly revised. Apparently the James Webb telescope is finding galaxies that are fully formed like 100 million years after the Big Bang, which is not possible, according to current theories of galaxy formation. All right. But that doesn't mean the creationists are right and that we should devote time to them. Think the universe was created 10,000 years ago and the tired light that comes into the telescopes of astronomers is just a deception. It's not really 13.8 billion. It's 10,000 years. So you would expect just to build up the taxonomy properly, you would expect that science has likely discovered the correct fundamental explanation and explosion. Cooling happens. Heavier elements are formed by processes, gravitation being the key one that drives things together in early stars. And when they go, Nova produce heavy elements, all of that, that that explanation is correct. But you could see a revision of the date. Right. If superior evidence came to light, that wouldn't invalidate the theory of the Big Bang, but it would modify it. And so that's the general pattern you would expect is we get it right. Broad brush. Our precision gets better over time. Every so often, something that we were pretty darn sure about gets overthrown. That is also a natural part of the process. And it's in fact the best argument in favor of science that there is, is that it's the one process that's built to self correct. Our final sponsor is Timeline. Timeline makes mitopure, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone. Urolithin A. Found primarily in pomegranates, Urolithin A has been the subject of hundreds of scientific or clinical studies, many of which find that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance. But how does it work? Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells, but like everything living, they can decay or get damaged. The older we get, the more likely we are to have damaged mitochondria, which accumulate in joints and other tissues. This is in part because mitipage, the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells, becomes less efficient the older we get. 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Furthermore, research published in Nature Medicine in 2016 found that in mice, the beneficial effects of Urolithin A on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age. Take two softshells of mitopure a day for two months and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance. mitopure enhances your cells' ability to clean themselves up and regenerate new healthy mitochondria. In combination with regular physical activity, mitopure can help you stay strong and healthy into old age. Timeline is now offering 20% off your first order of mitopure. Go to timeline.com slash darkhorse and use the code darkhorse to get 20% off your order. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash darkhorse. Any help to separate all your medical Khan Luthor creative to increase pressure Manitoba gentle touch. or whatever. So how can we trust anything the scientists say? Yeah, but it's usually the scientists that found out that Piltham man was a hoax and that that fossil was misidentified and so on. Not the creations. Well, I do think we have a new crop of creationists who have actually leveled up the quality of their science. Hmm. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, you know, I'm, I appreciate them. The intelligent design theorists, yeah, they're better than the Duane Gish, young earth creationist crowd for sure. Right. To be sure. But they're still, okay, so, but this is an interesting case study. Okay. Because I know all those guys I've read all their books and so on. There's still a move they make where they exit methodological naturalism and they end up, you know, with the God of the gaps type, an argument, it always comes down to that. And then a miracle happened. And then this, we can't explain the mind or, you know, the rise of complex systems, eukaryotic cells from prokaryotic cells. There's a RNA to DNA. There's a gap there. And, you know, they have a laundry list of these things. So, you know, I offer the best explanation we have and they go, yeah, I'm not buying it. So I go, okay, then what's your explanation? Well, and it just comes down to, well, God did it. But that's not really an explanation. I mean, how did God do it? Did God take RNA and mush it into DNA or, you know, how did the designer do this? So it's not an explanation that's useful. Well, to the extent that they offer that explanation, it is a violation of a philosophical principle that we require in order to do science, which is it just, it takes that which cannot be explained and offers to solve it with a much greater mystery. If God did all these things, then God has to be explained or you haven't explained anything. So I would hold their feet to the fire on that. But I also see, I see a, because these folks are motivated to search for errors in the Darwinian story, I believe they actually are doing a more honest job of finding genuinely difficult puzzles than modern evolutionary biologists who, in my opinion, are so afraid of opening the door to challenges to Darwinism that they pretend the story is far more complete and convincing than it is. And I say this as an evolutionary biologist who believes Darwin was not only right, but right at a level that is hard to imagine given how primitive his evidence set was. He did spectacularly well and I see no major challenge to Darwin, but I do see modern Darwinists failing to recognize the holes in the model that they've got because effectively they're fighting an ideological battle with religious folks that is blinding them. So that's an uncomfortable position for me to sit in. I'd love to, I'd love to be just rooting for team Darwin. It's a fair point. Why are they excluded? Well, in part, they don't publish in the scientific journals where you would challenge the Darwinian paradigm. Let's take by way of contrast, Lynn Margulis, who was pushing her theory of, what was it, angiogenesis? No, symbiogenesis, I think it was called, how prokaryotic cells merged into prokaryotic cells, mitochondria being the most famous example. They were themselves once an independent organism and so on. Well, you know about this and I do. But she plugged away for decades and now her theories are largely accepted. How did she do that? She published in peer review journals. She went to conferences. I spent a week with her in the Galapagos with a bunch of evolutionary biologists and she was quite the bellicose, I'm going to challenge the paradigm and I'm not a Darwinian. I'm not even a neo-Darwinian. I forget what she called herself, but she's in the room. She's one of them. So she gets a hearing because she's playing the game of science the way it's designed to be played. I'm with you, Michael. I think that these intelligent design folks should be publishing in all of the evolutionary journals that courageously stood up and said there are exactly two sexes and you can't change from one to the other by deciding to do it. Yes. That's where they should publish, right? Yeah. Because those journals don't exist, Michael. Okay, I see your point. Yeah, well, okay. Well, yeah, but enough of us are standing up on that particular issue. I think we're winning that battle on the trans thing. Right. But hold on a second. You have an entire field. Every single person in evolutionary biology knows not only that sex is binary, but knows why it is binary and knows that it has been binary for hundreds of millions of years. And yet the field did not stand up, not even en masse. There's not one department in the country that stood up and said, we're compassionate about people who have persistent gendered dysphoria, but you can't switch sexes as a human being. Not one. Not one medical school said it. So there's something rotten in the land of science. And as much as I would like there to be a level playing field where the intelligent design folks could bring their evidence and everybody else could bring their evidence and may the better model win, that playing field does not exist. Well, okay. But what's the alternative? So, um, it's rough. Well, we all stand up and say, no, that's wrong. And again, I think there it's so politicized, the trans issue. Let's just use that example, um, that scientists ideologies and their desire for social change and acceptance and so on. And you know, we had the civil rights and the women's rights and the gay rights. And so the trans rights, well, that's gotta be the next thing I gotta be behind. Okay. I'm support that. And now then they make the other mistake. Well, then the biology has got to match, um, my ideology, even though that's completely wrong. I mean, it's back, back in the days when, you know, well, blacks are less intelligent than whites. Well, we can't say that because then they could be mistreated. So you mean if it turned out that, that blacks are less intelligent than whites, then it's okay to discriminate? No. Okay. Or that gays are this or women are that, um, you know, we, we should hold those moral values regardless of whatever the science says, because if we don't do that, then we're going to push the science in an incorrect direction. So that's the mistake that they make. And, um, okay. So the fact that most of these biologists who know that sex is binary, um, we're, uh, did not stand up for that or, you know, what's in their hearts. Do they really know? Probably they really know. They're afraid to say something. I don't know which is more damning. I know it's worse. Yeah. I know they're both worse. They do know then they're cowards, which I can tell you almost all academics are, but does that mean all other areas in the biological sciences? Let's say, you know, some of your, um, uh, your issues like with vaccines or, or, uh, COVID or alternative models, what I think you have a lineage lineage selection. Yeah. Lineage selection. Um, that, that doesn't mean you're being discriminated against because of, for ideological reasons. It may be, Oh, I didn't, I didn't say it was. No, I know. I'm just using it as an example. So how should you introduce your ideas into the community? Like your lineage? I think you're starting with an assumption, which is that there must be a mechanism for doing this correctly in 2026. Well, I would hope so. Look, you and I would agree that we must have such a system because we have a very dangerous civilization that needs to be carefully governed based on sound scientific principles and to discover that the academy is unreliable in generating evidence or models to account for it because it's, uh, ideologically driven at best and financially corrupted in the more common case. That's a very dangerous statement. I don't relish making it because frankly, I've got kids who have to live in this world. So yeah, I'm not, I, I sometimes think I get misunderstood because I rail against the system consistently. I want the system to work and I'm not asking for perfection. I just want it to work well. I want the signal to noise ratio to be good so that we can make progress over time. And what I see is a system that, well, frankly, let's talk about the food pyramid. How do you feel about the new food pyramid? Oh, I like it. Mostly. I think it's right. But I thought that for, for many years, you were already eating that way, right? I was already in that way too. It wasn't that hard. And yet what we find is that it was not a major revision of the pyramid. It was a flipping. Yeah. They had it upside down. Let's look at that as an example of science working slowly, but toward the truth, right? The early skeptics in the nineties, Gary Tobs in particular, who was publishing everywhere he could in, you know, in major newspapers, not journals, because he's a journalist, but, but his books were, you know, published by major publishers and so on. And then Nina Tykholtz and others picked up the mantle and here we are. Okay. It should have happened in the nineties at the, at the latest, but that's how it goes because the, you know, the ideology was so, it wasn't really political ideology. It was just, just this, I don't know, this entrenched idea of what nutrition, proper nutrition. It was corruption. It was corruption overwhelming. Oh, because of the food companies. Okay. All right. Yeah. So, all right. You like the tobacco companies influencing. I think you're skipping a step. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Let's suppose that the food pyramid that we had grown up with was arbitrary, that it was generated by a random number generator, either somebody sitting at a desk with some dice or a computer, and they just slapped stuff on the pyramid willy-nilly. And then suddenly in 2026, somebody decides to actually look into nutrition and discovers what you and I figured out, even though it's neither of our fields, right? Okay. Suddenly we get a proper food pyramid. That's not what happened. The food pyramid was literally upside down. What we were being told about what to eat was an inversion of what we should eat. My point to you would be anytime you see that pattern, what that means is that the right answer was calculated by the system and then somebody took the reciprocal. That is incidentally, I know you will disagree with me on this years from now, my expectation is you'll have a food pyramid inversion moment, but that is the exact pattern we saw with the CDC and COVID. The CDC had the correct formula for how we should address COVID and they flipped it on its head. It was the inverse of what you should do. That is not an accident. I don't know what it is. I don't know. I think I tend to go with the incompetence over conspiracy explanation for most things. Well, I mean, I think like in the in the nutrition thing, you know, this goes back to the 1950s post World War II and the baby boomers and what are we going to eat? And then Eisenhower has a heart attack. What does he do? He eats a lot of meat. Oh, yeah, but he smoked. Yeah, but you know, smoking is fine because the tobacco companies said, all right, so you're right. Tobacco companies corrupted the research on tobacco and the food company. But I don't think that to me, the food companies followed suit like, okay, so this is what the government's recommending. This is what people are going to want when they come in the supermarket. These foods that they're recommending taste like crap. So we got to put sugar in it to make it taste good. They're just kind of following a market trend rather than we need to buy off the politicians. Maybe they did something later with I don't think that's the case. Now, this is, of course, speculative. But my sense is when a policy is actually in everybody's interest, it easily passes. Right. It doesn't matter whether you're a corrupt cynical politician or an honorable one. You have every reason to pass things that are good for everybody, which leaves a remainder. Things where what's good for the public is actually not good for some other power structure. In those cases, a power structure that has resources at its disposal corrupts the system in order that the system will dispense the advice that would lead people to whatever products are being sold that you shouldn't be eating. Yeah. And away from the public interest. And what we are finding out, in fact, I would flip the presumption on its head. I know that your bias is against conspiracy. I believe that that is should be the starting point. We should always assume a straightforward explanation and then require some sort of indication that something else may have happened before leaping to such a conclusion. But here's the question. How good do you imagine the protections are against the are against corruption in the area of, let's say, public health and nutrition? How about childhood education at the Laring Center in Minneapolis? Yeah. Corruption is pretty big problem. Yeah. Okay. So what do you do about it? Well, you have corruption busters. You bring in the Elon Musk, the Doge, you bring it. Now they just hired somebody new to be a fraud buster for the US government. Okay. Back to the peer review. Okay. So it's corrupted. There's problems. Yeah. Okay. What do you propose as the alternative? Peer review. I mean, but not peer review in the way that we do it. I would do peer review. So let me just say, for those who heard that and thought, what? Bret's advocating for peer review. I'm advocating for review by peers, not the system that goes under that name. If I was building that system, I would change a number of things. One, anonymity has no place because for one thing, it doesn't work. Right? Reciprocity networks break out. People in general know who's reviewed their work because the circles that these things are published in are small. So anonymity has to go. And they even ask you to recommend reviewers. When I review papers, I always know who the author is. Could you just look at the bibliography? And there's one name that appears like 27 times like, Oh, that's the author. It's all too easy to figure out. So I would have open review. I would have no bar to publishing things because they sound outlandish. At one time, it was necessary to do some sort of quality control because ink and paper were expensive. But pixels are not expensive. And there is no reason that just because somebody is too far ahead of the curve, and therefore their idea sounds outlandish, to bar them from lodging it. I would, the fact of peer review being uh, de-anonymized would also force people who run down their competitors in peer review to actually risk reputational harm if they have done so and done so wrongly. So I want people to have skin in the game. What if they say this paper is of low quality and here are the problems with it. And it turns out to be correct that the people who reviewed it badly, uh, have their reputations decremented and the person who saw it well ahead has their reputation, um, elevated. And maybe most crucially, I would have review done not by the people in your immediate quadrant of the field. I would have peer review done by people in some sort of adjacent quadrant, people who are in a position to understand what you're saying, but not part of a reciprocity network in your little corner of the field. And that has two advantages. One, it breaks up the temptation to give somebody a positive review. So they'll give you a positive review on your next paper. And it also forces you to explain stuff in English. Far too much poor work is disguised by jargon. And if you have to explain it, so somebody who's not in your immediate field understands what you're talking about, it will weed out some of the people who are basically distributing word salad in the guise of science. And it will elevate those who actually have a point that's sufficiently good that it can be stated. Okay. So, um, let me just use a personal example for you. You you've been on Rogan a lot, as has your brother. That seems to be the place where you introduce new ideas as if that's the peer review platform and you're hoping who's watching. So let's say you present your, your, um, sorry to get it wrong lineage selection, lineage selection. Okay. Now, Joe, he's not going to know any of that. He doesn't know this and that. Okay. So are you hoping that somebody listening or watching is an evolutionary biologist goes, Oh, that's a great idea. I'm going to put that to the test or something like that. In other words, how can you reach the people, the professionals that will know what you're talking about? Um, that, so you're, you're skeptical of the journals. Okay. But, so I've just done this. I've just done this. My, my most recent, uh, Rogan appearance. I know I, I watched. Yeah. I put forward an idea that I think is pretty interesting. And what I was hoping was I wasn't really expecting professors to be listening to Rogan though. I would bet some secretly do. Um, but I was imagining that graduate students might spot it and have, I mean, look, if this had happened back when I was in graduate school, we would have had some intense discussions over lunch about whether this idea was valid, whether there were things that I got wrong, whether there were things that I didn't yet spot that argue in favor of it. I was expecting a certain amount of that. And I did get one bit of feedback from somebody who studies the, uh, exact genetic phenomenon at the core of my idea, variable number tandem repeats, who was very favorable to what I had said, interested in further discussion. So anyway, but the thing, I think the right answer to your question, Michael, is I wasn't really expecting Joe Rogan to be the substitute for a proper journal or biology department. And in fact, I think I said that I don't expect that to be the case. It's a lousy substitute, but it's at least not constrained by corrupted cowards who are frankly so arrogant. They don't even realize they're making an error. And, you know, again, I'm sure you hear in that, um, too much of a dismissal of an entire field, but I lived in that field and, um, maybe a contrasting example would be, I watched your public event with Richard Dawkins. I think it was in Seattle. No, no, I was in Chicago. Oh, Chicago. Was that a Pangburn event? I forget. You were the, you were the, but it was an in conversation. You weren't just interviewing him, right? You guys could have. Yeah. So, um, I, if I recall you floated past him, your idea of, uh, of an example of a extended phenotype, which he then said, no, that's incorrect. And here's why. And then you moved, I think you moved on to another topic. And I just, as an example, if you think there is an example of the extended phenotype that Richard's gotten wrong, you should publish that. I mean, you should write it up and, and say, I'm challenging Richard Dawkins theory here. And here's my theory, a book peer review journal, I don't know, popular magazine article, something, because it's Dawkins, you would certainly get some attention. Right. But where do you go from public event to now I'm going to move on to some other topic. How can we resolve this? So the problem here, Michael, is that my interaction with the published literature began with my work on telomeres, senescence, and cancer. And I believe that what I attempt to publish ultimately did publish in the journal of experimental gerontology, but I believe that what I intended to publish sent to nature, sent to nature with a strong recommendation from George Williams, the author of the evolutionary theory of senescence, which still stands to this day, they rejected without review. And my then collaborator, Carol Grider, appears to have attempted to thwart its publication anywhere because it contained a, an explosive discovery on which she and I collaborated that she went on to profit by, by not telling the world. She kept it what she called in house so that she could predict the result of experiments that others would not be able to. And basically, instead of sharing this vital piece of information, which had implications for human health and wellbeing, in other words, keeping dangerous drugs off the market, instead of sharing that piece of information, she kept it to herself in order to elevate her, her own career. So that experience, watching my work silenced by a competitor at a major journal, in spite of the fact that one of the leading evolutionary biologists of his generation recommended that they take it very seriously, left me with very little respect for the institution of peer review. You're asking, well, what do you want to do instead? And my point to you is, look, you want to put me in charge of building a system that works, I'll take that question and I'll run with it. But I'm not in that position. So what will I do instead? Will I waste my life talking to a tiny number of peers who have the ability to shut down what I say, true, false or otherwise? Why would I do that? Okay, just a point of clarification, because I don't know this story. If she was listening to this, what would her response be? Something like, no, I never did that. Or he misinterpreted what I was doing? Well, first of all, at the point that I went to publish my work, and I discovered that she was secretly publishing our collaboration without my name anywhere on it, she pretended that the conversations had not happened. Now you will note, she's welcome to sue me. We will find out exactly what happened in discovery. And as is always the case, as extraordinary as the story I'm telling you is, I'm telling it like it happened. I have the evidence and But usually these things are played out in, you know, letters to the editor, some other journal, whatever this journal was there must have competitive competing journals who would love this story. Yes, but I, this is why I said ultimately, I did publish this work. And there's a story to how it got published. Because when nature turned this work down, I do not know for sure because he is now dead. But I believe George Williams approached the Journal of Experimental Gerontology, told them what had happened. They solicited the paper. I trying to be the scientist I was told I was supposed to be recommended reviewers, including Carol Greider, my collaborator. They sent it to her. She wrote a scathing review of my paper, just point after point after point, and they were preposterous. At the point, I finally worked up the courage to call out this leading light of the field and to tell the editors of the journal, Carol or whoever has reviewed this paper, I didn't name her because I didn't officially know who it had been. Whoever reviewed this paper does not understand the material. The review, the editors are welcome to point to any point she makes, and I will send back the proper response. But there are too many preposterous claims here to address them all. I sent that back, and within minutes, the journal published. They sent back an email and they said they didn't, it was not electronic at the time, but they sent back an email that says accepted for publication. So the editors of that journal actually overrode peer review because they understood the deeper story. Now, strangely, I thought that that was a one-off experience until Eric later pointed me to the book, The Emperor of Scent. Have you read this book? I haven't read, let's see, I read parts of it. No, I think I just saw a lecture by the guy. He was the New York Times reviewer of perfumes or whatever. I think. Luca Turin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so interesting. Yeah. Okay. Oh, I highly recommend this book. You'll love it. But he tells a story in his own case that mirrors the story that I lived when Eric read it. He called me up. He said, "Bret, you've got to read this. This happened to somebody else." So anyway, the idea of editors overriding peer review because what's going on in peer review is that competitors are snuffing each other out is apparently not all that rare. And in the case of my work, what was on the line? Human health, right? Dangerous drugs, mice that were being raised to test drug safety that were incapable of telling you that a drug was toxic. So anyway, I don't know why we focused on the story. Well, but when was that? How long ago was this? The, my paper was ultimately published in 2002. The work was completed in 1999. Wow. Okay. So long time ago. Well, you know, there's journalists that cover these kinds of scientific disputes. You know, you go back to Leibniz and Newton over the calculus and Wallace and Darwin over natural selection and I don't know, Crick and Watson and, and, and the other, you know, founders of that field and so on, but these things get played out. I mean, you know, it's just, it gets resolved at some point. I hate to be the guy to do this to you because as I say, I really appreciate the role that you play in the world holding people like me, holding our feet to the fire. However, do you think I didn't go to journalists? I don't know what you did. I went, I went to numerous journalists. I had the same experience over and over again. Okay. I would tell them my story. I would show them the evidence. They would be flabbergasted, fascinated. They would say, who can I call to find out if this is really true? And I would say, I don't know who you can call because reciprocity networks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They would call some friends somewhere. And the next thing I know, they would ghost me. It happened so many times. So what I'm telling you is the process that we believe exists is a cargo cult. It is embedded within a network of people who are largely cynical and careerist, who have an interest in shutting down interlopers who are not under anyone's control. I don't like saying that. It doesn't feel comfortable because, hey, I trained as a scientist. I want to believe in the system. I want to say, ah, they screwed up there, but here's a place where, you know, the light shine through. I can't say it because I've seen too much. And you keep asking me, well, why don't you do this? Or, you know, what should we be doing instead? And the answer is, well, I can answer those questions. Why am I not doing it? Because I did it and I saw a shocking story of what happens when an evolutionary biologist stumbles into a realm where there's actually money at stake. Right. That's what I think happened. So that's why I'm not that she, your co-author could make. Say again, the money that your co-author made or could make from this. She has a Nobel Prize now. And what's her name again? Carol Greider. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. And, you know, she got her Nobel Prize for work that she and her advisor did. They discovered the enzyme telomerase that allows cells to add extra repeats to the end of a telomere. That work had nothing to do with me. It was long before she and I knew each other. But during her Nobel lecture, she presented the work that emerged from our collaboration without mentioning me and presented upside down. Interestingly, she presented as if the ultra long telomeres that exist in captive mice colonies are a useful feature that allows us to discover all kinds of wonderful things about mice rather than an embarrassing product of the captive breeding protocols, which puts human life in jeopardy. Okay. I have an idea. All right. Rogan should have her and you on the show the same time. I would gladly go. Okay. Well, in other words, how do we get to resolution? All right. So by way of another example, so your brother has gone on Rogan a bunch of times talking about his theory of geometric unity. Yeah. And so, you know, again, what does Joe know about these things? And he's just a great conversationalist, but, you know, how about a physicist that does this, you know, that's in this area? So I see that Piers Morgan had on Eric with Sean Carroll. So I thought, Oh, okay, here we go. So I watched the whole thing and it got a little testy for sure. But I thought Sean, you know, made a good faith effort. Like I read the paper, here's what I have some problems with it. And, you know, Eric wasn't particularly vibe in that too much, although he made some responses. But again, why is this happening on Piers Morgan and Joe Rogan? Hockum, why doesn't Eric publish his theory in a journal? And then there's a peer, you know, open peer commentary. Here's our target article, Eric, Weinstein's article. Here's like 10 different responses to it. I mean, that's how it normally works. And although, yes, there are all the problems you identified are true, but as opposed to what? Well, hold on. Hold on. Let me ask you a question. Theoretical physics is dominated today by string theorists. Okay. Yeah, but there's, you know, there was that book like 10 years ago saying, not even wrong about string theory, right? By one of the major. Okay, so there are people in the field that are skeptical. Here's my question. How is it possible for string theory to dominate theoretical physics in light of the fact that it does not make predictions that render it testable? I don't know. Yeah, it seems to me it's way past its sell by date, but so I don't know. Yeah. I hear you struggling against a red pill that I think you should take. The fact that you have, look, if we policed our language correctly, string theory isn't a theory. It's not even a hypothesis. It's a notion, right? It becomes a hypothesis at the point that it makes predictions. So it's been boosted two rungs past where it actually lives. Not only has it been boosted two rungs to the level of theory, our highest category, but that does not leave room for some second school of thought to be ascending inside of the academy. That's bizarre. Would you agree? You mean in terms of why does the funding keep pouring into string theory research, even though everything what you just said is true, don't they? No. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's a, you know, an autocatalytic feedback system there where they scratch each other's back and, you know, I'll fund your project if you fund my project. Great. Where in the scientific method or the description of how peer review is supposed to maintain quality is that reciprocity network that you're describing? Yeah. Well, maybe we need some of those graduate students who are reaching out to to get in there and say, we're not going to fund this anymore. Yeah. But what happens? What happens? Oh, look, I've been, I've been the graduate student who didn't go along to get along. I almost didn't get my degree over it. It caused my department to polarize. I was very popular in one side of it and very unpopular in the other. And believe me, there are stories like, you know, at the point that I went to file my dissertation and defend it to get my degree, I saw emails I wasn't supposed to, in which the department is constructing rules that didn't exist in order to make it impossible. So look, I want to live in the world that you think we live in. You know what I'm saying? Let's see. Let me use another example. The replication crisis, which began in 2010, roughly with the publication of Daryl Bem's experiment on backward causality on ESP. Okay. So this was of obvious interest to skeptics. And so we followed that. And we were able to find out that, you know, these methodological flaws, how did all of this get past the peer reviews, peer reviewers? And then it was like, Oh, well, what about this study here? Like if you stand at the top of the escalator, you're more likely to give a bigger donation at the bottom of the escalator. Or if you put a pin in your mouth this way versus this way, you'll find that joke funnier or not funny. Or if you hold a cup of warm coffee and you meet somebody else, you'll interpret them as being warm versus a cold cup. None of these replicated. Okay. This is all bullshit. And so it turns out something like 50, 60% of all psychology, peer reviewed papers should have probably never been published. And then that got spilled over into some of the medical research, which is way more complicated than the psych experiments and open to corruption and mistakes and errors and so on. But the response over the last 15 years has been to clean it up. Right. So, and, you know, no more data snooping, you know, no more file drawer problems. You know, you, you tell us before you run the experiments, everything you're going to do, and then you publish every single thing you found. And so there's no, none of this, you're only reporting the one experiment of the nine that was significant and so on. That supposedly, I'm being, I'm told by people that follow this, is that, you know, that that's been a big improvement over what it was before the replication crisis. Right. But how could the replication crisis look, first of all, I should just tell you, uh, as a matter of in the interest of full disclosure, I was ranting about the problem and game ability of P values long before the term replication crisis existed. P hacking. Yeah. Yeah. It's obvious if you have been through statistics and you've looked at the way the academy functions on the inside, that people who take liberties, I mean, the whole system functions on the honor system and people who take liberties and it's not just P hacking. P hacking is one thing you can do to make your results look important. That will result in things that aren't even true being regarded as facts. But another thing you can do is you can collect data that you don't have a hypothesis about. That's nothing wrong with that. It's observational data. But if you see a pattern in that data and then you report the pattern that you saw as a hypothesis and then collect data, looking to see if the hypothesis was true and Eureka, it is, the prediction is visible in the data. There's no way for outsiders to know that you just committed fraud. So anyway, the basic point is if you don't punish people who are engaged in these every day run of the mill frauds, people who are engaged in these every day run of the mill frauds, they will out compete everyone else because they will publish more. They will publish things that seem significant in ways that they really aren't. So I think what I would say is the enforcement mechanism doesn't exist. The prosecutions of scientific fraud are rare. That predicts the system will be overrun by competitors who avail themselves of this tool. If you want to understand why people like me are skeptical of the entire academy, it comes down to things like this. The academy is structured in such a way such that unscrupulous people will rise to the top of it. And what do unscrupulous people do when an honorable person shows up? Well, they either corrupt them or kick them out. So, I'm not describing a conspiracy. I'm describing a selective regime that causes the academy to be feeble, clannish, unreliable, and full of cowards. Okay, another alternative idea. You have a mainstream New York publishing house that published your previous book 21st Century. I forget who your publisher was, but it was one of the big ones, right? Penguin. Yeah, penguin. Yeah. Okay. That's right. Penguin. It doesn't get any bigger than that. Okay. And you have a platform. I mean, you have millions of followers and you're a famous guy. Why not publish a book about, I don't know, scientific fraud or the whole issue and have a chapter on your particular one? Why not? Surely they would be interested in that. The real answer to that question is, where does outing scientific fraud fall in the spectrum of things I should be spending my time on? And I'm not arguing that it would not be a good investment of time if time were unlimited. The question is how many things fall above it? And it's quite a number. So, but it's important to you first. And also your core message here is that there's a massive problem with all of science, particularly as it influences public policy. That's huge. I mean, yes, but, but what's more important than that? Well, no, that's not, I mean, the calculation is a little more complex than that because the question is, as I've stated publicly many times, I don't believe that you can reform the academy to the point of functionality. I would call the problems with the academy three generation problems. Those are problems that if you started fixing it today, it would be three generations before you had a functional academy. It would get better almost immediately, but it wouldn't be the thing that I think you imagine it is for three generations. And that's because the number of people who know how to do the job correctly and are just simply not doing it because the incentives don't support it is small. It's actually a training ground for a kind of corrupted thinking. And, you know, I don't, no part of me is happy saying that. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. But here's what I'm after. What, how can we resolve this and, and kind of put it out there to see if what you're saying is true. Well, the only way to do it is to publish it. I mean, you can't, podcasts are not the same. They're great. I love podcasts, but you know, put it in print, you know? So again, penguin, surely your agent would shop that around if they didn't want it. One of the other big houses would want it. The famous Bret Weinstein has this idea and look what happened to him and so on. And and there's all these other areas of fraud and corruption, the CDC, the tobacco, the food companies that would make a spectacular book. So do it. Well, I mean, you're, why not? You're imagining that I'm not writing other books that are of higher priority. Okay. All right. Well, then tell me that tell you that I am. Yeah, I am. And unfortunately, my, my time is divided between projects that I think are blinking red light projects. So anyway, to some people, Bret, it feels like you're doing an end run around the system. Yes. That you don't want to play in it. And all the other, I mean, how many evolutionary biologists are there? Thousands, you know, they all have to publish in journals to get tenure. They have their jobs and so on. They look at you and they go, how come I'm not on Rogan? I do all this work. And it seems like this guy is just trying to cut to the front of the line and that doesn't feel right. Oh, look, I don't even take them seriously. Again, where were they when medical science was surgically destroying the reproductive capacity of innocent young people on the basis that they were born in a body of the wrong sex? Where were they? Yeah, I'm right there with you. Good. So, so my point is any evolutionary biologist who wonders why I'm on Rogan, but didn't stand up to the mutilation of healthy children. Okay. All right. Fair enough. All right. Fair enough. All right. Can I ask you about another Rogan statement you made in your recent episode again, back to, so here's the general issue. None of us know much about anything. So we have to rely on authorities and so on. Okay. So vaccines and COVID-19, this is not my area, right? So you've told Rogan that 17 million people died because of the mRNA vaccines. No, I didn't. You did it? No. What did you say? I said I had an incredible estimate of 17 million. All right. Anyway, so I just put it in. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't get to do that. What I said was careful and true. I've seen a credible estimate. I'm not saying one way or the other as to whether or not that estimate is high or low or what will happen to it over time, but the difference between portraying me as having said 17 million people died as if that was some fact that I knew rather than I saw Denny Rancourt's paper in which he estimated the excess mortality at the moment that the vaccine campaign showed up. I'm pointing to work, published work that says exactly this. I didn't misrepresent anything. Yeah. Okay, good. Here's, so I just typed into super grok. Did 17 million people die because of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines? Super Grok's response is no. There's no credible evidence that 17 million people die because of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna. This claim is false and originates from a flawed non-peer reviewed analysis that misrepresented excess mortality data by attributing it to vaccines while ignoring surges in COVID-19 infections and deaths. The 17 million figure stems from a 2023 report by Denny Rancourt and colleagues which analyzed all-cause mortality in 17 southern hemisphere countries and extrapolated a vaccine fatality rate globally. Fact checks from sources like AFP, Reuters, factcheck.org, and Science Feedback have debunked it, noting that excess death spikes aligned with COVID-19 waves, for example, amacron, not vaccination rollouts, and that the analysis failed to account for confounding factors like infection rates. Large-scale studies through 2025 consistently show no increased long-term all-cause mortality from mRNA vaccines and often lower mortality among vaccinated people. And then it has a bunch of sources and so on. All right, so yeah. Do you know how an LLM works? Yeah, it scrapes all the sources. It has a whole pile of sources there. Yeah, it has a whole pile of sources. And so to the extent that corruption results in those sources being biased in a direction, it regurgitates it. And now you're regurgitating it. Yes, well, but what are my alternatives? Well, you could think for yourself. Well, I know, but this is not my area. Oh, no, no, don't do that. That's a mistake. Let me ask you a question. Are you still getting COVID boosters? No. You're not? Why not? Well, I've already had COVID a couple of times, so I have natural immunity. Oh, so you believe in natural immunity? Well, after the initial vaccine. You don't know what the entire public health apparatus assured us that natural immunity was not good enough and that you still got a benefit from the next few years. Oh, they got it wrong. Look, Bret, they got many things wrong. Do you remember that moment in time? I do. I do. Do you remember people like me shouting about this? Yes, I do. Okay. So now we find out from Paul Offit that all of the major players gathered together and privately understood the very same thing that they were gaslighting us over. They understood that natural immunity was the best immunity that you were going to come by and that a vaccine wasn't going to augment it. And they decided to keep that to themselves in spite of the fact that these vaccines are built on a novel technology they didn't know the hazards of at best. So how is it that these people can privately meet and decide there's a whole swath, millions of people, hundreds of millions of people who'd already had COVID who didn't need to take any risk whatsoever from a novel vaccine? How is it that they get to privately decide to keep that information to themselves? Okay. And why, given that they did that, given that you remember the moment in history at which they were not only were they disagreeing with us, which was a lie, they were gaslighting us. They were telling people like you that people like me were crazy. Well, I don't understand how you don't learn that lesson or maybe you did. And that's why you're not getting any more COVID boosters. No, I just think again, it's more of a changing information landscape. We think this is what, you know, we think mass work, mass don't work. Yeah, we should have mass six feet distancing, close the schools, open the schools. Why do you think the information landscape changed? Well, because the information was low to begin with. And then we got more information. No, no, no, no, no. I'm less conspiratorial that Paul Offit and his buddies all met. They said, according to Paul Offit, I don't remember him saying that. You talked about it twice on video. He's described the meeting where he and Fauci and Collins and Walensky got together and they talked about the fact that natural immunity was superior and they decided not to tell the public. That's from Paul Offit. You can go look at the video. You gotta remember that, but they're going to lie to the public. I can't believe Paul Offit would say, yeah, we agreed we would lie to the public. He represents himself as having been outvoted. Okay. Okay. All right. So, but why? Here's the important point. And look, I'm sorry to be hard on you, Michael. I really do like you. My point is you've switched teams. You're now on team. Don't get your COVID booster. Okay. And I think that's wise. I think you were in error to ever get one, but why the information landscape changed is because I went on Rogan and Malone went on Rogan and McCullough went on Rogan and Pierre Corey went on Rogan. And we talked about these things in public bypassing the system that was set up to shut us down. See, I don't think that's what it was because that's very top down conspiratorial. We know Bret says it's true, but we're going to lie anyway. No, you don't know what I say is true. And frankly, one of the things that you should hear me saying is that Bret Weinstein does not believe that podcasts are a proper substitute for functioning institutions, but he also believes the institutions aren't functioning. And you can tell because instead of giving you noisy, good advice, instead of giving you random advice, they give you upside down pyramids. They give you the inverse of the right advice. And that is an alarming fact. It tells you that there is a process in there that knows what to do and tells you the opposite. But Bret, why are you going with this guy, Denny Rancour and against all the other authorities that say that I didn't, I said I'd seen a credible estimate. Okay. But the way it comes off, Bret, is like you're going with this one guy here and just saying, I don't know about the no later on. I asked Ed Dowd about that estimate because I'm interested in having a good estimate. And Ed Dowd, who has done a calculation based on entirely different data, says his estimate has 17 million at the top end. He thinks the number is lower, but 17 million is a credible estimate. It's within the realm of possibility. Further, the damage from these things is not stopping. If the number isn't 17 million, it's heading in that direction. Now, we were told these things were safe. Safe means they do not carry a risk. They are so obviously not safe. Not only do we have empirical evidence that people were harmed, lots of it, but we also have the perfectly obvious fact, which you and I have talked about before, that if you look at what the manufacturer says about how these vaccines work, it will inevitably result in whatever tissues do the heavy lifting. Whatever tissues transcribe that gene into spike protein being destroyed by your T cells. Now, you tell me, I know you're not a biologist and I know that you don't want to be asked this question, but if they can't tell you that the shot stays in your arm, how can they tell you that if it's taken up in your heart, your heart will not be damaged when your own cells turn on it and destroy the cells that are doing the transcribing because they appear to be virally infected. Are you talking about myocarditis? Well, you want the real answer? Myocarditis is a limited hangout. Myocarditis means inflammation of heart tissue. Inflammation of heart tissue is downstream of a real pathology and the pathology that is causing that myocarditis is the destruction of heart cells. It is the wounding of the heart by your immune system. Now, if I recall off its explanation for that was COVID-19, its virus itself causes myocarditis. Yes, that is what they say. And I'm sure if you query an LLM, it will tell you that very same thing. On the other hand, the evidence that COVID causes myocarditis is extremely weak. This is a case where you have a categorization error where lots of people who were vaccinated and then had myocarditis are filed as unvaccinated. It's a false signal. And Michael, the important thing is you have detected the truth enough that you have stopped getting these shots. Okay. Well, I only just got the initial vaccine. I didn't get boosters and stuff because I'm pretty healthy and so on. That's great. You should have gotten none. But back to the larger epistemological question, how do you change the system? Well, I'm sure you know Jay Bhattacharya. I spent a week with him at one of Peter Thiel's gigs. And this is just the nicest guy in the world. Super smart, very wise about these things. And now he's in the system reforming it from within. And he's at Stanford. He's a published figure and so on. So in other words, he's not doing an end run around the system saying, "Hey, listen to me." He's like, "You guys got it wrong and here's why. And I'm going to publish this. I'm going to state it. I'm going to go to conferences. I'm going to speak about it. Now I'm in government." Right? To reform it from within. To me, that's the system working. It is. On the other hand, how did this happen? How did this happen? Well, okay. And then another example. No, no. Hold on. I've had lots of... It happened. Because we did an end run around the system. Well, I don't know. There's quite a few books out now about how disastrous it was to close the schools, to close the beaches, to close restaurants and so on. And that they knew. Okay. So I forget the author's name now, Dan. But it's a journalist who tracked all this down that, let's see, what was it? In March of 2020, they decided, "Okay, we're going to... No, I think they decided we're going to keep the schools open in the fall." And then Trump said in June,"I want to open the schools." So they said, "In that case," because they had Trump Derangement Syndrome,"We're going to close the schools because Trump wants them open." This was kind of... He had the kind of the paperwork, the receipts for this, which looked pretty damning. And that it was not just... So from my perspective, that's just incompetence. It doesn't look like it was just incompetence. It looked like there was something more. So I'll give you that one. But that doesn't mean every single thing that turned out to be wrong means everything that they say is wrong. Right? I mean, so the system's working in that now we're finding out they lied about this or they were wrong about that, some of the stuff you said. But that's the system working from within. We have journalists writing books and writing articles. It's not the system working from within. Something very unusual happened with Maha. People who were derided as crazy are now running the system because they rode the Trump wave into office. That happened because of the end run that you're claiming is not effective. Bobby Kennedy was treated as a loony anti-vaxxer. And he is in office because an awful lot of us figured out that that story was wildly inaccurate. And his popularity, coupled with Trump's popularity, put them in the winner's circle. And now he has ascended to an office with an immense amount of power. That is the reason that the food pyramid has fallen. That is the reason that our childhood vaccine schedule is being revised to match the rest of the civilized world. That is the reason that we are not recommending COVID boosters to pregnant women, to healthy children. This is the rebels in the hills, the rare case where they have ascended to a level of power and are actually instituting reasonable reforms that frankly should have been done in most cases decades ago. Okay, a couple things on that. So, RFKJ has pushed this idea that vaccines cause autism, which has been around since that paper in 1996 in the Lancet that got retracted for fraud. And there's still been no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. We don't know what causes autism. So that kind of opens up the field for just... No, you say no credible evidence. That is not true. There is a battle over evidence. There is evidence for, there is evidence against. And I happen to know... Yeah, but this is like there's evidence against the Big Bang. Yeah, right. Like the 1% guy, the one guy that says,"I don't think the Big Bang happened." Yeah. But the vast majority say it did. And here's their evidence. No, no, no. That is not how this works. That is not how this works. When science functions, it doesn't matter that everybody says one thing and one person says the other. It doesn't matter, frankly, even if no person says the other. You have competing ideas and you have a body of evidence. And over time, if the system is actually functioning in a scientific way, you will end up with the model that more closely matches the evidence that assumes less and that predicts future experiments. Okay. So you think there's still some link between vaccines and autism? Well, I didn't say that. If you're asking me that question, I believe it is highly likely that there is an association. Okay. I don't see it. I mean, the whole thing got started on a fraudulent study. Fraudulent study. Well, okay. But let's say that you... A, I don't believe that that is as clear as you think it is. But if the idea is Michael Shermer is against fraudulent studies, then I would ask you to look into the work that established the safety of aluminum adjuvants in vaccines. Well, weren't those taken out? I don't know what, what am I thinking of it? It was like 1999. No, mercury. You're talking about mercury, which wasn't fully taken out, but was taken out of most vaccines and replaced with aluminum on the basis that aluminum was safe. Aluminum was tested on four rabbits. The data for one of the rabbits was lost and two of the rabbits came up pathological. So obviously it's safe. This is not... I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Well, but you know, no, the point is you want to go after Wakefield for a fraudulent study. I'm telling you, you should look into the studies that establish the safety of these vaccines. All the work that you and I assume, I assumed, you know, I think as I've mentioned to you before in Heather and my book, which we published in 2020, we said that vaccines were one of the three great triumphs of modern medicine. The other two being antibiotics and surgery. We have been schooled in the COVID era first about the mRNA vaccines, which we came to understand in detail. And from there were reluctantly dragged into looking at all of the vaccines that we gave our own children. And it's a horror show. The work that you as a normal believer in science imagine must have been done where these things were tested against an inert placebo wasn't done. And that's fraud. Another example. So RFKJ's latest explanation for autism is Tylenol ibuprofen in the third trimester of pregnant women. Okay. Is there a connection? Maybe. But as our doc, Skeptoc wrote in Skeptic, not taking, why were women in the third trimester taking Tylenol? Because they had massive fevers. Why did they have massive? Well, because they are having issues in their pregnancy. What happens to those women who didn't take Tylenol and just let the fever burn itself out? Well, we don't know. Right. So you have, you don't have exactly a controlled experiment there. You're picking out the hits and forgetting all the misses. What about the people that didn't take Tylenol and they had worse consequences for not reducing their fever on their pregnancy. Anyway, that's just an example of, you know, plucking out of the air. Here's something weird. Well, I don't know the third trimester. There might be something to it. I don't know. I don't know what it's an example of. Frankly, Heather and I have looked into Tylenol. I've been aware of the dangers of Tylenol for decades. It's an extremely dangerous drug. You'd be hard pressed to find another easily available drug that's as dangerous as Tylenol. And yet you'll find it everywhere. What about a leave? I take a leave from my bum shoulder. Should I stop? Yes. How about aspirin? I like aspirin. Aspirin is the one I take and it's not perfectly safe, but I believe it's way safer than any of the NSAIDs. Okay. Take it with plenty of water. All right. Well, no, look, I'm just, look, I try to live a consistent life. I try to tell the truth. I try to live as well as I can, according to the truths I believe in, to be honest about my uncertainties. I'm telling you, Tylenol is a dangerous drug. The idea of giving it to pregnant women is alarming. Are there cases in which it's better than not giving it? Maybe, but I am alarmed at the level of first principles of administering a drug that dangerous to a woman with a developing child inside of her. Does it cause autism? I don't know. And I don't know that the vaccines do either, but if you want to actually investigate that question, maybe he would be a good candidate for writing something for skeptic. You should talk to Toby Rogers. Okay. I don't know Toby, but you don't know. I don't know. Yeah. But I'll give you a standing invitation. Like I did your brother to publish in skeptic. And we could do a target article and have people comment on it to me. That's still working in the system. All right. Well, I would argue it's kind of an end run, but I'm all about it. Maybe I'm an end runner also. Look, I think you are. And maybe it's why, in spite of my yelling at you a few minutes ago, we get along. So anyway, where should we go from here? Oh, well, okay. That's right. I wrote a book on truth. We've kind of done a deep dive on epistemology there, which is super interesting. And I just should note, I guess, as a historian of science, much of what you say is true, but on the other hand, things do change. I mean, maybe it's the Planck principle that for new theories to be accepted, the old guard has to die. It could be that, but the change does happen, right? Or else we wouldn't know the things that we know today about whatever. I mean, the age of the universe and when dinosaurs went extinct and all that stuff. So I think maybe an interesting topic in which we share some overlap on religion. I've taken a different tact in this book, sort of against what a lot of atheists approach. Religion is just a bunch of bullshit and it's just wrong. That I'm taking more of a sort of Joseph Campbell, Jordan Peterson, if you will, mythical truth or psychological truth. And my analogy is like, so people send me articles, skeptic about, here's the actual explanation for the party in the Red Sea. It was an earthquake or these plague of locusts and frogs. It was actually caused by this ecological change and there was a drought or whatever. Or the swoon theory that when Jesus was on the cross, they gave him this drug through his side or something, and then he went into a coma. And then he was asleep for three days in the coma in the tomb, and then they whisked him off. And if you want to go full Dan Brown, he went to France and married Mary Magdalene and they had babies and so on. Anyway, but to me, this would be like going in search of, what is it, the railroad station nine and three quarters in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter. And when I made a joke about that, there actually is one. Some fans built a nine and three quarter railroad station there. Or is there a middle earth in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings? Well, by asking those questions, you're missing the point of the story. It's not a true story. It's a fictional story that has deeper truths, like the Brothers Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's novel. There are no brothers Karamazov. He's just made up a story, but it's deeper truths about deeper truths about this. What makes great literature great. It's touching things that are true about the human condition, jealousy and anger and love and power and deception and so on. That's what, you know, so to me, biblical stories are narratives. They're literature that carry some other message for people. And I go so far as to say that that includes the resurrection. Didn't literally happen. No one could come back from the dead after three days. But you're missing the deeper point of, you know, being born again, starting over, redemption, forgiveness, you know, that kind of oppression, redemption. We're going to start over and we're going to overthrow our oppressor. This is what to me, Jesus meant when he, you know, he said, heavens within you. And there are those standing here who will not taste death before you see the son of man come again. He's talking about the people, the Jewish people oppressed by the Romans. Now, you know, we have to state make change now that, you know, heaven is here and now, and we're going to overthrow our oppressors and start over that anyway. So that's my approach. And I think you share some of that right mythological truths about religion. Yeah, I call it metaphorical truth. Metaphorical truth are truths in which those who act as if they are true out compete those who act according to the fact that they're false. Let me ask you a question. So I when I got to that section of your book, I did wonder, you and I had a had lunch in Memphis at Freedom Fest a couple years ago. Was that three years ago? Must have been three years ago. Yeah. And I understood your position to be different than the one that you take in this book. Is that right? I'm trying. I'm trying out something new. Okay. So that's good. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. All right. I'm glad it seems to me that you're moving in my direction. And I agree with you about the important. Won't be important to religious people. But the most important thing from those of us who are not religious, who are trying to understand this phenomenon is the fact that there is value or at least has been value in these stories to those who believed in them. And you know, you point to some important kinds of value. But I wonder if there are not some things that need to be added to your list. Principally, these stories aren't just literature. They are actually the solutions to game theory problems. And crucially, they only work if you actually believe them. Hmm. So that I think is a bitter pill for people of the Richard Dawkins mindset. Because so let's just give an example. If we take the idea, which you talk about of the afterlife of heaven, and we think of it in Darwinian terms, a person who lives a life that is justifying of their entry into heaven. It just so happens will have endeared themselves to their community, will have built up a positive reputation, the kinds of things that put your children and your grandchildren in a much better position to endure hard times and profit in good times. You will build a platform from which they can prosper. And interestingly, you do live on after your death in their minds. So in a sense, the story, I would say, is literally false as far as we know, but not so far from an actual truth, which is you live on after death in a genetic sense, your progeny, and your memories and your impact on the world and so forth. Right. And so the point is, if you don't believe that heaven's a real place, and more importantly, maybe that hell is the alternative to it, then it may not modify your behavior substantially. And you may end up living closer to the naive atheist perspective, which is, well, I don't really care about what happens after I'm gone, because I ain't going to be here. Right. So a believer has an advantage. And one of the things I've given Dawkins and others a hard time about is by deriding these stories as mind viruses, which is very much not the perspective you put forward in your book. You rob those who have been more correct than you, right, that these stories have a value and that actually belief in them is a good thing of their proper position. You rob them of the recognition that in fact they were correct in a sense. So anyway, my basic point there, I didn't mean to divert us, is that the solution to the game theory problem is an important way, you know, I don't believe that the brothers Karamazov will do that. It may tell you many things about the way people are, but it doesn't solve a difficult to solve problem like a collective action issue. Interesting. That may explain the response I've been getting so far from Christians when I float this idea with great respect. I really respect the story. It carries deep truths and so on, but Jesus was not literally, you know, raised from the dead and their response is what? No, no, no, not mythologically, metaphorically, psychologically true. No, it literally happened. And Paul himself said, if Christ has not risen, then there's no reason to be a Christian. And so they really insist that as respectable and honorable it is to have these deep truths. No, it had to literally happen or, and then to this I respond then why don't Jews believe it? You know, because they don't, they just did the old Testament doesn't say that's what the Messiah is going to be like a carpenter from Nazareth who gets himself crucified. That's not what the Messiah was supposed to be. He's supposed to be our rescuers going to overthrow the Roman empire. And, and we're going to start again with this new empire with our great leader. That's not what Jesus was like at all. So they reject it. And so maybe your explanation here goes a long way to saying why they're not buying my idea here. Well, look, I mean, I, if you think carefully about the argument that I make in the game theory argument, it raises the question of why, yes, it makes it quite clear why you would resist in no uncertain terms, this interpretation, but that in fact you would deeply believe that what you Michael are saying is wrong and that actually this literally did happen. And the question is, um, I'm not inclined to try to persuade anybody of anything. I don't misrepresent my own perspective. If people ask me, I say, look, I don't rule out the possibility of the supernatural, but I've seen no evidence of it. And I don't expect to. Um, I think that's very clear, uh, what I believe, but I also, I'm not, uh, inclined to push people towards a modification of beliefs that have apparently been very effective at getting them into the present. If I don't have a proper substitute and I don't believe we have anything like a proper substitute. Um, in fact, I'm watching civilization wreck itself because of the vacuum left by the metaphorical beliefs that we have so recently abandoned. Hmm. The substitution hypothesis. Yeah. As religion declines, we substitute Marxism or woke ism or trans or whatever. Yeah. Maybe, um, uh, back to your previous point, though, let's look at some specific examples. I have a slew of these new books from formerly atheist or some of the people that said, you know, really, really, this is not such a bad thing. In fact, it's a great thing. And, you know, Charles Murray was just on, I don't know if you know Charles, but I've known him for a long time, you know, lifelong atheist. And now he's found God. Okay. And we know I.N. Hersey Ali's got her book coming out this year at some point about her conversion experience. I think you know, I.N. And, um, you know, her story, you know, it's, it's not that she laid out all the evidence and said, you know, I've been weighing the evidence of foreign against the resurrection and I think the evidence, it wasn't that at all. You know, it's very personal. She had a lot of personal issues. She found Jesus as her savior and it saved her life, literally saved her life. And it's like, okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna argue with her. I'm not gonna say, well, but you know, it's all bullshit, right? You know, it's like, I don't want to do that to anybody. It's like, whatever helps you get through the night. I mean, life is hard. Okay. Um, and, you know, maybe, and I'll give her, you know, it's metaphorically true or mythically true, whatever. Okay. If that works pragmatically to make your life better. All right, fine. Um, you know, my only objection would be trying to convert other people. And so far, you know, the books I've had here, they're not trying to convert anybody. They're just saying it's, it's, it's not so bad to believe like Charles Murray. He's not trying to convince anybody. He's just saying, this is what works for me. What was the other? Oh, Ross Douthat believe, um, he's Catholic and, but, but he doesn't insist you be Catholic. He's a just believe something, you know, one of the big three are just something. Right. Um, and, but that then merges into this kind of cultural religiosity, like, well, it's better than Islam Islamism, let's say, or it's better than the crazy Marxism woke wokeism, you know, for, for civilizational values, um, that we all agree are good for human flourishing. Those certain religions are better for that than others. Okay. I'll, I'll go along with that. Well, hold on. Um, this was another place where I think, uh, you could add to your model. Different religions are just like species adapted to different times and places in history. I think we need to be very concerned about what our religious traditions are adapted to, that it's not, one is not as good as another. And it isn't that one is less valid than another, but a religion adapted to a time of rampant lineage against lineage violence, for example, is a very poor match for the world we want to live in. If you want to live in Game of Thrones, you could embrace such a tradition, but if you want to live in an enlightened, tolerant society, then those are not the traditions to, uh, to base it on. Further, there's a question about how the different traditions are to get along with each other, because all of the long-standing traditions go back to a world in which the intermingling was not, uh, nearly at the level that it is now. And so, um, I by and large have a very, uh, hospitable relationship with religious folks. Um, I think I'm doing something the hard way that is much easier done through religious belief. And I think that there's a reason as an evolutionary biologist that I have to, um, to do it the hard way, even if it's worse. I think it's important for me to retain rigor in this way. But, um, one of the things that I find difficult to convey to religious people, even though I have good relations with, with lots of religious people, is because they are adapted to past environments, they do not have the solutions to many puzzles that are, uh, important in our time, in other words, let's look at kosher laws, right? We have kosher laws that, um, warn us off of pork, presumably because of trichinosis or because of something about the ecology of the animal that, uh, renders, uh, pork not a good deal. We don't need to worry about that anymore. We do need to worry about glyphosate. It's not mentioned in any of these texts. What is that? Glyphosate. It's the, uh, core ingredient of Roundup. Oh, okay. Um, so our kosher laws are not up to date. We need new kosher laws. Our new kosher laws look a lot more like the, you know, brand new food pyramid. And you should buy your stuff organic because of the toxic compounds that are sprayed on the stuff that isn't organic. And so, but anyway, the point is it is one thing to say that these texts contain a great deal of wisdom and that because the code is not like computer code, where there are comments that say this section accomplishes this goal, we don't know what section does which we don't know how it works. And so it's testerton's fence all the way down. Um, but all of that wisdom does not tell us that it is sufficient for modern problems that are not covered there. Right. The enrichment of uranium isn't covered. The pesticides are not covered. What to think about AI isn't covered. None of these things are addressed. And that means that the work isn't done. Are you familiar with David Sloan Wilson's work on group selection and religion? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So I don't think, I mean, you're an evolutionary biologist. What is your thoughts on group selection as a general theory? And does it apply to religion? Okay. Um, I'm going to do this as carefully as I can. Group selection is a logical dead end. Lineage selection is the rigorous version of this. Ultimately, David and I will have to have that out. But group selection allowed the group selectionists to reach a responsible theory of the evolution of culture that properly deals with religion. So my point would be David Sloan Wilson is correct about the stuff the other side of group selection. He is not correct about the mechanism in question, but, um, the adaptive at the kin selectionists, which is my tribe, does not under it's my tribe and it's Dawkins tribe. They do not understand religion because they don't have anything to jump them into the realm of culture at the proper level to understand how these things function. So the group selectionists, even though they are wrong about this mechanism, in my opinion, are right about the consequences, the evolutionary consequences. The right mechanism is lineage selection, which has yet to, I have yet to present it in a way that it will get a proper hearing and it has yet to get that proper hearing. Okay, Bret, there's your next book. If you're not going to write about the scientific fraud, you can write about religion and group selection and linear subjects is maybe that's it. Is that your next book? Uh, well, I'm, unfortunately, my attention is divided between two, but one of them contains that. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, my point of bringing this up was that, um, you know, maybe there's been a kind of an evolution of Christianity, you know, going through the scientific revolution and the enlightenment and coming out the other end, much more tolerant and enlightened as it were by Western values of freedom and a bodily autonomy and that sort of thing, the kind of things that work well with the constitution and the declaration of independence and all that. So, uh, whereas Islam has not gone through an enlightenment. And, uh, so that's why we're getting these conversations now of, you know, even Dokken said, I'm a cultural Christian, you know, even though I'm an atheist, right? So that, you know, that kind of theme, maybe that is along these same lines of a pragmatic game, theoretic, uh, explanation for the evolution of religions in a certain direction. Well, there's one thing that you have to add to that. I believe, um, let's just say Christianity in its modern form is actually a pretty good basis for the West as we understand it, right? Far better than Islam as we find it, but also better than biblical Judaism. Mm-hmm. And what I think the distinction between Quran, uh, era Islam and biblical Judaism is the willingness to culturally update. So the way culture works, it is adaptive and evolutionary, and it is also quite capable of, hybridizing. So what we have modern Jews have embraced many, um, pieces of Christian wisdom, the Christian update to the old Testament has been largely embraced by modern Jews, but not acknowledged. So to give one example, modern Jews believe in monogamy. That's not an old Testament concept. That's a new Testament concept. Yes. So I would argue that this is actually the roadmap. If we're to have a world in which we actually do get along with each other, we have to be willing to make our different belief structures compatible. And that is not going to be a simple process, but I believe the Western cosmopolitan world in which we don't stop competing with each other, but we stop fighting with each other. We compete by trying to outdo each other in terms of creating wealth, but we stop bludgeoning each other over different skin colors, ideologies, nose shapes, whatever it might be. That that world, uh, is superior. It is safer. It is fairer. It is more, um, rewarding to live in it. Um, it, it does all of the things that are on the best side of what it is to be human. And because of that, we should be welcoming the world to embrace the parts of that worldview that make the whole place function. And that what we are in fact watching is a battle of civilizations in which we have people who wish to adhere to ancient texts that are based on lineage against lineage violence. And you have got other people who want to modernize and get along. And unfortunately, those of us who want to get along are going to have to win that battle. Um, because there's the weaponry is too ferocious and the number of us on this planet is too large and we're too interconnected to fight each other lineage against lineage. We will drive ourselves extinct if that's what we do. All right. Let's see where, where we fall on this issue. People like myself and Steven Pinker and Dawkins Harris and so on. And I think that's and Dawkins Harris and so on. Uh, you know, we, we kind of adhere to secular humanism or as I prefer enlightenment humanism and has a little more gravitas to it. And also the secular humanists have become too political. They're pretty far left progressives and I'm not neither is Pinker and so on. So it's, but we're after something like, what are we going to replace religion with? Well, okay. When I got into this business and well, we started Skeptic 92 and I was sort of following Randy and Kurtz and those guys in the late eighties where, where like Paul Kurtz had this, you know, he was the founder of a center for inquiry and, and skeptical inquire and free inquiry magazine. So his vision, you know, he once gave me his, you know, I have a dream, you know, so, you know, one day, you know, in every city we will have a secular church, but people will go to, you know, and there'll be no more religion. We'll just have this whole worldview it's replaced. And so they have, you know, weddings and funerals and coming of age and it's all secular, right? We're going to replace it all. That hasn't really happened. At least as I envisioned it would happen back in the early nineties. The closest thing we have is Starbucks. Yeah, Starbucks. Yeah. And I've, I've gone to these, you know, ethical society meetings and, and the, you know, the atheist Sunday gatherings and, you know, they sing hymns to Newton and people get up to give their testimonials. This is how I lost my religion. I mean, it's kind of funny, but I'm just sitting there thinking, God, I feel like I'm back in church and I, I was never vibing it really. That wasn't my thing to sit in church, but maybe a lot of people, well, this is their idea that people need ceremony like that. So we're going to create a fake one essentially. And I don't, my, my sense is, what do you think? You know, this is not really happening. No, it's going to work about as well as Esperanto. Esperanto. Yes. That's a good example. And for the same reason. But I do think, you know, Heather and I talk about this with respect to male, female dynamics. Male, female dynamics need a renegotiation. We can't go back. Even the tread people aren't really going back as far as they think they are. And that's not going to work. The liberation of women has actually been a tremendous victory for liberalism. It's a wonderful thing, but it has not. Although you should be free to be a tread woman if you want. You should be free to be anything you want to be. And then the rules should be whatever they are. Not the rules that you would like them to be. But the point I usually make is it's wonderful that women are now throughout the sciences and equally represented in most of them, if not ahead. That's wonderful. The problem, however, is that instead of realizing that the rules of science were inherently more masculine because science is a competitive endeavor in which you hold each other's feet to the fire. So what should have happened is women should have been brought in on the culture of science, irrespective of the fact that it was masculine in nature, because those are the right rules if you want science to work. Instead, we've had a kind of an overthrow of those rules because they were masculine and it results in the science that doesn't work. So with that model in mind, the sexes need a renegotiation. We can't go back. There's nowhere to go back to that will work in the modern world. So we need to figure out what rules actually allow us to get along and to make each other stronger. And we can broaden that to the rest of civilization too. We're not going to have secular churches. It's a preposterous idea, but we do need to have something that does that job, whether that involves... I mean, one of the things that I truly appreciate about Judaism is that it is highly tolerant of you making your own peace with the religious realm. Now, not every version of Judaism is this way, but in general, say you're a Jew, doesn't mean that you do believe in the supernatural or don't believe in the supernatural. You're free to figure out your own relationship to the universe and not be nitpicked over it. I think that's a very positive thing. And so at some level, we're going to have to build traditions that can evolve and improve and serve us. And maybe those are religious traditions and we have to be flexible about what it means to believe in this or that. But we do need something because the free for all that has emerged in the absence of people being religious is not better. Yeah, I've had theists that I debate tell me, "Yeah, I know you're an atheist, but at least you know what a woman is." It's like, "Yeah, okay. We have common ground there." You're apparently ahead of most evolutionary biologists. Apparently so. By the way, I just thought of another example of the system of science reforming from within. Thinking of Naomi Oreskes' book, Why Science, where she has whole chapters devoted to the crazy science about women in the early 1900s, early 1900s at Harvard. One of her case studies was this, I think it was a biologist who published papers on why women should not go to college. And the reason is, is because during their menstruation, they have the blood flow. There's not enough blood in their brains for them to process higher mathematics and philosophical ideas. And this was like peer-reviewed journal articles, hard science, this is it, these are the facts. And the moment you... So my point is, her solution is, you bring women into the department and that changes everything. So that's reforming it from within. We're going to have a diversity of viewpoint diversity, in this case, gender diversity, I guess. But viewpoint diversity, that's a solution. Well, let's just say that's obviously a preposterous critique of why women should or shouldn't be in science. In my field, I trained as a field biologist. And at the point I got to field biology, of course, women were equally represented. But a couple of generations back, there was literally the idea that women couldn't do field biology because where would they pee? Right? I mean, it's as bad as the example you deliver. But I would point out, I'm sorry that I never got to talk to Jane Goodall. She's one of the people I really wanted to talk to. The example of Jane Goodall is a powerful testament. I am not in general a adherent to the idea that diversity is our strength. I do think there are kinds of diversity that matter a great deal. In general, meritocracy and perspective diversity are a good match for each other. But for reasons that may be obvious, in a physics lab, if you do the science correctly, it doesn't much matter whether you're male or female. The work may appeal more to males, more not. But what you're going to find out is not highly sensitive to who you are. In biology, especially if you're studying animal behavior, I do think there was kind of an epidemic of male myopia and that Jane Goodall is the best example where a woman and in fact, leaky, Heather and I have been trying to figure out to what extent this was intentional. But Jane Goodall was not highly trained. And it appears to have potentially been a choice on leaky's part. They were with Diane Fosse and then there was three of them. There was the orangutan. Galdicus is the orangutan. So anyway, what Jane Goodall did was she basically made the breakthrough that allowed us to understand the great apes in a way that males had failed to. George Schaller had tried and had failed the great lion biologist. But Goodall actually broke the male rules in order to make progress. And the key thing that she did was men had decided it's very important to be objective about these creatures. You shouldn't give them names because it'll blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which it's true. You can easily start anthropomorphizing animals. But when you're talking about chimps, your best tool is to understand what they must be based on what you know from yourself because they're not so distant. So she did name them and she watched them and thought about them as individuals and imagined that they had these emotional drives as we do. And it allowed her to see what was really going on in a way that men had not figured out. So anyway, it's a counterpoint. In general, my feeling is meritocracy overall. And if you want to do the job, figure out how to be good at it and compete. By the way, I met Jane at a party a few years ago in Calabasas. There was maybe a dozen people there and she drank whiskey. Somebody gave her a gift of a super expensive whiskey, so we all drank whiskey. And she had the little stuffed animal, the little stuffed chimpanzee. And it was very cute. What a sweetheart. She was something special. I presume you saw the Netflix special they released after her death? No, I've heard about it. Oh my God, it's very moving. Oh, it's just really, it's something else. But at the end, she says, "I have a reason to believe there is an afterlife. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but that's where I'm going." Whatever she said, it was very kind of like, "Oh, okay, interesting." Hell yeah. Well, I hope she's there and I hope it's great. And I hope that all her favorite chimps who have passed on are there with her. By the way, on the trans issue of men and women sports and peen. Okay, so as you recall, I used to be a bike racer in the 1980s, Race Across America. And then in the 90s, I was the race director. And so we had women's division and men's division. And then we had ages and relay teams and so on. But in 1995 and six, there were two women that were better than almost all of the men, Shana Hogan and Muffy Ritz. And the one year, all the way into Colorado, Shana was leading the entire field. She was ahead of like 25 men. And some of these guys are really good. And so then the issue came up about peen on the bike. So you have to kind of picture how this goes. You know, you're wearing these Lycra shorts. And for a guy, if you have like a long slow downhill, you just kind of turn and you just sort of pull it down and take care of your business. It sort of splashes on the road, whatever, no problem. But women can't do that. So poor Shana has to get off the bike, go into the motorhome or into the bushes or whatever and do her thing. And she's losing like three, four minutes every two or three hours because you're drinking a lot. So at some point she said, "You know, it's really not fair." And I should get like a time bonus or something. And I said, "Shana, you're in the women's division and you have your own prize money and so on. The men have, it's all equal. Do you want to just race against the men? There's no gender divisions, just one division." She goes, "Um, no." And it turned out, even though she led the first thousand miles, you know, she lost by the guy, the top two or three guys beat her by like 24 hours by the end of 3000 miles. There's just a massive difference between men and women. And I don't know if you saw the, also the special on tennis where the women's number one tennis player, Arina Sabalinka, who is just massive. She is so good. She just hits so hard and so on. She did a match against Nick Gariogos, I forget his last name, rated 671st in the world, hasn't played in two years because of an injury. And he just totally dominated. I mean, it could have been six love, six love, you know, he just started goofing around and she ended up being six, three, six, four, something like that. But it was just, and her court was shorter, narrower. So he had a narrower field to hit on and they made it as much as they could to her advantage. And it still wasn't even close. So the idea that letting men into women's sports is so absurd. I can't believe I'm ranting now, but it's one of my pet issues. Well, maybe we science types should come up with some term that explains this distinction that you and I both intuit exists between men and women. How about sexual dimorphism? There we go. That's right. That's a reality. Yeah. Or it was, it was back when I was in graduate school, we believed in sexual dimorphism, but now we know that you can become shorter just by declaring yourself female. Do you think that's over now or on its way out in the next year or so? I think it's on its way out. Too many of us are onto them. Yeah. I have a chapter in the truth book on free will and determinism, decided to take this on. I'm a compatible list. And so my work, or I'll just tell you my work around on this. And I use Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris as the kind of stereotypical determinists, although their arguments are not that original. It's been around for a long time as you know. And that they asked the question, could you have done otherwise? So here's how I think about it. I got thinking about Steve Gould's idea of the, you know, rewind the tape of life and play it back from the Cambrian, pre-Cambrian, whatever, would we still be here? Okay. And as Dan Dannett pointed out to Gould, well, if it's a read-only memory tape, then no, because that's just a recording of what actually happened. So that's where I start there. You know, if I go back a week or a month or 10 years in my life and play the tape back, if it's a tape of recording, then no, I can't have done different because that's what actually happened, right? So the past is determined. Once it happens, that's it. You can't redo it. But the future is not predetermined. And that, you know, the Heraclitus' principle, you can't step into the same river twice because the river is not the same and you're not the same. Or, you know, Jorge Borges, you know, Garden of Forking Paths, each fork path you take has a different outcome than had you gone this way or that way. And that future is not determined. So we are free to, in a sense, influence our future conditions for our present self. So the example I use is, you know, my current self knows that tomorrow morning at 6 a.m. when I'm supposed to get up and go for my workout, I'm really not going to be vibing and I'm going to be groggy. So I'm going to put my workout clothes today. I'm going to have my bike ready and I'm going to have the food ready and so on. I'll do that tonight because future Shermer, you know, I know what he's like. Right. So in that sense, we have some volitional choice over shaping the future. So I call that self-determinism in a way we help shape the future going forward. So anyway, that's my that's my standing on one foot explanation. All right. Well, here's my perspective. I believe the facts of the universe as we understand them strongly suggest we have a degree of freedom, that this is not a perfectly deterministic universe. I think the amount of free will that we have is far lower than it feels like we have, that free will is a struggle. But I do not agree with Harris and Sapolsky that we have no free will. And in Harris's case, I see him cheating that basically there are two versions of free will. One, the mot of the mot and Bailey is that whatever you decide to do is the result of whatever you've experienced, which you didn't choose. So you don't get credit. That's the low bar. And then the high bar is you don't have the ability to choose anything at all. Now, what I would argue is that the facts of evolution, it's not impossible that the world that we experience would be the product of a perfectly deterministic universe, but it wouldn't make any sense. What evolution is wouldn't make any sense. Having a consciousness would be completely pointless if it was trapped and unable to do anything that changed anything. So the punchline is I believe it is highly likely that we have a degree of free will, that a life well lived is one in which you take the small amount of free will that you have, and you use it to increase the degree of the freedom of your will. Right. That you are trying to accumulate the power to alter your course more so that you can do something useful and good with it. But I don't believe we have any mechanistic understanding of how we could have free will, that that's the sticking point. The fact that we don't have a good, you know, ultimately it has to derive from Heisenberg, but it's an awfully long way from Heisenberg and uncertainty to I have the capacity to lift this glass up at will or not to do so. But somewhere there must be a mechanism that explains this because otherwise if you think about, you know, the coyote chasing the rabbit in a universe where the outcome was completely predetermined from the first instant, the roadrunner. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's an insane paradox. Likewise, my own experience of this moment. Why would I have an experience of this moment if I'm a, you know, a puppet whose actions were completely guaranteed from the first instant? Well, I like Dan Dennett's idea of degrees of freedom, right? So the, the roadrunner and the coyote have fewer degrees of freedom than you and I have, and they have more degrees of freedom than the cockroach or whatever. So, you know, how many options are there, you know, going forward down the path of garden of forking paths and so on. And then I guess it depends on what you mean by will. I mean, free will, I will it to happen. Now this is an interesting problem for clinical psychologists. I've had a few on the podcast that wrote books about this, you know, there, what is it, what's happening when they are clients who have, let's say, some kind of addiction and they actually overcome it. They really do. They really stop drinking or smoking or drugs or whatever the problem is. And there's techniques, you know, that clinical psychologists use. Here's the kind of, here's some of the tools you could have when you feel the urge is bubbling up. This is what I'd really like, a drink or whatever. Here's like the three things you could do. You know, you repeat to yourself this, or you go in this other room or whatever it is. And so, but who's doing that? Well, you are, you know, and I guess the determinants would say, yeah, but that was all determined also. Yeah, but, but somebody, me, there's a me, there's a will, there's a self, which is sort of an illusion, I guess, but it's, it's a good illusion. And, and so, you know, the fact that the fact that people are able to do that seems to be evidence of something like a will to choose. Yeah. I think, I think, well, I mean, we could be a screensaver. Why we would have consciousness to be aware of any of this is a paradox. I don't think we can answer, but I think it is unlikely. This would be a very strange screensaver to build. It's a weird way of accomplishing whatever this is accomplishing. And so I wish I heard more people acknowledging our will appears to be free, not as free as we would like. We can increase the degree of our freedom as per Dennett's formulation, but mechanistically, we're at a loss for how that works. But there's nothing wrong with that. You know, I mean, Darwin was in the same position with evolution. He could see that evolution, that adaptive evolution took place, but he knew nothing of the underlying mechanism. And that didn't make the idea invalid. Right. Here's Sapolsky, we're nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck over which we had no control that has brought us to any moment. But, you know, Bob's book, Robert's book opens with a story of him at Stanford University graduation ceremony. And he's sitting there, one of the faculty and all the students are up there, getting congratulated. The parents and grandparents are so proud of their accomplishments. And there in the background is a gardener, you know, just trimming the tree or whatever that poor guy, he's never going to Stanford. Why is that? This is where he starts. A hot gum, that guy got to go to Stanford and get the degree and that guy's a gardener. Right. So that's, to me, some of this determinism feels like if, if determinism is not true, then, you know, then it's not just bad luck, good luck. There's something else in how lives turn out. Anyway, that was my sense of that, you know, it's sort of a kind of a more tolerant feeling. It feels like it's more tolerant of how lives come out. Well, let me say this. I'm a big fan of Sapolsky's. I really think very highly. Me too. Yeah. Oh yeah. I do not think his work on free will is high quality and is reflective of something that I think we all need to be aware of. I've known many great thinkers. There is often some quadrant where their thinking is not high quality. And I take it actually a contractor that Heather and I worked with many years ago said something interesting. He said, there's often one room in a house that makes no sense. And basically it's where all of the little errors have been pushed. So they concentrate because it's better to have the one, you know, crazy laundry room or closet than to have those errors distributed throughout the design. And so, you know, I hear Ian McGillcrest talk about panpsychism, right? And the belief that consciousness is in the particles themselves. And I think here's another incredibly high quality thinker. And there's this one place where it just doesn't sound like it doesn't sound like their other work. Here's Sam from his book, Free Will. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have. Okay. So here's my little humorous thought experiment. I'll use it on you, Bret. All right. So you and Heather have a devoted, high fidelity, loving marriage. Quite right. But let's just say, hypothetically, you strayed one time, you're out at a conference, freedom fest, whatever. And Heather finds out, how is she going to respond if you say, well, darling, my will is simply not of my own making. My thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which I'm unaware and over which I have no conscious control. Could you even finish the sentence? No, I do not intend to find out what she would think. Just keep that as a thought experiment. But yeah, I mean, the point is, come on, really. I mean, are any determinist actually really determinist in their lives? They're not, obviously not. I mean, and you know, Sam Harris being the world's best example, right? He spends how much time in meditation, which is presumably about liberating his mind from certain things and pointing it in a different direction and being super deliberate about it. Right. So you know, and scientists used to give postmodernists a hard time, rightly so, over their postmodernism. And I maybe it was even Dawkins, who invited some postmodern feminist if she really believed what she was saying to instead of taking the stairs down from her office to walk out the window. And I feel like this with these hardcore determinists, right? It's like, what sense would it even mean? You're making an argument. To make an argument is effectively to accept that there is an argument to be made. And the idea that you have a, you know, it is so preposterous that your consciousness would be trapped under the false impression that it was shaping the world in some way only to witness the screen saver from the inside. Like what universe are you even imagining? Yeah, I think also there's some physics envy there. Free will is not to be found in the quarks or atoms, right? It's like the analogy I use is, you know, where in your physics equations is inflation? I mean, inflation is a real economic phenomenon. People study it. It has huge consequences for our lives and so on. Where is it in the brain, in your quantum physics? It isn't anywhere. It's an emergent property of something else. Well, hold on. I was actually going to ask you about this. I had it written down in my list of questions. There's a dichotomy, I would imagine you're aware of it, between strong emergentists and weak emergent emergentists. Strong emergentists believe that you cannot, even in principle, understand higher level phenomena from the levels below. Weak emergentists believe that we cannot explain higher level phenomena from the lower levels, but that they are explainable. Why was that the lower? Yeah, I find myself in that category. Yeah, me too. Yeah. So if that is the case, then things like inflation are emergent properties that are not deducible from the particle interactions anymore than a baseball game is described in, you know, particles. But you could, if you had enough computing power and the will to do it, calculate the baseball game as a result of it, except for the Heisenbergian aspect, which we presume to be fundamentally incalculable. Here's how Kevin Mitchell, he's a geneticist and neuroscientist, his book is called Free Agents. He says, "Basic laws of physics that deal only with energy and matter and fundamental forces cannot explain what life is or its defining property. Living organisms do things for reasons as causal agents in their own right. They're driven not by energy, but by information. And the meaning of that information is embodied in the structure of the system itself based on its history. In short, there are fundamentally distinct types of causation at play in living organisms by virtue of their organization. That extension through time generates a new kind of causation that is not seen in most physical processes, one based on a record of history in which information about past events continues to play a causal role in the present." So would that be strong emergentism? I think so. I believe that, well, different levels of causality, right? There's, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a strong emergentism. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so, I don't know. So, in my book, these are under the sort of third section of the book on known unknowables. The problem is definitional. What do you mean by determined? What do you mean by will, free, and so on? And I have the same problem with consciousness. What's it like to be something else? What's it like to be you? Well, how the hell should I know? I'm not you, right? It was like to be a bat or whatever. I also struggle with that in a chapter, basically, it's the wrong question. It's a different category of question. It's a conceptual problem, if we just work a little harder, we're going to solve it. Like Christoph Cactus lost his bet with David Chalmers last year. After 25 years, the hard problem of consciousness not been solved. I don't think it'll ever be solved if that's the way you're phrasing it. Yeah, I think it is phrased to be insoluble. Yeah. But did you confront what is it like to be a bat in your book? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I also use what's it like to be a dolphin. I can sort of imagine it, you know, if I had one of those big single flippers and I put on a wetsuit and I go out and I eat sushi. But, you know, at some point, well, this really gets down to Aristotle's law of identity. A is a, you know, I cannot be a dolphin or a bat. And if I was, I would just be that I would not be this is a Cartesian dualism. We're picturing it like the little Michael Sherman homunculus transfers over into the brain of the bat and is in there going, Oh, so this is what it's like. That's not possible. Right. So yeah, that could never happen. I must say that essay, a colleague once inflicted that essay on me, knowing that I had studied bats and had quite many thoughts about what it must be like. Yeah. Yeah. And I really dislike the essay because effectively, I think it is built to derail a kind of productive work. And I'm not claiming that you can know what it is like to be a bat, but you can know a great many things about what it's like to be a bat. And so anyway, who is anyone to tell anyone else? Don't go down that road. You'll never get anywhere if it is as amenable to test as anything else further. And, you know, Nagel in his essay sort of pays lip service to these things. But the fact is a bat isn't all that distant evolutionarily from you. And there are certain things you can derive from that. For example, because a bat is a mammal and because all mammals meet their mother and their mother has to be self-sacrificing on their behalf, it is reasonable to imagine that love of the maternal form is the primordial form that all mammals experience it to one degree or another, that there are two versions. There's the giving parental version and the receiving childhood version. And that part of what it is like to be a bat is to experience that. So can I prove it? No. But is it more likely than whatever drives the mother bat to obsessively clean the wings of her offspring has nothing to do with the love that a mother human feels for a child? No. Logically speaking, it is much more likely to be the same property than different because of parsimony. It wouldn't make sense for evolution to have built that mechanism multiple times when you have a clear line of dissent unbroken between you and every other mammal. Now we agree. Yeah. And I agree. This is how I solve the other minds problem. How do I know you're sentient or whatever? Well, I just apply the Copernican principle to myself. Copernican principle, we're not special. I'm not special. You're a mammal. I'm a mammal. You're a primate. I'm a primate. You're a human. I'm a human. Very likely your nervous system works mostly the same as mine. So if I see you angry or sad or crying or laughing or whatever, there's a pretty good chance I know what the inner feeling is that you're experiencing because I've had that. Right. So that's as good as we can get. Yeah. And there's also, you know, there's an evidentiary approach too. If I want to know if you're sentient, I can just simply try to ascertain how many drinks you've had. Yeah. Well, apparently brain scans are going to be able to, you know, I know what you're looking at, right, based on the neural firing. Right. That's an interesting. And then could I know what your memories are or what you're feeling? That's going to be even harder. Oh, he's feeling sad. Look, there was a little burst of dopamine or whatever it is. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, let's take one that's a little more obvious though. If if you're up on stage and somebody asks you a question and suddenly you turn red in the face and you begin to sweat, we don't know exactly why. But what we can say, I think with mechanistic near certainty, is that your brain is suddenly working really hard to solve a problem such that the ability to dissipate heat is insufficient. And so it's not good from the point of view of your wellbeing to reveal to the audience that you are feeling the heat, but it's better than your brain not processing on high. So it's creating a lot of heat and you're having trouble dissipating it. And that's unfortunately conveying something to the audience. It's reasonable to surmise that from the indirect evidence. Yeah. In fact, there's whole body research on the social implications of reading other people's emotions. You know, the whites of the eyes, you could tell if somebody's blushing that that's not just for the person, it's for the other people to know what that person is feeling. They're thinking, which is why facial expressions are so important. All those micro expressions that people study. These are social cues. They're social cues. Some of them like blushing are unavoidable downsides where you're not better off to convey that you're feeling pressure, but you don't have a choice. And other ones are for the benefit of your kin to pick up cues that will help you coordinate and things like that. Before we close out here, let me ask you this. You mentioned the hard problem of consciousness, and I'm wondering if you can tell me what it would mean for it to be solved. Yeah. Well, this is the end of the chapter. I say it's insoluble the way it's asked. In other words, the easy problem is like figuring out what the wiring does. You know, here's where the language is processed or whatever. But the hard problem is asking, what is it like to be the wiring? Right. And I just, I just, what, I mean, it's like, what are you talking about? I mean, that's not, that's conceptually problematic. How would you know if you had the, what was the substance of the bet? Yes. I actually, I forget what their criteria was for what would constitute a win for Christophe. But yeah, I don't know. Well, you know, if you look at, it's really kind of funny, back to epistemology, what do the experts think? If you look at Wikipedia on their hard problem of consciousness, there's like 20 different theories and you know, and none of them are, you know, there's like maybe four or five that are preferred by most. To me, this tells me, okay, this whole field is back to your string theory example. You know, we're not even close. Yeah. We're not even close enough to phrase the question correctly. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right, Michael Shermer, this has been delightful. A little heated at times, but anyway, it's productive. Yeah. As always, I appreciate your dedication to holding other people's feet to the fire. And I appreciate that you do it with me. Your book, I have the pre-print. Here's the, here's the, here's the hardback edition. Look, it's got the, it's like the little North star light of truth. Yeah. That's the idea. The reading that I have done in it, I haven't read the whole thing, but the reading that I've done in it, it's beautifully written as always. Thank you. And anyway, it will provoke many important thoughts. Some of them you will have had a taste of here on this podcast, but in any case, thank you for joining me today. And you're welcome. And yeah, my philosophy on that by the way, Bret is let friends be wrong for disagreeing. Of course, said friends think you're wrong. So you have to deal with that too. I mean, the process over which we argue about who is wrong is how we collectively get smarter. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the core of the truth, right? It's a community process. All right. Hell yeah. Thanks for having me on, Bret. Thank you for joining me in this very tiny version of the community process and to everyone else. Thanks for joining us.