In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Joe talks with author Andy Fried Fried Frieden about his new book, Mind Parasites: The Search for a Better Way to Think. Frieden talks about UFOs, mind parasites, and the dark side of the universe, and how to deal with them. This episode is sponsored by Steven Pinker's book, "Infectious Ideas: A Better Way To Think," which is available for pre-order now. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: "Advertiser" to receive 10% off your entire purchase when you enter the discount code: CRIMINALS at checkout. We're giving away a copy of Frieden's new book and a signed copy of it to commemorate the podcast's 10th anniversary. Thank you so much to Andy Frieden for coming on the pod, and for sharing his book with us. We couldn't do this without you, and we could not do it without you. It's a gift to all of you, the listeners who made this podcast possible. Thank you, Joe! And we could all use it. -Jon Sorrentino Jon The Joe Rogans Experience Podcast by day, by night, all day, All day all day. Jon Rogan Podcast by night. (featuring the late, great and powerful, powerful, and powerful Steven Pinkers. The Dark Side Of) by the great, powerful and powerful Steve Pinker. by night all day by night by night by day by day - by all day all by night? , by night All day, all by day? , all day? by night?? By night, by day and all day?? By day, only by night ? on the road? All day? By night all day?! On the road in the morning, by the road, by day, ? by morning and by night?! by evening? by night, , day by so much by day ? , and by evening with all day by afternoon, by evening, by morning, by any day ? by afternoon, and evening? by ?
00:00:17.000Thank you very much for coming here, and thank you for bringing me a signed copy of your book, Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think.
00:01:15.000There's a big 60 Minutes piece last night that aired, and talking to Christopher Mellon, who used to work for the Defense Department, talking to Commander David Fravor, who is the guy who piloted that jet that I was telling you about that encountered that craft off of the coast of San Diego in 2004. There's been quite a few of these pretty spectacular videos that have come out that were released by the—well,
00:01:38.000Some of them were leaked and then confirmed by the Pentagon and— Well, that's the kind of evidence that should change your attitude from skeptical to, you know, hey, maybe there's something here, right?
00:01:48.000I mean, I think you've already indicated that you get the basic premise, one of the basic premises of the book, right?
00:02:28.000It creates copies of itself, induces something like an infection-spreading sneeze so it can get to other bodies, and it's often harmful of the very thing that hosts it.
00:03:16.000And isn't that kind of what voodoo is?
00:03:18.000Like, what voodoo is, you tell a person that they're cursed, you hex them, and then they believe it, and it changes the way they think, and they're terrified.
00:04:02.000And they checked the bottle of pills, found the physician on the bottle, contacted the physician, and he told them he was part of the study.
00:04:10.000The physician came down to the hospital and informed him that he was actually in the placebo group.
00:04:15.000Within five minutes, his heart rate came down to normal, his blood pressure came down to normal, and he relaxed, and he was subsequently released from the hospital.
00:06:15.000So I'm a philosopher by training and philosophers have always been kind of really eager to invest – to test ideas and try to weed out the bad ones.
00:06:27.000That's kind of what we philosophers do and a lot of times that doesn't make us particularly popular.
00:06:33.000But I argue in the book that the philosophical method of belief testing called, say, the Socratic method, right?
00:06:41.000Famous process pioneered by a Greek philosopher thousands of years ago.
00:06:46.000Basically, if you test ideas with questions and then toss out the ones that don't withstand scrutiny, that's a way to strengthen your mind's resistance to bad ideas.
00:06:59.000So here's kind of the skinny on this, and I think that the people who get this concept are going to be the thought leaders for the next few decades.
00:07:10.000We know our bodies have immune systems.
00:07:12.000And their job is to hunt down parasites and pathogens and eliminate them.
00:07:20.000And some of those antibodies actually consume pathogens in our body.
00:07:27.000Now, the new information, which is just now coming together in philosophy and in the sciences, is that our minds have immune systems just like our bodies do.
00:07:38.000Only a mental immune system's job is to hunt down and remove mind parasites or bad ideas.
00:07:50.000I've never seen you speechless before.
00:09:32.000But yeah, so I see what you're saying.
00:09:35.000But it seems a little bit more complicated when you're addressing ideas.
00:09:39.000Because one of the problems with these ideas is some of them are very attractive.
00:09:43.000Like I was watching the dumbest video yesterday.
00:09:48.000Where people were thinking that when they were getting the COVID vaccine that they're getting microchipped and they're approving it with magnets.
00:09:56.000They were sticking magnets on themselves and the magnets were clinging to the area where they got the COVID shot.
00:10:03.000And they were, from this they were concluding?
00:10:05.000That you're getting microchipped and that somehow or another this magnet was being held in place.
00:10:10.000So I take it you would think of that as a mind parasite?
00:10:23.000So our first example there was of your mental immune system functioning properly to spot a bad idea and say, nope, you're not welcome here, right?
00:10:48.000You're our lucky customer number 100. You get a chance to chat with God.
00:10:52.000So Fred marches right in to God's inner sanctum and says, so God, I've been a conspiracy theorist my whole life, a flat-earther my whole life.
00:11:01.000I gotta know, is the world flat or is it round?
00:11:05.000God shakes his head, does a facepalm, and says, I'm sorry to say, Fred, but the world is very round.
00:11:13.000Fred's face registers shock and then recognition, and he said, this conspiracy theory goes higher than I thought.
00:11:24.000That's probably exactly what they would do too.
00:11:30.000And what does this joke tell us about the conspiracy mentality?
00:11:35.000And you say that's exactly what it would do because I think you understand something about conspiracy thinking, which is that a conspiracy theory infected mind We're good to go.
00:11:53.000That those antibodies will attack the good information.
00:11:56.000So here's God telling you the truth, right?
00:11:57.000And Fred's mental antibodies just rush in and dismiss it as part of an even deeper conspiracy.
00:12:07.000So questions, doubts, suspicions, those are the mind's antibodies, all right?
00:12:20.000In the same way the body's immune system can go haywire and attack your body itself, your mind's immune system can go haywire and your questions and your doubts and your suspicions can attack your mind.
00:12:33.000I think one of the problems with conspiracy theories and people that believe foolish things is that they don't really seek the truth.
00:12:45.000They seek something that confirms what they want to be true.
00:12:49.000And they ignore things to the contrary.
00:12:52.000And there's even a word – psychologists have a word for this called confirmation bias.
00:13:02.000And so a lot of times we come to a belief that makes us comfortable, that feels good to us, and then we just seek out information that confirms it.
00:13:09.000And we actually dismiss or ignore or diminish anything that might conflict with it.
00:13:15.000But the problem is that will send you down a rabbit hole.
00:13:36.000I'll have to go back and check it out.
00:13:40.000I have never been down a conspiracy rabbit hole that I know of, but I've been down philosophical rabbit holes.
00:13:49.000I've been down some astrophysics rabbit holes and astronomy rabbit holes.
00:13:55.000There's some interesting rabbit holes to go down, but the thing about The conspiracy theory rabbit hole is you get to shittier and shittier designed websites.
00:14:04.000Like, further you go, you get to, like, those GeoCities websites.
00:14:34.000The idea that there's an alignment of the stars that can be accurately assessed and that'll determine whether or not this will be a successful trip or a dangerous trip is so fucking stupid.
00:14:47.000And wouldn't you be way better off and much more successful if you knew this information and you were actually applying it to your life?
00:14:53.000Aren't you disappointed in the results so far?
00:14:58.000This is why I brought this up, because he sent me a website of this guy who he goes to that's an astrologer, and it was the dumbest fucking website.
00:15:08.000And in the website, it was actually talking about how this guy had some other career, and it didn't work out well for him, and then he found astrology and realized this is his calling.
00:15:23.000There was a time in the history of the West when astrology made a certain amount of sense.
00:15:28.000So back when philosophers and theologians thought the Earth was at the center of the universe and that all of the stars and the planets revolved around it, the stars and the planets were thought to live in crystalline spheres that rubbed against one another.
00:15:46.000So the idea that the position of the stars could, through the rubbing of adjacent spheres, work its way down and affect things here on Earth kind of made a certain amount of sense because there was a causal story like the position of the stars and the fates down here on Earth.
00:16:03.000But then, of course, Copernicus came along, turned the...
00:16:25.000It's interesting in that there are these constellations.
00:16:29.000And it's interesting is that people have been studying these and they've been looking at Orion and, you know, cancer and all these different, you know, looking at all these different things and these images that they see in the sky and that they've been, you know, people look for patterns.
00:16:42.000They've always looked for patterns and things.
00:17:36.000I'm air-quoting their discipline justice.
00:17:39.000Because I think if you talk to an astrologist that really studies the ancient astrology...
00:17:45.000I mean, they literally have it down to what hour of what day and where the sun and the moon and everything is at the moment you've popped out of your mom.
00:17:58.000But the point is that this guy that I knew had a parasite, and he was infected to the point where it was...
00:18:05.000He was unwilling to travel unless he consulted his astrologer, and he was even canceling certain trips if the astrologer shook his head and said the magic says no.
00:18:17.000Well, and that's got to harm your life prospects when you...
00:18:23.000Your core beliefs on things that are not reality-based, on things that are based on wishful thinking.
00:18:30.000So a lot of people get into astrology because they want to believe that there are fates out there that are going to look after them or whatever.
00:18:38.000And if you indulge in wishful thinking that way, the evidence now shows you actually compromise your mind's immune system.
00:18:45.000So when you believe things because you want to, you want them to be true, your mind's immune system gets weaker.
00:18:52.000And there's actually now empirical research that indicates this.
00:18:55.000So if you, for example, accept that That clinging to your articles of faith, no matter what, is a virtue.
00:19:09.000You're less likely to change your mind when evidence comes along.
00:19:13.000And when that happens, you become more susceptible to conspiracy thinking, more susceptible to divisive political ideologies, more susceptible to science denial.
00:19:26.000Your mind's resistance to bad ideas starts to decay.
00:19:31.000You can actually damage your mind's immune system by indulging in wishful thinking.
00:19:37.000Do you highlight specific strategies in your book for looking at things accurately and looking at things objectively?
00:19:46.000Yeah, I mean so science is clearly a shining example of what's possible In the way of idea testing and the way of validating things with evidence.
00:19:58.000So, you know, scientists are especially good at testing things in laboratories or with experiments.
00:20:08.000Now philosophers have always gone in for a kind of a related but slightly different kind of idea testing.
00:20:14.000Philosophers don't have laboratories except the ones between their ears.
00:20:17.000And basically we test ideas against each other and we test ideas with questions.
00:20:23.000And we test ideas against our intuitions about right and wrong and try to figure out what makes sense.
00:20:30.000That's a complementary kind of idea testing that scientists go in for, and it's one that has done a huge amount to educate and Enlighten us over the centuries.
00:20:47.000And so what I try to do in the book is take things from this cutting-edge science I call cognitive immunology.
00:20:57.000You combine that with ancient wisdom about how to pursue wisdom, how to find wisdom, and you actually get some really powerful ways to strengthen mental immune systems.
00:21:11.000Do you need it or you've been sort of indoctrinated into the world of objective thinking to the point where you don't need any systems that you follow?
00:21:20.000Well, I try not to think that I have all the answers and that I've got it all figured out.
00:22:07.000They ridicule or deride other people's ideas for failing to meet basic standards, but then they don't apply those same standards to their own views.
00:22:51.000They only look at the other side as being bad and their side.
00:22:55.000They find justifications for every questionable behavior, every weird scandal, everything that doesn't fit the narrative.
00:23:03.000Yeah, and I'd say that politics is probably the best example, but religion and ethics and sometimes economics or others.
00:23:10.000So wherever values come into play, people get very attached to their ideas.
00:23:15.000We all want to think that we're right and true and virtuous.
00:23:20.000So whatever ideas we've already internalized as beliefs, they have to be the virtuous beliefs.
00:23:26.000And any new incoming information that challenges them from the other side of the political aisle or from another religion or from those damn atheists over there, that's the enemy.
00:23:35.000And then your mind's immune system attacks that information and you never gain the fair-mindedness needed to learn.
00:23:44.000Have you ever had a sit-down, like, a long-form discussion with someone who does believe some wacky stuff?
00:23:50.000So I actually facilitate difficult conversations with people across the political spectrum, across the religious spectrum, every week at my university.
00:24:06.000Well, there's a core group of students at Carnegie Mellon, where I've worked for many years, that meets regularly to discuss issues that we just pick as they might have to do with contemporary political phenomena, might have to do with We're good to go.
00:24:41.000Fair, open-minded dialogue in an attempt to learn from one another.
00:24:46.000So we don't always hit the sweet spot, but we try.
00:24:51.000And we think that practicing the art of difficult conversation and testing ideas in a mutually respectful way is the key to overcoming these divisions that are...
00:25:02.000It's helped me tremendously to talk to people that have different ideas than I do.
00:25:07.000Over the years I've been doing this podcast, I think early on I was way more argumentative.
00:25:15.000I just wasn't very good at it, wasn't very open-minded.
00:25:18.000And as time went on, partially from listening to myself, like sometimes you listen to yourself and you go, oh, that sounds shitty.
00:25:31.000And I realized along the way that I wasn't doing a good job of listening.
00:25:37.000In the beginning especially, I don't have any training in this.
00:25:40.000I've just sort of done this along the way.
00:25:42.000I've kind of gotten better along the way.
00:25:44.000And along the way, one of the things that was sort of a residual side effect that wasn't anticipated was it's made me way more aware of Kind of all aspects of the way I think.
00:25:57.000It's been an amazing education that accidentally...
00:26:02.000And I really admire this about the way you conduct your podcast.
00:26:51.000There's specific ways of addressing ideas and problems.
00:26:55.000And oftentimes, you get ways of addressing problems when it comes to mathematics, or maybe if you're talking about specific philosophers, you talk about how they address certain things, you get something out of that.
00:27:07.000But to give people a way of identifying issues, looking at them, and then reassessing them, perhaps looking at them from an objective Outsider's perspective, like how would someone who's not you look at this?
00:27:22.000How would you look at this problem if you didn't have an investment in it with your ego and the time that you spent arguing?
00:27:28.000Because that's one of the hardest things when you know you're wrong and then you have to like stop and go, oh wait a minute, I'm wrong.
00:27:38.000I was going to say, one of the things that I try to tell people that I've learned myself, and this is really important, I think, is that you're not your ideas.
00:28:03.000Because if you don't say it, you're never going to trust yourself.
00:28:05.000If you don't admit fault, if you don't admit that you're incorrect, then you'll never trust your own mind when it comes to different ideas that pop up.
00:28:14.000Because you're not willing to accept reality.
00:28:16.000You're so invested in your ego being nurtured that you're not willing to accept the fact that you made a mistake.
00:28:23.000So you are a core set of values, and one of those is honesty.
00:28:31.000And honesty not just with other people, but honesty with yourself.
00:28:34.000So when you look at something and you have this little problem, you've got to go, okay, well, what is this problem?
00:28:39.000So I actually think you're onto something really deep here, Joe.
00:28:42.000So when you practice meditation, you try to sit there quietly and empty your mind.
00:28:51.000But then ideas keep jumping into your mind and, oh, shoot, I've got to add this to the grocery list or whatever, right?
00:28:57.000And what you do with practice is you learn that the ideas that are flooding into your mind, they're not you.
00:29:05.000You actually develop a distance between you and your ideas, and it gives you a kind of peace of mind, and it gives you a kind of autonomy from just sort of your knee-jerk mental habits.
00:29:16.000So meditation has a long history of helping people Develop a kind of freedom from the ideas that just flood into their mind without thinking, right?
00:29:27.000I think the exact same thing can be applied to, well, I like to put it this way.
00:29:51.000Instead, you can actually think of your beliefs as like house guests that are maybe welcome to stick around for a while but might wear out their welcome, right?
00:29:59.000So keep your beliefs as long as they're, you know, working for you.
00:30:02.000But always check to make sure that they're not serving you poorly because when they do, it may be time to say sayonara.
00:30:11.000In my past, the more embarrassing moments is when I've become personally invested in ideas and will argue with them, argue for them with emotion and use tactics and talk over people, shout people down, that kind of stuff.
00:30:26.000It's one of the more embarrassing things when I think about my own belief system when I was younger, in particular, that I would want to win, right?
00:30:39.000This is one of the things I concluded from having studied the mind's immune system.
00:30:47.000When you start using reasons as weapons, you're actually subverting your mind's immune system.
00:30:55.000So when culture wars break out, people start grabbing onto reasons and using them to club people on the other side.
00:31:03.000Or they use them as shields to protect them from the attacks on the other side.
00:31:08.000But it turns out that you lose the ability to be fair-minded when you start treating reasons that way.
00:31:15.000And the alternative is to always check that you're using reasons to guide people's attention to genuinely relevant considerations, to honestly relevant considerations.
00:31:26.000If you're doing that, your mind's immune system is functioning properly.
00:31:30.000But if you're just wielding reasons as weapons to win, you're fucking with yourself as well as with the other guy.
00:32:06.000And one of the key ideas in my book is just that when we're willing to yield to better reasons, That's the mark of wisdom.
00:32:17.000Always be ready to yield to better reasons.
00:32:19.000So you might have a bunch of reasons why you believe some things, and maybe the reasons on the other side aren't enough to dislodge them.
00:32:26.000Pay attention to them anyway, because they eventually might accumulate to the point that would tip the scales.
00:32:31.000And if you're not ready and open to that happening, you're going to remain stuck where you are and unable to grow.
00:32:39.000I think there's also a problem with some of these ideas, and especially when you take into account confirmation bias, that a lot of conspiracies are not binary.
00:32:49.000It's not like there's no conspiracies.
00:32:52.000This is part of the problem, like Enron.
00:35:02.000And I think you have some mechanisms that you utilize to do that.
00:35:08.000Well, so people do sometimes conspire, and we need to be able to investigate that and find the truth.
00:35:15.000And the idea that there's a giant conspiracy behind all of these...
00:35:21.000Random-seeming things in our lives is incredibly seductive, and it can hijack your mind in a way that makes you interpret every new piece of information as just confirming the conspiracy, like with Fred the Flat Earther.
00:35:36.000So it's a dangerous thing to indulge broad-sweeping conspiracy theories.
00:35:57.000It says it was also mentioned in like 1909, but the Wikipedia does say that it was picked up in the Warren Commission to try to discredit conspiratorial believers.
00:37:50.000See if you can find this video of that guy talking about QAnon.
00:37:55.000Because someone interviewed him outside the Capitol building with his fucking crazy makeup on and the mask and all that jazz.
00:38:02.000And this guy, it's like someone spouting out sports stats.
00:38:08.000You know, like someone who could tell you about Sandy Koufax and, you know, how Reggie Jackson did this and, you know, Muhammad Ali did that.
00:38:16.000And you know how guys are, like, really good at sports stats?
00:38:51.000And then what they do is they use their billions or trillions of dollars to create a bunch of deep underground bases where they have all this like highly top secret technology going on.
00:39:01.000And they are like figuring out how to do things like create infinite energy or do things like anti-gravity technology or inertia propulsion.
00:39:09.000They're learning how to do things like cloning and all sorts of crazy stuff.
00:39:19.000Like, that guy's, listen to me, with all due respect to that guy, he's a fucking loser.
00:39:24.000And I don't mean that, I'm not trying to be mean.
00:39:26.000If he was me, I would say, damn it, I'm a fucking loser.
00:39:30.000And what I mean by, the guy was living with his mom, he's like a 30-year-old guy, didn't really have a lot of job prospects, shit wasn't going that well, he's got bad tattoos, I should talk.
00:40:39.000We got smart, smart, well-informed people on both sides that believe dumb things because our mental immune systems have been compromised by a culture that has been weakening them for decades.
00:40:52.000Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it.
00:40:55.000And we can understand how these mental immune systems work.
00:40:58.000The science is teaching us how to make them work better so that we can actually create a new generation of people who are much more resistant to cognitive contagion.
00:41:57.000When you're believing things because you want to believe them, that's going to mess with your mind's immune system.
00:42:05.000Here's one that's not well understood.
00:42:09.000So for 2,000 years philosophers have been fascinated by the idea that what makes a reasonable idea reasonable are the reasons that support it.
00:43:04.000So the picture of reasonable believing that has been pre-installed in all of us by Western civilization actually makes us more prone to confirmation bias.
00:44:07.000And then you believe it, and then all of a sudden you're infected with a mind parasite.
00:44:11.000Well, one of the things you see people doing online, it's a funny thing, they try to find sources, and then if people are battling on Twitter about an idea, you'll see they'll pull up an article that supports that idea, and someone will go...
00:45:13.000So this takes us back to an ancient concept of reasonableness that predates Plato, one of my philosophical heroes, Socrates basically questioned things, and if they didn't withstand questioning, didn't withstand scrutiny,
00:45:34.000We need to bring back the Socratic picture of reasonable belief because it's one of the most powerful mind inoculants ever invented.
00:45:42.000We've forgotten how to use it in our time, but we can take this new science, cognitive immunology, we can enhance the Socratic method and achieve levels of immunity against cognitive contagion that our species has never had.
00:45:58.000Isn't one of the impediments to cognitive immunity just ideology in and of itself?
00:46:04.000Like, as you were saying earlier that your friends on the left would get upset at you saying that you tend to lean towards a conspiracy theory from the killing of JFK. Like, well, why?
00:46:34.000And we will gravitate towards ideas that keep us in good standing with the people close to us, and we'll turn with hate and derision on ideas that threaten our little communities of support.
00:47:03.000And what's interesting is like even if you have – like I belong to a group called Liberal because I ascribe to a series of beliefs that are in that group like women's rights, gay rights, civil rights – I believe in climate change.
00:47:22.000I have a lot of things that might not even be good ideas.
00:47:27.000I don't know if universal basic income is a good idea, but I tend to support it, because I would like people to not have to think about money as much as they do.
00:47:35.000And I don't know if that's really possible, but when I talked to Bernie Sanders, he said it was, and he's got this idea that nobody On the right seems to think it's a good idea.
00:48:46.000You are responsible for so much more of your own destiny and there's so many success stories of people that have pulled themselves up from the terrible position that they find themselves in at some stage in life and then become a happy, healthy, productive member of our society.
00:49:00.000And I don't think that victim mentality is good for anybody.
00:49:04.000So in that sense, sometimes I get labeled as a right-winger because, oh, you're conservative and you look at things that way.
00:49:10.000Well, maybe I am conservative in some regards.
00:49:29.000And if you choose to then identify as a liberal, you're hitching your identity to a set of ideas.
00:49:37.000And then challenges to those liberal ideas start to trigger a mental autoimmune reaction.
00:49:47.000I also identify for the most part as a liberal, but I try to hold that identity really loosely so that I don't overreact to criticisms of liberalism.
00:49:59.000So anytime you hitch your identity to any set of beliefs, you're setting yourself up for possible mental immune disorders.
00:50:21.000Yeah, that sounds like a lot more— And if honest inquiry shows us that liberalism is wrong about X, Y, and Z, then to heck with X, Y, and Z. The problem is some of these concepts haven't really been applied or tested.
00:50:32.000You know, I mean, some have—like, there's a lot of people that believe in socialism, right?
00:50:38.000And a lot of people believe in even Marxism.
00:50:40.000But if you look at the history of that, it's a fucking bloody disaster.
00:51:01.000Maybe as we evolve, we can figure out a way to do it and take into account the fact that people need incentives.
00:51:08.000Because this is one of the things about people.
00:51:10.000People do need motivations and incentives for them to innovate and for them to work hard.
00:51:16.000And when they feel like there is an inequality of outcome, no matter what effort you put in, then you're not going to get an inequality of effort.
00:51:26.000Because there is an inequality of effort.
00:51:27.000That's one of the things that people don't take into account when they look at people that are extremely successful, right?
00:51:31.000Like if you look at some crazy business person who's just like working 20 hours a day and they've amassed this empire and people go, well, that's not fair.
00:51:39.000That person has an exorbitant amount of wealth and they have a disproportionate amount of financial success and this is wrong.
00:54:30.000This idea has wide currency in our culture and it serves to shut down thinking.
00:54:36.000And it's one of the things that has weakened our mental immune systems because, yes, our cognitive rights matter, and government shouldn't be telling us what we're entitled to believe.
00:54:51.000To the extent that we're entitled to our opinion is a claim about our political rights, fine.
00:54:57.000But when we misinterpret it as a claim about what we're morally entitled to, To believe and think and say?
00:55:04.000Then you've crossed a line, because I'm not morally entitled to misogynistic delusions and white conspiracist fantasies, and neither are you.
00:55:53.000You don't want to invite thought police into this.
00:55:55.000Because even though you're right about a lot of the things, particularly like white supremacy and a lot of these other, like QAnon type things, a lot of very soft-minded ideas that get bounced around out there, and people want to shut those ideas down,
00:56:16.000And then social media platforms have this incredible ability to do that.
00:56:21.000They just step in and go, this is wrong.
00:56:23.000We're going to stop it and silence it and shut it down.
00:56:25.000The problem is once you give people the...
00:56:29.000Well, they have the ability to silence opposing views.
00:56:33.000They've decided they're the arbiter of truth.
00:56:37.000When it comes to arguable philosophies, when it comes to political positions, when it comes to religious beliefs, when it comes to morals and ethics, people don't always agree.
00:56:56.000And the only way to see who's right is to allow people to talk it through.
00:57:01.000But a lot of our problem is that we have an election cycle.
00:57:04.000So if someone's going to talk it through, but November's two weeks away, like, Jesus Christ, we can't allow these fucking people to talk it through.
00:57:10.000Hide the Hunter Biden stories right now.
00:57:41.000I'm not an advocate of thought police.
00:57:43.000And I devote a chapter in the book to saying, how do we regulate our own thinking Without either policing our own thoughts or trying to police each other's thoughts.
00:58:04.000The best way to counter bad speech is good speech.
00:58:09.000Yes, and I think this problem is genuinely difficult when we have a media environment that lets, say, hate speech propagate like a virus online.
00:59:05.000I don't know that it was a goof, but it was someone was posting on there because that was the best place they could post without getting it deleted.
00:59:17.000Someone could just start a crazy conspiracy like that for fun, and then a lot of other people, like our friend with the buffalo helmet on, just start believing in it and quoting it.
00:59:27.000And a lot of people who aren't involved can get harmed when that happens, right?
00:59:31.000So conspiracy theories and crazy ideologies have proliferated through human populations for thousands of years, and they cause wars.
00:59:42.000They cause people to hate, and they've caused genocides.
00:59:46.000And as Mark Twain told us, you know, a falsehood can get around—he said a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.
01:00:25.000Then you have another real problem because you have like Twitter, you have their Trust and Safety Council.
01:00:30.000So you have a bunch of people, a lot of them fresh out of universities, that really don't have a lot of life experience and maybe have some very rigid ideologies of their own and they want to enforce those and they come up with reasons to censor people, reasons to delete posts, reasons to silence and suspend people temporarily for Things that they deem to be inaccurate.
01:00:50.000In fact, a Harvard epidemiologist was recently suspended from Twitter because he said that these masks do not provide the kind of protection that people thought they did with COVID-19.
01:01:07.000And that so many people were getting too close and they were not socially distancing because they felt like these masks gave them more protection than they really did.
01:01:18.000They were catching COVID-19 because of that.
01:02:08.000Which shows that masks do reduce transmission.
01:02:11.000Something's going on, whether it's that or the fact that people are staying away from each other a little bit more than they have in the past.
01:02:17.000But what this Harvard epidemiologist was saying was that he believes that they don't work enough to allow people to be around infected people.
01:02:27.000And that this idea that you and I could talk really close to each other if one of us was infected because we were both wearing masks, he's like, that's not true.
01:02:41.000So that is a powerful example to force me to think more deeply about this.
01:02:46.000I like that because what I was trying to say a minute ago is that, yes, for the most part dialogue, mutually respectful dialogue is the way to weed out bad ideas.
01:03:10.000Well, I seem to be saying that there needs to be some sense...
01:03:13.000I mean, I don't want to say it this way, but I think a minute ago, maybe you were hearing...
01:03:19.000There needs to be additional regulatory mechanisms in place beyond mere mutually respectful dialogue to keep harmful mind parasites from spreading across the internet.
01:03:35.000To keep people from just straight up lying.
01:03:49.000I don't know the details of the case, but I'm taking it.
01:03:50.000Yeah, I'm not sure if I know the details either.
01:03:52.000I just know that I was reading a story about overreach, and they were saying that this man is obviously very qualified to talk about this very specific issue.
01:04:02.000So I'm happy to accept that as an example of overreach.
01:04:06.000And I wonder if there isn't also underreach.
01:05:47.000And then they would infiltrate other pages and pretend to be someone who speaks for Black Lives Matter or pretend to be someone who speaks for white nationalists and they would battle it out.
01:06:04.000So imagine we took a free speech fundamentalism view towards the kind of problem that you're talking to here.
01:06:10.000We're just going to say, oh, well, if the Russians want to create civil unrest by organizing these competing and chaos is spreading through the streets, do we mitigate, do we start to moderate our free speech fundamentalism?
01:06:28.000Do you think we need to moderate free speech fundamentals?
01:06:31.000It's a very good question because then the question comes up is, is anonymous posting an issue?
01:06:39.000Because the only reason why this works is because it's anonymous posting.
01:06:42.000If I find out that Jamie Vernon and Jamie's fingerprint is on it and he used his face ID to make that post and his name is, you know, young Jamie Vernon on whatever social media platform that he utilizes.
01:07:27.000Say if I was mad at you and I wanted to write a book about where you stole all your information for this book and you're a bad person and you've done all these evil things.
01:07:38.000They could just make a bunch of fake pages and if they were really psycho and they had a lot of time and they were dedicated, they could make up a bunch of fake things about you.
01:07:48.000So I think the problem you're describing is one where people have influence without accountability.
01:07:55.000So anonymous Twitter accounts, anonymous Facebook accounts, can be used to spread disinformation, and when you try to trace them back and hold the peddlers of the disinformation accountable, they just don't exist.
01:08:10.000Or they're a front for some person who's actually trying to sow chaos.
01:08:16.000So, I mean, we know this about power without accountability corrupts.
01:08:23.000And the internet is now handing out lots of power to people, and we haven't figured out how to hold people accountable for the power of the soapbox, basically.
01:08:35.000And when we're talking about Cambridge Analytica and we're talking about the Internet Research Agency, we're not even talking about people.
01:08:40.000We're talking about employees of groups that are designed, I mean, they're set up to propagate propaganda.
01:09:04.000Well, I don't think we can allow organizations like that to flourish unchecked.
01:09:09.000I think we're finding right now at our moment in history that we can't simply be free speech fundamentalists and just say it'll all work out in the end if we do.
01:09:24.000Is that there's a profit incentive for allowing these people to propagate this shit because there's so many clicks involved, right?
01:09:33.000That's the thing is the algorithms, whether it's Facebook or...
01:09:36.000A lot of these other social media platforms, the algorithms favor anything that's going to cause conflict, because conflict inspires discourse, and then people are engaging.
01:09:47.000The engagement is very high on these algorithms.
01:09:51.000But it's interesting, too, that my friend Ari, he had a study, a test, he had a theory, and his theory was That everyone's saying that these algorithms encourage conflict.
01:10:07.000And he was like, is that or is that just what people do?
01:10:10.000And so what he tried to do is he only looked up puppies on YouTube.
01:11:50.000But the real problem is that you're eating those fucking things.
01:11:53.000The real problem is not that like ho-hos exist.
01:11:56.000The real problem is that's what you gravitate towards instead of an apple.
01:12:01.000So this makes perfect sense in light of – so philosophers have noticed for a long time that our cravings can often lead us to do self-destructive things.
01:12:18.000Your craving for fatty foods can lead you to have heart disease, right?
01:12:24.000So our minds actually crave all kinds of things that aren't good for it, at least in the quantities that we crave them, right?
01:12:31.000And so going all the way back to ancient Greece, philosophers have said, you've got to modulate your desire with reason.
01:12:41.000And, you know, Socrates, Plato, my ancient philosophical heroes, they're all basically saying if you let your desires control you, if you let the ideas that just swarm into your head unbidden to control you, You will be a slave to them your whole life.
01:12:57.000But if you actually develop your capacity to reason, to test ideas in dialogue, and by the way, you can have the dialogue within your own head, kind of like, or you can have your dialogue with others.
01:13:10.000But either way, that kind of dialogue teaches you how to develop a kind of freedom from these forces inside of your own mind that can enslave you.
01:13:25.000But I think for many people, they don't know how to start.
01:13:29.000Maybe you're listening to this right now, and maybe you have had moments in your life where you've just been hijacked by stupid ideas and you don't know exactly what to do.
01:13:40.000I have a friend, I've talked about her before on the podcast.
01:13:43.000She used to be a Mormon all of her life, and then one day she snapped out of it and they left the church and the whole deal.
01:13:53.000She said she finds herself to be very susceptible to, like, bullshit because she believed in things without questioning them her whole life until she was, like, in her 40s.
01:14:08.000So, like, all of a sudden she finds herself now trying to navigate the waters of reality without, like, a rock-solid belief system that she can fall back on.
01:14:22.000Because she's a very smart person, and she lived a kind of a dull-minded life when she was just believing part and parcel whatever the Mormon ideology was.
01:14:39.000She's definitely going to get a planet when she dies, and everything's going to be awesome, and I'm going to wear these magic underwear, and Jesus is looking out for me.
01:15:02.000So I once got a call as a philosophy professor.
01:15:04.000A woman called me and she basically said, I was brought up in a deeply fundamentalist Christian sect, and I was taught about hell, and I've lived my entire life just scared as shit that I'm going to be sent to hell.
01:15:17.000But my college professors, they're actually encouraging me to think for myself, but whenever I actually start to think critically about God's existence, I'm seized by this kind of panic.
01:15:29.000And she said, even though I know hell is an illusion, I know that hell is just an idea that was created to control behavior of children.
01:15:41.000And she said, even though I've outgrown those ideas, I still can't stop the sense of panic.
01:15:48.000This poor woman, her mental immune system had been crippled by her upbringing.
01:15:56.000Something in the way she was brought up, her fundamentalist training, had actually made it so that she was seized by irrational fear when she tried to think for herself.
01:17:34.000Building a culture where idea testing is so normalized that we don't need to censor anyone to become, to have herd immunity to crazy cognitive, to mind virus.
01:17:51.000The problem is, some people, religion is a fundamental principle that allows them to live their lives with, like, structure.
01:18:01.000It's a scaffolding for their morals and their ethics, and it's helped them tremendously.
01:18:07.000And I know a lot of people like that, who are really good people, that happen to be Christian, and they follow the best aspects of the Christian religion.
01:18:28.000Because if it is real to you, we've got a real problem here.
01:18:32.000Because that doesn't make any sense, not with anything we know.
01:18:35.000So at one point in time, there was a magic person.
01:18:37.000So there's never been a magic person since, but at one point in time, there was a magic person, he happened to be the Son of God, and he had all this information, and he tried to tell us, and we, you know, someone, not us, someone hung him up on a cross and killed him, and he came back three days later.
01:18:53.000But if you say that doesn't pass critical thinking, you're not allowed to think that, we can't have that in our platform, that you got a real problem on your hands because that's a large percentage of the people.
01:19:07.000And they use that even though they don't necessarily believe it hook, line, and sinker.
01:20:40.000That's why my book is, I think, fundamental to how the only enlightened way we can possibly address this disinformation problem is at the demand end by increasing resistance to bad ideas so that people freely, without coercion,
01:21:39.000I don't have any quick and easy answers, right?
01:21:41.000I don't have a silver bullet answer, but I will tell you this.
01:21:44.000There's a new science emerging in our day and age that's teaching us how mental immune systems work.
01:21:49.000It's teaching us why they fail and how we can make them work better.
01:21:55.000And we can make them work better by strengthening them in ways that philosophers are long taught and that the new sciences of psychology are saying actually help us become more independent and more autonomous thinkers.
01:22:14.000Which is, I think, a different approach to dealing with our disinformation problem than, you know, censor the sources.
01:22:20.000But again, it comes to this point where the only way this is going to work is you get a lot of people to adopt it.
01:22:49.000You develop your own mind's resistance to bad ideas.
01:22:53.000You learn the habits of mind that will largely inoculate you against many kinds of mind parasites.
01:23:03.000And then you gently, in a non-combative way, introduce the people You love to the process of loving idea testing, of collaborative idea testing.
01:23:19.000And they kind of have to see it in you as an example.
01:24:28.000You gently help them let go is a good way to put it.
01:24:31.000And I think that, like we're saying, someone who leads by example, that's very important, is that you're best served by doing your best work.
01:24:42.000And if you do, like, I've had friends that have lost a lot of weight, and a lot of the people around them that see them lose a lot of weight, then they start losing weight, too.
01:24:50.000Because they realize, like, oh, if he can do it, like, look how great he looks now, look how healthy he is, I'm going to try that, too.
01:24:56.000And they realize there's a path to do this.
01:26:22.000So when I look back on that moment, I could see that antibodies were mobilizing in my own mind to fight off threatening information.
01:26:31.000But it was fighting off good information, true information.
01:26:35.000So this is what happens when you embrace something as nearly sacred.
01:26:43.000Embrace something as sacred, then when information comes along that threatens it, you'll reject it almost before listening to it or before really hearing it out.
01:26:52.000That's the mind's immune system overreacting to a perceived threat.
01:26:58.000By the way, there's a famous experiment in the history of immunology.
01:27:01.000A Russian zoologist in 1882, he takes a starfish, he stabs it with a thorn, he sticks it under a microscope, and what he sees are thousands of white blood cells rushing to the scene of the injury,
01:27:17.000engulfing the tip of the thorn, and consuming, devouring it.
01:27:23.000He was the first human being ever to witness the body's immune system in action.
01:27:28.000I'm saying I witnessed my own mind's immune system overreacting to information about Martin Luther King.
01:27:40.000Imagine somebody, you log on one day and find that some jerk out there has been assassinating your character, has just been tearing you down online.
01:29:26.000It was just having dialogues like this.
01:29:28.000I just loved having long-form conversations with people I really cared about and just like shooting the shit with my buddies after school and exploring ideas, testing ideas.
01:29:41.000I just found that I loved that idea and I decided to devote my life to promoting dialogue.
01:29:50.000That was my kind of core conviction, and so I went to grad school, studied philosophy, and I tried to understand how reasoning dialogue works and what's the difference between dialogue that works well and dialogue that goes off the rails.
01:30:06.000And that's one thing that I could say is sorely lacking in most people's lives is long form conversations.
01:30:14.000Everyone is doing tweets and text messages and, you know, you don't have much time to yourself and you definitely very rarely just sit down with no distractions for several hours at a time just talking to people.
01:30:27.000And talking about the things that matter most is really important.
01:30:31.000So my philosophical heroes going way back say, you've got to think about what's important in life.
01:30:37.000And you've got to talk about what's important in life.
01:30:39.000And you've got to examine your values and consider updating and refining them day in and day out.
01:30:44.000And when you do that, when you spend time on that...
01:30:48.000It can transform your outlook on the world and it can transform your sense of well-being as well.
01:30:54.000So it's not the kind of meditation that involves sitting quietly, but it's a kind of meditation that involves thinking sometimes with others.
01:31:33.000Someone can tell you something, you know, maybe they grew up in Hungary, or maybe they did this, or maybe they did that, and they can say something to you and you're like, oh, okay.
01:32:03.000Like, that's something that, I mean, if we really want to do this government or this country, rather, a service, our government should actually be saying...
01:32:11.000That to the people, like, this is one way we can make our country stronger.
01:32:15.000If we have less ideologues, we have less people that are completely connected to one narrative and will fight tooth and nail.
01:32:24.000You know, like you see these Twitter political battles.
01:32:27.000I mean, there's so many of those where you're just like, God, boys, let it go.
01:32:32.000Girls, everybody, whoever's getting after it.
01:32:36.000So a minute ago you asked how to start.
01:33:49.000So there's a bunch of philosophers and people who are kind of inspired by philosophy who go out onto the streets with a cell camera and they walk up to somebody and just say, hey, do you mind if I ask you some questions?
01:34:00.000And if they give consent, you say, all right, I'm going to.
01:34:03.000And then they ask them, you know, tell me about a cherished belief.
01:34:06.000And then they ask gentle clarifying questions to kind of explore that belief, and in a very non-combative way, they get people to think really deeply about their values.
01:34:16.000It's a fascinating process, and it was inspired by Socrates, but it's kind of a phenomenon now that there are hundreds of people all over the world who do this.
01:34:24.000They're just out there having deep conversations about right and wrong and about core values.
01:37:54.000So Carl Sagan, the late astrophysicist, was really good at getting people to think about the vastness of space and how tiny our little blue planet is.
01:38:05.000And the humility that comes with that and the sense of perspective and the sense of awe and the sense of wonder that comes with that, I think can be transformative.
01:38:13.000And Sagan is one of my heroes as well.
01:38:15.000Yeah, Demon Haunted World is fantastic.
01:39:22.000So Sagan was on the team, the NASA team, that piloted the Voyager spacecraft, which made its way past Mars and Jupiter, Saturn and Jupiter.
01:39:33.000And way out there, near Saturn's rings, he convinces the team to turn the Voyager spacecraft around and photograph Earth when Earth was just a tiny blue speck in the distance.
01:39:46.000And he caught this image of the Earth from the farthest reaches of the solar system.
01:39:53.000And he says, think about that one pixel blue dot in that picture.
01:39:58.000Everything you've ever cared about has played out in that one little blue dot.
01:40:02.000Every war that's ever been fought on that blue dot.
01:40:06.000Every bit of suffering you've ever heard of, every joy, every civilization has lived or died on that little blue dot.
01:40:15.000Let that be an inspiration and a source of humility for us all.
01:40:51.000The way they have it set up is they have diffused lighting on the Big Island, and it's because of the observatory.
01:40:58.000They make it so that the light pollution doesn't get all the way up to the Keck Observatory.
01:41:05.000When one time I got up there and it was a full moon, and that was a mess.
01:41:08.000I was like, oh, you don't want to be up there on a full moon because the moon itself reflects the sun and then it becomes a problem where you can't see the stars.
01:42:26.000And imagine how that would change your outlook on the world, right?
01:42:29.000Change the Mayans and change the Egyptians and all these different cultures that they look to the heavens for the patterns that they use to establish their cities, like the Mayans in particular.
01:42:46.000Just the sheer awe that you would have in looking up at this thing that you didn't know what it was.
01:42:54.000And awe is the spark that lights so many minds alive, right?
01:43:01.000I've got a friend who teaches astronomy at Carnegie Mellon University.
01:43:05.000And she's on this big crusade to end light pollution or to dramatically reduce light pollution.
01:43:10.000It always struck me as this kind of kooky little project of hers.
01:43:15.000But she's actually probably been to Keck Observatory.
01:43:18.000She's actually seen how awe-inspiring the heavens can be.
01:43:22.000And she thinks that if all of us got to experience that, it would make us more enlightened and more tolerant and more humble.
01:43:30.000I think that could be a real problem with our civilization is that for the most part, most people experience a tremendous amount of light pollution every day.
01:43:39.000Most people don't ever get to see stars like that.
01:43:41.000It's only people that live in extremely rural places.
01:43:44.000I mean, maybe if you live in the middle of Montana, out in the middle of nowhere, your night sky looks like that.
01:44:20.000We get humble when we're around spectacular examples of nature's beauty, right?
01:44:26.000Like people that live near the ocean, for example, are more chill.
01:44:29.000And I think one of the reasons why they're more chill is like, how can you take yourself seriously when you're faced with this vast quantity of water that could just wash over your city and just...
01:44:39.000I mean, you're at the edge of this insane volume of water, and it's very...
01:44:43.000And the power of it in the waves that come in.
01:45:11.000It's like the most beautiful artwork you've ever seen, but it's nature.
01:45:17.000Especially on a sunny day after the rain when everything's vibrantly green and the clouds are parting and you see the birds chirping and you're like, God, this is pretty.
01:46:07.000When you're seeing those stars, those are stars that are the center of other solar systems and other solar systems that contain other planets and other planets that might have mountains and those mountains might have streams At the bottom of them with birds and,
01:46:32.000So it's that spiritual experience you get when you do see a gorgeous lake and, you know, a fish jump and an eagle fly times forever, times infinity, times what my science teacher in eighth grade was trying to explain to me.
01:46:51.000And a lot of my non-believer friends are almost allergic to spirituality talk, but I actually think that there's a place for it in this world, because there are things that words don't capture, and we need to be able to direct our attention to them and try to cherish them properly.
01:47:11.000The non-believer friends that I have that don't like spiritual talk, it's either because they've been around too much of it where it's nonsense.
01:47:19.000There is a lot of nonsense spiritual talk.
01:47:22.000Like fake yoga people, that kind of deal.
01:47:27.000The people that have done psychedelics generally are more likely to be open-minded towards the possibility of some sort of a spiritual realm and spiritual thinking and that there's something more to this.
01:47:40.000And that what's going on with most religions is they're trying to figure out, they're trying to grasp and put down on paper what these transcending experiences are.
01:48:03.000And that transcendent experiences are real.
01:48:05.000They can happen, and they can happen because of love.
01:48:09.000You just have a moment in time where you're with a person, and you're holding hands, and you feel like the world's a different place, or the birth of a child, or...
01:48:18.000Where you're connected to the redwood forest around you.
01:48:21.000Sometimes for some people it's even near-death experiences bring about it.
01:48:24.000But there's moments in this life where you kind of get it for a brief moment and then you just get sucked back into the drone of the grind of the day-to-day existence of being an ant.
01:48:37.000And some of the ancient Eastern philosophy traditions suggest that as soon as you try to affix those transcendent moments with words, you've already lost the game.
01:49:26.000But I'm saying I'm ready to open my mind to that.
01:49:30.000Well, there's a real problem with illegality.
01:49:32.000If they were legal and they were readily available with trained, qualified experts and professionals who are educated in correct dosages and how to administer them, we would have been way further off as a society.
01:49:50.000Light pollution, if we eliminated all of that, and psychedelics were more readily available, it would completely transform the way human beings communicate with each other.
01:49:59.000That and cognitive immunology principles applied.
01:50:02.000Cognitive immunology principles applied and also recognition of the established methods of alleviating physical stress to relax the mind, whether it's through yoga, meditation, exercise, mindfulness, all those different things that are absolutely real,
01:50:20.000but practiced by a minuscule percentage of the population.
01:50:24.000Do you think of what percentage of the population actually practices those things?
01:52:02.000That's why I was going to try to find something else.
01:52:03.000So it must be just a certain amount of regular activity that's physical.
01:52:07.000We can get a good sense of it, so that must be what it means.
01:52:10.000This is almost what you're actually asking for here.
01:52:13.000Age-adjusted percentages of adults 18 through 64 met both aerobic and muscle-strengthening federal guidelines through leisure time physical activity by state.
01:54:15.000I went to Boulder for the first time, I think it was in the early 2000s.
01:54:20.000There was a jujitsu seminar that a friend of mine was doing when I was working in Denver, and he did a seminar in Boulder, and so we drove up to Boulder.
01:54:29.000And I remember thinking, man, how pretty is it to live here?
01:56:11.000You're catching me in a good month because of the spring here.
01:56:13.000Well, I mean, it's like folks that live in the Pacific Northwest tend to be a little bit more depressed, and there's a real physiological aspect to that.
01:56:21.000They're not getting any vitamin D. It's terrible for you.
01:56:26.000I mean, vitamin D can help you a little bit, but really, you need sun.
01:56:31.000Just taking a vitamin is okay, but there's a feeling that you get where there's a reward that your body's like, yes, when that sun hits your face.
01:57:51.000Well, what if we built a culture, though, where it wasn't so hard to get good exercise, where it wasn't so hard to have good, deep conversations, right?
01:59:59.000You can't just do it for yourself because then you'll have a lazy conversation.
02:00:02.000You have to know that people are listening, but don't think about them.
02:00:05.000It's like this weird dance that you have to do to do a podcast.
02:00:09.000So, I mean, we want people to be candid and open and willing to try out things in conversation.
02:00:16.000And yet we live in this cancel culture world where people will jump down your throat for the slightest transgression.
02:00:23.000Yep, and they'll take things and decide that they're slight transgressions, even if you didn't necessarily mean what you, like, especially when you're tweeting something, right?
02:00:32.000Because so much is open to interpretation.
02:00:35.000And that's a terrible way of communicating, period.
02:00:38.000You know, we were talking about your friend that wrote the book about kindness, about most people who are kind.
02:00:43.000There's an aspect to this, when you're not experiencing the person's Social cues, you're not looking them in the eye.
02:00:54.000You're just tweeting or texting or emailing each other, whatever you're doing.
02:01:44.000I mean, when you have a conversation to win the momentary battle of ideas or whatever, a lot of times you're selling your relationship down the river.
02:02:03.000I think I stopped doing it as I got kind of older.
02:02:08.000That helped just get more maturity, more recognizing when I felt good or bad after conversations and why, and being sort of ruthlessly introspective.
02:02:17.000So as I got into my 30s, I started realizing what I was doing wrong.
02:02:21.000But then, I think the big one was starting the podcast, because as I started the podcast, it made me go, what am I doing?
02:02:31.000This is all accidental, but it's been the most spectacular education, the way my own mind works.
02:02:39.000And I think a lot of people are listening to you and realizing that this openness you have, this willingness to listen and learn and that if they follow you in that, they can become better people.
02:04:29.000But if you are in contact with a person and you're trying to get them to shift the way they think and behave, it's extremely difficult unless they're motivated to do so.
02:04:39.000And your approach, where you take the time to really have a long conversation where you really understand, from what I've seen of your approach, you're just really good at getting people to open up and share their worldview.
02:04:55.000And you ask the kind of clarifying questions that get people to do that.
02:04:59.000And a lot of times, if you just get people to open up, they'll start to see where their own worldview can use a little bit of modification themselves.
02:05:07.000And your approach is much gentler than Socrates was.
02:05:10.000Well, the thing is that this is one of the reasons why I want people to wear headsets is because this is very unusual, where your volume of your voice is the same as the volume of my voice, and it's in our ears.
02:05:23.000And all of that's controlled by the soundboard?
02:06:22.000It would be very beneficial to a lot of people to do it sometimes.
02:06:25.000It's very hard if you have a regular job to find this kind of time to do it every day.
02:06:30.000So I had the privilege of doing something similar.
02:06:34.000When you're a philosophy professor, you basically go into a classroom and you just get to talk big ideas with a group of 15, 25 kids for an hour.
02:06:58.000There's an exploring of your own humanity when you're talking to people because we've all had conversations where we didn't do such a good job.
02:07:11.000Conversations are like everything else.
02:08:31.000And I said, all right, well, here's what we're going to do.
02:08:33.000I want you to spend the next two weeks researching how the body's immune system works, and then we're going to try to do that for our minds.
02:08:58.000And if you do that in a structured, disciplined way, a lot of times you'll deepen your understanding and sometimes you'll get the answer.
02:09:06.000So I actually think one of the best things we can do to strengthen mental immune systems is to teach kids how to play the reason-giving game.
02:09:14.000I think it's a far and away better approach to teaching critical thinking.
02:09:54.000If you don't have enough personal validation, if you don't have enough – if you're not looking at your life as being successful as you'd like it to be, you're constantly looking to get some validation.
02:10:04.000And conversations take place all the time.
02:10:07.000And if you think you have to validate yourself by tearing somebody else down, you just become the person nobody wants to talk to.
02:10:42.000But it's a thing that people do because they think people are going to like it.
02:10:46.000And so you could respond the same way when somebody basically tries to tear down your idea by acting superior and smug and more smarter than you are.
02:10:56.000And you're so insecure, you have to tear me down to build yourself up?
02:12:25.000And I think if we take this Socratic method I mentioned before, this idea testing in kind of a structured way, You use something of your deft, soft touch in terms of gentle questioning to get people to open up.
02:13:01.000And then at step three, you kind of gently nudge people towards an alternative way of thinking about it that serves their own needs even better than the beliefs they had.
02:13:23.000I was thinking immediately when you were saying that, that that very structure is what's lacking in a lot of these really frivolous arguments that you see on social media, particularly on Twitter.
02:14:16.000Like an asshole is being a bully to some person, you know, and that person is trying to bully them back and they're just, fuck you, fuck you.
02:14:43.000That's a big part of what is happening with people.
02:14:46.000You're filling your mind up with this kind of discourse and it becomes commonplace.
02:14:52.000When it becomes commonplace, that's your go-to move.
02:14:57.000I wonder, that sounds to me like you're onto something really, really profound, which is that if our information diets involve disrespectful flame wars, our minds go downhill fast.
02:16:02.000And so, yeah, I mean, deep, heartfelt, mutually respectful conversations about the things that matter most, that's what we all need more of in this day and age.
02:16:34.000And man, people are just so hungry for these conversations.
02:16:37.000They just want a space where somebody listens to them and that helps them clarify their own thinking about right and wrong and what's important and what's not important.
02:16:48.000And man, if we just, I mean, everybody can get this from a good friend if you just make the time to practice it.
02:16:55.000Well, you're also experiencing healthy user bias, right?
02:16:58.000Because people are coming to you that actually want to know what's wrong and how to handle things.
02:17:03.000Whereas many people have never even internalized this to the point where they've tried to figure out what could be done better.
02:17:58.000COVID? Yeah, and then you also have like this...
02:18:01.000You know, you have a high degree of people that are, you know, fresh out of the universities where they're being taught these sort of radical leftist ideologies and then they try to apply those in real life and then they want to take down all these businesses and they're not doing...
02:18:16.000Like one of the things that I was saying, remember when they had that thing in Seattle where they had the occupied zone?
02:18:39.000So this is an area where they took over this whole area, like six blocks, and they weren't letting people in there, and they're smashing windows and taking over stores.
02:18:52.000But meanwhile, I'm like, this is a good example of people not thinking ahead and just thinking like children.
02:18:59.000Because if you do this and you decide you're going to take over all these buildings and you're going to smash these windows and you're going to occupy these streets, what you're not recognizing is you didn't build any of this shit.
02:22:06.000And in principle, this insight could allow us to adjudicate the centuries-long dispute between science and religion and arrive at a concept of responsible believing That ends this huge cultural divide.
02:22:24.000That's chapter six of the book, by the way.
02:22:26.000How is it possible, though, that science and religion could come together and have some sort of mutually agreed upon acceptance of reality?
02:22:34.000Well, they both have to be able to let go of the ideas that dialogue reveals to be problematic.
02:22:52.000Science is data and testing and then a bunch of people that have a background in this discipline examining the results and hopefully, especially to the layperson like myself, relaying an accurate synopsis of what the testing has revealed.
02:23:21.000So there are mathematical claims or equations where if you assume they're true and you follow up the consequences, you end up in a contradiction.
02:24:11.000And that's an example of how even the most mathematically rigorous scientists will sometimes look at the downstream consequences I think we're good to go.
02:24:38.000What would our situation be like if we bought into this?
02:24:45.000So there's a lot more attention to downstream effects in science than we're led to believe.
02:24:52.000Now, some scientists can do their thing saying, I'm going to prove this to be true or I'm going to prove this to be false, and I don't care what happens to the world if everybody believes it.
02:25:02.000But I'm actually saying, wisdom requires that we look at upstream evidence and downstream consequences and consider them all.
02:25:11.000But if a scientist is just examining data and they want to prove something to be true or false, they can't really take into consideration what the consequences of proving something to be true or false are.
02:25:25.000Don't they have to just, I mean, because if they do that, then it's all open to interpretation and open to influence.
02:25:31.000And so then human personality and societal concepts and ideas, culturally relevant concepts come into play.
02:25:39.000Like how does a culture fear about things?
02:25:41.000Is the culture influenced in any way by religion?
02:25:45.000So many factors come into play when you're not just looking at hard data.
02:25:52.000I mean, I think there's an illusion that scientists live in this kind of bubble where they can focus purely on data and not be affected by their confirmation bias, not be affected by social pressures.
02:26:14.000Because that was a thing that they kind of had to do, but yet when it was detonated, it was such an extreme event.
02:26:24.000I'm sure you're aware of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita when it happened, which is one of my favorite videos of all time, because he talks about it, and you see this super intelligent man who is contemplating the results of his own work and saying,
02:26:39.000I am, behold, death, the destroyer of worlds.
02:26:43.000And of course Einstein, who was part of the same group of scientists who helped, who understood that atomic weapons were possible, wrote a letter to the president saying, hey, you know what?
02:26:56.000You've got to know that atomic bombs are possible.
02:27:00.000And for years afterwards, after the atomic bomb was invented, Einstein said, that might have been the biggest mistake of my life.
02:27:09.000Even though it helped us win World War II. Yeah, it's a great example of the possible consequences of just following the data and the science.
02:27:19.000Because if you have a goal, and here's the goal.
02:27:22.000The goal is to figure out a way to split atoms and a weapon and detonate it, and this is the goal.
02:27:29.000Like, you go, okay, well, we're just trying to figure out how to make a weapon.
02:28:12.000Very close twice to accidentally starting nuclear wars.
02:28:15.000I know the Cuban Missile Crisis and...
02:28:17.000There was another one that was an accidental, like there was some sort of a systems glitch and they thought that missiles were en route and they had a decision to make and they decided not to do anything and it turns out it wasn't real.
02:28:30.000And some Russian guy decided not to push the button and It was his refusal to push the button, even though the flock of geese that had triggered the radar or whatever was actually...
02:28:52.000So, yeah, I mean, in a way, I mean, the entire story is a validation that we need to pay attention to the downstream effects of the beliefs we have.
02:29:04.000I mean, to have a truly—so in the book, I basically say, let's set aside our political differences.
02:29:10.000Let's set aside our religious differences.
02:29:12.000Let's investigate together what responsible believing looks like.
02:29:18.000Let's come up with a set of shared standards that make good sense to us.
02:29:22.000Let's apply them and let the chips fall where they may.
02:29:24.000It may be that your religion, aspects of your religion have to be modified.
02:29:30.000It may be that science will actually have to develop more sensitivity to the kind of effects they're having on the world.
02:29:38.000But we can't continue to indulge in irresponsible thinking or just assume that we're thinking responsibly without investigating the matter philosophically and coming up with better answers.
02:29:52.000Now, when you put together a book like this, do you have like an end goal?
02:29:56.000Are you hoping that people adopt it as sort of a guidebook?
02:29:59.000Are you hoping that it just spurs critical thinking and gets people interested in exploring ideas in a more objective and analytical way?
02:30:16.000I'm still—there's still a whole lot of scientists who need to understand what cognitive immunology is and understand the—it's about 60 years of evidence for the mind's immune system.
02:30:27.000It's out there, and we can talk about it if you like.
02:30:29.000Is it openly accepted, or is there debate?
02:30:32.000Oh, it's only begun to be debated because I've only—I've coined the term cognitive immunology.
02:30:39.000I've connected the dots and basically said this science is coming.
02:30:43.000And I was on a call with about two dozen scientists a couple days ago, and they were like, damn, Andy, yes, this science, we need to build out this science.
02:32:17.000Ego is a major disruptor of good mental...
02:32:20.000I've talked to some brilliant people on this very podcast.
02:32:24.000You listen to their thoughts and what they're trying to say and you go, oh my god, I see what you're doing, but I see where you're getting hit.
02:38:05.000Don't you think it looks distinguished?
02:38:07.000Well, it kind of does, but if I see someone with a big, crazy, long beard, I usually think they're either a special forces guy or some crazy person.
02:38:17.000Most of the people that I know that have big, crazy beards are kind of psycho.
02:38:22.000I know a few philosophers who actually, I guess they qualify in both counts.
02:38:27.000How many people have long beards that are normal?
02:38:33.000Like, God had a long beard, but all the other people, if you looked at the ancient depictions of religious figures, very few had a long, distinguished beard.
02:38:44.000Like, doesn't God almost always have a long, distinguished beard?
02:40:33.000He was a guy that, like, he didn't value money, he valued life experience, and he was very interesting to listen to when he talked, and it just really inspired a lot of people.
02:40:46.000Do you ever read the book Into the Wild?
02:40:51.000He talked about a kid who had a very similar set of values, just wanted to be out in nature and sort of explore different experiences and ended up dying in the wilds of Alaska, not Death Valley.
02:41:04.000But it sounds like there were some similarities there.
02:41:07.000I think there's a lot of people that just find the life that we're living, that most people live, to be very shallow and meaningless and unfulfilling.
02:41:14.000And they just want something different.
02:42:10.000What shitty, meaningless jobs did you do?
02:42:12.000Oh, I had a lot of them, but I think just being a kid, I worked at this place called Newport Creamery and another place called Papa Gino's, these restaurant chains, and I delivered newspapers, and I worked a lot of construction jobs,
02:43:18.000And I was looking at this guy and he's like in his 40s and I was like his life has already gotten to this.
02:43:24.000And they were like letting you know that you too could compromise your dreams and be like this guy if he just droned in and just showed up and just kept doing it day in and day out.
02:43:49.000I guess what I mean is, I don't mean to dump on that job either.
02:43:52.000I just mean that when you set aside your passions and your sense of purpose and just do work you don't even enjoy to get the bills paid, that can become a trap.
02:44:45.000So find the energy in those down moments to reorient yourself and to find your path.
02:44:52.000Right, but then we're talking about all the other issues that people have that we talked about before, like the lack of exercise and good diet.
02:44:58.000Those things rob you of your physical vitality.
02:45:01.000And if you don't have physical vitality and energy, it's very difficult to motivate yourself to do something.
02:46:31.000You've probably come across this fact that three years after winning the lottery, lottery winners are on average no happier than quadriplegics or something like that.
02:46:46.000I would imagine, first of all, winning the lottery is also like, say if you start a business and that business becomes successful and then you start doing well, people are going to ask for money, but they're not going to ask for money the way they ask for a lottery winner's money.
02:46:59.000Because the lottery winner is like, bitch, you didn't even earn this.
02:47:16.000That's most certainly going to happen.
02:47:17.000And this happens to a lot of successful young athletes, right?
02:47:20.000They suddenly have money and then the people close to them start asking for handouts and then they start to question whether their friends are real friends, true friends.
02:48:01.000There's also the culture of, like, expressing how much money you have through material possessions and the keeping up with the Joneses.
02:48:09.000From Billy Corbin's documentary, Broke, on ESPN. 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress within five years of retirement.
02:48:40.000They're getting hit in the head a lot.
02:48:42.000Which might account for the difference between the NBA and the NFL. I think it does.
02:48:45.000So you have the culture of keeping up with the Joneses with most pro athletes like nice things, right?
02:48:50.000You grow up poor, you hustle, you become a badass, you're a pro athlete, and now you want a nice car and a nice house and all these nice things.
02:49:10.000In a few years, I had hundreds and hundreds of families sending their kids to me to learn the sport and to learn basic character, things like resilience and a positive attitude and teamwork, things like that.
02:49:24.000And so one day we're up in a local park running camp, And who should be running laps around the track is Antonio Brown, the NFL wide receiver.
02:49:51.000He's a perfect gentleman, terrific guy.
02:49:54.000He signs some t-shirts, signs some discs.
02:49:57.000And I said, hey, Antonio, my kids here want to teach you how to catch.
02:50:02.000And so three of my kids, three of my best campers line up and I chuck the frisbee 40 yards down the field and the kids just run, run, run, run down and they pancake catch it.
02:51:11.000Most of those guys that get out, they have a really hard time.
02:51:14.000It's just, you know, your body's not designed to get into car accidents every day.
02:51:19.000You know, and these guys, they're basically giving each other car accidents and training.
02:51:23.000And I understand that they're more cognizant of that now in the NFL, particularly after that concussion movie that came out with Will Smith.
02:54:55.000No, there's a guy that I've had on multiple times that I'm friends with.
02:54:59.000His name's Dr. Mark Gordon, and he works with a lot of traumatic brain injury patients, especially soldiers, guys who breach doors, and some football players and fighters as well.
02:55:11.000And he said people get brain damage from jet skis.
02:57:17.000I think my only contact with the concept of the pituitary was, did you know that the philosopher Descartes learned a little bit about the brain's architecture and there was a little gland in there that nobody knew what it did?
02:57:32.000So his hypothesis was the pituitary is like the wormhole between the physical brain and your mind.
02:57:54.000Well, I was going to bring that up next because the pineal gland is – they believe that in ancient Egypt – you know that – What is that?
02:59:17.000He'd been on my podcast a couple of times, once remotely and once in person, and he was an Egyptologist, and he made this series called Magical Egypt, and he really explored deep, deep, deep into the history of these hieroglyphs and what the interpretations of them are,
02:59:37.000and How these structures are all, like, the Temple of Man is an intro, or Temple in Man, Temple in Man, I think is one of the temples is literally, it represents the various parts of the human being.
03:00:07.000But in the documentary, it's just amazing when you think that these people that lived thousands and thousands of years ago had this incredibly complex way of designing these structures that we still, to this day, don't exactly know how they did it.
03:00:22.000And they were so interested in preserving this story of...
03:00:32.000And so the idea is that this temple is supposed to represent a human body and that various parts of the temple, according to the hieroglyph, sort of depict various aspects.
03:00:57.000And you mentioned like the Mayans and the Aztecs and their incorporation of astronomy into their architecture.
03:01:03.000Yeah, well, you got to think they're staring at these incredible images in the sky every night, right?
03:01:08.000I mean, that would have to be so motivational.
03:01:10.000Like we want to, like, especially if you had deemed certain stars and certain constellations sacred, you know, we want to represent those down as heaven on earth.
03:01:21.000And when you go to like Stonehenge or something, doesn't the light coming in on the summer solstice like shine right through a gap between or something?
03:01:45.000So you know these people studied the motions of the planets and the stars.
03:01:51.000Yeah, but we don't know enough about it, unfortunately, because a lot of their records were burned in the Library of Alexandria when that was burned.
03:02:02.000There's so much stuff that they did that we just have to kind of back-engineer and guess.
03:02:09.000I actually think that that burning of the library of Alexandria was one of the key reasons we descended into a thousand-year dark age.
03:02:18.000So when information technologies come along and help people communicate better, societies begin to flourish.
03:02:27.000And when you either weaponize new information technologies, the way we're seeing and the way we talked about before, or when you destroy enlightening technologies like the library, And by the way, some of the same people who burned down the Library of Alexandria were also busy closing down all the universities throughout Europe.
03:02:47.000And there's a reason why we entered a dark age, because respect for learning was just trashed by people who were benefiting from stubborn orthodoxy.
03:03:32.000And my fear, more than anything, is a power blackout.
03:03:37.000My fear is the grid going down and something happening where we can't access the information that's on these disks and hard drives and It'd be financial chaos.
03:03:51.000Yeah, we have so much information on hard drives.
03:03:53.000We have so much information that relies on the internet.
03:03:55.000And as time goes on, we move more and more of our stuff into the digital realm.
03:04:00.000And as that happens, like think about what we have now from ancient Egypt.
03:04:03.000The best stuff that we have is all carved in stone, like the Rosetta Stone that showed us how these Different languages, the translations of them, and then we have all these hieroglyphs carved in stone.
03:04:15.000We have these incredible structures that still exist thousands and thousands of years later, again, made out of stone.
03:04:21.000If they had hard drives back then, they would long be gone.
03:04:24.000There would be no way to access that information.
03:04:27.000And also, imagine just what would happen, which was a few generations of darkness, right?
03:04:34.000And think about how it plunged so many civilizations into this like completely different way of life where you have to deal with extreme cold and just most of North America, like half of it was under a mile of ice, right?
03:05:11.000And this is Graham Hancock and Graham Carlson, or Randall Carlson, rather.
03:05:17.000Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, and a few other people, including Dr. Robert Schock from Boston University as a geologist, they're entertaining this idea that there was some sort of an impact somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000,
03:07:00.000And one of the more compelling theories is based on the water erosion around the Great Sphinx.
03:07:09.000Because the Sphinx around the Great Pyramid, the temple of the Sphinx, has these deep fissures around it that seem to indicate thousands of years of rainfall.
03:07:23.000The problem with that is the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9000 BC. So that predates the supposed construction of the pyramids by 7000 years.
03:07:53.000And he's been, it's much more accepted now because of Gobekli Tepe.
03:07:59.000Because Gobekli Tepe, which was discovered in Turkey, was more than 12,000 years old.
03:08:05.000This has been proven by carbon dating because of the surrounding area.
03:08:11.000It was covered up somewhere intentionally around 12,000 years old.
03:08:15.000And so it used to be the thought was, where are these ancient structures from 12,000 years ago that would indicate that it would be possible for a civilization from that time period to create something so magnificent?
03:09:20.000So if he's right, and if Randall Carlson's right, and if Graham Hancock's right, and Graham has written books on this and had many, many, many, many discussions with people that disputed it or agreed with it, and he believes that there was probably some sophisticated civilization similar to ancient Egypt that existed in You know,
03:09:41.00010, 15, maybe even 20,000 or more years ago.
03:09:45.000And that was wiped out by the Younger Dryas impact.
03:09:49.000And the Sphinx dates back to that earlier?
03:09:52.000They think the Sphinx could be thousands of years older than the current idea of what it is.
03:09:59.000The current idea is like 2500 BC. They think the Sphinx is around the same time as the Great Pyramids.
03:10:07.000You want to hear something really crazy?
03:11:12.000I'm looking through like one of those QR things where someone asked that and then someone else has come through and is giving them all the evidence.
03:11:18.000I'm trying to find the year where it says Cleopatra did, but it does say that that is a fact.
03:12:03.000And then if you add in Robert Shock's The theory about the construction of the Sphinx, he is theorizing that it is at least – so it would be thousands of years of rainfall.
03:12:15.000The last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley, the climate was very different, somewhere around 9,000 BC, which is 7,000 years old.
03:12:22.000And you have to think, well, it's got thousands of years of rainfall on top of that.
03:12:27.000So now you're like at 10,000 B.C. or something, or 7,000?
03:12:33.000It's like 9,000 B.C., which is 7,000 years earlier than they thought.
03:12:38.000But if there's thousands of years of rainfall that would have caused that erosion, if that's true, then you've got, you know, who knows how many thousand B.C.? 10,000 B.C.? 12,000 B.C.? Who knows?
03:13:28.000We supposedly diverged from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees about 7 million years ago.
03:13:37.000And Homo sapiens, as opposed to some of the other Homo species that have since died out, It's just emerged, what, in the last 200,000, maybe possibly 400,000 years?