I have a bet with Avi, $1,000, by December 31st, 2030, we won't find aliens. He says we will. I hope he wins.

You were just named, as I'm reading this now, just last week to this new White House panel council on alien and UFO and UAP task force, okay? Now leave aside that, you know, Avi Loeb is a mutual friend of ours. You've been on the Galileo Project for a while. There are some, you know, characters on this committee alongside, you know, that have legitimate credentials. Dr. Gary Nolan, professor at Stanford, he's another member who, you know, in his spare time, uh, scans the brains of abductees for a biomarker and claims to have evidence of alien, you know, uh, metallurgical isotope ratios that are anomalous. What happened, Michael? Did they get a big bag of Harvard money?

And no, there's no money. No, there's— this is all voluntary. There's no money at all. Same thing with the Galileo Project. I've been on it since the beginning, and I just do it because I'm interested in the topic. I think Avi strikes the right balance between open-mindedness and gullibility. Don't be gullible, but be open-minded, but also be skeptical. And their emphasis on data and evidence, not stories, right? I mean, we just had our first meeting today.

Avi started right off, no more stories about people who know people that touch the aliens or whatever. We've all heard these, okay? And no new physics, right? So you'll appreciate this because you're a physicist, right? I mean, it's like people are always talking— this is Avi— people are always telling me about the, you know, the aliens are going to give us new physics. No, there's no new physics, okay? So forget that. I mean, maybe they do, but you know, that's just too far off the radar here. But I'm not the enemy. I mean, I, I have a bet with Avi, $1,000, right? Uh, by 20— December 31st, 2030, we won't find aliens. He says we will. Okay, I hope he wins.

I would like it to be true. The aliens are probably out there somewhere in the cosmos. Run the numbers in the Drake Equation, it's like, yeah, okay, they're probably out there. But have they come here? Okay, so I think that's a, uh, that's a far less probable proposition. We don't know for sure. Let's see the evidence. Okay, so when Abby puts together this team, you know, it's like, yeah, sure, I'll do it. He described me as the advocatus diaboli, that is the Catholic Church's version of the devil's advocate, which they employed to debunk all the miracle claims in the Middle Ages.

Everybody had a piece of the True Cross, every, you know, these were holy relics. Everybody had the blood of this saint and this other person and so on. Okay, they know most of this is just bullshit, and they debunked it themselves. The Catholic Church was the primary skeptical debunker of miracle claims. Now, they, they still hold out, but there was this one, you know, so we're going to give Mother Teresa the, you know, her sainthood, that kind of thing. But for the most part, they're as skeptical as I am. So that's my job on the team, is really just to be a good skeptic. And of course, any good scientist is a good skeptic.

We start with the null hypothesis, that is, your claim about something is not true until you prove otherwise. The burden of proof is not on scientists and skeptics to debunk every particular claim, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. I have a theory of everything. I think Einstein was wrong, and Newton was wrong, and Hawking was wrong, and here's my theory of everything for physics. Well, you're not going to go, okay, and then, then I guess I have to disprove it and you're right. No, you're going to say, I don't believe it, but go ahead, make your case. And, uh, and we're having a conference next week, and all the top physicists will be there. Why don't you come and present your case for us, and we'll We'll judge how well you did.

In the same way that all the people that made a claim that they had a miracle cure for COVID, you know, the FDA doesn't just hand out approvals of new drugs. You actually have to present the FDA your evidence. How do you know this actually works? And you can't just say, well, my Aunt Mary had it and she took it and she felt better. Sorry, that's not evidence, right? That's not enough to refute the null hypothesis. That is, reject the null hypothesis at some level of statistical significance, as they say. That's all we're after there. So, and the more extraordinary the claim, the more evidence you better have for it.

A lot of these could be, could be actual claims, you know, based on truth and facts and reality, but just complete misinterpretation, right? I mean, one, one man's drone, you know, array in the dark could be another person's unidentified aerial phenomena. So, but when you see people that talk about things like Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, interdimensional beings and non-human biologics and now bipedal life forms on a spectrum. You know, ever go to Facebook and sign up for a new account and there's, you know, 46 different selections for your gender and your pronouns and, and the University of California. I mean, oh my gosh, it's even, even more, more impressive array. But apparently there's a spectrum, a continuum to sentient plasmoids to bipedalism, which is, you know, the insectoids, the multidimensional beings.

Yeah. There's 4 different alien species. Yeah, I've heard all this. Yeah, it's crazy. I don't believe any of it. As a good Bayesian, show me, you know, doesn't have to be me personally. I never personally saw the Chinese spy balloon, for example, but I trust the government, the Air Force, the Pentagon, Secretary of State, the president, all the news networks that showed it and so on. Okay, that's good enough.

If Marco Rubio shows up tomorrow and says, I'm here with a camera crew and the Secretary of War and the president, and here we are in Area 51 and we found the aliens, we have a big announcement. Here it is. And all the networks are there covering it. And, you know, experts are there. You're there, you know, Brian Keating, our physicist, he's there. And I don't have to see it personally. I would trust you and maybe Marco Rubio and whatever, you know. So, but, but that hasn't happened, right? So this was our, this is our complaint.

I've been following the UFO story since the early '90s, really since Carl Sagan. Well, he's over my left shoulder there. In the '80s. And, and I've been hearing about disclosure coming any day now. And I'm like, okay, this would be great. Yeah, I know, it's the greatest discovery of all time. Let's see it. And all we ever get is, sorry, can't show you, it's classified.

He won't tell us because his life is threatened. Or, you know, I can only tell you in a SCIF. Or, you know, they're buried somewhere and it's a national security— yeah, okay. And so we're still waiting. So I've become ever more skeptical.

Let's stipulate that if Grusch knows classified information, and he's not supposed to, just because he was in the intelligence community, I've interviewed, you know, 12 people that are in the intelligence community, it means a lot of different things. It doesn't mean, you know, top secret clearance at all levels at all times, right? So there's different levels. But let's just assume the worst case scenario for him, that he could reveal this, he could go to jail, he could lose his livelihood, he could have his, you know, home address doxxed, and so forth. And that might compromise his recent deal that I heard about with Jerry Bruckheimer for movie that he's working on. Okay, fine. I'm not— I'm not going to wish that harm on anybody. I have members of the military and these— and the 3-letter agencies in my extended family. And especially I didn't have the cojones to join the military like he did.

Okay, so, so fine. However, Anna Paulina Luna is the chairwoman of this task force. You know, this, this workforce in the congressional committee. Is she worried about her income? Is she worried about getting doxxed? Is she worried about what penalties would come to her? In other words, David Grusch could tell her something in a SCIF or not in a SCIF. She claims to already know it, right? He already told her about the non-human biology. objects, sentient plasmoids, and the interdimensional beings, and now these bipedal beings, which, you know, just keeps going up the escalation ladder, right? So where is the unlock here for her? Can you make that case? Why can't she come forward?

Okay, so what do you— what do we make of people that tell stories? Like, Grusch tells us a story. Okay, we've heard a lot of these stories. His sounds more credible than the, you know, the tinfoil hat wingnut that, uh, is a nobody. Credentials matter a little bit just to get a hearing. I think you know maybe there's something for that, but after that you still have to have evidence. So you know when okay so they claim they're interdimensional beings or whatever. This is just a hand wave. This is a way of saying I can't actually show you anything because they're invisible.

All right. So in the book, as you know, I present Sagan's dragon. You know I have a dragon in my garage. Would like to see it? Yeah, sure. Okay. And I open my garage and you don't see anything. I go well it's an invisible dragon. And you go okay, Shermer.

Let's sprinkle some flour on the ground and we'll see the footprints of the invisible dragon. Well, no, you see, Brian, this dragon hovers above the ground about a foot. It levitates. Oh, an invisible levitating dragon. How about we get one of those heat thermometers and outline that body heat? No, this is a cold-blooded dragon. What about the fire? No, it breathes cold fire. At some point you're going to ask, what's the difference between a, you know, levitating invisible cold-blooded dragon and no dragon at all, right? So at some point the stories have to end and we have to have evidence, or else It's not science. It's just science fiction or metaphysics or whatever you want to call it.

So how do you interact with these people? I mean, Gary Nolan is claiming that he, you know, he scanned the brain. He claims he witnessed an event. I interviewed him a couple of years back. He claims, you know, he saw the object over pine trees and so forth. You're face to face with these people, Zoom to Zoom with them. How do you comport yourself?

My first assumption with anybody is that they're not making this up. They're not lying. I would assume David Grusch is not just lying, making up a story. This does happen. I mean, I think Bob Lazar is probably a fabulist, you know, because he did make up his claim that he had graduate degrees from MIT and Caltech. He didn't even attend either school, okay? And that was debunked and exposed by his fellow ufologists, not by skeptics. So that's all you need to know. Anything else the person says, I'm not going to believe them or even listen to them because If they could lie about something so easily checkable.

In the case of Gary Nolan, yeah, he's a real scientist. Maybe he did see something. Okay. I'm going to give that assumption. Lots of people see things. Most UAP, UFO sightings in history are actual things. They're what I call ordinary terrestrial objects. All right.

Let me read you, uh, I'll give you, uh, Leslie Kean's list of, of, um—

Yeah, first tell the audience who Kean is.

Okay. So Leslie Kean is the, uh, where's my alien chapter here? Leslie Kean is the, uh, ufologist that wrote the book, um, Well, she wrote the New York Times article about this in which she first introduced the idea of the government, the Pentagon, having a UAP program. Okay, so her book is UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Her own quote, which I provide in the book, is that roughly 90 to 95% of all UFO sightings can be explained as weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, Secret military aircraft. Birds reflecting the sun. Planes reflecting the sun. Blimps. Helicopters.

The planets Venus or Mars. Meteors or meteorites. Space junk. Satellites. Swamp gas. Spinning eddies. Sundogs. Ball lightning.

Ice crystals. Reflected light off the ground. Clouds. Lights on the ground. Lights reflected on a cockpit window. Temperature inversions. Hole punch clouds. And so on.

Okay, so, you know, as they say, you know, if you hear, if you hear hoofbeats, think horse, not zebra. Because that's what's most likely to be, right? So like in the case, just take as an example, the New Jersey UAP flap in the fall of '24. This was just before the election. It got a lot of media coverage. And Trump said after he won, when I get into office in January, we're going to go figure out what this, this UAP flap was over New Jersey. Okay. Turned out it was just drones and regular ordinary terrestrial objects like airplanes, birds, the planet Venus, and especially Starlink satellites. The effect is that people who don't normally walk outside and look up into the sky, uh, because they're busy, they're just regular people, and now I heard these media stories, so they're like, oh, I'm going to go outside and when it's dark and look up.

And they're amazed to see— I mean, when you see Venus, if you don't know what you're looking at, it is striking, right? I know this because I live up in the mountains above Santa Barbara, way up in the hills.

And he knows a famous astronomer, right?

Yeah. And when you When, when I bring people up there, they're like, oh my God, what is that? I go, that's Venus. I'll show you. Here's the binoculars, right? And they're like, oh my God. And now, because there's so many Starlink satellites, there's over 10,000 of them. I have a big old mean 10-inch telescope and I, I'm looking at Jupiter, Saturn. There's the rings and the, and the moons and so on. Every time now a satellite streaks by in my little eyepiece.

And I've seen stuff on X, hopefully not anymore. Now that everybody knows about Starlink, uh, people are going, oh my God, look at this thing going around Jupiter, or there's a, there's a spaceship going around Saturn. It's like, no, it's a Starlink satellite going through our atmosphere, right? So that's how I think about it. Okay, so what about the other 5 or 10%, the anomalies? There are, there are those. I'm going to assume that Nolan and everybody else said that they actually saw something that they don't know what it was. And that's all the U means is I don't know what it is. Okay, so then the other 2 options: extraordinary terrestrial. So this is the claim that UAPs are like Russian or Chinese super advanced technologies, or they're part of the DARPA program from back-engineered crash retrieval programs the United States has.

Okay, we can dispense with that fairly quickly because first, the counterfactual— if this was true, what else would be true? If Russia had a technology that was like centuries ahead of everybody else, Wouldn't they use it in Ukraine? If we had this technology, wouldn't Trump have used it in Iran? Okay, we had everything else. We bombed the crap out of them with all our super advanced jets and, and missiles and drones. Why wouldn't we use these spacecraft that could supposedly turn on a dime and, you know, pull 500 Gs and, and, and so forth? We don't see anybody doing that. And that's not how the history of science and technology works anyway. Nobody gets very far ahead of anybody. I mean, the Russians stole our plans from the Manhattan Project during the Manhattan Project, right? Klaus Fuchs stole our plans and gave them to the Russians. They had a bomb within a couple years. Every one of these smartphones— I happen to have an iPhone, but they're all the same, right? No, no company, no matter how much property rights and secrecy they have and intellectual property that they protect, nobody gets ahead of anybody else.

They're all pretty much the same. I happen to have an Apple laptop, but all the laptops are pretty much the same. Nobody has the equivalent of like 2 centuries ahead of everybody else.

Like quantum computing iPhone, right?

The moment something like a quantum computing thing actually works, everyone, all the other companies will have it, other countries will do it. It's just not how things work. So the last hypothesis, could it be extraordinary extraterrestrial? It could be. However, and I'm talking to somebody who knows way more about this than I do, that The universe is just mostly empty space. It's vast distances between the stars. The chances of them finding us, you know, are very, very slim, right? So this is when the hand waving comes in. Well, you know, they have super advanced— they have warp drive, so they don't have to, you know, take 70,000 years to get here from the nearest star. They get here in, you know, like 10 minutes through the wormhole, you know, or like Sagan used a wormhole to get to Vega.

Right, in contact. But this is science fiction, right? There's— we— there's no such thing as, you know, new warp physics that we know of, right? You know, it could happen. Yeah, I mean, if the aliens are 100,000 years ahead of us, which they would be if we made contact with them, then yeah, maybe. But that, that, that doesn't mean that that's what's happening. It's more likely just a light, a balloon. It's the camera motion, right? A lot of these UAPs are just The camera zooms in on the object, and so it looks like it moves, but it's not. The camera's moving, you know, or the camera's tracking it, tracking it, tracking it. The object's moving, moving, moving.

Then the camera stops and the object zooms off. It's not doing anything. It's not zooming at 50,000 miles an hour. It's not doing anything. It's the camera moving, right? So even the hardcore, you know, UAP people that study this stuff, they go, yeah, yeah, okay, that one's a camera effect. That's a parallax effect. And so on. But what about this one? Okay, so here's the, the residue of anomalies problem.

There will always be weird shit that happens that nobody could explain, right? So I've been reading about— maybe you want to riff on this for a second— from the James Webb Space Telescope. I've been reading about and getting queries to skeptics, hey, should we be skeptical of the Big Bang Theory, inflationary cosmology? It's all wrong because these galaxies and black holes are formed way too early in the early universe. What do I know? Okay, maybe this is normal science, right? Just the better our instruments get, the more weird stuff we find that the old theory doesn't explain completely. Maybe it needs to be updated. I don't know. But, you know, as you know, there are people going, oh, the Big Bang theory is dead. I'm thinking probably not. But maybe, maybe you have an opinion.

The Big Bang theory is safe, at least around this household. But of course, you know, as Upton Sinclair said, it's hard to teach a man to believe something that his job depends on him not believing in. We have abundant evidence. I mean, that's the thing I just saw today. Diary of a CEO, my My friend Stephen Bartlett. I've been on his show.

Oh, right.

And we've been in contact with each other. I was on it a year ago and I just saw JD Vance was on it today. And Stephen's little shtick at the end of every episode is to ask a guest to leave a question for the next guest. And so Stephen put, you know, has millions of dollars in media exposure. He does, he's an incredible person. He's got 30 people on the team. It's an amazing thing. He's gonna be the next Rogan or maybe even surpass Rogan in many ways.

He's a very innovative person. Anyway, JD, I look and they zoom in on the— on what is the question that JD is asking? This is— it's, do you believe in God, yes or no, and why or why not? And I just thought it was like— I thought JD was a smart person. That's like one of the— one of the worst questions you can ask. I mean, it tells you nothing. It tells you—

Well, didn't he just find God? Didn't he just become a Catholic or something like that?

Just— I mean, he's been a Catholic, you know. I was a Catholic, you know. I was a Jew, then I was a Catholic, then I was nothing. Now I'm back to back to being Jewish, right? So who am I to criticize? I was an altar boy, Michael, Jewish altar boy, didn't have a bar mitzvah. So who knows more about, you know, kind of ecumenicalism than me? But, but this question of belief, like, I don't believe in gravity. I always say that I don't believe in gravity. I have evidence for gravity. And so when we have low signal-to-noise regimes, as you talk about in the book, you will always have these unfalsifiable claims.

But what's, what's kind of a little bit more disturbing to me, and I don't know why, it's not It's not that people have different facts. That actually doesn't bother me. It's that people have different epistemological techniques and toolboxes and frameworks. In other words, you know, it's not that truth is unfindable necessarily. It's that everyone's got their own, you know, their own truth, their own method of finding truth, their own epistemology. Where does that come in? How pernicious is that to you?

Well, very pernicious. But we have to make a distinction between different kinds of truth. So most of the truths I'm talking about, these kind of provisional Bayesian-type truths or scientific empirical truths for which I spend a fair amount of time in the book describing, you know, correlation and causation and signal detection theory and confounding variables and randomized controlled trials and the comparative method— all these instruments that scientists have developed to try to get at the truth of something that we can all see, right? So I start with the assumption that none of us are God, we're not omniscient, therefore we're fallible. So fallibilism. So there is an objective reality, universal realism, it's out there, we can know something about it but not everything. So you and I and everybody has to work together to see what we think is true, because any of us could be wrong. Okay, all that applies to these kinds of empirical questions. Now, there are other questions.

I could put these, say, in the literary or religious kind of truths, or mythological truths if you want to go full Jordan Peterson and Joseph Campbell. It's a different kind of truth. So, I start simply like something like J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Is there really a Middle-earth somewhere on the planet? Well, now some of my friends tell me, yeah, it's in New Zealand where they filmed the movies. Like, okay, yeah. But no, of course he just made this up. You know, J.K.

Rowling's train station, 9¾ in Harry Potter. There's no such thing. Okay. Although I double-checked that when I was fact-checking, and sure enough, some fans built a fake train station in London that says 9¾. But what makes great literature great is that it has deeper truths about the human condition, human relationships and love and jealousy and anger. And And power and truth-telling and lying and deception and all the human things that great novelists write about. So the stories are made up, the characters are made up, the things didn't actually happen, but you're— you're— you got to read into the story what is being said. Okay, now most religious people will go with me a little ways.

Like if I say, you know, do you think Jonah was actually swallowed by a great fish or a whale or whatever and spent 3 days in the belly of the fish? If you're asking that, you, you've missed the point of the story, right? The 3 days is symbolic. You know, he's here, then God delivers him to this other land through the fish, whatever, it doesn't matter. And he delivers this message from God to these other people that have to find redemption and start over and so forth. All right, so it's a kind of a redemption story. Yeah, most religious people go, yeah, okay, I get that. Yeah, sure, whether there really was an Adam and Eve is not that important. You know, there's no evidence that, you know, Moses led his people out of the— into the desert for 40 years. And so, you know, maybe it's just a story about something deeper.

Okay, now I've tried this out, as you know from, from those chapters in the book. I've tried this out all the way up to the resurrection. Maybe the resurrection of Jesus didn't actually happen. Maybe it's just a story that the Jewish people, uh, at the time, some told themselves as an oppression-redemption story about the Messiah that's going to come and overthrow the Romans and start anew, right? That, that's what the Jewish people thought the Messiah was going to be. That spun that into a completely different story that Most Christians today say, no, no, that's not mythologically true. That is literally true, right? There's one person out of the 100 billion who have lived and died before us who came back from the dead. He was dead for 3 days. There's that 3 days again.

And the tomb is empty, and the women went there, they didn't see him. And then there was the post-death apparitions, and, and so on and so forth. Okay, you know the arguments. Okay, I'm— my, my point is that you're— I think you're missing the point of the story. Right? It's a story about starting over, about redemption, forgiveness, and about like, let's rebuild our own society here now. Jesus himself said heaven is within you, right? He has this passage in Matthew, you know, people ask me where, when's it coming, where is it? And he's like, it's not there, it's not here, it's in here, right? I'm talking about heaven in here, you know. So I think we should take, we should take his words, you know, literally. That's what he meant.

He meant, you know, not some place that happens in the afterlife. Anyway, so my Christian friends are not vibing this, right? But I'm trying to make the point that I think religious stories serve a different purpose. And here I use an example, like when the preacher says the church has a parking lot in the back, you can go see it yourself. You can fact-check that. But when the preacher says, you know, God is 3 in 1, 1 in 3, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the Trinity and all that, how is anybody sitting there in the church going to go, well, I'm going to go check that one out myself and decide if I think it's true or not? Nobody does that, because how would you, right? So people go, yeah, okay, I just, I guess I believe it, or no, I don't really believe it, I'm gonna go to this other church, or whatever. But there's— it's a different category than the stuff you and I are talking about. Like, we can get our, we can get our hands on this, we can sink our teeth in it, we can look at the evidence, we can vote, we can publish, you know, we can go to a conference and try to convince our colleagues. None of that happens in religion, right? So I think it's a different kind of thing.

I mean, to push back, I mean, there are, you know, this is an old, old, you know, theme in Judaism, for example. And there are various, you know, kind of answers to this dating back to, you know, the equivalent of St. Thomas Aquinas, you know, in many ways for Judaism was Maimonides, who's a, you know, physician and a philosopher and a natural scientist such as it was at the time throughout the Mediterranean and the Spanish Tree Inquisition. And, you know, he talked about this and sort of the chain of lies that you would— like, if there was a— if this were not true, If Jesus were not him, he wasn't talking about Jesus, but I can use that example. Like, there are 3 different possibilities, right? He was the true, you know, Lord, or he was a lunatic, or he was just kind of a charismatic cult leader, effectively. But at some level, you have to believe that there was a lie and that that lie gets propagated through generation to generation. And, you know, you can sort of maintain— as I forget who said it, yeah, I think it was Mark Twain— 3 can maintain a conspiracy if 2 are dead, right? So you wrote about that in your last book. So at what level do you, do you start to say that human nature is somehow evolving? In other words, they're more comfortable with lies, or they knew that their lies might not ever come to be, and, and just sort of knowing evidentiary waiting.

How could they know? The Torah says, ask the history, or, you know, seek out from past, has any people ever been revealed to God by God and lived? And if you go back, there's a bunch of people where they claim to have experienced God or been— have revelation, including the Hindu tradition, but they all died in the Bhagavad Gita, right? They all die. Uh, and so you can look for it. And okay, this is not proof, but what do you make of this kind of grand lie design? For me to have been misled for, you know, thousands of years— I, you know, I have to lie to my kids, and I have to have been lied to by my grandparents ad infinitum, back to, you know, Moses on Mount Sinai. So what do you make of that kind of chain of reasoning? That's not proof, it's not evidence.

It is in between, uh, empirical truths and just making stuff up. I mean, the argument, you know, Jesus was, you know, liar, lord, or lunatic. That's the C.S. Lewis line. How about just genuinely mistaken? He just, you know, I'm just delivering a message that people heard something slightly different than in the retelling and retelling. I mean, the earliest gospels are written 40 years after the fact. The other ones are 50, 60, 80, 90 years after. And then the Book of Acts even later.

And then the Bible just gets piled on, you know, centuries later. Right? So it's not canonized until the 5th century. So we're talking centuries of piling up these stories. No one has to lie about anything. You can just retell the story, and it changes, and it changes, and it changes. I think, you know, parts of Jesus's message are really good. Bart Ehrman's new book, you know, Love Thy Stranger, about the Christian ethics and how that changed the world. There probably was a Jesus, but I don't think he was a Lord.

But I don't think he was—

You know, which has some reason to be, you know, kind of antagonistic towards Jesus. I mean, towards Christians, not Jesus, We know his rabbi. We know why he was kind of banned by the Jewish Pharisees at the time. I think it's near historical. I mean, you could dispute the Shroud of Turin, and yeah, of course. In terms of historicity of records, the Jews are pretty good about that, and that we do have records of his rabbi and his teacher and his tradition.

Oh yeah, sure, absolutely. I don't dispute any of that. Yeah, I think a man named Jesus existed. Okay, but let me ask you this: why don't Jews accept the resurrection if it's empirically, literally true? and it can be proved. You know, there's whole books about it. Here's all the arguments for why you should believe that the resurrection happened. Okay, Jews know these arguments. They've read those books.

You can't just say, if those rabbis knew our arguments, they would believe in Jesus. They know your arguments. They just don't believe it. First, the Jews didn't think that's what the Messiah would be like. They thought the Messiah would be a conquering warrior that would overthrow the Roman Empire and so on, establish this new land. That's not what happened. Jesus was captured and killed, along with a couple of nobody thieves, and then his body disappeared. Who knows what happened to it, right? It was a nobody.

So that's not who the Jews thought would be coming, not the carpenter from Nazareth. Okay, so, um, right there, that's— to me, that's a pretty indicting argument there. If— because the Jews believe in the same God, Yahweh, they believe in the same book, the Old Testament anyway, and they even believe that there's a Messiah.

Right?

I mean, I've talked to Ben Shapiro about this. He believes all that, right? He's just like, nope, I don't think it was that guy. I'm sorry, I just don't think it was.

So you've written another wonderful book with a single-word title, and you know we always love to do what you're not supposed to do, but you have a chapter on Bayesian evidence, so we have to judge this book by its cover. Hey book lovers, we're judging books by their covers. We know we're So Michael, take us through the title, the subtitle, and this mysterious cover artwork.

I actually had nothing to do with the design of it. I, I'm guessing they wanted that. That's the North Star and the North Star. My North Star is truth. Our North Star should be truth, not ideology, not politics, not religion, but you know, just whatever is truth. I start off first by saying we're not living in a post-truth alternative facts, fake news world. If we were living in a post-truth world, the people that make that case, they make a case. They, they argue, they present evidence and arguments that we are, which means that we're not.

That is, they've lost the argument the moment they open their mouth to make an argument, because that's the whole point of the search for truth, is to make arguments.

What does it even mean, post-truth? I mean, if you say something's post-truth, that means there are no truths, and therefore what they say is paradoxically not something.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. In reality, of course, I'd get into this a little bit more. What they're really saying is that there's been challenges to the truth-seeking institutions like the academy and scientific institutions and the CDC and Anthony Fauci and climate scientists and, you know, the whole routine, vaccine scientists and whatnot. So really what they're saying is, I don't really trust the scientists like I used to. Not that we're living in a post-truth world. People on the other side say, you know, we do have the truth and you should all believe it. But that's also fraught by overselling your confidence in a particular claim without putting any Bayesian probabilities on it, means that if you're wrong, people go, hey, you said that the masks worked, now they don't. Or you said we had to close the schools, but hey, wait a minute.

Or I see Al Gore is claiming that all of his claims in Inconvenient Truth were true, but I'm also seeing sites going, they're all wrong, and here's why, boom, boom, boom. It's like, okay. So I think when people say post-truth, I think that's what they mean. It's like, how come we can't get agreement? On what we are supposed to believe. And then I define truth as something confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent— rational to offer our provisional assent. Provisional as in it could change, and truth as in small-t truth. It's provisionally true. This is what we're confident in at the moment.

That could all change. And so, from there, that allows you to put truth as a truth-seeking as a virtue without having to be right or wrong. And therefore, it's, it's a virtue to change your mind if the evidence changes, rather than, uh, it's a threat to your identity or your politics or your religion, in which people put their backs up and refuse to, you know, engage because they feel like it's a threat to them. So that's kind of the thrust of the book.

How do you define, you know, kind of the difference between changing your mind, which is a commendable attribute, I suppose, those versus changing your model. I'm thinking of— there are a lot of internet charlatans and people— I won't say he's a charlatan, but there's a guy I follow who's really into Bitcoin and he's always got some new thing. And his main hypothesis was that the Bitcoin cycle runs on the monetary cycle, which runs on every 4 years in the election cycle. And so, we're due for a huge rebound in the beginning of 2026. And I don't know how much you follow crypto, but it's certainly not been— So then he said, oh, actually, it's actually a 5-year cycle. And, and I'm waiting, and it's going to peak in, uh, in mid-2026. He said that in January. We are at mid-2026 now.

It's, you know, who knows? But the thesis never changes, no matter how much, you know, Maynard Keynes said, you know, when the facts change, I change my mind. Okay, fine. But where's the virtue in changing your model? Isn't that kind of, you know, moving the goalposts and the sharpshooter fallacy?

I've been following people since I was an undergraduate at Pepperdine University in the '70s who are into these invest in gold and silver, and here's my newsletter of how to beat the market, and all these kinds of things. I even went to a seminar with friend of mine, my roommate at the time, about how you don't actually have to pay taxes, that this is not, uh, legal, that Congress never approved the income tax law and all that stuff, and here's what you got to do, and so on and so forth. And, you know, they walked us through the whole thing. And so my buddy's like, that's it, I'm just going to follow these steps and I'm never paying income tax again. But, you know, he got caught later, you know, years down the line, because we were just poor starving students, so The IRS doesn't care about us, but eventually caught up with them. But it's a little bit like that, you know, on these gold investment or crypto newsletter guys. I never trust them because they're selling something first. You know, you should invest in my fund, you should sign up for my newsletter, you should do this and that.

And they're mutually contradicting each other. I mean, you know, they all make claims, but they're not consistently like that. Here's a good statistical artifact here. There was a guy named Bill Miller. and a hedge fund manager who beat the S&P 500 15 years in a row. All right, so you do the calculations like, oh my God, the odds of this are like 370 million to 1. You know, he's the greatest hedge fund manager of all time, and so on and so forth. But in fact, this is called base rate neglect.

How many hedge fund managers are there? There's over 6,000 of them. Okay, at the beginning of 15 years, can you tell me which of these 6,000 hedge fund managers is going to beat the S&P 500 over the next 15 years?

No.

No, you can't. Nobody can, right? After the fact, you could go back and go, oh, those are the companies that succeeded, that's the guy that made the most money, and let's just do what they did. No, that doesn't work. And in fact, after the fact, if you go back to see how those people and companies do the next 15 years, they just go back to where everybody else is, right?

You know, in terms of like modern-day parallels, you know, not to make, you know, too, too, uh, big a record scratch here, but But, you know, the Feynman kind of standard is that only that which can be verified experimentally is valid. In other words, maybe a riff on Popper as well, which is, you know, neither one of which is, you know, truly held by, you know, modern philosophers of science to be the sine qua non of good science. I mean, there's many more things than just falsifiability and experimental evidence, but we all agree that that's a big plus. And on the back of your book is an encomium for many people, but one of whom is Brian Greene, you know, my kid's favorite physicist named Brian. But Brian Greene gives you this wonderful encomium, right? But he's of course known most especially for being the hype man for— and I've had him on the show and I've talked to him many times, but he's the biggest hype man aside from Michio Kaku, who we'll come to later, because I think he is also engaging in a myth-making fairy tale that needs to be countered in some way. And I've taken it upon myself to start doing that lately. But Brian Greene, you know, is known for the, you know, string theory sort of being the only game in town and that this is, you know, just We, you know, we're not worthy of string theory, and it kind of fell into the 20th century, but it's really from the 23rd century. You know, all this stuff.

And the leading string theorists like Witten and Seiberg have said things like, well, if something comes along and it's not consistent with string theory, we'll just kind of rebrand it as string theory, and then it'll be part of string theory. So if that's not true, if that doesn't count, string theory, where you rely on it quite heavily towards the end of the book in the cosmology section— well, you talk about M-theory and Hawking's theory. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You talk about Milad now, and all these things are just fanciful nonsense. I mean, no real practicing physicist thinks that Hawking really had anything important to say about the origin of the universe in terms of M-theory. No, there are very few people that work on M-theory anymore. Supersymmetry is another thing that's not worked on anymore. You talk about the variable speed of light.

I wish you had sent me the book beforehand, Michael, because there are some quibbles I would have pointed out to you, and maybe that Brian Greene could have been a Keating on the back. But anyway, Michael, so is metaphysics kosher? Religion is some form of metaphysical presentation. are they, are they legitimate avenues?

Okay, let me, let me back up and give you my thinking here. Those chapters, you know, God, why is there something rather than nothing, consciousness, and free will, are all in the third part of the book called The Known Unknowables. I'm not sure that we can get an answer to the question the way these questions are phrased. In the case of consciousness, what's it like to be something else? It's not possible to know that, you know, so it's all going to be somewhat speculative. Uh, you know, free will and determinism— I know all the arguments. Determinists have great arguments. I think they're wrong. It may not be something anybody can actually prove.

This may be one of these pragmatic truths. I also talk about this, like, I use the example of Martin Gardner, who was one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement, and he was there with Amazing Randy and, and Paul Kurtz and others that started the skeptics, you know, that we came on board in the early '90s. And he was a famous debunker of astrology and psychics and Uri Geller spoon bending and all that that bullshit. But, you know, later in his life, in an interview with me actually in Skeptic, he said, I, I'm a believer in God. I'm a fideist. F-I-D-E-I-S-T. Fideist, which is a kind of theist in a pragmatic sense that William James and Miguel Unamuno meant. That is to say, if it's a big important question, we cannot answer it ultimately through science or rationality or logic, and it makes a difference in your life, then just go ahead and believe whatever you want.

It doesn't matter. And he says, I believe in God, I believe in an afterlife, I believe in prayer. You know, of course, people like Randy are like, what, Martin? How could you say this? And he's like, I'm not saying I can prove it. I'm not saying you should believe. I'll even say that the atheists have slightly better arguments than the theists. I'm just saying no one can prove it for sure, and this is what works for me. It's sort of ending the conversation empirically. It's like, okay, you know, so somebody says—

Offshoot of a riff on Pascal, right?

I mean, it is. Well, kind of, but not Yeah. Not a bet for the next life. It's like, this is what works for me in my life now. Okay, so if I want to use the, the example of free will, let's say the determinists are right. But I've never met a determinist who actually believes it. All the determinists I know have written books about determinism, and they're very proud of their books. How could they be proud of their books? It was determined at the Big Bang that they were going to write that book, right? So this is what's called a useful fiction, you know.

Okay, I don't know, maybe I don't have free will, but it sure feels like it. I'm just going to assume I do. It works for me. I assume you do too, because I treat you like you're a volitional agent and I can influence you, and you're making free choices, I should hold you accountable. We all do this, right? So maybe belief in God, for some people— not me— but, you know, it just works, you know, in that kind of pragmatic truth sense.

But if you're really interested in the, in the search for truth, you could be more militant in your atheism, right? You could be like a Lawrence Krauss, or Sam Harris is a militant free will denier, although he does believe that artificial intelligence can have free will, interestingly. And so in my mind, a scientist can, can have permission to believe, maybe not at the same level as a devout deist or theist. Like, I talked to Stephen C. Meyer recently, and he invoked the claim that you made the other day, or the other minute, rather. Feels like a day when you're talking to me, I'm sure. And that was that the universe is so big and it's so vast, and there must be so many planets that have life, but yet we don't find any with life, and therefore that's a form of fine-tuning. tuning, which you address in the book. So maybe we could pivot there.

I have great difficulties with, with both sides of this debate— the fine-tuning argument, which I feel is, is overbroad, and, and also the denial of transcendent information that we do have about the physical universe and why, why that shouldn't be, you know, used in a scientific framework. So let's talk about fine-tuning. You talk about, you know, the trillions of planets, and, and you sort of use that as an argument, well, there must be life out there. I feel like that's a large numbers gambler's hypothesis fallacy. type argument because you don't know what the multiplying factor is. The Drake equation should never have been— you know, if I could go back in time, I'd probably, you know, slap Drake around, you know, the late great Frank Drake, because it's really not an equation at all. If, if my students hand in a paper and it's got a number on it and an equation and no uncertainties on that, I fail them, Michael. Okay, that has no uncertainties, no systematics, no error bars.

It's complete junk nonsense. It's just like a cocktail napkin party trick. But people then publish that napkin And I was astonished recently to read a survey in Nature, Nature Astronomy, that asked basically, do professional astrobiologists believe that aliens exist in the universe? And I felt like they shouldn't answer that question. I felt that question is not dignified for a scientist to answer. What do you make of this? This belief in science?

Yeah, I agree with that. You don't believe in it. You just practice it. You don't believe in science. It's just something you use. It's like, can you use rationality to prove rationality? Can you use induction to prove induction? That's the wrong question. As for the fine-tuning, again, this, this whole thing in my book is like, here's some big problems: free will and determinism, consciousness, the Big Bang, fine-tuning, why there's something rather than nothing. Here's a bunch of answers that people have offered.

Ultimately, I'm saying these are not— we're not able to answer these questions with the tools we have at the moment. I'm not saying we'll never be able to answer it. Hopefully we can. I offer some of my own. So whether I'm out of date with the M-theory or whatever, the point is, is that there's a bunch of different answers that people have offered. People like you that are physicists and cosmologists, like, here's what we think. When someone says, why is there something rather than nothing? I mean, don't you have some answer other than nobody knows? Okay, maybe, uh, that's fine. But, uh, okay, but the, the bigger picture here is that I'm trying to make is that if somebody says, I'm not sure what you believe, I don't care, this is what I believe, it works for me, then I'm okay with that.

I mean, as you know, Iain Herschel famously found God and Jesus and the thing. And people like Richard Dawkins, who insist on literal— this is a literal truth claim, so you better be able to prove it or else. Now, if, if Iain or whoever says, I'm not saying you should believe, I'm just saying this changed my life. Okay. And that, that is the case for her. And that's the case for a lot of people. You know, they have troubles in their life and believing in Jesus or Buddha or whatever makes a big difference. Okay.

I met Isaac Hayes once at a Thanksgiving dinner. He just happened to be the great Grammy Award-winning theme from Shaft. chef on South Park, big star, right? And he, you know, famously in the '90s was a Scientologist. So, you know, there he is at my best friend's Thanksgiving dinner. He's sitting right across from me. I'm like, oh my God, it's the great Isaac Hayes. I think I'll ask him, not in a confrontational way. I mean, it's a Thanksgiving dinner.

Like, so what does Scientology do for you? And so on. And he's just like, well, Michael, I, I lost everything I had. I, you know, I was at the pinnacle of rock and roll and the whole thing, and I lost it all, and the Scientologists saved life. Okay, you know, end of story. He wasn't trying to convert me or tell me how great Scientology is and you should join too. Nothing like that. So I'm perfectly okay saying, all right, fine, I'm okay with that. And I'm not claiming it's a make-believe, a phony, it's a myth and a fake.

There's a different category of, you know, things we assume about the world that just work for us, and that's okay, right? So that's my point there. Okay, so let's go back to the fine-tuning. What is your answer to Stephen Meyer's the intelligent design theorists' argument about the fine-tuning. It looks like there's a fine-tuner.

I had him on last week, and I'm in his new film. I'm highly paid. I got a Southwest ticket, you know, return trip. And I should say, I was the last up there in the Pacific Northwest to host Richard Dawkins. So, you know, people will criticize me for having him on, although I think I made the match, you know, like a yenta between you and Stephen. So I think I get some credit for for broaching that about 4 or 5 years ago with his book, The Return of the God Hypothesis. My role in the movie was to push back on some of the fine-tuning arguments.

What's this movie?

It's basically a movie version of Return of the God Hypothesis. My, you know, counter to him is that there are few things that are as poorly tuned as the universe. And, and, and the, for example, the one that you bring up in the book is sort of cherry-picked. I mean, with due respect, but you're not an astrophysicist, so I don't expect you to know this. But people like Hawking would cherry-pick certain things like the acceleration or the expansion rate of the universe, and the— and then Martin Rees, who's on the book as well, the amount of overdensities and underdensities needed to be just finely tuned. Apparently there's a lot of— there's a lot of hand-waving in those numbers. For example, right now we live in an era of what's called the cosmological constant or dark energy, that the largest source of matter energy in the universe right now, which propels its expansion, is called dark energy. And now that's just a name, and we have very— almost no information about it.

We have less information about that than dark matter. We've actually detected dark matter. We know what dark matter is. We don't know how much of it there is out there, but neutrinos, which you've heard of, are a form of dark matter. They're exactly the perfect Hollywood version of what dark matter is. They weakly interact with the other forces. They don't interact with light. They don't give off light, and they have mass.

Perfect example of what dark matter could be. there's just not enough of them to make up for the missing mass that closes the universe— makes the universe flat, rather. Anyway, but early on in the universe, uh, we were radiation dominated. In other words, the dominant source of energy in the universe was heat, light. And then the second phase of the universe was called matter domination. And then third generation is where we live now. It's called the, the dark energy or cosmological constant, potentially. Right now they claim that if this were off by a tiny bit, we wouldn't be here because the universe would accelerate way too fast.

But they always miss the fact that this is a real number. So real numbers can take on any value from, you know, and there's an infinite number of real numbers between any 2 real numbers, right? So they could have taken on any value. And to say that this value is so finely tuned, and I told this to Steven, you'll watch the podcast, comes out on Monday. And I told him this number is incredibly poorly tuned. It's even worse tuned than my violin, which, you know, I don't even play, Michael. You know, I play one instrument, Spotify. That's the only instrument I can play. And so to tell me that that's evidence of fine-tuning is just— it goes against his case.

Now, they'll make up things, you know, that seem to be. But I do want to point out something that they do say and that he did say on the record on my podcast. At least he claimed that intelligent design has made falsifiable predictions, which turned out to be not false. In other words, verified in terms of what was called junk DNA. For a long time, they had this weak kind of claim that all DNA has meaning and matter, you know, kind of like every sperm is beautiful from The Life of Brian or whatever, right? All parts of DNA have some, some purpose, just like all galaxies have some purpose maybe, and, and the extravagant universe. And so they claim that this is, you know, something that could have been falsified but wasn't. And I pointed out that's actually more empirical support in a Bayesian factor scenario than string theory. And I think that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

They start shifting around. They don't like that.

But it's true.

And you can check it on Grok or whatever. It's very weak, Michael. It's like saying, you know, they predicted the sky would not be blue, you know, something kind of semi-plausible but not— so it's not a huge way, but string theory has zero. So when you multiply zero by, you know, divide it by any number, it's gonna be zero, right?

Yeah.

So from this context, the fine-tuning is very weak. It is not at all, you know, convincing. The, you know, kind of alternative that there's, you know, God wouldn't make, as you bring up Sean Carroll in this book and the claim that, Well, why would God be so wasteful as to create, you know, 10 to the 24th planets in the observable universe? You know, if I were God, I wouldn't do that. Which I always think it's ironic when a militant atheist like Sean Carroll will say something is not the way that God would do it. I mean, is God like, what would Sean Carroll do? But I point it out, you know, 100 years, you know, science is provisional. And I do hope that, you know, we get things better and better. Like, I hope that my books are irrelevant in 100 years. Not that they're still correct.

We still have no idea what's going on. on. But I guess in the anomalies, there'll always be these anomalies you mentioned, always be the 5% residue that you cannot eliminate. And I worry that as, as we pick the lower-hanging fruit, all that's going to be left is anomalies. It's like Brandolini's principle. We won't be able to refute all the BS. So, and, and sum up, the, the fine-tuning is not convincing at all. There are numbers that seem to be interestingly inhabiting a region of parameter space.

And, and my colleagues in inflationary cosmology will say, yes, of course, you know, what's the anthropic principle at work? Thanks to the diverse, which I also don't think is plausible. So I'm kind of in the middle of these different worlds. I think they're, they're interesting questions. I hope to settle them with data. Unlike a lot of people, like, I don't think that the, you know, the Discovery Institute, you know, they do some sorts of research, but it's always what's called abduction. Not the alien abduction that you experienced, uh, 35, 40 years ago, but they're starting with a conclusion and they're reasoning back to the, to the facts that would cause it to be deductively true or abductively true. True. And I find that certainly not scientific.

You know, abduction is not a big, you know, apologetics, we call it, right? So I guess to you, what, what is the, what is the point? I mean, do you feel, do you feel, you know, depressed, or do you feel, you know, that these things will proliferate? For example, moon landing denial, you know, is, is, is rampant. People believe in the flat earth all around the globe. You know, I joke. What are their motivations? You studied psychology and you understand it better than anybody. So what motivates Bart Sibrel to keep claiming to Buzz Aldrin? Yeah, go ahead.

Well, let me come back to that for a second because that was a long discussion of the fine-tuning, which I'm glad to know. I took Martin Rees— since he's Lord Martin Rees now— I took him at his word that these are the 6 numbers that are fine-tuned, and, and all the creationists and intelligent design people quote him. So I thought, all right, I got to use that. I should have sent it to you and said it's not so fine-tuned. So I, again, on this this question of belief. I think most of us most of the time believe things that we can't prove or we can't explain. We know this from tons of research in cognitive psychology. I use the example in the book of asking undergraduates, do you accept Darwin's theory of evolution? They almost always say, yeah, of course.

But then you say, explain it, and they're like, oh, um, well, the giraffe stretches its neck and the baby giraffes have longer necks, you know, inheritance of acquired characteristics. No, that isn't Darwin's theory at all. That's completely wrong. Or, you know, do you support or reject NAFTA, you know, the North American Free Trade Agreement? Oh, I'm for it, or I'm against it. Okay, what is it? Who's in it? I forget, right? You know, and so most of what we claim we know about the world, like, oh, I accept this, or I believe that, no one actually facts checks those things, right? So research on climate denial, turns out that the people who accept anthropogenic global warming don't know anything more about it than the deniers. In other words, it's a technical science. Most people don't know much about it at all. I mean, I publish a magazine, we cover this story, people send me articles all the time.

I'm still completely a dunce cap when it comes to climate science. And, and so the average person goes, yeah, I, I believe it, or I don't believe it. Really what they're saying is, I accept the scientists, they usually get it right, and they tell me this is true, so yeah, I guess so. Or I, you know, I just don't believe the scientific institutions anymore, they lied about this and that. And You know, they're liberals and they're doing this and that. I don't believe them, right? So most of what people say, they, they have different motives. You know, it's a tribal thing. It's my, my party believes this, my religion believes this, or whatever.

As for the individual, you know, the flat earthers, um, you know, there was that Netflix documentary Beyond the Curve. It was so good because you could really see the ego involvement with these guys. Like, I have this thing. and no one else believes it but me. And then there's a few other people, and we have our little thing here, and I have this secret knowledge, and oh my God, I, I am in on this. It's very much like the conspiracy theorists, you know. I know what actually happened on 9/11, or who really shot JFK, or who really killed Princess Diana. You know, it's this whole thing of like, I have this— you know, it's a very ego-gratifying thing.

The flat earthers, you know, and all that— I mean, sorry, the no-mooners. Yeah, I think it's that kind of thing, you know. I think it's just a, a one-off thing. I don't think this is a big popular conspiracy theory anymore. That will never go away because there's always going to be people that, you know, want to own the knowledge. They're very ego-embedded in it. Well, their identity is defined by it. This is the point of, you know, the North Star should be your— it should be truth, not that the Earth has to be flat because this is how I define myself, or whatever it it is.

And so that's never going to change. You know, this is, you know, the my-side bias, the hindsight bias, and the confirmation bias. These are all just built into human psychology. And that's true for everybody, which is back to the start of our conversation, why we all have to work together to see what's actually true. I have to point it to you. You can't say, well, I know what's true, but I can't show you because it's classified. I mean, you could say that, but, you know, at some point I gotta see It myself, or, you know, or the whole community of people saw it, right? So my analogy in the book, like with Bigfoot, you know, people say they, they saw Bigfoot or whatever. You know, if you want to name a new species in biology, you can't show up at a conference and go and announce on the stage to your colleagues, I found a new species.

Oh, great. All right. Can we see it? Well, no, you see, I was out camping and it was 3 in the morning and I heard this rustle and I went out there and my camera didn't really work. But, and I took this blurry photograph, and if you use your imagination, it sort of looks like a body. They're going to go, you don't get to name a new species after this, you know, incident. We, we need a type specimen. Show us the body, the Bigfoot. Show us the alien, or else there's no reason to believe, right? It's back to Sagan's dragon, you know.

But I feel the presence of the dragon. Oh, that's nice. I feel like the dragon loves me, and, and, and believing in the dragon changed my life. life. Okay, fine, that's good for you, but that doesn't mean I should believe it because it didn't change my life, right? So, you know, that's the distinction I'm making.

There's also the corresponding problem with the fossil record, and you talk about paleontology a lot in the book as well. The same could sort of be said for like transitional forms. And yes, we— and, and, you know, certainly Meyer believes in, in, you know, microevolution. The question is macroevolution. How do you respond to that when there are these gaps and there will be forever bridgeable lacunae between what can be possibly known and what is going to be known? It's a huge gap. Just because we can't find a fossil, yeah, you could say that does, but for people that say yes, just like the biologist with the Bigfoot, you know, why should we believe, why should we have more evidentiary weight towards evolution that ascribes these, you know, transitional forms and universal common ancestors that we can't find?

I call this the fossil Right? So here's a fossil, and here's a fossil. I need a transitional fossil in the gap here. This is a big gap. All right, here, I'll use a banana because that's a good one. So here is a transitional fossil between these two fossils, and the creationist goes, "Now there's two gaps in the fossil record," right? Give me a transitional fossil there, and then there, and then there. Right? So in other words, it's non-falsifiable claim. There's there's no amount of evidence I'm going to present you that's going to get you to go, "Okay, I see there's a trans." All right, so that's the general principle there. And more specifically, these are inferential sciences.

These are events that already happened. So historically— so I have that chapter on history, you know, we have to use the comparative method and come at it from multiple lines of inquiry. How do you know the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago? How do you know the horses came from this transitional fossil? Whatever. This isn't like there's that one fossil and that proves it. No, it's a whole line of inquiry, a bunch of different pieces of evidence and so on that all add up to this conclusion. They may be wrong, but if everyone in— almost everyone in the field who knows a lot about this goes, yeah, I think you got it right, it's probably right. Not necessarily. They could all be wrong.

This has happened in the past historically. But usually when there's a general consensus among scientists, you know, that's, that's mostly probably right. You know, the, oh, they laughed at, uh, Galileo or whatever. Yeah, but you know, most of the colleagues of Galileo, they, they were wrong. So they should have been laughed at, maybe. I don't know.

That's what I get. I get the, uh, well, Professor Keating, you know, they laughed at Einstein, and I'm not good in math, but if you help me out, I'll share the Nobel Prize. Exactly, the actual Nobel Prize money. But, um, as we close, I was touched by the opening, uh, dedication to Daniel Dennett, who I have to say was, uh, very, you know, meaningful to me, that I, uh, I think I did the last interview he ever did 2 weeks before he died. I don't know what that says about, about him, that he chose to spend, you know, 2 hours with Keating before he died. But, but I was very honored to, to experience that time with him, and, and he obviously is a giant. I want to, instead of asking, you know, why did you dedicate it to him, or what did he get right about consciousness, what are your thoughts about his perspective on consciousness that maybe the field resists still?

Well, in general, I dedicated the book to him because I, first of all, he was a friend, and second of all, uh, he's one of the few philosophers I know that was deeply, uh, ensconced in science, and he really cares about science and evidence and arguments and so Not just thought experiments, right? Because one of the things that bothers me about philosophers is they just do thought experiments. And I always ask, you know, did you look out the window? You know, we're living in a simulation. I have this thought experiment that proves there's a, you know, 51% Bayesian probability we're living in a simulation. Really? Did you look out the window to see if it looks like we're living in a simulation? Do you see any buffering when you're looking out at the world, right? Anyway, so Dan, you know, he didn't fall for that. He liked to follow the lines carefully. And again, his, you know, the particular quote I gave from him about, you know, truth was the bottom line for him and not ideology or some political or even a philosophical method, which I appreciated about him. As for consciousness, yeah, well, both free will and consciousness on the— so he wrote several books on each, you know. On the, um, his book on free— wrote several books on free will, but Freedom Evolves was his book in which he made the argument degrees of freedom.

So rather than an on or off switch, you know, there's just like a spectrum of, of degrees of freedom that an organism can have depending on their evolutionary history and so on and so forth. So I really like that concept there. And I, you know, he was a compatibilist, so I often cite him because I'm not a philosopher. So I go, I'm a compatibilist. Well, you're not a philosopher. Well, Dan Dennett was a compatibilist and he's one of the great philosophers. It's kind of an argument from authority, I guess. And then same thing with consciousness, you know, it's a really hard problem I think that the, the question itself— what's it like to be somebody else or something else— is not answerable.

I think it's the wrong question. It's a conceptually— it's not a hard problem, it's an impossible problem. It's not answerable the way it's asked. What's it like to be something? How would I know? I mean, as far as all I know, Brian, you're not a sentient being. You're just a robot, right? That's the philosophical—

Plasmoid, Michael. Haven't you heard?

I just rewatched that Star Trek: Next Generation episode, The Measure Measure of a Man, you know, his data person, right? They're going to take him apart and make 1,000 of them. And Picard says, you know, prove to me that I'm conscious, to the other guy. You know, it's like, well, I can't. It's like, exactly, but I know you are. It's like, how do you know I am, right? Anyway, it's a crazy—

Prove you have a brain. I haven't seen it, have you? Yeah, so how do you know it exists? Well, I've got one right here. Just, uh, outsourced my, my third lobe. Well, Michael Shermer, I don't think Daniel, uh, is reading the book from heaven. I don't He believed in heaven. I'm glad that you quoted him, and I'm glad that this book exists, and I thank you for the role that you play. You know, I mean, you're very courageous. You're fearless.

This book has as many arguments, you know, if you sum them up just by pure evidentiary presentation rather, there's an equal number of arguments for God as against God, for example, or for almost any subject, but obviously they're not given equal weight, And the toolkit of science is something we must as a society preserve because we can disagree on facts, you know, and even findings. I mean, my sensors, you know, you hear something completely different than I do. I don't know one bit about your qualia, as Daniel would say. You know, I have no idea if you see the color red, it's exactly the way I see the color red. I know for a fact we don't see it the same way. All these reasons, I think, conspire to at least allow us to suspect that the laws of science science and the toolkit of science and epistemology in that realm are at least our best hope, you know, to get closer and closer to truth. So Michael Shermer, Dr. Michael Shermer, thanks for joining us on the podcast.

You're welcome.

Michael Shermer just bet $1,000 we will never find the aliens. That's epistemology with skin in the game. The burden of proof is on the claimant, not the skeptic. If that changes how you think about UFO disclosure, Hit subscribe and turn on notifications as well. Drop a comment too. What physical evidence would actually move you to belief? And if you want the opposing view, the case for taking UAPs deadly seriously, I linked Avi Loeb right here. Thanks for watching, and click on the special link that I made just for this episode, bryancaden.com/theory.