SIO118: Intercontinental Culture Wars, with Michael Marshall

Transcript

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

0:00:37 Thomas: Welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 118, I'm your host Thomas Smith. Alright, joining me for this episode is past guest of the show, Michael Marshall, He is, of course, the host of Be Reasonable, a co-host of Skeptics with a K, Co-founder and vice president of the Merseyside Skeptic Society, needless to say, he has a lot of experience with skepticism as a movement, but not in the U.S., and that's what we talk about, we go into some of the differences as we see it between movements in the US and the UK, and there's a lot there to talk about. And then also we touch on a really interesting article that he co-wrote, we'll get into it in the interview, so with that being said, it's all there, let's get over to it.

0:01:36 Thomas: Marsh, welcome back to the show. I'm so glad to have you here today.

0:01:41 Michael: Thanks for having me back, it's been a little while since we chatted, so yeah, always a pleasure to chat to you, yeah,

0:01:45 Thomas: Yeah. I mean, time flies. How long has it been? Time flies. I thought it hadn't been that long, but it's probably just having a baby and just thinking about not losing track of time.

0:01:53 Michael: I have no idea, also, the world is going so much faster these days, that I have absolutely no idea when anything happened anyway, Yeah. Everything is just accelerating as we start to spiral out of control.,

0:01:56 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. It could have been anywhere from like a month to two years ago, and I wouldn't really know the difference. But at any rate, it's great to have have you back. I think we've got a lot we could talk about. I want to touch on, I just saw hot off the presses here as of the time we're recording, you have an article that is really fascinating. I don't think we're going to focus on it, but I want make sure we at least touch on that.

But before we do, maybe we can set it up by framing it with sort of the differences in how skepticism is, as a movement, is being, I don't know, done, or I guess the attitudes in the US versus the UK, because a lot of what mine and your interactions have been, have been you saying, boy, that's a load of crap that's going on over where you are. But you say it, of course, in a much better worded way, because that's how you roll. But that's How I Would Say It. Uh, and, and I'm, I'm sitting here wondering like, wait a minute, but Carl is from where you're from. Why, how does, why, why does everybody come over here? Carl Milo, you know, whoever it is, they

0:02:09 Michael: Yeah. Yeah, yeah,

0:03:11 Thomas: Come over hier and they cause trouble. What's going on?

0:03:13 Michael: I really don't know, I mean, I hadn't really heard of Carl almost at all until uh just before that whole uh dumpster fire kicked off uh that you uh that you had a very up close and uh and personal uh view of. Um, he's just not someone who's particularly well known here in in UK skepticism, and I don't even think he's, uh, it's something I argued on my podcast. I don't think he's in UK skepticism.

0:03:38 Thomas: Hmm.

0:03:38 Michael: I'm not even sure he's in skepticism, but certainly not UK skepticism. Um, he's just not somebody who really has crossed a lot of people's radars. And I think, yeah, maybe it's because there is a far stronger atheist movement in America. And that kind of perhaps has needed more robust tactics over the years. I don't know, because we don't have in the UK, particularly, the intrusion of religion on laws, particularly. There's a little bit here and there, but it's not like we've got a too many crazy, uh, you know, evangelical conservative religious right in proximity to uh, to any, any laws.

0:04:09 Thomas: Yeah. Interesting. Actually, could you go more into like, what's the state of reproductive rights where you are? I mean, is that, is that something that you don't have a bunch of, don't a fundamentalists just trying to, you make life hell for any woman who wants to, uh, manage her own reproductive health. That must be nice

0:04:18 Michael: Um, No.

0:04:31 Michael: Well, not so much, so not in England, not in England, Scotland or Wales. Now there are some in Northern Ireland, uh, the DUP, um, who were a very, very minor party on the UK sort of spectrum, um, up until the last election, where the government lost their majority and had to kind of scrabble around to form any kind of working majority and have to do a deal with these completely crazy right-wing fundamentalist religious idiots, basically, um, but nobody had really heard of them outside of Northern Ireland, where they have a relative amount of prominence, um, but other than that, we don't really have that in the UK.

So you don't, it's, I can't imagine a time where, um, access to abortions is in any way politicized in the UK. I think we're so far from that that I can't imagine getting to that where there's any politician who would make a stand and say, I don't think abortion should be legal, I think, where we're still far past that. Similar with, uh, contraceptives, that's not something that you, you see any particular debate over in any mainstream, uh, religious circles at all or a mainstream political circles.

0:05:37 Michael: Rather, so

0:05:37 Thomas: You know I have to stop and just. Apologies, but now I have event a little bit of frustration here because that's what's so frustrating. And again, we're, when we say Carl, we're referring to the YouTube personality Sargon, who I had the debate with. And what frustrates me so much about these useful idiots is that he's coming from someplace, as you just outlined, where reproductive rights don't seem to be in any major threat, where healthcare is, you, where healthcare is available for everybody, while you can, there may be problems with it, at the very least, people can get access to healthcare if they need it. And he's come over here and essentially putting his finger on the, the scale in, you know, he has millions of viewers and subscribers. And indeed, when he came to the US, it sold the event quite well. And he's taking a bunch of, guess, atheists who usually, who historically, when this whole movement atheism thing started, were more on the left.

0:05:38 Michael: Yeah, yeah,

0:06:34 Thomas: And now it's ridiculous. It's all classical liberal, libertarian, and right-wingers. And it frustrates me because I just don't think he has a grasp of what the situation is over here. He may be where he's from. He's in the middle or whatever. But if you took positions that I would have to imagine he'd agree with, and I regret that I didn't get to push him on this further. It was actually on my list of things to talk about and we never got to it.

It's things that the right wing, that Donald Trump, that those people that he values so highly because of his war on political political correctness, they are threatening it and they are in control. And people don't keep that in mind. And it's just, it's so frustrating to hear you say that, like, it must be nice to live in a place where reproductive freedom, you know, like all that is not really in question in a serious way, the way it is here. It's like effectively impossible to get an abortion in some states. Like you've got to drive for hundreds of miles. There's a cool off period. They make you wait like 24,

0:07:26 Michael: Yeah,

0:07:35 Thomas: 48 and more hours, like all this nonsense. And it's just never in perspective. Objective.

0:07:35 Michael: Mean, if there's anything like that here in the UK, then I'm not aware of it. I mean, that's a huge caveat, is that, you know, I'm a mid-30s guy, I haven't really come across, my reproductive rights are not going to be the ones that are affected anyway, but I have, but these aren't the kind of conversations that are happening in the UK. There's, there isn't that level of, uh, worry about access to those types of things. I mean, we're not perfect, there's plenty of other things to worry about in our society, uh, hugely, but, uh, those aren't the, the battles we're fighting. Um, and what surprises me with, you know, and I'm not particularly familiar with Carl's work, mainly because over here in the UK he's a, he's an irrelevance.

0:08:16 Michael: He's not known, he just doesn't, I've given talks at something like 40 skeptics in the, the pubs, something like 150 talks in the last four years across those, something, those kind of areas, and his name hasn't come up once when they talk, when people talk about who they get, who got them into skepticism, who they follow in skepticism, who they're interested in.

It's just as you look at the skeptical community of the UK, he's in a totally parallel line, which is kind of over here doing a YouTube thing, which has just never crosses with skepticism in the UK at all, really. So I'm not hugely familiar with all of his, uh, all of his work, and I haven't really got a great appetite to get overly familiar with it.

But what strikes me is that he seems to be undeniably or unquestionably more right wing than the majority of British society, because we are a pretty left-ish wing country, I mean, certainly I would say Democrats would be on the right of our center. In our country we are much further left than, uh, than America. So to go over to America and be talking about, uh, some of the, the more, uh, right-wing issues, you've got to be, when you think about how that, uh, reflects on your political stance in the UK, that is way further right, uh, even than that. Um,

0:07:48 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:09:29 Michael: And it just seems to me that there's this generation, or it's kind of the one of the defining problems of our age, is, uh, a generation's inability to see through rhetoric. Um, that seems to be a huge problem to me, from what I can see. You know, Donald Trump, Brexit, Nigel Farage, taken at a level of any kind of prominence in UK politics, um, it's just rhetoric over substance. And, uh, yeah, we need to find better ways of unpressing those buttons, uh, that bad actors with, uh, with untrue motives or unpure motives are pressing to try and, um, get themselves power and influence, I think.

0:10:07 Thomas: Yeah, I think we can also tie it into the latest episode of Be Reasonable, because you talked to somebody about campus craziness and all that social justice, and it's rhetoric, but it's also, it's, I think it's more than just that. I think it's rhetoric, but it's also the culture war.

That's something that after dealing with so many of these hostile people in the wake of this event online and everything, is there was a point where I was just like, you know what, I just want to, I almost wish I could just get one of them in a room and just forget all the culture, like try to find a way to just say, what are the policies you care about? Because that hard to say what started it.

I mean, it's, it's hard to say, you know, the chicken and the egg kind of thing. But at least from my perspective, observing U.S. politics, I think it's something that very clearly comes from a right wing party whose only interest is in big business and lowering taxes on the wealthiest, which we've already seen in a massive $1 trillion, well, $1.5 trillion, but a trillion of which goes to just the top of the top. And at one time they cared about deficits, and that was the reason Obama couldn't do anything. By the way, Obamacare was funded, it was fully funded with taxes.

And yet when it comes to, and they still argued against it as though it was, it was creating because this deficit that was out of control. They can just flip on a dime and not care about that when it serves the top. And I think, I don't think this is tinfoil hattie, although you're the person to ask.

0:11:39 Thomas: You can tell me if this is tinfoil hat material. I don't think it's that unreasonable to suspect that given those policies that are what the Koch brothers want, that are what the top, like the right wing, the Republicans in this country want, given that that's such a tough sell, really, like it's such It's such a tough sell to be like, you know what we need in this country? Not health care and the top CEOs who are already experiencing, you know, around the highest income inequality, you know, the most going to the top. We need more of that. Like, that's what we need. I think that it's not a stretch to say, well, that that's a bummer of a message. Like that's not going to go anywhere. But what we can do is stir up rhetoric in the culture war and just talk about, you know, those postmodernists in universities, you know those people who, you know, they shout down that friendly professor that, you know, is usually a white, by the way, they're shouting down this older white male professor who knows everything.

0:12:33 Thomas: That's who we're against. And there's never a talk of like, okay, but what are the policies here that we actually should care about?

0:12:42 Michael: I do agree with that, and I think for me what's really bizarre, and especially on that episode of Be Reasonable, was to hear culture war rhetoric coming out of someone from the UK. It kind of feels like, is this what it felt like in World War II when you guys joined us late? Are we now joining the culture war sort of late on? Is that what this is now? Because these aren't

0:13:04 Thomas: Oh, god, I hope it's equivalent to that, like, because maybe that means we're going to win? I don't know.

0:13:06 Michael: Really... I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know that we're going to win. I think it means that the people who are joining in now are going to win. I don't know. I mean, I'm an optimist and I do think society is getting better, and I think in some ways the culture war stuff is sort of perverse reflection of the fact that society is getting better.

I mean, I'm no expert on this, but for me it feels a lot like the culture wars is stalked up by a right wing media, and in your country, in my country, the majority of the power in the media is in the right. So if you look at the UK, you have the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Telegraph, the Sun, you know, some of the biggest selling newspapers are owned by a couple of people, all on the right wing, many of them Rupert Murdoch. And it seems to me like you have a right wing media whipping this stuff up because the broader social issues have already been lost.

People are way more, you go back, what, 30 years, or not even as many as 30 years, and people were, that the issue was gay people and they're going to come and they are going to adopt children and raise those children gay and they going to pervert your children, all this horrible rhetoric, but the majority of society, in the majority of, certainly my country, and I imagine your country, and the majority of them, people are kind of okay with gay people now, you know, that's not as big a thing. It It is in some places and there's still pockets of deep homophobia.

0:13:49 Thomas: Now that's interesting.

0:14:29 Thomas: See,

0:14:29 Michael: And I'm sure I don't want to minimize that at all.

0:14:30 Thomas: Now I'm worried. This is worrying me because I think there are some key differences that I want to outline. Quickly, in the media, because I wouldn't actually say that the right wing holds anywhere near the majority of the power over the media in the US. The key is they hold a monopoly over the right-wing media. So, like, the bulk of mainstream media is centrist, you know, like people, the people on the right will think it's left, people on the left will think it's too right. Like it's, but it's pretty centrist and it's got a liberal bent when it comes to certain things, because facts have a liberal bent when it comes to the right wing. This is something that now I'm worried, because maybe eventually someone will figure out how to do this where you are.

But what happened was all of the right wing is tuned into Fox News and is tuned in, it's mainly Fox News, but now the Breitbart thing - Breitbart doesn't have that much influence in terms of numbers, but somehow given what's happened in the last few years, they have an outsized influence when it comes to the narrative. So they post some nonsense or whatever, and then it It filters up into Fox News, and then sort of a more tame version of it becomes like right-wing belief, and it's an immense amount of power in that. It's not bigger than the liberal, I guess, quote-unquote liberal media in any way. It's actually smaller as a total, but it's more homogenous, and it's able to more power that way. And then the mainstream media, like I said, while it's centrist, it's to being pulled in an Overton window way by the right drifting for the right.

0:14:50 Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

0:15:22 Michael: The

0:16:09 Thomas: And it really does happen where they want to say, it just frustrated me to no end. Like I was listening to a Washington Post podcast on the memo, if you followed any of that nonsense and They're still doing this. Well, here's what Democrats think. Democrats think that this memo, and here's what Republicans think. Republicans think the memo is, it's like, can't you just for one time point out the fact that this memo is nonsense and everyone knows it's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense, they can't get away from doing that. Well, Republicans think that if the, you know, and it, and it props it up on this, there's two sides to everything thing, and so that's the dynamic I think that's going on here. And now I worry, do you think anyone will be able to to sort of homogenize the right-wing media and have it exert control over enough people where you are to to start creating that situation?

0:16:21 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:17:00 Michael: I don't know. Maybe what's different here partly is that when we talk about the media here, we typically mean the print media or the old traditional print titles now online rather than broadcast media. And if you look at print media, the right wing are relatively homogenous, or maybe they're stratified. So you've got the Sun, which is aiming at the working class person and trying to influence them towards a right wing place. And the Sun readers, I think, politically tend to be more conservative, but they're less likely to vote conservative as they are to vote UKIP or even the British National Party, which is our kind of far-right racist party here.

0:17:49 Michael: And that's not all Sun readers. But that's kind of the area of right wing that the Sun is targeting, marketing, whereas, uh, once those people have, uh, if you go up the class chain a little bit, your middle class, um, version of that is the Daily Mail, and then probably up a little bit more than that you've got the Telegraph and the Express, and they aren't trying to do the same thing necessarily, but a lot of their goals overlap. So all of those papers would have been, um, pro-Brexit, all of them would have, uh, been anti-immigration as a big reason for for being pro-Brexit, um, don't, even if the individual journalists at those papers don't actually believe that Brexit is a good idea. And I actually speak to journalists relatively often for some of the stuff that I do with my work. And I spoke to someone who was a freelancer who'd been in the Daily Mail the day after the referendum. And all of the journalists were looking at themselves like, what the fuck have we done?

0:18:36 Michael: Because they didn't think for a second Brexit would happen. So they felt comfortable and confident putting out the stories that the Mail expected them to write, not thinking it would have the level of impact or sway that it did. Um, so I think that's where the sway is in the UK, is in the the old traditional print media titles rather than broadcast media. The BBC is the biggest broadcast media, but the Bc is also hampered by a, um, a charter that says they have to be politically unbiased, and they don't necessarily, don't really know how to play that neutrality, and so they get, they get quite easily played by, Boris Johnson comes out and says a terrible thing, and the BBC will quote Boris Johnson's terrible thing in the headline of their story.

And then somewhere down the story, we'll point out some of the facts, that someone else will be pointing out the facts, that prove Boris Johnson wrong. But the headline that's floating around is whatever Boris Johnson has said, it would be, and yeah, the coverage of Trump is exactly like that. Trump says terrible thing, that's the headline. If you only skim headlines, you just see Trump saying the terrible thing and you don't see it being challenged. So I think that's another another thing that, uh,

0:18:45 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:19:41 Michael: Yeah, the media really has to work on, yeah.

0:19:41 Thomas: That's absolutely true. I think that's Something that we just, I think everybody, maybe even globally, like we're not equipped to handle that. Like when our version, and I guess I say our, I just mean in general, in society, if society's version of being neutral is, let's just report what the two sides said, that's inevitably going to favor whichever side decides to say like crazier and crazier crap, because it pulls that, you know, that end of the spectrum over further, further, further, and then again it once again looks like a, you know, okay, well we've reported the two sides, and then, uh, you know, that that's our, that's our job.

When really, if you want actual neutrality in a meaningful way, we need to start understanding that as being to the best of your ability, loyal to actual facts. And that should include when somebody says something outright, just wrong or dishonest or lying. That should include pointing that out. And, that's something that we just, yeah, yeah. But, could you talk a bit about, for anyone who hasn't heard it too, the latest episode. Now, what was it like to talk to this person? Because again, this was someone, this is not an American you're talking to, but were they, has the American culture war infected? Is he patient zero over there for, for dragging these, this rhetoric over

0:20:41 Michael: It's a distinction between objectivity and neutrality, yeah.

0:21:04 Michael: Unfortunately,

0:21:04 Thomas: To where you are?

0:21:06 Michael: I don't think he is a patient zero, and that's kind of one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation, uh, with him. Um, yeah, part of me feels slightly uncomfortable talking about talking about the conversation when I, when he isn't here to defend himself on it, which is kind of again a lean towards a, um, a fairness that, uh, the people on on the other side of these conversations would never afford you, you know, and that's kind of an irony in this is I feel uncomfortable in a way that they would almost never feel uncomfortable talking about my version of this.

But I think there are, it's not hugely pervasive, but there is an underground swell of people who are following the stuff that's happening, or the stuff that isn't happening in America, but is being reported as happening in American. So they can trot out Jordan B. Peterson, they can trots out Brett Weinstein, they won't have gone into any of the details of the actual case. And this was even evident in the conversation I had. The chap I was talking to, who is a lawyer by profession, I mean, he's a personal injury lawyer, so he's not working in the sort of human rights stuff or the stuff that might have come across some of the laws.

But as a lawyer, he was telling me quite confidently that Canadian Bill C-16 bans pronouns and classifies misgendering someone as hate speech. And of course, the bill doesn't actually mention pronouns, as you've pulled apart on your, uh, on, uh, Opening Arguments, um, so it was just the the pure confidence of, uh, of of explaining what was happening over in America without necessarily having had to bother going on off and reading

0:21:46 Thomas: In Canada,

0:22:33 Michael: Any sort of material sorry, in Canada.

0:22:33 Thomas: By the way, not in America, in Canada, but yeah, Yeah. Also, yeah,

0:22:37 Michael: Yeah, well, I mean, but the whole controversy is kicking off, uh, probably it feels like it's an American thing from a distance, but I guess, because it's been co-opted by so many parts of this culture war conversation in Amerika, I don't know how big this actually is in Canada anymore, more, um, but certainly it's a huge thing in, uh, in America right now, um, yes, that's one thing that strikes me, just, just fascinating, is the confidence to stride into these conversations without having read the, uh, initial detail, and that the hard thing is once you're in that conversation to police yourself, and I found myself making similar missteps talking about the language of James Demore's memo, because there was no way we were planning to bring up James Demore.

0:22:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

0:23:13 Michael: But we dash gallop into James Demore, I now have to defend that position, and I'm not, I haven't got the prep in front of me, and I make a few missteps, um, but what I think is fascinating about the way that conversations affected me is ever since that conversation all I can think about are the things that I said that were either wrong or unclear or could have been better, better stated, could have been better expressed, and that's where I'm sort of beating myself up, um, whereas seeing the comments on Facebook from the chap I was talking to, all he's doing is focusing on the cases where he, he thinks I was wrong on these details and saying nothing about broad swaths of the conversation that he was proven to know absolutely nothing about.

You know, he's saying the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which is a statue that was going to be brought down in Oxford by students. That was because they saw a video at in one of their lectures that they disliked, and it said something about race they dislike. So even after 120 years of Cecil Rhodes's foundation funding the university, they were going to pull his statue down because they felt oppressed by the statue.

You, and actually it came from Cape Town University, where Cecil Rhodes is not a figure to be celebrated, and actually, if you're black in South Africa and you're going to university and you see a figure there of someone who literally was responsible for the enslavement of your people in that country, you're not going to feel particularly good about that. Now you're allowed into universities, and that's the the genesis of it. And he was completely ignorant of that, had no problem talking in detail about his his

0:23:14 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:24:33 Michael: Version of it, hasn't mentioned that that we talked about that at all in any of his comments where he's proven me wrong of everything I said, um, so yeah, it's just, there's something fascinating and impossible to unpick, or it seems impossible to unpick, as to how you break through that confidence in ignorance that, um, some people seem to have, and I don't just mean him, but certainly he was a reasonable exponent of it, which is

0:24:41 Thomas: Oh yeah. This is a very common, common tactic now.

0:24:59 Michael: Yeah it's My, there is nothing anybody else can tell me about something that I can't work out from, from my own taking a look at from a distance, or listening to people I agree with, and there is no way that anybody else's point of view could impact my assessment of things. It's, it's the, the false, um, belief that we are supreme rational actors, you know, the people who want to see themselves as "the facts don't care about your feelings" uh automatons, just repeat, repeating that annoying, uh, catchphrase, but really what they're, are actually finding is they don't want to know the facts that disagree with their feelings.

0:25:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:25:35 Michael: And so that's why, that's what, that's, you know, their feelings don't, uh, don't agree, don't care about the facts, I guess.

0:25:39 Thomas: Well, you know, I just realized, um, you were recently invoked on this podcast when I was talking with my friend, Aaron Rabi about the conversation Jordan B. Peterson had with Cathy Newman, I think is her name. Is that something that was on your radar at all? And once again, it's an...

0:25:54 Michael: What? That I was mentioned on your show, I

0:26:02 Thomas: With... Yeah, the important question

0:26:03 Michael: Actually hear it, I was just teasing, but I did actual hear it, it was uh, it was flattering to be mentioned.

0:26:05 Thomas: Is, did you hear that

0:26:06 Michael: I did, I was driving to work, and I thought, oh my god, this is weird. Yeah.

0:26:07 Thomas: We mentioned you? No, yeah, I meant to... Yeah. Did you feel it at all when we were talking about you? Yeah, I know. It was that interview, Jordan B. Peterson interview on your Radar, um, because that certainly is something maybe to gauge how this is, porting um, over from here to there.

0:26:27 Michael: It's sort of, it was and it wasn't. Um, I kind of, I wasn't interested enough to actually watch that interview, um, partly because I'm not as, not too interested in, uh, what Jordan B. Peterson has to say to journalists when he's being defensive.

I've seen some of the stuff he said when he's putting forward his point of view in a non-defensive way where he feels sort of free to make the points that he wants to make, um, and I'd read that the interview went terribly, and I thought, I'm not sure I'm going to get much out of this, but yeah, trying to unpick those kind of conversations, um, was on my mind, if not that particular interview, because it stemmed from the, the Skeptic magazine putting the campus craziness on the front page, which I threw up on Facebook, saying that I threw it up on Facebook, and then threw up privately at the sight of it, but I said, effectively, that it's a fucking embarrassment because campus craziness is a segment on Fox, and I think it's, you know, it's right wing, conservative, right wing meme pushed out to try and sort of stalk these kind of culture wars, the idea that freedom of speech is under such vicious attack by the left.

It's, just, even if you, you accept the details of the stories as they want to put them across, the people who are making this campus crazy narrative have maybe six examples of it across the 4,000 colleges in America, a few more hundreds of thousands in Canada, a couple of hundred in the UK, we're talking, even if we accept all the details that their case has been accurate, and you've shown on your, uh, your other podcast that many of them aren't, or maybe it was in this podcast

0:26:49 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I

0:27:54 Michael: In fact, um, but

0:27:55 Thomas: Was gonna, I wasn't going to correct you, but yeah, it's mainly on this podcast.

0:27:56 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but even if you accept their details as accurate, you're still talking about 0.1% at most of campuses are experiencing these problems. And even if those are the case, you are still talking largely about students who are, what, 18 to 21. And if they have done something dumb, they are probably in exactly the right place to do something dumb and learn from it. I don't think we should be legislating against people being dumb at university, even if that's what was happening. So yeah, that I found to be a complete embarrassment, that the premier, or one of the premier publications for critical thinking in the US, was taking this as their ground when there's so much other stuff going on in the U.S. that's of concern, you know, you've got a climate change denier, vaccine denier, uh, birther as your president right now. You've got a marauding white supremacist movement emboldened, including on student campuses, but the issue is too many 18 year olds are, uh, are disagreeing with professors who, uh, who aren't. You've been disagreed with. It's, yeah, it's just astonishing that that's, this is where we are.

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0:30:26 Thomas: One thing that's even more frustrating is even when one of these cases goes their way. So the, the recent one was, I guess it's Laurier, I think, uh, with this, uh, this grad student, now I'm blanking on her name, but where she had the whole conversation she recorded or whatever. The people were disciplined. The university apologized, acknowledged it like, oh, we actually, they were wrong to, to discipline her. You know, know, like they, they did everything that they needed to do, which was to say, Hey, this professor got it wrong. And there wasn't like all this stuff and they still have to make it out like, Oh, not good enough. There's not, you know, they're still milking it for all it's worth because that's what you have to do when you only have three or four examples. And by the way, half of them are in Canada. That one was in Canada and and, uh.

0:30:43 Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:31:12 Michael: And...

0:31:12 Thomas: They still have milk it for All It's Worth. And I think it's Lindsay Shepherd maybe is her name. She's instantly a celebrity now. Like this is the power that that has, that that narrative has and how much people are wanting it. The minute you do something like record a professor telling you maybe you should be considerate about trans people, you know, in a certain way. And it turns out the professor was kind of, kind of off in what he was saying. Like he wasn't entirely, uh, I, I actually thought he was, he shouldn't have, um, disciplined her in this way because it, the, the material she brought up was appropriate for the class and still she become, you know, she's got, who knows, a hundred thousand followers. Now, last time I checked, she had like 50,000, but that was months ago. Just, just for that, uh. That's how much power there is to, to people needing this narrative to, just fit their purposes.

0:32:03 Michael: What's really weird is looking at it from a distance, it seems to look an awful lot like, um, was it, um, what was the lady's name, Kim something, that the clerk who refused to, uh, sign a, sorry, yeah. It could be Yeah, and she's instantly thrust into the the right-wing headlines and dialing in all the, the Fox News segments, uh, and, you know, gets that level of, uh, of, of attention and platform very quickly. And it just, from a distance, it feels like the same kind of thing. It feels that we're just watching the same pattern happening with another right-wing character. It's just, this time, the people who are against the, the Christian in one sense, um, are often pro the Christians in another sense. I mean, this is an astonishing thing that happened in, even in the, the post-conversation dissection of, uh, of the Be Reasonable interview, and it's something I, I normally try and avoid doing, is this kind of post-conversation dissection. I don't think it normally helps me to help anyone too much, really.

But one of the, the things that the chap I was talking to put up as evidence was this case of a teacher in the UK who lost his job because he misgendered a student. He had a group of students and he said, "You're right, lads." And one of them was a trans student and he lost his job over it. And when you, and you look at the details of it, and the teacher had been suspended because a complaint had been made about him doing it.

0:32:12 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Kim Davis, maybe? Is that what it was? Mm-hmm. Oh yeah.

0:32:34 Thomas: Right.

0:33:24 Michael: Um, and because a complainant had been mad, he'd been suspended, which is kind, I guess, normal procedure if you're being investigated for a complaint. And he quit his job as a result of being suspended or being investigated over this and said, effectively, "I'm a Christian. It's my Christian beliefs that led me to do this. And I don't want my Christian beliefs challenged at work. I don't think I should have my beliefs put in the microscope." I mean, I'm paraphrasing a lot of it there. And the chap I'm talking to is putting this up and saying, "I feel a lot sympathy for him." And it's like, you are an atheist who, when I knew, the guy I was talking, he was actually a former member of the Merseyside Skeptic Society maybe six, seven years ago, he was an ardent atheist, he was a would-be Hitchens firebrand atheist, and you are literally supporting a Christian's right to exercise their religious, their religion, in a public school, uh, to the detriment of one of their pupils. That's the, the rights you're standing up for right now, yeah.

0:34:11 Thomas: Yeah, the same logic applies to teaching, not teaching evolution because it's their Christian, but it's unbelievable. It's been so frustrating and it really ultimate poetic arc for the online shitlord, for the YouTube shit. It really is like starting off worshiping Christopher Hitchens, who would have back in the day would have absolutely just gone on a tirade against Jordan B. Peterson and his nonsense about, can't all the same crap you've heard from all these debates. You know, you can'T be good if you're without co-opting a Christian worldview that you're borrowing all the ethics, all just Just all the stuff Hitchens would have, frankly, had a moral reaction to. I would have been morally indignant to. All that same stuff they're now celebrating because of the culture wars, because someone who believes those things now is also against political correctness.

0:34:19 Michael: Yeah.

0:35:08 Thomas: I firmly believe that, and we can kind of bring it back to, I guess, the conversation about the two skeptic communities, the community at large in the U.S., I really believe has taken to the forefront. Like, it's the most important part. Like, the thing people care about most. It caused Sam Harris to either not care or not be aware that he was taking a religious religious fundamentalist side over the freedom from religion foundation in the Masterpiece Cake Shop case. He either doesn't know or he doesn't care. And everybody who argues with me, when I keep pointing this out, he took? Ben Shapiro's side in this. So what, he has to take the freedom form religion foundation side like he has do?

0:35:55 Thomas: That's a fallacy, that he just, because he's an atheist, and it's like, no, I'm pointing out that this is where we are. Like, it's not that we're all taking the FFRF side because we're all atheists, loyalists to the cause. It's that that's the clearly correct answer to this argument is we don't allow people to mistreat people because of their religious beliefs in a place of business and government, whatever it is. That's clearly the right answer to that ethical problem. That used to be something all atheasts easily agreed on was, yes, of course we We shouldn't allow a Christian just because they don't like gay people to turn to just turn people out. That's what we tried to stop in the 60s. But now it's not so clear.

0:36:26 Michael: Yeah. So Well, that, that really, you know, distresses me, you know, and saddens me, really, really, because I don't think that's the case here in the UK at all. I don't think the skeptical community is that way in the slightest. And I often try and think about why that is. And I think part of it is because it seems, from a distance in America, that a lot of that stuff is filtered through the community from totemic individuals who have been the head of the movement or have been prominent and hugely visible in the movement for a long time and kind of are the people who, um, bring

0:36:43 Thomas: It should.

0:37:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:37:15 Michael: People into that movement. So, so people would have got into the movement

0:37:17 Thomas: So it's like it's more you're saying it's more like celebrity based, kind of like there's a, there's somebody that, it's fan-based culture kind of

0:37:18 Michael: Uh yeah. Yeah, I guess, or I don't want to sort of, um, throw in pejorative, the pejorative connotations around that, because there's nothing necessarily wrong with getting into skepticism because you saw James Randi's work and thought, "Wow, this is a really interesting and amazing thing that I really want to get involved in." Um, but it seems like the US has been led by, uh, individuals, individuals at the head of organizations, um, for, for the majority of the time that I've known skepticism, and probably way before that too, whereas in the UK we just have skeptics in the pubs, really.

And so the barrier to entry to that is if you are in a city that doesn't have one and you want to have one, have one, and if you want to know how to run one, or you want some ideas on how to run one, here are 40 other people in the UK running them, and they might have varying numbers of members, from 15 to 100. And so that's kind of the lay of the land in terms of the skeptical community.

But we don't really have these totemic figures. And probably the closest that we had was Richard Dawkins. But even when Dawkins would say stuff that was wrong, he was quite often called out for it or criticized for it here in the UK.

0:37:35 Thomas: Right, right, right.

0:38:27 Michael: Whereas, yeah, I just don't, because we're not top down, it kind of comes with its positives and its negatives. And I think the positive is that that you can think around the flaws of individuals, and those individuals are inevitably flawed because they're individuals. And the negatives is that you find it far harder to organize anything, because you don't have an individual saying, "Hey, guys, this is a good idea. Why don't 5,000 of you get behind me on it?" It's much harder to get those kind of networks together. But it seems at the moment that lack of figurehead is actually working out in our favor rather than to our detriment.

0:38:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:03 Thomas: Yeah, that's interesting. If I were to take a guess, and again, this is just taking a stab at it, but I wonder if it has to do with, once again, the difference in the situation, because I think things like having a, and I don't even mean this pejoratively in any way, but having a victim narrative, and it's a real one, like atheists in this country, or secularists, or people who don't want to have the Christian law imposed upon them, are in a very real sense victims a lot of the time in this, this country, in a way that maybe they aren't where you are. And it could be that that, that's such a powerful thing that it does give rise to a little bit more hero worship, in a way, like, it, like, sorry, if you're embroiled in some sort of actual, like, battle for very important ideals, you might be more prone to saying, "Okay, let's follow this, this leader who's doing good work," versus if it's a more casual, like, well, okay.

0:39:59 Thomas: Let's, you know, UK skepticism, let's point out this thing over here. Let's point out this over here and it's not like a systemic, you know, there's not a bad guy. There's not as much, you know, there's not like an opposing villain that, that you can demonize in a way. Maybe it makes you less prone to following a leader in that way.

0:40:17 Michael: Yeah. Maybe.

0:40:17 Thomas: I.

0:40:18 Michael: Although I think, um, we certainly have, you know, the bad guys, and we certainly have systemic issues, um, that, that as skeptics we're up against. I mean, the, the acceptance of alternative medicine at the heart of the, the NHS was, uh, was one of them that, uh, we're, um, rather successfully pushing back against, uh, unfortunately, over the last sort of 10 years, and more specifically the last kind of fall, with the Good Thinking Society, um, but I think it's maybe the, the power, power of the opposition.

So when it comes to homeopathy in the UK, they've got a fair bit of money, but they aren't an all-powerful institution that pervades every town, city, and village and has acolytes across the country worshipping them every Sunday. The most powerful person in terms of homeopaty in the UK is Prince Charles, and the closer he gets to the throne, the more he gets to be a mute, because he can't express his opinions and still be constitutionally in a position where he can take the throne with the same level of influence. Whereas in America, you were against the religion, which I guess, even particularly after the Cold War, was so ingrained in American culture as a way of being anti them.

0:40:46 Thomas: Hmm.

0:41:32 Michael: You are pro God, guns, and the pursuit of liberty, or whatever it is. Maybe because the power of the opposition you're up against is so great or has been so great that the figures who oppose them end up seeming like they are more powerful or less able to be questioned. I don't know, something like that, maybe.

0:41:54 Thomas: Yeah. Guess in terms of what we can do with all this, I just don't know. Like, is there, do you have any thoughts on, who you are wishing they were maybe where you are and not where I am? What do you think we can doing as a community over here to, to try to turn things around? Do you have any thoughts?

0:42:12 Michael: Yeah, although I mean these aren't particularly informed thoughts and are probably hugely ignorant of what it's like on the ground in America, but I think one of the things we can do as a community is be a community, community.

Um, that's one of the strengths in the UK, is that skeptics, you know, there is a Skeptics in the Pub, someone's decided they want to have a few drinks with people who are skeptical in their local area, they set up a Skeptic in the Pub, people come along, those people get to know each other, they get to nor their local, you know, the next town over, the next city over, and there's a, uh, a grassroots network that kind of, uh, springs up from that, and that's where a community sense comes from.

Um, and and that's kind of been a strength in the in the UK, is that loads of people now who end end up doing a lot of Skeptics in the Pub talks and end up speaking at conferences um were just people who ran a group or came along to a group and thought this is interesting and then plowed their own furrow and got the support of the group, of the community behind it. So I think anything we can do to kind of foster a sense of

0:43:06 Michael: Grassroots community in the US is a very positive thing, especially if that isn't necessarily based around a totemic institution. Um, I don't know whether that there is, I'm an optimist enough to think that there, you've got plenty of listeners, you know, Scathing Guy's got plenty listeners, Cognizant got plenty listening, there's loads of people out there who are saying good, sensible, uh, positive things, who are questioning the the shitholery and shit laudery out there, and are getting audiences for it. So clearly there's an appetite for a level of a type of skepticism that isn't pervaded by red pill, uh, super hyper rational, rational automaton, I don't care about feelings except my own, types of people. So it's anything we can do to engender a community between those people who feel like they're the ones outside of things, who are left behind because the people who follow this alt-rightness or the Jordan B.

0:44:06 Michael: Peterson, I'm going to say mean things about trans people and that's going to get me an audience, the people who follow that, um, can often be the loudest, and that can feel like they are the ones who are, who are um, most prominent in the movement, just because they're an empty vessel that shouted the loudness, but, we, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who are actually outnumber those people but don't realize it because they aren't the louddest.

So, yeah, anything that can be done to foster a sense of community and a sense, a support network, and a grassroots kind of movement below that, even if it's just as simple as, as all the Skeptics in the Public groups in the UK started out as, "I want to go for a pint in the local bar, the local pub," um, and just stick a thing up, a meetup, and say, "Anybody else who's skeptical, fancy a drink?" And that's where the UK skeptical scene came from, and it's, it's got a a lot of strength to it, and a lot, um, vibrancy, and, uh, a lot, uh, community to it, for that reason. So I don't know if that's something that would work in in America, or or whether this is a hopelessly naive and optimistic, uh, skeptic from from, uh, from another shores.

0:45:08 Thomas: Yeah, no, I think you're the optimist, and I can play the pessimist here, because in some ways my instincts are a little bit in the opposite direction, because I think the critical problem is that, I'll just speak for American discourse the way I see it here, our epistemologies are so incompatible on left and right that that's such a dividing force that there really can't be any organized community that transcends that in much of a meaningful way, unless it's just completely unrelated. What I mean by that is, if we try to band together, if we say, "Okay, skeptics unite," and then a bunch of people are going to say, "Well, what are we uniting for?" And then you mentioned, "Well, you know, I'm against things like the Masterpiece Cake Shop. I'm again, things like taking away health care, taxes going to the top based on bogus claims of that's what actually helps," that, like, all this stuff that I care about right now.

0:45:12 Michael: Yeah.

0:46:07 Thomas: And I, maybe not everybody cares about it, that's fine, but that's the stuff I care about. Like the theocrats, what the theocrats are doing is largely tied into what the right wing is doing. And then what will happen is a bunch of people who get their facts from alternate sources will think I'm completely nuts on that.

So it inevitably, guess, devolves to a left versus right thing, like everything, because we're just not watching the same film, as has been the common metaphor, for, like, we're just, we're not in the same set of facts.

My instinct has been, you know what, I almost, okay, I don't even necessarily care about a skeptic community, what I care about right now is is not like an unwavering loyalty to Democrats or anything, although people will accuse me of that, but there are issues that I think we have lost sight of, similarly to the to how we talked about in the beginning of the show, of how I think people in the UK take it for granted a lot of the things that are going in the U S like, because they would be so far to the right in the UK.

0:47:02 Thomas: It's almost like they don't people like Carl don't either don't know or don't care or whatever, but there are so many basic issues that people with an alternate set of facts. That's just not based on reality are able to get so wrong that that's, that's what I see is the biggest thing. Climate change again, healthcare like this. We, I am really worried. It's another guest pending interview I have about another economic crash, because a lot of the signs I was reading a Washington Post article, a lot of the signs are there when when inequality gets this bad, and Republicans just passed what they did, which is this massive tax cut for the top, things get bad. Like I'm worried about that. I know that's it's not a skeptic issue per se.

0:47:47 Thomas: But that's like I'm I'm more worried about that now. I'm worried about reproductive rights. You know, like all this stuff that that's been my instinct to be like, well, that's where I'll be. And then if skeptics are interested and want to be there with me, like, that'S great. But I'm not I'm not pursuing skepticism or a skeptic community for its own sake anymore.

0:47:54 Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

0:48:09 Michael: I mean, that's, yeah, for me that's a a real shame to to hear, um, just because I I guess I I get such a, um, I get so much from a skeptical community, and I enjoy the the skeptic community that's around me and the ones I've seen in Australia, and, uh, I've been to Sweden and seen a great kind of skeptical community there, and I can see it can be an incredibly, uh, powerful and, uh, and useful resource, and I don't know whether there's a way of getting a skeptic community light, where you gather around issues rather than around philosophies.

So you might not be able to convince everybody who ought to be paying attention to the evidence that universal healthcare is unquestionably a good idea and leaving 28 million people without healthcare is a really dumb idea or a really cruel idea. You might be able to get everybody on board with that, but you still have a huge anti-vaccination movement in the US, and you see in Australia there's a couple of great groups in Australia for whom countering anti-vaccination groups are their main and pretty much only remit, and so the people come from

0:48:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:14 Michael: Various different kind of beliefs and backgrounds because they have this one common goal, and and forge themselves over a common goal, and maybe then, once you've kind of got some some grounding with each other on a common call, there might be an opportunity to to explore the the differences between each Other. Because you trust each other.

0:49:29 Thomas: You know that that'S really interesting. Thing. That's a great point, because there are places, those are the key places, and and maybe it would be, that would be a good way to go, is to kind of focus in and find those issues. You mentioned anti-vax, that's something that is, I think that's pretty politically neutral actually, I think in our, in in my country, I think there's a far-right libertarian, uh, view against the government making you do anything to your kids, and then there's also a far lefty woo anti-science version of the argument.

And it's kind of, there's an overlap there. And I've talked about this before, but there are some anti-science positions in this country that really oddly are like 50-50 politically. Like they're perfectly symmetrical politically. And that would be a place where that higher, I almost wanted to say loyalty, but that's not really the word, but I that tie-in to skepticism over a political leaning can be emphasized. You know, it's like, no, I'm not just a Democrat. I'm not just Republican. It's, I want science to better inform our opinions. And here are some issues that are, you know, they're symmetrical, right and left. And it's not as though you have have to be to either side on them. You can be loyal to evidence and loyal to science. So that's a good thought. It might be a way to try to bridge that gap and bring things back to skepticism rather than just like partisanship.

0:49:30 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:50:55 Michael: And you know, I, I do honestly think, and maybe again this is, uh, my wife constantly accused me, accuses me of being hopelessly naive and optimistic and kind of a Pollyanna in my, my view of people, but I honestly think that once you have something where you can, uh, connect with someone that you disagree with, and and you humanize them and they humanize you, it's far easier to have a civil discussion about it. You know, it's so easy to get into, um, to to leave each other insulting YouTube comments and to get onto a Facebook thread rabbit hole and never actually have a conversation. But I think once you're in any way invested in someone, and that might be because you've done some activism to try and raise vaccination rates and to counter local anti-vax nonsense, for example, once you've got that level of personal investment, it's it's much harder to just burn that person off because they've said something you disagree with.

0:51:45 Michael: So I don't know whether that's a way of kind of breaking down some sort of divide. I don't know.

0:51:50 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Well, we're running out of time. I want to definitely, if you don't mind touching on, you said some things that I thought were very interesting about tying in the article that you co-wrote just, I think, came out just today and the skepticism approach. Would you mind giving a little bit of info on that?

0:52:09 Michael: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's a horrendously distressing case of an 11-year-old boy called Jonathan who has had brain damage since birth. His mum was in a car accident when he was still in the womb and he's borne brain damage with quite severe cerebral palsy. And the medical technicians who did a scan of his brain and said it was the worst brain scan he'd ever seen, this particular medical technician. And the doctors predicted he'd never be able to walk or never beable to feed himself, never beble to talk, maybe not even be able ever to recognize his family. And so that's how he kind of progressed the first seven or eight years of his life. But then his mum met a specialist who convinced her that she could reach Jonathan by using a spelling board. You hold a board up in front of Jonathan and he can indicate with his eyes which of the letters he wants to spell.

0:52:55 Michael: Well, and now Jonathan has his own blog and he, uh, he writes incredibly eloquent prose and very sophisticated poetry. When he was nine he had a very nuanced take on what we should do after Brexit, which is an incredible thing to have as a nine-year-old, uh, let alone as anyone, especially a nine year old who'd only been taught for two or three years, um, but when in the media is putting plenty of stories out in praise of what is an inspirational story.

And if if Jonathan really is able to communicate and able to be as eloquent and able, as is claimed in one of the Daily Mail articles, that he was put in a maths class with children literally twice his age and was able to do maths quicker than any of the children in the class, even though he'd only been taught numbers a few years previously. It's an astonishing mind. If the story all proves true, that's an incredibly uplifting story.

But when you look at the details of it and you see the way that Jonathan spells using the spelling board, it's very very hard to see any movement of his eyes as his facilitator is moving her hand very quickly around the letters. For many of the videos, the times he's not even looking at the board, and it looks an awful lot like facilitator communication, which is a well-known and well

0:53:04 Thomas: Yeah,

0:54:04 Michael: Debunked and discredited technique where effectively the facilitator is the one who is saying, well, I'm pretty sure he looked over in this direction, so I'm going to go over here, and I'm sure he meant this letter, and if he meant these three letters then the next letter would be this one anyway.

And without realizing it, you're doing the spelling, and you're effectively operating someone like a human Ouija board, which is an incredibly terrible and distressing, um, notion, I think, um, and so I've just written an article because Jonathan is, uh, Jonathan's parents have started a campaign to have other children who are similarly afflicted and similarly thought to be non-communicative but actually, if Jonathan story were to prove true, very communicative, to have those children moved away from special educational needs classes and moved into regular classes where they can be taught along with everybody else.

And that's what they're pushing for to happen to to other children with similar disabilities, and it's just an extraordinary distressing thing, because there are three, there are two options here. One is that Jonathan really is as eloquent and articulate and numerate as his, as all the stories in his blog would say, and there really is something remarkable going on here. Or two is that Jonathan isn't. And And the move into a normal class isn't particularly useful, potentially, for him. Certainly wouldn't be useful for many of the vulnerable disabled children. And sadly, the connection that his parents feel that they have to this son, they feel they've got to know through the language that he's been using, is unfortunately false and incorrect hope. So it's just an incredibly tragic case, I think.

0:55:36 Thomas: Definitely. It really does strike me as something where as much as your feelings want you to go one way, and we would all love for the the for the the actuality of the story to be that, what it's being presented as skepticism, I think is important, especially when someone is making political claims and policy claims based on something. I mean, it's one thing if it's just like, you know, not affecting anybody and it's just something that's happening somewhere between two people. But like, if it is something that is being used in a way, like a blog and all that, like It really does strike me that someone needs to take a skeptical eye to it, and I'm glad that you guys have written this article outlining that. But talk to me before we were recording, what went into your approach in writing this, because that's a difficult, very difficult article to write.

0:56:06 Michael: Yeah.

0:56:29 Michael: Yeah. Yeah, I think the way that you write an article like that, you have to be very, very aware of the fact that you are talking inevitably. I mean, it was published in The Guardian. It'd be very surprising if Jonathan's parents didn't see it. So you have be aware that you're writing to be read by the parents of this child who they feel like they'd lost a child and now they feel they've got the connection. And the worst case scenario from your article is that you, you effectively take their child away from them again. And it'd be so easy to be the type of skeptic who says, well, all that matters is reality.

Anybody who is fooled or fooled themselves deserves it. Facts don't care about your feelings. It'd be so easy to be that kind of skeptic. But think of the enormous damage that could be done and what you would achieve with that kind of approach. I think you'd just get nowhere positive. You'd cause an awful lot of hurt, and, uh, you, you'd just be acting in an incredibly unethical way. And so when you're writing these articles, you have to bear in mind that the people, uh, who, um, when it comes, I think, to any pseudoscience, uh, pretty much the people who are, that there are victims, genuinely, uh, genuine victims, um, you're losing out on this or being, uh, being convinced into these things.

And, uh, whenever I, I see skeptics saying, well, you know, it's Darwin Awards, you know, if they, if their kids die because they don't vaccinate, well, that's because their parents were stupid and their line will die out, what an astonishingly cruel way of putting that, and what an astoundingly self-defeating way of putting that, because there is nobody who is on the fence about vaccinations here who is convinced because you've called them stupid and that their kids deserve to die. Nobody's convinced by that. So yeah, whenever I see sceptics having that kind of approach, it just makes my heart sink because. Because you

0:56:49 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh,

0:58:15 Michael: Can lose an argument despite being right, or you can win an argument and still lose if you have all the right answers.

0:58:20 Thomas: Yeah! Happens to me all the time. Time. I lose arguments constantly despite being right.

0:58:26 Michael: But I mean, you can come out of the argument having disproved everything someone said and still be the person who was wrong in that argument because of your tone. You come out and you've not behaved the right way. We, I think, skeptics will always face kind of a bit of an uphill struggle because the people who are selling pseudosciences get to sell falsehoods. Whether they know they're falsehood or whether they're also conned, they get to tell falsehood. And it's much, much easier to sell a falsehood because you aren't bound by reality. Whereas on our side, we're bound both by reality but also by decency and compassion. I think it's so important that we keep those things in mind because we lose our audience, we lose the people we're trying to reach the second we're the ones who are the smug, haughty, facts-don't-care-about-your-feelings type. Yeah, I just find it so hard to see people talking that way, partly because I think It's just an unethical and incompassionate way of dealing with another human being, and partly because It's so astonishingly self-defeating.

0:58:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. And put another way, it's almost, I think you'd almost say that feelings are facts in a way, like people's feelings are fact about the world that you do have to negotiate, you know, like you do have to deal with how a large group of people is going to feel about something. It's not something you get to just ignore and then it goes away and has no effect on you.

0:59:52 Michael: Yeah. There's certainly factors. I mean, it's certainly something you have to factor in, um, you can't, we aren't operating in an emotionless vacuum, and the people who claim we are are evidence that we aren't, a lot of the time.

0:59:56 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, well, that's well put. I'm going to link the article, of course. And thanks so much for coming on. Really interesting conversation. I come out of it more depressed. You can come out of it optimistic because that's you. But Michael Marshall, thanks so much for becoming on the show.

1:00:13 Michael: Thanks. For having me, Thomas. Cheers. Right.

1:00:44 Thomas: Thanks again to Marsh for that really interesting stuff. I also want to point out that subsequent to this interview, a really disturbing clip emerged of Carl, Sargon of Akkad, going on kind of a racist meltdown, and I'm sure there will be the usual apologetics for it, but at any rate, if you're not interested in that, I don't blame you, but it was particularly ridiculous, not just the disgusting racism, but also he goes on to complain about how he's being treated on the internet, and how how, how people aren't true. People need to realize he's a person too. And it's, it just was, it was so frustrating to, to hear that from him. So I'll include the link in the show notes. If that's anything you're interested in, if you're not, I do not blame you.

1:01:31 Thomas: Enough of that, let's switch to a far happier topic, which is my new members over at SeriousPod.com slash support. And they are Moist Robot, Frederick, Eat the Rich Before They Eat You, Mike and Ryan from the Unholy Generation Podcast, and Pyro, thank you so much for your support, you are making this show happen. They are Scott M., John, Karen Sheets-Sole, support non-profit immigration legal services at immigrantlc.org, I always love those who use their shout out for a good cause, that's really nice. Corey Johnston, host of the Brainstorm Podcast and the Hardcore Skeptic, James Hamblin, Andrew the Waddington, Left at the Valley Podcast, Luke Voucher, Marco Rosano, yes, the Marco Rosana, just listen to the Wayward Willis Podcast already, and this next supporter is literally my favorite. Secular Saint, called me out on Twitter for not having a hilarious name. NZ Tim, capitalism is the shoulder bullshits of economics. New Orleans will pay France to take us back. Please. Zabi and J Alden Waltz, thank you, thank you, thank you. Once again, if you'd like to support the show, enjoy ad-free content and bonus content, go to seriespod.com support.

With that said, that's it for today's show. And as I keep mentioning, I have so many good reviews recorded and scheduled. It's really exciting. This is an exciting time. And actually, I need to give a shout out and thanks to my wife, Lydia, She's been handling guest outreach lately, and she is doing an absolutely killer job.

1:03:08 Thomas: Oh, and one more thing, I am going to vague book right now and say I have a really exciting announcement coming up in probably a week from today, and if you're a member, of course, I'll let you in on the secret a little early, but I'm excited, I know it's vague booking, but it's really cool, so that'll be in about a week. So, with that said, that's all I've got for you today, see you next time.