SIO21: Be Reasonable, with Michael Marshall

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:25 Thomas: Hello,

0:00:29 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode number twenty-one, and I am your host Thomas Smith. I got a great guest today, his name is Michael Marshall, uh you might know him as Marsh he hosts the show Be Reasonable, among other things, and you're going to hear all about that, what his show is. It's particularly relevant given the price discussion of a week back. And, well, you'll see. It's a great discussion. I wanted to have him on to talk about the tactics of talking to people who are just coming from a vastly different place, which is what he does over on Be Reasonable. And I hope you'll forgive it for being a little meta. I mean, this is a pretty meta discussion in addition to getting into his past and his podcast, which is, of course, fascinating.

0:01:15 Thomas: You should check it out. It's also a meta discussion on what we're doing here, what what we should be doing in light of this political situation and talking to people that really, really come from a different world in a way. So I hope you like it. I loved it. I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks to Marsh for coming on. And without further ado, here you go.

0:01:45 Thomas: Joining me right now is Michael Marshall, goes by Marsh sometimes. So Marsh, how you doing? I am doing great. You know, I'm really glad to be talking to you because, I think you messaged me after the Price interview, right? And it was like, hey, I've been doing this kind of thing for quite a while. And I thought, duh, like, why don't we talk about this? I can't believe we haven't talked about this sooner. But before we get to all that, I wonder for anyone who's not familiar with your work, if you want to talk about Be Reasonable a little bit and kind of the other things, projects you do.

0:01:50 Michael: I co-founded The Merseyside Skeptic Society back in 2009. When we set that up, we started a few different things going at once. We ran a local event, Skeptics in the Pub. We started doing things like fairly large-scale activist campaigns. We came up with the 1023 Overdose Campaign, where we had people all around the world taking overdoses of homeopathic medicine to uh to demonstrate that there's nothing at all in them, yeah, that was, that was a nuts. What's really weird about that campaign I mean, it was, from, yeah exactly well fortunately, all these, all these many years later, we haven't met anybody who died as a result of it yet, but um

0:02:43 Thomas: I heard about that. Yeah. How many people died? There must've been casualties, right? Oh, we're speaking with terrorist Michael Marshall. There's just thousands of bodies. No, I'm just kidding.

0:03:02 Michael: Well, it's nuts, we had like 1700 people around the world taking part in uh in that event, and we, it was, you know, run by myself and and two friends of mine at uh at the MSS, and it was front page, front page news, the BBC, less than a year after we started the skeptic society at all, which was kind of ludicrous really at the time, um, so yeah, we started a podcast there called Skeptics with a K, and uh, I've been an activist in skeptical stuff for years, I'm now a full-time skeptical activist investigator for a charity, and um, but yeah, the thing that kind of most fits, I suppose, is Be Reasonable, this weird semi-art project show that I have, where uh I have have conversations with people who are wrong on lots of different issues, in my opinion, and we try and just explore the gap in between our thinking and to have a about as civil a debate as uh as we can achieve, with the uh the starting point being that we fundamentally disagree, you know, I'm not there to to shout at them and berate them and tell them they're idiots and wrong and morons or anything like that, I'm just there to try and get what they're about and try and take them through their own views to see if it can kind of, as a lens,

0:03:10 Thomas: Yeah, that's really cool. Wow.

0:04:07 Michael: Reflect back to them the logic of their thinking and see whether that takes them anywhere they've not been before. So it's a slightly unusual show, really.

0:04:13 Thomas: Yeah yeah. Well, okay. Okay, that was going to be the first thing I was going to ask you. So what is your goal when you're doing this? And well, actually, why don't you tell me, how did you have this idea? Because this show goes back quite a while, right? When did you first think of doing this,

0:04:26 Michael: Well, it actually goes back to a show I did. Righteous Indignation was just a kind of a weekly skeptical show we did. And we used to do interviews on there. But we found, because I was hosting it with two people who were former believers who'd kind of come to the skeptical world, having been ghost hunters and crop circle believers and all sorts of things things like that, um, we found that while shores, uh, the skeptical shores that were around at the time, were doing interviews, they were all interviewing the names in skepticism and people who are doing this project or in that, and we thought, well, we could do that as well, but we're not going to get something out of them that someone else probably hasn't already got, um, but because my co-hosts had this background of being around believers, we started to just introduce, um, you know, these interviews of people who were on the other side.

So I think we interviewed a psychic by the name Patricia Putt, who'd failed the Million Dollar Challenge, I think, back in, gosh, 2009, something like that. And we had a conversation with her, and it kind of escalated from there, really. And it just, so when we stopped that show, just because doing a weekly show with a million other things that we were doing was just a bit too much for us to all take after a couple of years.

The bit that I really wanted to keep alive was this segment where we talked to someone we disagreed with, because it just didn't seem like it was out there anywhere else really, where we're actually engaging with people we disagree with.

0:04:53 Thomas: Yeah.

0:05:45 Michael: I mean, I'm a big proponent of the idea that for us to be the best logical thinkers, the best critical thinkers, the best skeptical thinkers we can be, we need to understand what it is that we're disagreeing with in the first place. And that might mean going to a psychic show. It might mean going to mind-body-spirit festival. It might mean going to a homeopathic consultation and see what kind of things they actually say. And it definitely means talking to people who believe in this stuff to understand what is the rhetoric that got them there? What is the evidence that got them there and how coherently do they consider that evidence? How coherently did they put their point of view together and what's convincing to them?

0:06:23 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, well that's really interesting. So that's kind of something that I wanted to look at, like, because I've been really struggling lately, just in my own mind, thinking about like, what can we even do? I mean, just with the climate as it is in the US, right? I mean, the Trump election was just such a blow, and it was, it's just, I never before have I felt, I mean, there's always been right and left and political disagreements, of course, but like, never before, four, have I felt like, okay, there is half of the country, or at least half of the voting population-ish, who I just, you can't even speak to. They're just in a different world. Like, they're a version of facts, or maybe I'm in a different world. You know, like, one of us is not in, one of this is in a different world from the other.

0:07:13 Thomas: And it's like, you can't ever talk about it. And I just got so tired of, especially after, it might have been different if Hillary had won the election. I might have just gone on my merry way. And I'll say for my part, by the way, I have tried to have people I disagree with on the show. That's actually always been one of well. My goals Not exclusively like Reasonable is. It's never been the exclusive goal of it. But I do want to be a place where we explore different views. And, you know, I've had pro-lifers on. Whatever it is, I do enjoy that quite a bit. But I would say, I'm scrambling around here a bit because there's two different things I want to ask you and I'm deciding which one. But, I wanted to know, and it sounds like you already answered earlier, but the biggest barrier for me is actually finding people willing to talk.

0:08:02 Thomas: And you talked about you had associates who had a history with with, with these kinds of people and, and ghost hunters and that kind of thing, is that your main source of being able to get people on your show? Because I, I cannot tell you how many times on Twitter, on Facebook, whatever it is, where someone is, you know, telling me all these reasons why I'm wrong on something. And I say, let's talk, let Skype right now. I will, you can, I will let you talk as much as you want. We can Skype. It's gotta be at least like a dozen times. I've tried to do that never, never works. It never works, I mean, maybe I'm going about it the wrong way, but where, where is your source of all these people where you're able to be like, hey, you're nuts, come on my show, yeah,

0:08:48 Michael: Weirdly, I don't seem to have too much of an issue finding people. I mean, the show was actually on hiatus for about eight months of last year, partly because I didn't have the time to go and find people when I had a million other things kind of going on. But other than that, we tend to have a fairly uh I say we, it's just me on the show now, but um the show tends to have a fairly good record of getting people on, I don't tend to struggle to find people, um, and I think partly it's because of the the approach, I don's the show doesn't argue with people on Twitter, I mean I, I personally will, and occasionally I'll say, you know what, fine, let's have this discussion, and people in that situation will often turn me down if I've been arguing with them on Twitter or pointing out to the the flaws in their logic.

I mean, I've been just arguing with a homeopath by the name of Dana Ullman, who you might have seen around, um, for a number of years now, he comes out the woodwork, says something incredibly dumb, and then sort of buggers off before uh you have a chance to really sort of uh

0:09:04 Thomas: Yeah. Right, right, right. Right. Yeah.

0:09:40 Michael: Uh test him on it or approach him on, and I'd love to have him on the show, but I don't think he ever will because he knows that I disagree with him fairly fairly vehemently, but the people that I I get on, I mean, I I tend to send them an email, um, you know, to uh to the whatever web form or email address I have to them, and just say, I do this show, I disagree with you, but I want to explore these issues, yeah

0:10:01 Thomas: Okay. So, that, that was going to be my other question. So you're totally open about it. They know what they're getting into, to, they know the fact that it's, you know, you disagree, um, but that, but you're still able to get them on, yeah oh

0:10:11 Michael: But I think, I think fundamentally for the show to work, I have to be honest at every point, you know, I can't have any level of uh disingenuity about it, because um that, well that kind of undermines what the show's about. It also gives me a uh a technical backstop too, because I can't edit the show, because I'd never want the guest to be able to say, oh, well, I answered that question much better, but you've cut the answer are down, or you've manipulated the audio in this way to take out this really good answer that I gave. So I say, look, it's going to be an unedited conversation, so I'm not going to skew it, you can see the the back catalogue I've had of uh of conversations.

I want to give you a chance to to explain to me why I disagree with you, explain to me why you see it one way and I can't see it that way, you know, get me over that hurdle to believe, to to agree with you, um, and sometimes, times, you get people on who are incredibly kind-hearted and uh utterly sincere, genuinely believe that they're, that uh whatever belief that they hold is uh is is correct, and uh it's, and they're kind of looking for truth. There's a chap I had on recently called uh Lee Piercy, who was a ghost, uh, ghost hunter, who

0:10:35 Thomas: Yeah yeah

0:11:14 Michael: Was really yeah, such a warm, lovely kind of fella, I think he, his, his understanding of quantum physics is uh is deeply flawed um

0:11:14 Thomas: I caught that one, yeah well his understanding of physics is, I like, I loved when he talked about sound particles or something, it was he was talking about how sound Particles couldn't get through something and you're explaining, well, no, it's it's actually they're waves, but you also on the spot you had such a good analogy and that was really cool. So I'm, it's it's cool to find out that you don't edit. I didn't realize because you just on the spot you're just like, oh, here's an analogy. I thought was really well done.

0:11:23 Michael: Yeah yeah yeah Well, thanks, yeah, sometimes uh it comes off well. Sometimes it's terrible, sometimes I don't have anything to Go to and you can hear me floundering, or you'll hear me say, oh, that's interesting, and it, my, that's interesting is the holding space that I use verbally. While I'm trying To process what they said, find the counter example and Then feed that counter example back through a filter so it doesn't come across as aggressive or dickish or confrontational or kind of, you know, on a high horse. But I think it's a verbal tick that I have in those conversations because I'm desperately trying to avoid anything that sounds like I'm agreeing with them or endorsing a point of view that I disagree with.

And it's quite hard in that kind of a social situation where you want the conversation to carry on flowing naturally to not agree with something you totally disagree with, so so yeah, it's normally me going, oh, that's interesting, or something like that. But the counterexamples, when you do get one on the spot, then it is, as an interviewer or an interlocutor, it is an incredibly satisfying moment that you feel like you've actually done something fairly well, but they don't always come in that way.

0:11:49 Thomas: Yeah Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah When Yeah, so that's interesting. You talk about, not um, ever agreeing with them or, or at least looking or peering as though you agree with them. And that was, that was something I was going to ask you about as well. Um, because because it was interesting. I listened to the last couple and the flat earth guy, that was one that I think was, that must have been a challenge because he threw so much at you so fast that I just don't feel like you had a whole lot of time to refute much of it. You know, did you feel, how do you, is there a fine line between, I guess, being like too too willing to be nice and to be kind, calm and rational, and let the person talk and just not getting a chance to really fight, question any of these points because it's just too much.

0:13:40 Thomas: I mean, he's just splattering all these things at you. Oh, this guy in Antarctica, this satellite, just all this stuff that you would really be hard pressed to respond to all of it. What's the line you walk there?

0:13:50 Michael: Yeah. Well, I think what I always try to do is keep the conversation going as it is basically. So you'll get some people who will throw out a huge amount of information, not all of which which we'll check out. But I kind of, I trust my audience that if somebody is doing that, is trying to sort of, in a sense, sort of railroad the conversation by overloading me with facts, you know, gish galloping past me, then the audience will hear that. And I don't need to go through and categorically go back and say, well, this was wrong, that was wrong. That was wrong. Because I think it's that, that tactic can be quite obvious to the audience. So it's knowing that there are details in there that you can pick out and go, okay, you've said said 20 different things. Let's examine one of them. Here's why this doesn't stand up. It's trusting that the audience won't then go, well, that one was wrong, but the other 19 were right.

0:14:40 Michael: And I think that's quite useful for the context of the conversation. And it's an argument that, or a discussion that I've had with people about the show in the past, because I'd have the worst, most abhorrent views on the show if I could. And in fact, I had a guy who was an AIDS denialist naturopath from India who was viciously anti-Semitic and deeply homophobic in the conversation was talking about how AIDS isn't caused by a virus because viruses are too small to affect the human body.

AIDS is caused by pieces of feces going down the opening in your penis when you have anal sex, and that dirtiness is what's causing AIDS. Now, in that situation, I'm hearing absolutely abhorrent stuff, and people might say, well, why would you give that platform? But I think the context of the show being, this is an exploration of fringe ideas, not all of which are going to be palatable, but all of Which I promise are worth hearing, gives me the space to give a platform to people that I think in other spaces, I wouldn't have wanted that chap Leo Rabello to be interviewed by the BBC News. I'm quite

0:14:40 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, right, right.

0:15:47 Michael: Happy for him to be interviewed by me. And that will be similar with anti-vaccination advocates, things like that. So when it comes to someone who's doing that gish galloping, I like to think that my audience will hear that and go, okay, well, that's what's happening there. There's a gish galop, and they know that I don't need to counter every one of those. Maybe I just need to find a few things here and there that skewer his point of view slightly. And I think I did that when he was talking about being a conspiracy theorist who believed in all the conspiracies before he became a flat earther. And then I said, well, now that you're a flat earther, are there any conspiracy theories you no longer believe in?

0:16:21 Michael: And he said, Well, I don't believe there's a face on Mars.

0:16:19 Thomas: Yeah. Well, just just the one that was incompatible with Flat Earth. Yeah,

0:16:24 Michael: Yeah, exactly, the one I don't believe there's a face on Mars, it's like, yes, because you don't believe Mars exists, that's, that's not a regression back to reality, that's a step into the beyond, so I think those kinds of things can be, uh, can be quite useful, but it does mean that I end up in positions where, I mean, I interviewed, um, Jim Humble, who was the, um, founder of Miracle Mineral Solution, the industrial bleach that, um, quacks give to autistic children and people with Crohn's disease as a cure, and I had him on the, I mean, this was back when it was Righteous Indignation, we had him for about an hour and a half, something like that, and that was at a time when he wasn't speaking to the BBC and he wasn's returning the Guardian's calls, um, but I said, I'm, I'd like to have a conversation with you where we'll be polite and good-natured and explore the difference in our opinions, and he said yes, and we ended up calling him in, um, I think it was in Guatemala or Nicaragua, where he's still giving this incredibly dangerous thing to people who've got terminal diseases, um, yeah, the only time in my life I've ever been on a phone call with someone that, I midway through the conversation, became very aware that he's probably responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, um,

0:16:28 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Oh, geez. Gosh,

0:17:33 Michael: But I think that's, makes the show useful, you know, to hear that, to hear his point of view, hear how he actually justifies himself

0:17:32 Thomas: That's yeah. So selfishly, you know, when I've listened to your show and when we've talked a little bit already, I've been imagining what I can apply to, to my show, you know, because what I've been trying to do, I really, and I've been kind of public about it is I'm trying to figure out just what to do. As I started to say earlier in this situation, like, do we, because there are a lot of people who, uh, and, and we'll bring it back to us politics. Sorry. It's Just, what's, what's go, what's so, what started all this, I guess, for me. Uh, is there any use to interviewing a Trump supporter? That that's something, and actually a lot of people have said just don't even interact with them, there's just no point. Like, it, and I, I'm really trying to find the answer to that.

I'm trying to finding whether or not it's worthwhile, and I think the key difference maybe between what you and I are doing is, as you've already stated, your show has a specific, um, theme. Like, you, people know what it is, people know that the people they're hearing, uh, are, uh, people with alternative. Because I would not want to bring one of those people on my show, like, say, the AIDS guy or the bleach guy. I would not want to bring them on my show unless

0:18:05 Michael: What's

0:18:50 Thomas: I'm just going to outright challenge them at every point that I can because I just don't – it's too much of a risk of – I would say on the most egregious points, like the things that – sorry, I didn't mean to say every point. But what I would do, I think it may be a difference in how we would approach it is if someone's gish galloping or whatever, I would want to try to slow them down and just take, and if not, let them go and then try to answer every point. Instead of doing that, stop them after a point and say, let's talk about this one point first before moving on to a lot of other stuff. But when you say your audience will know what's going on.

So one of my questions was going to be, who is your target audience? And it sounds like your target audience is skeptics. It sounds like you're having people who you know aren't skeptical to talk to a bunch of skeptics, and I wonder, do you know that is what your audience is? Do you ever think, hey, there's going to be some, you know, non-skeptical people listening to this for other purposes?

0:18:56 Michael: What's the purpose of point challenging him on every point, yeah Well, I think there may be people who aren't, uh, self, self-identified skeptics listening to it at that point. I mean, I never thought that would be the case when I started the show, but there was a couple of newspapers actually put in reviews of the show. There was the Telegraph and the Metro actually reviewed the show at one point. Oh God, kind of reaching beyond the circle. So of all the shows that was meant to literally preach to the choir, in the sense that I was trying to show the choir something that they hadn't previously thought about, it's expanding beyond the choir. But I think that still, even then, if you were are listening to the show, I think it'd be very hard to listen to the show, even an episode in its totality, but certainly several episodes to provide a kind of a context, a framework for what the show is.

I think it'd be very hard to listen to the show and not yet that the guest that's on there is holding a view that is outside of the mainstream, that isn't well supported by evidence. And I think there are probably, I'd like to think there were a few shows, if, if any, that a neutral listener who had no experience at all in any of the conversation that we were having, had no facts at all about the topic we're talking about.

0:20:03 Thomas: Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's really cool.

0:21:02 Michael: I don't think there's any shows that a listener in that position would come away from believing the guest was right and that I was wrong. I mean, I could be wrong on that, but I'd be very, very surprised. But yeah, the main audience overwhelmingly is the audience of people who already disagree with these views and will never ever hear them, you know, the audience, people who, for lots of great reasons, you know, they'll listen to skeptical podcasts, they've got a daily life that they go about, they've a job and a family, and they don't have the time or the energy to go out and, you know, look at blogs of alternative medicine and go see psychics and put themselves in those spaces, and that's not a criticism of them, but I think a level of exposure to those ideas is definitely useful, useful, especially if you're then going to go on and argue with your auntie over of Thanksgiving dinner, or with your friend from college on, on Facebook, about a particular topic.

If you've never heard the rhetoric that supports that topic, if you've never heard someone who's convinced that this idea is right, uh, tell you why they believe it's right, then you are kind of coming to that conversation, called, you've got no prep. So I like to think that this conversation, that the conversations I have, are a way of understanding how some people could hold these views, because I'm not going to change the mind of the person that I'm talking to. I'll be very, very surprised if I've changed

0:21:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:20 Michael: Anyone's mind significantly. There's maybe one or two who were, I think Lee at PSC, the last episode, was he clearly wanted to find, uh, the best way to discover truth, and maybe I'll have given him a few questions to ask himself along the way, and there's a couple of shows like that, but by and large, they, they come away unchanged, which again is why I'm not attacking them on every point, because my goal isn't to change their mind or to show them that all their facts individually are wrong and win the conversation.

0:22:49 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:49 Michael: It's to demonstrate that we can have a conversation, we can listen to these point of views, and anybody who's listening who might be coming across these views and be potentially persuaded by them will hear me being a reasonable counter, and it might not be a counter on every point.

0:22:49 Thomas: Okay, so you do want to provide... So there is still a difference then between just having them on to discuss their views. You do still want to provide some, I resistance, but it's just a question of, okay.

0:23:14 Michael: Yeah, it's polite resistance. I kind of describe it as being sort of intellectually rigorous, polite but intellectually rigorous. If they're going to make a point that doesn't stand up, I'll explain to them why I think that doesn'T stand up or I'll offer them a counter-argument, I'll offer them counter-logic that will make them question that. But I'm not going to lose the amiability of the conversation.

0:23:34 Thomas: But yeah, so you're, right. So you're only doing it in so far as it'll keep the conversation going, and you're not going to just stop them and sort of turn it into an inquisition and a challenge of that, that you're just going to, to the best that you can, keep them engaged, provide a little bit of resistance. Okay.

0:23:54 Michael: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because I think in a lot of these cases, you know, you'll talk to, let's say you talk to someone who is a big believer in alternative medicine and they think Big Pharma is this big, evil, shady thing who is intentionally keeping you ill and all these other things are being suppressed. If that's their belief, they see skeptics as the bad guy. We are the ones who are knowingly suppressing the thing that works or unknowingly following the party line of Big Phasma. Now, with those people, they may never have a conversation with a skeptic.

They'll just be told alternative medicine conversations are on blogs or in the various uh pseudoscientific fora that we don't frequent because of the way that the internet has become so split up and uh and divided these days that there are huge Facebook groups, even closed Facebook groups or even open Facebook groups that you haven't joined, that are having very very uh detailed conversations about why cannabis oil cures cancer, and we aren't seeing that because we're not joining them and they're not having it on blogs, so it doesn't appear in Google, so we're just not stumbling across those ideas, so they may never stumble across someone who's willing to talk to them and be skeptical.

0:24:38 Thomas: Yeah.

0:25:02 Thomas: The ultimate goal then sounds like it's still to be able to dismantle these arguments just at a later on point. Like it sounds like you don't, you're not doing it on your podcast, but the listeners might, or they might, if they come across someone, you want them to be be able to argue against these things more clearly. Is that right?

0:25:03 Michael: Yeah.

0:25:22 Michael: Or uh debate those ideas, yeah. To to uh to to dismantle, to, yeah, it's given them the tools to dismantLE the ideas It's kind of

0:25:24 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Right. So it's not that you don't believe in trying to dismantle these ideas. It's that that's just not the purpose of the show. Is that Right?

0:25:30 Michael: Absolutely. And also it's not always a good tactic, I think. I, from a tactical point of view, like I say, so, let's say you're talking to someone who never spoken to a skeptic before who thinks you're the bad guy. If you shout and rant and rave at them, you've confirmed that you're the bad guy. They aren't going to listen if you have a civil conversation, yeah.

0:25:48 Thomas: Well, hold on. Just right there to make sure we don't go down the wrong path. I would suggest the difference between shouting, ranting, and raving and merely disagreeing more forcefully or more persistently. You know, like it doesn't mean you have to be shouting, but you could you could be a marsh doing a be reasonable where you you you try to argue every point politely. You know what I mean? So like that's the distinction I would want to look at, I guess.

0:26:03 Michael: Yeah, yeah. Sure. I I completely agree, but I think you'd also agree that the sliding scale of engagement with um, with believers doesn't go from uh, might be reasonable style to a style of be reasonable that argues every point. It goes way past that into other territories.

0:26:20 Thomas: Mm hmm. No, no, you're totally right. You're totally Right. Right. I'm just trying to look at, and again, I'm kind of selfishly trying to look at what I can learn. And that would be, because I don't really shout at people I don't think that I can remember. So I'm trying to think in terms of me, like, where do I want to fit my approach into this sliding scale as you've described it? But yeah, you're right. That's absolutely not. I don't mean to suggest that is the entire scale or anything.

0:26:29 Michael: Yeah.

0:26:52 Michael: Well, I think this thing, so I think, um, when I have the conversation with these people, the worst case scenario in many of them, I would say, is that they go away saying, I just had a half an hour conversation with a skeptic and he seemed like an all right guy, actually.

He wasn't the big, evil, augurous, uh, aggressive thing, that I, monster that I've been painted, that he's been painted out to be, or that skeptics have been, uh, that I'm, in led to believe skeptics are. It was actually quite a civil conversation and maybe there are a few things in there that I'll be thinking about. That's kind of the best case in terms of the mind of the individual believer that I'm talking to.

Um, the average person listening, I think, will hear if they are, um, potentially persuadable to my guest's point of view, or even on, my on the side of my guest point of view, there's a level of determinism or doggedness that I think, even if I'm being utterly intellectually, uh, rigorous about it, is going to put people off. You know, there's that point if someone gish gallops and you pick up every single point and you have to keep stopping and say, sorry, could you stop there because I need to do this point next, then even though what you're doing is absolutely right, the structure of that conversation is such that it's an interrupted social interaction, that you're the one interrupting.

And it's awkward to listen to and you're the one being awkward. You're being awkward because the person who's saying all of that is not being consistent in their views and is using a rhetorical device that we all know is used to kind of, uh, just just wash you with information that you can't all counter, but if you aren't familiar with the gish gallop, to hear someone break it down individually, it's very hard to do that in a way that you don't lose the neutral observer. So there's an element of the neutral observer in there too, um,

0:28:37 Michael: And I guess that the last kind of thing that I'm, that I'm trying to do when you, when you talk to these people, every time they've had a conversation in the past with someone who disagrees with them, it's basically gone the same way, largely in many of these cases. You know, it'll, they, they'll hear the same, um, uh, counter arguments, they'll have the same points made to them. I mean, I interviewed a guy who was, um, picketing outside of abortion clinics and handing out baby clothes to the women as they were going in, which is a horrible thing to be doing, um, but it would have been very easy to go in and tell him all the reasons that he's wrong and a bigot and uh and a misogynist, and he'd have given me every single defense he's ever given to anybody who has called him a bigot and a masochist, and we'd have, we'd have just played out a conversation that he's had way more often than I have. His defenses go up, he's not, I'm not going to get into his mind in any kind of way.

So instead what I try and do is kind of, instead of saying, here's the reasons you're wrong, it's more of a, I can't agree with you on this point because I can't get over this hurdle, how do you get past that detail, how do YOU get past this fact, how do you get passed this hurdle, could you help me over that, I'm trying to understand where you're coming from and I want to kind of agree with YOU, but I don't understand how to get past THIS point, and sometimes if you do that, instead of kind of, I always say, instead of kind of hitting the the pot colors that they've, that they put up, their defenses that's been there forever, they kind of open the gates and you get to wander in and

0:29:09 Thomas: Yeah. Well, You know, that's interesting because the episode I just did, I think last week, where I did a a little bit of research. I'm not an expert or anything, but Haley and I did some research on the science of what actually persuades people. And what you're describing is a lot of what we found, which was finding a way around those initial defenses, which again is odd because you're not trying to persuade the guy. You're still walking this weird line of, you're not really trying to persuade the guy, but you kind of are. But that's kind of what I've tried to identify, I think I get it, but sure

0:30:28 Michael: Well, maybe I kind of, if I write my goals in order, uh, the goal is, number one, showcase these beliefs that skeptics wouldn't otherwise hear, so that skeptrics are more armed with, uh, the the arguments that are going to come across. Number two, two, demonstrate to the person I'm talking to that sceptics aren't evil, horrible people. And then number three, third on the list, because it's probably the least achievable, is convince them or help them see for themselves that they're wrong. Not tell them that they are wrong, but help them to see for them selves. And so sometimes it's that little thing of leading them around the maze of their own beliefs.

And because you're peeking behind the curtain, the start of the conversation, I let them talk a lot more because it establishes a rapport and they feel like they can open up to me a little bit more, and then I start to introduce a few challenging questions a little bit, maybe the one third or the two third kind of area. So they have already had a long conversation with me by the time I start to really pick apart some of their beliefs. That's kind of the rough framework, because if you do that, you're walking them around, you're working with them around the maze of their believes. And sometimes you can get them to take a left turn that they've never taken before and they're suddenly confronted with this wall that they didn't know was there. And

0:30:31 Thomas: Sure. Hmm. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay.

0:31:33 Michael: That's kind of how they kind of realized that actually maybe this doesn't work, look, maybe this isn't a consistent belief. And they probably will never tell me that they found that wall. They'll probably kind of, you know, wheedle their way out of it with some intellectual sleight of hand. But maybe afterwards, they'll be thinking that resonated a little bit. What was that all about?

0:31:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:51 Thomas: Well, when you put your goals in that order, I think that does make a lot more sense. So I would, I would want to ask though, how would you apply this now? You've again, you've got your show that has its goals and its guests. How would that change for you if in you had a show like mine, maybe, where you're not having people on who everyone knows are crackpots, who everyone knows have alternative views. You're having people on who half the country agrees with, and it just so happens that a lot of the views associated with them are particularly horrible. And though my show won't be 50-50, there's no way it's 50- 50 Trump and not Trump. There's a percentage, and there's a small percentage of Trump supporters who listen.

0:32:38 Thomas: I've heard from them. There's not many, but there's not a small percentage. But there's also a large percentage of people who have all kinds of ideas about how the left is responsible for Trump and kind of deserves it. And there's a lot, of the point is there's lot of gray area where when I had someone like Dr. Price on, it's not as simple as, we all know he's wrong. It's not quite that simple. And if not him, maybe the next person I have on, on where if we're talking about a contentious political issue, would that change what we're doing? Would that change what you would want to do? Where does the same approach work, I guess, is what I'm trying to ask you. And, and, and would you keep things consistent, or would you want to change your strategy if you were talking to the people I'm describing?

0:33:24 Michael: Yeah, I'd like to think the same kind of approach would work, because I think, I mean, I listened to the Price episode, and I thought it was a very fascinating discussion, because there were points where you were able to directly challenge on some things. And I think anybody who was listening would have heard that not all of Dr. Price's counters to your challenges were entirely consistent with one another, even. And I Think that would have been apparent to a relatively casual listener. So I think if you come into that conversation, well, if anybody comes into that conversation vehemently believing everything with exactly the same views as Dr.

0:33:47 Thomas: Yeah, right.

0:34:03 Michael: Price or vehementLY believing that Trump is a fantastic presidential person, then I think I doubt that that conversation would have changed it. But there are clearly plenty of people who are just in that middle ground who are like, well let's give him a chance, maybe he's not so bad, in that kind of area. And I think by having Dr. Price on and showing some of his beliefs and then saying, well, actually, what about this point? I mean, how can you be totally OK with the notion that Russia has intricate links into many elements of the Trump campaign? And that's totally fine. I think, yeah,

0:34:36 Thomas: You know, and let me complicate it a little bit more. It's something just occurred to me and apologies that this will sound, I don't know how this will sound but this is my current working theory on people like, for example, Milo Yiannopoulos who I'm sure you're familiar with, right? Or do I need to, okay.

0:34:53 Michael: For many, many years ago when he was in the UK.

0:34:54 Thomas: Okay, yeah. But this is, I would say this is a worry I have. I'm going to reframe the question again, apologies for that, but it's going to be the same question, but the added variable that I worry about is something I see happening happening in US politics. I'll just speak for here. I don't know what it's like over there, if it's similar or not, but there's a lot of dog whistling going on. Do you know what I mean by that?

0:35:18 Thomas: What people do with Milo, what I've seen them do, it doesn't mean every person, but I've seen it a lot, is they support, they want him speaking and they want them to be platformed because actually they agree with a lot of his racist ideas and same goes with Trump. They agree with the law. They agree a lot with his build the wall, Mexicans are rapists. They agree with a lot of that, but they know that they can't say that. And they know that, well, now they kind of can, but previously they've known that they've needed to keep these really egregious views kind of quiet. And that's, I think, a tough issue because I think they've kind of gotten by by saying, no, free speech, have everyone on, talk about it, whatever. And when really they want to support these racist kind of xenophobic sexist, when it comes to Milo, particularly anti-feminist views.

0:35:18 Michael: Yeah, yeah.

0:36:11 Thomas: Now, if you try to call them on any of them, they'll say, well, I don't agree with everything he says. I just, you know, I think he should in general be, he makes some points that I like and they don't like to get specific about it. But that's something I worry about where Where if you offer, let's say, Milo a platform and you're not fighting back against these points, I worry that, like if I had him on my show or something, I would worry about perpetuating that because there are a lot of people that the dog whistle happens where they're like, oh, I kind of agree with some of this. And maybe the host agrees if he hasn't specifically fought him on it. I think that's something when it comes to the fact that people want to hide some of of their racist beliefs and they want to use this tactic to be able to still support somebody who thinks the things they think. What do you think about that?

0:36:35 Michael: Yeah, I think that's fair. Um, but what I would say I think is, uh, if I was to ever have Milo on the show, and actually about four years ago, I think, or three years ago, I did actually genuinely consider it. I was very close to kind of, uh, debunking him. And one of the reasons I didn't is because I didn't actually think he believed anything and I still don't think he believes anything. That's, that's a real problem, is that he, and, you know, you've done a whole, a couple of shows on Milo, and I think one of them you said you, you never want to talk about him again, but kind of here we are, but um, I think, think one of the problems you have with him is that he will say a whole range of things, and whichever one, uh, doesn't connect or whichever one he's challenged on, he'll play the puppy dog eyes. Oh, did I say that? I'm only joking. Oh, it's just because of my, uh, my, my British

0:37:11 Thomas: Oh, yeah, that's another. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Right. Right, exactly. Oh, just

0:37:42 Michael: Campness, I think he recently blamed on his British countenance. Now, if you've met a lot of, uh, people in Britain, that is not a trait that that kind of, uh, say these these horrendous things. Well, we do, but only amongst Monk's friends. Yeah, certainly not in national news or anything like that. No, I think his views are, I would say his views are indefensible, but I don't think his views are his views.

0:37:42 Thomas: Kidding. Yeah, yeah. Oh you don't joke about about pedophilia all the time, or that's not every British person? Oh, okay.

0:38:05 Michael: That's kind of the problem.

0:38:00 Thomas: You know, that's a great point.

0:38:06 Michael: He's willing to say anything. We've got exactly the same types of media figures here in people like Katie Hopkins, who's a correspondent, a columnist, who was a former reality show winner, who saying things like, well, the Syrians who are drowning in the Mediterranean and deserve to drown and their cockroaches swarming here and when she's called out in it, well, it's free speech. Does she hold all those views, or is she, she paid to hold the worst possible view in order to get clicks to a newspaper and uh, and listeners to a radio show, you know, um, but yeah so, I think if you had something like that on, yeah

0:38:06 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so, you would say that kind of person, and it sounds like you did say that with Milo, not worth doing it with. Not worth, it's just, it's kind of pointless because they don't really believe it. They're just, yeah, Yeah.

0:38:44 Michael: Certainly at the time, I may be had, I been, uh, aware that he would take on the level of, uh, prominence in the U.S. that, uh, he certainly could never have, have achieved in the UK. I think he did a couple of TV shows, TV appearances in the UK, and bombed because his shtick just did not fly with with what we were doing I

0:38:52 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:01 Thomas: Now, why is that? Explain that to an ignorant American who's among the population that... Yeah. Go ahead.

0:39:05 Michael: Honestly don't know. It might have been, it might've been just prevailing culture at the time. I mean, I don't think we are vastly different from you guys, um, so it might just have been that there wasn't this anti-social justice warrior kickback that you hear in the kind of the, the blogs and forums and spilling out on the, the streets and pulpits now. Um, there wasn't so much of that five, six years ago, I don't think. It was maybe just kind of bubbling away, so, um, yeah, maybe that's it.

I don't know that there's inherently anything different about us and you guys, maybe there is, but it's not something I could really identify, um, but yeah, but I think if he was on the show, then I think, or if you had him in your show, I think you could, you, you can still challenge the majority of what he's saying, but what you'll see when people, uh, debate someone like him, because he is, uh, able to throw out lots of different areas, is they get distracted by each of those different areas so and you saw that with, uh, well, I've seen it with plenty of debates that he's been on, you know, he'll say one thing and someone will pick up on that, and he'll just pick up one line of the, the counter argument and spin

0:39:26 Thomas: Right. Yeah, yeah, sure.

0:40:05 Michael: Off into a totally different direction and now the conversation is all about that direction now, and the original horrid thing was lost. So I think the way that you'd counteract someone like that is to keep pinning him back to the first point and not let him move on, and I think that's, that's maybe how I, I would, uh, counter someone who I thought was disingenuously gish galloping, who was intentionally gish galloping

0:40:24 Thomas: Yeah and again, I know you did mention early on you have had people on your show who morally you think, wow, what you're advocating is awful, which was was something I was going to ask because the episodes I've heard, it's been more ghosts or it's flat earth is questionable. I mean, you could argue that kind of attitude is harmful in some ways. And woo of any kind is going to be harmful in some way. Just the risk of getting people to not trust science or not seek the right cures for things. But anyway, I was going to ask if you've ever had anyone on who morally was deeply questionable.

It sounds like you have, and it sounds like your approach didn't change, but I wonder, would it change, to get back to this question that I'm kind of asking, I mean, is there a point where you would feel the need to have to, if you're not challenging everything, is there a point where you would feel the need to to say, okay, what you're saying right there is is wrong and and harmful, or do you never want to be that kind of moral uh judge on anybody on your show, you know, like, are you not concerned with that, what

0:40:25 Michael: Uh, hmm hmm yeah I, I don't know, I mean, I had a guy on who, um, what was his name? Mike, was it Mike Buchanan? No, I forget exactly his name. He was, uh, a guy who ran a very niche political party in, uh, the last general election in the UK called, uh, Justice for Men and Boys and the Women Who Love Them. Uh, it was the only, uh, overtly anti-feminist political party, and that was probably, he was probably, I mean, I don't think he was the most morally objectionable, because I've had AIDS denialists on, and I've had, uh, anti-semites on, and I've had Jim Humble on, and you know, uh, people with all sorts of 9-11 truthers from, from lots of directions, so I've had some pretty, pretty nasty, uh, nasty views on there.

I'm not gonna say nasty people necessarily, necessarily, but nasty views that they're holding. But he was the one that I think that I was the most combative that I've been in conversation across the duration of the show, because I don't think he was making his point with any level of genuineness. And if you look through his manifesto, he had this ridiculous manifesto up on his political party's page, and it would pick up on genuine issues.

Like, if you're male, you're much more likely to be imprisoned than if you're female, which is true, and he would say, and this is because the feminists are out there trying to turn laws against us, and that's why they're intentionally trying to put men in jail. I said, no, that's not the reason, you had a good starting point that we maybe need to look at the kind of criminal justice system and why it disproportionately ends

0:41:54 Thomas: Is that sure oh yeah you

0:42:58 Michael: With men in prison, um, compared to women, maybe that's something we need to as a broader societal thing of what influences the, the, the journey for, from kind of of well

0:43:08 Thomas: Guys think you're imprisoning people don't even what was it like nine men and three women over there in prison compared to us which is most of society.

0:43:16 Michael: At least you might have adequate number of prisons, some of our prisons and, uh, are running at, uh, 180 capacity at the moment, so they've got, uh, 180 percent of the number of people in there. We won't go into the prison thing, the prison think is an area I look to go into soon you guys are number one in that, yeah, that's absolutely true but yeah, but I will say there are plenty of, plenty of things I was totally fucked off about the UK prison system, and that's something I'm hoping to come to in, in future months when I'll be able to, uh, to put something together in that area, um but yeah, so I think he was making a lot of points that he didn't believe in, I don't think, or he was, he was picking up on things that, uh, were a starting point and going, well, this here, um, I can see this fact and I can twist it to fit my agenda here.

And that was something that, um, I, I certainly don't let pass, I'd say, on the show, if someone, if, if I get the sense that someone is overtly, intentionally twisting a fact there, uh, to their end rather than genuinely believing it, then I think those take slightly different, they take slightly, slightly different, uh, handling.

I think, yeah, and it's not often that you get the sense that someone is, that you got a sniff of the fact that they are intentionally manipulating you here, but even then, I think sometimes I think I've got that sense, so now my job isn't necessarily to say, you are intentionally manipulating me, but

0:43:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:32 Thomas: You're never gonna beat us in a who can imprison more people contest. So we're number one, USA. Okay, go on. Yeah hmm. It

0:44:35 Michael: To offer a counter that anybody who is listening will recognize that's what I'm saying without me necessarily saying those words. I don't think, I don't like to be, uh, explicit all the time, I like to trust that the audience is going to come with me, um, and yeah, maybe that's kind of, uh, hopelessly naive, in naively optimistic at times, but I think as a, um, a broader intellectual thing, I'd rather sure, not sure, than tell, you know, I'd rather the audience were given the, the tools and the information and were able to hear how these two sides of this argument are playing out and be able to see very clearly what's, what's happening, then yeah

0:45:13 Thomas: Sounds like you trust your audience a lot, which is good. And it's certainly, but it's, I don't know, maybe I've just been too jaded by my Twitter interactions or something. You know, I just don't, I maybe I don't trust people enough. And It's also because I, again, I think it may be the difference in subject matter. I mean, if I'm talking to somebody who believes in ghosts, like, yeah, I would trust my audience on a lot of that. I'm not going to worry about every single ghost thing that they're going to say. But I just wonder if it's a difference in the subject matter that I'm trying to argue. Or maybe I could learn from what you're doing in being a little more trusting of my audience. But I also, I guess there's going to be a part of me morally when we're talking about some of these issues, especially when these people I'm arguing with, these, these Trump supporters are in power right now.

0:46:07 Thomas: Like, this is who is in power. It's not like it's, "Oh, this is a fringe thing, I just ignore, it's not going to matter." Like, I, there's a, there's a tough part of me, like a tough part to ignore. I mean, that I want to be able to declare, like, this is what I believe. I think it's, it's harmful, that some of these ideas, but I wonder, I wonder if I'm wrong to even to worry about that so much, in that I would be better served, and maybe we would be better served, if, if, if I took a softer approach, that it might have more of a chance of convincing people. So that's what I'm struggling over right now.

0:46:39 Michael: Well, I think there's a couple of things to say to that, I guess, and you're absolutely right that Trump supporters are in power in, uh, or in the ascendancy in the U.S., but I'd argue the extreme Trump supporters aren't in power, well, they're in power, but they're not in the majority.

0:46:54 Thomas: I was going to say, Trump's in power.

0:46:54 Michael: Yeah, Sorry, exactly, yeah, yeah, but but I would say like the Yeah, Absolutely, I mean, I would say Trump isn't in power, Putin's in power, Trump isn't in power Yeah, leader of the free world, Angela Merkel these days, I think, certainly not, uh, Trump, I look, things, um, Yeah, but I'd say of his supporters, um, the extreme wings of his supporters aren't in the majority, but the extreme wing, but if you were to tackle every Trump supporter like they were the extreme, uh, wing, or to use the, the kind of, uh, tactics and the kind of tone that you would use for the extreme wing, then the average Trump supporter will hear you with that level of, uh, of, uh, anger and aggression or kind of fortitude and will say, "Well, he's behaving like that towards someone who must agree with me because we kind of voted the same way. We must share some kind of things." So that's him essentially behaving that way towards me. I don't like that guy. I'm not listening. I think, for me, the way that I tend to deal with those conversations, there's an analogy that comes up.

0:46:59 Thomas: Breitbart's in power right now, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, I agree.

0:47:55 Michael: I give a lot of talks around the country on sort of skeptical kind of issues. And people People always say, how do I disagree with people? How do I converse with people I disagree with who I like in my family? How doI change their minds? And the analogy that I use is, you know when you see in films, there's an asteroid going to hit the earth. And one of the ways that you see in films to stop that is to send up Bruce Willis to blow that asteroid up, meet it head on, big explosion, and then you've got all the little chunks of asteroid coming just as much towards the earth, but now spread over a much wider area.

0:48:25 Thomas: Yeah, I'm glad you're saying that. I was gonna say that's not a good approach. Okay.

0:48:28 Michael: It's a terrible approach. Meeting things head-on with that level of aggression, it can be a terrible approach, whereas if you look at the best theories about how we'd avoid an asteroid collision, now is that you send up something with a reasonable amount of mass to hang around next to the asteroid and slowly tug it away, yeah.

0:48:40 Thomas: Yeah, it just kind of floats next to it, yeah yeah.

0:48:43 Michael: And slowly, over a period of time, just gently, gently, gently move it away, and pretty soon you've altered the course of that asteroid, so it no longer hits that's the analogy I use in, in conversation is just have those little bits, but keep nice keep on them. Exactly. Yeah. Just be the person, especially when it's someone you actually like.

0:48:49 Thomas: Oh, what a great analogy. Oh, I love it. But just kind of hang out with them. Stand near them. And oh no,

0:49:00 Michael: Yeah, but

0:49:00 Thomas: Now this is not, I'm getting too literal. Sorry, nevermind.

0:49:02 Michael: No, but when it is someone in your family, you know, be the person that they actually like, who challenges some of these ideas, but not to a point where you break that relationship, because once they aren't listening to you, they're not listening to you. You can't do anything at that point, I don't think. You need to keep them listening.

0:49:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I hate to say it that I think you're probably totally right because I think that the biggest, when I think about views that I've changed, I don't know your history, but I was actually raised conservative and I was raised in a very Republican Fox News household. And I wish I could say, and if I were a less, I'll be, I'm sorry to toot my own horn. If I were less honest person, I would probably say, you know what? I saw, I saw the arguments. I saw that the data just didn't line up with conservative positions. I saw it. But in reality, I worry and I wonder if what really changed me from, from a conservative to a liberal was was hanging out with liberals, was that my social circles, when I went to college and the people that I consider smart and intelligent all happened to be liberal.

0:49:17 Michael: Yeah.

0:50:06 Thomas: And I started shifting and giving more credence to those views. And now in retrospect, I think it's justified. Like when I look back, I think, yeah, well, it's because of this, you know, economically, this makes sense and this doesn't. And I don't mean to say that it's all kind of relative at all, because I do think morally when it comes to issues like gay marriage and issues like immigration, all these things that I do Think there is a very clear, right answer to those. But for some of these things, I really do worry that it is a matter of socially being around a different group of people. You just start to be able to trust that more. And I wonder if that is the best way to change someone's minds is to just kind of be, be a friend to them more, you know?

0:50:58 Michael: It's exposure to Stuff. It's exposure to other ideas, and exposure in a way that the ideas, the scenarios, the situation you've been exposed to, aren't scary, aggressive, angry. It's talking to the person who thinks that all skeptics want to murder babies in the name of Big Pharma, and not being someone who sounds remotely like that will change the perception that when they go away and they think about what a skeptic is, in my situation, they won't think that evil person, they'll have a picture of me in their mind.

0:50:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:51:28 Michael: And you know, for some people that's a good thing, for some people it's not quite as good, um,

0:51:28 Thomas: Hey, I think it's a great thing.

0:51:32 Michael: Similar. I mean, I grew up in uh, in the northeast of England, where the it, was it, population is overwhelmingly white, you, you know, you see nobody other than your own ethnicity growing up, and there are an awful lot of people grew up in my area incredibly racist because they've never met anybody who isn't from the same racial background as them. And what you see, and you, I don't want to go too much into this uh, now, maybe we'll have a conversation in the future, but you saw this with the Brexit uh, situation, that the majority, huge numbers of the people who voted to leave the EU did so over immigration. The places that correlated more strongly with immigration being the number one reason to leave the EU correlated least strongly with there being immigrants. You know, that you are, you are more likely to want to leave the EU over immigration if you had not met an immigrant, and vice versa.

0:51:32 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

0:52:17 Michael: And it's that exposure will teach you that the thing that you are scapegoating, the thing that you think is evil, the things that you thing is utterly counter and completely wrong and morally reprehensible, if you're not exposed to it in any way, it's very easy to paint it in such broad caricatures, terms. But when you actually have an interaction with the ideas you disagree with, with people that you disagree, it is very hard to keep those caricatures unless you meet someone like Leo Rubello, who was the Indian naturopath, who said horrendous things to me. And I think in that situation, you can listen to that show.

0:52:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:52:50 Thomas: Keep him out no I'm just kidding. How

0:52:53 Michael: But I mean, in that position, you Can Listen to That Show, and I don't think anybody's coming away from that show, I was very polite to him, he was incredibly aggressive to me, and I was therefore more polite to him, because he's losing the argument for himself, and he was astonished, I think, by the end. He went on this big, long comment rant in the comments to the show, because he assumed that everybody would agree with me, because he thought he came out of the conversation winner because he made loads of loads of arguments that I didn't counter, or he made, he made lots of statements and was, was dominant in the conversation, and I was thinking, you carry on, mate, because you can be as dominant and as aggressive as you like, but this isn't a one-on-one, everybody is not just listening to the content of what you're saying, which is utterly uh, reprehensible in lots of areas, but the tone in which you're having this debate is also losing you this, this conversation. You might win this debate, but you've lost the chance of anybody agreeing with you, um, Leo

0:52:53 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Not

0:53:42 Michael: Rubello actually, incidentally, is something I always like to say about him, um, I used to follow him on Twitter for a bit afterwards because he just tweet the most extraordinary things, absolutely bonkers things, I mean, he was incredibly like nasty in lots of ways. And there was, my favorite tweet of all time was his, his Twitter background is three images, him meeting the Pope, him meeting the Dalai Lama, and him meeting Mother Teresa. You know, I disagree with each of those, those people into, from that, from the ideology, but that's the, the situation, that's the, the company he saw himself in. So imagine that as the background to this tweet: "Scientists have found a jellyfish that never grows old and will live forever. We should take a gene from that jellyfish and inject it into people, not the Jews."

0:54:26 Michael: Amazing, just the best, the best tweet of all time, like Oh god.

0:54:30 Thomas: The Juice, wow.

0:54:31 Michael: So Yeah, sometimes when you're talking to someone with those kind of views, you don't need to challenge them, you just need to give them space to talk and they'll challenge themselves with the tone, and the content.

0:54:32 Thomas: Oh man, that is really, oh. Right. Right. Right, but again but again You're I mean, you're not worried about your audience agreeing with them, really, and, and, and it depends if you're talking to somebody like, I don't know, Milo or a Trump supporter, somebody like that. I have to worry about that, to worry about the fact that there's a lot of people who aren't going to just quietly assume along with me. Oh, that's, that's an insane view. That's a racist view. That's the sexist view. But let me throw more.

0:54:46 Michael: Yeah.

0:55:06 Michael: But It's all about the platform, it's all about this plot, the platform, you, I mean, I'm not, if I was the BBC, there's no way I'd be holding that conversation, and one of things I do in my day job is, actually, the BBC radio was having a conversation recently about the Andrew Wakefield film "Vaxxed", and how Curzon Cinema that was going to screen it in London pulled the screening, and in the end it went ahead in another place, and they were meant to have a conversation about free speech and whether this film should have gone ahead, and instead they got an anti-vax view on the radio and she said on there that vaccines are a danger for all these reasons, they've never been proven, and did a huge anti-vax rant. Now, as part of my day job, working for the charity, we talked to the BBC, we talked to the editorial board of the BBC and say this has to stop, you can't be having these conversations in this place,

0:55:10 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, right, right. And that's a great distinction. Yeah,

0:55:50 Michael: Where they aren't going to be challenged, or where if they are challenged, they aren't going to challenge adequately, you're still giving that air, giving air time and a level of prominence to such a fringe and completely disproven view, that isn't inappropriate, that that isn't appropriate, and that's true, it isn't appropriate for the BBC radio, yeah.

0:56:01 Thomas: And the faux 50-50 thing. We do too in the media, people do, which is take an issue that's settled science and here's one person from one side, here's One person from the other side. I think that's, that's pretty problematic as well. And it's something.

0:56:09 Michael: Yeah. Exactly, so I, I don't want that conversation to go ahead, but I would have Andrew, Andrew Wakefield on "Be Reasonable" in a heartbeat, because I get to have him in the space where I know that uh, I was describing kind of one, one element of the show the other day is essentially, like, you don't know what's going on, you don't want smallpox out there in the population, but you kind of want it in a test tube somewhere for you to study, and that's kind of what it is, a little bit.

Let's put these in a place that I think is safe for us to hear these views that aren't gonna, that none of of my listeners are going to come away from a conversation with someone like Wakefield thinking we shouldn't vaccinate their kids.

Um, so I'd have him on there in an absolute heartbeat, and I don't see a problem with that, but I'd also put him on that because it puts him in the context of a show where I've also interviewed people who believe that you don't need food and and water to survive, you can live on sunlight alone, and another chap who is utterly lovely who believed that in 15th century Dorset, which is a place in England, uh, two chill, two green-skinned children from the future were accidentally beamed down to the

0:56:17 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah,

0:57:09 Michael: 15th century Earth due to a temporal disturbance from the planet that they were being hybridized on. I'm quite happy for Wakefield to be on a shore where that's the context he's in, just, I'm, I'm quiet happy for a way for him to be a cruise ship that's all about conspiracies, yeah.

0:57:17 Thomas: Yeah. Right. I mean, that I, totally agree with that. That makes perfect sense. I um, would throw one more wrench into the works here, which, and this may be particular again to the U.S., so apologies, but one thing I'm worried about with talking about these, these, these extreme uh, or not so extreme now, sort of unfortunately mainstream right-wing views, is I have, I worry that the fact that we aren't required to vote here, uh, and the fact, fact that there's so many people don't vote. And actually, is it the same over there? Because I thought Brexit, a lot of people didn't vote on it, or am I wrong?

0:57:59 Michael: We don't have any uh, requirements to vote, and you look at someone like Nigel Farage, who was unofficially leading the Brexit campaign, and he was only, he's never been elected to uh, to parliament. Because he's tried six times and failed, but he did get elected to to European parliament because nobody turns out, so there's like a 30% turnout and it's so easy for fringe groups to push their agendas that way so

0:58:01 Thomas: Right, right. Yeah, right, right. See, that's a huge problem. I think it's Australia has mandatory voting, right? I'm pretty sure. I wish we did.

0:58:19 Michael: Yeah, yeah. But then there are other issues.

0:58:25 Thomas: Well, but hold on. Here's what I'm going to say, because here's what I worry about. Now, we've talked about, I think a lot lot of this discussion has been based around, you know, tactics and how, what might actually change someone's mind. When we did the research, we looked at some of these studies and I think you'll, you'll already know this just intuitively if you haven't researched it yourself, which you probably have, which is nobody changes their mind. I mean, it's, it'S a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of people. And it's something that takes a really long time. If it ever happens, It doesn't happen in real time. And I wonder when the majority of untapped resources in terms of votes, in terms of getting things to move in the right direction and whatever, you know, whatever I view as the right Direction in my country, since the majority of the untappd resources is going to be people who stayed home, people who didn't vote, who might already agree with me, is it then maybe wise?

0:59:20 Thomas: And this is something that I wish weren't true, but I think might be. Is it more possibly more effective to try to drum up like an enthusiasm in whatever way I can to get people motivated to vote rather than try to convince someone on the other side who I have very, very little chance of convincing statistically, even if I do everything absolutely correctly, which I think you do on your show. So even if I do a perfect Marsh impression and like challenge them just enough and do all that, that's what I worry about. Like maybe having someone on debating them, calling them out, getting indignant, doing all that crap that people do. Unfortunately, I wonder if that when it comes to the political realm is actually the more effective thing to do.

1:00:07 Michael: I honestly don't know, I honestly know. I mean, I, I would say from my experience with the stuff that I do, um, there are lots of people who, uh, listen to the show who, uh, who told me that they were skeptical about lots of stuff but not really that, not that far, who listen to it and it helps them form their critical thinking, it haunts their critical thinking to hear me have these conversations, to hear those conversations happen, to think how they would respond, to hear how I respond.

And then they end up in conversations themselves and the person they're talking to, they may be way better at convincing. So you're kind of arming an audience by hearing these views. I'd also say if you had a, even if you've got a particularly engaged engaged audience and let's say 70% of your listeners or 80% of listeners vote, there's still that 20% that don't, and not a bad way of convincing them, the uh, the merits of voting is to showcase the ideas that will be voting and that will win without opposition, um, to say, here is, you know, Richard Spencer saying all these utterly reprehensible, uh, ideas that he has, and and they're going out to vote, they will be voting, and so this is what we're up against, rather, so if you, yeah.

1:00:08 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh My gosh. Richard Spencer. I should have, I should ask you about that. We're not going to have time, but I mean, that was, that is another problem area. When someone like Richard Spencer comes on, it's sort of that dog whistling thing a little bit. When he does interviews, he presents himself as the most reasonable person he can, and he sort of makes him look like something he isn't, and then he gains more followers, and then he saves his more egregious views for later, which is what I've seen. And that's a problem, too, where I would wonder if you were going to have him on or something, would it be worthwhile trying to unearth views that he's maybe not even willing to be forthright about? Is that a consideration?

1:01:49 Michael: Oh, god, yeah, absolutely, yeah, you have to come armed with, uh, if someone like that you have to come on with some of us agree, yeah, absolutely. So, um, when I had Jim Humble on, one of the things Jim Humble had said, uh, was, uh, if you look at, uh, how we try and practice around the world, they try and shut us down all the time, Miracle Mineral Supplement, try and shut this down.

So he said, we set up as a church, because if you look at the way the Catholic Church deals with pedophilia and the way it shuts down investigations into pedophila, that's real power, that's what religion can do.

And so that was the, uh, that was a part of the court of his that I brought up at about the two-thirds mark of the conversation, which marked a sea change in the way, uh, if I remember, your memory's incredibly fallible, maybe I'm overstating it, but it marked a c change in the way he was responding to me, because I'd set up this conversation, this, uh, this, uh, the space, space, this rapport. And then I challenged him on a particularly terrible view of his.

1:02:06 Thomas: So do your research. And

1:02:54 Michael: And I think his justification was, well, I'm just trying to remind people that the Catholic Church had this big paedophilia scandal, and we can't stop reiterating that, I was just trying to bring that back to people's minds. It's like, bollocks were you doing that? No one is going to believe that's the reason you compared setting up your own church to the Catholic church's power to close down investigations into paedophilia. There's nobody who's going to believe that, from either way, so I think you have to have a few, if you're talking to someone who is going to be that far over the line, then you have to have that kind of stuff up your sleeve, Tommy

1:03:22 Thomas: I apologize, substitute Richard Spencer for Tommy Robinson. That's actually who I meant. I totally just had a mix up in my brain. I meant Tommy Robinson, Richard Spencer is always pretty extreme in his interviews. Tommy Robinson presents a different version of himself in interviews.

1:03:29 Michael: Robertson. Yeah, he does.

1:03:37 Thomas: And that's so substitute Substitute that back in. I hope the question still.

1:03:37 Michael: Yeah. He also ducks out of interviews about three years ago when, uh, when he agreed to interview, uh, to be interviewed by me and, uh, didn't turn up so yeah, I was totally fine to have, I'd like to debate someone who is vehemently racist, I weirdly enjoy that conversation. But yeah,

1:03:46 Thomas: Oh, oh, really? But he's so frustrating because he just, he says, he has a weird quality that I've seen, in my opinion, where he does want to make the person he's talking to happy. Like he does, he seems to, in the interviews I've see, I watched like four or five of them, so not a million, but he seems To want to be seen as reasonable to whoever's talking to you. So he sort of adjusts his views a little bit, or not his views, but how he presents himself. And that could present a particular challenge for, but, but I think your answer was already adequate, which is you need to make sure you research and you know what this person believes.

1:04:33 Thomas: Because when you look at his Twitter feed, it's, you know, it'S a totally different story. Like he'll tweet horrible, sexist, racist things, and then he'll go and put on a, you you know, a nice suit and look nice and look all presentable and, and, uh, polite in an interview and put a bit of a polite face on some views underneath that are really quite terrible.

1:04:33 Michael: It's crazy. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the thing about having the space of your own show is that you control the platform, so you don't have to control the detail of the conversation. You own the overall platform. Over time, you've cultivated an audience and they know where you're from. I'd imagine lots of your audience would know your response listening to that Robert Price interview, for example, I imagine a lot of your audienc would know where you stood on some of those issues before you said anything and I don't think they would have genuinely come out of it going, "Huh, Thomas didn't question that bit, so he must agree with that bit." I don't think they wouldn't have done that. I think you establish your character through the drip feed narrative of several different shows that you don't need to justify your position every time, you can give them that extra a bit of space, and sometimes it can it can sort of hang them

1:05:21 Thomas: That's true.

1:05:41 Thomas: Yeah, true. But I worry about with, with somebody like that, uh. The audience he brings to my show and what it, what it sounds like to them, to people who aren't familiar with me, but I, but understand that. Well, I, you know I've kept you long already, but I guess, do you have any closing thoughts? You haven't, I really do consider you an expert on this. What you're doing is really great work. I enjoy your show. Any advice for me going forward with this whole Trump supporter price stuff? What do you think?

1:05:44 Michael: Um, I guess what I would say is that the the Trump supporters aren't one block and it's very easy to write them off as one block, and that's kind of playing into the hands of, uh, the people who want to keep Trump in power is to, you know, your your extremists, the the people who are part of the KKK who are supporting, and the people who are, you know, viciously, uh, racist and misogynist and all these things, they want to, and and Nazis, literal Nazis, they want the safety in numbers. And if you write off everybody who disagrees with you in one block, then you're giving them that safety in numbers. So by challenging the extremes without lumping the middle in with them, you can maybe start to demonstrate to the middle-ish ground Trump voter who might have heard some stuff, might not have looked into everything because elections are really complicated. And that was such a long, drawn-out election campaign that I can imagine you could easily get jaded and fatigued and switch off and all sorts of things about access to information.

1:06:14 Thomas: Yeah, that's true.

1:07:03 Michael: So I think if you're able to demonstrate to the Trump voters who actually are incredibly well-meaning, and I'm sure there are lots of them, that this is not the pony to have backed and that this the bed you're lying in, these are your bedfellows, then at least you are maybe starting to get to a point where people will start to question the decisions they've made, where their supporters lied.

So not treating everyone who disagrees with you, I'm not saying you do this, but I imagine some people would, treat everyone who disagrees you with one cohesive unit and write them off all in one go or attack them with the level of viscera that you would save for the worst of their claims, the people who aren't holding the worst of those claims will feel that that level of viscera is, uh, is unjust, and they'll kind of be right because they don't deserve that side of it, so yeah, yeah, and it's also I think it would be, or the last little bit would be, um, think the strategy of what you're trying to to do, the long-term goal that you're trying to accomplish, even in a conversation, that goal, put that goal first, and moment by moment you might not need to do this challenge to achieve that goal, you know, you're you're the short term of the the point that you're making, you might not need to win that to win the overall goal that you're trying to achieve, um, so it's that, it's thinking, I don't sound Machiavellian, but thinking tactically or

1:07:52 Thomas: At least they'll think they're right, too. I mean, they'll, yeah. I thank you. Go ahead.

1:08:25 Thomas: Yeah,

1:08:25 Michael: Strategically about the way that you conduct in that conversation, uh,

1:08:25 Thomas: It is a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I mean certainly there's some tactics to it. Yeah, well, Michael Marshall, thank you so much for coming on the show. So, again, Be Reasonable is the podcast. Is there anywhere else we should point people? Oh,

1:08:38 Michael: If you want to check out the stuff that I do for a living, the skeptical, tactical, investigative activism stuff, uh, you can go to Good Thinking Society.org and see all the kind of work we're doing there, it's a charity, and uh, we're kind of doing what we can on a very small charitable kind of space, but we're having some real effect, so yeah, that's the kind of the other work that I'm, uh, I'm pretty pretty proud of

1:08:56 Thomas: Excellent. I will put that in the show notes. Absolutely. Check that out. Thank you for coming on. Really, really interesting discussion. Given me a lot to think about and apply going forward. And I think there's a lot of value in the approach of letting someone talk in some ways. I mean, I think as we've discussed, you know, our shows are a little different. I think I would adopt some sort of hybrid of that. That. I think it's always good to let someone talk to be able to refute their points better, to at least understand their points. And that's something that I think your show offers. And you have a very unique show. I love it. And I hope you'll keep on that schedule.

1:08:57 Michael: Really Yes.

1:09:33 Thomas: Are you going to keep up with this monthly schedule? Good.

1:09:37 Michael: Yeah. I've got the next couple already in the bag so I should be, I should be fine from here on, and I've got a renewed vigor for it as the world burns around my ears thanks

1:09:39 Thomas: Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. All right. Thank you so much for coming on. Really. And we'll talk Brexit later.

1:09:49 Michael: A lot, yes. We definitely will, but yeah, thanks for having me, Thomas. I've enjoyed this a lot.

1:09:51 Thomas: Absolutely. All right.

1:10:18 Thomas: Yeah, once again, thanks to Marsh for coming on. Really interesting guy. Really interesting show. And I mentioned it at the end, I do want to have him back to talk about Brexit. Totally different conversation, but something he can bring us up to speed on. Well, us Americans anyway. I'll just speak for myself. I'm sure everyone has kept up with it except me. But no, I haven't because of the Trump thing. I haven't kept up as much with what's going on. Good updates that that he could give us. So, or, well, maybe not so good. I don't know. It depends. But anyway, that'll be a later date. Uh, there's a lot to think about from this interview, uh, and listening to be reasonable. I think that our shows are trying to do different things, as I mentioned in the interview, but there's lot to be learned from what Marsh is doing.

1:11:03 Thomas: And I think it really does come down to what I want to get out of it when I interview somebody like that. So I think it'll all kind of depend. It'll depend on the guest. Uh, and, and I, but I look forward to the next time I'm able to utilize a lot of the tactics and techniques that Marsh talked about. So really great guests. I'm really glad he came on. All right. Well, that does it for today's show. I will see you guys on Thursday. Thank you so much to everyone who supports the show over at patreon.com/seriouspod. As I always say, very important to keep the show going. But I won't do another hard sell now or anything. Thanks so much and I will see you on Thursday.