Name: Joe Rogan Experience #846 - Michael Shermer
Uploaded: 2016-09-15T02:41:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #846 - Michael Shermer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #846 - Michael Shermer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-15. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #846 - Michael Shermer

three two one boom michael shirmer is here ladies and gentlemen again and we've
been
talking about silly people for the past 15 minutes we just we had to get warmed
up the
list is endless we had to get warmed up with body doubles yeah flat earthers um
forests aren't real
is that what they're saying jamie the flat earthers we're going to talk about
the flat earthers for
one reason um the reason why i wanted to bring this up is because i think there's
a lot of folks
out there that are super gullible and i think they're being trolled i think
they're being trolled
by people who put together these it's one of two options either they're being
trolled by people who
put together these elaborate arguments for something that they don't believe
because they're just trying
to make money off of youtube views which is entirely possible yeah and this
needs to be thought of i mean
it really needs to be considered because youtube videos can be extremely lucrative
if you can get
a youtube video with millions of hits and a lot of these videos on all sorts of
different conspiracies
and all sorts of different crazy things can generate that kind of volume you're
making real money pennies
on the dollar but if it's millions yes yeah it starts becoming real money and
starts and if you do a
bunch of them and you can you do them on a regular basis it becomes a gig it
becomes like what they do
they create these silly videos but people who just don't have the time or the
inclination to actually
read scientific papers and articles and journals and all these different things
that explain
how we've known for a long time that the earth is round right yeah it's a myth
that uh columbus proved
that the earth is is not flat that it's round they the ancients knew the greeks
knew columbus knew
everyone knew uh but then that it was round uh and the sumerians knew
absolutely their depictions
on clay right when they drew it in clay they drew all the planets as circles
right they knew right i mean
there's some obvious simple ones anybody could do if you see an eclipse like a
lunar eclipse you can see
the earth's shadow on the moon it's round uh you know if you if you're high
enough and you know the
ships are sailing out you can see the mast is the last thing you would see as
the hole drops over the
horizon first slowly you know there's things like that that we know the earth
is round uh you know you
travel around you come back to where you started um you know now their
explanation the flat earthers is
that yeah it's round like a pizza but a round flat pizza and all the continents
are on the one
flat face side up and that the satellites are up there going around it's like
yeah but the satellite
photos don't show all the continents in one picture because some of them are on
the other side of the globe so that
refutes that well not only that but they think that satellites are actually
in planes they're in planes in low earth orbit that are just circling around
there's no actual satellites
they don't even believe in satellites yeah so uh back to your original comment
i i some of these
recent ones are so crazy that you can't help but think okay they don't believe
that they're just
yanking our chain for maybe financial reasons but that does get to the question
i always get which is
do these people really believe it the cult leaders the people that make
extraordinary claims are they
just making this stuff up you know people make shit up all the time it's called
fiction fantasy
or do they really believe it are they you know true believers and you know it's
hard to tell it's
hard to get inside people's heads uh the old flat earthers in the 19th century
i think they really did
believe it uh there wasn't much money to be made you know on those kinds of
things i mentioned the
alfred russell wallace who was the co-discoverer of natural selection with darwin
i wrote my dissertation
on him and wrote a biography of him and he was quite the colorful character who
was so open-minded
to new ideas that he was also gullible so open-minded enough to see this
radical new theory of the
evolution of life by natural selection that's good pioneered other fields like
biogeography and so on
but he also was really into spiritualism and phrenology seances channeling all
that stuff and
and then he encountered an ad in one of the natural history magazines for this
500 pound bet if
anybody could prove the earth is round so he devised a test and he went down to
the bedford canal which
is a long straight like 10 10 kilometers long you can see the whole distance
and if you put these little
sticks in the ground with markers on them and you get a little telescope like a
a surveyor's scope and you line it up you can see that it bends so at each
point the stick is
you know three meters above the ground at each point and but you can see that
it's dropped down in
the last one so it's bent so he won the bet but he didn't get paid of course
because these people are
cranks and uh so we had to take him to court this ended up costing him about 15
years of his career you
know just wasting time you know writing letters and getting court dates and suing
this guy and
you know whatever to try to win the bet yeah just try to win the bet so and of
course what happens
you get caught up emotionally like i'm not going to let this bastard get away
with this you know he
should have just cut his losses and left but anyway and i found these letters
that this guy wrote to the
national or the uh the royal geographical society about uh alfred russell wallace
you know you have one
member of your society that should be you know he's a quack and a crank and you
know and he wrote
letters to the to wallace's wife you know you better not sleep in your bed at
night quietly because i'm
coming to get you guys and it's like like death threats yeah so uh you know you're
it's always
questionable to deal with cranks uh because some of them are a little uh
mentally deranged sure and
they can attach themselves to someone like wallace or darwin or anybody else if
if you can somehow or
another connect yourself to them in some sort of an argument it's kind of
legitimizes you at least in
a way because that person's giving you attention that person's engaging you and
it elevates your
standing and then whenever two people are arguing a certain amount of people
are going to choose sides
they're they're just going to even if what you're saying doesn't make any sense
there's going to be
a gang of people that go all right like what are you saying and they're going
to join in and people
love and they love to be on a team they love to be they want to be on team wallace
or team crank right
that's a natural well that's also why people like a lot of the creationists
want to debate dawkins
yes because he's the guy he's the number one top best known biological
scientist in the world
possibly for since darwin himself if i can get him on stage and dawkins likes
to say this will look
better on your resume than mine so i'll pass yeah and he doesn't need the money
so well in the contrary
argument or the uh the other position is so many people who are actual
scientists want to debate
deepak oh well yes and i have debated deepak and now so here's back to this
question is does he really
believe it because people most skeptics and atheists think well deepak's just a
fraud a con man selling
you know a snake oil i don't think so i've known him now for a number of years
and the last year
i've spent a lot of time with him and the reason i know he believes it
absolutely what he says is because
he's always working on me um privately you know if we're at lunch or dinner or
i mean i got you know
half a dozen emails just the last two days from depot and you know it's not for
public consumption he's
not trying to we're not debating he's just trying to convince me uh you know
that he's right like
why is he trying to convince you well about consciousness here uh can you do it
in his voice please
uh so here here you read them a quote from vendanta all of the body is in the
mind but not all of the
mind is in the body uh swami rama well as long as he's quoting swami rama we
know
so uh i mean he's on to something so he sends me these not because he's he's a
crank he he wants to
convince me right that his world view is um different from mine but better or i
should have a more open mind
well that's a bizarre quote and that quote can be interpreted a bunch of
different ways and um you
know one could say that we really don't know where consciousness is we believe
that it exists in the
mind right but you know what we do know is if you blow someone's brains out
they no longer exhibit any
behavior that you could recognize as being conscious right so um in my debates
with deepak i make the
point i mean he points out as you just did consciousness is the so-called hard
problem
right not how neurons fire we know how that works but the experience you have
of looking at me and vice
versa how does that derive from just uh dopamine going across synapses or norepinephrine
going across
synapses it's just electric meat how do you get electric meat to have this
experience we're having
as he likes to say where's the red if i open your skull up there's no red in
there there's no room
in there it's just neurons firing so how does that happen okay so this is the
hard problem no one knows
you know but but it's not that we know nothing you know we have some ideas
about how it works
and i think this is just one of those ones that either will never be resolved
like free will
determinism you know okay we live in a determined universe uh how can we have
free will if that's true
okay the words the language that you know there's certain restrictions on our
cognition of how we
think about the world and it's very much influenced by the words we use so that
could be one of those
mysterian mysteries that you know can't be solved simply by the not that we're
not smart enough that
just the limitations of how we perceive the world uh and it's just uh you know
so there i i like to look
at uh like this there was a big um survey of professional philosophers uh done
about three
years ago about 2600 phd either professors or or doctoral students in
philosophy what is your position
on and there's like 25 different debates in philosophy and like free will
determinism it was roughly equally
split between determinists and compatibilists like dan dennett is a compatibilist
sam harris is a
determinist and a small percentage of uh libertarian free will what are the
compatibilists
compatible is uh except the the premise that the universe is determined
governed by laws of nature
and so on but that um we make free choices within the causal net of the
universe that is i'm making
choices like i chose to come out here uh that was a choice uh yes the universe
is determined but my
behavior my actions my volitional choices within the net the causal net is part
of it uh and in any case you
can't know all the variables so it feels like you're making free choices so you
are in essence making
free choices because it feels free even if because you don't know all the
determining factors so the
compatibilist is something like that there's just different versions of it dan
dennett makes a good
argument degrees of freedom we have this idea of degrees of freedom in
engineering certain systems
are more complex or less complex and certain systems have more variation than
others so if you think of
degrees in freedom like an insect has very few degrees of freedom it's almost
entirely instinctively driven
small number of neurons and so on uh maybe a rat has more degrees of freedom
than an insect a dog more
than a rat a primate more than a dog us more than the other primates just how
many choices how many
variations so you can come up here you go this way this way this way this way
this way with the human it's not
clear which way they're going to go with the rat it's more predictable they'll
take this um t