Finally…The Truth with Michael Shermer

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0:36Rosetta Stone Sapphire is designed for personal learning, helping you go beyond generic lessons and focus on the topics that matter most to you. You've heard me talk about Rosetta Stone before. You know that I love the fact that I can learn on the go, anytime, anywhere, easily integrate it into my schedule, and more importantly, it helps me learn the language like a native. And that's why I love it, because I can secretly sit at the table and listen to my mother-in-law talk about me in Spanish, and she doesn't even know that I know what she's saying.

1:09Go ahead, be a stealth bilingual spy like me. Visit rosettastone.com slash startalk. To get 20% off your Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when you sign up today, you'll get unlimited access to all 25 Rosetta Stone languages, plus all new Sapphire learning tools. Just la hora, amigos. They are Rosetta Stone hoy mismo. So, Gary, are you objectively true? Maybe. But then again, there's your truth, my truth, and Chuck's truth.

1:40And I know for a fact that mine's a lie. Coming up, StarTalk Special Edition. All about truth. Is it still there? Coming up.

1:52Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

2:04This is StarTalk Special Edition, which means we got Gary O'Reilly right here next to me. Hi, Neil. Gary. Yes. I love having you. I love being here. Yeah. Chuck, how you doing, man? Doing great. So, you cooked up an episode. You and your producers cooked up an episode today. Yeah. That, oh my gosh, this is an eternal subject. And take us in. The truth. Ah. Is it out there? Yes. So, apparently it's trust.

2:35But do you trust the teller of the truth? Everyone trusts me. I'm the most truthy person that you'll ever meet. I make up the truth. I'm so good at it. Is it noise? Is it biased? Is it fake news? Are they alternative facts? Yes. 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?

3:06How 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 skill set that could get you closer to what you might call the true, true? Instead of the fake truth. The true truth. There we go. So, Neil, I think let's bring in our guest. 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.

3:37Nice to see you all. We don't go back to a previous life. 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. Yes. Sensibly titled. That was a focus group. Yes, I like to call it fake news.

4:09So, and you are also host of. That's pretty good. Don't encourage him. 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? Oh, it was original, huh?

4:24No, we're good. And your latest book, oh my gosh, because this could have almost written itself in the time and the place that this needs to appear. It's just called Truth. Man, that is an ambitious title, I gotta say. No, no, here's the problem. The real problem is that this book is even necessary. Well. Who would have thought? You know, yeah. I mean, in this day and age, it's far more necessary, though. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I'm just saying. Yeah. I'm sad that you had to write this book.

4:55You're sad to get to write it. Well, thank you. Yes. Well, that's the problem. 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. Oh, whoa, whoa. Oh, whoa, whoa. Wow. Wow. Wow. Stretching the deep end. Damn. Hey. Wait, can we start in the toddler pool first? I was gonna say, like, kiddie pool first. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, my man, it's like, he's standing in the square in ancient Greece, just like. We're gonna be life gods for this. Man. Okay. Can we unpack what you just said?

5:27Yeah, man. 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. So these are what people say. Nothing special. This is what people say, right? Right. 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. Wow. All right. So, so wait, I'm sorry, before you go further, can you define objective truth then?

6:02Because if we don't do that right now, then everything else we say is kind of like. Let's do that right now. It's really kind of flimsy. Something confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent. Something confirmed to such. A degree. A degree that it would be reasonable to offer. Our provisional assent. Our provisional assent. Our provisional assent. So provisional. It could be right. That's the key word in there. It could be wrong. I could be wrong. That word's doing a lot of lifting, Michael. 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.

6:35Sorry. That's right. We know who it is. I'm sorry. Go ahead. How do you know it's not any of us? Well, because we're all, so it starts with fallibilism. 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? How many people do that? Almost nobody, which is why I wrote the book. Well, you scientists do.

7:05Yeah, we do. But you're trained to do that. Anytime we come up with an idea, I say, can you check this? Did I make an error? Can you double check my calculations? You actually go, you go get your haters. Yeah, ideally. It's called a peer review. Ideally, you get your haters and they come in and they go, yeah, this is bullshit.

7:19So you remember Carl Sagan's dragon in my garage story from Demon Hunter and Rowan? I heard it, but I was never able to retell it. Okay, I'll retell it. If you can please. There's a dragon in my garage. Would you like to see it? Oh my God, that'd be so cool. So I take it 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're going, 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 an invisible levitating dragon. It hovers above the ground about a foot.

7:50All right, how about we get one of those thermometers they used in COVID where you point it at people's forehead and 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? 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. But they just don't maintain. They don't create their own warmth. There's no hidden secretion. There's no, right. So they wouldn't show up on an infrared camera. That's right. Or the fire. It's cold fire. Okay. What's the difference between an invisible, levitating, cold-blooded, cold-fire-breathing

8:21dragon 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've got to have some evidence. And that's science. By the way, Michael, I just want to 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. That's how you respond to it. Okay, now suppose, just while we're there, okay? Suppose you are so charismatic.

8:53You are so lovable. You are so articulate, sure, that anyone you speak to of this dragon ends up feeling the presence of the dragon just the way you do, out of the power of suggestion. Why doesn't that then constitute evidence? Because that's how you get cults. Yes. All the people in the cult feel what the leader of the cult feels. Why doesn't that constitute a certain kind of evidence? So for science, we need external validation of your internal state. So maybe you do feel this.

9:24Fine, 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 whole other 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, 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. Now, suppose that, and I'm playing devil's advocate here because what you just, I've actually experienced that. With ayahuasca? With ayahuasca.

9:55You did? Oh my God, it was amazing. Right. And I always- But he's on it now.

10:02Did you feel like there really is this other place that you can- It's more than a feeling. And that's why people are so incredibly passionate about it. Because it's- And just to be clear, you took it under a very controlled setting. Very controlled in a place where, yes, they have medical staff on board. And what will I, if I come back and go, Neil, I was wrong. There is this other spirit world. 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 ultra-consciousness we're able to tap into it, but we can't do it otherwise.

10:32You 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. Interesting. 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 who were in front of me, I'm like, it wasn't like in a hallucinization, a hallucinization, whatever. 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.

11:06I 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, okay? Because- So you're rationalizing it. Well, I'm not even really, I am rationalizing. You're absolutely right. I'm rationalizing it. But someone less rational than you, it's a whole other being. Oh, my goodness. You're all in. They're all in. By the way, it still exists as that for me as well because it's so real.

11:42Like I said, it's more than a feeling. It's a connection that feels completely external. But guess what? I know for a fact that it was coming from my brain. Okay, so, Michael, getting back to the dragon in the garage, 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.

12:12That's why cult leaders don't want you to engage with people on the outside. That's right. Yeah. Okay. Or you need a device. That's why they're- Or, yeah, yeah. Or you need a device. 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. I think that's wonderful. Yeah.

12:43Especially if it changes for the better. Yeah. Well, yeah. Hopefully. Is what Chuck was describing with his experience what people are calling truthiness, the truth you want to believe? Well, a little bit. But that was Colbert's riff on more political kind of truths. I think this is more internal. From the Colbert Report. Yeah. Not from the late show. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. But is that the truth that you personally believe and the one that you want to believe? And there's a differentiation? Yes. Yes. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's an extra step there where I would really like this to be true and I'm going to find the evidence for it. That's not helpful.

13:14This is slightly different. And again, I think if there's experiences you have that change, people have near-death experiences. Do they really go to heaven? Probably not. But it changed their life. Now they're doing this and that instead of what they used to do. Okay. Yeah. And I will say, and I'm going to get off the ayahuasca thing because that's not what we're about. But the biggest benefit to me was I was on several neurotransmitter medications and I was able to come off all of them under the supervision of my psychiatrist.

13:48Oh, wow. 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, you know. I would like scientists to be more open-minded about that sort of thing. They tend to be pretty dogmatically skeptical of that. Yeah. I think we need to keep the door open for these kinds of experiences just in case. But part of that skepticism is because if you were a betting person, most of such claims would not pan out.

14:18And 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. And so. Go back to the dragon scenario. Yeah. 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? 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.

14:53A 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. That's right. It's two very different paths. If you don't find the flaws in your research, somebody else will. Somebody else will. With great glee, and they'll publish it. Right. 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. That once was a magic.

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17:51All rights reserved. I'm Brian Futterman, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Is there an identikit standard construction of a truth? Where did you just use? Identikit. I don't know what that means. All right, I'll make some words up. Identicate? A kit. An identikit.

18:21So you get a... Identikit? 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 issue? Well, there's tools we use, you know, correlation and randomized controlled trials and these sorts of things, statistical tests, that scientists have developed over the last century and a half or so to see... How about us as an individual rather than as a scientist? Individually, we, you know, 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. Confirmation bias.

18:53Confirmation bias. Everybody does it. Motivated reasoning. I like that phrase. Yeah, we're motivated to find what we already want to be true, find evidence for it. And that's the problem. And 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 and our desires. And also, we have to trust our institutions and... Do we? Well, because who can fact... Well, you don't have to, but who can fact check everything, right? Yes. I mean, I never saw the Chinese spy balloon with my own eyes, but I accept the high resolution

19:23photographs. 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. Very much 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. Yeah. You can see, you know...

19:54So, 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? Yeah, so... Is that the my side... Sorry, Chuck. Is that the my side bias? Yeah, that's exactly right. What is my side bias? My religion is right. My political party is right. If you want to go into the Trump thing, that would be good. The Trump spirit comes upon him.

20:21That's the first time anybody's ever cued Trump. We don't summon Trump. Trump appears on his own. He's a channeler. So, again, I mean, you know, 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, these institutions actually work pretty well. They usually get it right. Sometimes they're wrong.

20:51I 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. 50-50, we're going to go with this. Maybe next week we'll change our mind. Yeah. They could have done that. That was the worst thing. That was never done. 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, well, what's that

21:25supposed to mean? I think there's some hope there, because when we grew up, I think we're, you know, in the same decadal age, polling results were not given with uncertainties, and now they are. Mm-hmm. Right. Okay, they just gave a number. Yeah, they just gave a number. And that was like, the number. Right. Now it's plus or minus three points. Right. So that was an important achievement, I think. You'll hear people say things like, my priors are this, and I changed my, upgraded my priors and my credence is now that.

21:55That'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. Mm-hmm. Right. And this is a good thing. It is. Like, I'm going to, it's okay if I change my mind. Yeah, it is. 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

22:26that has changed when better information has come along. And nobody, the world, the science world is not set on fire. They're like, yeah, okay, well, we got better information. Now, one proviso on that is that just because that idea was wrong and that one was wrong, my idea is surely right, even though you think I'm wrong. I'm one of the heritage, I'm Galileo. Right. I'm right, yeah, and everybody else is right. So, does AI help or hurt this exercise? It's a tool. I don't know. We don't know yet. It's a useful tool, which is going to-

22:58In the search for truth. Yes, yeah, absolutely. But you got to check the sites, the sources they cite. If they provided they give- Some of the sources are, they're hallucinating. They're not real, right? Totally. If you click on the link, it's like, that actual article doesn't actually exist. When we spoke to Geoffrey Hinton, he said, some AI does have overconfidence. Overconfidence. Overconfidence. He said that the hallucinations that we all know and laugh at with AI, he doesn't call them hallucinations. He calls them confabulations. Confabulations. That's what he said. Word of the time. Yes.

23:29That's good because we do that. Humans do that. That's why he calls it that. That's why he calls it that. Yes. We have fragmented memories of things and we fill it in so that the narrative can make sense to us. Reagan famously remembered things from movies he was in that he thought actually happened. It's like, no, that was a movie you did in the 50s. Oh, yeah. One. Yes. If we go back to the my side bias where people are believing things even though they know it's probably not right. Is that true? Oh, sorry. That's very meta. I came across the phrase, and I'm not sure if it's yours, if it is, I appreciate this,

24:03a servant of belonging. That's not my phrase, but I like it. What does that mean? What does it mean? Well, so when people publicly signal, like the example I use in the book is 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. That's not it. So they're publicly signaling, yeah, the scientists tell us this is true, but it probably is. And so a lot of conspiracy theory proclamations. Yeah, I think QAnon is real or the Pizzagate thing.

24:36I 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 happen. Those Democrats, they're up to no good. I don't know if Hillary actually, you know, did this at this Pizzagate. But she did something. She did something. That's it, yeah. That woman's guilty, find it. Find her, why she's guilty. That's right. 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. That's right. If you're rooting for the team that the call was made for, that one's definitely past interference.

25:08That's right. And you actually see it that way. That's right. My truth and your truth. All right. Let's back up a moment just to get the vocabulary established. You referred to Bayesian reasoning. Could you just say something about that? So that's Reverend Thomas Bayes and this is 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.

25:39And 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. Like rather it's maybe true, maybe it's false. I don't know. This is my confidence level now. Let's go there. So it's a more fluid. It's more fluid. It's a more fluid tracking of. So is there a point where truth is fixed and fixed only? It can never be changed. 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

26:12literary 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. Tolkien's... Don't ruin my dream. Maybe it's in New Zealand. Sorry. Exactly. Wait, wait, wait. You're making a really good point where we don't approach fiction declaring that it's false. Right. Of course. It's not the operative way to think about it.

26:43We approach fiction as a source of lessons, parables, ways of living. Moral homilies, yeah. 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. Yeah, so like the story of Jonah and the whale or the great fish. Did he really live for three days in the belly of a great fish who'd then spit him out at

27:14this 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, yeah, of course, I don't know. It's probably not real, but 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, forgiveness, just starting over, and they go, hey, hang on, time out. Yeah, time out. Time out. Red card. Yeah, red card. You've got Moses in the parting of the Red Sea. You're messing with the whole foundation here now.

27:45You've got Moses in the parting of the Red Sea. I mean, you can't really literally say it has to happen. Well, I've heard, you know, people have sent us articles of skeptics, oh, that was caused by an earthquake, or this tsunami, 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 days, and he woke up. Oh, he woke up. And then he married, he went with Mary Magdalene, and if you want to go full Dan Brown, they

28:16moved to France, had kids. Full Dan Brown. I get the reference, yeah. That's funny. And the Illuminati's protecting their lone descendant today. So, again, most Christians go, no, no, no, it has to literally happen. Now, why do they insist it literally happen? 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 say- In the age of science. Yes, yeah. So, I just, I think, okay. So, are we swapping out the lenses for different subject matters, and the way that we will look

28:47at 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. 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. Absolutely. But, you know, unfortunately- Well, he's going to hell.

29:13Just saying.

29:16We started our little chat here about post-truth era. Are we? Are we tiptoeing towards it? Please say no to that. Yeah. So, what's the status? Well, that was my opening. So, here's, before you even say anything, I'm really embarrassed to admit this now. What the hell does post-truth mean? Well, what does that mean? Pay attention. This is what I ask. That's why we're asking the man. Okay. This is what I'm asking. What does that even mean? He's got a book with this title, see? Okay? So, shut the hell up and let the man talk.

29:47Okay. Go. Well, what it's supposed to mean from the kind of post-modernism and all that stuff in the 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 aboriginals, Australian stories about the origins of life and so on is just as good as your scientists. And so, what we're pushing back against that is saying, no, they're not equal.

30:20Yeah. And so, that would be post-truth that there's no truth to be found. 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 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. So, then on the back of that, do you get the feeling that there are segments of society, whether it be Eastern, West, or whatever, that have just given up on the truth and have more or less just switched off? Well, some people have, yes.

30:50I 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 it's true. He actually said that? Yeah, he did. Yeah, he did. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. This was in, like, 2015. He's a great guy, I got to tell you, that Steve Bannon, he's something special. I was on a real time with him on one episode. Steve Bannon, yeah. Steve Bannon? Yeah, yeah. Ugh. He seemed pretty okay at the time. See, that's the problem.

31:18Isn't that the trick of the devil? That's the trick. The devil is very funny. He seemed like a regular guy. Yeah, exactly. He seemed. I'm just saying, I didn't know. That's the disturbing part. So, can you give me a short list of the kind of biases we should look out for, within ourselves? Oh, yeah, yeah. Because how do we know they're not in your book? Well, you have to read the book. Yeah. 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. He said we're designed. Well, designed by evolution.

31:49No! Look at that. So, 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. That would make sense. Now, you know, we have to have some capacity to understand what the world is actually like in order to survive. So, there's 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. Yes. 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. Right. My life had to come about that way because look what happened.

32:20Exactly. But 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 from your playlist. Uh-huh. People complained, they 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. You program it so that it hits every song before it then redoes it.

32:50But that's not random. That isn't random. That's not random at all. Yeah. That's like throwing the die and getting all the numbers in a row first. In a row first. Yeah. Before you go. That's exactly right. Or cancer clusters. Oh, look, there's this community here. We got to look to see if there's an industrial waste stuff there. Or some company. So, they find the cancer cluster first. Yes. Then they look for what could cause it. But there's other clusters where there's no cancer at all in this community. And no one goes in there to say, well, let's see what they're doing right. Right. Because they ignore those misses, right? So, that's one of the things that, you know, epidemiology, they have these tools.

33:24Like, we have to control for this. But you said a cluster of no cancer. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just a whole. That's not even, no one's even called that. Right. They're just like, well, these people are healthy. Let's find out what's causing that. What's causing all this health. Yeah. Yeah. Can't have that. There's not even a name for it. Right. There's not even a name. It's not going to make the news. People are healthy. Right. Right. There's no interest. And if they're living near high power lines, no one's going to say the high power lines made them healthy. That's right. Right. So, what kind of bias is that? Well, that's just the, you know, well, I call that patternicity.

33:54Tentancy to find meaningful patterns and random noise. Most of it is just random. Right. Like Jesus and a piece of toast. Yes. The Virgin Mary and the grilled cheese sandwich. Right. We're really good at that. But for reasons that I think are plausible, right? With the lion in the bushes. Tell us that story. Right. Yeah. So, you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator? 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

34:26just 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. Right. 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. Right. So, I better be cautious, just in case. 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

34:58the one conspiracy theory that's in front of everyone, and that is a small group of companies got together and decided that at all costs possible, they were going to make sure that we dig shit out, 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 that are like, dude, get the hell out of here. Well, same thing with tobacco, big tobacco. They knew. Big tobacco.

35:28They knew. They knew the deal. For a long time. That's a conspiracy. Yeah. But these conspiracies, they're not sexy. They don't have aliens, and so nobody cares. 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, they had meetings. We have their memos. Yes. And they knew the deal, and millions of people died, but yet somehow that's not a conspiracy. They're the ones that had that phrase, you know, the jury is not in, or the science is not settled. We have to wait.

35:59We have to wait. That's what they came from. Yeah, that's where they came from. This notion of settled science, 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 hundred, and so therefore the science is not settled, without realizing that there's always going to be outlier research papers. Right. And so at some point- Especially when they're paid for by the people who want a different answer. So tell me about the notion of consensus here, because when you look at, I think if you

36:30look 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 has that word worked for you when you've been voted? Well, in science, yeah, we have to be careful to define 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.

37:01We could be wrong, but that's what we, 97% of climate scientists say X. What about the 3%? Maybe they're right. Right. Maybe, but probably not. Yeah, Mr. Exxon and Mr. Shell. Is that who the scientists are? You know, that's the three scientists. Mr. BP, Mr. Exxon, and Mr. Shell. I mean, Neil, you must get these papers. You know, 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, I'll share the Nobel Prize with you if you help me with the math. Right, right. I mean, you get these. Okay, so how do you know that guy's not right?

37:32I mean, he could be. Maybe all these others. Probably not, right? Because usually the outsiders, the heretics, and so on, the would-be Galileos, they're not would-be, they're not Galileo. They're just wrong. Uh-huh. 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? I mean, we can't run a society in which there's not some agreed-upon reality, like money.

38:05I mean, money, you know, it's fiat money. It's just ink on paper. It's not valued at all by itself. That's for sure. But with a structure behind it that says, we value it at this level, and we will back it up. Okay. And so we all have to agree to that, though. And then once we do that, that becomes the reality, even though underneath it, those are more political. That means people have the power to create a truth. In that sense, yes. So political truths are a little different than others, right? In what way? Well, so in a way, a democratic election is a kind of experiment. What's the right percentage of immigration a country should have?

38:38Zero! Zero!

38:41There's no right number. Unless, of course, they're from South Africa.

38:46Or my wife, or my head of the FBI, or all with parents who are immigrants. Wow, look at that. Yeah. So we run an election. That's an experiment. We go, okay, these people are now in power. They're going to set it here, and we'll see how that goes. And then maybe the public goes, ah, we didn't like that. We're going to bring in the other team, and they're going to do something different, and we'll see how that goes. Yeah, try it. I dare you. Well, so, but when you talk about, when you're looking at it that way, you brought up money, okay, it's not just the trust that it's valuable.

39:20It 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 would become worthless, and we would stop trusting it. Therefore, it would not be of value. So the levers that we are pulling to keep the dollar as a viable world currency is the thing that gives us trust. Therefore, it really does have value, though.

39:52That's right, yep. I mean, that's why the government implemented the FDIC, and we're guaranteeing a certain level of 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. A bank run is people just don't trust that the money is in the bank, and it's actually not in the bank. It's out on loan. That's true, you're right. So it's too many people go to the bank. It's in your house, and it's in your house, Neil, and it's in your house, Gary. That's where the money is.

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44:07Well, I think there's an incentive to say that. I think people actually still want to know.