#1888 - Michael Shermer

[0] Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

[1] The Joe Rogan Experience.

[2] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[3] Michael Sherman.

[4] I come bearing signed gifts for you, sir.

[5] Thank you very much.

[6] I hope that's very much.

[7] Why the rational believe the irrational.

[8] Right.

[9] Why is that?

[10] Is it simple?

[11] It wouldn't be this big of a book that was simple.

[12] Yeah, it's not that simple.

[13] But, well, first of all, my argument is that it's not irrational to believe conspiracy theory.

[14] because enough of them are true that 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 costly error to make.

[15] That's a rational perspective.

[16] Yeah.

[17] The term conspiracy theory got thrown about.

[18] There was the first introduction of it into the zeitgeist was during the Kennedy assassination, correct?

[19] Yeah, well, around that time, right?

[20] It, before that, before World War II, really, conspiracy theories were kind of common knowledge.

[21] Everybody knew that things were going on behind closed doors, and it was just kind of commonly known, and we just kind of try to figure it out.

[22] It didn't become really fringy until, right, after the JFK thing, that it kind of got as a meme that you're crazy to think these conspiracy theories are true.

[23] It became pathologized.

[24] Yeah.

[25] And Richard Hofstetter's, you know, the paranoid style in American politics kind of put.

[26] that on the map.

[27] It's conspiracy theories or something delusional.

[28] It's a, it's a pathology in your brain.

[29] Whereas before that, it wasn't.

[30] It was just, I mean, even the Declaration of Independence, it's a conspiracy theory.

[31] 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 want to do, and we're against that.

[32] Printed right there in the declaration.

[33] So it's not fringy, right?

[34] It was kind of commonly known that these things happen.

[35] The term as a pejorative, though, was, it was introduced into like sort of the American culture around the Kennedy assassination.

[36] Yeah, that's an interesting story because I'm convinced Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

[37] I'm not a...

[38] Really?

[39] Yes, I am.

[40] What makes you convince of that?

[41] Oh, well, I have a whole chapter on it, and we can get into that in a second.

[42] But the twist about it where it seems like there was something up was that President Johnson was worried that if it looks like there's a conspiracy.

[43] a foot with the Cubans or the Russians, that that could lead to a nuclear exchange.

[44] So we don't want the American people to think that this is some kind of vast conspiracy of the Russians.

[45] Have you gone back and forth on that at all?

[46] Or is it just something you've always believed?

[47] No, no. Well, before the Oliver Stone film, I hadn't really given it that much thought.

[48] Well, the Warren report seems pretty thorough, but, you know, who knows?

[49] What do I know?

[50] And then, you know, the Oliver Stone film, which floats every conspiracy theory there was in one past, And I thought, well, you know, 10 % of this is true, seems like there was something else going on.

[51] But then, you know, there were web pages posted of like, here are all the mistakes in the film and here are all the counter arguments.

[52] And then I read Gerald Posner's book, the case closed about the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, and why all the evidence points to him.

[53] And then Vincent Bolliose's book, reclaiming history, which is like 1 ,500 pages long.

[54] And it dissects every one of the hundreds of conspiracy theories.

[55] These are something on the order of 140 people have been accused, and, you know, a couple hundred organizations have been affiliated with the JFK assassination.

[56] The problem 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.

[57] So it's not impossible.

[58] All the evidence points to him.

[59] Massive amounts of evidence, right.

[60] So now we're supposed to get a new trunch of documents.

[61] But they're not.

[62] They won't release them.

[63] They keep stopping the release of these documents.

[64] This worries me because that makes people suspicious, as it should.

[65] But wait a minute.

[66] It worries you because it makes people suspicious, or it worries you because it points to their withholding information because that information looks bad?

[67] I would love to see the information, and I would change my mind in a heartbeat.

[68] What do you think of your thoughts on the magic bullet?

[69] Okay, the magic bullet is not a magic bullet.

[70] single bullet theory.

[71] That is, what it's usually rendered as is Kennedy and Connolly are sitting like this.

[72] Oh, I'm aware of all of it.

[73] Yeah, right.

[74] So the bullet doesn't have to go left, right, and so forth.

[75] Kennedy was elevated.

[76] Yes, right.

[77] Yeah.

[78] 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 Connolly, through his arm, into his leg, and so forth, in a straight line.

[79] Well, you know, the only reason why they had to come up with the theory that that one bullet did all that damage.

[80] You know that, right?

[81] Well, you know why?

[82] Well, I don't know.

[83] Because someone was hit by a ricochet in the underpass.

[84] And so they had to attribute all that damage to one bullet.

[85] Right, that's right, yeah.

[86] But there's more in Connolly's body, there was more pieces of bullet than we're missing from the actual bullet itself.

[87] Did you ever look at the actual bullet itself?

[88] Have you studied it?

[89] Yeah, I have a picture of it in there.

[90] Yeah.

[91] I know a lot about bullets.

[92] And one of the problems about bullets is there's never been.

[93] a bullet that's gone through bone and shattered bone and gone through two different bodies and came out looking like that.

[94] That looks like a bullet that was shot into water.

[95] It is deformed, though.

[96] Yeah, it's slightly deformed, but every bullet that leaves a gun is slightly deformed.

[97] That indicates even more so that it didn't hit anything.

[98] When bullets hit things, they deform.

[99] That's the whole purpose of making bullets like that.

[100] These bullets are designed to shatter things and expand upon impact and it creates more damage.

[101] Well, hollow point bullets are.

[102] Sure, but all bullets are.

[103] Hollow points, even more specifically, but all bullets are designed to expand upon impact.

[104] Right.

[105] Even rifle bullets that are copper, because in California you can't use lead bullets anymore because condors and a lot of other birds of prey, they eat the lead bullets and they get lead poisoning.

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

[107] But bullets expand and they break up.

[108] They don't look like that.

[109] That bullet was found in Connolly's gurney, which is like so ridiculous.

[110] The idea that, oh, look, we found the bullet here.

[111] It just managed to magically fall out of his body and look pristine.

[112] Okay, 80 % of the ear witnesses heard three shots.

[113] Yeah, but you know witnesses.

[114] And the first shot missed.

[115] But witnesses.

[116] Yeah, but okay.

[117] That's just asking people what happened.

[118] If you talk to witnesses after 9 -11, they said they heard explosions.

[119] Yes, right, yeah, right, exactly.

[120] So, again, it's a probability argument.

[121] It's not black or white.

[122] But the probability of that, having gone through bodies, is very low.

[123] Well, I don't know.

[124] Almost zero.

[125] If you've seen those tests where they shoot the bullet through the, you know, the foam stuff that mimics a human body and so forth.

[126] Yeah, but it does get deformed like that.

[127] That's ballistic gel.

[128] Ballistic gel is not bone.

[129] But they have shot it through pigs with the body.

[130] bone and tendons and ligaments and muscles and all that.

[131] Never looks like that.

[132] Well, anyway, there's good shows on this.

[133] No, no, no, no, no. It never looks like that.

[134] There's no evidence of bullets hitting bone where they come out looking like that.

[135] I don't know, Joe.

[136] Are you sure?

[137] Because I am sure.

[138] I'm pretty sure it was either Nova or National Geographic that did this and replicated it.

[139] Shot it right through a body.

[140] No, I saw that.

[141] They looked deformed.

[142] The bullets looked deformed.

[143] They were bent up.

[144] Yeah.

[145] Okay.

[146] So what is your counter then?

[147] I think Lee Harvey Oswald was involved.

[148] I certainly think he was involved.

[149] And I think the possibility of a conspiracy is high.

[150] I do not know whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

[151] I think Lee Harvey Oswald was most certainly a part of it.

[152] But when Lee Harvey Oswald was captured, when they were talking to him, he said, I'm a patsy.

[153] I'm inclined to believe he was a patsy.

[154] But I'm also inclined to believe that he had knowledge of it.

[155] He was there for probably a very specific reason.

[156] and they were probably setting him up.

[157] I think there was probably multiple people involved.

[158] Yeah, who's the they?

[159] Who is the they?

[160] That's the question.

[161] Is it the CIA?

[162] Was it the mafia?

[163] Were they upset because he turned on them after they got him elected because there was a conspiracy to help him get elected?

[164] The mob was involved in getting JFK elected.

[165] Was it the people that were upset because of the Bay of Pigs incident?

[166] Was it the CIA because he wanted to disband them?

[167] Who knows?

[168] I think there was a lot of people.

[169] that John F. Kennedy upset.

[170] Well, that's true for every president, though.

[171] But the ones that don't get shot, then no one pays attention to that.

[172] How many people hated Trump or Nixon especially?

[173] Right, but we're talking about an actual murder.

[174] You're not saying, to say it's true of every president is fine, but we're talking about a president that was murdered.

[175] And you look at the people that may have had some sort of a vested interest in getting rid of them.

[176] Okay, so here's one argument I'm making.

[177] It's the argument from proportionality, that the effect should have a matching size cause.

[178] So let me just back up here for a second.

[179] If you take a little pebble and throw it, it doesn't take a lot of effort to do it.

[180] A fist size stone takes more effort, a big boulder, massive effort.

[181] So our folk physics, we feel like cause and effect should match, right?

[182] So interesting experiment if you take subjects and give them two dice and say, okay, now try to roll a low number.

[183] They'll kind of just gently toss it like that.

[184] Now try to roll a high number, like an 11 or 12.

[185] They'll give it a good heave like that.

[186] Well, that's dumb people.

[187] Well, but that's our intuition.

[188] But that's people that don't know about dice.

[189] We're not talking about trained assassins.

[190] Okay, but let me finish.

[191] So, you know, our sense is that big events, JFK assassination, Princess Dye, dies 9 -11, COVID -19.

[192] 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?

[193] Okay, so this has actually happened.

[194] John Hinkley.

[195] That's a straw man, because you're saying that.

[196] Oswald did act alone if he had missed.

[197] Yeah, if he had missed.

[198] But we're talking about after the murder.

[199] The reason why there's a conspiracy is because he was murdered.

[200] Right.

[201] So why are there no conspiracy theories about John Hinkley shooting Reagan?

[202] Because John Hinkley has a real trail of mental illness.

[203] He wrote letters to Jody Foster.

[204] He was a very specific human being who was obsessed with killing Reagan to impress Jody Foster.

[205] It's all really documented.

[206] He's out now, too.

[207] It's not like they got rid of him like they got rid of Jack Ruby.

[208] Or Squeaky Fromm tried to shoot Gerald Ford.

[209] Okay, but she missed.

[210] But she was also in the Manson.

[211] There's a big conspiracy about that, about the Manson family.

[212] And the fact that Charles Manson was a part of NK.

[213] Ultra.

[214] Oh, yes, right, yes, right.

[215] Did you ever read Chaos by Tom O 'Neill?

[216] No, I haven't read that one.

[217] It's a fantastic book.

[218] It's all about why Manson kept getting released.

[219] You know, Manson was in jail, right?

[220] And during the time he was in jail, he was visited by Jolly West, who was the head of the CIA's M .K. Ultra LSD experiments.

[221] They most certainly did something to Manson while he was in jail.

[222] And they also supplied him.

[223] There's anecdotal evidence that shows that they supplied him with LSD when he got out of jail.

[224] Every time he got arrested for violating parole, these cops and these local sheriffs that had caught him were told that it was a above their pay grade, and they had to release him.

[225] Manson got out for multiple offenses after he was on parole, things that should have kept him locked up.

[226] There's some real good evidence that, you know, about, M .K. Ultra was a rear thing.

[227] And that's an interesting conspiracy, right?

[228] Because it's a real one, documented.

[229] Our own government was doing this.

[230] Yeah.

[231] Well, there's Operation Midnight Climax that they were involved with, where they were, do you know about that one?

[232] That's where they were dosing up Johns when they would go to visit prostitutes, and they would film them through two -way mirrors.

[233] 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.

[234] Okay, but my point is that if it, let's say it was the mayor of Dallas that was shot that day, would there be vast conspiracy industry of books and films and so on?

[235] Who knows, but it wasn't the mayor.

[236] It was the president of the United States, which makes it a far bigger issue.

[237] Right, that's my point.

[238] We want something big.

[239] It doesn't seem right that a lone nut, like Lee Harvey Oswald, could have pulled this off or that 19 guys with box cutters could have taken down the World Trade Center Billies.

[240] It just doesn't feel right.

[241] So we add elements, this is my theory, we had elements of causality to match it.

[242] Princess die, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelt.

[243] But it doesn't feel right that a princess, famous, and so forth, would die the same way.

[244] Yeah, but you're adding a bunch of different conspiracies to one that's very specific.

[245] You're adding a bunch that are much more easily disprovable than one that's very specific.

[246] This is my problem with all conspiracy theories.

[247] And one of the things that you said at the beginning, some of them are real.

[248] Yeah, that's right.

[249] All right, so let's distinguish conspiracy theories from conspiracies.

[250] Conspiracies by definition are two or more people plotting in secret to gain an unfair, illegal, or immoral advantage over somebody else.

[251] That happens all the time, right?

[252] Sure.

[253] So how do we know, so it's a signal detection problem?

[254] How do you know which conspiracy theories are correct?

[255] They tag an actual conspiracy, right?

[256] So I draw this two by two grid.

[257] So up here you have real conspiracy theories that are real, and you associate them with that correctly.

[258] You say, yeah, that's what I agree.

[259] That's a hit.

[260] So conspiracy theories that are real, and you go, no, I don't believe it.

[261] I don't think there's a real conspiracy.

[262] That's a miss. So that's a big miss, right?

[263] That's a type two error.

[264] You don't want to miss those because those are real.

[265] That could harm you.

[266] Down here you have conspiracy theories that are not true, and you think they are.

[267] So that's a false positive, a type 1 error.

[268] That's a low -cost error to make.

[269] It doesn't cost a lot.

[270] It's not risky to assume a conspiracy theory is real when it's not.

[271] 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 Gathers, anthropologists tell us there's a lot of conniving and cabals and so on.

[272] This goes on.

[273] So I call this constructive conspiracism.

[274] It pays to be a little paranoid because sometimes they really are out to get you.

[275] 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 and just the chaos of the incident.

[276] I've heard explosions.

[277] I saw this.

[278] I saw that.

[279] And you know that in times like that of great distress, people and eyewitness testimoners are some of the most unreliable because people are so blown away by the extreme moment that they can't really recall things correctly.

[280] Okay, let's just do a counter, another counterfactual.

[281] What would be true if this really was a conspiracy?

[282] Well, there should be some documentation somewhere.

[283] There is, and that's why they won't release it.

[284] Well, okay, so this is the problem.

[285] Release it, damn it.

[286] Yeah, well, why do you think?

[287] What possible reason in good?

[288] I thought Trump was going to release it.

[289] I was quite surprised.

[290] I don't think they want to let anybody release that stuff.

[291] If it's anything, 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, overthrowing, rigging elections in South American countries, assassinating communist dictators.

[292] Real conspiracies.

[293] These are real conspiracies.

[294] These things happen.

[295] We found out about this in the 90s.

[296] So why you're so convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

[297] Okay.

[298] So let's just pull back for a thing.

[299] Okay.

[300] Right.

[301] I'm not God.

[302] You're not either.

[303] I'm not omniscient.

[304] We don't know for sure what happened.

[305] Nobody does.

[306] I like to get you in a room with Oliver Stone.

[307] Because Oliver Stone is so compelling.

[308] I mean, that guy will talk for days and days about it.

[309] I know.

[310] I watched his four -hour documentary.

[311] I watched him on here.

[312] What did you think about it?

[313] Well, okay, so again, here's my problem, is that it's not just a black and white thing.

[314] What's most likely to be true?

[315] Okay?

[316] Well, the evidence is massive against Lee Harvey Oswald.

[317] Okay?

[318] For sure, he was at least involved.

[319] Yeah.

[320] All right.

[321] Who else would have been involved?

[322] Okay.

[323] Can you pit, so Stone, thing, well, CIA, Alan Dulles, something.

[324] If you had Alan Dulles here, could you get a grand jury to agree?

[325] We have enough evidence to put him on trial.

[326] I don't think so.

[327] There's nobody, in fact, that you could point to that a grand jury would say.

[328] It happened over 50 years ago.

[329] Well, I mean, just rewind the tape to 10 years after or something.

[330] Okay, so we got somebody.

[331] Here he is.

[332] Well, this actually happened, right?

[333] Jim Garrison put on trial Clay Shaw and pointed all the evidence he could find and the jury acquitted him in under an hour.

[334] The jury also acquitted O .J. Simpson.

[335] Yes, okay.

[336] You know, I don't know if that's real good evidence.

[337] Juries are, you know, they're not the most informed people.

[338] Well, there was a made -for -television BBC trial of.

[339] Harvey Oswald in abstentia, in which was at Jerry Spence, was his defense attorney in abstentia, and what's his name, was the prosecutor, the reclaiming history, the Manson guy, the guy put Manson away.

[340] I just mentioned his name.

[341] I'm sorry, I'm just basing out on it.

[342] Viziozzi.

[343] Again, the jury, again, it's not a real jury, it's a made -for -TV series, but they present all the evidence and they acquitted.

[344] I mean, they convicted Oswald based on the evidence as the lone assassin because there was just nothing pointing to anybody else.

[345] So here's how I think about it.

[346] There could be somebody else involved, but we need some evidence, at least some paper trail.

[347] Why in the Pentagon papers that released all these top secret documents that Nixon tried to cover up and prevent from being published?

[348] There's nothing in there about, you know, the conspiracy to assassinate.

[349] The CIA was involved.

[350] They've stopped release of all of the documents about the Kennedy assassination.

[351] They keep postponing decades and decades.

[352] My guess is probably the CIA was up to even more no good back in the 60s and 70s.

[353] You know, you've mentioned M .K. Ultra.

[354] Don't forget.

[355] That's a good guess, but another good guess is that they were involved in the assassination in some way.

[356] Okay.

[357] Then, okay, I'm a good Bayesian.

[358] I'm willing to update my priors, change my credence, and change my mind completely and go, yes.

[359] I'm just very suspicious 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?

[360] And Jack Ruby, something happened to when he went fucking completely insane after visiting with Jolly West.

[361] And the assumption is that Jolly West gave Jack Ruby LSD while he was in jail.

[362] Maybe.

[363] But why would Jolly West go to visit the guy that killed Lee Harvey Oswald when he was the head of him?

[364] mind control experiment for the CIA.

[365] Again, this is what's called anomaly hunting, like any big event, we go searching for any little thing that's weird.

[366] Like the, you know, the umbrella guy, the umbrella man, Louis Witt on the...

[367] Well, there's a lot of that silly ship.

[368] You can ask, but that points to be to this thing where people always try to look for connections.

[369] And I do agree with you that a lot of conspiracy theories are ridiculous.

[370] But a lot of conspiracies, as you said, are real.

[371] 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.

[372] In like Stone's thesis that the CIA military industrial complex and so on were involved because Kennedy wanted to get us out of Vietnam.

[373] Nixon got us out of Vietnam.

[374] How come no one assassinated him from the military industrial complex?

[375] Well, that's only one piece that, I mean, his assumption that it was because of them trying to get out of Vietnam was only one of the assumptions that they made.

[376] His other assumptions were the mob, it was the CIA.

[377] It was, I mean, he wanted to get rid of a lot of the intelligence agencies.

[378] I mean, he had a real problem with secret societies and secrecy and secrecy in government.

[379] He made that famous speech about secret societies.

[380] Right.

[381] Well, and again, it's complicated by the fact that we did try to invade Cuba using Cuban nationalists in the Bay of Pigs.

[382] That was a disaster.

[383] Also Operation Northwoods.

[384] Operation Northwoods.

[385] That's one of the creepiest ones.

[386] Oh, totally.

[387] The fact that that was a real conspiracy, that they were really planning, blowing up a drone jetliner and blaming on the Cubans.

[388] They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, all to get us to go to war with Cuba.

[389] It's pretty wild that that was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by Kennedy.

[390] And McNamara, he didn't go for it either.

[391] But this is an example, again, of constructive conspiracism.

[392] It's not irrational to think that a lot of conspiracy theories might be true because enough of them have been, you know, or a co -intel pro.

[393] Right.

[394] Where the FBI was sending in agents to act as social justice activists in American Indian movement, feminist groups, the Black Panthers and so on.

[395] And, you know, including blackmailing Martin Luther King Jr. Yeah.

[396] Recording his sex capades and hotel rooms.

[397] I mean, our government was doing this?

[398] What?

[399] Yeah.

[400] The guy who assassinated Martin Luther King, what is he?

[401] Jesus Christ.

[402] It escapes me. What is his name?

[403] James Earl Ray.

[404] James Earl Ray.

[405] James, I always forget that guy's name for some reason.

[406] But I talked to Mike Baker, who was formerly with the CIA.

[407] I used air quotes formally.

[408] 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.

[409] Like he was kind of a loser, and then all of a sudden he had money and, you know, there was someone he believes was involved in aiding that guy to assassinate Martin Luther King.

[410] Yeah, again, so like we have the WikiLeaks, okay, millions and millions of top secret documents.

[411] Why is there no mention of 9 -11 as an inside job?

[412] Some documentation of somebody inside that.

[413] Maybe 9 -11 wasn't an inside job.

[414] Maybe that's why.

[415] And why is there nothing about JFK or the fake moon landing?

[416] Nothing like that.

[417] So we would expect if X was true that the following should happen.

[418] Yeah, but WikiLeaks didn't get all of the documents that the government is ever hidden.

[419] That's a weird way to connect the dots there, Mr. Shermer.

[420] I'm disconnecting the dots.

[421] Are you working for the governor or the government?

[422] What's going on with you?

[423] I'm an agent of disinformation.

[424] I've been accused of that, actually.

[425] Have you been?

[426] I think I have been, too.

[427] That's okay.

[428] Yeah.

[429] But, I mean, again, how do these systems really work?

[430] You know, so this is my kind of conspiracy detection kit.

[431] You know, the grander the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is to be true.

[432] Like, say, Volkswagen cheating the emission standards in Europe.

[433] That, you know, that's a very specific conspiracy theory.

[434] Turn out to be true.

[435] They really did do that.

[436] And for obvious reasons, profit motive, right?

[437] But so if you scale up from that, oh, they're trying to control the entire European economy or something like, well, no, that's too big.

[438] They're just trying to make money.

[439] They're just trying to make money, right?

[440] So, you know, the more people that have to be involved, the more elements that have to come.

[441] People are incompetent.

[442] People can't keep their mouth shut.

[443] For the most part.

[444] For the most part, yes.

[445] Now, to be fair, to the other side, you know, if you read about the development of the U2 spy plane and the AR -71 Blackbird, you know, this was done.

[446] in Burbank near where you used to live.

[447] And that's right in the heart of L .A. How did they do this for all those years and nobody knew about it, right?

[448] Well, they were acting on the interests of the government.

[449] They were trying to be patriots.

[450] They kept their mouth shut because they were trying to win a war against the evil others.

[451] Right.

[452] So, 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 going 3 ,000 miles an hour, 50 ,000 feet above me at 30 ,000 feet, this is impossible.

[453] We don't have anything like that.

[454] Well, actually, we did have something like that.

[455] So I suspect that some of these UAP, I think in a decade or two we're going to find out, oh, we had these incredible drones that could fly at these speeds.

[456] I tend to lean towards that as well sometimes.

[457] I go back and forth with it.

[458] I had Ryan Graves on recently.

[459] I saw that.

[460] It was a fascinating conversation because the way he was describing things with no visible means of propulsion, 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.

[461] And the fact that they seem to be transmedium, they seem to be able to enter into the ocean and then leave the ocean, I wonder.

[462] 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.

[463] 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 at, you know, 130 mile an hour winds or completely stationary.

[464] I wonder if those are super advanced drones.

[465] Another problem with these videos is that they're very grainy, blurry, you can't quite make out what's going on, like the one that looks like it goes in the ocean, comes back out.

[466] It's not clear that it goes in the ocean because the horizon in the ocean is so blurry, right?

[467] So I'm a member of this Galileo project at Harvard, run by Avi Lope, the head of the astronomy department.

[468] I had Avi on.

[469] Yep, I know.

[470] And, you know, he's raising money to put cameras, high -resolution cameras all over the world, particularly in the places where people like Graves say they...

[471] I mean, when Graves told you, We saw these things every day.

[472] It's like every day, there surely must be high -resolution photos of these things.

[473] But those jets are not designed to take high -resolution video.

[474] They're designed to fight against enemy jets.

[475] Right.

[476] That's what they're designed for.

[477] They're designed to recognize these enemy combatants and engage with them in the most effective way possible.

[478] That's not with high -resolution digital video.

[479] Right.

[480] Well, that would be the solution.

[481] We just need better data.

[482] Well, I wonder.

[483] if they want better data.

[484] Now, let's assume, 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.

[485] They wouldn't want people taking videos of these things.

[486] Why would they?

[487] Right, but everyone has one of these in their pocket.

[488] Yeah, but you can't get digital video of something that's seven miles away moving at, you know, the speed of sound you're not going to get digital video that's what we want to do with the Gallio project is get those cameras up there Christopher Mellon a guy who 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 that are pretty spectacular that they don't understand right I've heard him say that it's like okay then let's see them well we can't why would they release that 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?

[489] Probably wouldn't.

[490] Right.

[491] I wonder what that stuff is.

[492] And the fact that it happened so often in that very specific area, you know, who knows?

[493] Another thing I was thinking about with the UIPs is in the history of technology, no nation gets very far ahead of any other nation.

[494] Right.

[495] They either back engineered or copy it or steal the secrets and so on.

[496] And it's not likely we would have anything that the Russians and Chinese wouldn't be pretty close to having also.

[497] You know, just think of just the development of jets.

[498] Or the development of the nuclear bomb.

[499] The nuclear bomb.

[500] I mean, the Russians had, you know, so 1945 was Hiroshima.

[501] And 1949, the Russians, they stole our secrets, right?

[502] So this idea that, you know, these are super advanced 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 aerodynamic.

[503] and the engineering and all that because they read the same journals they do the same research we do So what do you think it is?

[504] Well I think it's probably multiple things I think some of them might be drones that just really high high tech drones, some of them are just blurry videos that are, I think the one of the sphere inside the cube or the cube inside sphere is probably a balloon A balloon, a balloon that stands stationary at 130 mile an hour winds?

[505] It appears to stand stationary appears with the most sophisticated tracking devices that these military jets have.

[506] I know.

[507] These are anomalies, yeah.

[508] So we just need better data.

[509] But why would you think it's a balloon?

[510] Well, what else would it be?

[511] Okay, it might be a drone.

[512] Certainly probably not an alien spacecraft and so on.

[513] Certainly probably not.

[514] Why do you say that?

[515] Well, this kind of gets into the argument of the SETI program.

[516] There's so many, there's so much empty space out there.

[517] The chances of them finding us are pretty slim.

[518] Really?

[519] But we find planets all the time.

[520] Yeah, but telescopes, not visiting.

[521] Telescopes and satellites and all sorts of, you know, things that we send into space.

[522] But we find planets all the time that are in the Goldilocks zone.

[523] And we have a very relatively unsophisticated in terms of like what we'd expect from something that's capable of intergalactic travel.

[524] Relatively simple technology in comparison to what we would think.

[525] If you took what we have today and you increased our capabilities, you know, a thousand years from now, you could imagine that it would be quite easy for someone at least send a drone from another planet to visit Earth and observe.

[526] This is the Fermi paradox that you know of.

[527] And where are they?

[528] Well, of course, most scientists like him don't think they're here.

[529] So I separate two questions.

[530] Most scientists?

[531] Most scientists?

[532] Mityo Kaku thinks they're here.

[533] He's been a little fuzzy about that.

[534] He's not totally committed to that.

[535] He's totally committed.

[536] He was here.

[537] He was here, and he talked about it on the podcast.

[538] He said for the longest time, he was a skeptic.

[539] Oh, yeah, that's right.

[540] Okay, he has kind of come down on that side a little bit.

[541] But why would you be firm on that?

[542] When you think about the fact that there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe.

[543] Let's separate two questions.

[544] Are they out there?

[545] Have they come here?

[546] Are they out there?

[547] Almost certainly.

[548] Right.

[549] I would say 99 .9 % they're out there.

[550] I would agree with you.

[551] 100 billion stars in our gallery.

[552] 100 billion to a trillion galaxy, just do the numbers.

[553] No matter how improbable it is, you get from bacteria to big brains and civilization, it's going to happen.

[554] Right.

[555] But have they come here?

[556] Okay, so how good is the evidence for that?

[557] Not very.

[558] It's pretty thin, right?

[559] How good?

[560] It's anecdotal.

[561] It's human eyewitnesses.

[562] It's blurry videos, grainy photos.

[563] If they were here, damn it.

[564] Where's the, you know, pick up the widget on the dashboard and bring it about it.

[565] back here.

[566] But just looking at what we know that these fighter pilots have witnessed, the data that they've acquired, when they're looking at something like Commander David Fravor, who, when they were off the coast with the Nimitz, when they tracked that thing that went from above 60 ,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet above sea level in less than a second.

[567] What's that?

[568] I don't know.

[569] Yeah, what is that thing that they have visual, 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.

[570] What's that?

[571] Yeah, I don't know.

[572] This is the problem with anomalies.

[573] No theory explains everything, right?

[574] 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 one of them.

[575] But no technologies come out of a vacuum like that.

[576] They always build on previous technologies.

[577] Right, but if you're talking about something from another planet, Or something from another civilization that we're not aware of that's on earth, maybe that lives in the water.

[578] We don't know.

[579] We don't know.

[580] And when you're seeing these things, when you're talking about people that are the best fighter pilots that we have available, that are operating with the most sophisticated fighter jets, with tracking systems that are, you know, constantly being updated.

[581] And then when they update them, they start picking up these things, like Ryan Graves discussed on the podcast.

[582] Why would you think that those are not possibly something from somewhere else?

[583] It depends on how you want to pose the problem.

[584] So here's how I think about it.

[585] So I take Leslie Kean's a book on UFOs and pilots and generals go on the record and so on.

[586] In that book, she says 90 to 95 % of all sightings have perfectly normal explanations.

[587] I would probably agree that's true.

[588] So the question is, what do we do with that other 5 % of anomalies?

[589] Okay, no theory explains everything.

[590] There's always going to be anomalies in every scientific theory.

[591] What do you do with it?

[592] Nothing.

[593] You assign it to a graduate student figured out, or, you know, that's future research, you know, 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.

[594] I mean, again, if we had this technology, surely the Russians have something pretty close to that.

[595] There's nothing from the videos in Ukraine of any Russian.

[596] drones that act anything like these UAPs, surely they would use this technology if they had it?

[597] Well, we're assuming that those UAPs are military in nature and not something that they used to observe things.

[598] It could be.

[599] 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 rate to speed, why would we assume that those things can launch missiles or act in a military capacity?

[600] Right.

[601] And you know there are UAP sightings over Ukraine.

[602] Yeah, but, okay, so Avi did a nice paper on that, showing that these were artillery shells and not what the other people said they thought it was, that it was like a drone or a plane or something weird like that.

[603] He showed that if it was what they thought it was, it would have had a much bigger impact going through the atmosphere at that speed and burning up.

[604] But it didn't, so these are artillery shells.

[605] Anyway, he did a nice paper on that.

[606] Interesting.

[607] But what about these things that supposedly move far faster than the speed of sound without the sonic boom?

[608] Yeah.

[609] How is that possible?

[610] How is that possible?

[611] That's right.

[612] It's not.

[613] That's where it gets weird.

[614] That's where it gets weird.

[615] That's where the question is, is it ours?

[616] Is it really moving at that speed?

[617] Or is it a misperception of the video, a miscalculation?

[618] People make, scientists make miscalculations of these sorts of things all the time.

[619] Yeah, that was one of the things that was posed to David Fraver.

[620] And he said they have multiple sources of.

[621] of data.

[622] It's not just like one system that's monitoring these things.

[623] It's multiple systems.

[624] Yeah.

[625] And now I follow these guys.

[626] I agree.

[627] They are incredibly credible, right?

[628] And they have good arguments.

[629] What do you do with the anomaly?

[630] I think you're an anti -conspiracy theorist.

[631] That's what I think.

[632] No, I'm a skeptic, Joe.

[633] I know you are.

[634] I'm just a -you -liter.

[635] What's your position in skeptic magazine?

[636] I'm the editor -in -chief publisher of skeptic magazine.

[637] There is.

[638] You're literally a skeptic.

[639] is my day job.

[640] Yeah.

[641] But it isn't that I don't believe things.

[642] I mean, I believe the theory of evolution.

[643] I think the Big Bang Theory happened when people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and my quantum physics friends tell me quantum physics is true.

[644] This is how we know it.

[645] To me, it's weird, spooky.

[646] I don't really understand it, but okay, you know, we have tons of evidence.

[647] Have you seen some of the new discussions based on the observations from the James Webb telescope that maybe the Big Bang theory needs to be revisited?

[648] Yes, vaguely.

[649] It was the expansion rate changing, right?

[650] Well, they're getting new data, right?

[651] They're constantly getting new data.

[652] And 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 universe itself would be.

[653] And that's one of the things that they're discussing right now.

[654] What was that?

[655] There was a recent article.

[656] What was it in which scientific publication they were discussing whether or not the Big Bang theory needs to be revisited?

[657] It was based on the James Webb.

[658] Yeah, I did see that.

[659] I mean, Joe, it would be astonishing if that didn't happen.

[660] Right, right.

[661] Because, you know, no theory in science is permanent.

[662] Especially, like, right, it's not like right now we have all the information about.

[663] We have the entire universe mapped out, every planet, everything.

[664] We know exactly what it is.

[665] We know exactly how old everything is, and we know for sure.

[666] We just have a limited ability to look, right?

[667] That's it.

[668] It's the limitations of our technology.

[669] So in the late 90s is when they discovered the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

[670] Well, how can that be?

[671] You know, because in an explosion, you know, the initial explosion, the inflation in cosmology, is really rapid.

[672] Then it slows and slows and slows and so it was supposed to slow down in another 10 billion years or something and maybe collapsed back on itself.

[673] They discover, oh, my God, no, these type 2 supernova, whatever it was, indicate that the expansion is accelerating.

[674] So there's this weird force, dark energy, that pushes it away.

[675] And dark matter is this proffered thing that explains why galaxies are held together because they don't have enough mass to hold them together in the structures that they are, as I understand it, and rotating it the way they're rotating.

[676] So there's something else we can't see.

[677] Right.

[678] Now, so when astronomers talk about dark energy and dark matter to explain these two anomalies, He's like, how could this be?

[679] That's not an explanation.

[680] It's just a linguistic placeholder until we figure out what it is.

[681] So surely there is going to be some discoveries of some kind of new energy or some kind of matter that we don't know.

[682] Century from now, it's like, oh, of course, if you came back after being chronically frozen.

[683] Oh, that's what it was?

[684] 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 UAPs?

[685] position and say it's highly likely that this is either something that we don't understand that we are observing that's come from somewhere else or something that we don't understand because it's technology that hasn't been released the actual specimen the actual the equivalent of the SR 71 blackboard I can go to the museum I can see it touch it walk on it so do you hold it like you have a place holder like perhaps yeah I do I do I do nothing's 100 % right now why is it so fun, though, to think that it's from somewhere else.

[686] It's so much more fun to think that we're being visited than to think that our government has some super sophisticated, you know, gravity propelling drones that somehow or another violate our laws of space time.

[687] Why is it so much more exciting to think that?

[688] I think it's a religious impulse.

[689] I think it's an idea that it feels like we're not alone.

[690] And when you think about the narratives from different religions, that there's something, an agent, a person, a being, of something, not just matter, not just the laws of nature.

[691] Space Daddy.

[692] Like when Einstein says, well, like Spinoza's God, it's just the laws of nature or God.

[693] It's like, that's not particularly comforting.

[694] It's like, well, they don't even know I'm here, right?

[695] But the idea that they're out there, they're super advanced, and they know we're here, maybe they're even coming.

[696] You know, it's like the day of the earth stood still, right?

[697] That was a kind of a film.

[698] That was a Christ allegory.

[699] Remember his earthly name was Mr. Carpenter?

[700] in that film, in the first one, the 1951 film.

[701] Oh, right.

[702] Clatu.

[703] Clatu.

[704] Clatu, but his earthly name was Mr. Clatu Baratu Nictu.

[705] Yeah, yeah.

[706] Yeah, right, exactly.

[707] Yeah.

[708] And that was really a reflection of, and by the way, in the climax scene where the authorities kill him and they put him in the tomb, and they put him in the tomb.

[709] And three days later, he's resurrected.

[710] Well, and then she goes to the robot and says, what you just said, Gort, Clotu, Barata, Nicto.

[711] 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.

[712] Now, in the original script, she, the Mary Magdalene character woman, says Patricia Neal, you mean this is the power that extraterrestials have?

[713] And in the original one, he goes, yeah, we have the power of life and death.

[714] And that Breen Censorship Board in 1950s said, no, no, no, you can't say that to the American public.

[715] Really?

[716] Yeah.

[717] The censorship boards are that?

[718] 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.

[719] Offend.

[720] Yeah.

[721] So they changed the script.

[722] Yeah.

[723] Offent.

[724] Yeah.

[725] So they changed the script.

[726] Now he says something like, oh, no, no, we don't have the power.

[727] Only the great spirit in this guy or something has that power.

[728] I didn't know that there was a censorship board that would monitor films and say, you can't say these things.

[729] Same way we have it for, you know, ratings, PG ratings.

[730] Yeah, but it's science fiction.

[731] Yeah.

[732] They had censorship boards for science.

[733] fiction, but they didn't for vampires?

[734] Well, I mean, even Star Trek, the original series, I mean, Roddenberry had to sneak in a lot of, you know, anti -Vietnam war, you know, commentary through these characters and had to be careful of how they were, you know, kind of presented because censorship boards are like that.

[735] You know, Captain Kirkie, you know, we always got the woman, but, you know, you never saw anything, right?

[736] Right, but that's just how things were back then.

[737] But I didn't know that they would have a censorship board that would say you can't offend religious people by saying that aliens have the power.

[738] to bring things back from the dead.

[739] Right, because there it kind of secularizes God.

[740] So in this scenario, I call this Shermer's Last Law, is one of my scientific American columns, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence would be indistinguishable from God.

[741] Right.

[742] Because as you went through the scenario earlier, a thousand years more advanced than us, a million years more advanced than us.

[743] Look how far we've come in a hundred years, extrapolate that out.

[744] They'd be able to engineer life forms, probably even engineer entire planetary systems.

[745] to create Dyson spheres to capture this, the light, all these fantastic scenarios.

[746] That would all be possible if you had a sufficient time and intelligence.

[747] How would that be any different from what religions think God is?

[748] Well, hasn't there been, wasn't there some sort of a recent experiment where they created an artificial life form that had, what was that thing?

[749] Do you know, we discussed this.

[750] it was a they had developed some sort of a an artificial embryo you know what I'm talking about yeah yeah yeah some sort of an artificially created embryo I think it even had a heartbeat yes that's right and before that an artificial genome yes I mean it's coming Joe it's it's coming scientists grow synthetic embryo with brain and beating heart without eggs or sperm right yeah I mean and now extrapolate go from here to 100 ,000 years of technology as long as we don't low ourselves up or have a super volcano kills all.

[751] Scientists through 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.

[752] Pretty wild shit.

[753] Well, it's just a molecular machine, you know, life.

[754] And once you know the blueprint, you just print it out.

[755] So we're getting there.

[756] It's a hard problem, but, you know, it's coming.

[757] And it may not happen in our lifetime, you know, Ray Kurzweil's, the singularity is coming, 2030, 2040, just take it out two centuries, right?

[758] It's coming.

[759] Something like that is coming.

[760] And how would it be any different from what our religions describe God as an omniscient, omnipotent being?

[761] Right, especially if you go a million years from now, a million years of evolution, we conceivably would have the power of gods.

[762] Yeah, it's coming.

[763] Yeah.

[764] Assuming we live our life long enough.

[765] So if you think of a life form that exists out there 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 all of our chaos and our territorial behavior and the fact that we have these thermonuclear weapons or pointing them at each other?

[766] I think they'd be pretty interested.

[767] Or in the plot of many of these, like the day of the Aristottsdale, warning us.

[768] Yeah.

[769] Stop doing this or else.

[770] Or intervening.

[771] You know, there's been discussions about them hovering over nuclear facilities.

[772] Yes, I know about that.

[773] But that may be a selection bias of where the cameras are located or where the, you know, monitoring of that.

[774] Of course, we have more monitoring around our nuclear sites.

[775] Sure.

[776] Missile sites.

[777] So that could just be an artifact of measurement.

[778] But nevertheless, your larger point.

[779] Yes, maybe.

[780] Yes, maybe.

[781] Yes, maybe.

[782] Got to be skeptical.

[783] Well, not in principle just because you're a cynic or a nihilist, not for that reason.

[784] The question is, is, you know, what should we believe, you know, justified true belief?

[785] What should I believe is true?

[786] Some things are true.

[787] Some things are not.

[788] I want to believe the correct things.

[789] How do I know, right?

[790] So this is what, you know, science has kind of developed, science and rationality of over the centuries.

[791] Okay, so we know we're biased.

[792] We know we have to be careful about the confirmation bias.

[793] and the hindsight bias and so on.

[794] So we have to set up some kind of system where it's not just me claiming it.

[795] You can look at it to.

[796] You can run the experiment.

[797] Here's how I did it.

[798] You do it.

[799] And when that's not done, we have all kinds of problems like the replication crisis in psychology and medical science over the last decade or so.

[800] You know, some significant two -digit percentage of these experiments can't be replicated.

[801] Even though they went through peer -reviewed professional journals and they were done by professional scientists at real universities and so on.

[802] And so this is a problem, it's a hard, it's hard to know what to believe.

[803] But there's also a problem of basing science on falsified studies, like the Alzheimer's issue that they're dealing with now, 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 because obviously I'm not a scientist, but this, there's a series of Alzheimer's drugs that were based on research that was falsified.

[804] And they're finding this out now.

[805] And this is a terrible thing for people that have invested their health in these medications, people that have promoted these medications, that this was all based on falsified data.

[806] Or how about the...

[807] Find that, because that's pretty fascinating.

[808] Because that, here it is.

[809] This is a legitimate conspiracy.

[810] Neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication and scores of Alzheimer's articles threatening a reigning theory of the disease.

[811] That's terrifying to find out that the people that are responsible for doing these experiments falsified.

[812] Matthew Shrag, a neuroscientist and physician of Vanderbilt University, got a call that would plunge him into a maelstrom of possible scientific misconduct.

[813] A colleague wanted to connect him with an attorney investigating an experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease called simophilam.

[814] The drug's developer, Cassava sciences, claimed in improved cognition partially, partly by repairing a protein that can block sticky brain deposits of the protein amyloid beta, a hallmark of Alzheimer's.

[815] 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 Simulam may have been fraudulent, according to a petition later filed on the behalf of the U .S. Food and Drug Administration.

[816] So this is a huge scandal in medical science.

[817] Right.

[818] And this one appears to be more fraud than just error or bias.

[819] That's horrible, right?

[820] Yeah, this is what whistleblowers are for.

[821] Often these things are exposed through insiders.

[822] I mean, almost always, rare that a journalist from the outside discovers that's usually a grad student or something that's suspicious of what the mentor professor is doing.

[823] So that, yeah, that's a problem, right?

[824] So that's why you have to disclose any financial connections you have to companies that might be affiliated with a drug that could treat the thing you're studying, that sort of thing.

[825] So there's more pressure to do that.

[826] There was another big meta -analysis on SSRIs, the antidepressants, showing, you know, big massive meta -analysis.

[827] You know, 50 years we've been prescribing these SSRIs for depression, and they do no better than nothing or just chance or just, you know, talking to friends or whatever.

[828] Well, also that this idea that it's a chemical imbalance of the brain is not based on science.

[829] Yeah, well, it's based on something, but it's probably incorrect science or fraudulent.

[830] I don't know if it's fraudulent.

[831] You know, that's a pretty hefty charge to heave on a scientist.

[832] That's the end of their career.

[833] It's the end of their lives.

[834] If they get convicted of actual fraud, they'll never work again.

[835] That's different than making errors.

[836] Well, this Alzheimer's thing is certainly based on fraud.

[837] It looks like it.

[838] And it looks like it was successful for decades, which is terrifying.

[839] Yeah.

[840] Well, and, you know, there's dozens of examples like this from, say, the last 50 years.

[841] Sure.

[842] But it's still rare, and usually scientists that figure it out and then call them out.

[843] Yeah, ultimately.

[844] I like to think of it that it works reasonably well, right?

[845] I mean, we find out about the errors, the mistakes.

[846] I mean, creationists always used to point out the errors that evolutionary biologists made, therefore God did it, right?

[847] The theory is not sound, right?

[848] But it was always scientists that disclosed that the error was made by another scientist.

[849] Different scientists.

[850] Do have, there is an incentive to uncover these things.

[851] Right, right, right.

[852] So now there's a movement of foot to kind of have scientists, say, ahead of time, post on these websites.

[853] This is the experiment I'm going to do.

[854] Here's exactly what I'm going to do.

[855] I will report all of the data.

[856] So then you avoid the file drawer problem where you only publish the successful.

[857] ones, the rest go in the file drawer that are non -success.

[858] You know, so this, I mean, a lot of major journals will not publish replication experiments.

[859] They're not interested in that.

[860] They want cutting -edge new research.

[861] Well, this is a problem because, like, again, you know, if you have this theory and no one can replicate it, but no one wants to publish the non -replication because it's not interesting, then you can go down this rabbit hole of, you know, of an error perpetrating for decades.

[862] How can they mitigate these problems?

[863] Well, that would be one way, you know, just transparency.

[864] Right.

[865] But how could they mitigate the issue of a lack of transparency?

[866] Is it funding?

[867] Is it promotion of these?

[868] Okay, so some of the publisher parish pressure leads.

[869] There's studies on why scientists commit fraud, and it's, again, like conspiracies, it's not a big grand thing.

[870] It's just like wants to get tenure.

[871] Right, right, right, right.

[872] Just, you know, keep his job.

[873] I remember one of the most interesting podcasts you had with Edward Snowden, and you guys were talking about conspiracies.

[874] and he starts talking about, let me tell you how it really works.

[875] Behind closed doors, it's just bureaucrats trying to keep their job.

[876] Right?

[877] So they're ramping up the threat of terrorism because if we don't have a threat, then we're going to lose our funding, right?

[878] So very narrow.

[879] I just want to keep our funding for our department.

[880] And a lot of science works that way.

[881] Without, let's say, external private money, you know, there's a massive competition for public government money for research.

[882] And that leads to these.

[883] You know, I'll just report the positive ones.

[884] Or I'll kind of throw out these data points because they're too extreme, and that'll bring my P value level to where I need it.

[885] That's called P hacking.

[886] And, you know, the P value is the probability of it being chance rather than a real effect.

[887] And it's set at 0 .05 or 0 .01, and maybe, you know, you're at 0 .06.

[888] You go, well, I got this outlier data point here.

[889] So I'm just going to not count that.

[890] Then all of a sudden now your P value is at 0 .04.

[891] Oh, I'm in.

[892] Now I can publish it.

[893] You know, this used to happen.

[894] lot now there's pressure like no pe hacking right so it's the it's kind of the shift in norms like in like in journalism is kind of going through this now you know where's the fact checkers and the editors of the editors and you know the editors editors should be have editors right and you know because too much gets published right as managing the managers yeah or you know like yeah just think about like the Kyle Rittenhouse story right and there's a bunch like that that it fed 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'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 mean because it kind of fit the conservative view of you know liberals and their confusion about gender and sex and and but the kitty litter boxes is a weird one it is weird it's like an urban legend I fed into that and let me I should probably clarify that a little bit I have a a friend and my friend's wife is a school teacher 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 this is 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 to that school she works for another school she contacted the other school she didn't get a response.

[895] I don't think they actually did it.

[896] I think there was discussions 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.

[897] The reason why I was interested in it and willing to entertain it was, there was a 10 years or so ago, we went to, uh, there was a UFC in Pittsburgh.

[898] And when we went there, as we landed where we're driving from the airport to the hotel, we see all these people with mascot outfits on.

[899] We're like, what is going on?

[900] And we talked to this guy and he said, there's a furry convention in town.

[901] And I said, wow, this is crazy.

[902] So they all decided to get together.

[903] So they were at bars and on the streets.

[904] And it was like a get together.

[905] They used to do it in San Diego.

[906] But at the time, San Diego was a little bit more conservative and they were having a hard time doing it.

[907] So they moved it to Pittsburgh.

[908] And this was the year they moved it to Pittsburgh.

[909] This is according to him.

[910] So we check into the hotel.

[911] The hotel, The guy was working the front desk was saying how crazy it was that these folks were asking for their food to be delivered in bowls on the ground so they could eat it like animals and I like that is crazy and then he said they asked for a litter box in the lobby now they didn't put a litter box into the lobby but someone according to this man asked him for a litter box.

[912] I'm like that is crazy.

[913] So I went and did a deep dive online.

[914] I went.

[915] I went.

[916] went to forums where furries go, because I was trying to find, like, is this a thing?

[917] Do they like to use litter boxes?

[918] Out of all of my searching, I could only find one poster, one guy who said he had used a litter box.

[919] So this one person who was saying that he thought it was kinky and he liked to use it, he, they, it, them, whatever, like to use a litter box.

[920] So that was all I could find.

[921] So is that something that people do?

[922] Or is it something that people talk about doing because it's fun?

[923] I don't know But one of the things that I found about these furries is like it's sexual in some sort of weird way They they they like to get together and have sex with their furry outfits on and they don't want people to know who they are Or what they want to keep the outfits on it's a cosplay kind of thing.

[924] Yeah, it's like a cosplay kink thing that some people engage in like how that got connected to gender, I do not understand.

[925] Because it seems to be a completely different sort of kink.

[926] But what I think people have concern with is that it's nonsense and that it's crazy.

[927] And if this nonsense starts getting into schools, because there are, Jamie, what was the thing that you were telling me?

[928] Someone was telling you about one kid thinks they're a wolf and they, and they, honestly don't know if I, I still need to, I think it's, I think they're trolling.

[929] I think there's something to happen on TikTok.

[930] Right.

[931] Got out of hand.

[932] In that film, what is a woman?

[933] Oh, there was that one person that said that they're a wolf.

[934] I mean, you can always find somebody.

[935] 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.

[936] But, like, you should see how different they are when they do it.

[937] Right.

[938] They went from being very reserved to, like, outgoing.

[939] Right, because it allows them to, when they pretend that they're a wolf, they can just be freer.

[940] So maybe they're, like, very shy, you know, introverted kids.

[941] and this allows them, like, some form of escapism.

[942] Yeah.

[943] Like you said, like a cosplay type thing.

[944] Yeah, but so what happens then is, so there's an element of truth to the, this is true with conspiracy theory is always a little element of truth, and then it gets blown up into something else.

[945] And then if it gets politicized, oh, that's just the sort of thing those libtards would do in these schools are trying to groom our children.

[946] Right.

[947] You know, then you get a moral panic.

[948] It's like the satanic panic of the 1980s, started with that McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach.

[949] Yes.

[950] Yes, we'll talk about that because that's pretty crazy.

[951] Totally crazy.

[952] So this was kind of in the time in psychology where Freudianism, sort of unconscious memories of things and so on, we're becoming popular.

[953] And there was this idea that, you know, there's a lot of molestation and secret satanic cults all over America.

[954] And there's a lot of these kind of preschools.

[955] So the McMartin preschool case was based on children telling these.

[956] fantastic stories about the stuff that was going on at the day school.

[957] Now, you have kids, I have kids.

[958] It's like how this is impossible for parents not to know this.

[959] Oh, they have tunnels, underground tunnels where they have horses.

[960] They take them out to Catalina and they do these satanic things to them and what the parents, no one had noticed this.

[961] And they were kind of coaching the kids when they were asking the kids these questions like, what did they do?

[962] Did they do this?

[963] And the kids are like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[964] Remember the anatomical dolls, anatomically correct dolls?

[965] Now show me where he touched you.

[966] Right.

[967] And worse, you know, they separate the kids from their parents that moms outside and the little kids scared to death in this room.

[968] Yeah.

[969] And then he's like, okay, he touched me there.

[970] Can I go back to my mommy now?

[971] Right.

[972] And then this ruined people's lives and careers and these people were accused of these horrible things that it turns out they did not do.

[973] They didn't do.

[974] Before the OJ trial, this was the longest, most expensive trial in California history that McMartin preschool case.

[975] But it launched this kind of satanic panic around America.

[976] There's one of these cults in every city.

[977] And finally, the FBI got involved.

[978] but, all right, we better look into this, and they, you know, found nothing.

[979] Okay, you can always find some weirdo who's a Satanist, right?

[980] And maybe they do some weird things with a cat or something, or a cat gets mutilated by a dog, and then you've got the Satanist, he's over there, and then the mutilated cat was found over there.

[981] There must be some connection, and before you know it, you get this spiraling moral panic.

[982] Right.

[983] And it was similar to the recovered memory movement in the 90s, that when we started in 92, we started covering this, because it was the same kind of thing, where these were, were adult, mostly women, going into therapy for various issues, sleep problems, depression, weight issues, whatever.

[984] And the therapist who had bought in all this Freudian stuff that you suppress, you suppress your memories.

[985] And we can get them out as if memory is like a video recording and you can watch it on the little Cartesian theater of your mind as if there's a little homunculus in there looking at the screen.

[986] Okay, play back for me what's your father to know.

[987] They don't start off like that.

[988] They're just, okay, so what?

[989] What are your