Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Part Two: The Rise of Cancel Culture, Distrust in Science & Misinformation: Dr. Steven Pinker Reveals The Hidden Psychology That Threatens Society.

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

The Rising Risks of Cancel Culture & The Psychology & Language That Built It! In this explosive episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Steven Pinker (renowned Harvard psychologist and author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows) joins Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen for a no-holds-barred conversation that quickly turns into a fiery debate on the limits of science, belief, and human consciousness. From the hidden mechanics of social dynamics and language to the perils of thought policing and cancel culture, Dr. Pinker dives deep into how shared knowledge shapes society, why what people think others believe can shift power, and how social media became a modern-day coliseum for public shaming. But the sparks really fly when Mayim and Jonathan challenge Pinker’s staunchly materialist worldview — questioning whether extrasensory perception (ESP), near death experiences (NDEs), and higher consciousness might point to something beyond the reach of scientific instruments. Pinker doesn’t hold back, offering his sharply skeptical takes on mystical claims and pushing back against spiritual notions with cool-headed logic. Dr. Pinker also breaks down: - Why what others think of us actually matters - Dangers of being too direct or too indirect — especially for neurodivergent folks - How to create or hide common knowledge in relationships - The first case of cancel culture on social media (and its ancient roots!) - The thin line between freedom of speech and incitement to violence - How distrust in science fuels conspiracy theories - Can we depoliticize science? Or is it already too late? - The danger of defunding academic research - Why authoritarian regimes fear open communication - The healthcare system: overprescription, profit motives, and how to fix it - Is free will real? Or are we just dancing to the tune of biology and environment? Don’t miss MBB's first-ever toe-to-toe spiritual showdown between Mayim, Jonathan, and a die-hard materialist. Whether you lean scientific, spiritual, or somewhere in between, this conversation will challenge what you think you know about reality. Dr. Steven Pinker's latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge And The Mysteries Of Money, Power, And Everyday Life: ⁠https://stevenpinker.com/publications/when-everyone-knows-everyone-knows-common-knowledge-and-mysteries-money-power-and⁠ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm I'm Bialik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our conversation with psychologist Dr. Stephen Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, the author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. In our first part of this conversation, we talked about many aspects of honesty, lying, social media, and what cancel culture says about all of us. And part two is where we talk about the politicization of science, the possible nefarious motives of the medical industry, and we're going to have a pretty heated debate about if God exists, what is the nature of reality? Does the mind exist,

or is it just a brain and a body? Dr. Pinker's a pretty staunch materialist, and we definitely have a healthy conversation. Can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Dr. Pinker. Break it down. I wonder if you can talk a little bit. It came up here and there. in the book. But I wonder, you know, in terms of truth, right? In terms of veracity, where does science end and the politicization of science begin? And what can we do to keep those separate? Yeah. It's, you know, where, I mean, the answer is that the science should be our best assessment of reality, of facts. They ought to enter into our political convictions, which policies work, which policies are a waste of time and money. What does history tell us about

the most effective systems of government, et cetera? What do people really believe? What do people want? These are all factual questions that then affect policy. But we should try to separate fact and value as much as we can. We can never do it completely because we're humans. There's some things that we want and they're going to color our assessment of what's true or false. But the idea of science is that you try as much as humanly possible to separate what you want from what is. And that's what scientists have to convince others of by showing their work, acknowledging their fallibility, crawling about their successes, but also explaining how those successes came into being. Science is just the attempt really to understand how the world works. There is reason to believe that there have been some failures within academia recently. Scientific journals have actually sometimes departed from the policy of publishing the best methods and saying, well, if any finding seems to portray some group in an unflattering light,

then we're not going to publish it or we're going to retract it. During the whole kind of wave of wokeness, there's a concerted attempt to actually back off from principles of scientific objectivity and to have science be a vehicle to advance social justice in the minds of those advocates. What does it mean for science to say that we are living in an era where there are things that are being influenced by aspects that aren't necessarily helpful for a scientific understanding of something? Well, it leads to two problems. One of them is that we start believing things that are not true. The other is that we discredit science. And so especially this enters into polarization where a lot of the American right, a lot of the Trump administration just kind of blows off science, in part picking up on the fact that when science becomes too politically correct, too woke,

it ceases to earn respect as a truth-seeking institution, giving them the excuse to blow off the things they don't like. So I've heard it said, you know, when I make the case for science, Let's say, you know, let's say human-caused climate change. Some people on the right say, well, you say that it's a scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet. But why should I believe a scientific consensus? Everyone knows that in academia, if you go against the consensus, you get canceled. And so it's just what a bunch of guys believe. It's not, why should I believe it?

So you undermine credibility in science. itself, even when it's clearly correct if you sow grounds for skepticism that the methods for coming to it are objective, open-minded. I think that's why it's crucial to safeguard the reputation of science by making it apolitical. It's one of the reasons I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, that the whole enterprise of science, scholarship, academia is corroded when people, sometimes correctly think that there's a thumb on the scale that if you say things that go against the consensus, you get canceled. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of defunding of the nation's very rich academic history, which has led to an enormous number of breakthroughs, which has also led to

recruiting some of the world's most intelligent and successful people to participate? Are you concerned and scared about the defunding of academic research. Oh, that would be an understatement, yes. And I wrote a pretty long essay for the New York Times called Harvard derangement syndrome over the Trump's administration's attempt to cripple Harvard based on, you know, I think largely bogus charges of anti-Semitism, even though I'm sensitive to anti-Semitism as a Jewish faculty member. I am concerned, but it has been so weaponized, exaggerated, lied about that it uses a pretext to, in Harvard's case, zero out funding of research.

A district court judge just ruled that that was unconstitutional. But it's damaging for a number of reasons. One of them is that the American University system is something that has just achieved fantastic breakthroughs. It's the envy of the world. It has come up with, and Harvard in particular is responsible for having invented or co-evented the defibrillator, the syphilist test, functional MRI, a long list of breakthroughs. But also, it's not so good for the Jews if you cancel funding of scientific research. You know, an awful lot of scientists are Jewish, a awful lot of students who want to go into science. And a lot of the people who aren't Jewish, we're not really doing the Jews a favor by saying,

oh, your career is going to go up and smoke, all of the research that promises cures. We're going to cancel in order to further the interests of the Jews. That's, you know, no thank you. That's not something that in the long run is going to be to the benefit of Jews, even if that was their main motive, which it patently is not. It's obviously a pretext. And I think also it's important just to say you're not saying that the accusations of anti-Semitism are fabricated or that they are lies, but that the Trump administration absolutely has

hidden behind the charges. of anti-Semitism in an attempt to meet their own needs in terms of curtailing Harvard activity. That is right. Although some of them are lies. It is just, it is not true that Harvard is a deeply anti-Semitic institution. It really isn't. I can say that with some authority. I am an openly Jewish faculty member. I've been at Harvard for a good part of the last 50 years. We've had, you know, three of our last four presidents serving longer than a year have been Jewish, three of our last three provosts were been Jewish. The chairman of the board is Jewish.

40% of our top-ranked university professors are Jewish. We know. They think we run everything. We get it. Well, that, yes, exactly. But, you know, Harvard has been, when it came to militant anti-Israel protests, Harvard was sometimes kind of confused and had to deal with them. There are pockets in Harvard that are just, you know,

Fountains of anti-Israel propaganda 24-7. Harvard has 400 centers completely separate from its departments. And two or three of those have become kind of propaganda factories, and they should be controlled. So there are some Israeli students have been discriminated against, which should not have been tolerated. I don't think anti-Semitism was treated with the same gravity as racism, and they should be on a par. So there are things to be fixed. But the idea that, which has been said in the right of center press and taken up by the Trump administration,

such as the dominant view at Harvard is, destroy the Jews as a first step to destroying Western civilization, that's a lie. That is just flat wrong. I think one of the places that many people do get a little conspiratorial regarding scientific research is in the field of mental health. And, you know, I'll give the example of SSRIs, which help a lot of people. I'm just going to go ahead and say that. They help a lot of people. I don't have a problem with SSRIs. If people would like to take them, that's your prerogative.

But the fact is that there are, for example, other things that often help more than SSRIs, which do not get the same funding or attention as SSRIs. And I guess one of the concerns that Jonathan and I have and that we do talk about here on the podcast, especially because we tackle mental health and we talk so much about mental wellness and the things that we can do and the things that we can tap into, right, to kind of help us feel better and live better, there is this huge, huge issue of what many of us call big pharma, but I can be more specific. but with the motivation of many pharmaceutical companies to sell medications that in many cases may not be appropriately prescribed. In many cases, they're part of a system that is not really addressing people's needs, but helping sedate them. And in many cases, the research that's being presented, and I worked in research, I got a doctorate, I had to do research, I know how it works. I totally understand how the presentation of data works. And there are many ways, though, that much information, for example, about SSRIs has slipped through the cracks in terms of the transparency that I think the public deserves to have.

And the motivation behind that is financial. How do we get around that? Because for many of us, this becomes a political issue, right? Who's supporting big pharma? Who's getting paid off to say we should do this? I mean, for many of us, RFK is a very, very complicated person because some of the things he says, many of us believe in. I don't know. You want to eat unpasteurized cheese? I don't really like to me that's your business. But there are many, many aspects to this that are funded by finances, which many of us could see by RFK Jr., you know, eating a Big Mac on an airplane.

So can you speak a little bit to the financial component of the motivation of scientific research? Well, the scientific research is what allows us to know that SSRIs are not a panacea. So it's not the scientific research. There are obviously interests of big pharma. There are temptations of people, namely if there is a pill that promises a big jump in mental well-being. People are naturally going to take it. There are problems in the professionalization of mental health so that more and more psychiatry consists of dispensing medicine. and psychotherapy is something that psychologists do,

and these are totally separate professions, people are more apt to get their entry into the mental health system through their doctor who refers them to a psychiatrist, and then the psychiatrist, as they say, we give a boy a hammer and the whole world is a nail. Psychiatrist, their toolkit is drugs. Well, general practitioners are now prescribing SSRIs. People aren't even being referred to psychiatrists

in a very large percentage of cases, which I also understand it's limitations. Most people can't even afford a psychiatrist. So now you just go to your GP and, oh, you're feeling sad. Here's this. Yes. And we know, for example, that cognitive behavior therapy can have efficacy rates that are comparable to medication in many cases. So there's, but it's, you know, obviously whenever there's a profit motive,

they're going to be incentives to maximize the profit. But it's, I think dealing with a complex problem by identifying the evildoer and saying, if only we could punish the evildoer, the problem would be fixed. It probably isn't the best way to address it either, because it also has to do with things like professionalization, with journalism, how many people know that cognitive behavior therapy has pretty good success rates. it's, you know, why that isn't, maybe that's a problem of big pharma, but maybe it's a problem of science journalism.

You know, maybe it's a problem of the way that, of our licensing system that makes it actually rather onerous to get a licensing clinical psychology. So there are a lot of aspects to it. We need more information out there, more knowledge. We have to acknowledge that we're often really unsure just because it, you know, better health, mental well-being is so complex. We don't really have answers just because, you know, as you know better than anyone, the human brain is this massively complex system. We don't really understand it. So we have to approach it with some humility, with some attempt to get out the

best knowledge that we have, but also to get more knowledge, that is, more research really has to be done in something that has such a huge effect on human well-being. I really appreciate that. And I also appreciate, you know, kind of the bringing us back, you know, even in this conversation, the kind of bringing us back to a place of reasonability. Because, you know, many people, I mean, I'm speaking about myself, I, you know, feel very outraged by many things that I don't like going on in the medical system, in politics, in the world. And it's true. We want someone to blame. We want the thing that if only this was better, I'd feel better, right? We want the magic pill, right? We want the SSRI for our entire life. And that's not actually how the world works. And I think social media and these kinds of forums make people feel that there are much simpler answers than there actually are. It's like we've literally lost nuance. My MBialx breakdown is supported by superpower.

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$199, but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional $20 off with the code break. Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention Miami-Biolix Breakdown to help support the show. Yeah, especially there's a temptation to find the evildoer, the villain. One of the things that I've pushed, this is not in the current book, but in my book, Enlightenment Now, where I talk about human progress.

including expanding life expectancy, literacy, affluence, and so on. A lot of these came from just trying to solve problems. Problems are inevitable. The world is complex. Nature is not in the business of making us happy. We've got to figure out how to do it ourselves. People disagree what some people want. Other people are not going to want.

Stuff happens. Pandemics. appear, crops fail, their weather disasters. Human nature is not uniformly, you know, nice and benevolent and wise. We've got to deal with the fact that all of us are, are fallible, all of us have some degree of self-centeredness.

So just like, problems are really hard. When things go wrong, it isn't always that some bad person wants them to go wrong. But for all those examples, I know the bad person. I do. Well, that's, you know, I think that is a problem because it doesn't, even if everyone was nice, there'd be huge problems. Just because the world doesn't have any particular interest in our well-being. The world is indifferent to it to our happiness. Well, you know, great transition, Dr. Pinker. This is a great transition.

We talk to many people who have either exceptional near-death experiences, exceptional transcendental experiences, exceptional, extrasensory perception and abilities. What if nature does care? What if there is a power in the universe that actually tends towards lower entropy, as Thomas Campbell says? Why is that not an option? Because it's false.

It is absolutely false. The world does not go to a state of lower entropy that violates the most fundamental law of science, the second law of thermodynamics. is just false. There's no such thing as ESP. There's no higher power. I think the wrong approach is to look for any kind of mystical, teleological, intentional forces in nature as a way to improve our well-being. We get better because we invent stuff, because we have institutions like science, like democracy, that we come up with, that we test, we see whether they work.

Nature is not going to do it for us. You don't believe there's any extrasensory abilities that exist? No. So the government trains people to use remote viewing. It's a technique that's been used since the Soviets started using it. Developed in Stanford, rolled out by the CIA. It's total nonsense. It is a total belief.

A government, a total waste of taxpayer dollars. Yeah, the military does all kinds of crazy stuff. So you don't believe that any of the techniques that are used in many governments all over the world, including ours, to teach people, it's basically a deep meditative state and they're dropping into this place and they're coming up with data and it doesn't exist? And these are doctors, PhDs who claim to have statistically significant outcomes that couldn't be replicated by other methods that this is all nonsense. Have you seen any of those studies? I actually don't think that is true. I mean, they claim, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I got a doctor. Those studies don't exist.

What is it like to be so certain as a scientist that something doesn't exist when people say that it does? Well, why do I believe, why am I certain that the Easter bunny doesn't exist or Santa Claus or ghost fairies and leprechauns because they're extraordinary claims. As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Absolutely. If ESP existed, the world would be unrecognizable. People would be making billions speculating on commodities futures. They'd be making billions of the racetrack. It also means that the laws of physics, as we understand them, which are pretty well established, would have to be false.

Is Thomas Campbell someone that you would listen to or no? No. I mean, that is, I don't think that he has convincing evidence at all. And, of course, the vast majority of physicists would roll their eyes at this kind of stuff. I don't agree. Wait, the vast majority of physicists who came up with quantum mechanics absolutely described irrational numbers as part of the formula for understanding the way that we explain waves and particles and everything. They were all deeply fascinated with the mystical explanations that for thousands of years have described the things that physics was trying to describe

in the 1920s and 30s. I would disagree with that. Quantum mechanics does challenge a number of our intuitions. It does not prove that ESP exists because any attempt to demonstrate ESP, that all failures, all of them, when you rule out either trickery by stage magic or overinterpretation of coincidences, there's nothing left. and there is no physical basis for the idea that people can know something outside of their senses and derivations from the senses.

Okay, so this is the question I will present to you. We've talked to Bruce Grayson and to Jim Tucker and kind of that whole group from the, you know, University of Virginia Perceptual Studies. So they study near-death experiences. They study all these, you know, incredible stories. And many of them say they don't necessarily. have an explanation for this. We also talk to Jeffrey Long. So Bruce Grayson discusses how when he was first, you know, a young doctor, he had a patient who was not conscious. She was in a coma.

And he had many conversations far away from her room that she recounted to him with tremendous detail. This is what led him on his life study. And he said she knew things about conversations that were happening for which the only explanation would be that her consciousness did not exist. in her body. So what is the skeptical, the skeptical interpretation of that to a man who has spent his entire career studying how it could possibly be? And he doesn't know, and I don't know either, I'd be surprised if you would say that you know one way or the other, but what is your explanation? My explanation, as a psychologist, people misremember stuff. Okay, so you think it's all misremembering?

Yeah. Because the studies that are, the studies that are. I've seen that try to establish a priori what the predictions are, independently confirm them with some ground truth or they show nothing. That is, that is, if it's simply, we know that people are wildly subject to confirmation bias. That is, you remember all of the positive examples. Totally. You forget all the cases that disconfirm. Sure. If someone could, from the great beyond, hear a voice telling them under which floorboard grandma hid the jewelry, and sure enough, the jewelry was there.

Yes. That is, if there was infinite confirmation rather than post-talk selection of confirmation, like the people who say, well, I dreamed something and then it happened, forgetting about all the times they dreamed it and it didn't happen. My question would be, why would something exceptional necessarily have to obey the same laws of things? things that are not exceptional and happen all the time. Is there any room for that in your world? Well, there is if you could, if there was good evidence for it, which there isn't. Well, I don't know that I'd say there's good evidence. There's not, there's not the kind of evidence that is consistent with the kind of evidence

that you believe in, correct? That is the way I would put it, the way that is good evidence. It's not, it has nothing to do with me. Right. It has to be due with, can, if you're skeptical of extraordinary claims, that is you require that they have extraordinary evidence, can they convince someone whose default position is there's no magic, there's no woo-woo, there are no vibrations, there's no cosmic field, there's what the laws of physics have established.

And quantum mechanics does not establish ESP. It really doesn't. No, I didn't say that it did. So I will stand, I did not mean to imply that. So when it comes to things that contradict everything that we know about both physics and everyday experience, given that we know that people can be diluted by all kinds of pseudoscience, witchcraft, necromancy, seeing things and entrails, that's just a human vulnerability. You know, that's why we have science.

Do you believe in any wisdom of like indigenous cultures, for example, for thousands of years, you know, that indigenous tribes have had different interactions with nature, a different understanding of the world that in many cases aligns with a lot of our, you know, current scientific understanding of how we do relate to nature. For example, for example, you know, Neil Thies, who was the, you know, the first person to prove that fascia is an actual sort of organ that lives in our bodies and is, you know, interconnected. People thought that was exactly the same line of, you know, poppycock that you're talking about, right? That's crazy. It doesn't matter what microbiome you're breathing and someone else is breathing. What about things like that? What about indigenous wisdom? Is there anything

there? Or, I mean, I'm not trying to set you up, but like, you know, how do we frame that? If they've been validated by scientific methods, and by scientific methods, I don't mean some particular exotic rights. I mean, just convincing a reasonable person that they're true. Well, the ones where we have scientific evidence that show that they're true, well, yeah, I believe that they're true. I think there's an awful lot of indigenous wisdom that's false. Spirits, lines of energy, you know, energy fields, trances, human sacrifice. What I'm saying is a lot of indigenous wisdom, wisdom is not so wise. It's just, you know, it's superstition, it's ignorance.

Occasionally, because people, you know, do observe reality, they can have intuitions of things. that may be validated, and if they are, you know, we should believe them because they've been validated. In general, I don't think that the whole point of science is it isn't just another source of tribal belief. It's just the attempt to discriminate between stuff that's true and stuff that isn't. What do you make of a university like the, like University of Virginia that has this entire department of perceptual studies? Yeah, there are institutes all over the world that, you know, there are religions that have that have theories of the origin of the planet and the universe

that we just know are wrong. The fact that their institutions proves nothing. And universities often have hundreds of centers, some of which have been set up on dubious grounds. It takes a while for the dean to realize that they're studying nothing. So the fact that there's a thing, The question is, how well have they made their case? That is, have they done studies that would convince someone who doesn't believe it in the first place

that there's anything there? And Virginia, I don't, you know, I guess we could Google it. I don't think there's a whole department devoted to ESP. Is there a program? I think it's the Division of Perceptual Studies. It's the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies. Division. Uh-huh.

I mean, I know what the University of Virginia Department of Psychology is. I've spoken there. I have a lot of friends there. But, you know, universities have promoted various kinds of pseudoscience. You know, inadvertently, they're not the mainstream, but that can happen. But the question is just how well have they made their case? That is, have they actually, the fact that there are a bunch of people who think something is not enough to believe it. You know, I think one of the other points and one of the things that we choose to entertain here,

is a much, you know, no insult implied, it's a much more open perspective, meaning if if thousands and thousands of people report a very specific experience that is studied by legitimate psychiatrists at, you know, government-funded universities, yeah, Jonathan and I tend to be very curious about what does it mean to validate thousands of people's experience, right? What does it mean to validate? Well, I'm just speaking to you from my heart. What does it mean to validate one person's experience to say, you have experienced something.

You had a near-death experience where you died. You believe you met God. You found the purpose of your life. We just had Anita Morjanian, who had, you know, who was in a coma from advanced cancer. This is actually very well medically documented with her. She wrote a book with her oncologist, who her oncologist said,

I cannot have provide any scientific reason why she wakes up from this coma and four weeks later her advanced stage 4B cancer has disappeared. A few things. Thousands of people read their horoscopes, probably millions of people. That doesn't tell you anything about whether astrology is valid. I wasn't saying it was valid. I was saying I choose to listen when people say I've had a life-changing experience or I believe, I believe that I witnessed things that have been documented that occurred when I wasn't in the room.

I think that's worth questioning, you know, it's worth talking about. Well, I do too. I'm a psychologist. So this stuff fascinates me in terms of how the human mind works. It doesn't mean that there's anything to it. I mean, people believe all kinds of false things, which is interesting to someone like me as a psychologist. Well, I know that God exists. So I think it's fascinating that you don't feel the need to believe that.

But it doesn't change my belief that God exists. It doesn't, but nor does it convince me that God does exist. But it doesn't matter. That's the thing. It doesn't matter to me. It seems to matter to you a lot more that people not believe what they experience than it is to me that you believe what I believe. Yeah. Actually, it is important to me.

I do think that people, you know, Bertrand Russell said it is undesirable to believe something when there are no grounds whatsoever to believe that it's true. I guess I believe that. I think it's better that people believe true things and not believe false things. I think it's completely subjective. I think that if I would have told you that there are sounds that other people, that other animals can hear that we can't, you'd tell me it was crazy. I think if I told you that the earth was the center of the universe, you'd say, that's crazy. The sun is the center, right?

Like, to me, it's just, this is just the moment that Dr. Stephen Pinker's in. We're just in this moment. Do you think that it's, well, let's say someone believes that I think the Jews stabbed the Germans in the back were resulted in the defeat in a moment. World War I and are conspiring to impoverish the German people. Therefore, the Jews should be wiped out. Now, you know, they believe it. They were sincere.

Do you think that it would be legitimate to say, well, that may be your experience. You might believe it, but you're wrong and terrible things will happen if more people think that you're right. Or that African Americans are suited only for slavery. A lot of people believe that. You know, they were wrong. It's really important to show they were wrong. The difference in that, of course, is that you're in, that has a negative consequence

to someone else versus people who have come back from these experiences having a significant internal shift. Well, if, you know, if people have a, you know, maybe there are, you know, beneficial delusions. And in the case, there is it really, there is an ethical question of do you allow people to persist in a delusion that makes them happier? Sometimes, yes. But when it has any implications for people other than themselves, or when people might think, well, I'm going to be rewarded in an afterlife, with 72 virgins, so I should blow myself up in a bunch of other people, too, if you say, well, you know, there really isn't any afterlife, that could have real benefits. Or if I pray,

my child will miraculously recover from cancer, so I'm not going to bring him to an oncologist. That's a real problem. And the fact that they believe it sincerely is not a reason to indulge them, especially when it comes to the well-being of someone else, like their child. So in general, I think that it is bad when people believe false things and good when they believe true things or when they are agnostic. I think that's so sub, but don't you think that's subjective? No, that's what science is all about, is making things as objective as we possibly can. If we take away the potential negative consequences to other people, for example,

I want to blow myself up for some future reward, or I'm only going to pray and therefore have not pursue medical attention, let's just touch on your potential for it. People shouldn't believe delusion. If the delusion makes them healthier, objectively healthier, then and it's seen repeatedly, then it may, like, for example, Dr. Lisa Miller believes that, and she's done studies where people who have a spiritual connection, their immune system increases, they fight disease faster, they recover from depression, they, she's done studies with mentally ill, people who develop some sort of spiritual practice, and they're, they're able

to recover from depression more significantly significant than SSRIs. She started the spiritual department in Columbia. So in that case, you're seeing that what may be considered delusion by one is seen not as a delusion by other and having widespread physiological benefit. You know, I think there is an ethical issue of whether you should allow people to be deluded if it, if they're probably if there only benefits and no harm. I think there is a problem in withholding the best knowledge from people, but possibly an argument can be made there. But what if it is, therefore, leads them to refuse antibiotics or antiretrovirals,

if they have HIV. I have, you know, I'm going to summon my immune system. I don't need antiretrovirals or I don't need antibiotics. I think that would be a problem. So, you know, there are cases. I'll give you an example where, so. a woman who did some jobs for me, she had a terrible tragedy, her sister and a couple of grandchildren were killed in a car accident. She said, well, my only consolation is that we'll all

be reunited in heaven. Now, frankly, I don't believe they're going to be reunited in heaven. It would just be cruel to say, well, there's no evidence for an afterlife. I would not be that much of an asshole. So there are cases where we indulge people, you know, we don't, but when it comes to anything that's a matter of policy, when it's a matter of them leading them to make decisions that would harm them or others, then I think, then it would be a problem allowing them to persist in a delusion. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the, one of the most prominent side effects of people who have near-death experiences or transcendental experiences is that they come back and don't want to hurt other people and they see that they have a larger purpose

in life. The psilocybin research, right, with terminally ill patients is showing that letting people touch something that is bigger than them allows them to not have fear of death. They don't have fear of pain. They're, you know, able to experience their life and even their transition to the next world as something that's not tragic and devastating. I mean, I've seen a lot of people die. It's not so fun, you know. I would much rather have a perception. I mean, this is sort of like, and from a 12-step perspective, you know, like live your life as if God exists makes you a very different person than if you live your life as if God doesn't exist. That's at least, you know, been a lot of people's experience

that I know. We know of a research being done at M.D. Anderson on, I don't know what to call it. I guess the only way to summarize it is in energy healing. It was, you know, rigorous scientific research on people who received hands-on healing for specific cancer diagnoses versus those who didn't. And it's going to be published in nature. The date has not been confirmed yet. We're going to pass it on to you just for your curiosity when it does come out. Absolutely pass it on. You know, there is such a thing as a placebo effect.

Which is fantastic. Yes, which is fantastic. It realizes it more. But the thing about the placebo effect, it doesn't mean that people's beliefs are actually real. It may be that people believe things that put them in a positive frame of mind, which then potentates their immune system, which then has real effects. But it is all still mechanistic cause and effect. It's the things happening in the brain.

Brain is connected to the body, causes things to happen in the body. There's a difference between indulging some belief that may, through physical means, help with the disease and saying, well, that means that we should agree with them in the content of those beliefs. Dr. Pinker, we really appreciate all of the things we've talked about with you. We appreciate being able to somewhat intellectually spar about some of these bigger esoteric concepts. And we also really appreciate when everyone knows that everyone knows. So where can people find out more about you or more about the book? If you Google me, my own website probably is the main, the first hit.

And the book will be sold in stores, sold in online dealers like Amazon, easy to find. And I do a lot of media interviews. I'm pretty easy to find. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Thanks to both of you. Thank you, Ma'am. Thank you, Jonathan.

That was just getting good. We had so much more to talk to him about, I want to know what he thinks of Tara Swart. This is a psychiatrist and an amicist. who now believes that she can communicate with her dead husband. He just dismisses her. Don't. Don't bring it up. I want him to talk to Dr. Bruce Grayson.

I want to facilitate a conversation with a pure materialist like him and Dr. Bruce Grayson and Dr. Lisa Miller and, like, get some of the heavy hitters to gang up on him because I, we don't have, we, I feel like we weren't prepared for the level of evidence that he needs? Well, I think that there doesn't exist the kind of evidence that he needs. Think about a conversation between him and Thomas Campbell. First of all, Thomas Campbell would have been so calm. Which I was not.

No, you got a little riled. The last time that I had that intense of a debate was literally when I was arguing in college with Orthodox boys who didn't think women should be rabbi. That was the last time that I got like that deep, like hip deep in a debate that I let, kept going. If you're just listening, at some point during that conversation,

Maim started taping her knuckles to put the boxing gloves on. Here's the thing. And I have great respect for Dr. Pinker. And he's a really wonderful scholar and academic. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. The thing that I have a problem with, which is a separate conversation is the level of certainty that he has. And there's a vibe about him when he's talking about this.

That's just like, that's so stupid. That's so ridiculous. And that I actually find a real turnoff. It's the actual opposite of what he was doing when he was talking about the need for science to have an open mind and to not have a finite knowledge science. Correct. And look, we spoke to, I thought of our conversation with Dr. Amir Raz, who is, himself. Also a bit of a downer. Also a bit of a downer in this

way. And our conversation with Dr. Roz, I do feel like there's, I totally get it. And I think that for certain kinds of scientists or people, doesn't have to just be scientists, there is a need to be so self-assured that they have the truth that it's like that's the antidote to what they see as this kind of nonsense. And I'm not going to deny that many people believe that God is telling them to kill people. Like, I totally get it.

Well, hold on, hold on. We have to differentiate between a spiritual connection, a connection with a personal God, and people who are carrying out acts of religious, I don't know, ideology that is creating an enormous amount of death and destruction in the world. Except that's like the entire Catholic Church, right? some people would say, or like all of the crusades. Suicide bombings and... I'm talking bigger than that, the Inquisition.

Like, these are very troubling things, and I understand why people want to have nothing to do with whatever this so-called higher power is. And also psychosis being, you know, connected to the idea that God told me that I need to blow up this building. I call it religious mental illness. Yossi Klein-Halevi used to be a radical,

right-wing activist who was, you know, essentially turned his life around and admitted that he was part of an elaborate brainwashing cultural system that trained him to believe things that he now, you know, can distance himself from. But that notion aside, the way that I describe it is Dr. Pinker seemed much more intent and much more religiously fanatical about me being wrong than I am about him being wrong. For example, I am willing to allow that he has his own perception. You know, I wasn't just being cheeky. Like, I believe that there's a power in the universe.

He doesn't have to believe it for that to be true or for me to believe it. And that doesn't bother me. What bothers me is him saying that, you know, thinking that there could be a higher power or thinking any of these things is ridiculous. It's nonsense. It's a delusion. You know, it's all of these sort of like clinically diagnostic things. He's a staunch, staunch materialist.

I would love him and Avi Loeb to have a conversation because Avi Loeb is a scientist. He wants scientific data. And yet he comes up with theories to explore that I cannot imagine Dr. Pinker being tolerant of. I mean, we didn't even get into aliens. But I do appreciate the ability to talk about it. I'm not really comfortable doing that. And I don't think we should ever do that again. I disagree.

I think you're doing great. I think we need to have more debates. where we're bringing on these materialists to talk to not only us, because I don't think we can communicate the breadth of the information. We did talk about Dr. Lisa Miller. We've done an episode with her. It's in the back catalog, if you haven't already listened to it. She's the founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at the University of Columbia.

Which he would say should be canceled. He would want it all canceled. Everybody gets their degrees taken away. Founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University, Maim, tell us about her research. So she's done some very powerful and by powerful, I mean, in terms of her scientific rigor. Ten-year longitudinal study. Yeah, a longitudinal study is a very big deal. I'm not a scientist, but that sounds like a lot of data gathering.

Yeah, people who rated religion or spirituality as highly important led to significantly lower odds of a major depressive episode. And these are people who are at risk for depression and 90% lower odds among those who were at a high familial risk. So the notion that religious, not just religious belief, it can't just be like, I believe in God. She's talking to people who have a belief system and a structure and typically a set of, I think, kind of practice or kind of mental focus. around these things that change the way your brain functions.

There's a cortical resilience signature that she finds. There's a lot of mirror-image neuron things that are seen to be at risk in depression risk. And she believes that when you have this kind of belief system, and again, the structure that goes around it, that there's, that there's essentially activation of networks that lead to resilience and can help lower the risk of depression, depressive episodes. What is a cortical resilience signature? The cortical resilience signature looks like a thickening of cortex in certain parietal and occipital regions. And there's other evidence that this is sort of a measure of a cortical reserve that is somehow giving resistance and resilience to depression.

I mean, that's fascinating. You know, what he suggests is that it's not that spirituality is doing it. It's that you're thinking a specific way, which may be caused by the fact that, you know, you think there's spirituality, which then has a physiological impact. So it's like, it almost like doesn't matter. Well, so, yeah, he's not wrong there. And I think that's exactly right. It doesn't matter.

And what Joe Dispenza talks about, what Tony Robbins talks about, what, you know, name anyone else. who's working in that field talks about. What is manifesting? What is Martha Beck talking about? Manifesting, positive thinking, all these things. That's what this is trying to do. Loving kindness meditation. I mean, maybe he would say Sharon Salzberg

shouldn't have brought that information from India. But yeah, that's what deep mindfulness meditation. That's what loving kindness meditation in particular is creating. It's the chemicals in your brain. He's not wrong. That for me, there has to be a mechanistic explanation. for it. But yeah, the notion that it's so separate or that like the brain is connected to the body.

It's like, what about the mind? Where's the mind? Where's the soul? Apparently it may not exist for some people, which again, I understand and I don't feel as fiery about him being as wrong as he is fiery about me not being right. I think we're going to collect a dossier to hand to people like this, a podcast research dossier that these are the MBB guests. This is the research they've done with a little executive summaries. I think we need to start winning over the materialists. That's going to be our new

adventure. I don't think that we're going to, and I'm okay with that. Sam Harris, you know, has too much fondness for me to come on here and wipe the floor with me the way Dr. Pinker did. But plenty of people that I know and respect, you know, would absolutely say the same thing. And the one person that actually Sam Harris introduced us to, who I would also love to get his take on it, would be Scott Barry Kaufman, who actually is a professor at Columbia who studies all sorts of these things from a very, very clinical perspective and has a tremendous amount of skepticism, but who is open-minded enough to sort of have these conversations. So Scott would be great to talk to about Dr. Pinker. We had a great episode with Scott Barry Kaufman. If you haven't listened to that,

it is also in the back catalog. The episode is titled, I Now Believe in Pass-Lock. where he talks about inherited memory. It's actually, it was interesting because our episode with Scott started in a very materialist normal way. And then as he got more comfortable with us, started opening the door to more dualist approaches, energy. He is actually a, he's also a magician. And so he talks about perception and what we perceive versus what is reality.

he's a fascinating guy. I hope you follow us on Substack. I think there'll be a lot of fun conversations about this over there and the community that we're building. That is where you can get exclusive content, not released anywhere else, as well as connect with other breakers in the community

and interact with Maim and I on our special Friday lives. People have really connected in an awesome way. Yeah, the comments there are so special. Come check it out. MyNB Alex breakdown on Substack. And we hope you've enjoyed this episode.

A lot of ups and downs in this one, but we really are glad you're here from our breakdown to the one who hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's My and Beaulix Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two.

One fiction. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.