The Sniper Bending Thing

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Most people don't understand things. Douglas adams had quite a nice story about im a man who didn't understand how television worked. He got an engineer to explain to him howe work. And i could see in his eyes he was thinking, you know, i'm a sceptic too, but this one thing. If copperfield makes the statue of liberty dis here, do you really think he moved the atoms somewhere? People, no, of course not. But the spoon bending thing, oh, or the mentalism thing? Oh, there's something special there. No, it's just another trick. In other words, they're kind of dumbfounded.

In episode 205, Michael Shermer speaks with Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene, voted The Royal Society’s Most Inspiring Science Book of All Time, and also the bestsellers The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor’s Tale, The God Delusion, and two volumes of autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford and both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.

This episode is heavily edited because Dawkins was having trouble with his voice, and Shermer tried to speak a little more to give Dawkins a chance to let his voice rest.