 There's no doubt speaking up takes courage. But we want to be your voice when you really need one. We back the Australians who are doing it tough. We're bold. We're credible. We're Australia's most fearless straight talkers. There is a rawness and an authenticity to sky that I think do struggle to find anywhere else. That is a promo piece for Sky News Australia. Which, no matter what you think about Rupert Murdoch's Sky News, you've got to acknowledge that's Sky News Australia's mainstream. And the reason I bring it up on this show is because they were in the news recently because they had their videos banned from YouTube because they dared to challenge the idea that masks are effective for COVID-19. Which I could go on and on about and I'm kind of tempted to. It's this interview I have coming up with Sarah and Jack Gorman. They have a new book called Denying to the Grave. Why we ignore the facts that will save us. So right off the bat, this is like so classic skeptical. This is like ten years ago skeptical. Because these people are super smart, qualified. Sarah, you know, undergraduate degree, Harvard, PhD, Columbia. Jack has an even more impressive background. MD, Columbia, psychiatry, multiple fellowships, taught at the med school there. I mean, these are very, very intelligent people. And their book is atrocious. When it comes to the science that we've talked about for so many years on this show, it completely fails from Jump Street. It fails from the fundamental science as a method. It's not a position statement. So again, I could go on and on. And I get into a lot of this with this interview slash debate that I know makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And for those of you who it doesn't make uncomfortable, let me tell you are in the minority. When I do interviews like this, most people really do not like this kind of dialogue. But I got to say, where else are you going to hear this kind of stuff? Where else is this silliness going to be exposed? So speaking of silliness, here's where I start, which seems obvious to me to anyone who cares about science. And that is, should we limit scientific debate? Should we feel okay that scientific debate is being banned, being censored? Here's a clip. Very disturbing to me when people talk about information being dangerous and opinions being dangerous. Why would we ever want to limit a scientific discussion because we don't agree with somebody? I find that very troubling. I do think that anybody who spreads information about a medical technology that people need in order to survive, that's not true. And usually it's intentionally not true. I don't think that they should be allowed to have any platform they want. Sarah, who would determine what's not true? Isn't that the job of science? Yeah. Well, science has already determined certain things about vaccines that they're safe and effective, certain vaccines that they're safe and effective. Does science really determine anything? In your book, you say there's nothing is 100% true. Science isn't about proof, right? It's about evidence. It's about statistically certainty one way or another, right? First of all, I think we should just one thing is we're not really talking about the First Amendment here because the First Amendment only applies to government censorship. The idea that YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are not part of what we have all assumed throughout our lives is this free press. Can't be sustained. So Sarah is obviously lost in the woods here. But as the discussion goes on, her dad, Jack, tries to save her when we wind up talking about whether masks are effective. And here comes the really interesting part. Overall, the use of masks in community did not reduce the risk of influenza. Over and over again, these studies have been replicated and they always generate a null result. And then finally, we had the man himself, Fauci comes out and reveals in an email that he never made public that he knew all along that in terms of public health, not in terms of laboratory, not whether you can make a mask work in a laboratory setting, which we all understand you can, but whether from a public health standpoint they work, he comes out and says, yeah, I know they never worked. I still think masks work, obviously, and probably Sarah does too. I don't have the data at the tip of my fingers the way you just did, which was really great that you had that there. So I'm not going to be able to engage in a informed conversation about it. But no one is suppressing either side, right? I got to say in my book, masks work. You get to say here, masks don't work. Public sees both sides. Oh, no, that's suppressed on YouTube. You can't say that or you're banned. You can't say masks don't work on YouTube. That's correct. So here it is. Here's the payoff. Here's the part I think is particularly interesting. Jack, super smart guy, MD, expert in public health policy, expert in this interface between science and public health policy, genuinely does not know that YouTube videos are banned. And I don't even completely fault him for this. This is where conspiracy and the kind of material that I've really engaged in the last few years. This is why it's so important. One more clip from the interview that's coming up. What else you got for us today? I tell you one thing I got you wrote on conspiracy theory. We think it's reasonable to say, even without any data to support it, that most people have never been part of a conspiracy or even known a person who has. And the thing that struck me is, man, first of all, I grew up in Chicago where I don't know how it is in New York, but you don't get anything done without paying somebody off, influencing somebody. And everything is a freaking conspiracy. And then I was a research associate at the University of Arizona. And I left because I thought, you know, the PhD process and that whole thing was very political quote unquote, which is also conspiratorial. And then I got into business and I had a business and built my business. I sold it to a NASDAQ company. Everything about that, everything about business, everything about large financial transactions is always a conspiracy. But then the first one you use is an example of a conspiracy. And my audience will love this. A conspiracy was behind the assassination of President Lincoln, but not President Kennedy. And again, since we'll wrap this up, but you guys need to Google United States House Select Committee on Assassinations and then add conspiracy or sound data. I mean, that is the finding of that committee is that it was a conspiracy. Wow, I guess as you can tell, I'm pretty worked up, but it is so, so skeptical. So anyways, this is a dialogue that I'm glad we had. I'm sure it's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable and I'm sure it made our guests a little bit uncomfortable. But man, you got to do your work if you're going to come on the show. Here's my interview with Sarah and Jack Gorman. Welcome to Skeptica where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares. And today, well, we have something special because intelligent science driven dialogues with people who disagree are difficult. And they're not only difficult to have these kind of discussions, but they're even difficult to arrange them. I can tell you, I can't tell you how many I've tried to do and it's really hard to get authors to come on if they have any sense that the other party isn't going to agree with them. So when Holly, who is the PR rep from Oxford University Press originally reached out to me and said, hey, would you like to do this? I was like, absolutely, just make sure they're down with it. So I was delighted and surprised. So I think this is good. It's an opportunity again to have these kind of dialogues that are can be difficult to have, but I think can be important too. So our guests today are super bright, super qualified. Dr. Sarah Gorman and Dr. Jack Gorman join us today. Why don't we start by talking a little bit about your backgrounds? First of all, this is the names of the same. We're just chatting a second ago. We have a father daughter writing team here, which is quite cool. And I was just saying, I think I'd love to do that someday with my daughters. It's a testament to a family that can hang together. I tell you, if you can write a book together and edit it together, then there's a strong relationship there that really needs to be celebrated. So maybe Sarah, start with you. Tell us a little bit about your very impressive background. Tell folks about your background, who you are, and how you came to write the book. Sure. So hi, thank you so much for having us today. It's great to be here. My background is mostly in public health and sort of the intersection of psychology and public health. I have a PhD from Harvard and a Master's of Public Health from Columbia. And I've spent many years writing and thinking about that intersection between these two fields, specifically how people make health decisions and why they make the decisions they do and why sometimes those decisions are not consistent with the advice they may get from health professionals or national authorities on health, et cetera. And I came to write the book because I was getting more and more interested and actually frustrated with the response that my field was having to people who were vaccine hesitant, so people who were afraid to get the vaccine, usually for measles, mumps, and rubella for their children. At the time, the predominant fear was that that vaccine might cause autism, which was not well supported in the literature, but was a prevalent fear among many people. And I was frustrated with the response from my field, which was mostly to basically fight with people and provide them with more and more factual information. And I really thought that they were missing the mark, that this approach obviously didn't work and that they were assuming that people just didn't have information, which I didn't think was at the heart of the problem. So I wanted to understand a little bit better, what is the psychology that goes into coming up with a decision or a fear like this about a vaccine and how does that develop? How does it become entrenched? What happens when it's challenged and everything along those lines? And I can let Jack talk a little bit about how he developed his interest in the same topic, but it just so happened that around the same time, we were thinking about this topic in slightly different ways, but very similar and realizing that there was enough here for a whole book project. Awesome. Jack, do you want to jump in there? Sure. Sure. So I trained at Columbia University to be a psychiatrist where I went to medical school and where I met my wife who's a psychiatrist. But as soon as I finished residency training at psychiatry, I went right into research and spent a career of about 20 years or so researching in biological areas of psychiatry and neuroscience, mostly at Columbia University. And the genesis of the book was really Sarah's idea because Sarah called me one day and told me about her ideas about vaccine hesitancy and the MMR and those kinds of things. And it happened to be at about the same time, I was thinking a lot about why people own guns. Not a second amendment issue, but rather what the data show, which is that if you own a gun, most of the studies show you're more likely to be at danger of being harmed by that gun than to ever use it to protect yourself. And yet lots of people argue that you need a gun at home to protect yourself and they own guns. And so we started talking about all the different instances in which mainstream science says one thing and at least a substantial number of people believe that we can use something else. And what is that disjunction between belief and science? And that interests us a great deal because we realized there were a lot of different areas where that was the case. We realized that we could irritate our liberal friends and our conservative friends equally because depending on which issue we looked at, we would find an issue where that was the case. And so that's how we decided to write the book together. And then subsequently we started a nonprofit company called Critica, which is intended to carry out some of these ideas. Very fundamental to our idea was the recognition that scientists like we are usually do a relatively poor job of explaining science to people and very often are arrogant and condescending to people and don't empathize with their goals, their needs and their interests. And so we wanted to try to explore what is the psychology of science denial and how do we overcome it? I'd also like to say in terms of your program, I'm very interested in spirituality as well. I'm a religious person. And I tell people always that when I'm in religious services, I believe the earth is 5,771, almost 5,772 years old. And when I'm in the laboratory, I believe the world is 13.5 billion years old and I have no trouble with those two beliefs. Well, good. That might actually be another point of incongruity between us because I'm a very spiritual person but not a religious person at all. I'm not down with that. But I think we're going to have a lot to talk about. Again, folks, the book denying to the grave why we ignore the facts that will save us. And I think you guys have done a pretty good job of laying out the basic premise of the book and the genesis of it, which is interesting. I feel like I've done 500 shows on denying to the grave, you know? That's what this show has all been about. But the issues are always the other way around. And that's the first thing that impressed me is like, isn't this what everybody says? Hey, I know the facts. The other guy, why isn't he relating to the facts in the same way that I do? You know, one of the very first interviews I did was with a guy I like and still greatly respect, Dr. Rupert Sheldrick, who is a Cambridge biologist, a published in Nature, certainly well respected guy. And he tells this story about presenting at the Royal Society in London about his work on morphogenetic fields, which you guys would probably completely disagree with. And one of his colleagues on the Royal Society stands up and turns his back to the screen, folds his arms over his chest, and says regarding Rupert's data, I wouldn't believe it even if it was true. So isn't that what we're really up against? This was not Rupert's position is not a mainstream position, but he has a lot of really good data to support what he's saying. And we have a dogmatic, scientific, ordained mainstream that says I wouldn't believe it even if it wasn't true. Isn't that at the core of what we're talking about? And then doesn't it quickly get to data? Don't we all think we have the facts and the other guy doesn't? Yes, I think that's true. I think that's true to some extent. And I would say, you know, part of what we, what we write about in the book is that no one is immune to these phenomena, these psychological phenomena in that, that make us not believe things or that make us skew the data or look at things in the wrong way. Nobody is immune to it, including scientists, including physicians, you know, we deal mostly with health sciences. And it's really important. We, you know, we have many, many pages in the book that we devote to helping professionals, medical and scientific professionals examine their own understanding, their own approach to data and how they're, you know, how they may be pushing things away. That could be true because they have conflicts of interest that may not be financial. They may be reputational or something else. And so that is really an important part of what we examine as well. I didn't, I gotta say I didn't see it right from jump. I mean, you guys still talk about denying science. It's like this is skeptical 10 years ago. Science is a method. It's not a position statement, right? So your book is filled with political statements about Trump and this and that and other political statements about topics that you guys seem to care about. It seems to be very philosophy of science, which is what I think you're getting at light. It doesn't mention the replication problem. It doesn't mention the experimenter effect. It doesn't mention the file drawer problem. All the issues that are at the cutting edge of philosophy of science, science methods, getting, sorting through where the data really is, how we're being fooled. I don't see any of that. I just see standing on a soapbox talking about climate change and COVID-19 and vaccine and all the rest of that stuff. Well, you're right. We don't discuss those things in the book and that's a good observation. And I think what you're getting at is all the things that scientists need to have a lot more humility about all the things that plague science and as you say, make science a method, not a belief system. So the replication issue, for example, is a very good thing that you brought up, which is particularly problematic in psychology. As you know, we're so many of the studies in psychology studies now shown don't replicate over time. I must say that as a scientist, that's one of the most painful things to have happen is when a paper you publish with a finding somebody else can't replicate it and that's happened to me. And that is a very painful thing. And that's part of our process, right? That's part of how we eventually come to a conclusion is by doing studies, seeing if people can replicate it, finding out when we're wrong, hopefully acknowledging when we're wrong, which is one of the things that we think scientists don't do often enough. I just read a harrowing story. It was a book review this morning. I just read in the journal Science. I haven't read the book. So I just read this book review. But it was the story about two children in an orphanage in Iowa who had their IQ measured and their IQ was measured at something like 36 and 46. You may have heard of this book and they were declared feeble minded in this Iowa orphanage. And the psychologists found another place for these people to go another horrible asylum. But in this horrible asylum, the two young children were actually doted on and raised by adults who also had low IQs. And they came back a year later and measured their IQs. And these children's IQs was 90 and 80 something. And they came back 20 years ago and they were both married people with children and very happy lives. What they had shown is that IQ was capable of going up if a child got the proper amount of nurturance and attention and love. And what the book is about is how scientists, psychologists in the IQ field refuse to believe it. And how mainstream science fought tooth and nail against this idea that IQ was susceptible to nurture. Because at the time, this is back in 1930s, it was firmly believed in science that the world, that IQ was totally a genetic function, totally inborn that there's nothing you could do environmentally to change it. And I have almost four tears to my eyes reading that because I thought that here's an example. And there were other examples of scientists refusing to look at the data. Cells refusing to look at that. And they are these two kids refusing to believe that these two kids had been able to have this much of a change in IQ in a year. So I think that's one of the things that you're noting. And we're very sensitive to this. And one of the things that we certainly say, and we write, I think in this book, for example, a lot of that the nutritional science where people have made such huge mistakes actually and refuse to give up on ideas when new data comes in, that science always has to be ready to change its mind when new data come in. Sarah, did you want to jump in there or can I move on? You can move on. Well, I guess the thing that I think is bound up with this thing that we're talking about right now relates to things that are happening right now that people care about, you know, COVID, climate change, global warming, stuff that you talk about in your book. AIDS, HIV, which is something else we've kind of looked at on this show, is what's commonly referred to as the cancel culture kind of thing. So if you look at like the vax thing and the vaxed movie by Dale Big Tree, there's a guy who's banned now on YouTube, Google, censored, Facebook banned there too. What do you guys think about banning scientific discussion, banning people who have different views? This is very concerning to me. You mentioned you have these, Jack, you were interested in, you know, gun ownership and you understand there's a difference between people's beliefs and Second Amendment rights and how people feel the need to protect it. I think something similar is going on with First Amendment rights. I hear people talk very disturbing to me when people talk about science information being dangerous and opinions being dangerous. And Dale Big Tree, who I've never interviewed, Dale Big Tree, I've interviewed some other people related to the topic, scientists mainly. Why that, why Dale Big Tree, who is a recognized TV journalist, has published on mainstream things, why we would want to ban someone, why we would ever want to limit a scientific discussion because we don't agree with somebody. I find that very troubling. What do you guys think? Should anti-vaxxers, as you guys would call them, should quote, unquote, anti-vaxxers, should they be banned from YouTube? They are, but should they be? Yeah. I do think that anybody who spreads information about medical technology that people need in order to survive, that's not true. And usually it's intentionally not true. I don't think that they should be allowed to have any platform they want personally. I know that's my own stance. I don't think that it has to be gospel, but I think that it does become dangerous. These things spread very quickly and people who are just trying to make a good decision for their children get pulled into, ultimately, in some cases, killing their own children because of this. So I do think it's potentially dangerous. Sarah, who would determine what's not true? Isn't that the job of science? Yeah. Well, science has already determined certain things about vaccines that they're safe and effective, certain vaccines that they're safe and effective. Does science really determine anything? I think in your book you say there's nothing that's 100% true. Science isn't about proof, right? It's about evidence. It's about statistically certainty one way or another, right? First of all, I think we should, just one thing is we're not really talking about the First Amendment here because the First Amendment only applies to government censorship. So whether or not we agree to Facebook, Twitter, they can do whatever they want because they're private companies. So the question is, is it morally, ethically right for them to do that? I also want to say that we try, we slip and we forget, but we try never to use that term anti-vaxxer because we find that to be a derogatory term. We want to talk to people who object to vaccinations and have conversations with them. That's very important to us. We want to understand exactly what evidence they have, what is on their mind, where they're coming from. I just wrote actually for our website, it'll appear hopefully in September, an article, a commentary, talking about this very issue about when is it scientific descent and when is it misinformation. And one of the things that we've debated among ourselves is the drug hydroxychloroquine, which as you know was originally said to be an effective treatment by some people for COVID-19. And now the scientific consensus is it doesn't work. Should people be able to say for example on YouTube, Facebook and similar to Twitter that hydroxychloroquine works for COVID-19 if that information might lead people to take hydroxychloroquine, get bad side effects and not any benefit. I don't actually answer the question by the way because I'm not 100% sure of the answer. But you're asking the most important question, which is at what point does something become dangerous and harmful and therefore should not be promulgated? And at what point is it a matter of legitimate scientific discussion that we don't want to stifle because it might lead us somewhere? If you have the answer to that, I'd love to hear it. Let's try. First off, the idea that YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are not part of what we have all assumed throughout our lives is this free press is really not, doesn't, can't be sustained. In this, you know, I asked my daughters who are younger, you know, what is the New York Times, they barely even know what the New York Times is, right? So, but you ask them what TikTok and Twitter and Instagram, they know that. So clearly Google, YouTube and these other platforms, social media platforms are a part of what we would consider the press. And we do as a public have a vested interest in the extent to which they censor, control and shape information. So I would take issue with you right off the bat saying there aren't First Amendment issues. I think they certainly are. But what I really object to is, Sarah, I just feel like there's a real disconnect when people talk about science. And then in the same breath, they say, but we need to control what's true and what's not true about science. That the whole endeavor of science is this constant questioning and challenging and retrenching of about what we thought was true. It's like the whole thing of extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. No, that is completely anti-scientific. The whole idea of science is to be not biased. Who would be the meta agency that would determine what's extraordinary and what's extraordinary proof? Who would be the meta agency that would determine what's true and not true in order to allow it to be on YouTube? And really the only way, I guess, and we're going to have to do it here, the only way to get to any grounding on this is to start diving into the data, which again, I kind of find is a shortcoming of your book. It's not like you guys deconstruct any of the issues that you seem to care about so we could go into climate change or we could go into, again, the masks on COVID-19 would be a perfect one because we did a show on Skeptico and I kind of debated a guy's a PhD in biology from MIT and he was spreading misinformation about masks being effective. And now, clearly, we know and we knew all along that masks work in the laboratory but every randomized controlled trial that's ever been done, and I can pull up for you just a sampling, if you look at a meta-analysis that's been done on whether masks prevent viral respiratory infections and they'll do a meta-analysis of how many did they do in this study? 17. Overall, the use of masks in community did not reduce the risk of influenza. Over and over again, these studies have been replicated and they always generate a null result. And then finally, we had the man himself Fauci comes out and reveals in an email that he never made public that he knew all along that in terms of public health not in terms of laboratory, not whether you can make a mask work in a laboratory setting which we all understand you can but whether from a public health standpoint they work, he comes out and says, yeah, I know they never worked and I certainly know the ones that most people are buying down at the drugstore so, hey, let's do a little reversal like you guys are talking about because your book talks about mask-wearing as it's absolutely proven 100% scientifically and now we have a reversal of that data so are we going to, can you guys demonstrate your flexibility or are you going to be denying to the grave that this is not the truth? Well, let's take the larger issue though which you know, I still think masks work obviously and probably Sarah does too, we haven't discussed masks in a while and I don't have the data at the tip of my fingers the way you just did which was really great that you had that there so I'm not going to be able to engage in a informed conversation about it but no one is suppressing either side, right? I got to say in my book, masks work you get to say here masks don't work public sees both sides Oh no, that's suppressed on YouTube you can't say that or you're banned You can't say masks don't work on YouTube? That's correct, you will be banned your video will be demonetized first then it'll get a strike and then it'll be banned and there's multiple, multiple people that can attest to that they have, you know, 50 videos that are fine and then a video like that gets banned all the time happens I mean some slip through and some are banned I mean that's the worst of it is that some slip through and some are banned I just saw a little snippet of the study that you pulled up but I didn't notice that it said that all included studies in the systematic review were deemed high risk of bias and it also said that it wasn't obviously about COVID-19 was it specifically? and I guess that's part of my frustration is like your points right now catapult us into a real scientific discussion which is, here's the data as it existed pre-COVID right? because these are, it's a meta-analysis of 17 studies done I think between 2010 and 2015 so it's definitely before COVID so do these studies are they relevant to our current situation? That's a real scientific question and it's interesting I think most people think that they are because if you're looking at viral infections and flu when we went through SARS probably a good connection there but then the other thing is because they found a null result what are we to make of a null result? what were the limitations of the study that caused them to come up with a null result? these are all good questions to ask but what I hear back from people particularly the policy health makers is, and there's an exact quote if I wanted to bother to dig it up I would ask, quit grumbling about wanting more scientific studies and just do what you're told wear the fricken mask well, when Fauci comes out in the hidden emails that he says I knew that the mask didn't work all along that to me is the headline story is there's a disconnect between science and public health policy there's no reason to wear a mask unless you want to wear a mask there's no evidence that there's this overwhelming loose that we're going to get from wearing a mask and yet that has been the public health policy so that's my problem with it I would obviously disagree I think the evidence is there that masks are effective reducing transmission of aerosolive viral infections as I said I'm not going to be able to pull up the study right now let's watch that song on Furby Ground here one thing I totally agree with you about is that the open discussion of the data and the evidence should never be suppressed I talk about that I think that reasonable people can disagree about the effectiveness look at the data come to different conclusions and I think there will be more studies done with masks or do randomized control trials with masks as you know and that gets this whole area of when do we want to trust observations studies as opposed to randomized controlled studies so lots of very interesting science questions here we have a situation though where and perhaps you don't agree with this but a potentially deadly virus is in our myths so what do we do and I'm asking you this question because I think this is a tough question I think the preponderance of the evidence right now favors the effectiveness of masks you do not I would argue that if I were looking at all this data and I was not exactly sure I'd wear a mask because wearing a mask in my opinion has almost no downside and I think there's sufficient data to say that it limits the transmission of aerosolized viral infections so I would certainly recommend that somebody wear a mask next question should it be mandate I don't think it's a bad question okay but you're, I'm with you Jack but then you kind of pull up on the really important one you want to wear a mask out there in New York I don't have any problem many people can wear a mask I see people all the time driving around in their car all by themselves wearing a mask you want to do that man it's your world and then I've got it well it doesn't matter what we care about is that whether the public health policy can be made and enforced without science behind it so what I think we so you can have your opinion you know which you're open at admitting that you don't have the data I at least have a little bit of data and I've I don't have the data with me right now okay I'm fine you don't have the data at your fingertips you could buy it I knew that we were going to talk about this and I at the time to emulate all of it because I've been reading these studies as well like you bet that well I can simplify it I think I can simplify the argument to a point where I don't know that we'll find agreement but we're already kind of closer to agreement than it might seem on this in that pre-covid our public health policy interface between the mask science was no mandates right so pre-covid we were not mandating that people wear masks when there was flu outbreak the prior year and all the rest of that there was none of that so I would suggest to you that again what I think your book should be about is what kind of science would we need to tip that over not tip that over to hey I recommend that you really ought to look into this you ought to do your own work and you ought to wear a mask what tips it over to no I can now mandate that and now to the situation where we're in now where we have a president who is in this is absurdity this is science completely run amok in my opinion is threatening imposing mask restrictions for people who do or do not take the vaccine so take out whether you pro or against the vaccine since when would a policy that is supposed to be driven by science and about the welfare the health and welfare of the population when would that be used as a threat I mean either it's good and you should do it or it's not we don't threaten it like hey if you do this you won't have to wear the mask if you do that we won't but that's where we're at that is science really run amok in my opinion what do you guys think I don't want to do what I'm talking here Sarah I'm wondering if maybe this is not a good question to ask but I'm wondering if you could tell us some of your suggestions for how to contain the epidemic I'm really curious because I hear that you're you know don't think masks are a good idea I'm not sure where you stand on vaccines what are some things that you've been hearing that you think are good I'm glad you asked that question I resist going there I really am about the science I really am about the method I really am about the way it gets done and I'm about a healthy discussion I'm constantly like you guys are too I think trying to absorb more and more information in order to figure out what's real what's true what's best for my family what's best for me personally so that is a moving target but it is a moving target we can move along and talk about any other topic we can talk about climate change or global warming same thing we're constantly getting new information new data and we're trying to make the best decisions about what we should do this show is primarily you know 500 shows 480 of them are about consciousness and about this kind of what I consider to be an absurdity and Jack you said you're a religious guy I don't know about you Sarah but you know science has insisted that we are the consciousness is essentially an illusion where biological robots in a meaningless universe this has been falsified over and over by science there really is something there there really is a spirit when you're in church or in synagogue there's something there's a realness to that behind it that's what this show has been about but where that where that information took me is to really try and understand science and understand how science is manipulated like you guys talk about I'll switch gears for a minute here you guys talk a lot in the book about global warming there's not one reference to climate gate climate gate is probably the most classic example from 2009 remember climate gate for people who are listening who don't remember what was his phrase hide the decline so scientists conspiring again you guys already believe conspiracy theories here's a clear conspiracy theory we caught these guys with their emails conspiring with each other to falsify data to mislead scientific review boards by hiding the decline and they even said how they would do it how they would manipulate the data in order to hide the data that was coming in that looked like there was increased temperature was actually declining doesn't that hit both buttons doesn't that hit there's a conspiracy theory clearly and doesn't that kind of call into question raise the point of how we have to be careful about people who are manipulating science climate gate what do you call climate gate doesn't mean anything to me whatsoever and the bottom line is that climate change is a real phenomena that is the greatest existential crisis that we face today so that is the bottom line there I'm not sure what to make of your picking and choosing and cherry picking among these different emails things like that because on the one hand you say you want to have a scientific discussion and on the other hand you want to get away away from science and evidence and talk about what's in people's emails I'm not exactly sure how those things go along with each other Sarah do you have anything to I'm sorry go ahead Jim I just certainly don't want your listeners to leave by thinking that climate change is not real for any reason because they're terrible I was just going to add that I may agree with that but also a slightly different point which is that at no point do we say we don't believe in conspiracy conspiracies do happen you know Watergate definitely conspiracy many other things like that so and I think that it's hard to tell when something's a conspiracy and when something's just sort of a mock conspiracy that someone's come off with so I don't have an easy answer to that but I just wanted to correct that it's not true that we don't believe in conspiracy in science too they happen in science everywhere okay so I don't know if this feels like it's far afield or not Jack you can be the judge of that but again I separate out the issue of whether man-made global warming is substantiated by the data we can almost put that aside from the discussion of Climategate so I just pulled up on the screen the email from Phil Jones that was he didn't reveal it was a whistleblower who leaked his email and it says I'll read it I've just completed Mike that is Michael Mann his nature trick of adding the real attempts to each series for the last 20 years to show him how to hide the decline now there's no other way to interpret that other than a scientist conspiring colluding to hide the decline that is the decline in temperatures in order to bullshit scientific peer review committee that was looking at their paper and to bullshit the UN climate committee I don't know how else to read that other than that you know again we can spend a lot of time there's a lot of ways that's been gone over a million times but you know again the thing that would concern me the most at this point is for your listeners to get misled into thinking for example that vaccines don't work or climate changes real or things like that based on a misinterpretation of some emails we really don't want that to happen that would be really tragic right if people well you'll think it's tragic I think that's what your book is all about I don't agree with what you're saying so I think we would have a vigorous scientific debate about all those things so we could and that would be great to have that I wouldn't be the one to debate that with you but I think vigorous scientific debates are always wonderful a vigorous scientific debate that honestly and carefully and rigorously look at the data would conclude that climate change is occurring to be known what's Jack? that's kind of dogmatic I mean that is your opinion and I appreciate that that's your opinion but you know I can just and you're not gonna you can tell uncle on this anytime or call you know when you don't want to kind of engage in this but you know here is my favorite person on the other side if you will Judith Curry climatologist from Georgia Tech head of climatology department and not only that but somebody who was on the climate alarmist side initially and then changed her position based on the data and here she is kind of preaching to a guy in the congressional hearing what was the guy's name again congressman Bayer and she points out that so we could get into that debate that's probably out of scope of what we're talking about here but there's a lot of folks that just wouldn't agree with you and for the record you know your credentials in our stellar from psychiatry and you fellowships Columbia I respect all that but if I want to know climatology I'll go to Judith Curry from Georgia Tech before I go to Jack from Columbia and you should and I would go to the 97% of climate scientists who agreed that climate changes are open on the and Dr. Curry be in a minority and we would put though we could put 97 against 3 and have their debate I'd be delighted to do that again Jack I think not be wonderful I don't think you have the data here is Dr. Curry's post on the 52% consensus if you really look at the Cook peer reviewed paper from which that 97% is derived if you look under the hood it's an example again like climate gate of just scientific scandal what this guy did was have a bunch of grad students evaluate abstracts from climate papers and then make a value judgment on their part whether or not they thought they agreed or disagreed on some thing that he made up that has been one of the most thoroughly debunked so there's some good science if you want to advance global warming idea but don't go the 97% that's been completely debunked and here again Dr. Curry from Georgia Tech a real climatologist shows you the survey of the American meteorological society who is really the group the kind of people that we would want to ask the question of whether they think man made global warming is a concern and her data is 52% so again you know it takes a lot to hash through all that stuff and we can't do it right here right now I wish I had noticed what you wanted to do because I would have brought more climatologists along I'm sure you've done that already I'm sure you've had programs which you've had people on both sides and let them show their data it's climate science very very difficult you know I don't claim to be a climate scientist very the math that those guys use is so complicated that you really do have to rely on experts to come to conclusions I took what else you got for us today well we can we can definitely move towards wrapping it up I tell you one thing I got right from this this this thing you wrote on conspiracy theory I thought was we think it's reasonable to say even without any data to support it that most people have never been part of a conspiracy or even known a person who has and the thing that struck me is man first of all I grew up in Chicago where I don't know how it is in New York but you don't get anything done without paying somebody off influencing somebody and everything is a freaking conspiracy right and then I was a research associate at University of Arizona and I left because I thought the PhD process and that whole thing was very political quote-unquote which is also conspiratorial and then I got into business and I had a business and built my business and sold it to a NASDAQ company everything about that everything about business everything about large financial transactions is always a conspiracy you're not telling the other side isn't it so that just struck me as just kind of exactly the opposite of my experience but then what you said was you said the first one you use is an example of a conspiracy and my audience will love this a conspiracy was behind the assassination of President Lincoln but not President Kennedy and again since we'll wrap this up but you guys need to Google United States House Select Committee on Assassinations had conspiracy or sound data I mean that is the finding of that committee is that it was a conspiracy they had all the data and there was this Dallas cop who had left his you know little walkie-talkie thing on and he picked up the sound data and there were four bullets on his sound data which then throws out the lone nut assassin thing and their conclusion was that it's probably a conspiracy so over and over again in the book it's just kind of a manifesto I don't get it well let me just say as we wrap it up I definitely admire the thoroughness which you research all these things I think it's really great and I certainly was intrigued by the idea of the spirituality of your work because it's very important in my own life and the way that science and spirituality intersect as you know we have the Ed of the NIH now who's in a bit chat like a Christian so it's quite interesting to think about how these things intersect with each other so I think it's quite interesting despite the fact that we obviously disagree about many things I do think that your advocacy for open scientific debate is really terrific well thank you very much Jack Sarah do you have any other thoughts that you'd like to add or anything else you know it's been me kind of going on about the book what else do you want to tell people that you feel they will find most useful in the book no I would agree with what Jack said and I think that hopefully there are tips in the book that can help people and they're making any kind of help decision it doesn't have to be about something that's quote unquote contentious it could be about anything that you have to make a decision about related to your health hopefully that there are tips in the book that and ideas that give you a sense of where you might have trouble making that decision where you might you know let your emotions get the better of you and where you can seek more information and make sure that you're making the decision in a calm way so that you're making the best decision for yourself and your family I think that you can find some of that in the book and just to become self aware and hopefully that will be helpful to people in their health in general awesome well as I said at the beginning these kind of discussions are sometimes difficult to have and that's why they're not done more so I'm glad we were able to do it and I think we did it right with a lot of respect and I thank you for coming on Skeptico thank you for having us thanks again to Sarah and Jack Gorman for coming on Skeptico the one question I tee up from this interview is should scientific discussion be banned on YouTube do they have the right to do it because they're a private company let me know your thoughts lots more Skeptico coming up stay with me for all of that until next time take care and bye for now