Humanism Now | Secular Ethics, Curiosity and Compassionate Change

52. Michael Marshall on Compassionate Skepticism: Empowering Critical Thinking, Beyond Being Right

• Humanise Live • Season 1 • Episode 52

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“Being a skeptic doesn’t make me smarter or infallible—it just means I’m trying to fail slightly less often.”

Michael Marshall has spent more than 15 years investigating pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and the psychology that sustains them. As Project Director of the Good Thinking Society, President of the Merseyside Skeptics Society and Editor of The Skeptic, Marsh has gone undercover at flat-earth conventions, exposed fake psychics, and campaigned successfully to end NHS funding for homeopathy. In this conversation, he explores how “compassionate skepticism”, leading with empathy and curiosity rather than confrontation can help us counter misinformation and connect more deeply with one another.

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Topics we cover

 ✔︎ Skepticism as practice, not a badge of superiority
 ✔︎ The ethics of “compassionate skepticism”
 ✔︎ How pseudoscience harms—and why empathy works better than ridicule
 ✔︎ What Flat Earth believers reveal about human psychology
 ✔︎ The legacy of QED and building communities grounded in reason

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Music: Blossom by Light Prism

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

James Hodgson:

Welcome to the Humanism Now podcast. I'm your host, James Hodgson. Our guest today has been at the forefront of the skeptical movement for more than 15 years. Michael Marshall, or Marsh, as he's widely known, is the project director of the Good Thinking Society, president of the Merseyside Skeptic Society, and editor of The Skeptic. He co-hosts the No Rogan podcast and has been the co-host of Skeptics with a K for more than 15 years. Through his long-running Be Reasonable podcast, Marsh has interviewed proponents of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. And his undercover investigations into psychics, anti-vaxxers, and alternative medicine practitioners have informed reporting across the UK media. Beyond his media work, Marsh has lectured on journalism and public relations at universities, helping students understand how misinformation spreads. Michael is also one of the co-founders and organizers of QED, the UK's leading skeptical conference, which this year hosts its final edition in Manchester in October. The event is already sold out, but today we'll explore QED's impact and legacy and what it means to dedicate one's career to skepticism. Marsh, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to Humanism Now.

Michael Marsh:

Oh, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, James.

James Hodgson:

So you personally define yourself as a skeptic. You have built a career on being a professional skeptic. But I think it might be helpful to start by understanding how you personally define the skepticism. Is this a worldview? Is it a set of tools? Is it a community? All of the above. What's your personal definition of skepticism?

Michael Marsh:

Yeah, so I'd say it's a mix of those things, really. What I would say is I don't like using it as a label to suggest that I'm somehow better than or smarter than or less likely to fall for misinformation than someone else. So I see skepticism as I'm a skeptic, therefore I'm going to try my best to use skeptical tools to analyze the stuff I come across and to try and think critically. And I'm going to fail to do that, but I'm going to fail to do it slightly less frequently than I would if I wasn't trying. And I think that's what I prefer skeptics to sort of um see themselves as, rather than you do, it can be easy to fall into this idea of I am a skeptic, therefore point me at something to be right about. And I think the moment you do that, you're very much setting yourself up to give yourself a lot of blind spots that you just miss something very fundamental. So for me, yeah, skepticism, it's a way of approaching life, it's a way of evaluating the things you come across, and also it's a way of giving yourself kind of goals, aims, missions. I don't know. Like I think being a skeptic also means that we should be looking out for other people because when we're in the worst position we might come across in our lives, that's when we're most vulnerable and least able to think critically and assess things critically. And if I want someone to watch out for me when I'm in that position, I need to be watching out for other people when they're in that position. And we can all therefore watch each other's backs. So it kind of is a community, it's a worldview, it's a set of tools, all of the above, but it's not a label that gives you a right to say that I am smarter than everybody else and I can't be wrong or I'm infallible. That's the one thing it definitely isn't.

James Hodgson:

Yeah, I think that's a really important point to make up front. And actually, I found as well the times when skepticism has been most useful for me is when someone else has pointed out an inconsistency or a fallacy of my own reasoning. And it kind of so that community element is really important, actually, that you want to be around people that can also help you correct your thinking. As you say, it's not about a way of proving that you are right or a label to say, well, I'm a skeptic, therefore I must be thinking clearly about this. It's more that practice which is relational to the world.

Michael Marsh:

Yeah, absolutely. And that community aspect is so important. And it's also important because a lot of people view the world this way or try to view the world this way. And what they'll find, and it's something that I found when I was growing up, is that you care about certain issues that the people around you don't really care about too much. So I remember talking to my friends when I was still at university or the back end of university, saying about how it bothered me that people were faking psychic ability. And my friends were like, Yeah, but why do you care? You're never going to go and see a psychic, you're not gonna believe in it, so why do you care? And I said, I care because other people are gonna be persuaded and they're gonna be in this kind of vulnerable position. And so what we find with skeptical communities is that there's a lot of people who felt like they were the only ones they knew who recognized this stuff was was not true and cared about it. So they they knew people who believed in it and they knew people who recognized it wasn't true and didn't care, but they seemed like they're they were the only ones who were motivated to do something about it and say they felt very alone until they found this community of other people who care. And I think the thing is probably also true of humanists and atheists too, is that it can be lonely when you grow up in a community or a society that doesn't value that kind of critical thinking, especially around sacred cows. You can feel like you're the only one until you find atheist and humanist and skeptic uh communities.

James Hodgson:

It's definitely a common feedback for that. I when I explain uh humanism to friends who probably share many of the same views and values, that's great, but why do you need the label? Why do you need to go out and practice it? And actually, I'm interested to know what your common feedback is when people would ask you that question, particularly around you as you the example you gave. Why care about someone else going to see a psychic, going to see a pseudoscientist, if it gives them peace of mind, if it has potentially a placebo effect on them? What motivated you to say, actually, no, I this is something that I need to investigate and expose?

Michael Marsh:

Yeah, so there's a couple of things. When it comes to the label, I've had it said before. In fact, my wife is somebody who is a skeptic who wouldn't call herself a skeptic, even though she co-runs QED with me. She's one of the organizers. She just doesn't need the label. And for me, the label's useful because you need to have something on the door to make people recognize that that's the door they need to walk through. We need to gather around something and the label's useful. But I think the reason that I am motivated to do something about the pseudoscience that I see is that I I don't like, I can't sit comfortably with the idea of harm being done to people. Um, especially harm where there is somebody um exploiting someone, where somebody might be profiting from that, and where somebody might be putting their trust, their faith, their time, their hope, their energy, their money into something that isn't going to help them and may even harm them. Um part of that comes, I think, from uh uh an atheistic position. Like, I don't believe there is an afterlife. Therefore, I believe that this is our only life. And so if it's my only life, it's your only life, it's everyone's only life, how can I in good conscience sit by and watch somebody's only shot at living be diminished in some way by someone who is exploiting them or taking advantage or even just selling them something unknowingly that doesn't work. So I think that's important. I think when it comes to the idea that some things offer people peace of mind, I feel very I feel a little uncomfortable with just accepting that, partly because somebody who is saying they're talking to the dead, they might well believe that. I've met people fundamentally believe that they're psychic, and I think they're wrong about that, and they can't demonstrate that they're right about that. I think they, even if people feel like this constant conversation with their lost loved ones is doing them some kind of good, I don't know about it actually does do them good in the long term. I think there are harms from that. It can stop people processing their grief and eventually moving on. Because why would you move on if your husband isn't really dead, but he's just in the next room and this person will talk to him for money? Why would you move on from the person that you love if they're not really gone? So I think arresting that grieving process is in itself a harm. And I think the other harm, especially when it comes to psychics, is because there isn't an afterlife, in my opinion, certainly there's no evidence of an afterlife. We shouldn't believe there is one until there's evidence. If there isn't an afterlife, we're never going to see those people again. All we have to remember the person we loved is the memories that we have. And the problem is when we go and see somebody who isn't in contact with that person and they tell you what that person is saying and how they're doing and how they're feeling, what they're doing is they're inserting these false memories in among your real memories, kind of like cuckoo memories that in 10 years' time, when you think about your granddaughter, will you be able to remember the man he was, or will it be infected by the thing that the psychic said was happening, the thing that the psychic said your deceased grandda told them? I think those memories get corrupted and degraded when they get infiltrated by things that aren't real. So yeah, so psychics, if it was real, it'd be remarkable. We have to keep an open mind to the idea that somebody might be able to prove it, but we should ask them to demonstrate it and prove it under good conditions before we invest our time and our energy and our money in it because it does people harm. And the same is true about alternative medicines, and the same is true about all sorts of other pseudosciences. We have to set a bar as to where we draw the line on what we will believe. And if that bar isn't evidence, then I don't know where we set it. There's no good place to set it that isn't going to lead us to some uh dangerous positions further down the line.

James Hodgson:

Yeah, and you would think as well that if they truly believe that it was true and they truly believe the claims that they were making, they would want more inquiry and scientific studies into what they're doing. Because as you say, if they could prove it, this would be one of the huge revelations and biggest discoveries in the world.

Michael Marsh:

Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I think certainly these days, when you do see tests of people who claim to have psychic abilities, and I've ran several of these tests myself, it tends to be people who genuinely believe, which means that the tests themselves are usually pretty underwhelming. You don't see anything absolutely remarkable happening. And part of me, I mean, I've been involved in skepticism 15 years, part of me wishes I was around in the heyday of the psychic who thought they were smarter than the skeptics, who would sit in a room and knowingly try and cheat and think they could deceive and be doing that deliberately. There are plenty of examples throughout the 70s, the 80s, even the early 90s, of people who would undergo these tests because they thought they could use sleight of hand and other techniques in order to con someone while they're in the room. I think there's something exciting about being in a room with somebody who you know is going to try and cheat you, and your job is to try and figure out how. I think that'd be amazing. Unfortunately, most of the time, most of the experiences I've had are the person who has sincerely convinced themselves that they have these remarkable abilities and then are genuinely surprised when they don't. It's always interesting to sit down with somebody who is promoting a pseudoscientific idea and try and figure out how to test it and to talk them through what they believe. I always learn something when I'm in a room with people who are putting forward these beliefs, whether they're people who are knowingly conning someone or whether they're sincerely deluded, you always learn something when you engage with it, I think.

James Hodgson:

There's amazing clips that you can find online of James Randi from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I think, exposing many of these supposed uh miracles. And as you say, it's unfortunately the explanation is always much more underwhelming than the claim, but it's it's always very straightforward. But speaking of being in a room with the pseudoscientist, the conspiracy theorists, you've gone undercover in flat earth conferences and spent lots of time with alternative medicine practitioners and psychics, as you mentioned. What have you learned about the psychology of people who believe in these claims and also the people who promote them?

Michael Marsh:

Yeah. Going undercover, seeing these things in person, I think it's one of the most interesting parts of the job that I've been doing for the last kind of certainly 10 years or more. But also I think it's kind of a really useful thing to do if you're interested in pseudoscience more generally. I always encourage people if you get the chance, there's a mind-body spirit festival near you, go along because you learn so much more there than you do sitting in a room with somebody just explaining what happens at these kind of events. And so going along is always really important. I actually, you spoke of James Randy. One of the most famous cases of James Randy exposing somebody who was cheating was Peter Popov, who was a faith healer who was using radio's earpieces in order to pretend to be psychic. I actually was in a room with Peter Popov. I went along to his show in London and I caught him cheating on camera. He got someone out from the audience, he touched her on her forehead, and she fell back in a convulsing fit, and then she said the chronic pain that she'd been suffering was completely gone. And she was, I would say, no more than six or seven feet from me at this time. I was there with a friend of mine, and we both looked at each other astonished because the lady who was having this convulsing fit was the lady who directed us to our seats when we entered the theater. She was just part of his team, and nobody's expecting that the that they're going to be fooled by something as simple as you put one of your Confederates in the audience. So you can see these things, you can learn those things. But I think as much as I mean, talking to the people who attend, you learn some really fascinating things. So you say I went undercover for three days at the Flat Earth Convention. This was 2018. And from the outside, it'd be easy to say to say that flat earthers, they all believe the same thing. They believe in a disc version of the earth. I've got one on my wall, in fact, a poster that I that I bought at the Flat Earth Convention, which is, you know, the Arctic circle in the middle, and Antarctica's kind of a wall of ice around the edge, and everyone believes the same thing. And actually, one of the things I learned was that a lot of flat earthers have different models of the world, um, fundamentally incompatible models. Some believe it's a it's under a glass dome, some believe there's an infinity of ice around the edges of the earth and it goes on forever, some believe it's a diamond shape on the back of stone pillars, all sorts of different models. But in that room, even though their models were fundamentally incompatible with each other, they didn't disagree with each other because what they agreed with was that everyone else was wrong. Right. If you were in that room, your version of the world wasn't what everyone else thought, and that's the most important thing. And so you learn actually that when it comes to that movement, it's maybe more about rejecting the mainstream than it is about being persuaded by a specific idea. And then you start to start to look around what else people were talking about, what else they believed in. I wrote a piece, I think, either for I wrote one for The Guardian, one for Gizmodo at the time. And one of the things I mentioned in one of those articles was the belief that come with flat Earth are maybe not as visible, but they are just as important. And I talked to a journalist who was there from the Times and he was treating it all like a lovely bit of fun. I said, well, you can write it up as if it's fun, but if you want to know what's really going on, you see there's a couple over there who've got a baby, ask them if they're going to vaccinate that kid. Ask them if that kid was ill tomorrow, would they go along to the hospital and get some of the evil big pharma medicine we've been hearing about all weekend, or would they try and treat the kid themselves? And we see that actually those type of beliefs were very common. And I even wrote that the flat earth movement was this rejection of mainstream that was a cluster of all sorts of other non-mainstream beliefs, and all it would take is a spark to light it into something dangerous. I wrote that in 2018, and COVID-19 happened at the back end of COVID-19, and that spark happened. So you start to see the patterns of pseudoscience and what kind of leads people into it. And I'll uh one other story I'll tell, which I think is is is also useful. If you ever saw any headlines about the NHS funding of homeopathy and how much money was being spent on homeopathy, and then how that money stopped being spent, that was my work. I was a person who figured out how much the NHS was spending, and I also got involved in the local contracting decisions around the country to challenge those contracts and those spends on homeopathy. And now the NHS doesn't spend money on homeopathy as a result of the work I was doing with um the charity I work for, the Good Thinking Society. But part of that involved going to public consultations and meeting people who were users of the homeopathy service. And I sat next to a lady who was in floods of tears because her medicine was being taken away. And she was explaining that she had this chronic condition, she went to a doctor, the doctor gave her a pill, she went back because it didn't work, he gave her a different pill, went back because it didn't work, gave her a different pill, and she felt like she was just being tested on a guinea pig, she described herself. And then she went to a she got referred to the homeopath, and they sat down for two hours and talked about everything in her life. And then they decided what they would try and give her. And when she took that and it didn't work, she went back and they talked about why it didn't work and talked for hours about it and give her another homeopathic remedy. And when that didn't work, she went back again. And if you take a step back, those two pathways are almost identical. Try a thing didn't work, try a thing didn't work, try a thing didn't work. But she was angry at the doctor and felt tested on. And she was so upset and distraught at the idea of losing her homeopathy that she was there in tears at a public meeting. And the difference, I think, is the time and the listening and the investment. The homeopathy didn't do anything. But the fact that she was able to feel heard and connected with and that someone cared about her, that's the thing that mattered. And I think that's what we see a lot about when it comes to believers. We see people looking for community, looking to feel heard, feel validated. Those are the things that often pseudoscience gives them. And those are the things that we we can't unpick pseudoscience until we understand that aspect and that element of it.

James Hodgson:

That's so true. Yeah. So understanding the true motivations and needs that people are falling for. And I guess there must be a difference between the followers of these beliefs versus the leaders and proponents. Was that something that you found? Or actually is it a lot of it is the same need for belonging to something which is uh potentially anti-the-mainstream or just gives them a sense of feeling comforted and heard?

Michael Marsh:

So I I think there's a broad range. I think there's a range within the community, and then when it comes to the people leading that community, that range expands further. Because on one extreme, you do have the people who are knowingly exploiting, and their motivations are power and money and greed and those kind of things, and a callousness that they don't care what's really happening. Those are in the minority, in my experience. The majority of people who end up even leading these movements tend to be believers at some level. Um, even a lot of people who are relatively prominent psychics might still at some part believe that they're psychic, even if they're faking parts of it, because it's a more impressive show and therefore people will come back and believe me. So you do get a blend in there. But when it came to the Flat Earth movement, for example, the leaders did feel like they were just people from within that community who'd gotten some traction, gotten some fame, some celebrity. And certainly they love the celebrity, love to be seen, they love the attention of being on stage. But every single speaker, I think, or to that can remember across the entire weekend, mentioned that the their path into Flat Earth involved at some point a personal crisis. Someone described having a mental health crisis, someone said they lost a job, a loved one, a health crisis more generally. Something happened in their life to make them question where they were or feel unsatisfied where they were, feel scared, feel like the world was against them. And then they discovered the truth of the flat earth. So I think that kind of moment of personal crisis is a real something we have to really understand as a motivational force in sending people off the beaten track onto off into the wild. We saw that a huge amount during the pandemic. A lot of people had those moments of crisis and ended up in quite extraordinary positions. So yeah, so I think there is a broad range, even within the movement, even within the community. I once interviewed a guy. Have you ever heard of Miracle Mineral Supplement?

James Hodgson:

This is a new one to me.

Michael Marsh:

So it's an alternative medicine which effectively is activated sodium chlorite, which is effectively a form of bleach, like an industrial strength bleach, that people will be encouraged to drink, to have, to drop in their eyes, to have enemas, all this kind of stuff to cure everything: AIDS, cancer, malaria, Crohn's disease, COVID-19, everything. It's a panacea. And it was, I think I came across it more than 10 years ago, something like that initially. It was promoted by a guy called Jim Humble. He called himself the Archbishop Jim Humble. He called it Miracle Mineral Supplement. I managed to get an interview with Jim Humble. The only interview that I think anybody has ever had where they disagreed with him. He's interviewed people who he'd been interviewed by people who were on his side, but whenever mainstream news came to talk to him, he just wouldn't talk to them. But for some reason he would speak to me in the podcast that I was doing at the time. And I expected him to be a real snake oil salesman because he has industrial bleach. He gives it to people for everything, a total panacea. I expected him to try and wrap us up in marketing speak and try and be savvy and slick and charm us and all this kind of snake oil stuff. And when we got him on the phone, he was this incredibly frail old man who I think genuinely believed in what he was doing, but throughout the course of the conversation, talked about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people with deadly diseases that he's given this poison to in order to cure them. And it occurred to me he's probably exaggerating, maybe by a factor of 10 or even by a factor of 100. But even if he's exaggerating by a factor of 100, that's still thousands of people with cancer and AIDS and malaria that he's given something to that can only harm them, which probably means that there's hundreds, if not thousands, of people dead because of the guy I'm talking to on the phone right now. And I think I've what I've learned from that is that even sincerely held belief can be enormously dangerous when they're unchecked by critical thinking. And so it's important that even when people are absolutely sincere, we need to be able to challenge them. Otherwise, they can sincerely walk people into some really dangerous paths.

James Hodgson:

And you've written a lot about the use of empathy as a tool in engaging with conspiracy theorists and other fringe beliefs. And given a referencing a couple of the examples you've given there, you can certainly see uh the need and power for that when you're speaking with perhaps the woman who's in floods of tears by having used homeopathy. But I imagine it's much more challenging when speaking with someone like the gentleman you mentioned, who has even if his intentions were right, given harmful poison to thousands of people. So how do you ensure you practice empathy when dealing with true believers? And when is it most challenging and how do you overcome that?

Michael Marsh:

Oh God, that's a really good question. I think fundamentally we have to start from a position of a position of compassion and an assumption of good faith until proven otherwise. And I think that's something that we can very easily slip out of. If that isn't our main focus, it's something we can very easily slip out of. And assume, well, this person's doing it because they're a liar, because they don't care, because they're trying to harm people, all this kind of stuff. And that's so rarely the case. And I think even when it is the case, you lose nothing by having that assumption first and let the person prove otherwise. When it comes to how I maintain that, yeah, when I'm talking to people who are very clearly the people being harmed by it, the people who are believing in it but are doing themselves enormous harm, having the compassion there is very easy. I've talked to people who've had all sorts of quite bad illnesses. And in those positions, it'd be easy to say, well, you're gullible, this stuff doesn't work, you shouldn't be such a fool. But if you have an illness that there isn't a good treatment for, a chronic condition that isn't easily treated, and you're desperate and the doctors have nothing for you, which is unfortunately the case in some cases, then I could totally understand why people would turn to something that isn't well proven, but what have I got to lose? I can entirely understand that. And so we have to kind of show that understanding. Because if you say, why are you trying that? It doesn't work. You're an idiot, it doesn't work. You're just a bad guy taking away hope. Whereas if you say, look, I understand how hard it must be for you, I understand the position that you're in, and you want to find the thing that helps best. My worry about taking that is here are the things that could happen. Yeah, you're gonna be much more approachable, you're gonna be much more effective in communicating. When it comes to the more extreme beliefs, it is hard to have compassion. A lot of the times when I've had those conversations, it's because I've been recording it for be reasonable or some other kind of uh place. And I know that if I maintain a compassion first position with the person I'm speaking to, they're gonna be way more likely to tell me what they actually think. If I go in and say, you're wrong for these reasons, and actually don't how dare you think that way, and how do you sleep at night? I spoke to a guy who was absolutely an avowed white supremacist, and I could have yelled at him for his racist beliefs, and he would have responded the way he's always responded to people who've yelled at him for his racist beliefs. We'd have played out a conversation that he's had a thousand times and I've not really had before, and I'm not going to come out well in that conversation because he's got the practice. Whereas if instead, when it comes to those conversations with even quite extreme positions, you start from a position of, I'm trying to understand what you're telling me. And when I try, I hit this barrier. How can you help me pass that barrier? You can show that you're invested in the conversation enough that they might not just tell you the thing they tell people to persuade them, but the thing they might tell you the thing they actually think. Because if you ask me, why do you think the world is flat? Or there's a guy I interviewed who pickets abortion clinics. Why do you picket abortion clinics? Why do you do that? He'd have told me the reasons that he thinks would be persuasive to me or persuasive to a stranger about doing that. But that's not why he does it. That's how he justifies it to someone else. If you actually talk to people about what they think and how they feel and how they where they were when they came across these ideas, you might learn what their actual motivations are. And I and in that particular example with the abortion clinic guy, you know, I could have said you're a Bible basher who's just there to promote an extreme Christianity. And I didn't do that. But I did ask him, you talk about the Bible here and there, you are a Christian. What biblical support have you for your position? And I expected him to rattle off some verses here and there. And what he did was spend three to four minutes trying to find a scrap of paper that his brother-in-law had written some Bible verses on that support this position. And he said, and in the end, he said, Oh, I can go downstairs and get it if you like. And it's it was pretty clear that he's not there because of his fundamentalist Bible beliefs, because he'd have to go into another room to find that that information. So I told I tried to ask him some questions around it. And what we got to was he had some very specific views about gender politics and about how women try and trap men into relationships by having babies just to try and get money out of them. It was very clearly coming from a misogynistic position and quite a confused gender roles in society position that I would never have got to if I'd have just shouted him about the Bible. So yeah, compassion can actually be a not only is it, I think, the right thing to do, it's also a useful tool for getting to the bottom of what's going on, getting a better understanding of people. And when we have a better understanding, we're gonna be better at unpicking these ideas.

James Hodgson:

You're potentially getting them to say things they probably haven't or answer questions they may not have asked themselves.

Michael Marsh:

Yeah, absolutely. The way I describe it is kind of if you shout at people and challenge them in a way of like being aggressive, they're gonna they're gonna put their defenses up and they're gonna just deflect in the way they've always deflected. And like I said, they've done that way more often than you have. But if you try instead to kind of have a collaborative conversation, you can get them to walk you around the maze that's inside their head, the maze of their beliefs. And if you do that and you're you're genuinely interested, you've invested enough that they genuinely think that you want to hear, you can then ask the little questions that nudge them to take a left turn in that maze, and then they're confronted by a wall they didn't know was there. And those are the moments that I think are really tell us what's going on with why someone believes in something.

James Hodgson:

Yes. And then yeah, it's very powerful because then you're in a proper position to try, if you did want to try and change someone's mind, then you understand their motivations and it's much easier to do. And I'm glad you mentioned your work on homeopathy as well. It was quite a reminder to me just how big an issue that was, sort of 10 years ago. And the fact that we don't really hear about it anymore. I don't know if it there are still people trying to push it back, but it does show that with the rides engagement and involvement from and work by people like yourself, these things can be defeated and can be at least taken out of the mainstream or stop public funds going towards them. And so I wonder then, uh particularly as you mentioned, going to things like the Flat Earth Society and seeing how one sort of fringe idea can lead to people being open to many others and it can spread in different misinformation spreads in different ways like that. What do you see as the next big challenges that are coming for the humanist skeptical movement?

Michael Marsh:

See, that's a really difficult question because I think the thing is we can track that that misinformation is virulent in that way, not just that a piece of misinformation spreads, but that once you are more susceptible to one piece of misinformation, you're going to be more susceptible to others. We can track that. And we can understand why as well, I think. If you think about the flat earth, for example, if you said if you came out tomorrow as a flat earth that your friends, your family would probably ridicule you or wouldn't want to talk to you about it, you'd find a new community of people who believe the world is flat. You've left one society to join another. If you find something in that society that you find objectionable, you're less likely to challenge it because if you leave that society, where are you going to go? You're not going to go back to your first society. You can't find a third community. So you're more likely to settle in that second community. And okay, Bob over there keeps talking about the Jews. And I wouldn't normally talk that way, but Bob's good about the flat earth, so maybe I should listen to him. And before you know it, those views have transferred. So we can understand that transference. What we can't always do is predict where it's going next. So when it comes to flat earth, I interviewed the vice president of the Flat Earth Society in, I want to say 2012, maybe something like that. I think it was the second episode of the Be Reasonable podcast that I was doing. So that was a very long time ago. And at the time, everybody I spoke to had no idea that were the people who believed the world was flat still. I would never have imagined that five years later, well, four or five years later, it would hit YouTube and become this massive phenomenon. So you can kind of watch what things are out there, but it's hard to see how they're going to grow and take hold. You can see some things coming, and I realize I'm avoiding answering the question of what's coming next because that's incredibly difficult to do. I was able to do that during the pandemic. You could by spending time in the flat earth community, I could see there was an anti-vax movement there. When the and when the pandemic came along, and I I actually joined anti-vax groups on Telegram and spent a lot of the pandemic undercover in Telegram groups and pointed and watched the way that those groups grew and how they were infiltrated by people who were pushing other conspiracy theories around things like 15 minute cities and digital currencies and also white supremacist conspiracy theories. That was a very specific thing. They were infiltrated by people who wanted to spread. The great replacement idea, the idea that there are deliberate attempts to weaken white majority countries by mass immigration of people from other parts of the world. And that's deliberately done in order to weaken the power of the white race. That's the conspiracy theory. Obviously, it's ridiculous. But I was watching that being spread in those spaces by people who were already susceptible to one form of misinformation and now they're trusting this space. I think unfortunately we're seeing we're going to be seeing that stuff growing even more. When I was seeing the Great Placement stuff in those telegram channels, it was still off the mainstream. You wouldn't see it in in more mainstream places. Now, places like Joe Rogan. I listened to a Joe Rogan episode recently from 2018, and he's saying that's a ridiculous, weird belief. That it's isn't it ridiculous that people believe that? And then I listened to one from last year, and he's saying, Well, you know that the billionaires are moving people into the Republican cities in order to weaken the democratic power, in order to weaken the power of the locals. And that is the great replacement. He's just not using the word wiper. So we're seeing that goal mainstream. I think that's only going to get more. I think that's a hardest challenge at the moment, in fact, because when it came to homeopathy, there was a clear pathway. Homeopathy is on the NHS, the NHS has to go through contracting decisions. If we challenge the contracting decisions, we could stop it being on the NHS. There is a clear something to do. It was a big, it was a hard thing to do, it took time, it took effort, but it was achievable. You could see it. There are white supremacist conspiracy theories spreading. I don't know what the answer to that is. There isn't a, therefore, I'll go to the head of conspiracy theories and get them regulated. There isn't an easy thing. So yeah, I'm worried about that proliferation of conspiracy theory. I'm worried that it's taking a turn towards fascist ideology, and I'm worried that there isn't a very clear way to stop that.

James Hodgson:

Yeah, I think there's something that occurred at to me as you were speaking, and I would love to get your thoughts on whether you think there is a direct link between some of these sort of fringe groups that were in their way harmless, like flat Earth 10-ish years ago, to now something that is more sort of orchestrated political misinformation, perhaps via something like QAnon, that actually there are people now who have seen that this is a good way to cultivate support or cultivate a loyal group identity to something where facts and truth don't matter.

Michael Marsh:

Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there's undeniably a link there. And I think the link from Flat Earth In wasn't the strongest one, but essentially, I don't know any flat earthers who aren't anti-vaxxers, who didn't turn into anti-vaxxers during the pandemic. In fact, you may have seen The Light Paper, it's like an anti-vax newspaper that's freely circulated in cities and things like that. That was established by a guy called Darren Nesbitt, who was the UK's leading flat earther, who was one of the main speakers at the Flat Earth conference that I attended. And they don't talk about the flat earth in that newspaper, and the anti-vax channels don't like to acknowledge that's some of the origin. But I think a lot of people no longer believe the world is flat, but do believe that the world is run differently, that the world is wrong, that there are elites and powers and stuff like that. They've retained the structure, even though they've quietly moved on from the idea of the world being flat. And they moved into ideas like QAnon. And it's a shifting wave in that not every fat earther moved into QAnon, but a chunk of them did and were augmented by new followers. And that went into anti-vax stuff, and we then see that flowing out into things like panic over gay people, panic over trans people, those types of ideas too, and also 15-minute cities and central bank digital currencies and that kind of thing. But during that time in the pandemic, anti-vax groups, we saw people like Tommy Robinson, a very noted, very visible far-right figure, suddenly become concerned about vaccines. And I'd seen Tommy's material for some time. I'd never seen him talk about vaccines until those anti-vax groups were taken hold. And after that, he did nothing but talk about vaccines. Not nothing, but he talked about vaccines a huge amount. And I actually spoke to one of the organizers, one of the moderators of those anti-vax telegram groups, partly because I got exposed in that channel as being an undercover sort of journalist, they described me. And I was a little worried, but fortunately, I was, it didn't turn violent. I was okay, I'm dripping in white male privilege, and it didn't, uh they didn't come attacking me. But one of the moderators reached out and said, What have you got to say for yourself? And I explained my concerns and said, I've got to talk about this. Come and watch my talk. And he messaged me afterwards and said, Ah, yeah, you're right. I didn't realize, I didn't see it, but I think you're right about this. And eventually from talking, he left that anti-vax movement and is joined a skeptic, in fact. Really lovely guy, was just going through a very hard time in his life and found all the wrong answers at all the wrong times. But I asked him, You're a very left-wing guy. You always have seemed like a very left-wing guy. Why were you promoting so much Tommy Robinson stuff at the time? And he said, We just struggled to find anybody else who was saying stuff that agreed with us. I really wanted to find channels and sources of vaccine stuff that wasn't Tommy Robinson, but I couldn't find it. He even said they had a meeting of the moderators to say, we need to find other sources here. We need to find better sources because the places that we're going are infiltrated by the far right. And he actually said this on a panel that I was on with him, and I pointed out, you mean you needed to find better sources of misinformation, though. That's what you're saying, is we need to find other sources of misinformation that aren't tainted in the these ways. There's a reason he couldn't find sources that weren't tainted in these ways, is that there were actors out there, there were groups who recognize you've got this massive, disenfranchised, disillusioned group of people who are scared and looking for answers. And if you say you agree with the answers they have, they'll start to believe the other answers you have. And it was a fishing exercise. And we saw Tommy Robinson's telegram group exploded, we saw various other far-right fascist telegram groups exploding during that. And then when the the big, evil, scary dictatorship didn't come in that COVID was meant to be faked in order to bring in, when we weren't all locked in our local areas and having to scan passports to go at the shops, when that didn't happen, they needed something else to be worried about. And they worried about immigration and they worried about 50 minute cities, they worried about trans people, they found anything they could to keep that scapegoating going, to keep the band together, because it's a community now, and you need to keep you need a reason to still be in that community, to still be hanging out with your friends. That's unfortunately the way these things go, but it absolutely was being cynically driven by far-right actors. The one other point I'll use to illustrate that, in fact, the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, that started the war in Ukraine, all of my anti-vax channels were immediately pro-Russia overnight. They never said a thing about Russia, never said a thing about Ukraine. The second that war kicked off, or the second that Russia invaded, every one of my anti-vax channels were pro-Russia. And that's because they were pro-Russia already, they just didn't know it. All of the sources that they were using had already been trained to accept Russian sources of disinformation as perfectly legitimate. So the channels were there, the networks are there, they just have to switch out the material, and they had a ready-made audience of people willing to gobble it all up.

James Hodgson:

It's fascinating. Going from sort of divisive, dangerous community, inclusive and positive communities. You're also one of the organizers of the QED conference, as mentioned. Sadly, this will be the final edition this year. It's been a uh pillar of the skeptical, humanistic calendar for many years. But for listeners who don't know, what is QED and what makes it such a special event?

Michael Marsh:

QED is a conference that we run in Manchester. We've run it almost every year since the first one in 2011. And it's run from the grassroots. So it's run by myself and some colleagues from the Murgerside Skeptic Society, some colleagues who are in the Manchester Skeptic Society, and it's grown into a few other people who weren't allied with either uh group. But it is very much designed to be putting the community at the heart of it. At every point of our decision making when we put the conference together is what is best for our attendees, the speakers that we invite with a mind to, who will best fit in with the spirit that we have, which is that we're all in this together. We're all here to do something, we're all here because we care, we're all here to be part of the same community. We don't really go for the idea of like, well, here's a big celebrity speaker, and they're on stage because they're big and famous and celebrity, and that's why they're there. We want to go for like, here's someone who's got interest, something interesting to say, and you're in the audience. And if you have something interesting to say and do some really interesting work, you could be on stage next year. It's we're all part of this same thing together. And it's an event that takes a lot of organizing because we try to make it as difficult as possible for you to decide what you want to do while you're there as an attendee. So we have a main stage of speakers, but we also have a panel room that's running simultaneously, and a live podcast room that's running simultaneously, and a hands-on workshop room that's running simultaneously. And at any given point, there's three or four different sessions that are going to be interesting. And it's become a thing, yeah, that um the communities of British skepticism and even international skepticism see as theirs, and that's how we always wanted it to be that the audience feels like this is their space. They're not buying a ticket and becoming an attendee and passive consumers of a thing that's there to justify a speaker's fee to the person on stage. It's very much a here is an event that we'd want to attend. For me, it's always been an excuse to get people together so they know each other. I've always wanted to have the different people who care about this stuff get together in a room for a weekend and get to know each other so they know that they're part of the same kind of community. And also the people who have similar kind of interests and concerns to find each other and then maybe do something together, find a way of doing a project, finding something to challenge, doing something to take skepticism beyond the event. So, yeah, that's QED. And it's lovely that we have a massive international audience as well. There's people who come over from America as their main conference, their main sort of skeptical humanist, atheist conference. They'll come to QED because they like the spirit and the feel that we have for the room. Yeah, it's something I'm remarkably proud of.

James Hodgson:

Oh, quite right too. And what do you hope will be the legacy of QED?

Michael Marsh:

I hope people go away and take those connections they've formed and the spirit of compassionate skepticism. We make compassionate skepticism isn't just what we do with the work we do with good thinking and not be reasonable. It's what we do with the skeptic magazine. That's a heart of what we're doing, and it's what we do with QED. The idea that getting the right answer is often the easiest bit. What you do with it and how you communicate to people is the more difficult bit, but also the most important bit. It's not enough to just be right yourself alone in a dark room telling yourself how right you are. It's much better to be trying to influence the people around you to have a better experience of their lives by embracing the tools we have to check what's real and what's not, and therefore avoid being harmed. That's what I think I'd like the legacy to be that people take, continue to take that compassionate skepticism message on. And I know there's lots of skeptics in the pub groups across the country who also make that the heart of what they're doing. And there's initiatives like Skeptics in the pub online for people who don't have a local group. You can just go to sitp.online and you'll find a monthly Skeptics in the pub talk and a Zoom pub where people can join and have that community online, trying to kickstart the community and keep that community going. That's the legacy I hope QED continues to have.

James Hodgson:

Compassionate skepticism. I think that's a fantastic phrase to take forward. And I know you already have several many exciting projects that you're working on. I was going to say, what are you going to be focusing on now that QED is winding down, but you already have a very full portfolio. Yeah, pretty much. If listeners wanted to follow or connect with you, where would you direct them to first?

Michael Marsh:

First place, let's see. So the Skeptic magazine is the magazine I'm the editor of. That's been going since 1987. I've been the editor since 2020. And we put up new skeptical articles, analysis of these types of things from a compassionate skepticism lens every day of the working week. So yeah, you can go there and you can find out what we're doing there. There's a podcast associated with it too. And then otherwise, my day job is the Good Thinking Society, which is a very small charity. I'm the only full-time employee who focuses on skeptical work. So we don't we put as much on the website as we used to because it's I do the work rather than spend as much time talking about it. But that's a kind of that's where I spend my kind of activism work. Yeah. And then Skeptics with a K is a is the weekly show that myself and two colleagues at the Merseyside Skeptic Society do, where we do investig original investigations into stuff we think is interesting to skeptics. So yeah, that's another good place to find us.

James Hodgson:

Fantastic. And before we go, we have our standard closing question I asked to all of our guests, which is what is something you've changed your mind about recently and what inspired that change?

Michael Marsh:

Oh, recently. Ah, okay. Because I can tell you something I've changed my mind about, and that was that was that approach of how to communicate skepticism. Because when I first got into skepticism, I wanted to be evangelical and tell everyone and pick everyone up on every little thing and be the kind of well-actually guy. And then I realized that isn't useful. That doesn't really get you anywhere. I think we all go through that when we first find it. And it's probably true of humanism and atheism too, that when we come across these ideas, we want to tell everybody how wrong the things we disagree with are. And I sort of refer to that as the kind of the skeptical adolescence of where we go through our time correcting everyone. But if we actually want to be effective, we come through that and we we try to take a what is going to be, what is going to get me to the end goal of making the world a more rational place. And that's when we find the tools of things like compassionate skepticism and listening before we try to correct people and actually really listening and not just waiting until it's time that I can now correct people. So that's something I have changed my mind on. Am I allowed to use that? It's not recent, but I think it's a useful change of mind all the same. It ties everything back.

James Hodgson:

And of course, it's the nice thing about skepticism, I suppose, is it's a constant process of at least adjusting one's view on the world and trying to create as accurate a view of the world as possible. But I really love this idea of compassionate skepticism. And thank you, Michael, for all of the great work that you've done and the great work that you will do in the future. And thank you very much for joining us on Humanism Now.

Michael Marsh:

Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed talking to you.

Humanise Live:

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