 The second wave feminists I've talked to, they're very just worried about the kind of woke gender identity movement because it's reducing women to just body parts. Like a guy can say, well, if I just get breast implants and I can have a vaginoplasty made out of a piece of my skin, and I'm in, I'm a woman, right? It's like, well, no, because women are not just, it's an ass, right? I mean, there's more to it than that. For decades, Michael Schermer has been one of the most popular and provocative explicators of science to popular audiences, having authored bestselling books such as Why People Believe Weird Things, Why Darwin Matters, The Moral Ark, and The Mind of the Market. He founded Skeptic Magazine in 1992, hosts a video podcast with leading activists and intellectuals, and for nearly 20 years authored a widely read column for Scientific American in which he debunked beliefs in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena, explained the rise of the new atheism, and showed how evolution systematically informs human behavior. Schermer's work is deeply and explicitly rooted in libertarian and enlightenment ideas about individual responsibility, free market economics, rationality, and the search for something approaching objective truth. In 2019, Scientific American cut him loose, a move he ascribes to the publication suffocating embrace of the sort of identity politics and wokeness that he says dominates academic circles and increasingly the culture at large. Les Fall Schermer, who holds a PhD in the history of science and teaches Skepticism 101 at Chapman University, started a weekly sub-stack where he hosts podcasts and the columns he would have written for Scientific American. The 67-year-old former competitive cyclist talked with Reason during Freedom Fest in annual gathering in Las Vegas about the fundamental clash between wokeness and scientific inquiry, how hard it is to overcome the cognitive biases we all have, why he thinks trans athletes should be banned from most women's sports, why we have so much trouble acknowledging moral and technological progress, and why he now identifies as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian. Michael Schermer, thanks for talking to Reason. Nice to see you again. So last year, last fall, you started a sub-stack publication to go along with Skeptic magazine and what not. And one of the early pieces was titled Scientific American Goes Woke, and you were a long time columnist for Scientific American, a very popular science communicator. Describe what you wrote about in Scientific American Goes Woke and why you started a sub-stack. Right. So I started Scientific American in 2001 and I went almost 18 years, 214 consecutive monthly columns. I was going for Steve Gold's 300 that he did in Natural History magazine, which would have taken me to April 2025, so I didn't quite make that. They terminated the column. There was no particular reason given other than, well, we're going different ways and it's time for a change. They didn't say, hey, we've gone woke and you're an old non-woke guy. But I could kind of see the writing in the wall. Last couple of columns I had written were dealing with some issues kind of related to race and sex and gender and that sort of thing. And I could feel the uncomfortableness in the editorial process. And then boom, they let it go. So I mean, I don't know for sure, but that was it. So I started the sub-stack just because I still had more writing in me. I like writing the columns. But this gives me a little more flexibility. If I want to go more than 700 words, I can go more. And also the new media, I try to keep up with, I have a podcast and what everybody's, what all the kids are doing these days. It's hard to know what's the right path to take. But it seemed like the sub-stack thing was a way to go. The finances for it are channeled through the Skeptic Society, which is kind of my day job. So the first one, Scientific American Goes Woke, I recounted my own experiences. But also I went through a bunch of articles they had published recently that were clearly what most people would identify as sort of a far-left, woke, progressive politics. And one of the most notorious or discussed pieces had to do with E.O. Wilson being a racist, right? Being a scientific racist. He's the, he wrote the book, Sociobiology. He, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, his vision of taking evolution and seriously applying it or trying to apply it to human society and whatnot, had always been a fraught project, right? I mean, he was getting pictures of Waterport over him in the 70s at conferences. But that, could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, that was one of them. And you wrote about that. Yeah, in fact, they published this right after he died. So, you know, the body's not even cold yet. And already, he's being accused of being a, you know, kind of race, realist, race science, racist, implied racist, that kind of thing. Even though he's not, so one of my other sub-stacks was a long piece. Kind of dissecting the claims against Wilson show that they're absolutely false. But the worst thing about the Scientific American piece on him was that they provided no evidence at all. No quotes from him, you know, saying something about the racial differences in IQ, nothing like that. And in fact, there's tons of quotes from him that I included in my piece where he's like, this can absolutely not be considered evidence of racial differences between groups, you know, and this is no justification for discrimination of any kind. You know, I abhor the, you know, kind of the old race science stuff. I mean, he made it clear he doesn't go into any of it. So that was disturbing. They had another one on how mathematics has gone, has kind of gone racist and bigoted and, I don't know, misogynistic. And their evidence for this is that there are more male math professors than female math professors, which is not, I mean, the explanation for that could be that, well, all these old guys are just misogynists against women. But there are other hypotheses. And you would think a scientific publication would say, okay, here are the three explanations for why there is an asymmetry in the number of professors who are male versus female, right? So you have, well, maybe they're just a bunch of misogynists, okay? Maybe, maybe there's a pipeline issue, right? That, you know, decades ago, young girls went different pathways than young boys and fewer of them ended up in STEM fields. So that by the time you get to now where they're being hired, there's just few of them to select for. Because every professor I know is uber liberal and they're all dying to hire more women in STEM fields. So it's not like behind closed doors, they're going, hey, I know we said this publicly, but we just want to hire more white guys. They're not doing that, right? So what are some other hypotheses here? The evolutionary cyclone is, well, there may be an interest difference. That men migrate boys, migrate toward toys and things and stuff, women, girls migrate more toward people. And so that kind of sorts out later, decades later, into the kind of profession you prefer to go into. So women tend to migrate more toward medical degrees and biology and psychology, social science been more in the STEM fields. Now, which of those is the right hypothesis? Let's just set that aside. Why can't a scientific publication even say here are the three hypotheses? Let's look at the evidence. Scientific American is either the oldest or one of the very oldest continuously published magazines in the world, certainly in the US. And it went through phases in the 19th century where it's like, okay, yeah, it's talking about scientific racism, other times it's super liberal, etc. What do you think is driving the publication or and the broader, I don't know, kind of popular science community towards woke-ism or a lot of attention to identity politics where that becomes a controlling kind of idea apart from anything that they're actually discussing? It's definitely new and it's really just in the last five years. I think it coincides with the general trend in culture in general of moving more in that direction as younger people get those jobs and kind of moving up the demographic scale, they're getting more and more powerful jobs to direct things the way they want. They came of age when those subjects were really important. Now, there's not much any one of us can do about the George Floyd incident or this thing or that thing that we see on the news constantly. But I can do something. I can say, well, look, I'm not a police chief, I'm not a mayor, but I'm an editor so I can kind of tilt the editorial decisions more toward the kinds of political directions we want to take the country. And I'm doing my little share and I think it makes people feel like I'm doing something, right? Like again, what can I do about the George Floyd thing or police violence or whatever, nothing, but I can go down in March, right? I'm going down there this afternoon and I'm going to carry my plan. Makes me feel like I'm doing something because humans are very moral or moralistic, we like to moralize about things and express our outrage. That kind of protest does have effect, right? Yes, it can, right, absolutely. You mentioned earlier on kind of being of an older vintage. We're of a similar vintage. How old are you? I'm 67. Okay, so is part of this just like, and we call it wokeism, 20 years ago, we would have called it political correctness. I think our parents were, we disappointed them or we defined ourselves against them is part of the woke conversation. It's just generational warfare that is to be expected and if not tolerated, like, you know, of course, right? I mean, this is a way, you know, and I hate to say it in this crude a term, but like, so you're a guy, you're an old guy, you've been at on the massive of Scientific American for 20 years and it's like, you know, you're not retiring, you're probably in better health than you were 10 years ago and it looks like you're going to live forever. Like, how the fuck do we get rid of you? Right. So yeah, have we become our parents? There may be a little bit of that just kind of a generational shifts. But but but that doesn't really matter. The question is, what's the right thing to do? What's the truth? What what's the direction we want to take the country? And what do we really know about this subject or that subject? Right. So I mean, if I may, I mean, you have in one of the sub-stack columns, a fantastic piece where you say you're raising that is to figure out what is right, not to be right. That's a powerful statement. Can you kind of expand on that a little bit? Yes. Well, because because I study belief systems for a living and I'm aware of all the cognitive biases, I can see them in myself. And so to avoid that, you just have to kind of focus on instead of looking for evidence confirmation bias to support what I already believe, got to look for the counter evidence. You know, what what are the arguments against the belief cycle like this issue on abortion? I'm hardcore pro-choice, but I purposely solicited a pro-life argument and said, please give me like the 10 best arguments you have. I want to hear them, right? Because I don't really know what they are, because I don't pay attention to that closely. Right. So we end up doing that you have to do in general. And is are you is woke ism for lack of a better term, but or identity politics? Is it are you worried about it? Not because, you know, you lose your scientific American column as much as this means we're not focused on trying to figure out what is right, what is true, what is correct, but rather we're kind of trying to create a narrative and maintain things that may or may not be true. Yeah, the word woke is pretty loaded now and it's changed already. I heard John McWhorter talking about this, the linguist, you know, it used to be a cold term. I mean, you and I would have been woke probably in the 90s because we were libertarian in favor of individual freedom rights or whatever. And now that word is mean something completely different. So but in general, and I don't want to pick on scientific American, I like the people I work with there and so forth, it's happening across the board. Twitter is mostly run by these kind of work progressives. And, you know, most science and nature, the two most prominent publications are running articles about this. You know, the and the Lancet had that cover story of, you know, we have long medicine is long neglected. What was it? People who give birth, right, like if only we had a word for this, right, that kind of thing. So, you know, but there is a truth. I mean, like beyond the language terminology, it is true that like women, you know, women who get birth were often times a medical discourse. We're kind of seen as like bystanders. Well, yes. Right. So there is a sociology here that's worth kind of rehearsing and understanding and unpacking. Well, and I think the second wave feminists I've talked to, like Helen Joyce, Carol Tavers, they're very just worried about the kind of woke gender identity movement because it's reducing women to just body parts. Like a guy can say, well, if I just get breast implants and I can have a vaginoplasty made out of a piece of my skin, then I'm in. I'm a woman, right? It's like, well, no, because women are not just tits and ass, right? I mean, there's more to it than that. A lot more. That's a very 70s woke. I think women are more than tits and ass. Yes, yes, very progressive. Before we talk about, I want to talk about trans issues and abortion and gun control and a couple of other things as you've written, you know, your sub-stack is absolutely one of like my must reads. I appreciate it because I didn't have a subscription to Scientific American and I didn't always go there and you can go long. So and I also want to talk about you have a great piece about independent media and why that's important, especially in today's kind of cancel culture world. But before we get there, and this goes to that question of you want to be right, you want to find out what is right but not be right. You started out, you used to call yourself a libertarian and now you say, I'm not a libertarian anymore. I'm a classical liberal and just as a kind of framing device, how how is that related? What does that mean and how is that related to your interest in finding out what is right, not being right? Yeah, well, the language does matter and the word libertarian has gotten a lot of baggage over the past quarter century or so. I mean, here we are at Freedom Fest. There's quite a wide range of people and they believe rather different things. But to the general public, it's like, oh, those are those people that the preppers that want to think the world's going to end, got to get Bitcoin and gold and guns. And, you know, it's like, well, I'm not really one of those, right? And, you know, also, you know, when you called yourself a libertarian, what did libertarianism mean to you? I think more of a kind of an iron rand, you know, just everybody, just self-reliance, self-responsible. I guess the core would be the individual as the fundamental unit of society and their autonomy and liberty to make the choices they want, right? So this is my concern about conservatives. They they say that, you know, we believe in liberty and autonomy and so, but they don't, you know, they very much care of what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms because they think it's going to leak out and cause the moral corruption of the family and then the community and then the society and then the nation. And and I think that's the wrong focus because that's kind of a collectivist argument, right? The nation is over the society. Well, it is true. I think it was Rick Santorum and Bill O'Reilly at various points talked about how you have gay marriage and then the next thing you know, men are marrying ducks and obviously we're all engaged to waterfowl, right? So they're not. So how why does classical liberal like why do you think that's a better descriptor for you? I don't know. It has sort of a gravitas to it. I like it. And by the way, historians talk about the founding fathers and though they were classical liberals and you kind of look back and know, yeah, I agree with that. I like that. Yeah. Just as it kind of a, well, a fuzzy set, as I call it, or a family resemblance of a concept, a schema that allows us to capture a bunch of stuff without firm borders where, you know, we can overlap and we're both this, but you believe that and I believe that and that's OK. And you have a wonderful column about the Kardashian. You use family, you know, a Vickinsteinian family resemblance concept and you use the Kardashians, which is kind of a great way to think about it because there is something I don't want to say essential, but there is kind of something essential to being a Kardashian, even if you don't have the same parents or the same genetics, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So so classical liberal for you that, you know, that kind of fuzzy set or family resemblance, right? And for libertarian, you think over the past 25 years, it's become too kind of prepper, too extreme or yeah, a little frenzy, but also a little hyper focused on the individual. It's not like we should be free to do absolutely anything any time we want. Of course, that's not true. You can't drive on the right side of the road or the left side of the road on any given day. However, you feel that day, right? We give up our freedoms all the time and, you know, the if you read the Federalist Papers, that this is what they talk about all the time. Well, we want to give people freedom. But, you know, of course, we have to have this and that. We need a standing army. Do you think libertarian has become synonymous with anarchism? Well, that that's an old mistake people used to make. And sometimes you have to correct that. No, I think it's more affiliated with like, you know, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, I don't know the kind of Second Amendment fundamentalist, you know, the gun nutters. So we're going to talk about gun nuts. Preppers fit into that. And also Christians, right? Evangelical Christians. Ron Paul and Rand Paul are Baptist. Well, libertarians are kind of over all over the map on religiosity, right? Yeah. You guys have been surveys on this. Some of them are religious, but others. Yeah. No, and you have on the one hand, you have people like on Rand and then you have people like Ron Paul. And, you know, certainly over the past 20 years, Ron Paul is probably the single biggest factor when people say, I become libertarian. It's because they've encountered Ron Paul. So he's a huge, you know, tributary into libertarian, the libertarian movement. And do you think, you know, if you're if you're kind of an evangelical Christian, can you be? Obviously, everybody can call themselves libertarian, but are you could you be in that family of people who? So what is the I think kind of what's the what's the litmus has or what's the Maginot line there where you're like, OK, I can't do this. I would say consistency of principles across different issues. And I'm more critical of conservatives than libertarians on that, for sure. But like when when DeSantis sick, the government on Disney. Now, I'm not crazy about Disney's woke progressive politics that we're going to introduce these characters into our cartoons. OK, well, you know, but but the libertarian way of dealing with that or what should have been the old conservative way of doing it, that is, well, I'm just not going to go to the end and give my money to Disney. I won't go to their films. I won't go to their parks and so on. But DeSantis is like, no, the conservative thing to do is we're going to slap them with, you know, with higher taxes and regulations. It's like, when did that become a conservative thing? Right. So and I do think libertarians are OK, where's the consistency, say, for foreign policy? You know, don't we have a moral obligation to help people that are under suppression of civil liberties around the world? You know, sometimes we do, sometimes we where's the balance there? I don't know. I guess as a fuzzy set, I would say, classical liberalism and libertarianism, they're either in the same or they're too very overlapping set. No, and you're not alone in this. And I'm curious, you know, Pendulette, obviously famously also kind of voice similar misgivings. And it's interesting when high profile libertarians like yourself start to say, you know what, I don't know, I kind of want to be in a different club. And again, I wonder if part of it is generational. I mean, because when you say, you know, kind of like Second Amendment people, do you feel like the movement is more focused on gun rights now than it was in 1990? Now it is. Yes. Because of all the mass public shootings and the government responds to this and that drives up gun sales. You know, ironically, Obama probably did more for gun sales than anybody. Even though he actually never did much. No, he actually, in his first term, he he allowed people to carry weapons on Amtrak at a national park. So he actually was liberalizing. People certainly fundraised against the idea that he was a gun grabber. Well, we've seen this kind of consistency. My body, my choice in the two different issues of abortion and vaccines and each side is like pretty hypocritical about this. Do you feel with COVID? Is that also a place where, you know, libertarian libertarian skepticism towards state power is one thing. And then, you know, but you also want good science and good public policy. And then there was a lot within the libertarian movement. I think there was a lot of not simply being anti vaccine mandates, but being anti vaccine. See here, I would say the libertarian position would be, I don't like mandates. And yeah, OK, that's just a principle. Government forcing you to do something. But on the other hand, to say, well, but if the vaccines really work and the CDC and Fauci are saying, we should all get them, if I go along with that, then the next step is going to be the mandates. And I don't want that. So I'm going to be skeptical of the science. Right. No, no, no. It's OK to just say, look, we should all do this. And by the way, most of us really should get vaccinated. They work. And there is within your conception of libertarianism, there is a public. I mean, you're not an anarchist. You believe the state has legitimacy in certain roles and that there are. And, you know, I would argue, maybe COVID is not that case, but that if there is a communicable disease and there is a vaccine that prevents me from giving it to you, whether you ask for it or not, there's a role for the state to say, now you have to get manned. You have to get vaccinated in the same way. You have to pay taxes. Now you're really. Yeah, I know we need a standing army. We need a police force and, you know, and so forth to protect our freedoms and our property rights and so on. How are you going to do that? And if you say, well, I don't I'm not participating. I don't I'm not paying taxes. You didn't sign that social contract. So you'll see. So you would say you did not you did not change libertarianism. Maybe maybe or something like that. Well, let's let's talk about your abortion pieces, because this is also something I'm. So I'm 50. I'm about to turn 59. And when I joined reason in 1993 and I had grown up reading reason. So and that's how I became libertarian. And I would say everybody I knew who was a libertarian basically said either they were pro-choice affirmatively that abortion, at least through a certain point in pregnancy, was a woman's right. And it was nobody's business and that it was not a morally bad issue. It might be morally complicated and that even people who were pro-life would say, you know, this is not something the state should be involved in. That no longer seems to be the case among libertarians. And even though it still seems to be the case in the public at large, only about 20 percent, according to Gallup or against abortion under all circumstances, that's been very consistent since Roe was decided. It's religion. Yes, so Reagan was pro-choice until as I understand Jerry Falwell sat him down and said, I can deliver you millions of votes, but you got to get religion. I'm not sure if that's I mean he definitely signed a very liberal law in California as governor and then at various points recanted. And I'm not sure if the motivation for that. But, you know, what you you say, and I found this really fascinating because you said I am pro-choice and you started out definitely very, you know, pro-abortion basically through the term of pregnancy. And now you are still pro-choice, but it's more complicated. Can you can you make the case for, you know, why abortion should be allowed? OK, well, first of all, I'll give a nod to the pro-lifers that it is a human life that's developing, you know, from the day one. It's a potential human life. It's not a legal person and so forth. And so, you know, here is what Richard Duckins calls the tyranny of the discontinuous mind. If you if you're stuck in black and white on or off, it's only two sides. There's no continuum. You're going to get very confused in your thinking about these kinds of issues, right? So you have to draw the line somewhere. You know, why is why is a 17 year old not allowed to whatever vote or something an 18 year old can on the next day? OK, well, it's because the law is to draw the line somewhere. Science doesn't have that kind of demarcation, right? So we do those kinds of things all the time. And so I'm willing to say you're right, it's a life. But the female, the mother is also alive and it's also a legal person and far more advanced than the two day old fetus or the three month old fetus or whatever. So, you know, as Thomas Sowell says, there are no solutions. There's just compromises. And when you have conflicting rights, something has to give like the trans athletes, you know, women's rights, trans rights that conflict when men want to compete in women's division. Something has to go. You can't have both. So we just have to make a decision whose rights should we favor in this case. So in that case, I said, well, the adult woman should be given the nod just in principle, you know, individual autonomy and liberty and control over your own body. That's fundamental. Even while saying, but don't put yourself in that position where you have to make that choice. It's not a good choice to have to make, you know, it happens. So OK, we should be your choice to do if you want to. But, you know, as I tell my students, you know, two words birth control, right? Just be be prepared. Are you satisfied with the, you know, are not satisfied? But how do you feel about the Dobs decision, which gets rid of the right of abortion at the national level? So now you had invoked the Federalist Papers and just thinking about federalism. And now we have 50 states that are laboratories of democracy. It sounds good in principle, right? But because I know a lot of pro-lifers and they're all pretty much evangelical Christians. And, you know, overturning row is just the first step. They want to abandon every state. They will chase people down to the bitter end to get them to stop having abortions and are in any conditions. And that scares me. So it's do you worry that on the flip side of that, that, you know, some states are now going that are pro-life or pro-choice are going to, you know, where they might have had regulation of abortion in, you know, the second after viability or, you know, in later in the pregnancy are going to be like, OK, as a response to, you know, if we're California and we're neighboring a state that is getting rid of all, you know, life begins at the moment of conception, we're going to say abortion is allowed until the moment of birth. Yeah. I mean, right. So there's extremists on both sides. Yeah. So the pro-choicers that say you should be OK to abort your fetus the day before you're supposed to give birth. Of course, that's wrong. You know, and again, you get away from the binary thinking and then you can see a spectrum. Yeah. OK. So let's just draw the line. I know three months in Germany is three months, maybe four months. Right. And then OK. So that's like the age 17 to 18. OK. There. Right there. That's that that's the time. And do you feel like we I mean, and this is interesting when you're talking about kind of gradient thinking or, you know, things on a continuum that to me and we've talked about postmodernism versus, you know, kind of modernism or whatever in the past. But it's, you know, in the 21st century, it seems like on certain levels, we're much more comfortable with gradients and a kind of range of options. And we realize that things are kind of continuous. It's not even though this is the digital age, it's not black and white, it's not one in zero. Right. Right. But on other levels, we seem to be, you know, I mean, and the abortion question is, you know, seems to be front and center on this. If like, no, it is either murder at all stages or it is not. Right. And that just seems like a terrible way to kind of be engaging reality. Exactly. Right. And again, on the consistency issue of, you know, if conservatives are really pro-life, you know, they don't seem to be very pro-life after you're born. Right. This is George Carlin's riff. Right. You know, after that, you're on your own. You know, now of course Christians will because he does that riff about, you know, no preschool support, no school lunches, no help for single moms and on and on and on. Of course, the conservatives will say, no, no, no, it's we just don't want the government providing those. That's the job of religion or whatever. And then he throws in the little line and tell you become military age and then we're interested in you again. Okay. So there's some truth to that humor. Right. And so again, that consistency, you know, if you really care. Why is consistency so important to you? And I mean, this is true of libertarians, right? You know, post even, you know, laps libertarians or whatever, like, you know, and when I talk to most people, like I'm always like, well, I got, you know, is this logical? Does it make sense? Does it work all the way through most people? I don't give a shit. Like this is what I believe here. This is what I believe here and they don't have to be consistent. Yeah. Well, because if you have a principle that's based on some factual basis that it should be applied consistently as consistently as possible with the recognition there may be a few exceptions here and there. But that's the whole point of having a principle is that you apply it evenly across the board, right? And so again, I just think, you know, people are inconsistent about that. For obvious reasons, you know, I just want what's good for me and my tribe. And, you know, it's like, it's like the issue over the private prayer that the high school football coach gave. Right. 50 yards. The private prayer on the 50 on the 50 with the players around him and he's a Christian. OK. And of course, Christian, yes, this is great. You know, the Supreme Court voted in his favor. Yeah. Well, what if he was down there saying Alou Akbar? Yeah. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to allow that. Oh, OK. Well, what's the principle here? Thankfully, as this is what Satanists exist for, they're already filing to do satanic prayers on the 50 yard line. Yes, yes. And, you know, this also like takes us away from the question of like, OK, well, it's football. Like, why are high schools playing football? Well, I don't know, you know, like as a taxpayer, I'm kind of like I they can't even teach our kids to read. And now they're giving them brain damage or whatever. That's a separate issue. Well, let's let's talk about trans athletes and what is a woman. You wrote most recently, you looked at Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman? And, you know, he is a right wing troll. He wants to make fun of feminists. He wants to make fun of gender activists and things like that. But the documentary you found pretty compelling and interesting. Can you talk a bit about it? I was expecting something of a borat like Send Up or a Milo Yiannopoulos kind of troll. And it wasn't that bad. I've seen him elsewhere. And yes, he's definitely in the kind of that Ben Shapiro classical conservative issues. And I disagree with him on most of his beliefs. But I but what made the film powerful is he's not saying the things that are crazy. Right. The people he's interviewing. Yeah. And it's not like he like Borat, he gets a couple of guys drunk and they start yammering away about the blacks and the Jews or whatever. Yeah. Here's the underbelly of America. He's not doing anything like that. He's going to the here's a professor of gender studies. You know, what is a woman? It's right there in your title. Gender women studies. Right. You know, what is a woman? This guy can't answer the question. OK, so what's going on here? I mean, these are smart people. So the problem here, I think, is we're back to the postmodernism. Like I learned from you that, you know, the original postmodernism was really good. It's kind of a form of skepticism. Right. Let's challenge the mainstream dogmas back in the 40s and 50s. Yeah, that's good. Right. And then it kind of just run, run, run amok and goes too far. And I think that's what's happened here where and then this particular professor said, you're just trying to tag me with an essentialist definition of gender. It's like, yeah, that's right. Because to have a fuzzy set or a family resemblance, you need some agreed upon words that we're going to use of characteristics that define this thing. And that's the essence of, you know, so it's the gametes, right? Biologists say, well, a woman and a man is defined by their gametes. You either make it sperm or you make it eggs. That's it. And everything else follows from that. And if you look under the hood, there's a thousand different differences in the body that go toward sperm production and development and so on or egg production and development of the fetus and whatnot. And it's not just whatever my inner feelings are. And that would be kind of the most extreme of postmodernism, whatever I feel is the truth. It's my truth. And that's essentially what Walsh's film shows that these people have gone that far. Whatever it is you say it is, that's what it is. And why do you think the trans issue you've also written about how, you know, when these poll results came out, I guess earlier this year, it was kind of stunning that if you look at older, you know, the silent generation, the percentage of people who identify as LGBT, so lesbian, gay, bi and trans, very flat, baby boomers, flat, Gen X, flat, millennials picks up a little bit and then Gen Z people are basically about under like 25. It is 10% of the population now says that they are LGBT up from like half of that in 2017. What's going on with an interest in trans, being trans? Do you think it is that people are, there are more trans people now or is this all kind of a rhetorical gesture and how do you deal with this? Yeah, well, we don't know for sure because it's so new. What is the normal background rate of gender dysphoria where you feel like from a very young age that you were born in the wrong body? Now, before recently, it was like maybe one 10th of 1% or even less, a 20th of 1%, just vanishingly small. And now all of a sudden you have, you know, these spikes of like 4,000% increase in this one age core like age 14 to 19, you know, that kind of thing. And so that would suggest the social contagion hypothesis that is it spreads amongst a community of people that are either in the same classroom in school or they're on an online community. And they get a lot of social proof and positive feedback if they say I'm this, you know, I'm buying, I'm paying, I'm whatever. And I had a student a couple of years ago who in the middle of class, this was a small seminar, so we talked a lot. And she said, I've decided I'm a boy. This is what I feel like I'm gonna be a man. And she changed her name and everybody called her the name, including me, cut her hair, change her clothes and so on. And then, but in the conversations that ensued, it was clear to me, she doesn't wanna be a man. She wants to be trans. That's the thing to be. And the moment you announce that, it's like, oh my God, what's that? And, you know, a thousand questions from the other students. And it's like, I see. So, now the other hypothesis is that societies become more liberal, tolerant, open, so more people are coming out. Now that is true with, I think, gays and lesbians, although now we're having a backlash, say, some lesbians and gays, that where are all the lesbians now? And their concern, and I agree this is a concern, is that what if you're a 13, 14-year-old young man or young boy and you find yourself attracted to other boys and somebody tells you, that's because inside you're a girl. You're not actually gay. When in fact, this person's most likely gonna grow up to be gay, which is now okay. That's accepted, right? Now, another thing I've been thinking about is, is it that, because the LGBTQ, the gay marriage, same-sex marriage, they happen so fast. But from 2011, when the majority of Americans finally tipped over to above 50% in support to 2015, the Supreme Court decision to make it the law of the land. That was pretty fast. That's probably the fastest rights revolution ever. So it could be the next sort of cohort. It's like, well, what are we gonna champion? You know, what's next? There's animal rights, but there's gender rights, and so LGBTQ is one thing. So the focus has primarily been about who you are attracted to, and that used to be against the law. You can't be attracted to the same-sex people. You can't have sex with it. That was illegal. People were fired in the government. Thousands were fired for that. And now that's okay. So they've kind of shifted it to, okay, what about who you identify as, man or woman? That's kind of become maybe the next rights revolution, and people, again, they wanna be engaged in something that's meaningful in life. There's a next rights revolution there, and I'm gonna go for that. In, you know, when we were younger, and I'm thinking in the 70s and whatnot, being trans, back then it was short for transsexual, and it always implied surgical gender reassignment surgery, and I'm thinking of people like the tennis player, Renee Richards, who had been Richard Raskin, I believe, who joined the ladies professional tennis tour, but it was very much about physicality. I mean, obviously there were hormone treatments and things like that, but it was like, if you were a man and you wanted to become a woman, you got the surgery, and that's what defined it. And you were saying before that the equipment isn't necessarily the definition of being male or female. Today's trans, it seems to be much more about performing a kind of, almost public sexuality. Yes, right. How does that, yeah, how does that factor into any of this? Well, again, I think that supports the social contagion hypothesis. The whole point of doing it is to make it public, or else why would you do it? Whereas before it was, you know, a private thing, except for the public figures like Renee Richards, it's just something you do because that's what you need to do. And our mutual friend, Deirdre McCluskey, was Donald McCluskey and transitioned to great cost to her personal life. This wasn't like she was getting love bombed by everybody, quite the contrary, and did it anyway, and still does it because that's who she is. Okay, that exists, that's a real thing. But is it true that, I mean, I've been hearing stories and reading accounts like half the class or a quarter of the class of a high school class says I'm trans or bi or pan or there's something. So it also looks like being cisgender straight is about the boringest thing you could be. And you don't wanna be that. And actually a number of gay and lesbian friends of mine, they like gay men, white gay men feel like they are even more square than heterosexuals because heterosexuals are talking about kinks and poly and stuff like that. And lesbians, yeah, because lesbians have always been a smaller percentage of the population. And I know people like Abigail Schreyer, who I've talked to, I know you have, who's quite controversial in a lot of things, but she argues that particularly girls who would grow up to be lesbian, their parents, I mean, this is kind of a complicated argument, but I kind of buy into it that their parents are actually almost homophobic and they would rather that their child be trans than to be lesbian, which, I mean, I guess what I'm asking you is, I mean, you have witnessed and participated in like this vast kind of rights revolution over the past 50 years where society is so much more profoundly libertarian than we could have imagined in the bicentennial. And I picked that not because of bi, but it's just because it's like 76, right? But it's like you can, you know, you can be gay, you can be straight, you can be anything, and it does not seem to be an impediment to any kind of social success, any kind of professional success. Yeah, so that's progress, right? It really is. Yeah, right. But just from a scientist's perspective, what is the real number? Yeah. And we don't know, but I suspect that the current numbers we're seeing now are greatly exaggerated. I mean, back when the Kinsey report came out, he reported what 10% of the guys are gay. Right. And I mean, in a study that was clearly poorly designed, right, or kind of like cooked data in a lot of ways. I mean, the real number is probably something like three to 5%, and then it's also curious to know what, why are there not as many lesbians? It looks like maybe how many lesbians are is like half of how many gay guys are. Why is that? You know, that could be some social aspect. This is kind of a bizarre question, but we are at freedom fest, so we can talk about whatever we want, but how much of sexual orientation do you think is kind of baked in when you come out of the womb? And how much of it is susceptible to kind of social influence? Well, I think most of it's baked in biologically, genetically, in the womb, chemistry, and so on. After that, of course, it can be tweaked a little bit, but the vast majority of people that are cisgender, also cisgender, and yeah, society can, you know, the whole blue and pink thing, that used to be reversed like a century and a half ago. I forget maybe like 1890s or something. You know, the blue and pink thing was different than it is now. So what is- And by that, you mean pink was associated with men and blue was, yeah. I forget why that was, but in any case, but it's not like the colors of the toys are gonna make the little boy more masculine. Well, we've all seen the pictures of Hammingway in a dress as a kid, and it's like his latent homosexuality had nothing to do with the way he was raised, right, or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I do think the born this way, I think the other interesting thing about the current trans movement is that the gay community fought for decades that for a kind of biological determinism, I was born this way. It's not a lifestyle choice. Your little reparative programs are not gonna work. You can't de-convert me. If I just had the right woman, then I would know how to be straight or anything like that. So, and the reason for that also is that if you're born that way, then you're a protected class, you're right stand. But now the trans movement seems to be saying, you could be anything you want, anytime you want. You can change from day to day. You can change genders. You can change who you're attracted to. It's totally fluid. And that's actually scary for gays because it's like, well, hang on. Now we're gonna get pushed back from the conservatives. They're gonna go, oh, so you are not that born that way. In that case, we can fix you. And all of this exists when we're talking about rights or the individual's relationship to government or something is totally separate. Like, so I mean, because regardless of why people are trans or identify as trans or gay or straight or whatever, it doesn't, that doesn't imply the government should discriminate against them. In any way, shape or form. Yeah, of course, right. Trans rights or human rights, absolutely. You should not be fired for being trans. I mean, if that's the only reason, then no. For the same reason, gays shouldn't have been fired decades ago. What is, with trans athletes, you've written about this and what, on a certain level and particularly at the highest levels possible, when we're talking about Olympic athletes or NCAA athletes or something, it's such a small number of people. It's almost seems wrong to be looking at that and then kind of generalizing backwards because by definition, these people are extreme outliers in performance and everything. But how do you, you know, what is your sense of like, what is fair for, you know, trans athletes competing against, you know, biological male or female? Well, so if you're born male and you go through puberty, there are so many changes that are substantive if you compare to female body development and puberty. After that's happened and the international swimming body just made this decision based on that argument that it's too late. There's no amount of testosterone suppression you're gonna take to even the playing field with the average amount of testosterone that men have versus women if we could just lower those. After puberty, it's too late. I mean, all the big changes have been made. The bones are bigger and denser. The sinews and muscles and ligaments and tendons are all different. The VO2 uptake for your lungs, your oxygen capacity and on and on and on. So it's like a thousand different differences. And now it's true, there are, again, two overlapping sets. There are some women who are much more physically strong and so on than some men. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about, you know, kind of the average, the two means. Although sometimes they get kicked out of a limp, say track and field and things like that. Yes, well, you know, the East German dopers. Well, those were dopers, right? But Casper, I'm sorry, I'm blanking on her name now, the South African runner who's a woman or has always identified as a woman and who's fantastic but has elevated levels of testosterone and other things. Can't compete internationally unless she reduces that. Is that fair? I mean, it might be that you need to have some kind of system set up. You have to draw the line somewhere, right? You know, so, I mean, so on average, there's a pretty vast differences between average testosterone levels. And it's not just testosterone, that's kind of the big one, right? So you're gonna, but you have two overlapping bell curves. So some of the higher women are gonna be higher than some of the lower men. Okay, but, and so then you have to make it, so the outliers, well, this woman is right up against the upper limit and, well, okay. And so this is the rule we made. So we got a, you know, should we be looking at a world beyond, like, why do we have male and female sports competitions? Well, because if we didn't, there'd be no women in sports. You know, I mean, there just wouldn't- You are stepping in it everywhere. You're like, sideshow Bob, hitting breaks everywhere you go. Have you seen the doubles match in tennis where I think it's Federer and the Dahl on opposite sides and each of them has a top woman. I think one of them was the William Sisters and one of the other top ones. And the women can't even get a racket on the male serve. I mean, they can't, I mean, they're like diving and rolling on the grass and they can't even hit it. That's what would happen. There would be no women players at all. That would be the end of women's sports. That's just the way it is. That's reality. I'm not talking about chess or something like this, but these physical sports like that, you know, when I was directing Race Cross America in the 90s. Explain what that was. Because that's a phenomenal kind of event, yeah, it's worth rehearsing. Yeah, so in 1982, me and three other guys started this race called Great American Bike Race, later changed to Race Cross America Ram. So this is a nonstop coast-to-coast race. Each rider, a cyclist has a support crew that follows them. The clock starts and stops when you're done. And so you can skip sleep or whatever. And so- This was because it was the Reagan 80s. We were all worried about nuclear annihilation and we were coped out of our minds. So we were just going to ride our bikes across the bar. This is the rise of the Iron Man Trabzon and the Iditarod dog sled race. Let's just go crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so, but by the night, of course we had women right away enter the race and we had a women's division and a women's prize and plaques and rings and all that stuff. And, but in 93 and 94 I had, when I was race director, I had two women, a Shauna Hogan and Muffy Ritz who were better than all of the men for the first thousand miles all the way to Colorado. And there was talk like, well, maybe a woman could win the race, right? And- And if I recall correctly, I think it was the anthropologist Ashley Montague at various points in the early 70s hypothesized that women were designed by evolution to be better ultra-marathons than men. Right, right, yes. Kind of, it's kind of true in the longer people race, gender falls apart. It falls, it becomes less important, but you're considered- If it's, but not say something like a high speed race. Like a 200 front stage is pretty long, but women wouldn't last the first 20 minutes. So what happened in- So they're leading up through Colorado and then what happened? Yeah, what happened while she got caught and then finished over a day behind the winning men. The winning two or three men beat her. And it's just strength. Ultimately it's just every little bit of difference in the bodies that it just made a difference over nine days rather than the first three days. So, but I even asked the women, would you like, just have one division and you compete against them? No, no, because it's not fair, right? Guys are just on average to be stronger. Let me go back to something we were talking about at the start of this. There seems to be a tendency. E.L. Wilson was a conventional liberal. And towards the end of his life, he's very big on things like climate change and all of that. He subscribed to a lot of kind of bromides of progressive liberal policy. But within the concept of sociobiology and whatnot, there does seem to be a real tension broadly on the left where it's like we can create the world however we want. We believe in evolution because we believe in science and we are not those rubes in Arkansas who are biblical, literalists and reject science. We believe in science. But then Wilson's theories kind of suggest that no, like if you take evolution seriously, there are going to be limits on how much you can engineer humanity. And there are going to be different groups even will select for different properties and characteristics that are gonna have real world outcomes. Is that a tension within kind of the science community and either the right or the left? Well, yes, but Picker points out in his book, The Blank Slate that in fact, the opposite is true. That of course, biology and genetics is part of it. The environment can't operate on nothing. It has to operate on a physical system, which is the brain, which is designed by your genes because it's made of proteins. And so it's not possible that it can't have any effect. And so you have to understand what the effects are before you can re-engineer society to make it fair. Thomas Soule wrote a book about this, this kind of conflicting worldviews and that is kind of utopian worldview where it's all blank slates and we can re-engineer society to make it perfectly equal. We'll always fail because we're not perfectly equal. We have different interests, different physical characteristics and skills and so on. Well, that's just the way it is. So there you need kind of a more general principle that says wherever you fall on the bell curve of whatever it is we're measuring, you should have the opportunity to do whatever it is you want without any barriers based on these protected classes that you didn't choose, right? Kind of a Rawlsian argument. You don't know what your running speed is gonna be or what your IQ is gonna be. So we have to make it fair that you have access to all the different jobs and the chips fall where they may. Wilson at the end of his life, maybe the last decade or so, endures group selection. Now group selection is more supported by liberals in the left because it's this idea that we as a group can be the target of selection and make things happen that the individual can't. Now most evolutionary biologists, people like Dawkins and Pinker say now this is not true. There's no evidence for this and it's still the individual genome of the individual is the one that is the target of natural selection. But I just thought that was interesting toward the ends of his life. It was a more liberal kind of argument he was making. And I mean, Steve and Jay Gould was, I guess what I'm getting at is that science, I mean people and maybe it's libertarians or scientists want to believe that I am arguing from science and reality into my politics, but perhaps these are separate spheres. Not necessarily. Okay, yeah. I'm willing to leap over Hume's wall separating is or not. We do it all the time. I mean, the way things are, we have to structure society in a way based on human nature. And again, just fairness should be our goal. Why fairness? Well, again, kind of a Rawlsian argument that you don't know where you're gonna be. So we have to make it as fair as possible and then you do whatever you want. And we're not gonna have equal outcomes. This is the problem today. Is that the drive toward equal outcomes? No, no, because we're never gonna get equal outcomes. Just for a thousand different reasons. So just equal opportunities is the goal. But yeah, anyway, so there is a tension of people like Gould and Wilson on the left about, well, what about genetics? This is just a misunderstanding, says Pinker. And I agree with him that you're just misreading this thing like it. If it's genetic, you can't change it. No, in fact, that's not true, right? Let's talk about gun control because you've written, and this is probably one of the issues where you've depart most from a kind of libertarian orthodoxy, but you believe in gun control and can you make the briefcase for that? And why do libertarian or maybe not libertarians, let's say, second amendment fundamentalists in your phrase, where are they wrong? Well, society's filled with collective action problems we need to solve as a group. And to do that, you have to get a majority and then they all have to chip in like paying taxes. Again, it's just most libertarians are not anarchists and they agree, okay, we need property rights and therefore we have to have a court system to support your property rights and we need a police force and the prison system and a military. All of a sudden you have a big government that you got to fund with taxes. All right, how is this any different? Why is guns separate? In my opinion, it's because guns are almost totemic as a proxy for something else. This kind of focus on individual autonomy, freedom, self-defense, liberty, freedom from the government, that sort of thing. Over and above all the other concessions you've already made, coming to pay for police and fire and military and so on. And if I don't pay my taxes, they're coming to get me at some point, I'll get the letters and then and so forth. But eventually men with guns will come to your house, right, you've signed on for that. But I think that's why they want the guns because then they can fight back, right? Yeah, but why would, okay, so yeah, right. So, but why would you support that? Because you've already agreed that, well, we need somebody to protect our, my property rights through a court system that I'm willing to pay for. Well, how about the guy over there? He doesn't want to pay for it. Well then send men with guns over there and he has guns. You know, in a way this kind of fanaticism about just arm everybody, you know, is a way of saying the United States is a failed state and it's just everybody's on their own and we don't really trust the police or the military to do their job. We don't trust our institutions. We give up, it's like we're living in Somalia. Well, no, we're not living in Somalia. I can see if you live there while you'd want a gun or something. And I do get the, you know, if I'm an African-American living in an inner city and I don't trust the police because they're not trustworthy and they can't get there in time. And there's violence around me. I should have a gun. So again, not by an area, you know, I'm not anti-gun at all. I grew up with guns. My stepfather was a hunter. So I had a BB gun and a pellet gun and then a 20-gauge shotgun and a 12-gauge shotgun. And for 20 years, I had a handgun in my house in Altadena and, you know, but it's just, we're facing a social problem. How do we solve it? The carnage is, you know, more people die by guns than by cars. And is that, I mean, one of the things that is true, I mean, gun homicides have been going down, you know, since the mid-90s. So there's slight upticks and things like that. But the suicides, you know, I mean, that's like more than half of gun deaths, right? So that's part of what your argument is, right? Yeah, right. So how about just regulation in the form of better background checks, right? And we already have laws about, you know, men with restraining orders against their significant other. I mean, when a woman is murdered, I think it's like 90% of it is by a significant other. After they broke up or got divorced or child custody issues, something like that. You know, why have the gun there? If he already has a restraining order, he can't buy a gun. You know, a lot of those laws are already in place. Just enforce them, you know, the gun show loophole. Are you sympathetic to the argument that, yeah, I mean, this is the point. We have tons of gun laws and they don't seem to be, you know, they're in the same way that we, you know, you can't be utopian about certain things like school shootings are horrible, but they are not the, they're not common enough where that's where you make all the laws. To be honest, man, I'm ready to give up on the whole thing and just say, if I get, I mean, it's just, just let everybody have their guns because there's already 400 million guns, right? 120 guns for every 100 people. So we're talking about 400 million guns in America. We're not going to get them back. You know, if the government said we're doing a buyback or a take back program and be like Waco every day. Yeah. Ruby Rid. It's fascinating too that actually, as more guns are in circulation, it's in a fewer percentage of households, which so fewer people are having, owning more guns. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not particularly, you know, focus on the gun issue, but that seems like an interesting social change. And I'm not sure what accounts for it or if that's good or bad or different. Yeah. You know, in the examples that I use, everybody uses, you know, Austria and Australia, other countries have done these things and it worked. Yeah, but they're smaller, homogeneous population. They didn't have very many guns in the first place. They don't have the same culture that we have about guns, Second Amendment, all that. I don't know. I don't know how, I don't know what the solution is. It seems like somebody should do something and I know how libertarians respond to that. Yeah. The government, we don't want the government to do more. It's already doing too much. Okay. But again, like back to the analogy with cars, pretty much everybody signed off in the idea, well, cars should be regulated. You know, seatbelts are good and airbags are good. And, you know, even though the number of car deaths still hovers, right, 35 to 40,000 a year, but if you adjust it by the miles driven, cars are much safer now than they used to be. And why is that government regulation? You have to have seatbelts. Oh, you're speaking heresy now. I know. I know. That government can never do anything good. I don't see how that would have happened just by private enterprise. Yeah. I mean, that's a serious challenge to a kind of knee-jerk libertarianism, which I think people who still call themselves libertarians like myself, I need to take up that mantle. And sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. Right. I mean, just one last point, a collective action problem, like the motorcycle helmet thing. You know, in fact, when that happened, you know, libertarians, a lot of motorcycle, I'm not going to do it. Right. Or they would wear these, you know, little nothing helmets. You know, I get that. I totally get that. But, you know, the way our medical system operates, eventually, you know, you and I are going to have to pay for these accidents and these head injuries. Do you, I'm assuming you grew up riding bicycles without helmets. Yeah. And then when did you start, when you were a bike racer? Yes. Well, that happened in the accident. But are they effective? Yes. The current helmets are totally effective. Yes. Because they're designed on, based on motorcycle helmet design. It's a compressed polystyrene shell that on impact, it absorbs like 95% of the impact. And they work. The bike helmets before that. And these are the old leather hairnets. Leather hairnets. Completely worthless. Yeah. At the, again, when I worked for, at the bike show when I worked for Bell Helmets, they were one of my sponsors. We used to take one of those leather hairnets and have the people come by. Okay, put your fist inside there. Yeah. Yeah. Now slam it against that brick wall. Yeah. No, I'm not. Yeah. Are you kidding me? Yeah. Now do it with one of these helmets. No problem. That's your head, right? But was that, you know, was that innovation driven by superior technology and information or was it by mandate? This is, well, by mandate, because enough people were died in the tour de France from head injuries that the tour itself said, hey, we need to mandate helmets. So, and when I was working for Bell at the time, they were saying, they already had the bell shell, which was this white geeky looking helmet. And they've had this for like 15 years. No one was buying it. No one serious cyclists would not wear it. So I said, you need to design it to look like a leather hairnet. So it's got to be black and, you know, thin with some air vents and maybe a little gold trim. It's got to look cool. And you got to get pros to wear it. And the people go, oh, all right. You know, and that helped, but it wasn't until it was mandated. And again, this collective action problem, most cyclists wanted to wear helmets because they know it's safer. Right. But when some of them don't wear it, they get a slight advantage. It's like, well, I got a, it's like doping. Like I got to do it because that guy's doing it, right? And then once it's mandated, okay, no one gets to take the drug. Everyone has to wear a helmet. It's like, okay, good. I want to take you down a slight detour. Now that we're talking about the Tour de France and also about technology and innovation and doping and things like that. Greg LeMond was the first American to win the Tour de France. And he's like a fascinating figure who also embraced every technological innovation he could. And there was one Tour de France in particular where he beat Laurent Fignon who eschewed technology. It was like, oh, that's like American stupidity and things like that. Lost by seconds over a 21 day race. How important is like understanding technology and innovation and kind of pushing that forward. How is the best way to make that happen or more people embrace that? Well, it happens naturally. It kind of trickles down from the pro ranks to serious weekend athletes. And people have more money now and the bikes are better than they used to be. They really do get better. Like I get a new bike every three to four years and every one of them is really better than the previous one. Maybe just a little bit, just 1% and 2% but you can feel the difference. And disc brakes instead of the rim brakes, they're better, electronic shifting, it's better. And it just kind of starts to add up but because of the market, because of capitalism, what would have been say a $15,000, $20,000 bike I could get for like 6,500 now because so many people are buying them because they really are better and you see all the pros racing. Do you think this is part of the problem of our current moment? And now I'm leaping from kind of technological innovation and bike racing or something to in general, I mean the world is so much better than it was 50 years ago but we don't seem to want to recognize that or acknowledge that and is that a problem? Well you don't see it, it's hard to see because it happens slow enough. Like again, the bike thing, if I was a regular weekend warrior or whatever and maybe I'd buy a bike every 10 years and oh, okay, I really see it but when you buy him incrementally he's like watching your kid grow. You see the pictures from three years ago, oh wow, he got big, you don't notice it, right? And that's hard to see, Pinker talks about that and Matt really does, you know, just the cost of how many hours a week you have to work to get your dinner or your light. Matt has those charts and it's like, oh wow, I mean it's just very incrementally, very slowly over decades and centuries and from day to day we don't see that because our senses are geared to immediate environment, the next day, the next week, that's about it, that's all we care about because we're really designed to pay attention to threats so the negativity bias. So we focus on bad things rather than the good things and also immediate threats and the way the world works because of second law and entropy is that good things happen mostly very gradually, slowly over long periods of time but bad things can happen, boom. You get the stroke or the heart attack or the company goes out of business, the thought collapses, the country falls. These things happen very quickly so we're tuned to looking for those kind of threats because those are the things that took us out. Just to close out the tour to France, beginning with Le Monde and going through Lance Armstrong, this to me I found it interesting that, Americans didn't care about bike racing, it was like ridiculously European and all of that and it was kind of like soccer in the 70s and 80s it like picked up and then Lance Armstrong and people, Americans after him who were caught doping and cheating and whatnot after protesting that they hadn't. Now we don't care about bike racing in the same way, right? And has that happened all over society? Where I mean, we live in an era now, things are getting better and better but our trust and confidence in institutions and in society have been declining. You know, how do we deal with that kind of dynamic? Yeah, interesting analogy. Yeah, well there are Americans in the tour this year but they're not doing that well, I'm just kind of in the middle. It definitely punctured the, I mean, there was a growing interest in things like professional cycling and certainly the tour, you know, and I guess, and it's even broader than just America. I mean, the revelation of profound doping which in a way goes back to the very early beginning of the tour, there were doping controversies from the beginning and I'm kind of big on performance enhancing drugs. I kind of, you know, I don't. Just let everybody do it. Well, or yeah, I mean, but then you do have rules in the, but you know. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you on that. I mean, I guess if it didn't trickle down to junior athletes that are up and coming and you get that, again, that you get that kind of collective action problem and like, well, I don't want to do it but that guy's doing it and I don't want to get to his level and so on and that's how it happens. That's how it happened with Lance. I mean, it's unfortunate. He was not able to articulate that very clearly on Oprah's couch there that, you know, when he didn't start any of this, he just did it better than everybody else was doing it and he hired the top guy and said, you can't work for anybody else. I'll give you a pile of money to an exclusive and you know, but there's, you know, when he was first starting and he was getting his ass kicked and you know, it's like, why is this happening? And somebody said, see that guy there and that guy there, they're doping. They're using this, they're using that. They're going to that guy over there. He's the top doping. Oh, okay. And then, so here's the choice. I either do it or I'm out, right? And then, you know, you don't get to fulfill your dream so they do it. You know, it's a rational choice, I think. And there's, I mean, I guess in humans, would you say in evolution, there's this, there are these two tendencies. One is that we want excellence but then we also, and we're willing to do almost anything for it but then we are very disappointed if not in ourselves and our heroes when they actually do what we're kind of urging them to do which is, you know, pay any price in order to become the best or something. Right, right. Yeah, I'm not sure you have to put it at such extremes though because you have spectacular performances that you, where you don't need the drugs maybe but again, you just have to have good enforcement. I mean, there was an interesting thing when Rafa won the French Open this year and then it came out like a week later that his foot was all shot up with all kinds of drugs and stuff because he has some weird problem there and a couple of cyclists were commenting, boy, if we did that, we'd be kicked out and we'd be shamed and humiliated in the front pages of the newspapers. And it is true, the doping agencies like that, you know, that govern sports are terrible and very arbitrary and just incompetent, I mean, in many ways. And I can recall Olympic swimmers, you know, losing their gold medals because they had taken the wrong kind of cold medication or whatever. Whereas the NFL, you know, their program was, you know, the doping agency has to contact the player's agent and then set a date to test it like in three weeks. Okay, no problem. We'll clear it all out. Let's close up by talking about Skeptic, the Skeptic Society, Skeptic Magazine, 30 years and running. You know, explain what the Skeptic Society is about. Well, we're a 501c3 nonprofit. Science education is our thing, critical thinking, rationality, you know, reason. That there, you know, a commitment to universal realism. There is a reality. We can know something about it, albeit not perfectly. You know, that kind of enlightenment ideals of the search for objective truth through tried and true methods. You know, that's kind of our thing. And just, we just try to tackle subjects that are important. And as you see with the abortion issue, trans issue, the next one on race, you know, we've already done astrology, big foot UFOs, you can only do those things so much. And it's like, okay, we pretty much know what the story is there. Let's find something new. It's amazing how the Loch Ness Monster and the Bermuda Triangle, just people don't care about those anymore. No, I know they're out, but the UFOs are back because of the UAP thing. Absolutely, yeah. But, and although it seems like this is the end of UFOs, right? Like it's obvious that it's, you know, it's not extraterrestrial. It should be obvious to everybody, although it's still pretty popular that ancient alien show is on its 18th season. Wow, that's great. It's up there with the apprentice or something, right? But, so I wanna ask you, is this a good time to be a skeptic in terms of like, does rationality, and again, understanding that it's imperfect, we all have, you know, our cognitive bias and all of that kind of stuff. Is there more broadly speaking, are we more rational than we were 50 years ago? Or is that never the way to really think about things? This is a big debate in cognitive cycles of, to what extent are we naturally gullible and we fall for things like cults and scams, things like that, because people do fall for those things. But the counter argument to that is, in fact, most people don't fall for cults and scams. The reason these scammers have to send out, you know, a million emails to get one sucker is because most people are not suckers, right? And most people who join religious sects and groups and self-help groups and they go to Tony Robbins weekend, they're not joining cults. And if the thing turned into a cult, they probably would leave, right? So we only hear, there's an availability here, we only hear about the ones, you know, the Jonestown and Waco and sort of the crazy ones, the, you know, Heaven's Gate. But those are really rare, right? And so I've been thinking about this, you know, to what extent this is called default of truth. You know, when you tell me something, I just tend to believe you because I know you, I don't have time to fact check everything you tell me. So there's kind of a social trust that most of the time works, right? And I was just telling people about the story I read of this guy, a cyclist, who, do you know what Strava is? You know, you post your rides on this app. And then on Strava, there's these King of the Mountain KOM, every segment is timed. And you know, there's thousands of people who have done that segment and you can see what the average speed was. You try to go out there and break that guy's time order. Well, so there was this guy who turns out he was like a total con man, fraud, you know, an impersonator, I mean, he said he had, he was a CEO of a major corporation. He had been an IPO startups and he was in special forces and on and on and on. And he was a professional bike racer on this European team and the people wherever he was living in California, no one bothered to check until he posted a time on a Strava KOM that somebody saw and went, that's not possible. The speed was like what a top European pro would do and this guy's like 45 years old. It was like, wait a minute, I'm gonna look into what else he's done, right? But if I just heard, you know, I was in the special forces, okay. I mean, I wouldn't even know how to check if you told me that. Who would I call this? Was Nick really a Navy SEAL guy? I wouldn't even know, right? So I think for the most part, we're not gullible so much as the trust thing works pretty well most of the time, but evolution did not eliminate all the psychopaths and the free riders and the liars and the deceivers and the cheaters because that would take too much energy to get rid of every last one, right? So a society can tolerate like a small percentage of con men and liars and cheaters and thieves and so on and still function reasonably well. What's your favorite cult? My favorite cult? Well, I guess this is gonna sound crazy. The cult of Trump at the moment. I mean, I really think it is something like that. You know, even just yesterday, just after the latest January 6th hearings where it's obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that he knew he lost and he was just to make a grab for power and you still see some of these Republican totes. Yeah, tons of Republicans, people running for office saying that the election was stolen. Right, now it could be there just opportunists saying I gotta say whatever I think the boss wants me to say so that he gives me his endorsement so I can win the election. I don't really believe it, that's possible. But what concerns me is that like 60% of self-identified Republicans say and they have nothing to gain. They just, yeah, I think there was, I think rigged, I think it was rigged. That's a kind of conspiracy theory and maybe even a cult that's not on the fringe. I'd say, what's the status of skepticism? More important than ever. Because most of these conspiracy theories that I've used to deal with, the JFK or 9-11, they're pretty fringy, right? And this one is right there at the top of the government. And I'm worried this could threaten our democracy, right? If enough people believe this, they won't accept the outcome of the next election. Do you worry going into the midterms by all accounts that Democrats are gonna lose big for a variety of historical reasons? President, when the president is unpopular in his first midterm election, he loses 25 to 35 seats, et cetera. Democrats are already starting to rehearse how these elections, the Supreme Court is not legitimate. The Republicans have stripped people of voting rights all over the place. Do you worry that? So we're gonna go from a right-wing conspiracy theory about illegitimate elections to a democratic one. Yes. Well, the Dems have always had conspiracy theories whenever they lost, if you just go back to the last 50 years in every election. This one was slightly different because it ended up at the Capitol. But yes, of course, they're gonna, I'm worried that if a Republican genuinely wins, say in 24, whoever it is, maybe DeSantis, hopefully not Trump, that the Dems won't accept it. They'll just say, no, we know they were doing this behind the scenes and the gerrymandering and this and that. This was all illegal and then what? Then we're in trouble. Well, although I suspect skeptic magazine's circulation is gonna go up. I don't know. Or it's gonna go out of business, one or the other, right? I find most people, they're not that interested in the truth. You have to kind of remind them why this is important. I feel like Liz Cheney sometimes, you know? Standing up there going, you know, what actually happened matters, reality matters, right? And I mean, what a funny thing. I mean, she's my hero and I don't agree with her on almost everything, politics, right? You know, she's pro-life. Do you hope, I mean, well, do you hope people are becoming more independent minded? That would help, yes. I like Andrew Yang's idea of a viable third party. Of course, he's not the first pre-missile forward party. I like this idea. I'm not a big UBI guy, but you know, I think the duopoly, he talks about the duopoly, you know, Germany where my wife's from, they have what, six or seven parties that are viable parties. No one gets more than 50%. I mean, no one gets more than really 20, 25%. That's good. That sounds great. That's good now to end on. Michael Shermer, thanks for talking. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.