It's great to welcome back to the program today, Dr. Michael Shermer, who's the publisher
of Skeptic magazine and a New York Times best selling author.
His latest book is Giving the Devil His Due Reflections of a Scientific Humanist.
It's so great to have you back on.
Nice to be back on, David.
Nice to see you.
So these are strange times.
And I mean, just just to sort of open things up.
What have the last couple of months revealed to you, if anything, about humanity that you
maybe did not consider as deeply before in terms of our ability to deal with calamity,
about our leaders, about really anything?
I mean, just where is your mind right now?
Yeah, I'd say first of all, people for the most part have been pretty good about social,
social isolation.
And, you know, staying down in one place.
You know, there's a few handful of protesters with their Confederate flags or swastikas
and and semiautomatic rifles that people point to.
But that's pretty rare.
I think most people, particularly in California where I'm at, are pretty good.
On the negative side, I'd say it's a sign of how fragile and networked the economy is.
Quickly, things can kind of unravel and there's no mystery about it.
We know exactly why the economy has collapsed in.
But it does show you to what extent it it's all sort of propped up by all of us doing
our thing.
You know, just kind of collective action by individual action and how what happens when
everybody stops, even when they don't want to.
How fast that can unravel.
Although, as Adam Smith famously said, there's a lot of ruin in a nation.
So I don't think we're on the brink of the apocalypse or anything like that.
But obviously, we have to get back to work at some point here in the first probably bit
by by June or July, certainly by the end of the summer before things really get pretty
serious in that regard just based on the numbers.
I'd say I'm a little bit worried this morning that the death rate has not plummeted like
I thought it would when the testing went up.
I thought with mass testing, the denominator would go way up and therefore the percentage
of death would go down to more like 1 percent.
But it's still at like five point eight percent this morning in the United States and about
7 percent worldwide.
So it's possible more testing will change that and get it back down to something like
a serious flu.
But right at the moment, it's it's not just a bad flu.
It's way worse than that.
So I think the social isolation thing was the right move.
Yeah.
And of course, when we look at the antibody tests, we have to assume, at least from what
we see so far, that the real case denominator is certainly at least a couple of times higher
than than the real number of cases.
But a lot of us know that we really won't know until later in terms of the in terms
of the protesters a little bit.
I've not been giving it too much oxygen in terms of the individuals.
I've been more just thinking about the public health implications and the guidelines that
are being put put out there.
You and I have talked about these issues of free speech and suppression of speech before.
You've been critical of right and left for suppressing speech.
Is the entire thing of these protests really even an issue of free speech at all in your
mind?
Because you very quickly see protesters who say being told I can't be out gathering and
protesting violates my constitutional rights to assemble and to ask for my grievances to
be redressed.
It's the government literally saying, don't speak what it is, there's something there
or is that not really a concern here?
I don't think it's really a concern constitutionally or in the long run.
Of course, you know, the Constitution guarantees the right to assemble and so on.
But if we want to think of it just as a liberty issue, you know, the freedom for you to swing
your arm ends at my nose.
You know, the harm principle applies here that in this particular case, you know, assembling
in a large group without, you know, social isolation or, you know, takes feet, distance
and masks and so on does put other people at risk.
So while you want your freedom, I should be free from your contamination.
And so my freedoms are violated.
And so we can we can talk just freedom versus freedom rather than just freedom versus security
in that.
And when you frame it that way, I do think this is gonna pass.
Most pandemics do to wind down after a while.
I think the most vulnerable will have already, you know, suffered through within, say, the
next month or two, I think.
And whether we get a vaccine or not, I think we will get some kind of herd immunity in
the next year or so.
But the problem is, there's so much we don't know.
I mean, even Fouchier.
He's not omniscient.
No, as much as I. Biram, nobody knows a lot of these questions, we just don't know.
And that's, of course, where where there's a, you know, a vacuum of causal explanation.
That's where all that goofy ideas come in.
And in conspiracy theories and alternative theories and alternative medicine, quackery
cures and things like that.
And they're all over the place.
I've been writing about these and tweeting about them.
And it's just that pretty much every couple hours is a new conspiracy theory.
And even Trump yesterday was talking about, you know, that that the Chinese invented the
virus in a lab.
It very likely as a, you know, a bat virus derivative from that web market thought they
did.
They did do totalitarian states typically do, which is be, you know, dissemble and then
be less than honest and delayed by weeks before they admit what's going on, much like Chernobyl
in the Soviet Union.
So this is China's Chernobyl.
And I think they're gonna pay the price for that, probably with sanctions from other nations
again.
But again, we just there's so much we don't know.
Well, this seems like ground zero for so much of the work you've been doing for for a long
time now in terms of the importance of inquiry, understand having a basic science education,
knowing how to think critically, epistemological basics where we we see I mean, even with the
lab thing as an example, if this was was if a mistake was made at a lab in China and this
was allowed to sort of get out, that does not in any way bear on Donald Trump's competence
or incompetence in reacting.
Right.
I mean, like in mine.
That's right.
South Korea and the United States had their first cases within hours of each other.
They dealt with this completely differently.
Whether it escaped via a lab accidentally or not seems wholly irrelevant to analyzing
our government's response.
That's right.
Totally irrelevant.
Yes.
And, you know, Trump's easy to criticize because he stumbles so many times, but really, it's
not fair because whatever he would have done, it was going to be the wrong thing to do in
somebodies eyes half the country size.
So you shut down too early and then say and in early February that he would have been
accused to being an autocrat using the pandemic as excuse to grab more power, which some politicians
have been doing, like in Turkey and angry in Israel and of course, already in China
and North Korea was already there.
So Trump would have been lumped in with those.
And then if you wait, too, if he waits too long and then he you know, he's a genocidal
maniac by letting people die.
And, you know, so I don't envy that job no matter what you do.
Universal things like, for example, South Korea immediately, for example, developed
a working test while Trump said, we don't want that test.
I don't know that we need one yet.
We'll make our own.
That failed.
South Korea hired contact tracers right away.
We Massachusetts now is looking to hire a contact race.
There seems to be less controversial things that weren't done.
Yeah, that.
That's right.
I would agree with that.
And in hindsight, we can look back at the different countries responses and use those
as natural experiments, sort of a comparative method that we that social scientists used
to say, well, this country did that and these were the results.
And so I know they're not perfect, like Sweden, for example.
It's a very different culture and more home, homogeneous, much smaller and so on, so that
they're they're keeping the economy open.
You know, is maybe not comparable to us doing the same in America.
So you have to be careful on that.
Let's say South Korea is a pretty good model.
You know, they are a democracy.
They have pretty good civil rights, pretty good record of civil rights.
And and they seem to be striking the right balance so far.
But again, we'll see when it comes to some of the stuff you talked about.
So we've seen everything from here's a silver liquid you can drink to protect yourself.
We've seen claims of this is less deadly than the flu.
We've seen videos go viral of one or two doctors here or there who will say, hey, nobody else
is telling you the truth about this.
I'll tell you the truth.
We don't need lockdowns.
We don't even use the Bill Gates conspiracies regarding vaccine like we've seen the full
gamut of it.
You know, is this you've studied this for so long.
Is this something that could be cut off with better education in middle school?
Is this a media based problem?
What are the sources of having this degree of disinformation spread?
Well, the source, of course, is the Internet and instant publishing and everyone's their
own publisher.
So conspiracy theories can spread more rapidly, particularly in that vacuum of causal explanation
when we don't know.
So this is kind of a perfect storm for conspiracy theories.
I also like the five G-1.
You know that the sort of accidental correlation of the rollout of 5G with the with the chronic
virus pandemic.
And again, people just glom onto whatever is available.
And, you know, 5G, it's invisible and spooky and powerful.
You know, Bill Gates, he's he's.
Powerful.
And so I'm old enough to remember when Bill Gates was trying to take over the world in
the 90s.
Oh, you know, these conspiracy theories about him have been around for a long time.
Well, I think new research since 2016, since the 2016 election and the stuff about the
Russian hacking and the manipulation of social media by bots and so on, it looks like it
had very little effect on the election itself or on people's opinions.
That is, people were already fairly divided and that those kind of social bubbles just
reinforce what you already believe.
But fixing the incorrect facts that are post there is not likely to change somebodies mind
because that's not why they're there in the first place.
As the line is that, you know, if you believe that Hillary is running a pedophile ring out
of a pizzeria.
My correcting your error and believing that isn't going to change your opinion of Hillary
as you already don't like Hillary.
So I think these kinds of conspiracy theories don't are largely ineffective in terms of
the masses of people in what they're likely to do.
I think most people will do what Dr. Foushee says we should do.
You know, even though there'll be a handful of the people that try the the.
What was that that fish tank liquid that had hydroxy chloroquine in it as a anti-fungal
drug for for for fish.
You know, that guy died.
That's so rare.
You know, and in a population of, you know, 300, 40 million people, you know, just point
0 0 0 1 percent, doing something crazy is enough to fill the evening news.
But but not an existential concern.
So how has the pandemic, if it all shifted what you think the priorities for humans should
be over the next five or 10 years in the sense that you've written about where where's the
future of humanity in terms of space?
And you've talked about Mars.
You've talked about your shift on your perspective on guns.
Of course, you talk about free speech and the limits of government.
Has any of what's happened shifted your view, notably on what the priorities should be going
forward?
Yeah, well, I do think a lot of cultural norms are going to shift.
The handshake is probably gone for years and it probably won't come back because once those
cultural norms are pretty fluid and they're not all that binding, perhaps even hugs will
be gone.
But, you know, we can make it up what we, you know, with the yoga Bauer or the Japanese
bar or something like that.
And and people get used to that.
I do think we're probably for a long time be more sensitive to hand-washing and and
the cleanliness of our environment, both both at home and in public places like restaurants,
stadiums, things like that.
And that's probably a good thing.
I could I could project the number of communicable diseases going down just from those kinds
of protective prophylactic measures that we probably should be doing anyway.
I think we've all gotten kind of lax about that.
I was at that Vancouver Ted Talk Tech TED conference when Bill Gates gave that speech
about then, you know, the next big pandemic.
And this is what he's worried about.
And all of us were sitting there going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We've heard this before, you know, not that we thought he was wrong, but just that like,
you know.
Yeah.
I mean, people say this all the time and and and even if that happens, it won't be that
bad.
And then in here it is.
So, you know, I think probably we should have been in hindsight, you know, doing more and
now we will.
And I think that helps.
I think probably psychologically will more of us will be appreciative of friendships,
social relationships and contacts are our immediate social group and who we hang out
with just because so many people are are kind of feeling bad, missing that social contact
that, you know, zoom in and online social media just doesn't give you.
And I know, you know, I'm in California.
Gavin Newsom close some of the beaches, but not all the beaches where I'm at in Santa
Barbara.
The rates very low here.
So the beaches are still open.
It's a huge relief for people just to get out and walk around and see other people,
even if they're six feet away.
You know, that that human contact just, you know, within, you know, physical contact,
not not touching, but just visually seeing people, I think does matter.
I think that's probably going to the longest term effects.
So we'll be healthier.
You know, there's there was a study done just before the Corona virus hit and that the average
human body temperature of 98, 98 per watt is at ninety eight point six degrees.
Right.
It has actually been going down over the last century or so, probably because the number
of inflammatory diseases that causes body temperature to go up have been going down.
But just because we're getting better medically at treating these things so I can actually
see body temperature is going down, less inflammatory diseases, which is good for long term health
and and maybe people, particularly Americans and the obesity problem.
This might scare people into getting a handle on their their diets and.
Size and and more and more people are exercising now.
That's a good thing.
So even if the whole rotavirus thing was was exaggerated, we never had to social isolation
and workout and eat so well.
Well, exercise and eating well is a good thing to do anyway.
So that's not such a bad thing.
No question about that.
We've been speaking with Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, New York Times
bestselling author.
The latest book, which we're linking to is Giving the Devil His Due Reflections of a
Scientific Humanist.
Michael, always so great to have you on.
Nice to see you, too, David.
You stay safe there.