StarTalk Podcast: Coronavirus & Conspiracy Theories, with Michael Shermer & Neil deGrasse Tyson

this is star talk i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist with me is my comedic co-host chuck nice chuck hey hey neil how are you still tweeting a nice comic thank you sir yes i am having to remind people that you're a comic well i have to remind myself that's the problem yeah i'm not worried about them it's me that i'm concerned about you know so uh this is gonna be another in our multi-part series on different angles into the coronavirus and yes in this particular episode we'll be addressing coronavirus conspiracy theories oh my goodness so we're going to be here for a few days i'm scared and more broadly skepticism and science literacy and how do you invoke that coronavir is just one example how we can invoke skepticism but there's no end in this list and there's only one person only one who's the ideal candidate guest for this and it's the one and only michael shermer michael welcome back to star talk that's right i'm the returning champion [Laughter] you're a founding publisher of skeptic magazine and a best-selling author uh you've been our guest on star talk multiple times and you have a recent book you have several books in fact if i look carefully on your shelf what a coincidence you've got some other books it's always fun to see what people put on the shelves behind them in this uh pandemic era well our most recent issue as you can see right there is on conspiracies that was before the pandemic so it was a good timing i've never seen the spread like a virus of conspiracy theories like this this is really quite crazy and so in your latest book giving the devil his due reflections of a scientific humanist now you have a book with the word devil in it why do you do you expect to sell that book to yeah there he is yeah you just cut the sails in half at least right there well so yeah but so what what are your main arguments in there and why is the devil in the title uh well the devil is whoever uh disagrees with you or whoever you disagree with whose opinions you dislike anybody uh whose uh viewpoint diverges from yours and the reason those devils should be given they're due is so that for your own safety sake that is to say if you sign off on censorship and silencing people for voicing their minority position what happens when you're in the minority when you're the lone voice pushing back against the mainstream when when you want to push against the dogma and you've signed off on on silencing people who disagree then then they'll come after you so the title comes from um a play called a man for all seasons about um this is robert bolt's play that was made into a film uh about sir thomas more in his collision with king henry viii uh over his divorce from catherine of aragon and the church you know there's a bunch of different threads in there but one of which is um thomas moore arguing with his uh future son-in-law about uh tearing down the laws to get after the devil metaphorically speaking and uh and more is arguing that we have to give the devil his due for our own safety sake that is the laws are there to protect people for example the first amendment so if you say well we got to make an exception for this one person because he's really really bad and he okay well what about this person because they're really bad also and you know so you start with something like you know a conspiracy theorist extremist like alex jones and you go okay well we got we have to silence him and cancel him well what about this this person over here david ike what about this guy what about that guy what about this coronavirus skeptic well wait a minute maybe the skeptic of the coronavirus theory maybe has a point maybe we can learn something from them in other words there's a kind of concept creep or the bin of which we put stuff in that we think is dangerous gets larger and larger so is this it seems to me we've all heard the phrase the devil's advocate and if i remember correctly this was would be in catholic church trials yeah where someone you know you're accused of heresy and someone would be appointed by the church to defend you in the face of the heresy and of course you're you're on the side of the devil so we need someone to defend the devil and devil's advocate so that was it seems like even though the whole system was rigged against it nice to see that this court isn't biased i'm already on the side of the devil as you are prosecuting me for being on the side of the devil but but that has an inkling of what you're saying i think yeah that's right actually that the position the devil's advocate the advocate of diable was the position by the catholic church also to act as a skeptic against miracle claims that is to say everybody and their brother had somebody they thought should be canonized and and you have to be you know you have to i forget it was like two major miracles and three minor miracles to begin it's a checklist it's a checklist it's a checklist and uh and so the you know and everybody had a story about weeping statues and and bleeding pictures and miracle cures and things like this so the catholic church realized that most of these are bogus so they would appoint a skeptic essentially someone like yourself or me to go out there and investigate and find the natural explanation and then it once all those are eliminated and if there's some left and they that they could say well that one is a miracle now you and i would not go that far of course but they did centuries ago so the devil's advocate was actually a valuable position a skeptical position yeah yeah so i'm going with the blue oh blue oyster cult i'm i'm i'm living i'm living forgiven the devil is due that's that's where i come in and i'm burning i'm burning i'm burning for you so tell me there's a song in there okay but you but you you need free speech in order to combat conspiracy theories yeah that's right so um you know here i kind of are taking so let's bring this back to coronavirus so how does this play out does it work so the reason we need free speech is because most of us are wrong much of the time and so the only way to find out is to listen to what other people have to say so the moment you think well we have the final truth no we don't have the final we never have the final truths there are enough truths with a capital t in science and the coronavirus is a perfect example of this there's so many unknowns and you know although i admire dr fauci very much he's not omniscient okay he's not god he may be wrong about some things and and the cdc same thing and so forth so it's good to listen to the people that are you know you know kind of pull away from that or they're you know they disagree a little bit could be this could be that is it a bio weapon or is it a you know genetically engineered virus or is it a bat virus well we have the answer to that now but but it's okay to talk about that because you know maybe it is this or that and the things with conspiracy theories neil is that a lot of them there's enough of them that are true that it pays to be constructively conspiracy that is a little paranoid you know and and uh it's not that you know we think bill gates is going to take over the world or 5g is causing the coronavirus but we do know that pharmaceutical companies have hacked the you know system of regulations to cheat the the standards and make more money we know volkswagen hacked the emission standards to make money we know government agents uh and politicians lie and and insider trading and wall street there's enough these kinds of things that go on that when someone says you know i'm a little skeptical about what the cdc said or what the chinese are telling us that's not a crazy position to take you know in other words enough of it happens that there's a kind of a logic to listening to some of it at least now you sort of go from like 10 percent away from the fouchy you know mainstream to 20 to david ike thinks it's the 5g towers and bill gates okay but the problem of silencing him let's say he got kicked off youtube because he appeared on this british tv show a youtube channel wait who got kicked off uh this guy named david ike who's who's sort of the alex jones of england yeah i mean he's way out there he thinks you know the lizard aliens are secretly running the world and all this stuff okay i mean he is way out there but you know chuck thinks that by the way chuck chuck is totally behind that one they're they're not they're they're more amphibians than they are so i mean sorry i got that wrong don't don't hey don't lump me in with the crazies i'm talking frog people you know there is a funny story about that that the 911 truthers are are uh kind of divided amongst themselves about um you know whether there really were planes or not there's there's an extreme a group of the truthers who think there were they're called the no planers that these were holographic images that people think they saw planes but but but it was actually just explosive devices and the regular 911 truthers who just think it was an inside job by the bush administration they say oh those no-planers they're crazy so yeah it's kind of funny that they debunk each other and um and there's splits like that and creationism and and the flat earthers are divided about their arguments and so it's kind of fun to watch them go at each other but that's part of the free speech let everybody have their voice it'll be pretty obvious which ones are crazy and which ones are not so may i ask this michael um with respect to health concerns such as a pandemic there are consequences to misinformation and there are consequences to uh for people who propagate conspiracy theories to the detriment of the greater society how do you deal with that so here's a person who says like we shouldn't do a b and c i don't care what it is let's just say but but a b and c actually contributes to the public good by keeping us all safe from one another and mitigating the spread of the disease what do you do with somebody like that who is posing an imminent threat yeah well i agree with you on that um and there's a difference between that which is actual action or behavior that people take versus the words that they speak i'm less concerned about the words that they speak and but but going out without a mask or mingling amongst other people when you're sick uh you know a lot of americans have this crazy idea that freedom means i can do anything i want like there's that viral video last week of the woman in target it might have been costco you know purposely coughing into somebody's face you know i'm an american and the constitution says i can do anything i want no ma'am it does not say that you know you are not free to drive on the left side of the road right you give up that freedom for the security of of a safer drive right and just go right down the line from there there's a thousand freedoms you give up every day in the national interests or security or safety of your community whatever and you know the kind of that libertarian notion uh can go too far i mean the freedom for you to swing your arm ends at my nose and the freedom for your kid to cough in my kid's face when he's got you know a communicable disease that that ends up my kids you know uh health so you know to the to the anti-vaxxers who say well i should be free not to vaccinate my kid well okay maybe but then my kids should be free from your kids so you can't send your kid to public schools public libraries public pools you know don't let them out of the house because you know that that's a risk so and we we make those kinds of sacrifices in the interest of health and safety all the time so the coronavirus has kind of pushed people on this you see these people very confused about what freedom means so mike my question is what makes the coronavirus more susceptible to conspiracy theorists than some other thing that might be in the news is it because we don't have a com complete and total handle on it and so that leaves open uh room for people's imaginations i think that the cause and effect of this yeah to to quote one of your heroes aristotle you know the the the nature abhors a vacuum the mind that pours a vacuum of explanation and we'll fill it with anything we got and so we we didn't know for a while what was going on with coronavirus and you know the novel coronavirus that's why it was called that it was novel you know we'd never seen it before the origin was you know kind of um obscure china wasn't exactly the you know the most honest regime and trustworthy regime and and then the cleveland 19 uh pandemic that comes from the coronavirus then we weren't sure how fast that was going to spread and you know in hindsight it's like yeah we should have closed the economy a few weeks earlier like germany did because look now they're coming out of it sooner than we are so forth but nobody knew that that's with hindsight right we just didn't know and you know i was there when at that ted conference when bill gates gave that famous speech now seen gone viral on video i think it was 2015 saying this is coming it's the next big thing and we're all like yeah yeah we've heard this before you know the h1n1 and the bird flu and the swine flu and ebola and and on and on every couple years there's one of these things and everybody says this is it and then it peters out okay so it was not completely crazy to think this might just peter out right and that but now we go oh okay it didn't so that kind of opens the door this is uh so you have uncertainty a threat a serious threat a real threat um and then couple that to a couple other things that were going on uh the rollout of 5g at the same time right so what is 5g well it's an extension of 4g it's this invisible force the electromagnetic radiation i can't see it like nuclear energy i can't see it smell it taste it touch it and it's dangerous it's potentially threatening and uh and so the 5g thing and then you throw in there's always a few way plus 5g was pioneered by the chinese so that that gave a double force operating on the right and the fertility of the discussion parenthetically we should note that the counter factual cities that don't have 5g that have been hit by the coronavirus and and so forth that it refutes that hypothesis but nevertheless uh also another normal driving force behind conspiracy theory theories is power differentials so conspiracy theories are usually targeted at rich and powerful people corporations big government agents uh and agencies and so forth and so you know here's bill gates now involved in public health vaccinations things like this and the virus and he's rich and powerful and you know that kind of got lumped in there with the big companies rolling out 5g and then big pharma is always in that formula right so here they're now being discussed you know they're going to make a vaccine that everybody has to take so they're going to make a fortune on it and then bill gates is going to chip everybody so he can control the world population and before you know it you're you know you're you've gone off the deep end yeah by the way michael it's not a chip it's nanites and uh just like i was wondering how they're gonna fit them inside the needle yeah yeah yeah nanobots that's right nanobots we're gonna take a break and when we come back we'll take your questions that have been uh solicited uh we were overloaded with skeptics questions about the coronavirus and skepticism in general when we come back on star talk we're back star talk this is actually a cosmic queries edition exploring conspiracy theories in the coronavers i got checked nice as always and i don't believe you neil i don't believe it i don't believe this is not exploring conspiracies uh we've got michael shermer who is the patron saint of uh can i say that about you michael patron of skeptical one more miracle before i'm sainted [Laughter] so with this new book out um give me the full name of the devil giving the devil is still here it is here it is there it is i mean the devil is due yep uh so exploring uh free speech and arguments and the skeptics movement and how we can apply that wisely in our current with our current challenges so chuck you got a question for us yeah we have uh several questions from our patreon patrons who support us of course so they lead off this they'll leave there's not just patreon for this but we lead off with our patreon patrons and we invite you they bought their way to the front of the list yes that's just like the titanic except the titanic sank chuck i hate everything no that's not a god that's not a good uh uh noun is it yeah okay all right so anyway let's go with robert colonel who says uh to assist in the death of conspiracy theories is it better to confront them or ignore them has there been any research on whether confronting these theories makes it more likely people will believe them because of belief reinforcement or does confronting them give them credibility and help them spread wow robert i'm gonna say that's a damn good question all right michael what do you got yeah it is kind of the question of the day well they're going to spread anyway whether you ignore them or not in the modern age everybody is their own publisher with their own youtube channel and so on so that's not a great strategy on the other hand you're not required to respond to everybody uh i mean we ignore the flat earthers for a long time because you know the head of it died back in 96 or whatever and that was the end of that he was the last member but then it kind of erupted as you know neil a couple years ago and kind of spread went viral so then we thought all right i guess we need to have an issue of skeptic on how we know the earth is not flat and you know how does science work anyway and we kind of used it as an excuse to talk about that but you know if you ask the average person how do you know the earth is round how do you know it goes around the sun and so forth a lot of people can't articulate that so we thought well we'll just use that as an excuse something like that we also kind of depends on the influence that the claim has the conspiracy theory is are people talking about it do they care about it do we need to provide some kind of response to the media and the public and so that also depends so in terms of free speech you know uh people should be free to say what they want but i'm not required to enable their speech so you know occasionally creationists or holocaust deniers have tried to place ads and skeptic i don't take them uh but that's not a i'm not censoring them they're free to publish their own newsletters and magazines and produce their own ducks or whatever but so that's a different kind of thing there um so maybe i hope that answers the question well you are censoring them in your own mouthpiece that's right well in a way though i i have to be selective we can't talk about everything so i i pick the ones i think that are most important just like college campuses you know they they invite maybe 12 public speakers to come to campus all right but there's a thousand to choose from so in a way there that's a kind of a censorship i suppose uh that you you you discriminate but that but they're free to do whatever they want all right but but right so i did you i don't know i don't think you answered the question should you directly engage a conspiracy theorist on the hope or expectation that you will change their mind oh i forgot about that yeah so there was this idea a few years ago so-called backfire effect that is by addressing a particular claim and explaining why it's wrong like climate denial denial uh you'll actually just double the people will double down on their beliefs digging their heels yeah digging their heels now the studies on that have not been replicated that is to say it looks like people can change their mind if you present evidence in a particular way one in a very visual way you know pie charts bar graphs things that are easy to understand not just piles of numbers in a in a table but you know something that's visual and two you present in a way that that doesn't challenge the person's deepest moral beliefs right so the number the number one predictor of climate uh skepticism is political position so uh but but climate skeptics who are tend to be conservative they don't know anything more about climate science than than the climatic believers say democrats or liberals that is to say knowledge about climate science does not predict who believes in it or accepts it so the public expression of your skepticism or belief is more of a signal to your tribe i'm so conservative i doubt that climate science business right even if you don't know anything about it same thing with evolution you know and uh if you give people if you give christians a choice between darwin and jesus they're not picking darwin okay darwin is not going to be anybody's savior right so you have to take that off the table keep keep your savior keep jesus keep your christianity evolution was the way god created life for something like this and then you take that off the table so they don't feel threatened so those are the two things you can do to get around the backfire effect so the tactics this is tactical yeah strategy yeah okay all right so chuck what else you got okay uh this one is from um who is this guy chuck nice co-host of star talk radio are you a patreon member indeed i am okay um has there been any studies done on the psychological makeup of people who are prone to believe in conspiracy theories yeah there's a fair amount of research on that now first of all the the meme we hear of you know the conspiracy theorists is some overweight guy in his parents bedroom you know with a tin foil hat and an internet connection uh you know that that's not the case really most conspiracy theorists are thoughtful educated and so on it depends on the conspiracy theory right so um say politically those that are in power tend to be less conspiratorially minded than those out of power so the losing party usually goes goes conspiracy bonkers after they lose those in power drop the conspiracy theories now the current administration president seems to be an exception to that he's still talking about the conspiracy against him in the election it's like dude you won shut up oh it was rigged it's like uh you know you won right so but there but there are some things uh you know like what's called global coherence that is the moment you tick the box for believing one conspiracy theory uh that you think princess diana was assassinated you're more likely to believe that jfk was assassinated by a conspiracy and or in any number of the other popular 911 was an inside job and and so forth that that there's sort of a a tendency to to think somebody is behind the scenes pulling the strings and the moment you sort of go down that pathway you think it happens everywhere even within a particular conspiracy theory that is people that are more likely to check the box that they think princess diana was murdered are also more likely to think she faked her death and is still alive somewhere well that can't be they can't both be true she can't be dead and alive at the same time right so uh and so and also there's a bias that some people are more inclined to that is the size the size of the cause should match the size of the effect you know so the holocaust was the worst thing ever happened to a group of people committed by the nazis the worst regime in history so you sort of get this match right but jfk leader of the free world and the most powerful man on earth assassinated by who lee harvey oswald some lone nut you know it doesn't match so you got to add the fbi and the cia and the kgb and the cubans and the mafia you know to kind of make it match same thing with princess die you know cause of death drunk driving speeding no seat belt you know tens of thousands of people die of that every year but princesses are not supposed to tie like that right so you gotta have the mi5 and the mi6 and the royal family and the arabs and we're all in on it and so 19 members of you know 19 guys with box cutters you know brought down the world trade center building that i mean come on that's just that you know bush had to be involved in this group and that group so you get some of that and some people are more inclined toward that kind of reasoning than others is it because deep in our minds we we want a full explanation for there's there's a need that's being served but a psychological need being served by the flesh that's on a conspiracy theory exactly right and and even scarier is the idea that nobody's in charge you know the idea that there's a cigarette smoking man behind the curtain and he's making all these things happen wars and economic revolutions and so on uh but the idea that actually there's nobody that runs the economy the economy is just this sort of chaotic unpredictable thing that's kind of scary in a way uh wait i gotta wait i got a question michael okay isn't god the ultimate conspiracy theorist i mean people who believe in god that's the ultimate conspiracy god is in charge of all things so here's the question are religious people if they're satisfied that god is operating do they have any more or less susceptibility to other understandings of the world with regard to conspiracy i i haven't seen any data on that that religiosity is a predictor of conspiracy mindedness or the or not or the opposite of the opposite religious people are less correct if i'm wrong are less represented among astrologers and other sort of yes um um new age uh yes that would be good that that may be a good study for our research uh team at okay we'll get to it get to it i'm gonna i'm gonna do this the moment we hang up here but let's actually neil you got me thinking there uh in a way i mean um the the common line that religious people use is everything happens for a reason now it's not just christians i mean there's a lot of like deepak chopra following buddhist western buddhists that think you know there's some kind of cosmic force that balances things and if something bad happens over here something good happens over there that's the ultimate conspiracy theory that that is a kind of conspiracy theory yeah i hadn't really thought of it that way yeah it's interesting wow chuck give me give me some more all right here we go um this is alan demoss says first of all i love the show my question is where is the healthy line between believing in some grand conspiracy and being a very cautious skeptic and is this is it for some not for you of course or or neil but is it for some perhaps the beginning of the slippery slope i start off as a skeptic and then before you know it i don't believe anything this is all bs yeah carl sagan had a great line that i i quoted in my first book why people believe were things on the the kind of healthy skepticism that finding the rub between being open-minded enough to accept radical new ideas but not so open-minded that your brains fall out and you believe every wacky thing that comes down the pike and it's hard to know where that line is essentially the line of demarcation between science and pseudoscience say and it depends on the particular area so since we're talking about conspiracy theories you know the bigger it is the grander it is the less likely the theory is to be true again conspiracies like volkswagen cheating the emission standards or pharmaceutical companies cheating the fda regulations you know those are real conspiracy but they're very narrow and targeted like we know why they're doing it to make money you know in this one little area you know but the moment you scale up you know world domination it's like okay you know probably not no but you need the cubans and the chinese and the north koreans just keep adding them in there right you got nothing that's right and the more people that have to be involved right because people's people are fairly incompetent and they bumble and stumble their way through jobs and you know the idea that you know you've you've cracked the perfect team to go out there and pull this off i mean nixon had a pretty good team of you know the watergate burglars right i mean these were g-men you know g gordon liddy i mean come on and they couldn't even burgle an office without getting caught right that's kind of how things normally go the more elements now now a billion photos are uplifted to the internet every day you'd have pictures of stuff even even you know the stockpiled aliens in area 51 somebody's sneaking a photo out on their instagram you know that's right actually i i use the wikileaks as an example of the absence of evidence is evidence of absence that is to say uh you know the ufologists or the 911 truthers would always say well of course we don't have direct evidence shurmur it's a secret it's classified you know and it's like okay here we have 10 million documents that are classified leaked by wikileaks there's nothing in there about roswell alien bodies at area 51 you know some memo from bush telling somebody to plant the explosive devices in the world trade center bill makes sense wow what it is we're going to take another break and when we come back our third and final segment conspiracy in the coronavers on star talk we're back star talk chuck nice michael shermer mike i've known you for okay i've known you for a really long time i'm just pleased to have this friendship that goes back decades uh that we're we're kind of fighting for the same causes but differently i mean i'm not in your face because i know you don't need me you you you're your face you got this i just want you to know that i'm a huge supporter of your work and your life's direction that you've taken it so just want to put that well thank you i i appreciate that uh operators are standing by to take your uh your donation just kidding so chuck give me some really it takes all of us working on this together you know right scientists from all fields pushing back in their areas you know all we are is kind of a collective body that says here's all the different uh claims and here's the experts in that you know so we're all you know working to the same really enlightenment idea that there is a truth to be known truth of the small t and that science is the best tool we have to get there nice all right check keep it going all right uh let's go to maddalena grouper and magdalena says thank you for sparking joy and curiosity of science in my 40s um could you please tell me how to sell the idea of skepticism to people successfully to get them excited about being skeptical i find it immensely hard not to sound condescending or sarcastic when i try well matt delano maybe it's you [Laughter] no but michael you got you got to admit there are a lot of skeptics in the community that are just [ __ ] and they're it's like i'm no more than you i mean as an educator it hurts me to watch that exchange because i i want i care what someone knows and doesn't know and i find you know ways that that i can communicate not just talk down to them and you know such folks are in the skeptics community what do you do about that yes well um you tell them don't be a dick but even that well that that was the title of a of a speech given by our friend and colleague uh the bad astronomer yeah phil plate yeah that's right okay we'll hold speech don't be a dick yeah and i think that i think that was fairly well received although i know he got some push back but carl made that point back in the 90s i think it was a passage maybe from demon haunted world where he uh he said something like it's easy to be condescending to people i i feel the urge myself bubble up and i have to kind of suppress it we should all suppress it and just talk about you know the positive aspects of what we know acknowledge that the other person uh you know is intelligent thoughtful or else they're not gonna listen to you you know be respectful there's certain kind of basic rules of engagement or conversation and by the way that point of view is deeply imbued within andrewian who was co-writer of all three cosmoses so that at every turn we were to talk about um some crazy idea that people have the urge to just say this is just preposterous that urge is so strong yeah but but then you know you can't and shouldn't go there otherwise you just lost your audience so you've got to find a way that it sort of organically reaches them so that they feel like that you care about who they are and how they think and where they came from and that you're going to take them to a new place yeah that's right i'm fine to say no one in the history of the world has ever joined a cult you know they join a group that they think is good and they just get sucked down the rabbit hole and that you know only outsiders can kind of assess that but if you tell people you know you're in a cult you know that's not what they think is going on and analogously i say no one's ever no in the history of the world has never been a pseudo-scientist who goes down to a pseudo lab to collect pseudo-facts to test the pseudo theory right you know they think they're doing something and so you have to address it at that level like you know what why is it you think that that's the case i'm i know you get these theory what i call theories of everything you know einstein was wrong and newton was wrong and hawking was wrong and i've worked out this new theory of the universe in my garage you know okay you can't just say you know what you're the 20th crazy person this week to send me one of these uh because you know that's just hurts their they don't think that that's what they're doing so you have to at least listen i mean if you're gonna engage with them you know the rules of conversation listen to what somebody has to say let them finish their sentence see if you can repeat back to them what they just said you know the the kind of steel manning rather than straw manning you know say it in a way that they would go yeah yeah that is what i'm arguing or they're more likely to go no no no that that's not quite what i mean what i mean is now maybe they did mean that and they realized how nutty it sounds when you say it so they correct it but that's also good right conversation is about adjusting our ideas and exchanging ideas and so on so and i was honored michael that you had invited me onto your podcast for my last book which was letters from an astrophysicist about a third of them are i'm carefully uh communicating with some of them were conspiracy theorists there's a flat earther in there and a bigfoot person and and so i i was i i was honored that you saw that in me enough to have me as a guest on your podcast oh yeah no that's uh that kind of exchange i think is super fascinating i i love getting those kind of letters because it's it's interesting to engage with them and and just ask them what how did you come to this belief or what makes you think that's true or what would what would it take to change your mind you know and it's just super interesting to think about the psychology of why people believe what they believe and that's different from say refuting their arguments or whatever those are kind of two different levels all right chuck what else you got okay uh back to our corona uh our coronavers that we live in josh v says to mask or not to mask that is the question why did the cdc change their advice about mass halfway through the pandemic does this type of flip-flop fuel conspiracy theories or at least increase distrust in authority nice one yeah yeah it certainly can i remember when that happened part of the reason they were saying no masks was at first they were worried about the supply chain for healthcare workers to have enough masks and if everybody made a run on mass there wouldn't be enough for the healthcare workers i think that was the first reason you know because i remember it as well yeah they kind of masked it by saying well maybe you don't need it and then this the science changed i don't think the science ever really changed i think it was more of a supply chain concern um and you know we're still again here we are that they were recording we still don't know 100 about you know how many feet should you be apart from you know six feet where they come up with that number maybe it's seven maybe it's three who knows you know still a lot of that so we're you know there's going to be a lot of hindsight bias in the next say decade of you know pundits uh uh second guessing everything we did you know i saw some numbers today on germany it looks like they they they timed it just about right of when to shut down the economy and they're starting to reopen now but they're all experiments different nations trying different things different states within the united states trying different things this is good you know experimentation is how we get to the truth yeah but that's not the the fluctuating frontier of what is experimentally true is not something that's taught in school you think of science as a known thing and if a scientist says something different tomorrow than today all of a sudden people feel justified to discount the entire source of this information yeah the whole source gets cancelled right that's right yeah yeah the problem with teaching justif science is just a body of facts is too delimiting it's really a method it's just a way of asking questions about the world and seeing what kind of answers you can get that are reliable so if we were to perhaps um just adjust the perspective uh behind what the way we're teaching science and the way it's received more importantly focus more on discovery yeah yeah see if it's about if it's all about discovery then it's okay for things to change we've discovered like for instance we thought it was all about surfaces we now discovered that it is not that yeah you still got to be concerned about surfaces but we also now must be equally concerned about our exchange with one another uh when it comes to speaking and being in our presence and and distancing so but i think what happens is that this definitive and these declarative nature of of arguments being made is what causes people to go well then you don't know what the hell you talking about way out i'm not listen you don't know what the hell are you talking about chuck for surgeon general yeah that's right uh it would be better if we thought of failures as actual successes you know we succeeded in finding out the cause of it is not this this this this those are successes actually and this is the this is the famous mantra in in space exploration it's if a rocket explodes on the launch pad and you say it's a failure no it is an experiment rich in data for the next experiment that's funny i mean not that the rocket blew up that's not funny no no no no the richard data parties could be right right chuck time for like maybe one or two more okay all right here we go all right uh this is jessica bennett and she wants to know who is controlling the massive amount of twitter bots that are pushing for no mass and pushing to reopen america uh that's something i didn't know about but is that a we should ask uh jack about that the guy that runs oh yeah jack dorsey yeah yeah because what do i know i mean maybe they're russian bots or chinese bots or whatever i'm encouraged by some recent research by hugo mercier the cognitive scientist uh about the influence of those kind of bots on say the 2016 election he thinks that the influence was negligible if at all that people were pretty already pretty much already made up their minds you know and and you know the the funny story is you know that if if you think hillary is running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria and i correct you on that you're not likely to vote for hillary you know you're you're probably inclined to kind of not be a big fan of hers anyway she's like oh she's not selling babies i'll go for now exactly all right did we answer that question what's the next one what's the next one uh yeah here's the next one um spin bourne sven bjorn bird wants to know this i've had that we've had these questions before oh yes back again uh and why aren't you telling me where the what platforms these are coming from ah giving out that information it's not here so okay okay so how can you say theories are conspiracies if china is not being transparent so you know and i think this is this is really emblematic of a big problem and that is you have one fact that actually leads and supports a conspiracy but then that mushrooms into like these thousands of things that are attached to it yeah that's right so this is the problem with authoritarian regimes not being up front uh they may be transparent and honest now but how do we know because they've lied so many times it's a little bit like that that's why it's called the chernobyl of china you know that because we know the soviets were you know took him like i don't know a week and a half uh and until radiation started falling over sweden and norway that they said uh well i guess we you know should be more upfront about what actually happened at chernobyl uh that's the problem so if you lie and then you say well this time i'm telling the truth you know how do we know that fuels conspiracism of course because that's part of conspiracy theories is that somebody is behind the scenes doing something wrong and of course they're going to lie about it that's true so there's a good reason to be skeptical or or conspiratorial so but what it means is in the case of china then even if like you said even if they are telling the truth you don't know even if that is true because there's the room that it could be a lie or a false interest false information you know disinformation right yeah well in the words of xi jinping you can't handle the truth was that who said that i was wondering where that came from sure i'm pretty sure it was see [Laughter] so uh mike i want to spend the last couple of minutes could you give me some of the more outlandish by your judgment conspiracy theories regarding the coronavirus i mean like top three yeah top well like you know 5g bill gates uh bio weapon is bioweapon is not quite as crazy but but we now know from the genetic analysis that it was not engineered it's a bat virus um you know that uh you know the of course the the anti-vaxxers were all over this very predictable they jump on anything like this we've been tracking them for a quarter century every time something like this happens there's the anti-vaxxers and uh so that you know that that's not great just crazy it's dangerous because you know vaccines are one of the best things we've ever invented for saving human lives and uh you know so that that's a disturbing one not just crazy but but but but dangerous what do what would anti-vectors say oh that um that the either the government you know or the pharmaceutical companies big pharma are using the coronavirus pandemic as a scare tactic to force people to vaccinate and then from there you go to their they're going to chip us all so they can track us uh or nanobot us and then track us you know even the tracking and tracing you know you know this this idea is is part of that kind of new world order conspiracy theory that goes back to the 1980s and in a way if you think about it uh you know we are all being tracked we are already chipped you have a smartphone in your pocket that has chips in it and somebody knows where you are and uh and maybe who you're talking to and where you're shopping and so on and so forth in a way this has kind of happened but we voluntarily did it and it's not big pharma and it's not big government it's uh you know big tech walked right into it and then uh what about the conspiracy that it was maybe it's not a conspiracy or cover-up that it was a lab leaked yeah so uh you know uh nature uh nature medicine journal published uh the genome analysis of the uh novel coronavirus and that it is like 98.5 similar to a bat corona virus remember coronaviruses are very common you know a third of all common colds are coronaviruses the others are rhinoviruses and one other you know it makes sense bats live bats are mammals they're very uh susceptible to respiratory diseases they live in giant populations there's this cave in texas with like 20 million members like it's the city of mexico and you know they get these kind of pandemic spreads all the time so it kind of makes sense wet market in china you know wait so bats bats don't social distance when they they don't they they hang upside down right next to each other that's what makes it kind of spooky they're making a cute comic batch social distancing [Laughter] i don't want to get a human virus [Laughter] wash your wings for 20 seconds but but it is true that the uh wuhan is the site of a infectious disease research center that's right and there are bioweapons labs around the world and you know twice under during the cold war the russian bile weapons labs had a leak one was i think a fire and the other one was an accidental leak uh and so you know it's again it's not completely crazy to ask the question or to explore the idea but i think that one's answered now so chuck michael we are out of time but this has been highly illuminating michael it's always great to talk to you and your new book i think just released just in time for the coronavirus because you knew you were planning this in fact you're the one who closed the camera and as soon as we hang up i'm going back into my bio weapons lab [Laughter] giving the devil his due reflections uh of a scientific humanist which you are so uh michael always good to have you uh don't be a stranger jack i love you man i love you too man yeah all right gentlemen thank you this has been star talk cosmic queries yet another coronavirus edition this one on conspiracy theories as always i bid you to keep looking up

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 435,842

Rating: 4.7792239 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Chuck Nice, Michael Shermer, Skeptic Magazine, Giving the Devil His Due, COVID-19, free speech, misinformation, freedom, conspiracy theories, skepticism, experimentation, hindsight bias, China, vaccines, covid, coronavirus, masks

Id: L2cMZK8SgBs

Length: 47min 50sec (2870 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020