Joe Rogan Experience #1888 - Michael Shermer

Joe Rogan 0:00 (drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Michael Shermer 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays)

Michael Shermer 0:13 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:13 ... Spears. Michael Shure.

Michael Shermer 0:15 Icon-bearing signed gifts for you, sir.

Joe Rogan 0:17 Thank you very much.

Michael Shermer 0:17 (laughs) I hope that's all right.

Joe Rogan 0:19 Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

Michael Shermer 0:22 Right.

Joe Rogan 0:23 Why is that?

Michael Shermer 0:24 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:24 Is it simple? It wouldn't be this big of a book-

Michael Shermer 0:27 N- no.

Joe Rogan 0:27 ... if it was simple.

Michael Shermer 0:28 Yeah, it's not that simple, but, uh ... Well, first of all, my argument is that it's not irrational to believe conspiracy theories, because enough of them are true that i- it pays to err on the side of assuming more of them are true than actually are than missing real conspiracy theories, and then that's a, a costlier err- error to make.

Joe Rogan 0:49 That's a rational perspective.

Michael Shermer 0:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:51 Uh, the, the term conspiracy theory got thrown about ... There was the first, the first introduction of it into the zeitgeist was during the Kennedy assassination, correct?

Michael Shermer 1:00 Yeah. Well, uh, around that time, right? It, it, uh ... Before that, before World War II really, conspiracy theories were kind of common knowledge. Everybody knew that things were going on behind, uh, closed doors and it was just ki- commonly known and we just kind of tried to figure it out. It didn't become really fringey until right after the JFK thing that it, it, it kinda got a, as a meme that you're crazy to think these conspiracy theories are true. It became pathologized.

Joe Rogan 1:27 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:28 You know, Richard Hofstadter's, you know, the Paranoid Style in American Politics kind of m- put that on the map as conspiracy theories are something delusional. You ... It's a, it's a pathology in your brain. Whereas, before that, it wasn't. It was just ... I mean, even the Declaration of Independence, it's a conspiracy theory. It's saying, "Look, the British are doing this whole train of abuses and usurpations, and here's what we think they're up to, and here's what we think they wanna do, and we're against that." That's printed right there in the Declaration.

Joe Rogan 1:54 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:54 So it's not fringey, right? It was, it was kind of commonly known that these things happened.

Joe Rogan 1:58 The term as a pejorative, though, was ... It was introduced into, like, sort of the American m- m- culture around the Kennedy assassination.

Michael Shermer 2:08 Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting story, because, um, I'm, I'm convinced Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I'm not a-

Joe Rogan 2:14 Really?

Michael Shermer 2:14 Yes, I am. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:15 What makes you convinced of that?

Michael Shermer 2:16 (laughs) Uh, well, I have a whole chapter on it, and we can get into that in a second. But, uh, the, the, the twist about it where it seems like there was something up was that John ... President Johnson was worried that if it looks like there's a conspiracy afoot with the Cubans or the Russians, that that could lead to a nuclear exchange, so we don't want the American people to think that this is some kind of vast conspiracy of the, of the Russians so we can avoid war.

Joe Rogan 2:42 Have you gone back and forth on that at all?

Michael Shermer 2:44 Uh-

Joe Rogan 2:44 Or is it just something you've always believed?

Michael Shermer 2:46 No, no. I ... Well, uh, before the Oliver Stone film, I hadn't really given it that much thought. I thought, "Well, the, you know, Warren Report seems pretty, uh, thorough, but, you know, who knows? What do I know?" And then, you know, the Oliver Stone film, which floats every conspiracy theory there was in one package, and then I thought, "Well, you know, if 10% of this is true, seems like there was something else going on." Uh, but then, you know, there were web pages posted of like, "Here are all the mistakes in the film, and here are all the counterarguments." And then I read Gerald Posner's book, Case Closed, about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and why all the evidence points to him, and then, uh, Vincent Bugliosi's book, uh, Reclaiming History, which is, like, 1,500 pages long, and it, it dissects every one of the hundreds of conspiracy theories. There are ... Something on the order of 140 people have been accused, and, you know, a couple hundred organizations have been a- affiliated with the JFK assassination. The problem is, is that there's no convergence of evidence to any other one than Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and all the evidence points to him. So it's not impossible, you know that-

Joe Rogan 3:48 All the evidence points to him?

Michael Shermer 3:49 Massive amounts of evidence, right?

Joe Rogan 3:51 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 3:51 And so now, we're supposed to get a new, uh, uh, uh-

Joe Rogan 3:54 Why do you think they-

Michael Shermer 3:55 ... troch- tranches of documents.

Joe Rogan 3:55 But they're not. They're, they won't release 'em. They keep stopping-

Michael Shermer 3:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:59 ... the release of these documents.

Michael Shermer 4:00 Uh, this worries me because that makes people suspicious, as it should. And, uh, so any, any ... But, but back, back to-

Joe Rogan 4:07 But wait a minute. It worries you because it makes people suspicious, or it worries you-

Michael Shermer 4:11 Yes. Yes.

Joe Rogan 4:11 ... because it points to their withholding information because that information looks bad?

Michael Shermer 4:18 Uh, I would love to see the information, and I would change my mind in a heartbeat. Uh-

Joe Rogan 4:21 What are your, what are your thoughts on the magic bullet?

Michael Shermer 4:24 Okay. The magic bullet is not a magic bullet. It's a single-bullet theory. That is ... What, what it's usually rendered as is Kennedy and Connally are sitting like this, si- uh, you know, back-

Joe Rogan 4:33 Oh, I'm aware of all of it.

Michael Shermer 4:34 Back to back. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:34 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 4:34 Right. So the bullet doesn't have to go left, right, and, and so forth.

Joe Rogan 4:37 Kennedy was elevated.

Michael Shermer 4:39 Yes. Right.

Joe Rogan 4:39 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 4:40 So if you draw a line straight back to the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository building, the bullet goes straight through his back, out his neck, into Connally, through his arm, into his leg, and so forth, uh, in a straight line.

Joe Rogan 4:52 Well, you know the only reason why they had to come up with the theory that that one bullet did all that damage. You know that, right?

Michael Shermer 4:59 Well, you know-

Joe Rogan 5:00 You know why?

Michael Shermer 5:01 Well, th- th- I don't know. Go, go ahead and give me your-

Joe Rogan 5:03 'Cause someone was hit by a ricochet-

Michael Shermer 5:04 Oh, yeah. I'm da- I'm da-

Joe Rogan 5:04 ... in the underpass.

Michael Shermer 5:05 I'm da-

Joe Rogan 5:06 And so they had to attribute all that damage to one bullet.

Michael Shermer 5:09 That's right. Right. That's right. Yeah. S-

Joe Rogan 5:10 But there's more ... In Connally's body, there was more pieces of bullet that were missing-

Michael Shermer 5:16 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 5:16 ... from the actual bullet itself.

Michael Shermer 5:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 5:18 Did you ever look at the actual bullet itself? Have you studied it?

Michael Shermer 5:21 Yeah. I have a picture of it in there.

Joe Rogan 5:22 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 5:22 You know, it, it-

Joe Rogan 5:23 I know a lot about bullets.

Michael Shermer 5:24 Yeah. It is-

Joe Rogan 5:24 And one of the problems about bullets is there's never been a bullet that's gone through bone and shattered bone and gone through two different bodies and came out looking like that.

Michael Shermer 5:32 Well, uh-

Joe Rogan 5:32 That looks like a bullet that was shot into water.

Michael Shermer 5:34 It is deformed, though, if you-

Joe Rogan 5:36 Yeah, it's slightly-

Michael Shermer 5:36 ... if you look at it on the-

Joe Rogan 5:37 ... deformed, but every bullet that leaves a gun is slightly deformed. That indicates even more so that it didn't hit anything. When-

Michael Shermer 5:43 So-

Joe Rogan 5:44 ... bullets hit things, they deform. That's the-

Michael Shermer 5:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:46 ... whole purpose of making bullets like that. These bullets are designed to shatter things and expand upon impact and it creates more damage.

Michael Shermer 5:54 Well, hollow-point bullets are.

Joe Rogan 5:56 Sure, but all bullets are.

Michael Shermer 5:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:58 ... hollow points even more specifically-

Michael Shermer 6:01 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 6:01 ... but all bullets are designed to expand upon impact.

Michael Shermer 6:04 Right.

Joe Rogan 6:05 Even rifle bullets that are copper, because in California you can't use lead bullets anymore because condors and a lot of other, uh, birds of prey, they eat the lead bullets-

Michael Shermer 6:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 6:14 ... and they get lead poisoning.

Michael Shermer 6:16 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 6:16 Because, like, if there's a, an animal that gets shot and the hunter doesn't recover it and then the condor or something else eats the... you know, some sort of a raptor eats that, then they get lead poisoning.

Michael Shermer 6:25 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 6:25 But bullets expand and they break up. They don't look like that. That bullet was found in Connally's gurney, which is, like, so ridiculous. The idea that, "Oh, look, we found the bullet here." It just managed-

Michael Shermer 6:37 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 6:37 ... to magically fall out of his body and look pristine.

Michael Shermer 6:40 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay, 80% of the ear witnesses, uh, heard three shots.

Joe Rogan 6:45 Yeah, but you know witnesses-

Michael Shermer 6:46 And the first shot missed.

Joe Rogan 6:47 ... but witnesses-

Michael Shermer 6:48 Well, well, yeah, but okay, so-

Joe Rogan 6:49 ... that, that's, that's just asking people what happened. If you talk to witnesses after 9/11, they said they heard explosions.

Michael Shermer 6:55 Yes, right. Yeah, right, exactly.

Joe Rogan 6:57 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 6:57 So, uh, again, it's a probability argument. It's not black or white, you know?

Joe Rogan 7:00 But that-

Michael Shermer 7:01 What's most likely.

Joe Rogan 7:01 ... the probability of that having gone through bodies is very low.

Michael Shermer 7:07 Well, I don't know if you've-

Joe Rogan 7:07 Almost zero.

Michael Shermer 7:08 ... if you've seen those, um, those, uh, uh, tests where they shoot the bullet through the, the, the, you know, the, the foam stuff that mimics a human body and so forth and-

Joe Rogan 7:18 Yeah, but that's gel.

Michael Shermer 7:18 ... and it does get deformed like that.

Joe Rogan 7:20 No, that's ballistic gel.

Michael Shermer 7:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:21 Ballistic gel is not bone.

Michael Shermer 7:23 But they have shot it through pigs with the bone and tendons and ligaments and muscles-

Joe Rogan 7:27 Doesn't look like that.

Michael Shermer 7:28 ... and all that.

Joe Rogan 7:28 Never looks like that.

Michael Shermer 7:29 Uh, well anyway, there's, there's good shows on this.

Joe Rogan 7:31 No, no, no, no, no.

Michael Shermer 7:32 And-

Joe Rogan 7:32 It never looks like that. There's no evidence of bullets hitting bone where they come out looking like that.

Michael Shermer 7:38 I don't know, Joe. Are, are you sure? Because I, uh, uh, I'm-

Joe Rogan 7:41 I am sure.

Michael Shermer 7:41 ... pretty sure it was the, uh, the... it was either Nova or National Geographic that did this and replicated it, shot it right through a body.

Joe Rogan 7:47 No, I saw that.

Michael Shermer 7:48 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:48 It, they looked deformed. The bullets looked deformed.

Michael Shermer 7:51 So-

Joe Rogan 7:51 They were bent up.

Michael Shermer 7:52 Yeah, okay. So, what is your counter then? Where, w- where is the fourth shot?

Joe Rogan 7:57 I think the... I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved. I certainly think he was involved, and I think the possibility of a conspiracy is high. I do not know whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was most certainly a part of it, but when Lee Harvey Oswald was captured, when they were talking to him he said, "I'm a patsy."

Michael Shermer 8:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:16 I'm inclined to believe he was a patsy, but I'm also inclined to believe that he had knowledge of it, he was there for probably a very specific reason, and they're probably setting him up. I think there's probably multiple people involved.

Michael Shermer 8:28 Yeah, who's the they?

Joe Rogan 8:29 Who is the they? That's the question. Is it the CIA? Was it the mafia? Were they upset because he turned on them after they got him, uh, elected? Because there was a conspiracy to help him get elected. The, the mob was involved in getting JFK elected. Was it the people that were upset because of the Bay of Pigs incident? Was it the CIA because he wanted to disband them? Well, who knows?

Michael Shermer 8:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:53 I think there was a lot of people that John F. Kennedy upset.

Michael Shermer 8:56 Well, that's true for every president, though. But the ones that don't get shot, then no one pays attention to that. H- how many people hated Trump, or Nixon especially?

Joe Rogan 9:04 Right, but we're talking about-

Michael Shermer 9:05 Or-

Joe Rogan 9:05 ... an actual murder.

Michael Shermer 9:06 Or so-

Joe Rogan 9:06 You're not saying... to say it's true-

Michael Shermer 9:08 I, I-

Joe Rogan 9:08 ... of every president is fine, but we're talking about a president that was murdered. And you look at the people that may have had some sort of a vested interest in getting rid of him.

Michael Shermer 9:18 Okay, so here's one argument I'm making. It's, it's the argument from proportionality, that the, the ef- the, the effect should have a matching size cause, so let me just back up here for a second. If you take a little pebble and throw it, it doesn't take a lot of effort to do it. A, a fist-sized stone, takes more effort. A big boulder, massive effort. So our, our folk physics, we feel like cause and effect should match, right? So, interesting experiment. If you take subjects and give them two dice and say, "Okay, now try to roll a low number," they'll, they'll kind of just gently toss it like that. Now, try to roll a high number, like an 11 or 12. They'll give it a good heave like that.

Joe Rogan 9:51 Well, that's dumb people.

Michael Shermer 9:52 Well... (laughs) But that's our intuition. So it feels like-

Joe Rogan 9:54 But that's people that don't know about dice.

Michael Shermer 9:56 Okay.

Joe Rogan 9:56 We're talk- talking about trained assassins.

Michael Shermer 9:59 Okay, but let me, let me finish. So, you know, our sense is that big events, JFK assassination, Princess Di, uh, dies, 9/11, COVID-19, uh, uh, counterfactually, if Oswald had missed Kennedy or just wounded him and he didn't die, would there be massive conspiracy theories about who he was? Okay, so this has actually happened.

Joe Rogan 10:20 Well, the-

Michael Shermer 10:20 Now, John Hinckley-

Joe Rogan 10:21 But hold on a minute.

Michael Shermer 10:21 John-

Joe Rogan 10:22 That's, that's a straw man-

Michael Shermer 10:23 Wait, lemme finish.

Joe Rogan 10:23 ... because you're saying that Oswald did act alone, if he had missed.

Michael Shermer 10:27 Yeah, if he had missed.

Joe Rogan 10:28 But he w- but it, but-

Michael Shermer 10:28 Nobody would make a big deal about it.

Joe Rogan 10:29 ... we're talking about after the murder.

Michael Shermer 10:31 Right. That's my point.

Joe Rogan 10:32 The reason why there's a conspiracy is 'cause he was murdered.

Michael Shermer 10:35 Right. So why are there no conspiracy theories about John Hinckley shooting Reagan?

Joe Rogan 10:40 Because John Hinckley has a real trail of mental illness.

Michael Shermer 10:44 Well-

Joe Rogan 10:44 He wrote letters to Jodie Foster.

Michael Shermer 10:46 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 10:46 He was a very specific human being who was obsessed with killing Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.

Michael Shermer 10:52 Right.

Joe Rogan 10:52 It's all really documented.

Michael Shermer 10:54 Right.

Joe Rogan 10:54 He's out now, too.

Michael Shermer 10:55 (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 10:55 It's not like they got rid of him like they got rid of Jack Ruby.

Michael Shermer 10:59 Or Squeaky Fromme tried to shoot, uh, Gerald Ford.

Joe Rogan 11:01 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 11:02 Okay, but she missed-

Joe Rogan 11:03 Sure, but she, but she was also in the Manson fa-

Michael Shermer 11:05 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 11:05 ... there's this, there's a big conspiracy about that, about the Manson family and the, uh, the fact that Charles Manson was a part of MKUltra.

Michael Shermer 11:12 Oh, yes, right. Yes, right, right. So we can go-

Joe Rogan 11:14 Did you ever read Chaos by Tom O'Neill?

Michael Shermer 11:17 No, I haven't read that one.

Joe Rogan 11:18 It's a fantastic book. It's all about why Manson kept getting released.

Michael Shermer 11:23 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:23 You know, M- Manson was in jail, right? And during the time he was in jail, he was visited by Jolly West, who was the head of the CIA's MKUltra LSD experiments. They most certainly did something to Manson while he was in jail, and they also supplied him... there's anecdotal evidence that shows that they supplied him with LSD when he got out of jail.

Michael Shermer 11:46 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:46 Every time he got arrested for violating parole, these cops and these local sheriffs that had caught him were told that it was above their pay grade and they had to release him.

Michael Shermer 11:55 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:55 ... Manson got out-

Michael Shermer 11:57 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:57 ... for multiple offenses after he was on parole, things that should have kept him locked up.

Michael Shermer 12:03 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:03 There's some real good evidence that, you know about M- MKUltra was a rare thing.

Michael Shermer 12:08 Yep. Yep.

Joe Rogan 12:08 And that's, that's an interesting conspiracy, right?

Michael Shermer 12:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:10 'Cause it's a real one.

Michael Shermer 12:11 It's a real one.

Joe Rogan 12:11 Documented.

Michael Shermer 12:12 Our own government was doing this.

Joe Rogan 12:13 Yeah. Well, there's, there's Operation Midnight Climax that they were involved with, where they were ... Do you know about that one?

Michael Shermer 12:18 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:18 That's where they were dosing up, um, johns when they would go to visit prostitutes-

Michael Shermer 12:22 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:22 ... and they would film them through-

Michael Shermer 12:23 Yes. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 12:23 ... two-way mirrors.

Michael Shermer 12:24 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:25 You know, he was, Jolly West was a part of that and he also was a part in some way, shape, or form of that Manson family.

Michael Shermer 12:33 Okay. But my point is that if it, let's say, it was the mayor of Dallas that was shot that day.

Joe Rogan 12:37 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 12:37 Would there be vast conspiracy industry of books and films and so on?

Joe Rogan 12:40 Who knows? But it wasn't the mayor. It was the President of the-

Michael Shermer 12:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:44 ... United States-

Michael Shermer 12:44 And that's my-

Joe Rogan 12:44 ... which makes it a far bigger issue.

Michael Shermer 12:45 Right. That's my point. We want something big. It doesn't seem right that, that, uh, a lone nut like Lee Harvey Oswald could have pulled this off, or that 19 m- guys with box cutters could have taken down the World Trade Center buildings. It just doesn't feel right. So we add elements. This is my theory. We add elements of causality to match it, you know, Princess Di, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt. But it doesn't feel right that a princess, famous and so forth, would die the same way most people do.

Joe Rogan 13:10 Yeah. But you're adding a bunch of different conspiracies to one that's very specific.

Michael Shermer 13:15 Well, yes. I know.

Joe Rogan 13:15 You're adding ones that are much more easily disprovable than one that's very specific. This is my, my problem with all conspiracy theories, s- and one of the things that you said at the beginning, some of them are real.

Michael Shermer 13:26 Yeah. That's right. All right. So let's distinguish, uh, conspiracy theories from conspiracies. Conspiracies, by definition, are two or more people plotting in secret to gain an unfair, illegal, or immoral advantage over somebody else. That happens all the time, right?

Joe Rogan 13:39 Sure.

Michael Shermer 13:39 So how do we know ... So it's a signal detection problem. How do you know which conspiracy theories are correct? They-

Joe Rogan 13:44 Right.

Michael Shermer 13:45 They tag an actual conspiracy, right? So I, I draw this two-by-two grid. So h- up here you have real conspiracy th- theories that are real and you a- a- a- a- associate them with that correctly. You, you say, "Yeah, that's, that's what I, I agree." That's a hit.

Joe Rogan 14:01 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 14:01 So conspiracy theories that are real and you go, "No, I don't believe it. I don't think there's a real conspiracy." That's a miss. So that's a big miss, right? That's a type two error. You don't wanna miss those 'cause those are real. They could harm you. Down here you have conspiracy theories that are not true and you think they are, so that's a false positive, a type one error. That's a low-cost error to make. Doesn't cost a lot. It's not risky to assume a conspiracy theory is real when it's not. And so this is my argument, is that we've evolved this cognition to be very suspicious and paranoid about other people and what they're doing because historically and evolutionarily wise, in these small bands and tribes of hunter-gatherers, anthropologists tell us there's a lot of conniving and, and, and cabals and-

Joe Rogan 14:42 Right.

Michael Shermer 14:42 ... and so on. This goes on. So I call this constructive conspiracism. It pays to be a little paranoid because sometimes they really are out to get you, right?

Joe Rogan 14:50 But it also pays to be rational and recognize which ones are conspiracies and which ones are probably people just in the moment of chaos, like 9/11, adding a bunch of stuff to what they've experienced in just the chaos of the incident. "I, I've-"

Michael Shermer 15:07 Right.

Joe Rogan 15:08 "... heard explosions. I saw this."

Michael Shermer 15:09 Hey, right?

Joe Rogan 15:09 "I saw that." And you know that p- in times like that, of great distress, people and eyewitness testimonies are some of the most unreliable, because people are so blown away by the extreme moment that they can't-

Michael Shermer 15:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 15:23 ... really recall things correctly.

Michael Shermer 15:25 Okay. Let's just do a counter, another counterfactual. Like, what would be true if this really was a conspiracy? Well, there should be some documentation somewhere.

Joe Rogan 15:33 There is, and that's why they won't release it.

Michael Shermer 15:35 Yeah. (laughs) Well, okay. So this is the problem. Release it, damn it. Right?

Joe Rogan 15:38 Yeah. Well, why do you think ... But what possible reason-

Michael Shermer 15:42 I thought Trump was-

Joe Rogan 15:43 ... in, in good-

Michael Shermer 15:43 I thought Trump was gonna release it.

Joe Rogan 15:44 I don't think-

Michael Shermer 15:44 I was quite surprised.

Joe Rogan 15:45 I don't think they wanna let anybody release that stuff.

Michael Shermer 15:47 If, if it's anyth- if I had to guess, it would be something like what the CIA was up to even more than what we know about, you know, over- overthrowing, rigging elections in South American-

Joe Rogan 15:56 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 15:56 ... countries, assassinating communist dictators.

Joe Rogan 15:59 Real conspiracies.

Michael Shermer 16:00 These are real conspiracies.

Joe Rogan 16:01 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 16:01 These things happened. We found out about this in the '90s.

Joe Rogan 16:03 So why are you so convinced-

Michael Shermer 16:05 And-

Joe Rogan 16:05 ... that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

Michael Shermer 16:06 Okay. So let's just pull back for a second.

Joe Rogan 16:08 Okay.

Michael Shermer 16:08 All right? Uh, uh, I'm not God. You're not, either. I'm not omniscient. We don't know for sure what happened. Nobody does.

Joe Rogan 16:13 I'd like to get you in a room with Oliver Stone-

Michael Shermer 16:15 Uh-

Joe Rogan 16:15 ... 'cause Oliver Stone is so compelling. I mean, that guy-

Michael Shermer 16:18 Well-

Joe Rogan 16:19 ... will talk for days and days-

Michael Shermer 16:20 Oh, I know. I know.

Joe Rogan 16:21 ... about it.

Michael Shermer 16:21 I watched his four-hour documentary. I watched him on here.

Joe Rogan 16:23 What did you think about it?

Michael Shermer 16:24 Yeah. Well, okay. So h- again, here's my problem, is that it's not a, just a black and white thing. What's most likely to be true? Okay. Well, the evidence is massive against Lee Harvey Oswald. Okay. For sure, he was at least involved.

Joe Rogan 16:36 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 16:37 All right? It ... Who else would have been involved? Okay. Can you pit ... So Stone's thinking, well, the CIA, Allen Dulles, something. If you had Allen Dulles here, could you get a grand jury to agree we have enough evidence to put him on trial? I don't think so. There's nobody, in fact, that you could point to that a grand jury-

Joe Rogan 16:53 Well, we're talking about something that happened over 50 years ago.

Michael Shermer 16:55 Well, I mean, just rewind the tape to, to 10 years after or something and go, "Okay. So we got somebody. Here he is." Well, this actually happened, right? Jim Garrison put on trial, uh, Clay Shaw-

Joe Rogan 17:05 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 17:05 ... and he ... and, and pointed all the evidence he could find and the jury acquitted him in under an hour.

Joe Rogan 17:09 The jury also acquitted O.J. Simpson.

Michael Shermer 17:11 (laughs) Yes. Okay.

Joe Rogan 17:13 You know, I don't know if that's real good evidence.

Michael Shermer 17:15 And-

Joe Rogan 17:15 Juries are, you know, they're, they're not the most informed people.

Michael Shermer 17:21 Well, there was a made-for-television BBC trial on, of Lee Harvey Oswald in absentia in which, um, was it Jerry Spence, uh, was his defense attorney in absentia. And, um, a- and, uh, what's his name was, was the prosecutor, the, um, uh, Reclaiming History, um, the Manson guy, the guy who put Manson away. I just (laughs) mentioned his name. I'm sorry. I'm just spacing out on it.

Joe Rogan 17:43 Bollosi?

Michael Shermer 17:43 B- uh, Vincent Bollosi. Again, the, the, the jury ... A- again, it's not a real jury. It's a made-for-TV, uh, series. But they, you know, they present all the evidence and they acquitted, uh, uh, I mean, they convicted m- um, Ha- Oswald based on the evidence as the lone assassin 'cause there was just nothing pointing to anybody else. So here's how I think about it. There could be somebody else involved.... but we need some evidence, at least some paper trail. Why, in the Pentagon Papers that released all these top secret documents that, uh, Nixon tried to cover up and, and prevent from being published, there's nothing in there about, you know, the conspiracy to assassinate-

Joe Rogan 18:19 Right, but they've-

Michael Shermer 18:19 ... the CIA was involved, and so on.

Joe Rogan 18:20 ... they've stopped release of all of the documents about the Kennedy assassination.

Michael Shermer 18:25 Okay, so-

Joe Rogan 18:25 They keep postponing it-

Michael Shermer 18:26 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 18:26 ... decades and decades.

Michael Shermer 18:27 Right. My guess is probably the CIA was up to even more no good back in the '60s and '70s. You know, we know, you mentioned MKUltra. Don't forget, uh, the-

Joe Rogan 18:37 That's a good guess, but another-

Michael Shermer 18:38 I- i-

Joe Rogan 18:39 ... good guess is that they were involved in the assassination in some way.

Michael Shermer 18:41 Okay. Then I'm, okay, I'm a good Bayesian. I'm willing to ch-

Joe Rogan 18:44 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 18:44 ... update my priors, change my credence, and change my mind completely and go, "Yes." It, but-

Joe Rogan 18:49 I'm just very suspicious-

Michael Shermer 18:51 Yeah, I mean, if you, in-

Joe Rogan 18:52 ... of multiple parts of that assassination, including the fact that, you know, do you know that Jolly West visited Jack Ruby while he was in jail? And Jack Ruby, something happened to him, and he went fucking completely insane-

Michael Shermer 19:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 19:06 ... after visiting with Jolly West.

Michael Shermer 19:07 Mm.

Joe Rogan 19:07 And the assumption is that Jolly West gave Jack Ruby LSD while he was in jail.

Michael Shermer 19:12 Mm, mm, maybe.

Joe Rogan 19:14 But why would Jolly West go to visit the guy that killed Lee Harvey Oswald when he was the head of a mind control experiment-

Michael Shermer 19:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:20 ... for the CIA?

Michael Shermer 19:22 Again, we're, this is what's called anomaly hunting. Like, any big event-

Joe Rogan 19:25 Well, that's, that's-

Michael Shermer 19:26 ... we go searching for any little thing that's weird.

Joe Rogan 19:28 ... that's a giant anomaly.

Michael Shermer 19:30 Like the, you know, the umbrella guy, the umbrella man?

Joe Rogan 19:32 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 19:32 Louis Witt on the, on the, uh-

Joe Rogan 19:33 Well, there's a lotta that silly shit. You can ask, acc- that, but that points, to me, to this thing where people always try to look for connections. And I do agree with you that a lot of conspiracy theories are ridiculous. But a lot of conspiracies, as you said, are real. I don't know if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but I have a feeling that there were other people involved based on the evidence, based on a lot of it.

Michael Shermer 19:59 And en- and like Stone's thesis that the CIA military-industrial complex, uh, and so on were involved because Kennedy wanted to get us out of Vietnam. Nixon got us out of Vietnam. How come no one assassinated him from the military-industrial complex?

Joe Rogan 20:10 Well, that's only one piece that, I mean, his assumption that it was because of them trying to get out of Vietnam is only one of the assumptions that they made. He, his other assumptions were the mob-

Michael Shermer 20:22 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 20:22 ... it was the CIA, it was, I mean, he wanted to get rid of a lot of the intelligence agencies. I mean, he had a real problem with secret societies and secrecy and secrecy in government, and he made that famous speech about secret societies.

Michael Shermer 20:37 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Right. Well, and again, it's complicated by the fact that, uh, we did try to invade Cuba using Cuban nationalists.

Joe Rogan 20:45 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 20:45 Uh, in the Bay of Pigs. That was a disaster. Um-

Joe Rogan 20:48 Also-

Michael Shermer 20:48 ... the CIA-

Joe Rogan 20:49 ... Operation Northwoods.

Michael Shermer 20:50 O- Operation Northwoods. (laughs) That doc-

Joe Rogan 20:51 That's one of the creepiest ones.

Michael Shermer 20:53 Oh, totally, you know?

Joe Rogan 20:54 The fact that that was a real conspiracy, that they were really planning on blowing up a drone jetliner-

Michael Shermer 21:00 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 21:01 ... and blaming it on the Cubans. They were gonna arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, all to get us to go to war with Cuba. It's-

Michael Shermer 21:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:08 ... pretty wild that that was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by Kennedy.

Michael Shermer 21:12 Mm-hmm, and McNamara. He-

Joe Rogan 21:14 Yes.

Michael Shermer 21:14 ... he didn't go for it either. But this is an example, again, of, uh, of constructive conspiracism. It's not irrational to think that a lotta conspiracy theories might be true-

Joe Rogan 21:23 Right.

Michael Shermer 21:23 ... because enough of 'em have been, you know? So, or, uh, COINTELPRO-

Joe Rogan 21:27 Right.

Michael Shermer 21:27 ... where the FBI was sending in agents to act as social justice activists in, uh, American Indian m- movement, feminist groups, the Black, um, uh, Panthers and so on. And, uh, uh, you know, including blackmailing Martin Luther King, Jr. -

Joe Rogan 21:44 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 21:44 ... recording his, uh, sexcapades in hotel rooms.

Joe Rogan 21:47 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 21:47 I mean, our government was doing this? What? Now-

Joe Rogan 21:50 Yeah. The, the guy who assassinated, uh, Martin Luther King, um, what his name?

Michael Shermer 21:56 Ray.

Joe Rogan 21:56 Ray.

Michael Shermer 21:57 Ray. Um-

Joe Rogan 21:58 Jesus Christ.

Michael Shermer 21:58 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:58 What, it escapes me.

Michael Shermer 22:00 Yeah. (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:00 What is his name?

Michael Shermer 22:01 Uh, uh, John, uh, James Earl Ray.

Joe Rogan 22:04 James Earl Ray.

Michael Shermer 22:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:04 James Ear- I always, um, forget that guy's name for some reason. But, um, I talked to Mike Baker, who was formerly with the CIA. I, I use air quotes, formally. Um, he had investigated that for his television show, and he said that is one of the weirdest ones, because that guy was funded in some strange way. Like, he was kind of a loser, and then all of a sudden, he had money and, uh, you know, there, there was some- someone he believes was involved in aiding that guy to assassinate Martin Luther King.

Michael Shermer 22:36 Yeah, again, so, like, we have the WikiLeaks, okay? T- millions and millions of top secret, uh, documents. Why is there no mention of 9/11 as an inside job? Some documentation of-

Joe Rogan 22:45 Okay, but-

Michael Shermer 22:45 ... somebody inside that-

Joe Rogan 22:46 ... maybe 9/11 wasn't an inside job. Maybe that's why.

Michael Shermer 22:49 A- a- and why is there nothing about JFK or the f- the fake moon landing? Nothing like that. So we would p- we would expect if X was true that the following should happen.

Joe Rogan 22:58 Yeah, but WikiLeaks didn't get all of the documents-

Michael Shermer 23:01 No, I, well, right.

Joe Rogan 23:01 ... that the government has ever hidden. That's a, that's a weird way to connect the dots there, Mr. Schermer.

Michael Shermer 23:06 (laughs) I'm disconnecting the dots. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 23:07 Are you working for the governor or the government? What's going on with you?

Michael Shermer 23:11 (laughs) I'm, I'm an agent of disinformation. I've been accused of that, actually. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 23:14 Have you been?

Michael Shermer 23:15 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:15 I think I have been, too.

Michael Shermer 23:16 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 23:16 That's okay.

Michael Shermer 23:17 Yeah. But I mean, again, how does, how do these systems really work? Um, you know, the, so this is my kind of, uh, conspiracy detection kit. You know, the grander the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is to be true. Like, s- say Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in, uh-

Joe Rogan 23:33 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 23:33 ... Europe. That, you know, that's a very specific conspiracy theory. Turned out to be true. They really did do that, and for obvious reasons, profit motive, right? But, but, but, so if you scale up from that, "Well, they're trying to control the entire European, uh, um, uh, economy," or something like, well, no, that's too big. That's-

Joe Rogan 23:50 They're just trying to make money.

Michael Shermer 23:51 They're just trying to make money, right? So, um, you know, the, the more people that have to be involved, the more elements that have to come-

Joe Rogan 23:57 Right.

Michael Shermer 23:57 People are incompetent, people can't keep their mouths shut.

Joe Rogan 24:00 ... for the most part.

Michael Shermer 24:00 For the most part, yes. Now-

Joe Rogan 24:02 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 24:02 ... to be fair to, to the other side, um, you know, if you read about the development of the U-2 spy plane and the AR-71 Blackbird, you know, this was done in Burbank-

Joe Rogan 24:12 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 24:12 ... in where, near where you used to live.

Joe Rogan 24:15 Yeah, sure.

Michael Shermer 24:15 And that's right in the heart of LA.

Joe Rogan 24:16 Yep.

Michael Shermer 24:16 How did they do this for all those years and nobody knew about it, right?

Joe Rogan 24:20 Well, they were acting on th- the interests of the, the government. They were trying to be patriots. They kept their mouths shut-

Michael Shermer 24:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 24:26 ... because they were trying to win a war against the, the evil others.

Michael Shermer 24:30 Right. So, um, again, like, with the recent UAP sightings, what I want ... my initial response is, the SR-71 Blackbird was, before it was declassified, there were commercial pilots going, "Oh my God, there's something-"

Joe Rogan 24:45 Right.

Michael Shermer 24:45 "... going 3,000 miles an hour, 50,000 feet above me at 30,000 feet. This is impossible. We don't have anything like that." Well, actually, we did have something like that.

Joe Rogan 24:53 Yeah, so-

Michael Shermer 24:54 So I suspect that the-

Joe Rogan 24:55 That's what you think the UAPs are?

Michael Shermer 24:56 ... some of these UAP, I think in, in a decade or two, we're gonna find out, oh, we had these incredible drones-

Joe Rogan 25:01 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 25:01 ... that could fly at these speeds and-

Joe Rogan 25:02 I, I tend to lean towards that as well sometimes. I go back and forth with it. I had, uh, Ryan Graves on recently.

Michael Shermer 25:08 Yeah, I saw that.

Joe Rogan 25:09 It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things, with no visible means of propulsion, um, no technology that we currently know is available could act in the way those things were acting. I wonder if that is what it is, if they have some sort of very advanced drones. And the fact that they seem to be trans-medium, they seem to be able to enter into the ocean and then leave the ocean, I wonder. I wonder if that's something that we have because these things, they're ... you know, one of the ones that he described is like a translucent circle with a black sphere inside of it.

Michael Shermer 25:42 Yes, right.

Joe Rogan 25:42 And that when they updated their radar systems in 2014, they started seeing them all over the place on their systems and that these people spotted them visually and that they were behaving in a way, like, uh, you know, 130 mile an hour winds were completely stationary. I wonder if those are super advanced drones.

Michael Shermer 26:01 Yeah, a lot of pr- uh, another problem with these videos is that they're very grainy, uh, blurry, you can't quite make out what's going on, like the one that looks like it goes into the ocean and comes back out. It's not clear that it goes in the ocean 'cause it ... the, the, the horizon and the ocean is-

Joe Rogan 26:14 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 26:14 ... is so blurry, right? So I'm a member of this, uh, Galileo Project at Harvard run by Avi Loeb, the head of the astronomy department there.

Joe Rogan 26:21 I had Avi on.

Michael Shermer 26:21 Yep. I know.

Joe Rogan 26:22 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 26:22 And, uh, you know, we're, we're g- he, he's raising money to put cameras, high resolution cameras all over the world.

Joe Rogan 26:28 Right.

Michael Shermer 26:28 Particularly in the places where people like Graves say they s- ... I mean, when Graves told you, "I ... we saw these things every day," it's like, "Every day?"

Joe Rogan 26:35 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Michael Shermer 26:36 There, there surely must be high resolution photos of these things.

Joe Rogan 26:39 But those things, those jets are not designed to take high resolution video. They're designed to fight against enemy jets.

Michael Shermer 26:45 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 26:46 That's what they're designed for. They're designed to recognize these enemy combatants and engage with them in the most effective way possible. That's not with high resolution digital video.

Michael Shermer 26:56 Right. Well, that would be the, uh, that would be the solution. We just need better data. (laughs) Right?

Joe Rogan 27:01 Well, I wonder if they want better data. Now, let's assume-

Michael Shermer 27:05 They ... well, we do.

Joe Rogan 27:06 ... the gov-

Michael Shermer 27:07 It's like the federal government.

Joe Rogan 27:07 But listen, the federal government, imagine they are running top secret programs using advanced drones, and the technology that we're not currently aware of, right? And that the United States government has these. They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things. Why would they?

Michael Shermer 27:24 Right, but everyone has one of these in their pocket. I mean, why don't we have-

Joe Rogan 27:28 Yeah, but you can't have digital video of something that's seven miles away moving at, you know-

Michael Shermer 27:32 Well, right, right, right, right.

Joe Rogan 27:33 ... the speed of sound.

Michael Shermer 27:35 Well, that's-

Joe Rogan 27:35 You're not going to get digital video of that.

Michael Shermer 27:37 That's what we wanna do with the Galileo Project is get those cameras up there.

Joe Rogan 27:38 And according to Christopher Mellon, a guy who, you know, did work for the Defense Department, he said there are top secret videos and photographs that he's seen or that he's aware of-

Michael Shermer 27:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:48 ... that are pretty spectacular that they don't understand.

Michael Shermer 27:52 That's ... I've ... right, I've heard him say that. It's like, okay, then let's see them. Well, we can't. All right.

Joe Rogan 27:55 Yeah, but why would they release that?

Michael Shermer 27:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:57 This is, this is the question, is like, if they, just like the Blackbird, just like the stealth bomber, many of the other projects that they have that were top secret before they became public, why would they release all that information?

Michael Shermer 28:09 Right. Probably wouldn't.

Joe Rogan 28:10 If it's-

Michael Shermer 28:10 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:10 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 28:10 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:11 I wonder what that stuff is. And the fact that it happens so often in that very specific area, you know, I ... who knows?

Michael Shermer 28:20 Another thing I was thinking about with the UAPs is, in the history of technology, no nation gets very far ahead of any other nation.

Joe Rogan 28:26 Right.

Michael Shermer 28:27 Um, they either back engineer it or copy it or steal the secrets and so on. It's not likely we would have anything that the Russians and Chinese wouldn't be pretty close to having also. You know, just think of just the development of jets, uh-

Joe Rogan 28:39 Or the development of the nuclear bomb.

Michael Shermer 28:41 The nuclear bomb. I mean, the Russians had ... you know, so in 1945 was Hiroshima, and 1949, the Russians-

Joe Rogan 28:47 Right.

Michael Shermer 28:48 Uh, they stole our secrets, right? So this idea that, you know, these are super advanced, uh, uh, drones that we have and the Russians and Chinese don't have, it's not likely they would not know the technology that we know, the physics, the aer- aerodynamics and, and, and the engineering and all that, because they, they read the same journals. They do the same research we do.

Joe Rogan 29:07 So what do you think it is?

Michael Shermer 29:09 Well, I've ... well, I think it's probably multiple things. I think some of them might be drones that just t- ... really high, um, high tech drones. S- some of them are just blurry videos that are ... I think the one of the sphere inside the cube or-

Joe Rogan 29:20 The cube inside the sphere.

Michael Shermer 29:21 ... cube ins- cube inside the sphere is probably a balloon.

Joe Rogan 29:23 A balloon?

Michael Shermer 29:24 Yes.

Joe Rogan 29:24 A balloon that stands stationary-

Michael Shermer 29:26 Well-

Joe Rogan 29:26 ... at 130 mile an hour winds?

Michael Shermer 29:28 Appears to s- to stand stationary.

Joe Rogan 29:30 Appears with the most sophisticated tracking devices-

Michael Shermer 29:33 I know, I know.

Joe Rogan 29:33 ... that these military jets have.

Michael Shermer 29:35 Again, I know, these are anomalies, yeah. So we just need better data.

Joe Rogan 29:37 But why would you think it's a balloon?

Michael Shermer 29:39 Well, what else would it be? Okay, it might be-

Joe Rogan 29:41 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 29:41 ... uh, uh, you know, it might be a drone. It certainly probably not an alien spacecraft and so on.

Joe Rogan 29:46 Certainly probably not. Why do you say that?

Michael Shermer 29:49 Uh, well, because ... well, this is kind of gets into the argument of the SETI program.

Joe Rogan 29:52 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 29:52 There's so many ... there's so much empty space out there, the chances of them finding us are pretty slim. I th- so I separate-

Joe Rogan 29:58 Really?

Michael Shermer 29:59 I say, I say we have two questions-

Joe Rogan 29:59 But we find planets all the time.

Michael Shermer 30:02 Y- yeah, but through telescopes.

Joe Rogan 30:04 We are aw-

Michael Shermer 30:04 Not, not visiting.

Joe Rogan 30:04 Right, telescopes and satellites-

Michael Shermer 30:06 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:07 ... and all sorts of, you know, things that we send into space. But we find planets all the time that are in the Goldilocks zone.

Michael Shermer 30:14 Uh, I think.

Joe Rogan 30:14 And we have a very relatively unsophisticated in terms of like what we'd expect from something that's capable of intergalactic travel, rel- relatively simple technology in comparison to what we would think if you-... took what we have today and you in- increased our capabilities, you know, a thousand years from now. Uh, you could imagine that-

Michael Shermer 30:36 Yes.

Joe Rogan 30:36 ... it would be quite easy for someone to at least send a drone from another planet to visit Earth and observe.

Michael Shermer 30:42 This is the Fermi paradox-

Joe Rogan 30:43 Yes.

Michael Shermer 30:44 ... uh, that you know of. And, uh, where are they? Well, of course, m- most scientists like him d- don't think that they're here. So I separate two questions-

Joe Rogan 30:51 Most scientists?

Michael Shermer 30:51 Most scientists.

Joe Rogan 30:52 Michio Kaku thinks they're here.

Michael Shermer 30:54 Uh, he's been a little fuzzy about that. He's not totally committed to that. He- he- he-

Joe Rogan 30:58 He's totally committed.

Michael Shermer 30:59 ... you think so?

Joe Rogan 31:00 He was here. He was here, and he talked about it on the podcast. He said for the longest time, he was a skeptic.

Michael Shermer 31:05 Oh, yeah. That's right. Okay, he has kinda come down on that side a little bit.

Joe Rogan 31:08 But why would you be firm on that? When you think about the fact that there's hundreds of billions-

Michael Shermer 31:13 Okay, hang on, hang on.

Joe Rogan 31:13 ... of galaxies in the known universe.

Michael Shermer 31:15 Yes, yes, yes. Let's separate two questions.

Joe Rogan 31:17 Okay.

Michael Shermer 31:17 Are they, are they out there? Have they come here? Are they out there? Almost certainly.

Joe Rogan 31:21 Right.

Michael Shermer 31:21 I would say, you know, 99.9% they're out there, yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:24 I would agree with you.

Michael Shermer 31:25 100 billion stars in our galaxy, 100 billion-

Joe Rogan 31:27 Sure.

Michael Shermer 31:27 ... to a trillion galaxies. Just do the numbers.

Joe Rogan 31:29 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 31:29 No matter how improbable it is, you get from bacteria to big brains and, and, and civilization, it's going to happen.

Joe Rogan 31:35 Right.

Michael Shermer 31:35 But-

Joe Rogan 31:36 But-

Michael Shermer 31:36 ... ha- have they come here?

Joe Rogan 31:38 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 31:38 Okay, so i- how good is the evidence for that? Not very. It's pretty thin, right?

Joe Rogan 31:43 How good-

Michael Shermer 31:43 It's, it's-

Joe Rogan 31:43 ... d-

Michael Shermer 31:43 ... anecdotal.

Joe Rogan 31:44 ... how much?

Michael Shermer 31:44 It's human, i- it's human eyewitnesses, it's blurry videos, grainy photos. Uh, if they were here, damn it, where's the... You know, pick up the, the, the widget on the dashboard and bring it back here.

Joe Rogan 31:57 But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the data that they've acquired, when they're w- looking at something like Commander David Fravor, who, when they were off the coast of the n- with the, the Nimitz, when they-

Michael Shermer 32:11 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 32:11 ... tracked that thing that went from above 60,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second-

Michael Shermer 32:18 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 32:18 ... what's that?

Michael Shermer 32:19 Mm-hmm. I don't know.

Joe Rogan 32:20 Yeah, what is that-

Michael Shermer 32:21 Nobody-

Joe Rogan 32:21 ... thing that they have visual-

Michael Shermer 32:23 ... nobody is telling us?

Joe Rogan 32:23 ... eh, they have visual contact by multiple sources, and they tracked it, and they have video of this thing moving off at insane rates of speed.

Michael Shermer 32:31 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 32:32 What's that?

Michael Shermer 32:32 Yeah, I don't know. This is the problem with anomalies. No theory-

Joe Rogan 32:35 But if, if the-

Michael Shermer 32:35 ... explains everything, right?

Joe Rogan 32:37 But if there was any evidence that pointed to something that operated in a way that we can't comprehend any of the known technologies being able to reproduce, that's the, that's one of them.

Michael Shermer 32:47 But no technologies come out of a vacuum like that. They always build on previous technologies.

Joe Rogan 32:52 Right, but if you're talking about something from another planet-

Michael Shermer 32:55 Uh, well, okay. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:55 ... or something from another-

Michael Shermer 32:56 Right.

Joe Rogan 32:56 ... another civilization that we're not aware of that's on Earth, maybe that lives in the water, we don't know. We don't know. And w- when you're seeing these things, when you're talking about people that are the, the best fighter pilots that we have available, that are w- operating with the most sophisticated fighter jets, with tracking systems that are, you know, c- constantly being updated, and then when they update them, they start picking up these things, like Ryan Graves discussed on the podcast-

Michael Shermer 33:24 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 33:25 ... why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else?

Michael Shermer 33:29 It depends on how you wanna, like, pose the, the problem. So, here's how I think about it. So I take Leslie Kean's, um, book on UFOs and, you know, pilots and generals who go on the record and so on. In that book, she says 90% to 95% of all sightings have perfectly normal explanations.

Joe Rogan 33:47 I would probably-

Michael Shermer 33:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:48 ... agree that's true.

Michael Shermer 33:49 So, the question is, what do we do with that other 5%-

Joe Rogan 33:51 Right.

Michael Shermer 33:51 ... of anomalies? Okay? You c- no theory explains everything. There's always gonna be anomalies in every scientific theory. What do you, what do you do with it? Nothing. You assign it to a graduate student to figure it out, or, you know, that's future research, or, you know... Eh, rather than going to, you know, a grand theory of visitation by aliens, or the Russians or Chinese have these super advanced technologies that we don't have, or we have them and they don't have... I mean, again, if the, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something pretty close to that. There's nothing in, uh, from the videos in Ukraine of any Russian drones that act anything like these UAPs. Surely, they would use this technology if they had it.

Joe Rogan 34:27 Well, we're assuming that those UAPs are military in nature and not something that they use to observe things.

Michael Shermer 34:35 Yeah, could be.

Joe Rogan 34:36 I mean, why would we assume that these things ... If they're capable of behaving in this way, and they're just some sort of a device that can travel at insane rates of speed, why would we assume that those things can launch missiles or act in a military capacity?

Michael Shermer 34:50 Right.

Joe Rogan 34:51 And you know there are UAP sightings over Ukraine.

Michael Shermer 34:54 Yeah, but th- okay, so Avi did a nice paper on that showing that these were, um, uh, uh, artillery shells, and not what they, the, the other people said they thought, th- thought it was, that it was, like, a drone, or a plane, or something weird like that. He showed that if, if it was what they thought it was, it would've had a much bigger impact going through the atmosphere at that speed and burning up. But it didn't, so these are artillery shells. Anyway, he did a nice-

Joe Rogan 35:18 W-

Michael Shermer 35:18 ... paper on that show.

Joe Rogan 35:19 Interesting.

Michael Shermer 35:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:20 So, but what about these things that supposedly move far faster than the speed of sound without the sonic boom?

Michael Shermer 35:28 Yeah, how is that possible?

Joe Rogan 35:29 How is that possible?

Michael Shermer 35:30 Right, that's right. It's not.

Joe Rogan 35:30 That's-

Michael Shermer 35:31 So, the qu-

Joe Rogan 35:31 ... that's where it gets weird.

Michael Shermer 35:32 That's where it gets weird. Right, so-

Joe Rogan 35:33 But is, that's where-

Michael Shermer 35:34 Is it really moving?

Joe Rogan 35:35 ... the question is, is it ours?

Michael Shermer 35:36 Is it really moving at that speed, or is it a misperception of the video, a miscalculation? People make, scientists make miscalculations of these sorts of things all the time.

Joe Rogan 35:44 Yeah, that was one of the things that was posed to David Fravor, and he said they have multiple sources-

Michael Shermer 35:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:49 ... of, of data. There, it's not just, like, one system that's monitoring these things. It's multiple systems.

Michael Shermer 35:56 Yeah. No, I follow these guys. I agree, they are incredibly credible, right, and they have good arguments. What do you do with the anomalies? And, and-

Joe Rogan 36:05 I think you are an anti-conspiracy theorist.

Michael Shermer 36:08 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 36:08 That's what I think.

Michael Shermer 36:08 No, I'm a skeptic, Joe. I'm, I-

Joe Rogan 36:10 (laughs) I know you are. You literally are the, the-

Michael Shermer 36:13 I'm just a, I'm just a skeptic.

Joe Rogan 36:13 ... editor, or what do ... What's your position in Skeptic Magazine? You're-

Michael Shermer 36:16 I- I'm the editor in chief-

Joe Rogan 36:17 Yes.

Michael Shermer 36:17 ... publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

Joe Rogan 36:18 Yes.

Michael Shermer 36:18 There it is.

Joe Rogan 36:18 You're literally a skeptic.

Michael Shermer 36:19 Yeah, that is my day job.

Joe Rogan 36:21 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 36:21 But it, it isn't that I don't believe things. Uh, I mean, I believe the theory of evolution. I think the Big Bang Theory happened. When people like, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson and, and my, my quantum physics friends tell me, "Quantum physics is true, this is how we know it," to me it's weird, spooky. I don't really understand it, but okay. You know, there, eh, we have tons of evidence.

Joe Rogan 36:41 Have you seen some of the new, um-... discussions based on the, uh, observations from the James Webb, uh, Telescope that maybe the Big Bang Theory needs, needs to be revisited?

Michael Shermer 36:53 Yes. Uh, vaguely. It was the expansion rate changing, right?

Joe Rogan 36:58 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 36:58 The, uh, from the new, um ...

Joe Rogan 36:59 Well, they're getting new data, right?

Michael Shermer 37:00 Right.

Joe Rogan 37:00 They're constantly getting new data and we, we would assume that with more and more sophisticated ways of viewing the known universe that we could possibly get some new data that would change our ideas of what the theory of the Big Bang Theory or the theory of the, the universe itself would be. And that's one of the things that they're discussing right now. What was that? There was a recent article. What was it in? Which, uh, scientific publication that they were discussing whether or not the Big Bang Theory needs to be revisited?

Michael Shermer 37:28 I-

Joe Rogan 37:28 Bas- it was based on the James Webb ...

Michael Shermer 37:30 Yeah, I did see that.

Joe Rogan 37:31 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 37:31 I mean, it ... Joe, it would be astonishing if that didn't happen.

Joe Rogan 37:34 Right. Right. Yeah.

Michael Shermer 37:35 (laughs) Because, you know, no theory in science is permanent. They-

Joe Rogan 37:37 Especially like, right-

Michael Shermer 37:38 ... it's never fixed.

Joe Rogan 37:39 It's not like right now we have all the information about... We have the entire universe mapped out, every planet, everything. We know exactly what it is, we know exactly how old everything is, and we know for sure. We just, we just have a limited ability to look, right?

Michael Shermer 37:52 Yeah. It ... That's it. It's the limitations of our technology. So in the nine- late '90s is when they discovered the ex- the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Well, how can that be? You know, because in an explosion, you know, the initial explosion, the inflation in cosmology, is really rapid then it slows and slows and slows. And so it was supposed to slow down in, you know, another 10 billion years or something-

Joe Rogan 38:14 Right.

Michael Shermer 38:14 ... and maybe collapse back on itself and then they discover, oh my God, no. These Type II Supernova, whatever it was, uh, indicate that the expansion is accelerating so there's this weird force, dark energy, that pushes it away.

Joe Rogan 38:27 (sniffs)

Michael Shermer 38:27 And dark matter is this, you know, proffered thing that explains why galaxies are held together 'cause they don't have enough mass to hold them together in the structures that they are, as I understand it, and rotate at the way they're rotating, so there's something else we can't see.

Joe Rogan 38:40 Right.

Michael Shermer 38:41 So now, so when astronomers talk about dark energy and dark matter to explain these two anomalies, like how could this be, that's not an explanation. It's just, it's just a linguistic placeholder until we figure out what it is.

Joe Rogan 38:52 Right. Right.

Michael Shermer 38:52 So surely there is gonna be some discoveries of some kind of n- new energy or some kind of matter that i- w- we don't know of. A century from now it's like, "Oh, of course!" If you came back after being chronically frozen. "Oh, that's what it was. Oh." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:05 So what would it take for you to look ... I mean, what kind of discovery would it take in terms of UAPs for you to revisit your position and say it's highly likely that this is either something that we don't understand that we, uh, are observing that's come from somewhere else or something that we don't understand because it's technology that hasn't been released?

Michael Shermer 39:29 The actual specimen. (laughs) The, the actual e- e- the equivalent of the SR71 Blackbird. I can go to the museum, I can see it, touch it, walk on it. Everybody knows that.

Joe Rogan 39:36 So do you hold it like ... Do you have like a placeholder, like, perhaps?

Michael Shermer 39:39 Yeah. I do.

Joe Rogan 39:40 You ... Okay.

Michael Shermer 39:40 I do. I do. Nothing's 100% right. No. There's just a f-

Joe Rogan 39:43 Why is it so fun though to think that it's from somewhere else? It's so much more fun to think that we're being visited than to think that our government has some super sophisticated-

Michael Shermer 39:53 Mm.

Joe Rogan 39:53 ... you know, gravity propelling drones-

Michael Shermer 39:56 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 39:56 ... that, that i- somehow or another violate our laws of spacetime and-

Michael Shermer 40:01 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 40:01 Why is it so much more exciting to think that?

Michael Shermer 40:03 Mm-hmm. I think it's a religious impulse.

Joe Rogan 40:05 Ah.

Michael Shermer 40:05 I think it's an idea that it feels like we're not alone, and when you think about the narratives from different religions, that there's something, an agent, a, a person, a being-

Joe Rogan 40:17 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 40:17 ... of some ... Not just matter, not just the laws of nature, you know, we're like-

Joe Rogan 40:21 Space daddy.

Michael Shermer 40:22 Yeah. (laughs) Like, when Einstein says, well, like, Spinoza's God, it's just the laws of nature are God. It's like that's not particularly comforting. It's like, well, th- they don't even know I'm here.

Joe Rogan 40:31 Right.

Michael Shermer 40:31 Right? But the idea that they're out there, they're super advanced, and they know we're here, maybe they're even coming. You know, it's like The Day the Earth Stood Still, right? That was a kind of a ...

Joe Rogan 40:39 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 40:40 That film? That was a Christ allegory. Remember?

Joe Rogan 40:41 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 40:42 His, his earthly name was Mr. Carpenter in that film, in the first one, the 1951 film.

Joe Rogan 40:46 Oh, right.

Michael Shermer 40:47 Klaatu.

Joe Rogan 40:47 Klaatu.

Michael Shermer 40:48 Klaatu. But his earthly name was Mr.-

Joe Rogan 40:49 Klaatu barada nikto, right?

Michael Shermer 40:50 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly.

Joe Rogan 40:52 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 40:53 And, and that was really a reflection of, uh, i- and by the way, i- in the, uh, climax scene where the authorities kill him and they put him in the tomb, it's like, it's like the, uh-

Joe Rogan 41:03 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 41:03 ... the crucifixion of Jesus. And they put him in the tomb and three days later he's resurrected. Well, and then, and then she goes to the, to the robot and says what you just said, Gort, Klaatu barada nikto, and he goes there, burns a hole into the morgue, takes the body, takes it back to the spaceship, lays it on that slab, does some stuff with the lights, and he comes back to life.

Joe Rogan 41:21 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 41:22 Now in the original script, she, the Mary Magdalene character woman says, Patricia Neal, "You mean, this is the power that, you know, extraterrestrials have?" And, and in the original one he goes, "Yeah. We have t- the power of life and death." And the Breen Censorship Board in 1950 said, "No, no, no. You can't say that to the American public." That's-

Joe Rogan 41:39 Really?

Michael Shermer 41:39 Yeah. So if you watch-

Joe Rogan 41:40 The censorship boards did that?

Michael Shermer 41:41 Yeah. There was a Breen Censorship Board that censored films that said, you know, you can't defend religious people is one of their criteria.

Joe Rogan 41:47 Offend.

Michael Shermer 41:48 Yeah. So they changed-

Joe Rogan 41:49 I thought you said defend.

Michael Shermer 41:50 Yeah, o- offend.

Joe Rogan 41:51 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 41:51 Yeah. So they, they changed the script and now he says something like, "Oh, no, no. We don't have the power. Only the Great Spirit in the sky or something-"

Joe Rogan 41:58 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 41:58 "... has that power." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 42:00 I didn't know that there was a censorship board that, that would monitor films and say, "You can't say these things."

Michael Shermer 42:06 Well, the same way we have for, you know, ratings, PG ratings.

Joe Rogan 42:08 But it's science fiction.

Michael Shermer 42:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:10 They, they had censorship boards for science fiction but they didn't for vampires?

Michael Shermer 42:13 Well, I mean, s- even Star Trek, the original series. I mean, uh, Roddenberry had to sneak in a lot of, you know, a- anti-Vietnam War, um, you know, commentary through these characters and had to be careful of how they, they were, you know, kind of presented because censorship boards are like that. You know, Captain Kirk, he ... You know, they always got the woman, but you know, the, y- you never saw anything, right? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 42:32 Right. But that's just-

Michael Shermer 42:33 That's normal.

Joe Rogan 42:33 ... how things were back then.

Michael Shermer 42:34 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:34 But th- uh, I didn't know that they would have a censorship board that would say you can't offend religious people-

Michael Shermer 42:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:40 ... by saying that aliens have the power to bring things back from the dead.

Michael Shermer 42:44 ... right, because there, it kinda secularizes God.

Joe Rogan 42:47 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 42:48 So, in this scenario, um, I call this Shermer's Last Law, it was one of my Scientific American columns, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be indistinguishable from God.

Joe Rogan 42:56 Right.

Michael Shermer 42:57 Because they, as you, you went through the scenario earlier, a thousand years more advanced than us, a, a million years more advanced than us, look how far we've come in a hundred years, extrapolate that out, they'd be able to engineer lifeforms, probably even-

Joe Rogan 43:08 Sure.

Michael Shermer 43:09 ... engineer entire planetary systems to create Dyson spheres to capture the s- the li-, all these fantastic scenarios. That would all be possible if you had a, a, a sufficient time and intelligence.

Joe Rogan 43:20 Right.

Michael Shermer 43:20 How would that be any different from what religions think God is?

Joe Rogan 43:24 Well, hasn't there been, wa- wasn't there some sort of, uh, a recent experiment where they created an artificial lifeform that had, what was th- that thing? Do you know? W- we discussed this. It was a, they had d- developed some sort of a, an artificial embryo.

Michael Shermer 43:44 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 43:45 You know what I'm talking about?

Michael Shermer 43:46 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:46 Yeah, some sort of an artificially created embryo-

Michael Shermer 43:49 And it, and, and-

Joe Rogan 43:49 ... I think it even had a heartbeat.

Michael Shermer 43:51 Yes, that's right, and before that, an artificial genome.

Joe Rogan 43:54 Yes.

Michael Shermer 43:54 I mean, it's coming, Joe, it's-

Joe Rogan 43:55 There, it is.

Michael Shermer 43:56 ... it's coming, yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:56 "Scientists Grow Synthetic Embryo with Brain and Beating Heart Without Eggs or Sperm."

Michael Shermer 44:01 Right.

Joe Rogan 44:01 Yeah, I mean, and now extrapolate, go from here to 100,000 years-

Michael Shermer 44:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:06 ... of technology-

Michael Shermer 44:06 Yep, right.

Joe Rogan 44:06 ... as long as we don't blow ourselves up, or have a-

Michael Shermer 44:09 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 44:09 ... super volcano kill us all. "Scientists from u- e- University of Cambridge have created model embryos from mouse stem cells that form a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations of all other organs of the body."

Michael Shermer 44:21 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 44:22 Pretty wild shit.

Michael Shermer 44:24 Well, it's just a molecular machine.

Joe Rogan 44:26 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 44:26 Our, you know, life. And once you know the blueprint, you just print it out.

Joe Rogan 44:32 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 44:32 You know? So we're getting there. It's a hard problem, but, you know, it's coming.

Joe Rogan 44:35 Y-

Michael Shermer 44:35 And it may not happen in our lifetime, you know, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity's coming 2030, 2040, 20-, uh, uh, y- just take it out two centuries, right?

Joe Rogan 44:43 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 44:43 Uh, it's coming. Something like that is coming. And w- how would it be any different from what, uh, how religions describe God as an omniscient, omnipotent being?

Joe Rogan 44:53 Right, especially if you go a million years from now, a million years of evolution, we conceivably would have the power of gods.

Michael Shermer 45:00 Yep, it's coming. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:01 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 45:02 It's, it's, assuming we live o- our lives long enough. So if-

Joe Rogan 45:04 So if you think of a lifeform that exists out there, you know, millions of light years away, that has achieved this sort of advanced technology, do you think that they would want to be visiting us and be interested in us with our nuclear power and a- all of our chaos and our territorial behavior, and the fact that we have these thermonuclear weapons-

Michael Shermer 45:27 Yes.

Joe Rogan 45:27 ... we're pointing at them each other, and I think-

Michael Shermer 45:29 I-

Joe Rogan 45:29 ... they'd be pretty interested.

Michael Shermer 45:30 Or, i- the plot of many of these, like, The Day the Earth Stood Still, warning us-

Joe Rogan 45:34 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 45:34 ... "Let's stop doing this, or else." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:37 Or intervening.

Michael Shermer 45:38 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:38 You know, there's been discussions about them hovering over nuclear facilities.

Michael Shermer 45:41 Yes, I know about that, um, but that may be a selection bias of where the cameras are located or where the, you know, monitoring of that... Of course we have more monitoring around our nuclear sites.

Joe Rogan 45:51 Sure.

Michael Shermer 45:52 Missile sites. So, it could, that could just be an artifact of measurement. But nevertheless, the, your, your larger point, yes, maybe. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:58 Yes, maybe.

Michael Shermer 45:59 Yes, maybe. This is not all-

Joe Rogan 46:00 Gotta be skeptical.

Michael Shermer 46:01 Well, uh, uh, not, not in principle just because you're a cynic or, you know, a nihilist. Not that, not, not for that reason. The question is, is, you know, what should we believe, you know, justified true belief? What should I believe as true? Some things are true, some things are not. I don't, I want to believe the correct things. How do I know, right?

Joe Rogan 46:20 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 46:20 So this is what, you know, s- uh, science has kind of developed, science and rationality over the centuries. Okay, so we know we're biased, we know we have to be careful about the confirmation bias and the hindsight bias and so on, so we have to set up some kind of system where it's not just me claiming it. You, you, you have, you can look at it too, you could run the experiment.

Joe Rogan 46:37 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 46:37 Here's how I did it. You do it. Right? And when that's not done, we, we have all kinds of problems, like the replication crisis in psychology and, and medical science over the last decade or so. You know, the, some significant two-digit percentage of these experiments can't be replicated even though they went through peer-reviewed, um, professional journals and they were done by professional scientists at real universities and so on. And, uh, so this is a pro- it's a hard, it's hard to know what to believe, right?

Joe Rogan 47:03 But there's also a problem of basing science on falsified studies, like the Alzheimer's issue that they're dealing with now.

Michael Shermer 47:09 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:10 You know, the whole amyloid plaque thing, where they found out that a lot of... Like, what is the... I don't want to butcher this, 'cause obviously I'm not a scientist, but this, there's a series of Alzheimer's drugs that were based on research that was falsified.

Michael Shermer 47:26 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:26 And they're finding this out now.

Michael Shermer 47:28 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:28 And this is a, a terrible thing for people that have, you know, in- invested their health in these medications, people that have promoted these medications, that this was all based on falsified data.

Michael Shermer 47:41 Or how about the, uh-

Joe Rogan 47:42 Find that, 'cause tha- that's pretty fascinating, 'cause that, here it is. This is a legitimate conspiracy. "Neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer's articles threatening a reigning theory of the disease."

Michael Shermer 47:56 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:57 That's terrifying-

Michael Shermer 47:58 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:58 ... to find out that the people that are responsible for doing these experiments falsified. "Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University, got a call that would plunge him into a maelstrom of possible scientific misconduct. A colleague wanted to connect him with an attorney investigating an experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease called simofyllam. The drug's developer, Cassava Sciences, claimed it improved cognition partially, partly by repairing a protein that can block sticky brain deposits of the protein amyloid-beta, a hallmark of Alzheimer's. The attorney's clients, two prominent neuroscientists who are also short sellers who profit if the company's stock falls, believe some research related to simofyllam may have been fraudulent according to a petition later filed on the behalf of the US Food and Drug Administration." So this is, um...... this is a, a huge scandal-

Michael Shermer 48:55 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 48:55 ... in medical science.

Michael Shermer 48:57 Right. And this one appears to be more fraud than just error-

Joe Rogan 49:00 Right. Yeah.

Michael Shermer 49:01 ... or bias.

Joe Rogan 49:02 Right.

Michael Shermer 49:02 So, well, okay-

Joe Rogan 49:03 That's horrible, right?

Michael Shermer 49:04 ... this is what, yeah, this is what whistleblowers are for. Often, these things are exposed through insiders. I mean, almost always. Rare that a journalist from the outside discovers it. It's usually a grad student or something that's suspicious of what the mentor professor is doing. Uh, so that, yeah, that's a problem, right? (laughs) So, that's why you have to disclose any, um, you know, financial c- uh, connections you have to companies that might be affiliated with a drug that could treat the thing you're studying, that sort of thing, you're, um... and so there's more pressure to do that. There was another big meta-analysis on SSRIs, the antidepressants-

Joe Rogan 49:36 Mm-hmm, yes.

Michael Shermer 49:37 ... uh, showing, you know, big, massive meta-analysis. You know, 50 years we've been at, um, prescribing these SSRIs for depression, and they do no better than nothing or just chance or just, you know, talking to friends or whatever. Uh-

Joe Rogan 49:49 Well, also that this idea that it's a, a chemical imbalance of the brain is not based on science.

Michael Shermer 49:57 Yeah, well, it's based on (laughs) something, but it, it, probably incorrect science or-

Joe Rogan 50:00 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 50:01 ... or-

Joe Rogan 50:01 Fraudulent.

Michael Shermer 50:03 I don't know if it's fraudulent. You know, that's a pretty h- hefty charge to heave on a scientist. That's the end of their careers, the end of their lives if they get, uh, convicted of actual fraud. They'll never work again. That's different than making errors. And-

Joe Rogan 50:15 Well, this Alzheimer's thing is certainly-

Michael Shermer 50:16 Yeah, that-

Joe Rogan 50:16 ... based on fraud.

Michael Shermer 50:17 ... it looks like it, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:17 And it looks like it was successful for decades-

Michael Shermer 50:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:21 ... which is terrifying.

Michael Shermer 50:22 Yeah. Well, and, you know, there's a, dozens of examples like this from, say, the last 50 years.

Joe Rogan 50:26 Sure.

Michael Shermer 50:27 But it's still rare, and usually scientists that figure it out and then call them out.

Joe Rogan 50:31 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 50:31 So it, it-

Joe Rogan 50:32 Ultimately.

Michael Shermer 50:32 We, we, I like to think of it that it, it works reasonably well, right?

Joe Rogan 50:37 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 50:38 I mean, we find out about the errors, the mistakes. I mean, creationists al- always used to point out the errors that evolutionary biologists made, therefore God did it, right? The theory is not sound, right? But, but it was always scientists that disclosed that the error was made by-

Joe Rogan 50:50 Right.

Michael Shermer 50:50 ... another scientist.

Joe Rogan 50:51 Different scientists.

Michael Shermer 50:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:52 Do, do have, uh... there is an incentive to uncover these things.

Michael Shermer 50:57 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 50:58 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 50:58 Right. So, now there's, um, a movement afoot to kind of, uh, have scientists say ahead of time, post on these websites, "This is the experiment I'm gonna do. Here's exactly what I'm gonna do. I will report all of the data."

Joe Rogan 51:13 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 51:14 So then, you avoid the file drawer problem where you only publish the successful ones. The rest go in the file drawer that-

Joe Rogan 51:18 Right.

Michael Shermer 51:19 ... were not successful. You know, so this, I mean, a lot of major journals will not publish replication experiments. They're not interested in that. They want cutting-edge new research. Well, this is a problem because like, again, (laughs) you know, if, if, if you have this theory and no one can replicate it, but no one wants to publish the nonreplication 'cause it's not interesting, then you can go down this rabbit hole of, of, you know, of a, of an error perpetrating for decades.

Joe Rogan 51:43 How can they, uh, mitigate these problems?

Michael Shermer 51:47 Well, that would be one way, you know, just transparency.

Joe Rogan 51:49 Right. How can... but, but how could they mitigate the issue of a lack of transparency? Is it funding? Is it-

Michael Shermer 51:55 Y- yeah, well, yes.

Joe Rogan 51:56 ... promotion of these...

Michael Shermer 51:57 Okay, so some of the publish or perish pressure leads... There's studies on why scientists commit fraud and it's, it's, again, like conspiracies. It's, it's not a big grand thing. It's just like, wants to get tenure. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 52:09 Right, right, right, right.

Michael Shermer 52:10 Just, you know, keep his job. Uh, I remember one of the most interesting podcasts you had with Edward Snowden, and you guys were talking about conspiracies. And he, he starts talking about, "Let me tell you how it really works."

Joe Rogan 52:20 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 52:20 "Behind closed doors, it's just bureaucrats trying to keep their job."

Joe Rogan 52:23 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 52:24 Right? (laughs) So, they're ramping up the threat of terrorism because, "If we don't have a threat, then we're gonna lose our funding," right?

Joe Rogan 52:29 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 52:30 So, very narrow, "I just want to keep our funding for our department." And a lot of science works that way. Without, um, let's say, external private money, uh, you know, there's massive competition for public government money for research, and that leads to these, you know, "I'll just, I'll just report the positive ones," or, "I'll, I'll kinda throw out these data points 'cause they're too extreme, and that'll bring my p-value level to where I need it."

Joe Rogan 52:57 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 52:57 That's called p-hacking. And, you know, the p-value is the probability of it being chance rather than a real effect, and it's set at 0.05 or 0.01, and maybe you, you're at 0.06. And you go, "Well, I got this outlier data point here. This... so I'm just gonna not count that." Then all of a sudden now, your p-value is at 0.04. "Oh, I'm in."

Joe Rogan 53:15 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 53:15 "Now I can publish it." You know, this used to happen a lot. Now there's pressure like, "No p-hacking," right? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 53:20 P-hacking. (laughs)

Michael Shermer 53:22 (laughs) So, it's the, it's kind of the shift in norms, like in, uh, uh, again, like in journalism is kinda going through this now, you know. Where's the fact checkers?

Joe Rogan 53:29 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 53:29 And the editors of the editors and, you know, the editors' editors should be, have editors, right?

Joe Rogan 53:34 Right, right, right.

Michael Shermer 53:34 And, uh, you know, 'cause too much gets published. Uh, that-

Joe Rogan 53:37 Right, who's managing the managers. (laughs)

Michael Shermer 53:39 Yeah, or, you know, like the-

Joe Rogan 53:40 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 53:41 Just think about like the, um, Kyle Rittenhouse, uh, story, right? And there's a bunch like that, that it fit a certain narrative so it got published as a certain way. And then it's like, oh, you know, weeks later, months later when they dig into it, it's like, "Okay, well, that was misinterpreted." Why did that happen, right? Or the kitty litter boxes in schools from last week, you know, that got spread around as a meme 'cause it kinda fit the conservative view of, you know, liberals and their confusion about gender and sex and, and, and-

Joe Rogan 54:09 But the kitty litter boxes is a weird one.

Michael Shermer 54:11 It is weird. It's like-

Joe Rogan 54:12 You know, I-

Michael Shermer 54:12 ... it's more like an urban legend.

Joe Rogan 54:13 I, I fed into that, and let me... I should probably clarify that a little bit. I have a friend and my friend's wife is a s- schoolteacher, and she told him that there was discussions in the school that a mother wanted to put a litter box in one of the bathrooms. And he told me this, and I talked about it on here, and then people were saying, "That's not true. That's an internet rumor." So, I contacted him again and I said, "Tell me exactly what she said and contact her and find out." She no longer works at that school. She works for another school.

Michael Shermer 54:43 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 54:43 She contacted the other school. She didn't get a response. I don't think they actually did it. I think there was discussions-

Michael Shermer 54:50 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 54:50 ... about doing it because there was one particularly wacky mother, but there is... it doesn't seem that there's any proof that they put a litter box in there. The reason why I was interested in it...... and willing to entertain it was, there was about, uh, 10 years or so ago, we went to, uh, there was a UFC in Pittsburgh. And when we went there, as we landed, we were driving from the airport to the hotel, we see all these people with mascot outfits on. We're like, "What is going on?"

Michael Shermer 55:19 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:19 And we talked to this guy and he said, "There's a furry convention in town."

Michael Shermer 55:23 (laughs) Oh, right.

Joe Rogan 55:24 And I said, "Wow, this is crazy." So they all decided to get together, so they were at bars and on the streets, and it was like a get-together. They used to do it in San Diego, but at the time, San Diego was a little bit more conservative and they were having a hard time doing it, so they moved it to Pittsburgh, and this was the year they moved it to Pittsburgh.

Michael Shermer 55:39 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 55:39 This is according to him. So we check into the hotel. The hotel, uh, the guy was working the front desk was s- saying how crazy it was that these folks were asking for their food to be delivered in bowls on the ground-

Michael Shermer 55:52 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:52 ... so they could eat it like animals. And I'm like, "That is crazy." And then he said, "They asked for a litter box in the lobby."

Michael Shermer 56:01 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 56:01 Now, they didn't put a litter box into the lobby, but someone, according to this man, asked him for a litter box.

Michael Shermer 56:08 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 56:08 I'm like, "That is crazy." So I went and did a deep dive online. I went to forums where furries go, 'cause I was trying to find, like, is this a thing?

Michael Shermer 56:18 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 56:18 Do they like to use litter boxes? Out of all of my searching, I could only find one poster, one guy who said he had used a litter box.

Michael Shermer 56:27 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 56:28 So this one person who was saying that he thought it was kinky and he liked to use it, he, they, it, them, whatever, liked to use a litter box.

Michael Shermer 56:37 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 56:37 So that was all I could find. So is that something that people do or is it something that people talk about doing because it's fun? I don't know. But one of the things that I found about these furries is, like, it's sexual-

Michael Shermer 56:52 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 56:52 ... in some sort of weird way. They, they, they like to get together and have sex with their furry outfits on.

Michael Shermer 57:00 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 57:00 And they don't want people to know who they are or what they... They wanna keep the outfits on.

Michael Shermer 57:05 So it's a cosplay kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 57:07 Yeah, it's like a cosplay kink thing-

Michael Shermer 57:09 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:09 ... that some people engage in. Like-

Michael Shermer 57:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:11 ... how that got connected to gender, I do not understand, 'cause it seems to be a completely different sort of kink. But what I think people have concern with is that it's nonsense and that it's cra- and if this nonsense starts getting into schools, because there are... Jamie, what was the thing that you were telling me that someone was telling you about one kid thinks they're a wolf and the, and they-

Michael Shermer 57:33 I, I honestly don't know if that... I, I, I still need to... I think it's a... I think they're trolling. I think there's something happened on TikTok-

Joe Rogan 57:39 Maybe, but, you know, and, uh-

Michael Shermer 57:40 ... that kind of got- Right.

Joe Rogan 57:40 ... got out of hand.

Michael Shermer 57:41 And, um, in that film, what is a woman, um, Matt Walsh's film-

Joe Rogan 57:44 Oh, there was that one person that said that they were a wolf-

Michael Shermer 57:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:46 ... with hair.

Michael Shermer 57:46 I mean, you can always, you can always find somebody who's-

Joe Rogan 57:48 Right. (laughs)

Michael Shermer 57:48 There is a report from ABC, though, where they went and talked to a bunch of younger kids and parents that were having, like, a meeting and they're like, "Our kids like to dress up and talk this way, but, like, you should see how different they are when they do it."

Joe Rogan 57:58 Right.

Michael Shermer 57:58 They went from-

Joe Rogan 57:58 Right.

Michael Shermer 57:58 ... being very reserved to, like, outgoing and...

Joe Rogan 58:01 Right, because it, it allows them to... W- when they pretend that they're a wolf, they can just be freer. So maybe they're, like, very shy, you know, introverted kids and this allows them, like, some form of escapism.

Michael Shermer 58:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:15 Like you said-

Michael Shermer 58:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:16 ... like, a cosplay-type thing.

Michael Shermer 58:18 Yeah, but s- so what happens then is, i- i- so there's an element of truth to the... And this is true with conspiracy theories, always a little, a little element of truth and then it, it gets blown up into something else. And then-

Joe Rogan 58:27 Right.

Michael Shermer 58:27 ... if it gets politicized, "Oh, that's just the sort of thing those libtards would do in these schools-"

Joe Rogan 58:31 Right.

Michael Shermer 58:31 "... trying to groom our children."

Joe Rogan 58:33 Right.

Michael Shermer 58:33 You know? And then-

Joe Rogan 58:33 Right.

Michael Shermer 58:34 ... then you get a moral panic. It's like the satanic panic of the, of the 1980s.

Joe Rogan 58:37 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 58:37 Started with that McMartin Preschool, uh, case in Manhattan Beach.

Joe Rogan 58:41 Yes, that's... We'll talk about that because that's pretty crazy.

Michael Shermer 58:44 Totally crazy. So this was, um, k- kind of in the time in psychology where Freud- Freudianism, uh, sort of unconscious memories of things and, and, and so on were becoming popular. And there was this idea that, um, you know, there's a lot of molestation and it's... And, and secret satanic cults all over America and there's a lot of these kind of preschools. So the McMartin Preschool Case, um, was based on children telling these fantastic stories-

Joe Rogan 59:12 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 59:13 ... about the stuff that was going on at the day school. Now you have kids, I have kids, it's like how this is impossible for parents not to know this. Oh, well, they're ta-... They have tunnels, underground tunnels where they have horses, they take them out to Catalina and they do these satanic things to them and what, the parents, did no one noticed this or...

Joe Rogan 59:28 And they were kind of coaching the kids when they were asking the kids these questions-

Michael Shermer 59:32 Right.

Joe Rogan 59:33 ... like, what did they do? Did they do this? And the kids were like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

Michael Shermer 59:36 Remember the anatomical dolls, anatomically correct dolls? Now-

Joe Rogan 59:39 Show me where they touched you.

Michael Shermer 59:39 ... show me where he touched you, right?

Joe Rogan 59:41 Right, right.

Michael Shermer 59:41 And worse, you know, they, they separate the kids from their parents, the-

Joe Rogan 59:44 Right.

Michael Shermer 59:44 ... mom, mom's outside and the little kid's scared to death in this room.

Joe Rogan 59:48 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 59:48 And then he's like, "Okay, he to- touched me there. Can I go back to my mommy now?" You know?

Joe Rogan 59:52 Right.

Michael Shermer 59:52 It's like...

Joe Rogan 59:52 And then this ruined people's lives-

Michael Shermer 59:54 Yeah, totally.

Joe Rogan 59:54 ... and careers and these people were accused of these horrible things that turns out they did not do.

Michael Shermer 59:59 They didn't do. Before the OJ trial, this was the longest, most expensive trial in California history, that McMartin Preschool Case, but it launched this kind of satanic panic around America. There's one of these cults in every city.

Joe Rogan 1:00:09 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:00:09 And finally the FBI got involved and said, "All right, we better look into this." And they, you know, found nothing or... Okay, y- you can always find some weirdo who's a Satanist, right?

Joe Rogan 1:00:18 Right.

Michael Shermer 1:00:18 And maybe they do some weird things with a cat or something.

Joe Rogan 1:00:21 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:00:21 Or a cat gets mutilated by a dog and then you got the Satanist, he's, uh, over there, and then the mutilated cat was found over there. There must be-

Joe Rogan 1:00:28 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:00:28 ... some connection and before you know it, you get this spiraling moral panic.

Joe Rogan 1:00:32 Right.

Michael Shermer 1:00:33 And it was similar to the recovered memory movement in the '90s, that, uh, when we started in '92, we started covering this 'cause it, it, it was the same kind of thing where these were adult, mostly women, going into therapy for various issues; sleep problems, depression, weight issues, whatever. And the therapists who, who had bought in all this Freudian stuff that you suppress, you, you suppress your memories, you... And we, we can get them out, as if memory is like a video recording and you can watch it on the little, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:01:02 Right.

Michael Shermer 1:01:02 ... Cartesian theater of your mind as if there's little homunculus in there looking at the screen. Okay, play it back for me what your father did. Now, they don't start off like that. They just go, "Okay, so what are your issues?" And-... client says what the issues are. "Well, you know, um, some people that have those symptoms were molested when they were children." "Well, no, that, that didn't happen to me." "Well, I, I know you don't think it happened to you, but, in fact, we know about repressed memories, that you repress the memory of that trauma because it's so traumatic." "Really?" "Yeah." "How do I know?" "Well, okay, have you ever had a dream or ever had fleeting thoughts about this, this, and this?" "Yeah, I think I might have." You know? So six months later, now the person thinks, "I think this actually happened to me."

Joe Rogan 1:01:40 Right.

Michael Shermer 1:01:40 And then there's this big moment of confrontation with the father, grandfather, uncle, whoever it is and, you know, of course, they're just in a state of shock. Like, this, but this is horrible. And then it got worse where they were actually, uh, tried, put on trial for-

Joe Rogan 1:01:53 Yes.

Michael Shermer 1:01:53 ... and, and some of these guys were convicted based on nothing other than one of these recovered memories.

Joe Rogan 1:01:58 Yeah, that's an, that's a real issue with hypnotic regression, right, that you can introduce thoughts into-

Michael Shermer 1:02:02 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:02:02 ... people's minds. You know, that was an i- that was an issue with John Mack's work.

Michael Shermer 1:02:07 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:02:07 You're-

Michael Shermer 1:02:07 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:02:07 ... aware of John Mack?

Michael Shermer 1:02:08 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:09 John Mack, who was a psychologist out of Harvard. He wrote a book called, it was called Abduction, I believe it was.

Michael Shermer 1:02:15 Abducted, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:15 Abducted, and it was all about-

Michael Shermer 1:02:17 The abduction thing.

Joe Rogan 1:02:17 ... UFO abductees.

Michael Shermer 1:02:19 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:02:20 And it was a similar situation where they were using hypnotic regression, and the problem was the way the questions were formulated and the way these hypnotic regression sessions were conducted, a lot of people thought was extremely unscientific, and in fact, could have introduced these ide- 'Cause like one of the things was like, "Oh, this is a uniform tale that everyone keeps tell-" Okay, well, do you have the same person asking these people these questions and how are they doing this?

Michael Shermer 1:02:47 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:02:47 And do they have a vested interest, like perhaps maybe they're publishing a book?

Michael Shermer 1:02:51 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:52 D- do they have a vested interest in trying to make this a narrative? And it turns out, yeah, that seems to be the case, that they were asking these people these very leading questions and taking them through these hypnotic regression sessions and they were all convinced that they were abducted by aliens.

Michael Shermer 1:03:09 Yeah, the pioneering researcher on this, Elizabeth Loftus, a, uh, psychologist that is memory, uh, she made famous these studies of where you show people like a video of a, a, of a car accident and you ask one group, "How fast would you estimate the cars were traveling when they collided?" Second group, "How fast would you estimate the cars were traveling when they smashed into each other?" The latter one gets a higher estimated speed.

Joe Rogan 1:03:31 Mm-hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:03:31 Or you show v-, uh, subjects a video, little 30-second video clip of like somebody sitting on a park bench and some guy walks up and grabs her purse and runs off. All right? What color was his hat? Oh, it was a blue hat, it was a baseball hat, it was a knit cap, and so on. The guy was- wasn't wearing a hat at all.

Joe Rogan 1:03:48 Hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:03:48 Right, so just asking the question plants in the me- now the memory is, is corrupted. Now the person thinks the person had a hat. That's the new memory, right?

Joe Rogan 1:03:57 Right.

Michael Shermer 1:03:58 Her most famous research was then on the lost in a mall. So these are adult subjects, um, who had been, uh, screened and they know that when they were children, they were never lost in a mall, right? But they introduced, amongst many things that they were talking about, "Do you remember the time when you were five, 'cause your parents told us about this, when you were lost in the mall?" "Oh, yes. Oh my God, it was terrible."

Joe Rogan 1:04:19 Hmm.

Michael Shermer 1:04:19 "I was s- so scared, and then I remember hearing my, uh, the voice of my mom, and then this guy helped me and he was wearing this flannel shirt, and he took me to my mommy," and so on and so forth. They just make up this complete... It never happened.

Joe Rogan 1:04:29 Right.

Michael Shermer 1:04:30 She just made that up on the spot. So we have this little internal storyteller to try to make sense of this chaotic world, and so the moment you get new information, you gotta try to fit it somewhere in there. What's the narrative? How does this fit with my life?

Joe Rogan 1:04:42 Well, this is goes back to what we were talking about with chaotic events and eyewitness testimony.

Michael Shermer 1:04:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:46 That it's always screwed up because-

Michael Shermer 1:04:49 Not reliable.

Joe Rogan 1:04:49 ... not reliable at all.

Michael Shermer 1:04:50 No. No, and, uh, (laughs) so what do we do about it? Because in the criminal justice system, back to our signal detection problem, right? You got the, the guy sitting there. Is he guilty? If he's really guilty and you find him guilty, then that's good. That's a hit, right? But if he's really innocent and you find him guilty, that's really bad, right? So we have this-

Joe Rogan 1:05:08 Right.

Michael Shermer 1:05:09 ... kind of what's, what's called the, the Blackstone ratio of 10:1. Better 10 guilty people go free than that one innocent person be found guilty.

Joe Rogan 1:05:17 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:05:17 And so the criminal justice system has the same problem without, before DNA and, and, and some of that forensic evidence, it was all eyewitness and it's, it's terrible. So the Innocence Project is, as you know, exonerated, I don't know, 300 and something people, many of them on death row-

Joe Rogan 1:05:32 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:05:32 ... for crimes they never committed and, um, that's the pro- Even, like, forensic stuff you see on CSI, you know, the bite marks or the hair, uh, uh, you know, analysis of the fabric, even that's not very well, uh, tested and replicated.

Joe Rogan 1:05:47 No. In fact, Josh Dubin, who w- worked with the Innocence Project, talked about that.

Michael Shermer 1:05:51 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:05:51 He has a podcast on junk science-

Michael Shermer 1:05:54 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:05:54 ... and particularly discussed bite marks, about how you can tell people that it was a bite mark from a specific individual and they'll go with it.

Michael Shermer 1:06:02 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:06:02 And then you can show them that that absolutely is not the case, and, you know, this is not, this is not like, it's not like DNA evidence.

Michael Shermer 1:06:11 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:06:11 It's not like something that is absolutely 100% true.

Michael Shermer 1:06:15 Even the polygraph, there's, there's a reason it's not allowed in-

Joe Rogan 1:06:18 Oh, the polygraph's horse shit.

Michael Shermer 1:06:19 (laughs) It's total horse shit.

Joe Rogan 1:06:20 Yeah, that's horse shit.

Michael Shermer 1:06:21 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:06:21 When, you know, someone tells you they passed a lie detector test, it's like, "Congratulations, you're a sociopath."

Michael Shermer 1:06:25 (laughs) That's right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:26 It just, it doesn't fucking mean anything.

Michael Shermer 1:06:28 If you believe it-

Joe Rogan 1:06:29 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:06:29 ... and you're not gonna give up the keys-

Joe Rogan 1:06:30 But just also like you have to have a very specific response to like this question and everyone's response to stimuli and stress, it, they, they vary. Some people are going to react in a certain way.

Michael Shermer 1:06:42 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:06:42 But that's not indicative of, of evidence like you can absolutely prove. Also, like you c- there was a, a woman who was convicted, I believe, in, in India of, uh, from fMRI data of a murder because she had knowledge of the crime scene and so like-

Michael Shermer 1:07:01 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:07:01 ... I, I discussed this with a neuroscientist in America and she was like, "That is absolutely not evidence-"

Michael Shermer 1:07:07 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:07:07 "... that that person committed the crime." But if you are in a trial and you have knowledge of the crime scene because they've told you, "This is the case, this is what they're saying happened," and then they use this fMRI data to show that you have knowledge of the crime.

Michael Shermer 1:07:23 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:07:23 Well, of course you have knowledge of the crime. You're about to go to fucking jail for something you didn't do-

Michael Shermer 1:07:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:07:27 ... and they're telling you, you know, it was, uh, Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick.

Michael Shermer 1:07:32 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:07:32 Like, "Oh, look, through MRI data we can show she knows about Colonel Mustard."

Michael Shermer 1:07:37 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:37 So I believe this woman was actually convicted.

Michael Shermer 1:07:40 ... there are people, neuroscientists, trying to figure out how to use MRIs to see if you can, uh, see if somebody's lying.

Joe Rogan 1:07:46 Yeah.

Michael Shermer 1:07:46 I think, I think we're a long ways from that.

Joe Rogan 1:07:48 Long ways.

Michael Shermer 1:07:49 And, uh, uh, I did a TV show once, I don't know, 20 years ago for Fox Family, Exploring the Unknown, and we did an episode on the polygraph. So, we found this guy, Doug Smith, who was now working. He, he was a former cop, you know, in, in Dallas, and he was working with, uh, defense attorneys showing why the polygraph is bullshit. So, he had the funniest story where he said the first day on the job, he got the training on how to do the polygraph. So, it's his first day. His, his boss says, "Okay, we, we got the, we got, uh, the accused in there. We think he's the perpetrator. Go in there and, and do the polygraph test." So, he does the thing, he comes back. "Well, boss, I, I think he's lying." And he goes, "Yeah, we know he's lying. They're all lying. Get in there and get the confession." He's like, "What?" "Yeah." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:08:28 (laughs)

Michael Shermer 1:08:28 "Tell him we know he's lying, and tell him, tell him we got his fingerprints, too." "You mean you just..." "Yeah." (laughs) It's like, oh my God.

Joe Rogan 1:08:34 Jesus Christ.

Michael Shermer 1:08:35 Yeah. (laughs) So-

Joe Rogan 1:08:36 Man.

Michael Shermer 1:08:36 Now... So, he g- he gave up because he thought, "Oh, you mean this is like planting evidence in a way."

Joe Rogan 1:08:41 Hmm. It is in a way, right?

Michael Shermer 1:08:43 Okay. So, this is my, this is my type specimen for p- uh, what I call proxy conspiracists. That is, conspiracies, that is they're, they're a stand-in for something else. The O.J., uh, case. O.J. was acquitted based on a conspiracy theory that the LAPD planted the bloody glove and the blood splatter and so forth, and the jury accepted it. Now, you know, the evidence is pretty overwhelming. He, he killed his wife and her friend, and there was no, uh, police tampering. There was the one guy, Fuhrman, who was probably a racist, but it wasn't clear that he did anything. But my explanation is that in a way the jury, you know, uh, said, "Yeah, maybe not this time, but the LAPD have done these sorts of things."

Joe Rogan 1:09:21 Right.

Michael Shermer 1:09:21 And there's this great ESPN documentary series called O.J. in America, and it's like six hours long, and it, it tracks the history of the African American community post-World War II coming to Southern California and how bad the relationships were between the LAPD and the African American community, particularly right in downtown LA. And they did plant evidence. They did do things like that.

Joe Rogan 1:09:42 Yes.

Michael Shermer 1:09:42 Right? So, there's an element of truth, back to conspiracism. It, it, you should be-