Finally…The Truth with Michael Shermer

Is there such a thing as objective truth? Are we living in a post-truth world? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly sit down to build a toolkit for finding the truth in an era of motivated reasoning, misinformation, and alternative facts with science historian and professional skeptic, Michael Shermer.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, are you objectively true?

• 0:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Maybe. But then again, there's your truths, my truths, and Chuck's truths.

• 0:07Chuck Nice?

  And I know for a fact that mine's a lie.

• 0:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up, StarTalk Special Edition, all about truth, is it still there? Coming up.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition, which means we got Gary O'Reilly right here next to me.

• 0:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Hi Neil.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary!

• 0:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love having you.

• 0:41Gary O'Reilly?

  I love being here.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Chuck, how you doing, man?

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  I'm doing great.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you cooked up an episode, you and your producers cooked up an episode today, that, oh my gosh, this is an eternal subject, and take us in.

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  The truth. Is it out there? Yes. But, so apparently is trust, but do you trust the teller of the truth?

• 1:05Chuck Nice?

  Everyone trusts me.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  I'm the most truthy person that you'll ever meet. I make up the truth, I'm so good at it.

• 1:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it noise? Is it biased? Is it fake news? Are they alternative facts? But then stop and think for a second and ask, do we actually examine the truth differently for, say, science, or then for history or politics, even religion? How about UAPs and aliens? Yeah, might talk about them as well. What if there was a toolbox of sorts that could help you build a skillset that could get you closer to what you might call the true true?

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Instead of the fake truth, the true truth.

• 1:50Gary O'Reilly?

  There we go. So Neil, I think, let's bring in our guest.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Well, I am delighted and honored to bring in someone who I can claim as a friend for decades. It is the one and only Michael Shermer. Michael, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 2:04Michael Shermer?

  Nice to see you all. We don't go back to a previous life?

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, maybe, maybe. That's a different episode. And welcome to my office here at the Hidden Planetarium. And you're author of a dozen books, each one trying to get people to think straight in a different way. You are a founder of the Skeptic Society, is that correct? And there's a magazine called The Skeptic.

• 2:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sensibly titled.

• 2:29Gary O'Reilly?

  That was a focus group.

• 2:32Chuck Nice?

  As I like to call it, fake news.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and you are also host of-

• 2:37Gary O'Reilly?

  That's pretty good. I encourage him.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're also host of the Michael Shermer Show, it's your own podcast. And how did you come up with that name for it?

• 2:47Michael Shermer?

  Oh, it's original, huh?

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we're good. And your latest book, oh my gosh, because this, this could have almost written itself in the time and the place that this needs to appear. It's just called Truth.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  Man, that is an ambitious title, I gotta say.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, here's the problem. The real problem is that this book is even necessary.

• 3:10Chuck Nice?

  Well...

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who would have thought?

• 3:13Chuck Nice?

  You know, yeah, I mean, in this day and age, it's far more necessary, though.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying. I'm just saying, I'm sad that you had to write this book.

• 3:22Michael Shermer?

  Well, thank you, yes. Well, that's the problem. And so I start with the idea that there is no truth and we're living in a post-truth world, which the moment somebody opens their mouth and says that, it can't be true because they're making an argument. Which is searching for truth.

• 3:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Spreading the deep end.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, wait, can we start in the toddler pool first?

• 3:41Chuck Nice?

  Kid pool first. I mean, my man is like, he's standing in the, in the, in the square in ancient Greece, just like.

• 3:48Gary O'Reilly?

  We're gonna need lifeguards for this.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, okay, can we unpack what you just said?

• 3:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 3:55Michael Shermer?

  Well, so there's people, you know, fake news, alternative facts, or post-modernism, there is no truth. My truth is as good as your truth. Scientific truths are just another narrative, just another story like anybody else's story. Nothing special. This is what people say, right? So, so we counter that, these are the so-called science wars, we counter that by saying, actually, there are objective truths, and we can get at them. Here are the methods we have, that's chapters two, three, and four, of how to get there.

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so.

• 4:23Chuck Nice?

  So Wade, I'm sorry, before we go further, can you define objective truth then? Because that, if we don't do that right now, then everything else we say is kind of-

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's do that right now.

• 4:34Chuck Nice?

  It's really kind of flimsy.

• 4:35Michael Shermer?

  Something confirmed to such an extent, it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent.

• 4:40Chuck Nice?

  Something confirmed to such-

• 4:43Michael Shermer?

  A degree.

• 4:43Chuck Nice?

  A degree, that it would be reasonable to offer-

• 4:46Michael Shermer?

  Our provisional assent.

• 4:48Chuck Nice?

  Our provisional assent.

• 4:49Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, that's the key word in there.

• 4:51Michael Shermer?

  It could be wrong, I could be wrong.

• 4:53Chuck Nice?

  That word's doing a lot of lifting, Michael.

• 4:54Michael Shermer?

  I know, so, I start with the premise that, whether there's a God or not, I know for sure it's not me, and it's not you, or you, or you, sorry.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  That's right, we know who it is. I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you know it's not any of us?

• 5:09Michael Shermer?

  Well, because we're all, so it starts with fallibility, and we're all, could be wrong about anything. So we start with the idea that I may have my personal truths, but I might be wrong, so I need to ask you to double check for me. You know, if I think I believe X, can you look and double check for me to see if I'm hallucinating?

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many people do that?

• 5:27Michael Shermer?

  Almost nobody, which is why I wrote the book. Well, you scientists do.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we do.

• 5:32Michael Shermer?

  But you're trained to do that.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anytime we come up with an idea, I say, could you check this? Did I make an error? Can you double check my calculations?

• 5:37Chuck Nice?

  You actually go, you go get your haters.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, ideally.

• 5:40Chuck Nice?

  It's called a peer review.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ideally.

• 5:41Chuck Nice?

  You get your haters, and they come in, and they go, yeah, this is bullshit.

• 5:46Michael Shermer?

  So you remember Carl Sagan's dragon in my garage story from Demon Hunter World?

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard it, but I was never able to retell it.

• 5:52Michael Shermer?

  Okay, I'll retell it.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you can please.

• 5:54Michael Shermer?

  There's a dragon in my garage, would you like to see it? Oh my God, that'd be so cool. So I take you to the garage, I open it up, you look in, there's some bicycles and paint cans and a ladder, you don't see any dragon. I go, well, it's an invisible dragon. You go, oh, okay. How about we sprinkle some flour on the floor, and we'll catch the footprints of the dragon walking around? Well, you see, this is a invisible levitating dragon, it hovers above the ground about a foot. All right, how about we get one of those thermometers they used in COVID, where you point it at people's forehead, get the temperature, we'll see the outline of the dragon walking around in there. No, this is a cold-blooded dragon. How about the fire?

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, when you're cold-blooded, you are the temperature of your environment. So they don't necessarily have cold blood.

• 6:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just don't maintain-

• 6:34Chuck Nice?

  They don't, they don't create their own warmth.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Their own warmth.

• 6:37Chuck Nice?

  They don't create it.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no, right, so they would be, they wouldn't show up on an infrared camera.

• 6:40Michael Shermer?

  That's right. Or the fire, it's cold fire, okay. What's the difference between an invisible levitating, cold-blooded, cold-fire-breathing dragon and no dragon at all? And you can't say, well, I feel the presence of the dragon when I'm in the room, or I feel the love of the dragon. That's all fine for you personally, but at some point, for us to believe there's actually a dragon, we gotta have some evidence. And that's science.

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  By the way, Michael, I just wanna go on record and say, if an old white man comes to me and say, there's a dragon in my garage, would you like to see it? I'm calling the police.

• 7:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you respond to it.

• 7:12Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now suppose, just while, while we're there, okay? Suppose you are so charismatic, you are so lovable, you are so articulate.

• 7:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Manipulative?

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure, that anyone you speak to of this dragon ends up feeling the presence of the dragon just the way you do.

• 7:33Michael Shermer?

  Ooh.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out of the power of suggestion. Why doesn't that then constitute evidence? Because that's how you get cults.

• 7:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 7:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the people in the cult feel what the, what the leader of the cult feels. Why doesn't that constitute a certain kind of evidence?

• 7:45Michael Shermer?

  So for science, we need external validation of your internal state. So maybe you do feel this, fine, that's your truth, but for me to believe it, I need to have some external validation. So if I take ayahuasca, and I realize, and I tell you, oh my God, there's this, all of this spirit world, I saw the entities, they were floating out there, here's the color, I felt their love and so on, and you go, can you show me the evidence? And I go, here, you take the ayahuasca, and you'll see it too. That's still in your brain, it's still an internal truth. We need to have some measure of it.

• 8:14Chuck Nice?

  Now suppose that, and I'm playing devil's advocate here, because what you just, I've actually experienced that.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With ayahuasca?

• 8:21Chuck Nice?

  With ayahuasca.

• 8:22Michael Shermer?

  You did?

• 8:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God, it was amazing.

• 8:23Michael Shermer?

  Right.

• 8:25Chuck Nice?

  And I always-

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he's on it now.

• 8:28Michael Shermer?

  Did you feel like there really is this other place that you can-

• 8:31Chuck Nice?

  It's more than a feeling, that's, and that's why people are so incredibly passionate about it, because it's-

• 8:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, you took it under a very controlled-

• 8:40Chuck Nice?

  Very controlled, in a place where, yes, they have medical staff on board.

• 8:45Michael Shermer?

  And will, what will, if I come back and go, Neil, I was wrong, there is this other spirit world.

• 8:49Chuck Nice?

  You will not come back and say that. Now, you might say that there's a possibility that there's a spirit realm, and that somehow in the altered consciousness, we're able to tap into it, but we can't do it otherwise. You might say that, but the truth is, everything that, the entire time that I was going through, and you're not high, that's the misconception, you're not, you're not high, okay? But as you're in this altered state, the only thing I kept saying, as I was looking at beings, whoo. Who were in front of me.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Chuck Nice?

  I'm like, it wasn't like in a hallucinization, a hallucinize, whatever.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 9:24Chuck Nice?

  They're there. To me, they're there, but I knew they weren't there. And I kept saying, these are artifacts of my mind's making.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:32Chuck Nice?

  I kept telling myself that. However, what my mind, through this experience, revealed to me was so deep and so useful that it felt like this couldn't have come from me. But I know for a fact that it had to come from me.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 9:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay, because

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're rationalizing.

• 9:53Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm not even really, I am rationalizing. You're absolutely right.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But someone less rational than you, it's a whole other

• 10:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're all in. They're all in.

• 10:02Chuck Nice?

  By the way, it still exists for, as that for me as well. Because it's so real. Like I said, it's more than a feeling. It's, it's a connection that feels completely external. But, but guess what? I know for a fact that it was coming from my brain.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Michael, getting back to the dragon in the garage.

• 10:22Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a charismatic cult leader, one by one, people are drawn in. And for them, the evidence is that they feel it. So at some point, you need someone who is not swayed by the charisma of the leader, who then would be counted as an outside reference.

• 10:39Michael Shermer?

  That's why cult leaders don't want you to engage with people on the outside.

• 10:42Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:43Chuck Nice?

  Or you need a device.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why they're

• 10:46Michael Shermer?

  Or, yeah, yeah.

• 10:46Chuck Nice?

  Or you need a device.

• 10:47Michael Shermer?

  The E-meters. Well, if I could just say something about your experience. So in my model of truth, there is a realm of personal truths that are true for you and do make a difference in your life. So when somebody says, I found Jesus or God or whatever, and it changed my life. I'm not saying you should believe. I'm not saying I can prove it. I'm just saying this is what worked for me. I'm fine with that. Yeah.

• 11:08Chuck Nice?

  I think that's wonderful.

• 11:08Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Chuck Nice?

  Especially if it changes for the better.

• 11:11Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, well, yeah, hopefully.

• 11:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Is what Chuck was describing with his experience, what people are calling truciness, the truth you want to believe?

• 11:18Michael Shermer?

  Well, a little bit, but that was Colbert's, you know, riff on, on more political kind of truths. I think this is more internal.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Gary O'Reilly?

  But is that the truth that you personally believe and the one that you want to believe?

• 11:32Michael Shermer?

  Yes, yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's an extra step there where I would really like this to be true. Now I'm going to find the evidence for it. That's not helpful. This is slightly different. Again, I think if there's experiences you have that change or, you know, people have near death experiences. Do they really go to heaven? Probably not, but it changed their life. Now they've, you know, they're doing this and that instead of what they used to do. Okay.

• 11:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And I will say, um, the, and I'm going to get off the ayahuasca thing because it's not what we're about. But the biggest benefit to me was I was on several neurotransmitter disease, um, medications. And I was able to come off all of them under the supervision of my psychiatrist.

• 12:14Michael Shermer?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:14Chuck Nice?

  Who was like, hey, man, I don't know what to say. Like, we don't have these answers in neuroscience right now, but clearly something happened and boom. And I haven't taken them since. So that's

• 12:27Michael Shermer?

  I would like scientists to be more open minded about that sort of thing. They tend, they tend to be pretty dogmatically skeptical of that.

• 12:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Michael Shermer?

  I think we need to keep the door open for these kinds of experiences, just in case.

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But part of that skepticism is because if you were a betting person, most of such claims would not

• 12:43Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  pan out.

• 12:44Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so if a scientist has limited time, you're going to say, well, investigate this because it surely works. But you're just in a line of people making exactly the same suggestion of the time of the scientist.

• 12:55Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so

• 12:57Gary O'Reilly?

  So go back to the dragon scenario.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Gary O'Reilly?

  And you've got the, I suppose deception of a false narrative. But are we programmed to be self deceiving in the way that we will absorb a truth that we know may or may not be?

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's because you started saying there's a truth you want to be so. And then you look for evidence in support of it. A good scientist will certainly want their hypothesis to be correct. But a good scientist will try to find ways to show that it's not.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's two very different paths.

• 13:29Michael Shermer?

  If you don't find the flaws in your research, somebody else will. With great glee and they'll publish it.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:35Michael Shermer?

  So the whole development of science is to get around those issues. Our brains are more like lawyers than scientists. We want to win the case for our side, not find out what's actually true. So that's what we have to work against.

• 13:57Chuck Nice?

  I'm Brian Futterman and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 14:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Is there a, an identikit standard construction of a truth?

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What word did you just use?

• 14:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Identikit. So you come

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know what that means.

• 14:18Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, I'll make some words up.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Identikit?

• 14:20Gary O'Reilly?

  A kit, an identikit. So you get

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Identikit?

• 14:24Gary O'Reilly?

  The truth has to have this, this, this, this, and this in it. It's how you structure it and bring it. Is there a standard?

• 14:30Michael Shermer?

  Well, there's tools we use, you know, correlation and randomized controlled trials and these sorts of things, statistical tests that science has developed over the last century and a half or so to see.

• 14:40Gary O'Reilly?

  But how about us as an individual rather than as a scientist?

• 14:44Michael Shermer?

  Individually, we, no, we're more subject to this motivated reasoning. I want this to be true. Now I'm going to just collect all the evidence that confirms it. Ignore the evidence that disconfirms it. Everybody does this confirmation. Everybody does it.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Motivated reasoning. I like that phrase.

• 14:58Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, we're motivated to find what we already want to be true. Find evidence for it.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And at some, at some point, can you really fault people for that? I mean, we're human, right? We're subject to the whims of our emotions.

• 15:10Michael Shermer?

  And also

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And our desires.

• 15:12Michael Shermer?

  We have to trust our institutions and, uh, well, because who can fact, well, you don't have to, but who can fact check everything, right? I mean, I never saw the Chinese spy balloon with my own eyes, but I accept the, the high resolution photograph. There was the jet shooting it down. It was on all the news. The president, the secretary of defense, they all said it's real. By contrast, the UFO videos are always grainy and blurry. You can't quite make it out. No one will confirm it. It's all like, oh, it's classified. We can't show you. That's very different.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so two different examples of news reports. One has a level of evidence that doesn't leave you skeptical of the claim. Because the images of that spy balloon were pretty high resolution.

• 15:54Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can see, you know.

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  So what do you do with the, I'll call it, the trust of the masses? Where so many people believe something, but the thing that they believe is still wrong.

• 16:06Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, so

• 16:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Is that the my side? Sorry, Chuck, is that the my side bias?

• 16:09Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is my side bias?

• 16:11Michael Shermer?

  Right. My religion is right. My political party is right. If you want to go into the Trump thing.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Trump spirit comes upon him.

• 16:22Chuck Nice?

  First time anybody's ever cued Trump.

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't, we don't summon Trump. Trump appears on his own.

• 16:31Michael Shermer?

  He's a channeler. So again, I mean, uh, you know, the, the levels of trust the public has in scientific institutions, medical institutions and the academy, universities has plummeted to an all time low post COVID. This is a problem. So we need, that's one of the reasons I wrote this book was like, hey, you know, these, these institutions actually work pretty well. They usually get it right. Sometimes they're wrong. I would, I would have preferred our institutions to couch their recommendations in more probabilistic. Right now, this is what we think about masks or vaccines or whatever, social distancing. Sixty, fifty, fifty, we're going to go with this. Maybe next week we'll change our mind.

• 17:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Michael Shermer?

  They could have done that.

• 17:08Chuck Nice?

  That was the

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was never done.

• 17:10Chuck Nice?

  That was the worst thing they did is the fact that the best available evidence, no one ever used those terms, but it's hard to engender trust when you preface everything with the best available evidence up until now. And then people go, whoa, well, what's that supposed to mean?

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think there's some hope there because when we grew up, I think we're, you know, in the same decadal age.

• 17:33Michael Shermer?

  We're young. Yeah.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Polling results were not given with uncertainties and now they are.

• 17:40Michael Shermer?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Okay, they just gave a number.

• 17:42Chuck Nice?

  They just gave a number.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was like the number.

• 17:44Chuck Nice?

  Right. Now it's plus or minus three points.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So that was an important achievement, I think.

• 17:50Michael Shermer?

  You'll hear people say things like, my priors are this, and I changed my, upgraded my priors and my credence is now that. That's a whole Bayesian area of statistics that people have no idea what they're actually saying, but they've inculcated it from just pop culture.

• 18:04Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:04Michael Shermer?

  And this is a good thing. Like

• 18:05Chuck Nice?

  It is.

• 18:06Michael Shermer?

  I'm going to, it's okay if I change my mind. Yeah.

• 18:08Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yes, absolutely. And I think that's very important too, to give people the leeway to say, it's okay if I'm wrong. The best thing I like about science, it is hands down the number one thing since I've been working with Neil for all these years. The thing that I appreciate the most is information that has changed. When better information has come along and nobody, the world, the, the, the, the science world is not set on fire. They're like, yeah, okay, well, we got better information.

• 18:39Michael Shermer?

  Now, one proviso on that is that just because that idea was wrong and that one is wrong. My idea is surely right, even though you think I'm wrong. I'm one of the heritage. I'm Galileo.

• 18:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm right. Yeah, and everybody else is right. So does AI help or hurt this exercise?

• 18:55Michael Shermer?

  It's a tool. I don't know. We don't know yet. It's a, it's a useful tool with, which is going to

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the search for truth.

• 19:01Michael Shermer?

  Yes, yeah, absolutely. But you got to check the sites, the sources they cite.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they provide they give

• 19:06Michael Shermer?

  Some of the sources are, they're hallucinating. They're not real. Right? If you click on the link, it's like that actual article was, doesn't actually exist.

• 19:14Gary O'Reilly?

  When we spoke to Jeffrey Hinton, he said, some AI does have overconfidence.

• 19:18Michael Shermer?

  Overconfidence.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said that the hallucinations that we all know and laugh at with AI, he doesn't call them hallucinations. He calls them confabulations.

• 19:28Chuck Nice?

  Confabulations?

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 19:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Word of the day.

• 19:30Michael Shermer?

  That's good because we do that. Humans do that.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why he calls it that. We have fragmented memories of things and we fill it in so that the narrative can make sense to us.

• 19:40Michael Shermer?

  Reagan famously remembered things from movies he was in that actually hap, that he thought actually happened. It's like, no, that was a movie you did in fifties. Oh, yeah.

• 19:49Gary O'Reilly?

  If we go back to the my side, my side bias where people are believing things even though they know it's probably not right.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that true? Oh, sorry.

• 19:57Michael Shermer?

  I think most people.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very meta.

• 19:59Gary O'Reilly?

  And I came across the phrase, and I'm not sure if it's yours, if it is, I appreciate this, "A servant of belonging."

• 20:06Michael Shermer?

  That's not my phrase, but I like it.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does that mean? What does it mean?

• 20:10Michael Shermer?

  Well, so when people publicly signal, like the example I use in the book is, you know, asking undergraduates, "Do you accept Darwin's theory of evolution?" They go, "Oh, yeah, of course, yeah." Explain it. Well, they can't, you know? The giraffe stretches its neck and the baby giraffes have long... No, that's not it at all. So they're publicly signaling, "Yeah, the scientists tell us this is true, so it probably is." And so a lot of conspiracy theory proclamations, "Yeah, I think QAnon is real," or the pizza gate thing. I mean, if you really think about it, this cannot possibly be true. But what they're signaling is, "My side says this is a crazy, this is a conspiracy theory." And I do know there's bad things that hap... Those Democrats, they're up to no good. I don't know if Hillary actually, you know, did this at this pizza gate.

• 20:52Chuck Nice?

  But she did something.

• 20:53Michael Shermer?

  She did something, yeah. That's it, yeah.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That woman's guilty, find her. Find her, watch her guilty.

• 20:58Chuck Nice?

  I call it the past interference syndrome. If you're rooting for the team that the call was made against, it's not past interference. If you're rooting for the team that the call was made for, oh, it's definitely past interference. So you, and you actually see it that way.

• 21:11Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 21:12Chuck Nice?

  Like, you know.

• 21:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Who my truth and your truth?

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's back up a moment, just to get the vocabulary established. We refer to Bayesian reasoning. Could you just say something about that?

• 21:22Michael Shermer?

  So that's Reverend Thomas Bayes, who has this kind of statistical methods of when you should change your mind, when the evidence changes. So you start with, "Here's what I think is true based on the following points of evidence." Now, if those change, I may change my credence, that is, my belief, my confidence that this thing is true. And it's just an influx, constantly changing. This allows you to not be so committed to the belief that I have to defend it, like it's my territory and it's under attack. Rather, it's maybe true, maybe it's false, I don't know, this is my confidence level now, let's go there.

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a more fluid...

• 21:56Michael Shermer?

  It's more fluid, yeah.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a more fluid tracking of...

• 21:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So is there a point where truth is fixed, and fixed only, it can never be changed?

• 22:04Michael Shermer?

  Not in science. I mean, if it's a religious truth, this is what we believe... All right, so I'm trying this out in the book, that a lot of religious truths are actually more like literary truths. They're just stories that have deeper meaning behind them, like great literature, you know, a Jane Austen novel, or a Dostoevsky novel. Is there really a Middle Earth somewhere on the planet from J.R. Otokians?

• 22:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't ruin my dream.

• 22:26Michael Shermer?

  No, maybe it's in New Zealand.

• 22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 22:29Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're making a really good point, where we don't approach fiction declaring that it's false.

• 22:39Michael Shermer?

  Right, of course.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not, that's not, that's not the operative way to think about it. We approach fiction as a source of lessons, parables, ways of living, moral compass can come out of it. And so, that's why I've never liked it, when people say, "Is this fact or is it fiction?" Because that equates fiction with being false. And I'd rather fictional literature not be thought of as true or false. Same with mythologies. Just, is there a lesson in there? So now, pick up where you were going.

• 23:09Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, so like the story of Jonah and the whale or the great fish, you know, did he really live for three days in the belly of a great fish, who then spit him out at this other land where he goes to deliver the message, the moral message, to these other people, okay? You're missing the point of that story. It's not, you know, how do you live inside a fish for three days? You know, the three days is very symbolic, okay? And most Christians, when I, you know, of course, I don't know, it's probably not real, but you know, there's a deeper truth there, okay? How about the resurrection? Maybe that didn't actually literally happen, but it's a story about redemption, forget this, starting over, and they go, "Hang on, timeout."

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Timeout. Red card.

• 23:42Chuck Nice?

  You're messing with the whole foundation here now.

• 23:46Gary O'Reilly?

  You've got Moses and the parting of the Red Sea. I mean, you can't really, literally say it has to happen.

• 23:51Michael Shermer?

  Well, you know, people have sent us articles, "Skeptical, oh, that was caused by an earthquake or this tsunami."

• 23:56Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 23:57Michael Shermer?

  Or this volcano. Maybe it didn't happen at all, and it's just a story, right? And in the case of Jesus, you know, there's people that think, "Well, this is called the swoon theory, that he wasn't actually dead on the cross, he just fainted, he swooned." And then they put him in the cold cave that preserved him for a couple of days, and he woke up.

• 24:13Chuck Nice?

  He woke up.

• 24:14Michael Shermer?

  And then he married, went with Mary Magdalene, and if you want to go full Dan Brown, they moved to France, had kids.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Full Dan Brown.

• 24:19Gary O'Reilly?

  I get the reference, yeah.

• 24:21Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Illuminati's protecting their lone descendant today.

• 24:26Michael Shermer?

  So, again, most Christians go, "No, no, no, it has to literally happen." Now, why do they insist it literally happened? I think part of the reason is because we live in the age of science, where your core beliefs should have some foundation in evidence, to which I...

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the age of science.

• 24:40Michael Shermer?

  Yes, yeah, so I just, I think, okay.

• 24:43Gary O'Reilly?

  So are we swapping out the lenses for different subject matters?

• 24:46Michael Shermer?

  That's what I think we're doing, yeah.

• 24:48Gary O'Reilly?

  And the way that we will look at religion and biblical stories through one lens, and if you take politics or something else, and we talked about UAPs at the beginning of the show, and we see them in a totally, through a totally different lens, maybe more skeptical, maybe less skeptical.

• 25:00Michael Shermer?

  Well, this is my point, use the other, use the right lens to look at this thing. Read biblical stories as literature rather than as empirical claims.

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. But, you know, unfortunately...

• 25:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's going to hell. Just saying.

• 25:16Gary O'Reilly?

  We started our little chat here about post-truth era. Are we... Are we tiptoeing towards it?

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please say no to that.

• 25:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so what's the status?

• 25:29Michael Shermer?

  Well, that was my opening comment.

• 25:31Chuck Nice?

  So here's, before you even say anything, I'm really embarrassed to admit this now. What the hell does post-truth mean? What does that mean?

• 25:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Pay attention.

• 25:39Michael Shermer?

  This is what I'm asking.

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we're asking the man, okay?

• 25:41Michael Shermer?

  This is what I'm asking, what does that even mean?

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got a book with this title, see? Okay? So shut the hell up and let the man talk. Okay, go.

• 25:49Michael Shermer?

  Well, what it's supposed to mean from the kind of post-modernism and all that stuff in the 90s, 80s and 90s is that the old model was that there is an objective reality and truth that we can discover through science. The new reality is that science is just another narrative story that people tell, and it's no better or different than any other stories. So the Aboriginal Australian stories about the origins of life and so on is just as good as the, as your scientists. And so what we're pushing back against that is saying, "No, that, they're not equal."

• 26:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Michael Shermer?

  And so that would be post-truth, that there's no truth to be found. But, but when you actually read post-modernists, they're making an argument, and they're going, "Here's our evidence for it." It's like, that's a, that's not my post-truth, you're making an argument. So you're on the page with me, like, "All right, let's see what you got."

• 26:38Gary O'Reilly?

  So then, on the back of that, do you get the feeling that there are segments of society, whether it be east and west or whatever, that have just given up on the truth and have more or less just switched off?

• 26:50Michael Shermer?

  Well, some people have, yes. I mean, that was, remember Steve Bannon's famous line to Trump was, "Just flood the system of shit and then we'll tell them what's true, because they won't know what to think is true."

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He actually said that?

• 27:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he did.

• 27:04Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, he did, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This was in like 2015.

• 27:06Chuck Nice?

  He's a great guy, I gotta tell you, that Steve Bannon, he's something special.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was on a Real Time with him on one episode.

• 27:12Michael Shermer?

  Steve Bannon?

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. He seemed pretty okay at the time.

• 27:16Chuck Nice?

  See, that's the problem.

• 27:18Michael Shermer?

  Isn't that the trick of the devil?

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  That's the trick.

• 27:22Michael Shermer?

  The devil is very...

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He seemed like a regular guy. I'm just saying, I didn't...

• 27:27Chuck Nice?

  That's the disturbing part.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, can you give me a short list of the kind of biases we should look out for within ourselves?

• 27:35Chuck Nice?

  And how do we know they're not in your book?

• 27:37Michael Shermer?

  Well, you have to read the book. Check the evidence there. Well, so obviously, the big one, motivated reasoning, again, we're all just designed to look for and find evidence for what we want to be true, confirmation bias.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said we're designed.

• 27:49Michael Shermer?

  Well, designed by evolution.

• 27:51Chuck Nice?

  No! Look at that.

• 27:53Michael Shermer?

  There's one theory that reason evolved as not to find veridical truth, what's actually out there, but to win our arguments for our side. That's one case. Now, you know, we have to have some capacity to understand what the world is actually like in order to survive, so there's some, probably a balance there. But the idea is that we're going to win the argument for our tribe. That's the my-side bias.

• 28:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 28:13Michael Shermer?

  The hindsight bias, you know, after the fact, you look back at how things unfold, and you go, "Oh, it obviously had to be that way. My life had to come about that way, because look what happened." In fact, most of it's just random, and we're not good at detecting randomness, you know, in your business. You know, the stars in the sky are clustered, that's what randomness looks like. My favorite story from Steve Jobs is when they released the iPod shuffle feature that randomly played your songs off from your playlist. And people complained, and said, "Certain songs come up more than others, it's not random." It's like, no, that is what randomness looked like. So they had to program it to be less random, so people would feel it's random.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You program it so that it hits every song before it then redoes it, but that's not random.

• 28:53Chuck Nice?

  That isn't random.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not random at all.

• 28:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's like throwing the die and getting all the numbers in the world first.

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, before you go.

• 29:01Michael Shermer?

  Exactly, right. Or cancer clusters. "Oh, look, there's this community here, we gotta look to see if there's industrial waste stuff there, some company."

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they find the cancer cluster first.

• 29:10Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then they look for what could cause it.

• 29:12Michael Shermer?

  But there's other clusters where there's no cancer at all in this community, and no one goes in there and says, "Well, let's see what they're doing right." Because they ignore those misses, right? So that's one of the things that epidemiology, they have these tools, like we have to...

• 29:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said a cluster of no cancer.

• 29:27Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's just a whole...

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not even, no one's even called that in.

• 29:32Chuck Nice?

  Right, they're just like, "Well, these people are healthy."

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out what's causing that.

• 29:37Chuck Nice?

  What's causing all this health?

• 29:38Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't have that.

• 29:39Michael Shermer?

  There's not even a name for it.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, there's not even a name.

• 29:41Gary O'Reilly?

  It's not gonna make the news, people are healthy.

• 29:44Michael Shermer?

  Right.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 29:44Gary O'Reilly?

  No interest.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if they're living near high-power lines, no one's gonna say the high-power lines made them healthy.

• 29:49Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what kind of bias is that?

• 29:51Michael Shermer?

  Uh, well, that's just the, you know, well, I call that patternicity, tendency to find meaningful, uh, patterns in random noise. Most of it is just random.

• 30:00Chuck Nice?

  Right, like Jesus and a piece of toast.

• 30:02Michael Shermer?

  Yes, the Virgin Mary and the grilled cheese.

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but we're really good at that, but for reasons that I think are plausible, right? With the lion and the bushes, tell us that story.

• 30:12Michael Shermer?

  Right, yeah, so you hear a rustle in the grass, is it a dangerous predator, or is it just the wind? So if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator, and it turns out it's just the wind, that's just a false positive, no big deal, you just move aside. But if you make the other kind of error, in which you assume the rustle in the grass is just the wind, it's a dangerous predator, you get a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool early by making that mistake. So we tend to assume the worst, we tend to assume the pattern we think is real is really is real, just in case.

• 30:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:40Michael Shermer?

  Same thing with conspiracy theories, you know, most of them are not true, but some of them might be. Maybe it's better to err on the side that they really are after me. Even if they're not after me, they might be.

• 30:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:49Michael Shermer?

  So I better be cautious, just in case.

• 30:50Chuck Nice?

  It's funny when you say that, because I have talked, you know, I do a lot of work in climate. And one of the things I say is, everybody loves conspiracy theories, except the one conspiracy theory that's in front of everyone. And that is, a small group of companies got together and decided that, at all cost possible, they were gonna make sure that we dig shit, I'm sorry, that we dig stuff out of the ground and burn it, full well-knowing, since 1950-whatever, that it would destroy our planet. Now, that is a conspiracy! But you say that to people, they're like, dude, get the hell out of here.

• 31:27Michael Shermer?

  Well, same thing with tobacco, big tobacco, they knew.

• 31:29Chuck Nice?

  Big tobacco.

• 31:29Michael Shermer?

  They knew.

• 31:30Chuck Nice?

  They knew the deal.

• 31:30Michael Shermer?

  For a long time.

• 31:31Chuck Nice?

  That's a conspiracy. But these conspiracies, they're not sexy. They don't have aliens, and so nobody cares.

• 31:38Michael Shermer?

  That's right. I mean, the Illuminati, these 12 guys in London running the world, okay. But there are 12 CEOs in tobacco that, you know.

• 31:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:45Michael Shermer?

  They had meetings, we have their memos.

• 31:46Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 31:47Michael Shermer?

  And they, yeah.

• 31:48Chuck Nice?

  And they knew the deal, and they, and but, and you know, millions of people died, but yet somehow, that's not a conspiracy.

• 31:54Michael Shermer?

  They're the ones that, you had that phrase, you know, the jury is not in, or the, the science is not settled, we have to wait.

• 32:00Chuck Nice?

  We have to wait.

• 32:01Michael Shermer?

  That's what they came from.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, this notion of settled science, I, the people I've spoken with who would invoke that term, the way they bring it to the table is, there are these two research papers that are opposite the other 100. And so therefore, the science is not settled. Without realizing that there's always gonna be outlier research papers.

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so at some point.

• 32:23Chuck Nice?

  Especially when they're paid for by the people who don't, who want a different answer.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so tell me about the notion of consensus here. Because when you look at, I think if you look up the definition, it refers to opinion, consensus of opinions. And in science, when we speak of consensus, it's the agreement of experiments and observations. So, how have, how has that word worked for you when you've invoked it?

• 32:46Michael Shermer?

  Well, in science, yeah, we have to be careful to find that. I mean, it's a consensus of the experts who have been finding each other for decades about whether this hypothesis or theory is true or not. By the time we consume it, they've already hashed out all the problems. This is what we think is probably true, could be wrong, but, you know, that's what we, you know, 97% of climate scientists say X. What about the 3%? Maybe they're right.

• 33:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:09Michael Shermer?

  Maybe, but probably not.

• 33:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Mr. Exxon and Mr. Shell. Is that who the scientists are? That's the two, that's the three scientists. Mr. BP, Mr. Exxon, and Mr. Shell.

• 33:19Michael Shermer?

  I mean, Neil, you must get these papers, you know, I, I've been working in my garage here, and the, you know, Einstein was wrong, and Newton was wrong, and Hawking was wrong, and I got the theory of it. I'll share the Nobel Prize with you if you help me with the math.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 33:30Michael Shermer?

  I mean, you get these, okay, so, how do you know that guy's not right? I mean, he could be, maybe all these others, probably not, right? Because usually, the outsiders, the heretics and so on, the, the would-be Galileos, they're not would-be Gal, they're not Galileo, they're just wrong.

• 33:45Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 33:46Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we take a holistic view, and go in and look at all the different components of a truth, our truth, my truth, your truth, what value is truth to modern society right now?

• 33:58Michael Shermer?

  I mean, we can't run a society in which there's not some agreed-upon, uh, reality. Like, you know, like money. I mean, money, you know, it's fiat money, it's just ink on paper, it doesn't, it's not valued at all by itself.

• 34:11Chuck Nice?

  That's for sure.

• 34:12Michael Shermer?

  But with a structure behind it that says, we, we value it at this level, and we will back it up, okay. You know, and so we all have to agree to that, though. And then, once we do that, that's, becomes the reality, even though underneath it, okay, those are more political.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means people have the power to create a truth.

• 34:27Michael Shermer?

  In that sense, yes. So political truths are a little different than others.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In what way?

• 34:32Michael Shermer?

  Well, so, in a way, a democratic election is a kind of an experiment. What's the right percentage of immigration a country should have?

• 34:39Chuck Nice?

  Zero.

• 34:42Michael Shermer?

  There's no right number.

• 34:43Chuck Nice?

  Unless, of course, they're from South Africa.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or my wife, or my, or my head of the FBI, or all with, with parents who are immigrants, all of them.

• 34:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow, look at that.

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Michael Shermer?

  You know, so we run an election, that's an experiment, we go, okay, these people are now in power, they're gonna set it here, and we'll see how that goes. And then maybe the public goes, ah, we didn't like that, we're gonna bring in the other team, and they're gonna do something different, and we'll see how that goes.

• 35:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, try it, I dare you.

• 35:11Chuck Nice?

  Well, so, but when you talk about, when you're looking at that, where you brought up money, okay, it's not just the trust that it's valuable, it also behaves as if it were valuable. Which is why we then continue to put more trust in it. So for instance, if we had runaway inflation, right, our dollar, uh, would become worthless.

• 35:38Michael Shermer?

  Yep.

• 35:38Chuck Nice?

  And we would stop trusting it. Therefore, it would not be of value. So the levers that we are pulling to keep the dollar, uh, as a viable world currency, is the thing that gives us trust. Therefore, it really does have value, though.

• 35:53Michael Shermer?

  Mm-hmm, that's right, yep. I mean, that's why the government implemented the, you know, FDIC, and that, you know, we're guaranteeing a certain level of, uh, money in the bank, even if you think it's not really there, you don't have to have a run on the bank. That's all based on exactly what you just said.

• 36:07Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 36:07Michael Shermer?

  You know, a bank run is people just don't trust that the money is in the bank. And it's actually not in the bank, right, it's out on loans.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true, you're right.

• 36:14Michael Shermer?

  So it's too many people go to the bank.

• 36:16Chuck Nice?

  It's in your house, and it's in your house, Neil, and it's your house, Gary, I want the money, oh!

• 36:23Michael Shermer?

  Exactly right.

• 36:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Jimmy.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that in Some Wonderful Life?

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Touching the memory.

• 36:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we experiencing more disinterest in the truth?

• 36:54Michael Shermer?

  Well, I think there's an incentive to say that. I think people actually still wanna know.

• 36:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Are they getting steered towards this?

• 37:01Michael Shermer?

  By, by political groups, religious groups, whatever, yeah, they might say, but, yeah, that's, that's happening. Probably more than before, but, but it's hard to say. It could just be elevated because of social media. It just becomes so prominent so quickly, in real time, you can see what's happening on X or whatever, where people's attitudes are, I doubt this, or I doubt that. I mean, just like the, the, um, the ice shooting, uh, of Renee Good. Right, so you have, you have the exact same video clip, you, you, you go Fox News, you can clearly see here, she's trying to run over the agent. You go over to CNN, you can clearly see here, she's trying to escape the agent and not cause a problem. We're looking at the same video, so. So even the video evidence is not gonna be enough.

• 37:43Chuck Nice?

  Not enough, yeah.

• 37:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we failing to adapt to the speed of social media? And are we gonna struggle even more with social media?

• 37:50Michael Shermer?

  I don't know, the whole thing could collapse, it's so new, I don't know what's gonna happen.

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because it's feeding you, you know, it's, it's, it's an outrage engine. But let me ask a different question here. You are doing the bidding of science and scientists, yet you yourself are not a scientist. What is your disappointment?

• 38:10Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute, what?

• 38:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm joking.

• 38:14Michael Shermer?

  Well, I am a historian of science, I have some understanding.

• 38:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's important, yeah, that's your background, the history of science. So, so my question is, why aren't more scientists doing exactly what you're doing? Why are you doing the bidding of scientists?

• 38:25Michael Shermer?

  Well, they're too busy working in labs, actually doing real research.

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because what you say is exactly what's going on, but we, the scientific community doesn't articulate it. We're not trained to articulate it in our, in our

• 38:39Chuck Nice?

  You're not built for it. I mean, let's be honest.

• 38:41Michael Shermer?

  I'm often accused of defending the, you know, the orthodoxy, you know, where's your, I thought you're a skeptic. Why aren't you skeptical of whatever their pet peeve is about science? Well, because of the consensus thing. I trust the experts. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe you're right with your pet theory about vaccines or the big bang or whatever, but probably not. And so I'm really just, what I'm expressing is the system works pretty well most of the time. And even when it, there's a mistake made and there's a correction, all that theory turned out not to be right, or this or that, expanding, accelerating, expanding universe, all this. But, but that wasn't scientists just being wrong. It was scientists correcting the, you know, updating, upgrading our priors and so on, and finding new evidence. That's how it works. So even the worst mistakes in the history of science that like creationists point out,

• 39:26Michael Shermer?

  Piltdown Man, they got that one wrong and they got that fossil wrong. Yeah, but the mistakes were made, discovered by scientists.

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 39:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it wasn't the journalists finding the mistake. Scientists found their own mistakes.

• 39:36Michael Shermer?

  And even after the replication.

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The system is built to do that.

• 39:39Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So no, unpack our understanding of the word skeptic, because I've heard people saying, I'm just being skeptical of what the scientists are telling me. Isn't that a healthy posture? At what point do you say, you know, because I'm one, one of the skeptics organizations, if not yours, I don't remember which, had a button. The button just said, I doubt it.

• 40:04Chuck Nice?

  Oh yeah, that was Joe Rogan.

• 40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, and I'm just saying, no, being skeptic means you know, at which point you no longer need to doubt it.

• 40:13Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 40:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so where does that training come in?

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because a lot of the people who, who are, were quote skeptical of vaccines, like you said, skeptical of masks, skeptical of any emergent scientific objective truth, they're just being skeptical. How could you fault them for that? How do you take a step?

• 40:30Michael Shermer?

  Well, so at the beginning of a

• 40:31Chuck Nice?

  I'm just asking questions.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just asking questions.

• 40:33Michael Shermer?

  I know that's a very dangerous, because they're usually not just asking questions.

• 40:36Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 40:36Michael Shermer?

  They're moving us down a pathway. So we start in science, we start with the null hypothesis. Your hypothesis is probably not true. Now, go ahead and give us your best evidence. You know, I think ivermectin will, you know, cure the issues with COVID-19. That's nice. Okay. Do you have any evidence for this? Well, my aunt tried it and, and she got better. Okay. Sorry, in medicine, you know, an anecdote is not data. You know, we have to have controlled trials, epidemiological studies and so on and so forth.

• 41:02Chuck Nice?

  The plural of anecdote is not data.

• 41:06Michael Shermer?

  That's right. You know, I think Bigfoot's real. Okay. It could be. Maybe there's another bipedal primate running around out there in Canada, the Himalayas. Show us the body. And, and if they do, okay, then, then it's real. But if not, then I'm going to remain skeptical until I see that evidence. That's completely reasonable. All people should be scientists and that. So there's nothing special about science and skepticism in that regard. We should all be skeptical to start, but then be willing to say, okay, I think that one's probably true.

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's some people who believe they are nobly skeptic, who don't know that boundary between when the skepticism is healthy and when it's just wrong to be skeptical.

• 41:47Michael Shermer?

  That's right. Yeah. There, I mean, there are people that are just sort of contrarian by nature. I'm just going to doubt everything just

• 41:53Chuck Nice?

  That's for the hell of it.

• 41:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the button. I doubt it.

• 41:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:55Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. So I don't believe anything anymore and skepticism. And I mean, the line's quite blurred right now.

• 42:02Michael Shermer?

  Back in the nineties, when post-modernism was big and, you know, there is no real truth. I said, so the claim that the Holocaust never happened is as good as your claim that it is? Well, no, okay. I'm not saying that. I'm like, oh, okay. So there is a way to find out whether something's true or not. Yeah, I guess so.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, catch us up on this, because I don't want it to go unresolved, because the nineties was 30 years ago. Okay?

• 42:24Michael Shermer?

  What?

• 42:26Chuck Nice?

  That can't be. You're just making up math now.

• 42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  30 years ago.

• 42:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  30 years before the nineties was the 1960s. So this post-modern movement was led in academia by the liberal arts community. Could you just remind us about that?

• 42:46Michael Shermer?

  Humanities, you know, the literature, lit crit and all that stuff, deconstructing the text. What did the author really mean when they said this? And we can't know because they're gone, whatever. Okay. So it kind of came out of that. And then, so we're examining narratives. Well, science is a narrative. It's a story. It, then it became, it's just a story. It's just another story. There's nothing special about it.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No better or worse than anybody else's story in any other profession.

• 43:10Michael Shermer?

  And then it got wrapped up in the whole, well, it's, you know, it's Western industrialized, capitalist, white, you know, male.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. But that, but that was pretty strongly seated in academia. When did that spill out into the public?

• 43:25Michael Shermer?

  Well, again, probably in the nineties, you know, and just like any kind of claim that anybody makes, we should doubt it just because it came from a white guy or it came from, you know, an academy where this capitalists were running it or whatever, funding it, that kind of thing.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. What is the health of that movement today?

• 43:43Michael Shermer?

  Uh, well, it's still around, but I think it's been challenged. I mean, to be fair, on the right, there's also the kind of fake news, alternative facts, you know, all this stuff. You can't trust the media.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the post-modernism was a leftist movement.

• 43:55Michael Shermer?

  That was a leftist.

• 43:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Michael Shermer?

  Yeah. So there's, there's one on the right too.

• 43:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 43:58Michael Shermer?

  Um, and I, so again, one reason for the book is that we have to get back to trusting experts. Expertise does matter.

• 44:04Chuck Nice?

  Definitely.

• 44:05Michael Shermer?

  Even if they occasionally get it wrong, that's fine.

• 44:07Chuck Nice?

  Here's what, here's the deal. They may sometimes get it wrong, but your dumbass always gets it wrong.

• 44:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, you know, that should be on a poster. That's a poster.

• 44:17Chuck Nice?

  That's it. That's it. That's it in the next.

• 44:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Michael, there are people who say, I did my research.

• 44:22Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By, and they spent an hour reviewing YouTube videos. When, when a scientist says, I did my research, they mean something completely differently.

• 44:30Michael Shermer?

  Yes, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I like independent journalism. I think it's a good corrective for some of the errors of mainstream journalism, but most of those people don't have fact checkers or editors. So that, they also get it wrong a lot. I just did an op-ed piece for the Washington Post. I had, there was just 700 words excerpt from the book. Four people went through it. I mean, it took like four days and I had to like provide a link for every single sentence. And I was to the point I was getting irritated. And I'm like, actually this is a good thing. There's people checking me.

• 44:58Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 44:59Michael Shermer?

  Because I know when I'm just posted on some website that, you know, there's nobody fact checking it.

• 45:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. So let me ask you this. Um, and I think, I'm opening up a Pandora's box here right now, but I don't care.

• 45:10Michael Shermer?

  Don't do it.

• 45:11Chuck Nice?

  I gotta do it.

• 45:11Michael Shermer?

  You gotta care.

• 45:12Chuck Nice?

  It's just so important. In this country, right now, after almost officially eradicating or officially eradicating measles, we now are at a 35 year high for measles outbreaks. And it, there is a direct correlation between the number of people who are not vaccinated and the increase in the cases of measles. What do you say to someone who is listening to the voices that says, well, vaccines are like, they're, they're, they're harmful to your children. They're wrong. And there are clearly cases where people have died because

• 45:54Chuck Nice?

  they've been vaccinated and all the things that they put together. How do we talk to someone like that?

• 46:00Michael Shermer?

  Well, you have to ask questions first. Where'd you hear that? You know, oh, on Tucker Carlson or, you know, Rogan or whatever. I was listening to RFKJ talk about, okay. So, but those sorts, you have to counter the false information with more accurate information. So, I mean, there, there are people that are harmed by vaccines. That does happen. You know, if you give a billion people something with a point 0001% side effects, you're going to get some, you know, enough to fill the evening news, right? So you have to counter it with data. This is the, this is the answer to what's the harm of people just being skeptical or whatever. Well, some people won't get vaccinated and then they'll, they'll get measles and things like that. That's unfortunate. I mean, RFKJ, some of the stuff, you know, we should eat healthier. Yeah.

• 46:40Chuck Nice?

  No joy.

• 46:40Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, the liberals were OG anti-vaxxers.

• 46:47Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 46:48Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It only crossed over the fence to become purple.

• 46:51Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When it became mixed in with the freedom. Can't have the government tell me.

• 46:58Chuck Nice?

  Government can't tell me what to do.

• 46:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The right has never really been anti-pharma from my read of the news.

• 47:03Michael Shermer?

  No, because they're, they're fine with pharmaceutical companies making money.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Michael Shermer?

  Uh, but some liberals are like, I don't comfortable with big pharma making money on vaccines. So maybe the vaccines are better. No, no, no, no.

• 47:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got just a couple of minutes left here. Have you found anything other than science that has access to objective truths?

• 47:22Michael Shermer?

  By accident.

• 47:23Chuck Nice?

  It's called truth sauce.

• 47:26Gary O'Reilly?

  We took this long?

• 47:27Michael Shermer?

  There it is.

• 47:28Gary O'Reilly?

  It took this long for you to go there?

• 47:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, go ahead.

• 47:34Michael Shermer?

  Well, I mean, they may get there by accident. I mean, some of the claims about religion, about how we should live our lives, turned out to be good. You know, you should treat others like you would want to be treated, the golden rule. Okay. There, you could, you can graft a game theory model with math on that and go, yeah, that actually is true. Okay. They got that through experience, trial and error over thousands of years. Okay. So yeah, some institutions like that can get it right without actually testing, you know, I mean, it's just, yeah, we, science is so new, right? We've been bumping around for

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 48:04Michael Shermer?

  thousands of years, getting some things right and some things wrong, but we're making progress.

• 48:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, that's cool. Quickly or slowly?

• 48:11Michael Shermer?

  Slowly. Moral progress happens on a decadal level. It happens just slow enough. You don't quite notice how it happened. And then you look back to the nineties and look how far we've

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there such a thing as a moral truth?

• 48:24Michael Shermer?

  I think so. Yes.

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

• 48:28Michael Shermer?

  Wow.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how many of your books have been with him?

• 48:30Michael Shermer?

  Uh, two, Conspiracy and this one.

• 48:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 48:32Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, they're good. They're really good.

• 48:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The publisher?

• 48:35Michael Shermer?

  Yes, they, they fact check. They do a lot of fact checking and editing.

• 48:38Chuck Nice?

  Is this out now?

• 48:39Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, it just came out.

• 48:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 48:40Michael Shermer?

  Yep.

• 48:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what are you working on now? And how do we find you on social media?

• 48:44Michael Shermer?

  Skeptic.com, Michael Schirmer.com and on Twitter, X, at Michael Schirmer. Yeah.

• 48:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Michael Schirmer is the key?

• 48:52Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, that's the, that's pretty.

• 48:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you post with some frequency?

• 48:56Michael Shermer?

  I do. Yeah, yeah. I could, not as often as you maybe, or yeah, I don't, depends what's

• 49:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a TikTok account?

• 49:01Michael Shermer?

  I, I don't. I should get one. I know. Not even on Instagram. I mean, I'm so, I'm so old school. I'm older than you.

• 49:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Old man on the porch. Okay.

• 49:10Michael Shermer?

  I'm more on the porch. Yeah. Yeah.

• 49:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Michael, take us out with some hope.

• 49:17Michael Shermer?

  Oh, well, I, you know, again, I think there is an objective truth to be found. I think we're able to find it provisionally and that our brains are smart enough to figure out what's really going on and understand reality, even if it's error prone. We do it better than other species.

• 49:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we'll dig out of this.

• 49:36Michael Shermer?

  I think in my, my ultimate chapter is on, at some point we could become the equivalent of omniscient beings. That is, if there's a God, we could become in the far future or the aliens, if we discover them, they'll be so far advanced than us, they'll appear to be omniscient and omnipotent. And that, that's the closest we could get to a deity. It'd be our future selves or the aliens.

• 49:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, dude. And Chuck, we still got you on, on, on our YouTube channel.

• 50:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, thank you.

• 50:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just Smart Enough.

• 50:03Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir. Chuck Nice, Just Smart Enough. Look it up and watch it on YouTube, guys.

• 50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And Michael Schirmer, delighted to have you.

• 50:09Michael Shermer?

  Thank you for having me.

• 50:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.