Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1222 - Michael Shermer
Uploaded: 2019-01-11T00:30:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1222 - Michael Shermer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-01-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1222 - Michael Shermer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-01-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1222 - Michael Shermer

and we're live hello Michael Shermer hello Joe Rogan I'm doing well thank you
good to see with
your pile of your writing look at you got the moral arc heavens on earth look
at you skeptic
magazine that's the latest issue why is there something rather than nothing we
like to tackle
the little questions that's a deep one you've dealt with this on the show yeah
too much it's
that's one that just you know when you're in traffic you know what is this you
have someone
like Neil or Sean Carroll or Lawrence Krauss talking about this it's like whoa
yeah I'm
not a physicist I'm a social scientist so for me I come at it like what do you
mean by this
word nothing because most of us have this idea what I mean oh no in physics it
means this other
thing like okay yeah well I think our limited understanding of what they're
talking about
when I see those guys writing down on legal papers with all that scritchity
scratchity
crazy-looking right fake alien language mathematics like thank god you guys are
out there well I open
heavens on earth with imagine yourself dead and you know most people go well
you know I see myself in
the casket and my friends and family around hopefully they're mourning no you
wouldn't see anything of
course you're dead I mean to imagine anything you have to be conscious and
alive so you can't even
picture being dead so you can't picture not existing and it would be the same
thing imagine there's no universe
yeah okay I see blackness no there's no blackness I mean nothing would
literally be not just no light
but no no perception of darkness nothing not even nothing I was going through
Instagram the other day and
there was this one person who was talking about the purpose of life and when
you die what's going to
happen and I immediately just started laughing I'm like you don't know right
how are you saying this like
when you die what happens he was like one of them spiritual type characters is
just kind of a huckster
there's a lot of spiritual hucksters out there these days there are yes the in
the 90s we debunked
all those psychics talking to the dead that was a that hasn't been too popular
in recent years but
that was a big thing people caught on to that little earpiece thing yeah the
earpiece or just the
cold reading yeah I see a a father figure is this a grandfather father uncle
friend of the family
you know you can yeah and uh he's saying something about um you know it's okay
for you to forgive
yourself oh okay how about like well where was the will yeah he hid his will
somewhere where is that
because that's what we want to know is you know that that ring he had where is
that if you're just vague
enough I mean like uh horoscopes if you're just vague enough people are like oh
my god it's right
all the time it's always right like right that's not even a real horoscope if
you really want to pay
attention to actual astrology that you they have to know the date you were born
the time you were born
it's not just the month of august right you know it's like they gotta they want
to know morning or
evening yeah you know what do you think about all that stuff it's all bunk is
it yeah yeah why has it
been around so long uh well because the well it's called the barnum effect
where you know pt barnum
you just offer something for everybody so if you make it general enough you
know i i sense you're an
intelligent uh wise person that people really enjoy your company and and you
like going to parties and
being with other people and yet you like the quiet solitude of a walk on the
beach you know people
going yep that is so me well i pretty much described every scenario you can
have you're alone you're with
people but it's one of those things where if you talk to someone who is an
actual believer in astrology
like they they are so convinced i got a friend of mine who's trying to tell me
that he makes all of
his decisions based on consulting with his astrologer well reagan well nancy reagan
yeah for his travel
after he was shot she got real paranoid about that well so part of the problem
is these astrologers and
psychics are themselves remembering their hits and forgetting their misses the
confirmation so
i knew a psychic or a magician uh who was working the uh psychic friends
network um back in the 90s
when it's hard to make a living as a magician doing kids parties they all want
to have their own vegas
show but only a few people get that so you got to do something on the side so
this guy was doing
psychic friends network and uh he told me all about they gave him a book a
three ring binder you know
here's the kinds of things you should say and you know people are calling for
love health money career
questions so you can spend 20 30 minutes at 395 a minute just going through
there you know i sent you
in a relationship right now and one of you is more committed than the other
tell me about that
10 minutes later you know they're still talking and you're thinking about
travel you're not happy with
your job there's some financial stress in your life right now and then he told
me about stuff like uh
now go get a crystal and then a candle and i want you to set it up here on your
desk and this would
go on and on for hours and they charge by the hour and they charge by the hour
so one of the problems
that psychic friend networks had was people were not paying their phone bills
because they you know
come back on 800 phone or whatever so they would just not pay it so the phone
companies cracked down
on the psychic friends network company going hey this is getting out of hand
that people aren't paying
their bills so they had to ratchet it back a little bit oh that's right they
would do it through the
phone that's interesting yeah they wouldn't get a credit card from you they
would just stay on the
line with you right so he told me that when he first started he got like 60
cents on the minute
for the 395 of that per minute but then they they bumped it up as he got more
experience and kept
him on the line longer they gave him bonuses now you get a dollar per minute or
whatever how is that not
illegal i mean he's not even a psychic shouldn't you have to like if you want
to be a doctor you have
to go and you got to you know go to medical school you got to get a degree you
shouldn't there's a
interesting history there because in new york city for example it was difficult
to outlaw like the three
card monte guys on the sidewalk with the cardboard because it's just kind of a
game right now now it would be
illegal to sell fraudulent stocks or something like that or sell a product that's
advertised as a health
product when it's not but if say in that case it's under food rather than drugs
or or say no health
products like vitamins are under different standards than say medical drugs a
psychic is more like an
entertainer so this is for entertainment purposes only so we can do whatever we
want as opposed to a
medical doctor that's dispensing advice so therefore maybe doctors a bad
example maybe i should have said
engineer but the point is like if you're going to work as a psychic like on a
psychic network if you
have a business of selling psychics yeah like you should be able to you have to
exhibit some sort of
psychic something yeah well they can't uh you know under controlled conditions
they always fail there's
nothing that's ever been done no no what about the one thing that i've read
that uh statistically more
people can recognize that people are staring at them yeah like when they're
looking at you from behind
that horse well it's not been it's not been consistently replicated um so is it
possible that some people
with a certain sensitivity can detect well we okay so one explanation the skeptics
explanation is that
if i'm in a say a starbucks or something and i kind of have a sense that people
are talking about me
maybe looking at me and and and i look and that catches somebody's eye and they
turn to me and i
think oh that person's looking at me or vice versa i'm looking at them and then
they send something or
whatever so there could be some element of chance to that now um the guy that
does this rupert sheldrake
um you know he believes that it's actually some kind of like uh psychic power
through the medium like
when i'm looking at you something's coming out of my eyes and tickling your
neck so that's his morphic
resonance morse morphic resonance now richard wiseman a british experimental
psychologist he's tried to
replicate that and he always fails and then this other woman marilyn schlitz
she also tried to replicate
it and she was able to replicate some of it so there may be an experiment or
bias it's not clear if it's
the skeptics that are biased or the believers that are biased but in that case
it's best to just say
you know we don't know it so the default position the null hypothesis is that
it's not true
until you prove otherwise and that's a that's a difficult one to prove now if
if they say if i say
well why is the effect so subtle why can't you go to vegas and become a
millionaire gambling or play
the stock market you know we know traders just need a tiny you know one point
point one percent
advantage over the other traders or whatever they can make a lot of money
in terms of just psychic ability yeah so if the psychic ability is a very broad
term right it's
almost like saying drugs because like yeah certain drugs that put you to sleep
and certain drugs that
make you hyper they have very different effects so saying psychic ability like
maybe you have the
ability to see if someone's looking at you but you don't have the ability to
pick the lottery
right uh so the hard part in testing psychics is to pin down what exactly are
you saying you could do
right and that that's where it gets pretty fuzzy so these like why is it legal
for the phone psychics
because you can't pin them down if somebody says look i'm just giving
relationship advice why is that
illegal if i say like the tony robbins netflix documentary i'm not your guru
which is basically
i am your guru he has that moment in this huge auditorium there's like 3 000
people there and he gets
this woman up on stage and she's got relationship problems he says do you have
your phone she goes
yeah take out your phone and call him right now and she he talks her through
dumping this guy on stage
on the phone and he's at work or something he's like what and then she hangs up
and everybody's
happy that she did this now is that a good thing or a bad thing i have no idea
that's great for show
business but what if you know so who the fuck i mean that seems crazy like how
do you know what
kind of relationship they really have now somebody that talked to both of them
right wouldn't you
somebody that i brought this up at a at an event recently a party and somebody
said oh i know the
backstory his staff had been working the audience and they they knew all about
her and the relationship
and it was about to go sour anyway so we brought her up it's like okay so this
is the thing with you
you see the psychics on tv there's a lot of stuff you don't see they work the
audience they know
people fill out like the psych the faith healers they fill out prayer cards
yeah they put their name
and address and their ailment and then you know the faith healers have a little
earbud in there and
they're listening to the person in the back reading okay here's the person they
have you know glaucoma
or whatever and you hear him calling this out so uh so there's a lot of that
that we don't see but
anthony robbins is not claiming any kind of psychic ability he's just he's just
trying to provide
positive paths for improving your life and if you're in a bad relationship that
would be a positive
path let's get out of that relationship and just like move forward with it with
emotion and power
and love and he'd fucking probably throw a karate kick and get everybody pumped
up and jump around
his little bobby brown headphones on you know it's like but he's he's a showman
too yeah th