355: Michael Shermer—Hunting for Anomalies

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

History, Society & Culture

4.9 • 40.8K Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2023

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, podcaster, and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University talks about why we believe weird things, how our brains seek patterns to stay safe, the state of science and journalism, intellectual humility vs. certainty, the surprising rise of antisemitism, and his book Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, it's the way I heard it on Halloween, at least at this moment in time.
0:09.0	Episode 355 is upon us.
0:12.0	It's called Hunting for Anomalies with Michael Shermer.
0:16.0	Chuck thought Michael Shermer would be a good guest for Halloween.
0:19.0	How come?
0:20.0	Well, he's a guy who got on your
0:23.0	radar originally because he wrote the book, Why People Believe Weird Things. And I believe
0:29.5	you gave me a copy of that book a million years ago. And you gave it to a lot of people.
0:35.1	Dear friends, many of whom who were believing what I thought were weird things at the time,
0:39.3	but we don't have to get into that now.
0:40.6	What was I believing at the time that you thought I needed that book?
0:44.1	Well, you know what?
0:45.1	You and I were having a lot of...
0:46.0	Was that in my crystal period?
0:47.0	Yes.
0:47.7	Yes.
0:48.1	We were having a lot of conversations about the new age and all of what was possible.
0:56.0	And Jonathan Edwards was on TV, making a fortune, taking people's money, claiming to read their minds.
1:03.7	And, you know, this was just another sort of version of the prior generation when Yuri
1:09.1	Geller was bending spoons and so forth.
1:12.3	And so Shermer came across my radar originally as a kind of debunker,
1:17.4	you know, a good-natured guy who just wanted people to see the truth of a thing
	...

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