Cosmic Queries – Why do we believe conspiracy theories? with Michael Shermer

Why do rational people believe irrational things? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice break down media literacy, the psychology behind conspiracy theories, and how to combat our cognitive biases with author and science historian, Michael Shermer.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk, Cosmic Queries Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me my co-host Chuck Nice. Chuck?

• 0:24Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, how's it going?

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back on for another episode of Cosmic Queries.

• 0:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes. Inquiring minds want to know.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the title of this one is, "Why Do People Believe Conspiracies?" Why do they want to believe conspiracies? That's what we really should call this.

• 0:45Chuck Nice?

  Oh, do we need a whole episode for that? Because I could clear it up for you right now, okay? It's called stupid. They're stupid. They're stupid, stupid people. We live in a nation of stupid people. Thank you. Good night.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. We have a guest, one of the leading... If there was a patron saint of skeptics, it would be this man, Michael Shermer. Michael, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:14Michael Shermer?

  Nice to see you guys again. Oh, boy. Yes. Yeah, it's a good start. Well, you know, if the intelligence is distributed in a bell curve, by definition, half of them are below the mean. So you may be right, Chuck.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, except for Lake Will Be Gone, where everyone's...

• 1:29Michael Shermer?

  Everyone's above normal, yes.

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  That's very funny.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me just get a little of your bio out here. Founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine. And you've got your own podcast, The Michael Shermer Show. I've been on multiple times. Thanks for inviting me. You're a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. Where is Chapman University?

• 1:49Michael Shermer?

  Orange, Anaheim, Southern California.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And you have degrees in psychology, experimental psychology, and in the history of science. Very important topic there, history of science. You've got a book this fall titled Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational? You see, good thing Chuck didn't write that book. People just said, "You ain't rational if you believe..."

• 2:16Chuck Nice?

  My book would have been called Conspiracy. What's up, dumbass? There you go.

• 2:26Michael Shermer?

  Oh boy.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so, Michael.

• 2:28Michael Shermer?

  I love Michael's response. Oh, boy.

• 2:32Michael Shermer?

  He's like, it's gonna be a long show.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, you are deep in, in this topic, your whole life.

• 2:43Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, it's a career, you're a career skeptic. And I just wanna, uh, just enter on, on common ground here with you. There are people who might say, uh, I don't believe the claims of vaccines because I'm a skeptic.

• 3:00Michael Shermer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? And so at what point do you say, no, you're not a skeptic, you're actually ignoring evidence? At what point? Because they might think that they're, they're trained to be skeptical of everything they hear. How do you, how do you help those people?

• 3:15Michael Shermer?

  Right, that's the rub, because nobody thinks that they are believing nonsense. No one joins a cult, you know, people join groups that they think are good. You know, no one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist, going down to their pseudo labs to collect pseudo facts to support their pseudo theories, right? They think they're on to something. And so the question is, what does it mean to be a skeptic? Really, it's following the evidence. And when there's enough evidence to kinda tip the scales into belief, with a small b, in the truth, with a small t, when there's a consensus, you can say, yeah, okay, so it's, I'll accept it as provisionally true. I'll be willing to change my mind if the evidence changes, but for now, I accept the Big Bang Theory of, uh, and the Theory of Evolution,

• 3:59Michael Shermer?

  the germ theory of disease, global warming is real, vaccines do not cause autism, you know, and, and are helpful for public health, and so on. So, uh, none of these are based on arguments from authority. It's that I know the scientific process works in a way that scientists themselves are competitive, and they push each other, uh, to higher levels of evidentiary standards. And so by the time it trickles down to me, I'm not a climate scientist, but, you know, if most climate scientists tell me that, you know, global warming is human-caused and real, it's reasonable to accept it because, uh, of all the competitive. Push and pull in the process to get there in the first place, right?

• 4:40Michael Shermer?

  So in the case of conspiracies, it's a little bit different because conspiracy theories are ideas about conspiracies, which is defined as two or more people plotting in secret to gain an unfair, illegal, or immoral advantage over somebody else or some other group. And that happens all the time, right? So it's not unreasonable for people to think, I'm suspicious that something might be up because it happens often enough in the real world. Corporate America corporations, you know, cheat to dodge the regulatory state or government agencies do things behind our backs.

• 5:15Chuck Nice?

  And they don't tell you, and so there it is. It's a conspiracy. So wait, that brings up a very interesting question for me. Okay, conspiracies are legitimate as conspiracies. But if they are done in secret, then how is it that you're... How can you convince somebody that the secret has been exposed? Or that there was no secret to begin with?

• 5:48Michael Shermer?

  Right, well, so you do have to have evidence. So not all conspiracy theories are equal. Which ones have evidence or not? And what would you predict for evidence? So for example, if WikiLeaks showed, you know, millions and millions of classified documents leaked to the public, not one mention of 9/11 as an inside job, not one mention of the hoaxed moon landing and where it was filmed and, you know, no memos about that. Or, you know, or just take your pick. You would expect in a leakage like that, like with the Pentagon Papers, we found out all kinds of things that the government was lying about, but none of them had to do with the moon landing or anything like that. It was like they lied about the Vietnam War.

• 6:31Michael Shermer?

  Well, okay, that's not exactly shocking. Governments do lie to their citizens, right? But you would predict if something, one of these other conspiracy theories that are popular were true, there would be some evidence for it in a leakage like that.

• 6:45Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So, Michael, in your book, you speak passionately about...

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially in many places, but the one that that struck me was when you commented about the reaction of people to your nine eleven analysis that appeared in Scientific American magazine. I mean, Scientific American is as as pedigreed a place as you'd ever find the writings of science. And could you just tell us a little bit about people's reaction to you?

• 7:16Michael Shermer?

  Hmm. Right. So there I wrote about this, one of the little memes going around that, you know, that steel melts at twenty seven hundred degrees, I think it is, and the jet fuel only burns at like eighteen hundred degrees. Therefore, no melting steel, no collapsed buildings. They must have used internal explosive devices, you know, demolition, intentional demolition. Who did this? It must have been the Bush administration. And you're off and running. Anyway, I just pointed out, I called that Fahrenheit two seven seven seven. You don't have to actually melt steel all the way, right? You only have to weaken it.

• 7:52Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't have to become a liquid.

• 7:53Michael Shermer?

  It doesn't have to be a liquid.

• 7:55Chuck Nice?

  It doesn't have to be a liquid. It only has to be.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As blacksmiths know, they don't melt the horseshoe to reshape it, right?

• 8:01Chuck Nice?

  It just has to become malleable so that no longer can support the weight of the structure itself. That's it.

• 8:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't melt horseshoes.

• 8:09Michael Shermer?

  That's right. Right. Right. And those buildings are heavy. I mean, they're each floor is really heavy, right? So and from there, then it's actually a nice test case of how you know if a conspiracy theory is likely to be true or false. How many elements would have to be involved, come together just perfectly in the in perfect coordination for it to happen? How many people would have to be involved, you know, to plant explosive devices in a building, you have to break through the drywall and wrap this structural support beams in these explosive devices. There must have been hundreds of them in each of the two buildings, two of the most secure buildings in the entire world after the Al Qaeda tried to bomb it in ninety three, right? So how did they get in there? Oh, well,

• 8:52Michael Shermer?

  they were there under the pretense of elevator repair. Oh, elevator repair. Then why are they nowhere near the elevators planning these explosive devices, right? And also, they would have had to know exactly which floors that the planes were going to hit ahead of time to put the explosive devices on those floors because that's where the buildings collapsed. They this collapse started at that those floors at an angle.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael, you're just you're giving rational facts, right? Why are they even relevant?

• 9:18Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, here's the most rational fact. It was the Bush administration.

• 9:25Chuck Nice?

  Come on.

• 9:26Michael Shermer?

  Yes, right. And the people that believe this, by the way, also think this is the most incompetent presidential administration we've ever had. And somehow they pulled off the most sophisticated conspiracy of all time, right?

• 9:38Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 9:39Michael Shermer?

  And no one that was involved wants to go on 60 Minutes and write a tell-all book, or somebody that knows somebody that was involved in this, not one person?

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And become wealthy, independently wealthy, thenceforth, right, for having done so. Well, let's get to our questions, because we know, I don't want to ask questions that I know we got people who are asking. So Chuck, what do you have lined up?

• 9:59Chuck Nice?

  All right, so this question-

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For Michael here.

• 10:01Chuck Nice?

  This first question-

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael, he looks all comfortable in his chair there.

• 10:04Chuck Nice?

  He looks my captain's chair. He looks great. I mean, that's a good chair.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see if we can destabilize his chair with these questions. Okay, go.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  So this first question is from a superfan named Chuck Nice. He says-

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, are these Patreon members? And are you still not a Patreon member? We will get to ask questions.

• 10:25Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's right. Okay. I do have a question I want to ask. It's a personal question for Michael, but I'll get to our Patreon members first. Here we go.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 10:33Chuck Nice?

  Kevin the Semenier says, "Do most conspiracy theories get conjured up because of Hollywood films, or is it more the mistrust of government, or is it a combination of the two?"

• 10:49Michael Shermer?

  Well, it's a combination of the two and many other factors as well. Politics plays a role. But in general, if a film comes out that's very popular, like JFK in 91, Oliver Stone's film-

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oliver Stone retelling.

• 11:03Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, I mean, it was a well-made film. I mean, it's compelling, you know, "Back into the left, back into the left," Kevin Costner's repeating this, and it's like, "Oh, my God, he must have got shot from the front," right? And until you dissect the film and you pull out all the mistakes and errors and exaggerations and incorrect inferences and so on, there's really not much there. But yeah, so films drive it, make it popular for a while. I mean, there were some actual studies done after JFK was released in which the percentage of people that suspected the government or somebody was involved besides Lee Harvey Oswald went way up. It's always been above 50% since the Warren Report. This is kind of the mother of all conspiracy theories. It never dips below 50%. But after the film, it got bumped up.

• 11:47Michael Shermer?

  So, you know, I have a whole chapter on that because that it's one everyone's so interested in. There's a whole industry of books and films about it.

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but Michael, you commented that that World War I began in a bit of a, had some conspiracy roots to it. And that's before we have modern media, even before films.

• 12:08Michael Shermer?

  Right, right.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what, there must be something deeper within us that's not so much slave to media that we still want to make this happen.

• 12:17Michael Shermer?

  Right, because conspiracy theories go all the way back to ancient Rome, right? The plot to kill Caesar and so forth, or when Rome burned, there were conspiracy theories about, you know, Nero made it happen on purpose, my hop, or he let it happen on purpose, lie hop, right? This is a very old idea. Even, you know, Roosevelt was accused of letting Pearl Harbor be bombed or making it happen on purpose.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just to get us into the war.

• 12:43Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, just to get us into the war.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, because why else line up the ships that way?

• 12:46Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, like sitting ducks for the bombers, right?

• 12:49Chuck Nice?

  Because if everybody, if there's one thing we all know about America is we will resist getting into a war at all costs.

• 12:58Michael Shermer?

  Well, see, I call this, I call this, instead of my hop or lie hop, I call this cow hop, capitalized on what happened on purpose, right? So it's not that Bush orchestrated 9/11 or let 9/11 happen, but he certainly capitalized on it to follow his own agenda, as did Roosevelt, who wanted to get the United States into the war to support Great Britain against Germany, couldn't do it without some event, and that was the event. So politicians do do that, you know, and they do so in secret often, you know, and I have old chapters on all the shenanigans the CIA has been up to in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, you know, MKUltra, you know, dosing US citizens with LSD and

• 13:41Michael Shermer?

  other mind control drugs because we didn't want to fall behind the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans in mind control technology, or, you know, planting spies in social justice organizations like AIM, the American Indian Movement, feminist movement. Are you telling me we fell behind in a mind control gap? That was the, that was, just exactly like there was a missile gap, there was a fear that we're behind the Russians on mind control, there's a mind control gap.

• 14:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. But it turns out the Russians were making us think that we were behind all along.

• 14:15Michael Shermer?

  Don't get meta on me now, Chuck.

• 14:18Michael Shermer?

  That's actually a thing, Chuck. That's, you know, an agent of disinformation, you know, they're purposely, you know, leaking information that's false that sends us down the wrong track. UFOs are subject to that, you know, that, there's a lot of people that think that the government is very amused by all the talk of UAPs and UFOs because it distracts the public from what they're really doing, whatever that may be.

• 14:41Chuck Nice?

  Right, right, wow, God. All right, here we go. This is Stephen Somers. Stephen says, greetings, stargazers. Please, what are the top three cognitive biases that prevent intelligent people from making intelligent choices?

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so this is the core of the subtitle of your book, where you make the assumption, contrary to Chuck's book that he hasn't written yet. Michael, you are granting the person the power of rational thought, and then posing the question, how does a rational person believe in such a thing? So where does the rationality get driven off the cliff?

• 15:29Michael Shermer?

  Well, in fact, back to where we started with Chuck's comment about intelligence. In fact, intelligent people are really good at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for non-intelligent reasons. That is to say, most of us believe all sorts of things that we didn't arrive at through evidence and rationality. And smart people are really good at that. The confirmation bias, only seeking confirming evidence for what you already believe, and ignoring the disconfirming evidence. The hindsight bias, after something happens, it seems obvious why it happened, and we should have known it happened. Like the August 9, 2001 memo from Condoleezza Rice, you know, Al Qaeda to strike US on US soil. How come the Bush administration didn't do anything about that?

• 16:11Michael Shermer?

  Well, because there were 10,000 pieces of intel every week about what Al Qaeda was up to. And, you know, only after the fact do we go, oh, that's the one. We should have known that that memo.

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me add, you know this, but I just want to add, because I come from the universe here, that for the shuttle disasters, right? Once you have the disaster, you then look and find the memo from an engineer saying they shouldn't launch for those reasons. And for successful launches, you don't engage in that same search, where you might find as many, or possibly even more memos, that give just the same kind of warning.

• 16:47Michael Shermer?

  But it's very simple. It happens to everybody, probably on a daily basis. Let's just say, for instance, you're about to drive to work, and you say, should I take Elm Street, or should I take Pine Street? And because you had that thought of the choice between Elm and Pine, you get on Pine Street, it's backed up. You automatically say to yourself, I knew I should have taken...

• 17:11Chuck Nice?

  taken Elm Street. You say that. I knew I should have taken Elm Street. Something told me to take Elm Street. No, what you did was you equally weighed both and decided on one, but in hindsight, the other seems like it was your choice because otherwise, you know, you're just stupid.

• 17:30Michael Shermer?

  Exactly right.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So hindsight bias sounds pretty pernicious, but the, the questioner asked, is there a third bias that we put at the top of this list?

• 17:37Michael Shermer?

  Oh, well, just, I mean, just riff on that one more time because, um, and by the way, Chuck, Elm Street was one of the streets that the Kennedy, uh, that JFK turned off of onto, into the Dealey Plaza. So interesting you picked that one, huh? I wonder if that was random.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He should have turned on Oak Street instead of Elm Street. Yeah, okay.

• 17:56Michael Shermer?

  Exactly.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, Mike, Michael, before we get your third bias and before you flesh out what you just said, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, more with Michael Shermer. He's got a new book out on conspiracy theories and why rational people might think irrationally about them. We'll be right back on StarTalk.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, Michael Shermer, patron saint of skeptics, not only on Earth, but across the universe. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. And I, I, Michael is an atheist, so for me to call him patron saint of anything. Uh, so I mean, I mean that in a, in a, in a metaphorical sense, Michael.

• 19:13Michael Shermer?

  I don't think he's offended by it.

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Michael, the question was, what are the three top cognitive biases that would lead someone to think conspiratorially? And we left off with the hindsight bias, which is particularly pernicious, right? What else you have going there?

• 19:33Michael Shermer?

  Well, then also, we missed the events that didn't happen. So, there's no conspiracy theories about Hinckley shooting Reagan, because Reagan survived. Had he died, he very likely, there would have very likely been, you know, conspiracy theories about who was really behind Hinckley, besides that, you know, mental illness, something like that. The third one, I'd say proportionality bias. It is, we want to proportion causes and effects. They should be roughly equal. If you take a little stone and, here's some physics for you, and you throw it, you know, a little bit, it doesn't go very far. If you throw it, you know, hard, it'll go much farther. So, we think of cause and effects, you know, if I put a lot of effort, if you ask subjects to roll a dice, and try to get a low number, they kind of throw the dice gently, and if you want them to get a high number, they

• 20:17Michael Shermer?

  really throw the dice as if like-

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 20:19Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my-

• 20:22Michael Shermer?

  It's hilarious.

• 20:22Chuck Nice?

  That's really funny.

• 20:24Michael Shermer?

  So, if a big event happens-

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gently, if you gently drop the dice, oh, my god.

• 20:28Michael Shermer?

  I'm gonna get a one or a two. No, I want a five or a six, right? So, in terms of conspiracy theories, if a big event happens, so Reagan survives, so, okay, it wasn't that big of a thing, but JFK didn't. So, what's the cause of Kennedy's death? It's gotta be, the most powerful person in the Western world's gotta be something equal, right? So, Lee Harvey Oswald is a lone nut, with some psychopathy and whatever mental issues he had. That doesn't feel right, right? So, you gotta add elements, you know, so the KGB and the FBI and the CIA, the Cubans and the mafia and the Russians-

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you're just, you're just cranking it up-

• 21:04Michael Shermer?

  Right, to make it match, right.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like the jack of a car, until it's, causes-

• 21:09Michael Shermer?

  Or if you think about the Holocaust, the Holocaust, one of the worst things that's ever happened in human history, committed by one of the worst political regimes of all time, the Nazis. There's a kind of a cognitive balance there. Or just take, say, 9/11, you know, you telling me 19 guys with box cutters managed to pull this off? This is the kind of thing you hear. No, it had to be something massively big, because it was massively big. Or Princess Diana, you know, cause of death, drunk driving, speeding, no seatbelts, right? Tens of thousands of people die in automobile accidents for those three reasons. But princesses are not supposed to die by the same way that the rest of us, hoi polloi, die, right? So, you know, it had to be the royal family and Prince Charles and the MI6 and so on.

• 21:54Chuck Nice?

  Her brown-skinned boyfriend and...

• 21:56Michael Shermer?

  Right, yeah.

• 22:00Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, oh man, so proportionality.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck had to go there.

• 22:04Michael Shermer?

  Come on, you know, that's still a big deal, everybody thinks that.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still a thing, still a thing. But, so, Michael, we mentioned JFK, mentioned 9/11. Is, are there conspiracies, like the mothers of all conspiracies, that we can learn the best lessons from?

• 22:22Michael Shermer?

  Ooh.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that we can then walk away and apply it to our Thanksgiving dinner and any other conversations we might encounter?

• 22:30Michael Shermer?

  Well, let's just take the rigged election conspiracy theory, you know, when...

• 22:33Chuck Nice?

  Please.

• 22:34Michael Shermer?

  You know, you and I, how would I check?

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take it, please, yes, were you being any young man there?

• 22:38Michael Shermer?

  Yes, I was.

• 22:40Chuck Nice?

  It was like, take the rigged election, I'm like, please!

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, please, take it, take it, take it anywhere, just take it.

• 22:46Michael Shermer?

  Throw it in the dumpster. Well, okay, so first of all, you know, there's always election anomalies if you go and search for them. We call that anomaly hunting. And in other countries, there are rigged elections. I mean, the CIA famously was involved in rigging elections in South American countries in favor of fascist dictators over communist dictators, because at least they'd be friendlier to US industrial interests, business interests and so on. Our government did that, right? So, it's not unusual for people, it's not unreasonable for people to be a little suspicious of that. And if you look in past elections, almost every time, every losing party thinks that the other party was up to something. There were some shenanigans there in Ohio, or there was some quirky thing in Iowa, and so on.

• 23:30Michael Shermer?

  So what's the take home here? How do you know what to believe? What's true? What's justified true belief in the definition of knowledge? Well, the justified part. Well, how am I going to determine if, I don't know, what that van was doing at 3:00 in the morning when it pulled up behind that building in Georgia somewhere? And there was a grainy video of this and you can't quite make out what's going on, but it looks like they were bringing in boxes of votes? Maybe there was something to it? I wouldn't even know who to call, right? But, but, so you have to have some trust in institutions that do confirm these things, that do look into these things, right? So when Attorney General Bill Barr, appointed by Trump himself, and who is a lifelong Republican

• 24:14Michael Shermer?

  and who would be motivated to find some kind of fraud, couldn't find any and said, "We didn't find anything. The election was totally legit." That should have been the end of the story when society is normally structured in a way where you trust institutions like that. But that's not the world we live in at the moment.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:33Michael Shermer?

  You know, people don't trust science like they used to, or the CDC, or scientists, or professors, and they certainly don't trust politicians anymore. So that, that's a big problem for us now.

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I want to actually save that for the third segment because we want to know, we need some positive thoughts at the end of this. How, how do we rebuild confidence in institutions? But I want to save that for the third segment. Chuck, why don't you give me another question?

• 24:57Michael Shermer?

  Okay, let's go to Ruud van der Linden. Ruud says, "Hello Neil, hello Chuck, hello Michael." Ruud from the Netherlands here. "I've got a question. Scientific research after COVID indicated that people in countries where government trust was not, was high, got vaccinated more often. If this is true for misinformation as well, does high distrust equate to more misinformation circulating?" Or, you know, he's basically...

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that.

• 25:28Michael Shermer?

  Is there a proliferation of misinformation when the ground is fertilized by mistrust? Basically is what he's saying. Yeah, indeed it is, right. As the example I just gave, if you don't trust any voting institutions to run a legitimate election, no one's gonna believe it. So I am worried about that for 2024.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck, what's a common fertilizer, but, you know, bullpoo?

• 25:48Chuck Nice?

  Bullshit. I'm sorry. I didn't even say it. I'm sorry.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said fertilizer.

• 25:54Chuck Nice?

  I said fertilizer, right. Yeah. However, I mean, that just begs the question then, why don't I believe, like, if you're talking about an election, why don't I believe that it was rigged when my guy won? If the whole thing is crap to begin with? So if you don't trust the institutions, that means the institution of elections are rotten.

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, very important question there.

• 26:27Chuck Nice?

  They're rotten.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is, this is the, I only complain about the Umps when they're...

• 26:34Chuck Nice?

  Right, when they call a strike against my team.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Against my team, right.

• 26:38Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, that's called a my-side bias. It's certainly quite strong. We notice...

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, Michael has names for these biases, man.

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  It is so great to put names to this stuff.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wish I was that fluent, man. It's my-side bias.

• 26:52Michael Shermer?

  You cosmologists and astrophysicists, you're not the only one to have cool names.

• 26:59Chuck Nice?

  So the my-side bias.

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And every sporting fan

• 27:01Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, the my-side bias.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  probably can admit to my-side bias, even though they don't want to, but...

• 27:06Michael Shermer?

  But, so, what normally happens, though, in previous elections, is that after a while, the losing side drops the conspiracy conspiracy theory and they start focusing on the next election. This is unusual, what we're going through now, where Trump has kept it alive and only because he still has some political pull in the GOP is anybody saying that there's anything to it. We know from the January 6 hearings that none of the top people believed the rigged election. They believed Barr. When Barr said there was nothing to it, then that was it. But, but it's...

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but wouldn't the conspiracy be Barr has been bought out, or he's...

• 27:41Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, there is a conspiracy theory about that.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to maintain the thought, you have to keep going.

• 27:46Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 27:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Conflicting data.

• 27:48Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Chuck Nice?

  All right. Well, this is Cicero Artiphon, and Cicero Artiphon.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What a name. Oh, my gosh.

• 27:55Chuck Nice?

  Right?

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's the name of an artist in the Louvre.

• 27:59Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not anybody's real name.

• 28:03Chuck Nice?

  This afternoon, we shall be surveying the works of Cicero Artiphon. Um, yes.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 28:14Chuck Nice?

  The very first artist to take cubism and impressionism and put them together.

• 28:20Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Isn't that great?

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, just a quick thing. I had an occasion to have a chat with Rob Reiner recently.

• 28:27Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Meathead from All in the Family.

• 28:29Chuck Nice?

  Family, yeah.

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, anyway, so I don't know if he did this. We had an idea. It was brilliant. He said, he imagined that there's, he was gonna make a movie where there's this big institution with big columns on it and stairs that lead up to it. And it's just called "They."

• 28:44Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so it's like, "Well, they say that..." Really? And then you go in there, and there's this whole set of committees, and the typewriter's going away, and out comes a statement. "They say that what goes up must come down." And that's, it's the place where they communicate with the rest of us. I thought that was a cute idea.

• 29:04Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty funny, actually.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pretty funny, yeah.

• 29:06Chuck Nice?

  I like it. All right, so what else you got? Cicero Artiphon says, "Hi, Dr. Tyson. Hi, Dr. Shermer, and hello, Lord Nice. Cicero from Toronto, Canada, here. What kind of questions should I make when I'm dealing with a situation that I would like to avoid being biased on an issue? So, how do we, how do we self-assess to make sure that we are not falling prey to all these wonderful biases that you have pointed out to us?"

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the mirror. Yeah, how do you, because if I think, like you said, Michael, if you think you're rational, like you said, no one ever said, I'm going to my pseudoscience lab to find pseudoscience results so that I can be a pseudos. No one says that. So how do you self check?

• 29:53Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That might be impossible at some.

• 29:56Michael Shermer?

  Um, well, it's not impossible because it does happen. We know that scientists are subject to all these same biases, but they can't let themselves get away with it because their colleagues will call them out on it. Right? So you have to think, if I was reading my paper here or my research as a critic, what errors would I find? What mistakes of reasoning would I see that I personally can't see? So you have to kind of mind read. You have to put yourself in somebody else's, a critic's shoes.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You also have to check your ego at the door.

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Or, or just have my mother as your mother. Don't worry. She will tell you all the stuff you did wrong. And, and every single place you failed.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck has continued his therapy sessions into start talking programming.

• 30:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I have.

• 30:41Michael Shermer?

  So you have issues with your mother, Chuck. Okay, this is interesting.

• 30:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a whole other thing. Yeah, just don't, don't, don't egg them on, egg them on, Michael.

• 30:49Michael Shermer?

  Oh, I'll tell you what you should do, Chuck. You should go to your local Scientology center and tell them this while you're holding the little cans doing the, the E meter readings and tell them about your mother. Oh, they will, they'll have a course for you to take. It's only $10,000.

• 31:03Chuck Nice?

  I love it. It's only 10 grand? Okay, that's a, what a bargain.

• 31:07Michael Shermer?

  Okay, a couple of other questions you can ask yourself, like, what would it take to change my mind? Because almost nobody tries to dis, kind of falsify their own beliefs. It's almost impossible to do. People find a pattern and then they find, search evidence to fit it.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael, I'm in complete agreement with that. I've, I've attempted that in a few cases and it really puts people back on their heels without you coming across as being aggressive, right? If you just say, and what they, they're quick to say, well, what would change your mind?

• 31:33Michael Shermer?

  Right.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I don't go into that question unless I have an entire litany of things that would change my mind.

• 31:38Michael Shermer?

  So there's research by a psychologist, Peter Wesson. So this is one of the Wesson tests. So if you give subjects like a series of numbers, like two, four, six, what is the rule? So people go, I think the rule is probably increasing numbers by two even numbers. So then they'll go like, all right, 10, 12, 14. And the guy goes, yep, that's correct. Okay, 56, 58, 60, yep, that's right. And then they'll go, well, that's it, that's the rule. And it's like, no, that's not the rule. And no one ever says like, well, 1, 7, 13. And the rule is something very simple, just increasing numbers, that's it. A sequence of, right? But no one tries to falsify it. You know, they go, well, I think I figured it out.

• 32:21Michael Shermer?

  It's 2, 4, 6, so it's increasing even numbers by two, that's the rule. Why didn't you ask some other sequence just to see if that would violate the rule? And so Wesson's conclusion was, is we only try to confirm hypotheses. It's, it's very difficult to get people to try to falsify their hypotheses. And this is what you have to do.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:40Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that.

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  That is, that's tremendous. I mean, that, and what a, I mean, that's an exercise I don't think many people are going to want to engage in. Because one, it's, it's, it's arduous. It's really tough on your, on your own psyche. And, and two-

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Chuck, if I say convince yourself that you're not funny.

• 32:59Chuck Nice?

  Right. You know, seriously. And I, my response would be, there are audiences all over the world who have done that for you.

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, whether or not that's true, you'll come back to me and say, F you too.

• 33:14Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly. It's, it's a tough, tough thing to do. Okay. Man, this, I gotta tell you, this is a great show. Everybody in this country needs to be watching this show right now. All right, here we go. Uh, this is Alejandro Reynoso.

• 33:33Michael Shermer?

  Rich Corinthian leather.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me guess, he's from Monterrey.

• 33:40Chuck Nice?

  He is from Monterrey, Mexico.

• 33:44Chuck Nice?

  And he says, hello.

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a regular on this, so we got this rehearsed at this point. Okay, so what do you have?

• 33:54Chuck Nice?

  Or should I say hola?

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  He says this.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, I'm assuming he's not offended by this.

• 34:04Chuck Nice?

  I hope not. He keeps writing in, so, you know. I mean, he has some pretty decent questions, too, so, you know, anyway. He says, how do you deal with a world that accepts so much pseudoscience and supernatural things, but then denies real science? You know, I don't know. How do you explain that? I don't know.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So supernatural, like religions and things?

• 34:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay, yeah, so anything supernatural, whether it's ghosts, whether it's religions, you know, you can say, you know, bordering on extraterrestrials, you know, where there seems to be this willingness, if not a willingness, an almost eagerness to believe things that are mystical and magical and, you know, that are, you know, fantastical. You know, we found the remains of a dragon, but, you know, when we unearthed it, it turned to dust, but we got this blurry picture of it right here. See?

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Blurry picture.

• 35:09Chuck Nice?

  See? Like, you know, what is it in us? Is there something in us that makes that, like, happen?

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, we'll try to give Michael Shermer a chance to answer that question.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna take a last break, and when we come back, Michael Shermer, tell us about his recent book, a book that it sounds like required reading for anyone who is a citizen of the world. How about that? How's that for a prerequisite?

• 35:41Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Cosmic Queries. We've got a longtime friend and someone I deeply admire, Michael Shermer, who's, as I've said, the patron saint of skeptics on Earth and across the universe. And I've confirmed that, Michael. You can put that on your resume, I think. Of course, I've got Chuck Knight. Chuck, we can find you on social media. Yes, sir. Chuck, nice comic. You're there. Yes, sir. Thank you, thank you. And, Michael, share with me briefly your social media footprint.

• 36:36Michael Shermer?

  Oh, well, on Twitter, MichaelShermer, and MichaelShermer.com for my webpage, skeptic.com for the magazine. Here's what the magazine looks like. Skeptic available on bookstores and...

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For those who can watch it, yeah, yeah, uh-huh.

• 36:49Michael Shermer?

  Skeptic.com and so on. Yeah, that's it.

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. It's in well-stocked bookstores that have sort of periodicals in them. You can find it there. And I think Barnes & Noble is among them, even. So, we left off, I think, a very important question, Michael. There are people who just simply embrace mysteries and the unknown. And are you taking this away from them? Are you just a curmudgeon? And you're no fun. You know, "I want there to be dragons. I want the aliens to have come. I want all of this." Why are you taking away my fantasies?

• 37:26Michael Shermer?

  Well, first of all, doesn't the truth still matter? I think so. And, you know, 500 years ago, everybody believed pretty much the entire world was ruled by demons and gods and angels and so forth, and witches. And I call that the witch theory of causality. Everything was caused by witches of some sort, and other demons and so on. And, you know, diseases, accidents, storms, droughts.

• 37:50Michael Shermer?

  Starvation, it all had supernatural explanations. And we didn't lose anything by getting rid of all the, most of those. There's still mysteries to be solved. And here is where the mind fills in the gap with something. You know, the god of the gaps argument, it's God. Or in the case of conspiracies, if it's a big event, like no one who has a conspiracy theory about the yearly flu epidemic that sweeps around the world, right? But if it's something huge like COVID-19 or, you know, the AIDS epidemic, you know, for a while that was thought to be, you know, targeting the black communities or the gay communities, you know, by the CIA, that kind of thing because of Tuskegee and other, you know, kind of shenanigans, the CIA was up to dosing American citizens with mind control

• 38:35Michael Shermer?

  drugs, as I mentioned. You know, if the CIA could do that, maybe they planted AIDS in inner cities. But no one has conspiracy theories like that for, again, the flu or, you know, antibiotics. Why are there no antibiotic skeptics like there are vaccine skeptics, right? It just depends on the effects and the bigger the effect, the more likely it is you're going to get some, some kind of extra causal vector thrown in there. A secret conspiracy, a cabal, you know, it was the demons, it was Satan, something like that. So it's a, it's a way, it's a causal explanation. You know, we want, we want explanations for things. It's, you know, uncertainty is uncomfortable. And, you know, as discombobulating as it might be to think that there's 12 people called the Illuminati running the world and doing a crappy job of it, it's even more discombobulating to think that-

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A crappy job of it?

• 39:23Michael Shermer?

  It's even more disconcerting to think that nobody's running the world. Nobody's in charge. It's just mostly chaos and complexity, emergent properties. You know, why, why is inflation going up? Well, this guy says this and this economist says that, who knows? Right? It's, you know, it's like, what? You mean, no one's running the show? It's just us? Yeah.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, isn't that, I'm sure you have a term for this, but, because we have to blame somebody or something. Okay, what's your term for that?

• 39:49Michael Shermer?

  Well, yeah, I don't think I have a term for that.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The blame game. Yeah, okay, how about that?

• 39:54Michael Shermer?

  Well, actually, there is one, you know, so I call this agenticity or intentional, you know, the kind of hyper-agency detection that is, we tend to see patterns in random noise and infuse those patterns with agency. There's somebody behind the scenes making that happen, right? So, much of the world operates randomly, there's just a lot of statistical randomness that explains things, but it's hard to see randomness, right? So, you know, just take the stars in the sky, that's what randomness looks like. It looks like Big Dippers and Little Dippers and scorpions and fish and horses and things like that, right? The patterns of randomness actually in our minds look like things.

• 40:35Michael Shermer?

  So, if you get a random, you know, cancer clusters, as they're called, you know, those are mostly just random, but people see the pattern of that somewhere. Example I like to use is when Steve Jobs first came out with the iPod and they had the random shuffle feature where your music will play randomly. And people complained to Apple saying, "Well, it's not random. Certain songs come up more than other songs." Like, that's randomness. You know, if every song came up equally as well as every other song, you'd have to program that.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So, Michael, they changed that. So, now, random means randomly, but don't repeat a song until you get fully through the list.

• 41:11Michael Shermer?

  Oh, interesting.

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That option's not available.

• 41:14Michael Shermer?

  Interesting, I did not know that.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Purely random is not there anymore.

• 41:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 41:19Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. We are so stupid as a society that we forced Apple to change the definition of random so we can be comfortable listening to our stupid MP3 players. Jesus, okay, never mind.

• 41:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, let's go lightning round here. This is our final segment, see what we can slip in.

• 41:39Chuck Nice?

  This is on internet influence. This is Steve Murphy, hi, Dr. Schirmer, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. People can research a conspiracy online and probably find it, find just as many articles that support the conspiracy theory as debunk it. Should gatekeepers censor or flag media supporting false conspiracies? If not, if not, what do we do?

• 42:04Michael Shermer?

  Well, my lightning round quick answer is no, we shouldn't censor those ideas.

• 42:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 42:08Michael Shermer?

  And media companies can just tag them like they are with, you know, vaccine questions, vaccine articles that doubt it, you know, here's, here's a good article that supports vaccines or rigged election claims.

• 42:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the gatekeeper is a gate tagger, basically, at that point?

• 42:22Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, I mean, that's not censorship, that's just more information is good.

• 42:26Chuck Nice?

  More information, I love it, I love it, label them, excellent. Frederick de Kamp says this, hey, I love this podcast, I listen all the time, my question is, do you think that science denying people will lead us all to extinction?

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  I love it!

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael, you can't say yes to that, you just have to say no, and then we'll move on to the next question.

• 42:48Michael Shermer?

  No, next question, please.

• 42:49Chuck Nice?

  All right, I don't believe you believe that, Michael.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, right? Part of me says he's packing up, he's stockpiling food in his basement.

• 42:59Michael Shermer?

  Just in case.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Michael, just to give a little seriousness to the question, generally, in my public rhetoric, I say that I don't mind what people think, anything, the problem comes about if such people rise to power over laws, legislation, and influence governments in society. So what do you do if, if such a person gains a following and then they get elected and they do have such power?

• 43:24Michael Shermer?

  Mm-hmm, well, that's why you should vote, right? This is why we should have a voice in a democracy like that, that's all, really, all we can do and try to keep people like that out of power. You know, in a free society, they can have a web, they have their own podcast, or, you know, like an Alex Jones type person, he's unlikely to, you know, be the lead anchor on ABC News, right? So, you know, there are, those gatekeepers keep people like that out for a good reason, you know, they're not following the rules of rationality and fact checking and editing that, you know, journalism has, so, or in politics, hopefully, but our political system is, you know, it's not perfect, so, those kind of people do occasionally get into positions of power, but not often, and as, you know, much as it's fun to pound on Trump, you know,

• 44:07Michael Shermer?

  he's not president anymore, Biden's in there, so, however bad you think it was, January 6th and so on, we still had a peaceful transfer of power and things are still going along like they usually do.

• 44:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Okay.

• 44:20Michael Shermer?

  Wow.

• 44:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For now.

• 44:21Michael Shermer?

  For now, yes, well, right, I'm not prophetic.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, alright, Chuck, keep it coming.

• 44:27Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here we go, this is Connor Holmes. Connor Holmes says, "Hi Neil, hi Michael, hi Chuck." I'm going to condense his question, sorry Connor.

• 44:37Chuck Nice?

  "Is there any correlation between education and not believing in science? I've found that my undergraduate degree taught me how to determine a source's credibility, while my graduate degree taught me how to better understand the actual science and its significance." So, clearly, he believes it.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What did the data show, Michael?

• 44:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, high school, there's a whole section in your book on this, so why don't you just tell us where you went there?

• 45:00Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, so, education does attenuate belief in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and things like that.

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, attenuate is an SAT word?

• 45:12Michael Shermer?

  It reduces the amount of superstitious thinking.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, thank you, okay.

• 45:15Michael Shermer?

  Let's put it that way. And other irrationalities, but not as much as you might think, right? So, having a graduate degree is better than having a BA, and having a bachelor's degree is better than having just a high school diploma, in terms of the kinds of things you would believe that turn out to be nonsense. But not that significantly, as I mentioned, you know, smart people are also really good at rationalizing beliefs they hold for non-smart reasons, and, you know, they're subject, smart people are subject to the my-side bias, confirmation bias, the hindsight bias, and so on, just like everybody else. So, it helps, but it's not a cure-all.

• 45:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 45:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, is there any understanding as to why it's not? Should we teach different things in school, for example?

• 45:55Michael Shermer?

  Well, in terms of science education, yes, of course, you know this, Neil, that it's teaching how scientists think is probably just as important as scientific facts.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, yes, yes.

• 46:05Michael Shermer?

  Do you remember that study showing that some significant percentage of Harvard grads couldn't explain why we have seasons? They thought it was how close the Earth is to the Sun, right? How did they get through Harvard without knowing something basic like that?

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's probably online, it's a short educational video called "A Private Universe", and it's a freshly minted Harvard...

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Graduates, they still have their robes on and they're asked, you know, how do we have, why do we have the seasons? And they're up there saying, oh, well, because the Earth's orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle. Sometimes we're closer and that's what makes it hotter. And these are Harvard graduates and the title of private universe is in your own head, you create your own worldview and make everything fit into that worldview. And, and you will speak with confidence, even not knowing that you're wrong, simply because it fits your worldview. So thanks for remembering that, Michael. That was an important video made some few decades ago.

• 47:01Chuck Nice?

  The takeaway here, people, Harvard, a waste of money. Okay.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, maybe this audience doesn't need it, but we have our seasons because of whether our axis is tilted towards the sun or away from it. Because consider if we, just because what the Harvard graduates embarrassingly didn't think about was, if it was summer because we were closer, that means it would also be summer in the southern hemisphere. But it's not. They have the opposite run of seasons there. So they were not thinking this through. So, right, that's $70,000 down the drain.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see we get a couple more questions in. Go.

• 47:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. Scott W. Peterson says, Dr. Schirmer, to answer the book's subtitle, because they are not in fact rational.

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is my point for the whole show. Thank you. Thank you. He doesn't need to answer that. But just let's keep going.

• 48:00Chuck Nice?

  Then he says, seriously though, I was thinking the other day that people hold on to fantastic beliefs in the face of mountains of evidence, to the contrary, because they do other, to do otherwise would mean admitting that they are wrong. Maybe they're too embarrassed, ashamed, or something else. So is there a psychology behind this that says, hey, look, man, I gotta stick with this game. I gotta see this hand through. I already bluffed my way this far and now I gotta go all in.

• 48:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a poker game. That's right. Interesting. I bluffed my way in.

• 48:27Chuck Nice?

  Bluffed my way in. Now I can't back out. I gotta, I gotta go all in.

• 48:31Michael Shermer?

  Right, that would be an example, loss aversion, you know, where we are afraid to give up on something that we're too committed to because we've already lost things. And so you kind of chase after, you know, bad money, or stay in a bad marriage, or stay in a losing business, or hold on to losing stocks because, you know, we're already in. So in terms of beliefs, the more committed somebody is to their religious belief, or their political position, or whatever it is, the harder it's going to be for them to give it up. So if you confront somebody, say it's a dinner table at Thanksgiving, and you know, and they bring up climate change, or vaccines, or whatever conspiracy theory they're into, you know, you can't just say you're an idiot. First of all, you can't just say you're an idiot to believe this, right? Because then they're not even going to be listening to you anymore.

• 49:17Chuck Nice?

  I'm in trouble.

• 49:18Michael Shermer?

  But, but you have to make sure that when you're countering their beliefs with facts that go against them, that, that they don't feel like they have to give up their whole worldview. Like the example I use, if you give people a choice between Darwin and Jesus, and they're Christian, they're not picking Darwin, right? He's not gonna, you're not gonna give them everlasting life. So you have to take that off the table. And just talk about evolution as a science, and here's the evidence, maybe this is God's way of creating diversity of life, and so on.

• 49:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, Michael, just, I want to say, so everyone knows, that's a very important component of your book. How the sensitivity that you need and should have when you're having those conversations. Otherwise, you're adding to the polarization. So I thought you covered that very well in the book.

• 50:03Michael Shermer?

  Thank you.

• 50:03Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 50:04Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, listen respectfully, nod, ask questions.

• 50:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, he's got a whole set of rules, how you do that, which everyone should read before Thanksgiving, definitely.

• 50:14Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah. Actually, we did after Thanksgiving, because I love that argument at the table.

• 50:22Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is the artist formerly known as James Smith. He says, hello all, this is James from Indianapolis here. So, Dr. Shermer, what do you have to say to those flat-earthers out there? Do you think that people just follow the skeptic train right down the skeptic hole of misinformation? Is there such a thing as mis-skepticism? In other words, are people sometimes skeptics to a fault? Thank you, have a great day.

• 50:51Michael Shermer?

  You have to believe, you have to believe things just to get out of bed and get out the door, you know, that the society's gonna function, my car's gonna start, the money's still in the bank, you know, we make assumptions about the world that otherwise you couldn't function and we do that for the most part, I think, with science, you know, we, most people accept most of what scientists tell them without themselves knowing much about it. It's only when it bumps up against, again, like a religious belief, oh, I don't know about that evolution thing, because, do I have to be an atheist to accept evolution? Because I don't want to be an atheist, you know, something like that. Or, you know, if you're talking to a climate denier, a climate skeptic, you know, I find myself usually, all of a sudden, we're talking about free market capitalism and the American way of life, and it's like, how did we get from CO2 gases to capitalism? Because that's what

• 51:36Michael Shermer?

  they're really concerned about. If this is true, then do I have to give up this other stuff I believe?

• 51:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Absolutely. Oh, man, that's just great. Very sensitive. Okay, I like that, I like that. Guys, I think we're out of time.

• 51:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, this show is so good, it can't be out of time!

• 51:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't be out of time.

• 51:53Chuck Nice?

  God, no!

• 51:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want more, I guess. No, you can buy his book, buy the man's book. Well, I mean, that is, that's a no-brainer, and everybody who hears this better go get this book. I mean... Conspiracy, and the subtitle, Why Rational People Believe the Irrational, did I get that right?

• 52:09Michael Shermer?

  Why, here it is, Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

• 52:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Right. All right, guys, Michael, it's been a delight to have you back on.

• 52:16Michael Shermer?

  All right, boys.

• 52:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for thinking of us on this book tour, and, and the publisher is?

• 52:22Michael Shermer?

  Oh, Johns Hopkins University Press.

• 52:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Johns Hopkins University Press. Good one. All right, guys, let's, let's hope for a, a more skeptical future so that civilization can survive itself, where, where we all have doubts, and, but with folks like Michael Shermer running around, maybe there's some hope, I would say. Mike, always good to have you. Chuck, always good to have you too, dude. Always a pleasure, man. All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here for StarTalk, as always, keep looking out.