Why Smart Women Podcast
Welcome to the Why Smart Women Podcast, hosted by Annie McCubbin. We explore why women sometimes make the wrong choices and offer insightful guidance for better, informed decisions. Through engaging discussions, interviews, and real-life stories, we empower women to harness their intelligence, question their instincts, and navigate life's complexities with confidence. Join us each week to uncover the secrets of smarter decision-making and celebrate the brilliance of women everywhere.
Why Smart Women Podcast
If the earth is flat, how do you not fall off?
Michael Marshall takes us behind the scenes of his daring three-day undercover mission at a UK Flat Earth Convention, offering rare insights into the minds of conspiracy believers. This fascinating conversation reveals why smart people believe strange things and how compassionate skepticism can succeed where confrontation fails.
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I went to the Flat Earth Convention in the UK Three days undercover in a hotel with 250 people who think the world is flat, and it was remarkable.
Speaker 2:You are listening to the why Smart Women podcast, the podcast that helps smart women work out why we repeatedly make the wrong decisions and how to make better ones. From relationships, career choices, finances, to faux fur, jackets and kale smoothies. Every moment of every day, we're making decisions. Let's make them good ones. I'm your host, annie McCubbin, and, as a woman of a certain age, I've made my own share of really bad decisions. Not my husband, I don't mean him, though I did go through some shockers to find him, and I wish this podcast had been around to save me from myself. This podcast will give you insights into the working of your own brain, which will blow your mind. I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I'm recording and you are listening on this day. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Well, hello smart women, and welcome back to the why Smart Women podcast.
Speaker 2:Today, actually, this evening, here in Sydney, I am interviewing a very, very famous sceptic from Great Britain, and because the Australian community is not terribly plugged into the British community, I'm just going to explain that it is Michael Marshall, who is a British sceptic and journalist. He is the editor of British the Sceptic Magazine and a co-host of Sceptics with a K and Be Reasonable podcast. He's a fellow with the Committee of Sceptical Inquiry and he is the co-founder and president of the Merseyside Skeptic Society. Hello, hi, hello hello.
Speaker 2:What time is it there in Britain?
Speaker 1:It's not too bad. It's 8.30 in the morning, so it's not too bad. I'm not a morning person, so this is early for me, but it's not too bad. It's not unreasonably early. I'm very happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you Well, nibbly early, I'm very happy to be here. Oh, thank you. Well, I'm very happy to have and you probably don't remember me, but I am a um, a very. I'm a member of the australian skeptics and I speak at quite a few of their conferences now, but prior to me speaking, I saw you speaking at one of the conferences in melbourne.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to think when that would be. Melbourne might have been 2017, I think Something in that kind of region. Yeah, I think maybe something in there. It was certainly pre-pandemic. So yeah, I think it was about 2017.
Speaker 2:Yes, it was pre-pandemic because the place was packed.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, yeah, no, that was an interesting, that was a really interesting event. Yeah, I think I've spoken for two of the Australian Skeptics National Conventions and I enjoyed both of them a huge amount. I have enjoyed all of my time that I've ever spent in Australia. The Skeptical community there is such an interesting community. Yeah, I've enjoyed it a huge amount.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is an interesting community and we're very interested to hear about your community, how skepticism is going at the moment for you in this post-pandemic environment, and I guess I was interested to read something that you talk about which is remaining sceptical and empathetic of people that believe in pseudoscience, because I've got to say at this juncture I'm really struggling to be empathetic.
Speaker 1:um, yeah, yeah no, I, I totally appreciate that, but I I do think it's something that's um incredibly important um the magazine. When I took over as editor of the skeptic magazine here in the uk, we even changed the strap line of the magazine. To reason with compassion, just say that that's kind of the way that we try to do things is through compassionate scepticism, and I think partly that's because I think it's the right way to do it. It's the right thing to do to respect the fact that the people we disagree with are deserving of our compassion, our empathy, our understanding. But I also think it's tactically the right thing to do because I think we are far more likely to be approachable to the people we want to be able to influence and help direct towards checking their sense, checking their logic, checking their beliefs. We're way more approachable if we're kind of nice about it and if they actually want to listen to us.
Speaker 2:So I definitely agree with you philosophically and I definitely agree with you tactically. I think where we come unstuck is that. Or, personally, I become unstuck because I start to get really angry about the effect of the pseudoscience on vulnerable people, and then I don't know what to do with the fact that I'm really cranky about it, and then I sort of find myself in this position because I understand the thing to be doing would be to finding the commonality of values. You know, we're all trying to take care of people, trying to do the right thing, and that's where I struggle, because sometimes I question the values of the people that are the purveyors of some of these supplements and replacements for vaccines. I do, I question their motivation of actually why they're promoting it, and that's where I come unstuck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I totally appreciate that, and I think it does depend a little bit on exactly who we're talking to and exactly kind of what they're doing.
Speaker 1:so I think I I share the same um, I'm loathe to say anger because I don't think anger is, uh, is is an emotion that I I typically connect with too much but I said share the same kind of frustration, um, uh and, and focus on the, the harm that's being done, um, but one of the things I think is is valuable is to when you're feeling that the way that you let that out is by expressing it in terms of the, the danger to vulnerable people. Because otherwise, if you're in a conversation with somebody who is promoting things that are pseudoscientific, if your anger and frustration kind of manifests as just anger and frustration, it can feel to them like you're being superior, you're talking down to them, you're being patronizing, but if instead, the way you frame it is to say, well, the reason that I find this quite upsetting is I've talked to people who have cancer and I know how tempting it must be, when you're given a very scary diagnosis, to follow anything that looks like certainty.
Speaker 1:And my worry is, if they follow you, they're going to end up in this position where they're trusting something that doesn't work and that's kind of so you're. You're kind of elucidating what the, the source of your frustration is, rather than it just kind of yeah spilling out as generic kind of you're wrong and you're wrong and you're an idiot.
Speaker 2:You're a total idiot yeah, yeah, yeah um, so have you have? Let me ask you this question um can? Sorry to put you on the spot, but have you got an example of when you actually have said to someone in Australia we call them cookers, what do you call? It Do you have a sort of disparaging name or do you try to resile from using a disparaging name?
Speaker 1:yeah, I tend to avoid disparaging names as well, um, I think, because it then when you're thinking, when you allow yourself to think in those terms, you, um will more readily frame the conversation in those terms. So I try to kind of avoid that and try to keep to the front of my mind the fact that 99 of the time, the person I'm talking to is just wrong. They're not not evil, they're not nasty, they're not deliberate, they're just wrong, and we can all be wrong. And they're just wrong about something really serious and we need to try and help them see that.
Speaker 2:And let me ask you this have you got an example of where you have been having a conversation with someone who has been the purveyor of um pseudoscientific, for instance, cancer cures? It's pretty common over here that there's a lot of um. There's a lot of activity online about cancer cures and menopause.
Speaker 2:Menopause is the new black, like oh, everybody every influencer, all these ripped young men that are like 35, right, and now suddenly experts in menopause right, I want to throw a dumbbell at them. I'm like, mate, you're 35, you're male. Stop trying to sell me an anti-inflammatory turmeric capsule, because it's not going to work, or black cohosh, or whatever it is. So have you got an example where you have actually managed to communicate your concern and it has shifted an opinion from somebody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when it comes to people who are actively selling fake cancer cures, I I think, um, I think it's actually quite difficult to to talk them out it, especially when they're the purveyors. So, for example, I interviewed, you know, a miracle mineral supplement, mms the form of industrialized bleach that's used as a cure-all for all manner of things AIDS malaria, cancer, everything, menopause.
Speaker 1:It was invented yeah, absolutely yeah, it was invented by a guy called jim humble. Um and I, I got one of the only interviews with jim humble from anybody who didn't agree with him. Um and again, I, I prepared myself for that conversation how did you do that?
Speaker 2:tell me, how do you prepare yourself?
Speaker 1:I'm interested yeah, so well, actually, the. What I expected was his, his, um, he calls it miracle mineral supplement, he calls himself, uh, the the archbishop jim humble or professor jim humble, and all these things. I expected this to be real snake oil, like the guy would come on the on the telephone call, I think. I think he's in guatemala when I was calling him because he was there treating people who didn't have access to good medicine, um, and I expected him to try and out, talk me to, to try and wrap me up in marketing language and charm and kind of be the slippery snake oil salesman. And that's what kind of was in my head yeah um, but the second.
Speaker 1:I actually got him on the phone. He was this incredibly frail guy who was struggling to breathe. He was wheezing and it became pretty clear to me that he's not well and I think he was probably treating himself with his own stuff because he thinks it really works. And as we talked it became clear to me that this is a guy who is deluded. But he's also talking about and we put the episode out on Be Reasonable, so I can't remember the numbers, but he was talking about tens of thousands of people with cancer that he's given this to, and tens and tens of thousands of people with aids and malaria, and it was totaling up to more than 100 000 people, easily, of course of course yeah, that he says he's given, you know, people with deadly diseases.
Speaker 1:He says he's given this stuff that can't possibly help them, can only hurt them and, as it occurred to me as we were talking, um, I thought he's exaggerating the numbers. Of course he is everybody would in those situations but maybe he's exaggerated by a factor of 100. That means there's thousands of people he's treated, which means there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people that are dead because of the guy I'm talking to on the phone right now.
Speaker 2:Did you actually, as you were talking to him, um, excuse my voice, I've had laryngitis. I got sick. Um, as you were talking to him, did, did that sort of um? Did that occur to you that they were the result of this as you were talking? The number of people that probably died?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so. It's hard. I've told the story about it so many times that I can't be certain exactly what was in my mind at the time or what I've kind of repackaged in the way that my memory has. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, I mean I certainly got a sense the the weight of it and the size of it as as we were talking, but I also couldn't square that with the fact that this guy really believed what he was doing. He was just sincerely wrong but dangerously so and it's kind of that's.
Speaker 1:that's helped kind of frame the way I talk to her, to people in their kind of spaces, because, um, you can do an enormous amount of harm and still believe you're right, um, and the way that we should counteract that can't be in calling someone a hoaxer, a charlatan, a liar, because for the most part, the things that he said he believed he did the. So it's not about him deliberately conning people, deliberately deceiving people or trying to get money out of them at all costs. He just thought he really was a miracle healer, and I think the way that we have to unpack that has to be different to. And I've come across people who are con men.
Speaker 1:I've caught on camera peter popov, the famous psychic um, using, uh, people from his team as the the people in the audience you know, pick them out and touch them on the head and they fall backwards into a fit. And then, yeah, I have on camera the fact that she was the lady who was directing us to our seat at the start of the show. So that is a deliberate con man. I know for a fact. He has to be lying. There's no way in the world this can be sincere, and I think we can then change our tactics and chain and be much more bolder in our language, so we talk about that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So, if you go back to the first example, because they're a good polarity, aren't they of the sort of people that we deal with? Yeah, yeah. So with the first fellow with the miracle cures, how did you manage? How did you deal with him? Because he was quite sincere in his belief, but wrong managed. How did you deal with?
Speaker 1:him because he was quite sincere in his belief, but wrong, yeah, and it's hard because, you know, jim humble didn't stop selling miracle mineral supplement after the conversation I had with him. So I didn't, I didn't change his mind, but I think what, what the conversation was able to do was kind of get as much information about who he is and what he believes and why what, and, you know, introduce the idea that these things are wrong, so that that conversation can be used whenever anybody was looking for what jim humble believed, because he had a massive following. So I think in those kind of situations it's rarely the conversation, the one-on-one with the person who's so far out there. Yeah, you're unlikely to change what they're doing. It's for the, the people who may come across.
Speaker 1:That, and one of the reasons I I used to have a show I don't really do it so much anymore called be reasonable is I have these conversations with people on the extreme fringes, because not everyone you meet is going to make it to the extreme, but they're going to pass through these points where they meet these people who are, you know, alternative health influences or bad idea influencers, and if they've never heard a skeptic, have a proper conversation to unpick with that person why they're wrong.
Speaker 1:They are much more likely to just buy the rhetoric they're given, whereas what I'm trying to do is kind of arm people who are on that journey. Uh, you can arm the people who are trying to persuade them out of that journey because, um, if you listen to these conversations that I have, you know where the road ends up and you know which turns it takes, so you're not going to be surprised by a fork in the road. You know the decision points, you know the influence points and say, actually, the reason this you may come across this thing and the reason this doesn't work is for this reason here, and you can actually start to explain it before they they ever encounter the nonsense or the pseudoscience kind of um for themselves.
Speaker 2:Um, I have quite a lot of dealings with another skeptic called the snarky gherkin, and, um, and what he does is he? He just point by point, by point by point. You know. So if you're doing a blood detox to get rid of the spike proteins, which everyone's obsessed about something about people that have been vaccinated seem to shed spike proteins it makes absolutely no sense. Yeah, but what he does is he takes the claim. But I think, um, in some regards, what you're saying is is highly accurate, because we're not really trying to change the opinion of the person we're talking to. We're trying to to limit their efficacy and their influence yeah, yeah and absolutely.
Speaker 1:And part of the way we limit their influence is by showing people, um, where their rhetoric doesn't work and where their rhetoric leads and and the essentially the wrong turns that it, uh, that it will take on a kind of a logical maze. I think, um, and I think one of the other things that I I typically do is I I try not to argue facts and I try not to you. You know, break down as you, as you were just saying that your colleague does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I try not to do that quite so much when I'm talking to someone who is trying to promote these pseudoscientific ideas, if I'm trying to understand what they're about.
Speaker 1:Because, it's very rare that the reasoning they bring to you is the reasoning that persuaded them In any given given conversation. People, when they, when they try to have these kind of um, persuasive conversations, they use the arguments they think will work on the other person. Um, but that's maybe not the reason that they believe so. The the reason they came to be an anti-vaxxer wasn't because they saw you know, this study over here from the, you know, vaccine adverse events reporting system that suggested there were this number of adverse effects. That's not why they're an anti-vaxxer. That's why they want you to be an anti-vaxxer. That's what they think will persuade you. So what I try?
Speaker 2:to do is I try to understand so the inception that what influenced them in the first place was probably an anecdote right somebody in their environment? An anecdote?
Speaker 1:a fear, a personal, a personal experience. And what I try to do when I'm having those conversations with people is actually try to get to well, where were you when you first came across this? What persuaded you? Can you remember your journey into this? Because I think if we connect with people, at that point we can understand the real influences and not just have these artificial conversations where they will say, well, actually, do you see this study over here? And then you go off and you find the study and you point out why it's not true and they say, yeah, but there's a study over here and really none of these studies was central to why they believe in this thing.
Speaker 3:They're just using it as kind of flack as armor to prevent you from getting.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly, to prevent you from getting to the bottom of what they actually think or why, and in so many cases, the reason people believe stuff is emotionally led. We're all emotionally led in our decisions yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it in those terms, because it's like you might have the same thing in Luna Park, where you throw a ball and the clown drops and then it swings back up and then another one comes up and you can never yeah you can never quite get. You're right. It's like study after study, after study after study and you never quite get there, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, and and you know this is how people have, um, uncomfortable conversations or talk to people who, who disagree with them and all sorts of things. You know you'll you'll find the the person who brings up three different excuses why they didn't do something. And if they're bringing three different excuses, none of those excuses are real. It was actually something else, but they just don't want to admit their real thing because they don't think it's it's going to be persuasive enough or understandable enough, or you know you're going to be empathetic and sympathetic to it. So they bring up all these other reasons as to why the thing never got done. But the more excuses you bring up, the more it's clear that that's not the reason. Um, so I think, trying to understand exactly what tell me, tell me about yourself, tell me what you think. People don't want to admit that. I was scared first, and then I went looking for reasons why I should be scared.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you try to address that fear first of all. That's the heart of it, and we all make our decisions based on our emotions first. Even sensible sceptics make their decisions based on emotion and backfill with evidence. It's just how our brains and kind of our decision-making works.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the whole. You know, we're just one big limbic system with post-rationalising right. We're just one big post-rationalization and sort of driving around in these bodies making emotional decisions. But you know, feeling like we've got these really sharp intellects and, of course, as we know, you know the smartest people can be fooled. So a high IQ is no protection against believing nonsense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's never about intelligence. Very smart people are very good at justifying their bad ideas. Partly because they're so smart, and partly because they need to be, because they see themselves as so smart. So why do I believe in this? It must be very smart. I must be very intelligent.
Speaker 3:There must be a very good reason why I believe it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people will do that. So I think you have to try and get to kind of where people were. I remember during the, the pandemic, one of the things I I did very early in the pandemic was join my um, my local anti-vax groups. There were these anti-vax groups that were promoting themselves through qr codes on lampposts around town and I joined the local group and it was a local chapter of an international group and I spent about two years, every day sort of like, just scrolling through their telegram to see what they were saying to each other, because I need to understand how their conversations between themselves work before I can have any effect on the conversations they're having with the general public.
Speaker 1:You're going to learn their arguments before those arguments have been tested on the public and you see them learning it for the for the first time and you can see the, the, the influences and arguments, the, the sources, the origins of those arguments, see them forming, seeing which ones they coalesce around. You kind of get an understanding of what rhetoric they're going to employ on the general public. Um, but I I gave a talk about this after a couple of, maybe 18 months or something like that. I was spending in this time in this space and explaining the, the fear, the paranoia, the, the ways that people get more and more extreme in their rhetoric, the way that bad actors who have very divisive intents and often, from you know, racist backgrounds, come in to try and change these people's minds in a influence them into far-right politics and various other kind of things.
Speaker 2:Interesting um conflation, isn't it? That notion of anti-vax conspiracy theories, and then this very sort of white um supremacy, um far-right wing element, that's really. It's all coalesced now, hasn't it?
Speaker 1:yeah, and I think partly it was because with the anti-vax stuff and the conspiracy theory stuff you had a group of people who were disaffected, mistrustful of authorities. And you know we should be mistrustful authorities, but that comes to a point and if you go beyond that point it's it's unreasonable mistrust. Um, but they were already outsiders in society for the positions that they were holding. And once they are particularly when they're holding those positions, largely through things like fear, like they're scared of, uh, of things they don't quite understand or that kind of stuff, um, that makes them very uh, malleable and very easily persuadable. If you come along and say I you know there were very well known, uh, far-right actors here in the uk who's who'd never said a word about vaccines until the covid vaccine was coming out and then suddenly they were hugely, you know uh, in favor of taking down the vaccine.
Speaker 1:And the reason for that isn't because they suddenly became convinced that vaccines are bad, it's because they suddenly convinced, became convinced that there was a large amount of anti-vaxxers they could recruit yeah if they spoke in their language first and then drip fed in the more extreme stuff. Um, and so I. I give a talk about all of this, we give a talk. I toured around the uk various skeptics groups and I also give a talk on youtube about it, and when I did that the group found me.
Speaker 1:The group I was in recognized that. They saw the talk being advertised. They found what my profile in their telegram group was and they were saying this guy here's a journalist, he's here to out us, he's here to expose us. And they kicked me out and it. I was worried because there were quite a lot of violent actors or violent rhetoric in those spaces, but I'm dripping in white male privilege so they didn't come after me. It might have been different had I had been been somebody else.
Speaker 1:Um, but at the end of all of that, the leader of the local liverpool chapter of this group where I live, um, who's one of the moderators for the global chapter, got in touch to say what have you got to say for yourself? You've been here for so long, you've been spying on us. What have you got to say for yourself? And I said look, I've never said anything. That isn't true. I've never misrepresented myself. I haven't goaded anybody into anything. I'm just here to document. But I've got concerns and if you want to know what those concerns are, watch the talk on youtube. And he went away. He watched it, he messaged me immediately afterwards and said oh, my god, you're right oh what this is.
Speaker 1:I I didn't see it. I had no idea. I spent I was moderating the group. I spent all my time kicking out the obviously fake accounts and the crypto scammers and the things, and I didn't see that the guys whose names I knew, who I would go for a drink with, were getting more and more extreme in their rhetoric until you were able to take a step back and show it. And so we talked for a few months, just back and forth on telegram and I said ask me anything, and I promise you there's no judgment here. I want to understand you and if you want to understand me, tell me anything that you're thinking, tell me what you're worried about and I'll see how I can explain how I feel about that and maybe some of that will be helpful.
Speaker 1:And we talked for a few, like I said, weeks, months, and at the end he left the conspiracy theory movement and he joined our local skeptics group and he talked out about how the reason he ended up in that position wasn't because he saw a lot of studies that suggested it or a lot of yellow card you know the VAERS data, or anything like that. He said he was working in a very stressful job. He was a night watchman, essentially in a in an old building. He said it was um periods where you didn't speak to anyone. You didn't talk to anyone, punctuated by things that were really scary because suddenly something was happening, and so his job was quite quite an emotional toll.
Speaker 1:It was a night job. He couldn't sleep, he couldn't see his friends. During that, he felt more and more isolated and then the pandemic happened, when he'd already been isolated and he found this online community and he just escalated from there and only by talking to me and a couple of other people who were able to just talk to him like a human being and show that compassion and empathy and not shout names at him and not call him uh, all the things under the sun and not talk down to him but actually just say look, it's a scary time, let's have a chat.
Speaker 1:That's what helped him get out. So I think there is merit in remembering that we're human beings and we're talking to humans that's a.
Speaker 2:That's a. That's a very satisfying story.
Speaker 1:That's brilliant yeah, it is, and um, it really helped that I've been doing this. Talk about this anti-vax movement around, different skeptics in the group, uh, skeptics in the pub countries and skeptics of pub groups in the uk yeah, and I didn't have a good ending because I was like well, and it's terrible and there's a lot of bad stuff out there the end. And then this happened. Oh, at least I've got an ending to the talk now as well.
Speaker 2:You know, if you are feeling disengaged, abandoned, then you find something, a group. We know that identity, protective cognition, that notion that I have to keep agreeing with this, because if I don't agree with this I'm going to be expelled. And this is my tribe and it's very emotional, right, I need to be part of something right. Yeah, absolutely, and this is my tribe and it's very emotional, right, I need to be part of something right yeah, absolutely, and this is something I found.
Speaker 1:So I I was investigating the flat earth movement from about maybe 2015, something like that, before it became this international movement of, and really took over youtube.
Speaker 2:It fascinates me the flat earth how yeah, so, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I came across it. When I came across the Flat Earth Society I think it was the second or third episode of the Be Reasonable podcast and it was really small at the time. It was a forum where people were discussing proofs of the flat earth. Some of those people didn't believe the world was flat, but were just mucking about trying to think of very esoteric, off-the-wall, hard-to-disprove proofs even though they didn't believe them, because they just enjoyed the intellectual pursuit of adding richness into this kind of other-world view.
Speaker 3:But the problem is those people.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and I could understand the fun of that when it seemed very harmless. But the problem is, those people would come up with fairly sophisticated arguments that the real believers didn't need to understand to parrot, and so they would end up making people more entrenched. And then the skeptics would come rushing into the forum to point out why every flat earther is an idiot and wrong, and the skeptics would say the first thing they could think of that they think proves the world is round, and never stop to think. If it's the first thing I can think of, it's probably the first thing they thought of, and they're still flat earthers, which means they have an answer. It doesn't mean there doesn't need to be a good answer or a right answer, but it's an answer that's satisfying to them, and if you don't know it, they're going to tell you it in that conversation and maybe you're not going to be able to unpack it live and you've just lost the argument.
Speaker 1:The skeptics rush in, call people all sorts of names and lose the argument because they're coming across an answer they've never heard before and don't know why it's wrong. And so because people rushed in, assuming themselves to be better, that that was making things worse, but it never really exploded until it hit YouTube and YouTube was actively promoting it to people who were looking for images of space or were interested in other conspiracy theories or who were just looking for something weird. Every one of these different audiences are people who watched it because they believed it, or watched it because they thought it was funny, or watched it because they wanted to study all the ways in which it was wrong. So they watched it five times. Youtube doesn't see different people there.
Speaker 1:It sees one big audience and says this video was seen by this many people yeah I'm going to recommend it to more people, and it really was youtube pushing the flatter that people that persuaded them to be part of it. Um, but I went to the flat earth convention in the uk oh, what awesome three days undercover in a hotel with 250 people who think the world is flat, and it was remarkable because I know that you, that you're a sceptic or do you just?
Speaker 2:Is your face known? I don't know.
Speaker 1:No, it's not particularly known. So, yeah, nobody, I've never been rumbled just on people knowing who I am. I'm very, very fortunate in that regard and I don't go there to deceive them. But I know that if I went there and said I'm a skeptic, I think this is nonsense. Every conversation would be that one we talked about, where they bring up the things to persuade me but not the things that persuaded them, and I want to hear what's persuasive to them.
Speaker 2:That's such a brilliant distinction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's so important.
Speaker 1:Otherwise we're just seeing this surface level stuff and they. They've had that conversation with people who disagree with them way more times than I have, so every conversation they have with somebody.
Speaker 1:They meet, they practice it and if you actually stop and say, instead of saying you're wrong about these things, you say I'm not following. Could you help me try and understand this better? Because when I try and follow you, I come across this hurdle and I can't get past it. How did you get past it? And that is me introducing the challenge of saying your point is wrong without me saying you are wrong. You are being challenged here and people will then really consider what you're saying and maybe they will find an answer. Maybe they'll find they don't have an answer and you'll get the huh moment in the conversation.
Speaker 1:That's what I live for, those huh moments.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I bet I hadn't thought of that. We're just pausing for a minute to hear a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3:I hadn't thought of that. We're just pausing for a minute to hear a word from our sponsor. The why Smart Women podcast is brought to you by Coup, a boutique training, coaching and media production company. A Coup, spelt C-O-U-P, is a decisive act of leadership, and decisive leadership requires critical thinking. So well done you for investing time to think about your thinking, if your leadership or relationships would benefit from some grounded and creative support. If you want team training or a conference presentation, reach out for a confidential one-on-one conversation using the link in the description or go to coupco.
Speaker 2:That was part one of my interview with the brilliant skeptic Michael Marshall. Tune in next week for part two. Thanks for tuning in to why Smart Women with me, Annie McCubbin. I hope today's episode has ignited your curiosity and left you feeling inspired by my anti-motivational style. Join me next time as we continue to unravel the fascinating layers of our brains and develop ways to sort out the fact from the fiction and the over 6,000 thoughts we have in the course of every day.
Speaker 2:Remember, intelligence isn't enough. You can be as smart as paint, but it's not just about what you know, it's about how you think. And in all this talk of whether or not you can trust your gut, if you ever feel unsafe, whether it's in the street, at work, in a car park, in a bar or in your own home, please, please, respect that gut feeling. Staying safe needs to be our primary objective. We can build better lives, but we have to stay safe to do that. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast and share it with your fellow smart women and allies. Together, we're hopefully reshaping the narrative around women and making better decisions. So until next time, stay sharp, stay savvy and keep your critical thinking hat shiny. This is Annie McCubbin signing off from why Smart Women. See you later. This episode was produced by Harrison Hess. It was executive produced and written by me, Annie McCubbin.
