The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi - #123 The Stanford Podcast Experiment

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Psychologist Steve Rathje joins to validate Gianmarco’s feelings about astrology (with a couple caveats), then we discuss the study that depressed him the most, how academia views his TikTok fame, our Valentine’s Day plans and whether you’re really in love with your significant other or just saw them after walking across a scary bridge.  You can watch full video of this episode HERE! Join the Patreon for ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and MORE. Follow Steve Rathje on Instagram, Twitter, & TikTok For all the latest, visit https://stevenrathje.com/ and https://linktr.ee/SteveRathje Follow Gianmarco Soresi on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, & YouTube Subscribe to Gianmarco Soresi's email & texting lists Check out Gianmarco Soresi's bi-monthly show in NYC Get tickets to see Gianmarco Soresi in a city near you Watch Gianmarco Soresi's special "Shelf Life" on Amazon Follow Russell Daniels on Twitter & Instagram See Russell in Titanique in NYC! E-mail the show at [e-mail] Produced by Paige Asachika & Gianmarco Soresi Video edited by Dave Columbo Special Thanks Tovah Silbermann Part of the Authentic Podcast Network Original music by Douglas Goodhart Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, buddy. Hi. You were saying that the topics you cannot talk about in psychology are what? Yeah, so we start the podcast with the most controversial thing. So I think that psychologists have to be really careful in how they talk about genetics, like traits being heritable. Sure. So there are a lot of twin studies, essentially, where they look at twins who were either raised

together or raised apart to see how much certain traits are genetically heritable versus how much your environment or your family environment or your social environment impacts you and what a lot of these twin studies have found is things like your intelligence your personality your political beliefs they are highly heritable they have a strong genetic component somewhere around like you know 50 percent heritable they try to do estimates they're always like very fuzzy estimates so you can't so it's hard to say exactly like how much of it is genetic but you know a large portion of it is heritable sure and um i think that is a tough thing to talk about because sometimes people might draw like more you know conservative

conclusions from it or like right-wingers could latch on to those findings sure like you know it's not worth it to invest in educational interventions or to try to like you know um i see things like that right um and is it a struggle like is it like it must be tough when a psychologist is like I'd like to explore this thing but I know people are going to use it poorly or it might I don't know it depends on if you're a utilitarian

or you're like you know there's a degree of like well could you take something from this that is just going to be terrible yeah no it's always a balance and there was so there was a researcher she released a book called I forgot her name she released a book called Yeah, no, it's always a balance. And there was, so there was a researcher, she released a book called, I forgot her name. She released a book called The Genetic Lottery.

And she argued that, so like a lot of things are highly heritable, like intelligence and our personality and et cetera. And she was arguing that we should like believe in like leftist policies because things are highly heritable you know for instance like we shouldn't just have like the most intelligent people uh get the most amount of money in society so she was trying to make like a leftist case yeah or like trusting like uh these sort of genetics-based studies and she got a lot of controversy about that position even from

Was it just from the right or was it some I think was left. I think the left wasn't fully Buying that position even though she was like sort of advocating like a leftist stance on how we should interpret genetics research So I mean genetics is like not my area of expertise. So I'm like I might be like Guys yeah guys band together when someone gets dragged? Like, like, do you guys like, or is it cutthroat? You're like, well, bye. Shouldn't have published that result. No, I think it's very cutthroat.

Yeah, no. And I've also been involved like in academic debates with other researchers and stuff. And it's um yeah i think it's a competitive field and a lot of it is also like a very um status driven field and also academics are very much on twitter so like academic twitter is very much a thing yeah and like academic twitter like a lot of areas of twitter can be like a very toxic place or like academics are kind of all at each other so how often like because it feels like it's daunting to be like we have to weigh every possible way that the public could use these findings like the corruption of science like

before doing the study or is that something like you do the study and then you're like oh here's how the world could use this let's come up with all the ways and then just abandon the study or or is it like more more so before the fact does that make sense yeah i mean okay so here's a relevant controversy there was a big controversy i don't know if these niche academic controversies are interesting but i'll i think so yeah there's this journal uh nature human behavior that um that I'm going to publish in soon. They're a pretty good journal. They released sort of like an ethics statement where they argued that they would consider

in part of their editorial decisions about whether to accept an article how the findings might be used and how they might potentially know potentially perpetuate harm especially if they show that like you know if your finding is that like one group is i think that's how they phrased it like if you present findings that show that one group is sort of superior than another group and your findings might do harm we might consider like the ethics of how this study will be presented to the public yeah um and that got a lot of controversy because a lot of people were saying like we should just be truth tellers as science we should just be like sharing comedy

all over again that's what we're like we're just truth tellers up there man yeah yeah um and i think it was like it's funny everyone really wants to believe that their their field is their position is fully integral i know and then those people are often the ones who don't care as much about the truth, who are advocating for truth. So it is a dicey area. I mean, I think you have to think about it in some way. Sure. I think your ultimate goal should be truth,

but you can also have secondary goals like ethics and how you communicate things. And I mean, I'm very like i'm i think i'm i'm careful as like a tiktok science communicator because i know that like people don't pay attention to much more than like the first 10 seconds so you want to like you know you want to present things that won't be misinterpreted you want to be very like clear with your conclusions you want to think of like all possible ways the internet might you know yeah so so let's say kick off this music and we'll introduce i wonder what the fuck's going on yeah can you tell me a study recently that any any conclusion of something you read recently we were like it was a real bummer it was real like oh that's not good

oh that's sad any studies that made you feel more hopeless about the world doesn't have to be recent either could be you can remember that first like like oh that's a bummer i'm trying to think what because i was talking about how i took ap psych in high school and how like it was it was one of the reasons i do think it was intense was like i wasn't ready to talk about free will or no free will or consciousness or or or the brain split stuff where you're like, are there two people existing? Oh, yeah.

What's going on? Love that study. Has a study ever made you feel sad? Yeah. Okay. So the study that has made me probably feel the most sad that our field is grappling with a lot is,

have you guys heard of the replication crisis in psychology? No. Oh, really? It's about trying to do a test to make sure the original hypothesis was correct, the original conclusion was correct. Right, right, basically. And there was a big study that came out about this.

Fucking idiot. And look at you. See that AP psych class paid off. But I think there was a big study on this done in maybe 2013 or 2015, and it really sort of shook the field. So a bunch of scientists got together and they tried to replicate 100 psychology studies, like classic psychology studies in top journals to see, to estimate how reproducible psychological science is. And they were only able to get like the same results in about 33% of those studies.

Incredible. And that's like, that's like, oh, it's all going to collapse. Like that's a disaster. Yeah. And yeah, it did really shake the field a lot. There are books based on each of those individual incorrect studies. Yeah. And we were talking about Malcolm Gladwell before you came here.

So a lot of like Malcolm Gladwell's early books like blink about how like, how like little tiny things in your environment influence your behavior. Those things didn't replicate. Like, so an example of like a study, and it's a bit silly that we all believed in the study. There was a really popular study. It has like about like 5,000 citations on Google Scholar,

which is a lot of citations for a paper that basically said that if you like prime the idea of oldness by like showing people words like Florida or Walker or retirement home. And then you have someone like, you know, you have someone walk and you covertly measure how fast they walk. They walk slower because they're primed by the idea of like elderly words. And this this this study got a lot of attention by showing that like, oh, like little subconscious things in our environment influence us in these like profound ways. So like if you if you if you go to retirement home and you want them to be sprightly, you put a pictures of Sonic. Yeah. Red Bulls, and that's going to make them move faster.

Yeah, well, that was the thinking based on the study, but the study did not replicate. And all sorts of studies like this didn't replicate. There was one big study called the Lady Macbeth effect that basically showed that if you wash your hands, it makes you feel less guilty basically like you wash away the guilt this is the problem with theater kids uh going into other fields yeah that were like i need to make this degree worth it but they do show that

movies like think of all the movies you've seen where people like have murdered or have but it's a metaphor it's like a visual metaphor i know but they use it too much i feel like it's like the thing of like it's, communicating that idea though. Sure, sure. Like, you know, like I did something, you know. You were just saying, because you never wash your hands after your masturbate. Exactly.

So that was one where people. That didn't replicate. Of course. But like, because it was so surprising, essentially, like it got like a ton of media coverage. It got a ton of citations. There was a study that found that psychology studies that didn't replicate

basically get cited more and get covered in the media more. Basically these unreplicable studies just get really popular because they're surprising. And they're surprising because they're literally not true. Of course. I have so much to say. Listen, this is the downside.

You're listening to The Downside. You don't have to put on your headphones just so you know. I didn't present them to you. It's been a mess. Just so everyone knows, just in case we don't put

the intro part here. Yeah, that's good. This is Russellsell's fault so russell how you doing can i ask you real quick this is this is uh this is a this is a little bit out there uh psychologically speaking would you say for for uh two men in their 30s to stay friends what's the appropriate ratio of each calling each other to check in on how they're doing because russell believes that it's 100 the other person's responsibility has anyone ever done this test has anyone ever studied this okay let's can we talk about let's talk about this let's dive in because okay i saw you last monday we did a show together we went out afterwards uh i had a drink

you sat there and had water and ripped up your because I was on hold there I'm almost done last day but um okay so we did that uh-huh I'm pretty sure we talked Tuesday Wednesday at some point right through text through text but it was like okay I went to away on Thursday you went to New Orleans Orleans. Yeah. And I will say, I had some issues with my phone in New Orleans. I, um... What do you mean? You wrote me.

You said the image didn't load. I was like, are you sending me a thing about big titties? You sent me a... No. No, I sent you a tweet. I sent you a tweet.

It was not like I did... Okay, it referenced big titties. It referenced, but it was a joke about... I know, I know, I know. You make it sound like I... I'm not going to get into it. And I said,

well, you're texting me. So anyways, you sent me a thing,. I know. I know. I know. I'm going to make it sound like. I'm not going to get into it. And I said, well, you're texting me. So anyways, you sent me a thing, but the picture didn't load. So I couldn't see the screenshot. And so then I was like, that's weird. New Orleans is in America, right? It's in America. Okay. But for some reason, something happened where I didn't.

So then I noticed people on the trip. They were sending me photos of the trip. And I was not getting those photos. I was like, what's going on with this? So I had to do a phone update, which caused some things to get lost in the shuffle and then on the way home I was like oh yeah John Mark was sending me this big titty thing um okay I need to see the big titty thing no no no we're not gonna talk about what it is uh for two but it's a it's a it's a basically someone's tweet reference okay big titties okay

and it was it was a funny little inside joke so um anyways so then i responded on sunday night uh to that and then here we are today on tuesday um it's not that much time went by you know thursday to sunday i was on vacation i wasn't really texting a lot i was you know trying to be in the moment um and then and it's just been i've been in you know catching up on things okay new orleans was okay it was i had i had a disaster weekend oh no i can't get i'm so excited to talk to i know i know can talk with us now. You don't have to be quiet. How are you? We're here with Steve Rathje.

I'm good. Yeah. You pronounced it right. Yeah. Psychologist, is that the leading term? Yeah, so I'm a psychology researcher. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at NYU right now. Yeah, just finished my PhD over the University of Cambridge in England.

Thank you. I truly am so excited. I love psychology. You know, I was realizing just as I was watching all your TikToks, whenever I have to write... Thank you for watching them. Of course, whenever I have to write a TV show pitch, they don't want you to be a comedian. Because everyone in the profession is in the arts,

so they want their character that's about them to be an actor or comedian. It's unfair. But I'm always like, I'm like, what profession would I do that's not arts related? And then like doing this, I was like, right. I've always loved psychology to a degree.

And I'm like, that's the field that if I needed to research something for a show, I would enjoy that. That'd be awesome. You should just like make your character me. Sure. Model your character after me. I mean, you were a theater kid. We talked about theater.

He's in Titanic right now. I know. I've heard Titanic's amazing. I've heard incredible things. I really want to. I wanted to talk about one of his videos. If you're going to do ads for your show, mid-show, I'd like some kickback from the show itself. You mentioned it.

I didn't say come see it i just said it as a statement of fact you brought up eight times a week happens to be at this place yeah no need to go let's see i don't know i'm gonna do it again for the first time in over a week tonight yeah i don't know um the um i did have a question about one of your videos not a question more of a statement um i want to talk about it. He thinks astrology is real, but go ahead. Stop. It's okay to like astrology.

Astrology's fun. I'm not an astrology boy. Okay. He hates it. We'll go into it. So if you're listening, this is the downside. This is a place

where we talk about negatives, complain, kvetch, and I think it's easy to complain and kvetch when you're talking about the psychology. This is coming out on Valentine's Day,

so we should talk about love. Ast compatibility exactly exactly yes uh and and if you're listening if you're a fan please uh join the patreon patreon.com slash the patreon has exploded it's exploded yeah it's uh it's i'm about to get the tattoo that i promised for the first 50 there's other perks you're getting a tattoo yes of what of uh uh it's. You're getting a tattoo. Yes. Of what? Of me. So we're on a sketch team and this is what I'm taking it with right now. So this was a picture

we took a long time ago and I thought I'd keep it real simple and it's going to be like either five circles, not perfectly on top of each other but kind of overlapping

in the way that picture does. Okay. And then just say like either an estimated whatever 2015 or just uncle function or UF something small and cute. Why are you interested in tattoos? You just seemed so

excited. No I just thought that was cool you were doing a tattoo for the podcast like that's yeah we'll see if I you're ready to move on. So patreon.com slash downside you get all our amp live episodes that we did for Amazon our most recent it's coming soon our live episode with You get all our AMP live episodes that we did for Amazon.

Our most recent, it's coming soon, our live episode with a former adult actress, current stand-up comedian, Aaliyah Janine. It's such a good episode. And then you just support the show. And we're adding something new. If you see me at a show, like headlining, if you come up and say that you're a Downside listener, I will have a free sticker for you of a new design of russell and me illustrated by branson reese yes fantastic illustrator thank you so russell okay what study do you disagree with no no i i agree with that i just thought it made me feel bad because i knew that i would be like one of the people that like didn't

do a very good job of it sure sure not that there's a good or bad. But that study where the smoke comes in the room, I was like, I definitely would burn alive. Break down what it was. Okay, so basically, the study is people... How do I describe it? Do you want me to? Yeah, yeah. Wait, let me do it and you tell me if I did it correctly.

Okay, yeah. The study analyzes how people will react when there's something strange going on, whether they will... If no one else is reacting. It feels related to the bystander effect in a certain degree. Totally. Part of it is you're in a room. They think they're waiting to do a psychological study, and smoke starts emerging from a closet under something. And they saw that when

the person they're they're basically surrounded by actors yeah and they found that when they were uh actors the person was not alone they only reported the smoke which you would think would be fire yeah uh 25 of the time i don't remember the percentages and then if they were alone they would report it higher. So it was the idea that social people being there, you're like, well, if no one else is freaking out, it's probably fine. Can I tell you something really? That's basically exactly right. Good job.

AP Psych paid off. I love psychology. Just to add a layer to all this. So before I came here, I had a meeting. There was a fire that you didn't catch? No, quite honestly. Listen, I was in my house and i i was alone we're just animals with me and i was watching some of your videos to be like okay this is who we're talking to today so i watched that video i thought to myself i'm cooking some some

chicken uh to bring for my dinner tonight it doesn't smell it smells bernie smells like the house is burning i i but i say no maybe you know i look i look in the oven doesn't smell it smells bernie smells like the house is burning i i but i say no maybe you know i look i look in the oven doesn't look like anything's burning but it smells bernie but then i'm like maybe maybe just like psychologically i'm watching this video and i'm like think putting this bernie thing on so then i'm like just to be safe i'm gonna i'll turn off the oven and like open the windows for a little bit um but then you know it still smells bernie uh but i'm like okay well oven's off windows open close the windows have to leave okay uh half an hour you see this video you're so stressed you start like checking every

half an hour later uh i get texts from nicole is everything okay the apartment the neighbors say that our apartment sounds like it's on fire and I'm like so it wasn't just that so luckily we have a key they go and check they can't find anything either and it seems like something happened something's in the oven somewhere like maybe a piece of plastic fell down something but it's not on fire but I didn't really give it a good of like, let's, let's investigate the fire that much. And I was alone. I wasn't even pressured by other people being like, I just was like, probably fine. Um, but anyways, I know. What are you going to do at a certain point? You're going to call the fire department.

I don't know, but it did smell bad. It smelled like plastic burning. Um, I think there'd be like these studies could become infinite in that you could study if people see this study Does it change How they behave Yeah Five years from now Ten years from now

Yeah Right I remember I had a friend Chris Cafaro He thought he smelled CO2 Yes And he called 911 And like the full brigade

And they made fun of him Didn't they Yeah they made fun of him Or they came in And it was something stupid Yeah Better safe than sorry Exactly

But anyways that study I thought you know There's smoke coming in the room and if no one else reacts are you gonna are you gonna say something and i know that i wouldn't i know that i'd look around i mean there are like factors too being like if you know that you're there for a psychological study i can't see how it wouldn't play into being like oh maybe this is part of it yeah i feel like nowadays people would be more skeptical now that like psychology is bigger and like the discourse and everything people would be like has the study already started like people would kind of catch on but i do think if i didn't know i would probably just be like looking around making sure everyone else would be like oh maybe

there's just smokes in here yeah i feel awkward about like raising a fuss i would definitely kind of like go along speaking of ap psychologyotic studies that stuck with me like the learning about the bystander effect uh-huh like i feel like that sticks with me for the rest of my life like something about that yeah you know that you know the bystander effects yes but like if something i think it's partly because the story that they used to illustrate it was the woman who got stabbed by the guy kitty genovese yeah that was the name yeah that inspired the study or that was just the example they used? So I think that did inspire the study. Yeah, basically.

So it was like this murder that happened. In New York, right? In New York. I didn't know that. I don't remember a lot of the facts, but apparently there were a lot of bystanders. She was stabbed multiple times. The guy left. The guy came back and then continued and ultimately killed her so and all these neighbors the whole block is like seeing this they see the guy leave they don't yeah they see the guy come

back they don't call i think it's talked about an episode of girls that's how i know it but i know now i remember i saw someone like nicked by a bus and i remember my first thing was like you call 9-1-1 like i was like like the thing oh that's awesome be like very specific like you and i called 9-1-1 too but i did the thing of like you i'm making you the person who does something yeah yeah as opposed to us all assuming especially now because people can't get out their phones to film it's horrifying horrifying right yeah um and uh it's horrifying because sometimes you miss the moment on your phone and it's it's i under like i know it's fucked up well it depends like if it's active danger blah blah i understand some people's

rationale of their head of like it's their crime happening do like if we get footed you know what i mean like yeah like i because for instance i remember uh i was taking a walk once and a car seemingly drunk driver slammed into a couple of cars and kept driving and I took out my phone not like I'm gonna jump in front of the car

to stop him but I took out my phone to try and get his license plate and I did get his license plate and gave it to the police so like so damn

I didn't know you were a cop piggy boy good job I didn't know you were a fucking rat it's bad to even contact the police about that I just did even contact the police about that

I just did you tell the police all the things you've said about them when you're drunk I didn't call them there was one like nearby and

you went when was this no it was 2016 2017 you went in there with your phone you were like officers

no no no no other people were calling a car came by like two minutes later I was still on my walk and I showed him the thing and he wrote down the license plate. That's very interesting. It was very easy.

Did they give you a NYPD shirt that you could wear places? Nothing. They probably didn't follow up. No, none. Okay. So, Steve, you did do theater. I did do theater, yeah. Did you pursue your theater dreams

or did you close that chapter on your own? I think I closed that on my own. So basically my story is like, I was a bit of a child actor sort of in like middle school and stuff. I wasn't like a famous child actor. It wasn't like, I wasn't a film. What was the biggest thing you did?

I did a few few plays at this theater called Artist Repertory Theater in Portland. It was a regional theater, an equity one. So that was as big as I won, some equity productions. But when I started doing the professional acting in sixth grade, I just thought I was famous, just like my child brain was like, I'm famous now. I did that just that and i just did middle school i would have been so jealous of you if i was in middle school you were like in professional you know what i mean yeah no but i think i think

uh there needs to be like more psych studies on like child actors because i think even doing it to like a small degree it does something to your like psychology a bit um but it's happier maybe that's what i think maybe it makes you just like amazing and incredible and perfect former but yeah yeah i don't know i'm always very jealous of it it seems like a nightmare that reject i mean yeah of course yeah it's also but like um it's very tough now oh yeah yeah yeah no i'm so glad i'm like not an actor anymore um but like so basically when i got to like my teenage years um I I stopped getting cast as much essentially and I was like kind of down on that and then I

transitioned into playwriting I got really into playwriting and I did that like playwriting is always the actor's first stop on the way out of exactly the first exit I did the playwriting too however we all but I liked it because I liked to write and I got really into it. I think I got like better at writing during it. And when I like when I went to undergrad, when I first got there, I was still kind of had theater in my mind. But like the first class I took was a like psychology class was an intro psych class. I had already taken AP psych at high school. And I just loved it. And I think I think I ultimately yeah loved it more than theater and I think I got frustrated with theater over time I still obviously like love theater and I'm like

a theater fan but like I don't miss doing it at all I don't miss like the auditions like just like how you're like like judged instantly based on like all these things I like how I can currently be like a little bit more detached from my work a little bit just I mean, as a researcher, there's always still like the ego involved in your research and you want to do well, but it's not you you're not putting like your full self on the stage. There's this like, there's this other goal, which is like to like generate knowledge and truth. And that's like a kind of a communal activity and also even when i do like tiktoks and public speaking it's not about me it's literally like this is a psychology study

and then people don't comment on me in the comments they comment on like the psychology and like i like that better do you ever feel like you should see joe marco he can get really detached okay that's the key. If I'm not the main character in a sketch, I might as well be a chair. I definitely in rehearsal I can be kind of lazy, but I always bring it on stage. You do always bring it on stage.

You're saving your energy. That's what I say. Do you ever feel that your peers don't in stand-up comedy if you're like a big on tiktok as you are some people might not take you as seriously at the thing that you profess to be because you're partially the communicator oh right right the dumber people yeah do you ever feel like being this path that you're partially the communicator to the dumber people. Yeah, yeah. Do you ever feel like being this path that you're on,

where you are the face of it, ever makes it so that, like, are there some that are like, oh, that fucking TikTok star? Yeah, I'm doing real studies. I'm putting babies in boxes like a real scientist. Yeah, no, I definitely feel that. And that's also, like, very much... I've had a lot of people, no, I definitely feel that. And that's also like very much, um, I've had a lot of people like warn me that as I go on the academic job market. So essentially as I apply

for professor positions, which I'm starting to do, I'm going to do that over the next few years. Cause basically being a postdoc, it's like the in-between between having a PhD and being a professor. You kind of, you sit around and you do. We're out of academia so deeply. What was the first degree? Yeah. So my first degree was an undergrad. Okay. And then I did a PhD in psychology. So yeah, my undergrad in psych at Stanford, and then I went to Cambridge for my PhD and I just finished that this October. And now I'm- What was your thesis paper? this October. And now I'm- What was your thesis paper?

So it was about misinformation, basically, and social media. My entire thesis was about like social media, misinformation, what goes viral on social media. Well, so the thesis had a number of studies. I think my biggest paper from my thesis was a study about what goes viral on social media and political context and it was uh it essentially found that like if um politicians uh dunked on a member of the

opposing party so if they sort of were negative about the opposing party they went very viral and this was essentially like the strongest predictor of virality out of a number of predictors measured so um if i mean joe biden if one day you know whenever trump's first tweet is comes back which i'm sure is around the corner if joe biden quote tweeted and just said suck my dick it would go so viral it would be the most viral tweet of all time if he said fuck you yeah i'm fucking stormy right now yeah that would that would be the most liked tweet in the history of the world yeah it makes sense he has so much potential but he doesn't he doesn't seem to like any of my pitches there what would you say joe biden trump goes back he goes i'm back and that's it what's what's your biden i don't know

biden calls you imagine him saying anything so i was like trying to imagine a real if trump did a big tweet what if he did like well now i now I am sleepy. Oh, that's good. Some kind of twist on the. You should be his writer. Like, yeah. Please, that's, honestly, I think that's like when comedians disappear sometimes. I think that's where they go. They're ghost writers for Trump specifically.

They are good. So, okay. So that was your thesis. Tell me, because I'm very pessimistic. Yeah. And I imagine. Yeah, same. I just, to me, there's no way out of social media.

I think social, I think this is, these sites have to get so unbearably bad, which maybe they will because of capitalism and how everything gets worse. which maybe they will because of capitalism and how everything gets worse with the ads and whatever Elon Musk is doing, that I got an ad today for like, join the Christian seminary thing. And I was like, this targeting system is out of whack right now. No, they're awful. Because I made a priest joke, I think.

Wow. But like, yeah, all of a sudden I'm like, why the fuck is Jordan Peterson on my timeline? It's like all sorts of conservative weird things that I'm seeing. But I think the only solution is social media has to – it's bad. It's bad. There's no – it's a deal with the devil. It's destroying us.

It's polarizing us. It makes us have a complete disconnection from reality. But you can't force these things to go away so you can only hope that they get so bad that people go i just want to watch a tv show instead yeah i yeah i know i'm pretty pessimistic about social media i don't see it like changing much anytime soon you saw elon musk go in there and completely like mess with twitter and people are still using twitter like no one ever like left it. Like, of course. Oh my God. Remember all those days.

I don't care if it's all Jordan Peterson. Yeah. There was like that. Those like week. I did not make a Mastodon account. Thank you very much. I hate Mastodon was horrible. It's just like the,

the user experience was horrible. It was the social media platform that everyone was leaving Twitter for because like everyone, people were also going to like. I wonder if they're posting over there. No. I don't even know. The thing with Twitter is it's just like the thing that makes it so god awful is what makes it so fascinating.

You're seeing high drama. Yeah, people live for the drama. Yeah. You're seeing high drama. Yeah. High quick drama. Yeah. Which social media app is the most. Is the best most if only one could be around and this is for

the health of society causing the least amount of what's the cause yes which social media app causes the least amount of harm in your professional the least amount of harm probably linkedin oh you know sure linkedin i would have counted i mean maybe in your world people use it for that no like we i don't know we barely use it but like least amount of harm it's just like because it has like no effect entirely besides like people are twitter i think like twitter has done more you gotta balance the good and the bad because some people think twitter has done great things for citizen journalism yeah i think it's great for journalists. It's great for niche communities.

Like for academics, it's been amazing. It's been really helpful for me to sort of learn like the inside ropes of academia because academic Twitter is great. It's also toxic. So it's like it is really good and really bad. Yeah, I mean, I do like TikTok. I know everyone's talking about like banning TikTok and everything. And TikTok has a misinformation problem.

But I do, I do like that you get to see the full experience of someone like talking. I think that it humanizes someone a bit more. I just think it moves so fast that like they just revealed they have like a button that they're allowed to use. They say they use it very often. They call it the heating. Where like they can make a video kind of show up on yeah they call it the heating yeah where like they can

make a video kind of show up on more phones than it deserves based on the algorithm they could boost it a little um and uh i would do anything to press that button i know my conspiracy theory is that like i was heated like as soon as that article came out i was like oh maybe that happened to me because they said they were doing it partially to like increase the diversity of like content on the feed so it wasn't just like people like dancing and part of it they wanted to increase like the amount of educational creators and like last november so basically like a little bit more than a year ago my account just went from like 70,000 followers to like 900,000 followers in a couple of weeks, basically. So it was like, yeah, it was, it was so.

Sure. It was like, and maybe I had there that was like, like you must've had a, what was the, yeah. So, so one of the videos I had during that time was the smoke filled room study that you guys were talking about, which was, you know, that was a hit. I got like a 5 million or something. I had one on change blindness, which was, you know, that was a hit, it got like five million or something. I had one on change blindness, which also got six million.

So I had a string of videos, I guess, that got around like six million. So it could have been that I was just producing content that people liked or something. But it just felt- It's also like we know what you're gonna get when we go to your account. Like I think that it's very, like if you like psychology and you're not in, I mean, or you are, but you just, it's an easy follow, I think.

Yeah. And I, you know, I, I also, I tell people to follow me if they're interested in psychology. So that always like helps a little bit. Um, yeah, there are things like that. And I try to like keep my account like one very specific niche so people know what they're getting. Exactly. to like keep my account like one very specific niche so people know what they're getting exactly like the tiktok like i don't know if you've seen like the tiktok gurus who are like this is what you do to grow on tiktok they always say like you have to niche down so like you know that's the

problem you're following yeah that was a big decision when we started this i started this podcast was like do i make it on my account or to make a podcast account yeah and i probably regret i i stuck with one because i had i had a bad, in the past, I was like, this is marketing. But it's just like, I remember I created a sketch series and I made it like separate from myself. And with social media, I feel like it did not help. I feel like people have to, they want to see you in your thing. I think it's hard to make sketch teams go viral on TikTok because I think it's very much about the individual. Yeah.

Individual experience. That. The individual experience. That's why we have... So you're saying just cut Russell out more. Just like we can do edited clips of just you speaking. I mean, that's pretty much what we do. Shut the fuck up. I can do lots of great clips. This episode is brought to you by A Real Pain.

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Buy from DysonCanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. So, OK, so you got your PhD, you did it on social media. Yeah. And then what's after PhD? So, postdoctoral researcher, which like no one knows what that is basically. But yeah, it basically means you're like a full-time researcher who's not quite a professor yet.

I have, you know, an advisor who is a professor who sort of helps me with the research. I'm part of like a research lab. So I work with other like PhD students and everyone at NYU. So it's, you know, it's basically, it's just like the in-between stage. And, but yeah, I'm also- What are you doing in that?

Are you taking classes? Are you doing research? Oh, I'm just doing research. I'm continuing to publish mostly on social media. Again, that is kind of like the niche of like what I research basically is social media misinformation polarization topics like that does that involve a lot of like statistics i imagine oh yeah totally

volumes and interpreting numbers yeah so um some of it is like uh like big data stuff like you analyze like big data sets of data from facebook and twitter, and you do like text analysis. Some of it is conducting experiments as well, either like survey experiments that are just conducted online, as well as like digital field experiments. Like we're currently running, I guess I shouldn't tell, say too many details, but we're, we're currently like running an experiment where we sort of change aspects of people's like social media feed by having them follow and unfollow certain accounts on social media. And then like sort of tracking them over time

and seeing like how that might change their experience. So basically things like that. Like, does it ever feel like you're, because the conclusion is going to be social media does affect how you feel social media like like yeah but the nuances are interesting i mean it's not always like intuitive like sometimes it is intuitive what's an example that it really was counterintuitive um one is uh this isn't from my research personally but like one is that uh social media seems to have very different impacts in like different countries like the impact like social media and polarization might be like a very unique to the u.s problem like uh there have been

lots of studies in the u.s showing showing that you know social media increases seems to increase polarization and then when you ask people to deactivate for instance like their facebook accounts for a month um their polarization decreases and their well-being increases so there seem to be benefits i'd love to do that like before thanksgiving meals like you have like one group of New York NYU freshmen deactivate for a month and they go, oh, that's nice. And the other day they go home and they hit their dad.

So what do the other countries show? Yeah, so there was this really interesting study. It was conducted in Bosnia by another lab at NYU, actually. And I know the people involved. And they essentially found, they had people deactivate their Facebook accounts. And it was during a very specific time.

It was like during Genocide Remembrance Week in Bosnia. And I don't know the entire politics of Bosnia and everything, but they essentially found that deactivating uh facebook um increased ethnic polarization in that country um and they found that this was specifically for people in um sort of who had homogenous offline social networks meaning you know their offline social networks were a lot of people who were like them and And what they found is that social media exposed them to more people who were different from them, essentially.

Very interesting. Yeah, so in that specific context, social media might have had positive effects. And just to be clear, to test their level of polarization, did they take a quiz that was like, was the Holocaust real, yes or no? And they were like whoa they started denying it more like ultimately it was a paper questionnaire yeah it was like a survey

response like usually like psychologists measure polarization through these things called like feeling thermometers saying like how do you feel about democrats on a scale of zero to 100 and um yeah and a lot of like people who aren't in like psychology or like that's silly. Does that mean anything? But you know- Has that been studied though? Like doesn't it go, I'm sure there was a study,

are feeling thermometers more useful than yes or no? But they are. The thing is they are very like reliable and valid measurements. Often like survey measures are more like reliable and valid than like measuring people's behavior because people's behavior is like so unpredictable and stuff.

So psychologists love these like little like strongly disagree to strongly agree because oftentimes they actually like tell you a lot about people. They predict behavior pretty well. Like do they ever matter in terms of like, I think some people would be very much like all the way here, all the way there. So in a way, like their number might not be as, just because they did a 10 and a 2 doesn't mean that they were more affected than the person that does an 8 and a 4. Because that person in relation to their answers just scales it differently. Yeah, I mean.

So many ways to be incorrect so you know what i mean yeah and that's like a good point but oftentimes those differences don't matter when you're just because these psychology studies just often look at group differences so you'll look at like 500 people um who weren't given some experimental treatment versus 500 people who were and you'll see these group differences between the group who deactivated their Facebook and the group who didn't. And once you average everyone together, you'll see these group differences. And that's how you can sort of make conclusions, basically.

Do you think Facebook generally, it's thought of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg gets blamed for inspiring the Holocaust, basically. And just all sorts of hate stuff over the world. Yeah. Do you think he deserves or Facebook, the entity, deserves more credit? Because I certainly never saw the Facebook helped people appreciate other cultures. I've never heard a positive thing said about this app. Do you think that we overestimate the negativity?

I think we do a bit. And coming from me, this is maybe a bit surprising. Because I have hated on Facebook a bunch. And I even had Facebook respond to my research before. Was it Mark on the phone no it was like a p it was it was like andy stone or some of the like kind of pr communications people at facebook so we wrote uh so we published a paper it was the one i was talking about earlier about how like um if like politicians dunk on the opposing party it goes viral and then we wrote a washington post op-ed about that

research um uh basically talking about the broader implications of like how social media incentive structures are um really toxic and might be encouraging people to post divisive content online um the washington post picked our headline for, and the headline they picked was really dramatic. It was like, why Facebook really, really doesn't want to stop extremism on their platform. That's so funny. That's so funny. The fact that they're allowed to do that,

that you write this article, and they go, why Mark Zuckerberg can suck Steve's dick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like it's so Facebook then Then Facebook saw that headline and they were like But they know that you didn't come up with the headline, right? Yes, and so they wrote

this long response and mostly what they were criticizing was the headline. They were like, the article wasn't even about extremism. It was about polarization and it's like, yeah, but did you read the article? That was the one thing we wrote. We didn't didn't write the headline the truth is no one read the article they just read the headline so that's why they care so much about the headline yeah and then they went into they kind of cherry-picked a lot of research about like um they were they essentially

argued for the rest of it they were like facebook doesn't increase polarization and then they sort of cherry-picked a bunch of research showing sort of the positive sides of Facebook. One of the studies they picked was actually the one I talked about in Bosnia as well. They were like, look, Facebook has, does some good things in some context, which is true. I mean, that's- Were they trying to convince you to write a retraction

or what were they trying to scare you into shutting up about Facebook? No, I like, I don't think it was for me. It was just for like, it was their research blog. So I think they essentially wanted to write a response to make themselves look better, but it didn't, it didn't work. It didn't, it seemed like, I mean, I wrote a response to it on, on Twitter and it seemed like no one was on Facebook side.

Especially on different social media. That's going to be a tough one. Yeah. Like I did not see anyone go like oh facebook like you have a you have a point there like um oh that's nice you made one person in bosnia smile for a day you know what that does balance it out with facebook anecdotally i can just look at how many people i view differently from my time on facebook you know, we all have like a handful of people that you're like, oh, that person's so weird on that social media app.

Yeah. Any app or any of this technology. But it influences how you think about that person. And then sometimes you then draw. Is part of Facebook sucking, though, just the fact that that's where more older people are? But even before that. Is it Facebook's fault?

Maybe. Twitter is pretty bad. I think I like Twitter more because at least, well, my timeline is skewed, but it is more of a left-leaning. It is, yeah. But that's not because of Twitter.

The current owner is flirting with a far right all the time. Right-winger, yeah. Applies to cat turd every day. Yeah. Cat turd. Yeah. But that's why.

It's not that I'm like a Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah. See, I don't even think that. I don't even see any. Like, the thing is, like, now I'm like, Facebook for me seems so harmless because I go on every once in a while now. And I'm like, no one's on there. It's like truly like people I went to high school with posting their kids' photos. Yeah.'m like no one's on there it's like truly like it's empty people i went to high school with posting their kids photos yeah that's all i see on there now it's

not like but it's there it's it's it's you're just not privy like a lot of people are i am saying like there was a time i i'm thinking like 2016 like there was a time where you went on there and you saw people in your life hyper political blah blah and and I just don't see that kind of thing happening on there anymore but that's just my own experience but that's why it feels like a less toxic thing in my point of view than like Twitter now where you're like

well you know. Russell you recently went on TikTok and you sent screenshots from the first three videos that popped up. Okay I go on TikTok once every few months. Okay. Shut up. We're not lying on this podcast.

Once every few months? Yeah. The only time I go on TikTok is when you or Douglas send me a TikTok to look at. That's wild. I don't go on there. I have nothing to go on there.

But TikTok, they know what I want and what they show me is... Okay, so one, let's see. It's a woman leaning over like yoga outfit I have nothing to go on there. But TikTok, they know what I want. And what they show me is. Okay. So one, let's see. It's a woman leaning over like yoga outfit when your mom didn't want you to have kids at 20 like her. It's a sexy woman.

Okay. Okay. Next one. Okay. The next one is another woman in underwear. And she's putting on pants. What's that? What happened? I don't know.

I didn't watch it. I'm just... Okay. And then the other one. No, you can't show it because it's mean. It's not mean. It's a picture of a man.

It's a picture of a large man with bad teeth. Yeah. It's telling me that that's what my... And then the fourth thing was a woman breastfeeding. Wow.

So is this what the algorithm has decided for you? Or are you really new to TikTok so these are just the first videos they're showing are you like really new to tiktok so these are just the first again i'm only going on once okay let's maybe three is two once a month probably i'm going on there okay for a video that someone sends me and i don't do too much scrolling we all know tiktok is the most accurate app well but i'm saying like here's what but if you're really new to tiktok then it doesn't know you pull from yeah I guess if you don't give it much data it's not that good.

It's boobies. Yeah. I love I talk about like a positive to social media. I and maybe it's apocryphal but I love the idea

of people finding out they're gay or bi based on their TikTok. They go like oh like that moment of realization is very cool.

Yeah. Though I think based on my interest TikTok would be trying to be like you're gay. Yeah. So I think based on my interest, it would, TikTok would, would be trying to be like, you're gay.

Yeah. And I'd be like, TikTok. No, really? It's just like musical theater. Has TikTok been showing you like been thinking you're gay? Back in my theater days,

I could see it being like, well, you liked 20 legally blonde reality show TikToks. So we assumed, we assumed, uh, there was, there was, there was there was uh they found the lead for the show they did an mtv reality show i love that i watched that with my mom oh wow um that is a fun concept that was a good show yeah and legally blonde good musical uh i thought like it's i don't people it was like 10 years ago i don people on Broadway hate it though because I feel like the people who won they weren't like

she was not as good as like the original lead Laura Bell Bundy I just remember back in the musical theater bitchy days there was some long note that she holds and so someone got a bootleg of her like taking like a big breath in the middle of it and they're like what a dumb bitch

she can't hold a note for 30 seconds. Yeah. And then there was, there was another show where they were casting like the leads for Greece. Yes. Like on TV. Was it London? I thought that was,

it was in London. Uh, I don't remember which, um, and I think the female lead they picked ended up becoming famous or something. Like she became like a Broadway actress after. I did a master's with Catherine McPhee before she became, before she was conservative. Before Smash?

No, after Smash. She's conservative? Oh, yeah. Wait, who is she again? She's married to someone. David Foster. She sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow on America's, America's, America's, American Idol. Oh, American Idol.

Oh, I remember. Yeah. And it was like an amazing performance. Yeah, I used to watch used to watch american idol yeah yeah those first couple years were so great simon got so nice what the fuck kelly clarkson really good no astounding but think about though think of like psychological experiment think about the first thanks for keeping us on track first years of of american idol if you look at some of those old videos of the bad people it's so fucked up you know what I mean they were mean

they were getting mentally ill people for us to laugh at and that was like the beginning of like reality competition kind of things what do you think Real Housewives is Russell?

what do you think any of the things that you enjoy now are? I agree I agree they're taking advantage of people I remember when reality TV wasn't ethical oh what a horrible time that was any of the things that you enjoy now are. I agree. I agree they're taking advantage of people. I remember when reality TV wasn't ethical.

No. Oh, what a horrible time that was. Milf Island, you know. At least they were paying a lot of housewives. At least they get paid rather than like, you know,

and at least in their mind, in our minds, we're able to do it because they're like, they have some sort of money, some sort of thing. We're able to rationalize a bit more than like

a poor person coming in who we're all just laughing at because they're, you know. And it's not only are we embarrassing them, they're also, they suck. Yeah. No, it's like, we're laughing at it, you know.

Sure. But it was the self-indignant ones that were the most glorious. The ones who were like, I am a good singer. I know, I know, I know. Did you see this thing, Milf Island?

I need to watch it. No, I haven't seen it. I've never heard of Milf Island. Oh, so it's this new show where it's like, these moms are trying to find love, but they're with each other's sons. Oh, no, I've seen an ad for it. And there was something where they blindfolded the moms.

Very Freudian. Very Freudian. The moms had to touch them, right? The moms had to figure out which one was their son based on feeling their naked upper body. And I was like, oh my God! How is this allowed on TV? Wow. Okay. Sometimes I pair

psychologists with reality TV and make like a reel. Because these studies are fascinating to watch. Okay, but remember that one reality too, where everyone was an actor, except the Joe Schmoe show or whatever. Everyone was an actor. A Truman show like that. show or whatever everyone was an actor a true show like

he thought yeah he thought it was almost like the truman show he thought he was doing like a house with everyone like big brother type situation but it was like everyone was an actor except him um so like the truman show which is so fucked up kristin wigg was it was before snl was one of her first like she was one of the actors on the show. But, like. Did any of them fuck him? I don't think so. Because that would make the show the most exciting. You got to film that one in Russia.

Man. Okay. So, you are, it's postdoctoral. What's your dream? You want to be a professor? You want to tour? Yeah. So, I do want to be a professor? You want to tour? Yeah, so I do want to be a professor.

Yeah, like that's my number one thing besides the science communication, which I love. Like I'm trying to emphasize on all my job applications that like look psychology research or being a professor. That's like my, that's my number one thing. Ideally, I would also like continue to do because I love the public speaking. I love the TikToks. I love science communication i do want to write like a book like a popular science book so i definitely want to do all the science communication stuff because i love that but yeah my number one i i do actually love doing

research and i i like teaching as well so i do want to be you are yeah to to bring it to to valentine's dave uh first of all are of all, what are you getting Nicole? What did you get Nicole today? Oh, on Valentine's Day? We have a date night planned. Okay. I got my beautiful girlfriend, Tova Silverman, a free ticket to see Gianmarco Cerezi headline Levity Live in West Nyack.

What a thoughtful gift I can't think of you know what you picked the perfect spot to say because if it had been out of town I'm like oh nice to get out of town

blah blah but you picked somewhere just far enough away that it's so fucking annoying just she has to go to that like not in the city either

where you can do something after no West Nyack so it's a hassle oh I'm gonna take her to the food court after to go to that. Like, not in the city either where you can do something after. No, West Nyack. So it's a hassle. Oh, I'm going to take her to the food court after. Romantic. Does she see a lot of your performances and stuff?

Or does she... Yeah. Does she get tired of them? Or does she like love it? I'm sure... I think she I was gonna give a Jokey answer

But I'll give a real one I think like It's fun sometimes When I'm doing well Yeah She knows If she goes to see me And I don't do well

That the night is over Yeah That the night That I'm gonna wanna listen To my set right after Even if we're at dinner Oh yeah And with one earphone in

And I'm gonna say like Okay do you think This would work instead So I think it's probably listen to my set right after even if we're at dinner yeah and with one earphone in and i'm gonna say like okay do you think this would work instead so i think it's probably like stressful yeah depending on the circumstance same way of like yeah i've seen you a lot um i think uh chris the reason i had a tough weekend i did a set for this thing called don't tell oh uh which they film and it's it's a very good channel and i just try not to put too much weight on it i just said to myself if i do well i'll never have to worry about selling tickets again and i i it was just fine it was just fine i had one joke that like just did not work at all and i had a meltdown and our friend chris was there and at some point he said to me he said

you want to go listen to your set don't you go do it go do it this was in la this was in la and then and then in the morning i went to the delta lounge i couldn't sleep all night i was so verklempt and i was in the delta lounge and i called tova and i cried in the delta lounge and and henry winkler was sitting there and he looked like really he looked like really like charm like he looked like camera ready he looked good he's like cool green pants and i had this fantasy in that moment that Henry Winkler would see me crying. And he'd come over and he'd say, artist. And I'd go. And he just ignored you.

And he'd say, talk to me, buddy. And we would have a moment. And I thought that would be so nice. Did that make you cry more? And then he'd tell me a story. And then he'd tell me a story like, I remember one time I failed. And then he'd say, i can see that you're talented but instead i just talked to tova and i cried oh wow you need to write that into your

netflix show yeah henry get henry uh but but i had a meltdown so so to answer your question uh no i don't think tov enjoys watching me at all um awful she likes it sometimes it's exciting it's exciting to see you know because you're like most of the time you've seen the material, you know the material. But it's exciting to see different groups respond. You know, that's what I imagine as a loved one. You know, she takes away to probably. Yeah, sure. Like, I'm sure when Nicole sees your show, she goes, how does this completely different group of older gay men respond to the show as opposed to the previous one?

Very interesting dynamics here. Some young gay people there, too. I'm so lucky to have Tova watch because she's a genius comedian. She works as a manager, but I always say that she really is a comedian. And her input is invaluable to me. So I'm very lucky. That's cool. And I hope she enjoys it sometimes.

What are you bringing? Is there any chance you're bringing your boyfriend to West Nyack? To see me. So you have a performance on Valentine's Day? Yeah, it's a big stand-up comedy day. Okay. Because I think like... Maybe.

I mean, I said I wanted to see you what is Wes Nyack? it's just a mall no please I feel ashamed that I even made it don't I was thinking of seeing

one of your shows stop don't worry we were talking about I might bring my friends to your Sunday show or something or one of your

New York shows yeah no I really want to see and I've seen a few of your sets online. Like your, what's the, James Corden. Yeah, I saw that set and some of your TikToks. I thought you were coming up with an adjective and you were like, your. And I was like, fun, charismatic, talented.

Incredible, talented. Your boyfriend is a psychologist as well? He is, yeah. So he's a PhD right now. He's at Princeton. So yeah, he's in psychology. He's also a TikT psychologist as well? He is, yeah. So he's a PhD right now. He's at Princeton. So yeah, he's in psychology. He's also a TikToker as well. His handle is Danny's Brain.

And he's a big educational TikToker as well. So we're both like educational TikTokers. We started together during the pandemic. This was like during like 2020, fall of 2020. And he is the one who actually sort of inspired me to do an educational TikTok because I had this TikTok that was just like kind of a fun account basically, where I was just like posting random stuff and I had like 500 followers. It was just like nothing.

I was just like playing around with the app. And then he was like, oh, I'll try TikTok. But he's into both like linguistics and psychology stuff so we started doing like content about like linguistics and he started taking off so he took off first and then i was like oh i'll i'll try this and then i started uh doing some videos and then i started taking off so it's something we do like kind of did you feel like whoever had the most followers became the dominant one in the relationship? I mean, it's definitely like a point of like contention a bit. But I mean, we deal with it.

But it's a little bit. I mean, he started with more followers. And then I surpassed that because I had that random blip last November. But yeah, no, we manage it. It's nice that we are in like similar fields. Like we both research psychology and that we both are like psychology tiktokers i know there was a study there was a psychological study that was uh do moral philosophers behave more morally i love this and my question is does do uh psychology

boyfriends uh behave less irrationally i think the answer is no from that seems to be the thing knowledge isn't it doesn't change no i i don't think i've seen any like psychologists who seem to behave less irrationally um there's a psychologist paul bloom who's like i'm a huge fan of and he is often asked like has psychology impacted the way you live your life at all? Are there any psychology findings you like take to heart and change your behavior and, or like change how you parent? Cause he's like a dad. And he was like, no, like basically not. Cause it's funny, like a lot of these psychology findings don't come away with like, like, like advice or anything. They say that like

this group behaves differently when we do this, uh, this group, which is why I like, it was nice that you like took something out of the bystander study that you could apply to real life. Um, it was sticky. It was just sticky. Cause like, I have trouble coming up with examples where like psychology has influenced like how I behave in real life but also like the fact that i've been doing this for like 10 years or what however long i've been doing it maybe like i just it's so ingrained in me that i don't know how it's shaping my behavior but like i can't think of like concrete ways in which like oh i'm gonna apply this psychology finding to your study made me think oh i'm gonna be more negative on twitter to go viral. Yeah. So I appreciate that. Yeah. No, I think, I think some of that research has maybe influenced

how I behave on the, because like on TikTok, sometimes you're like, should I like lean into the controversy a little bit? You never want to do that too much. You never want to lean into like the sort of the bad incentives and become like, you know, a polarizing mess of things. But sometimes you're like, how can I have like a, you know, a hook that like is like a little bit. I have a book pitch. Take it.

Please. If I ever had a baby, I would want to do some of these more, the nice psychology experiments. Like there was one that you showed of a baby crawling across a clear glass essentially. And if the parent made like a face, the baby would like not do it. Yeah, yeah.

And if they made like a, the baby, and the baby did it backwards. It was very cute. I think as my child got older, I would want to like do the thing of like, ooh, I wonder if they can,

I remember this study. I've talked about it on here before. I love it. Yeah. Where they, they like knock something off a shelf, but there was a rod, so gravity did not play out. And the baby doesn't register it.

It's nothing to the baby. But then one day they do it, the baby's old enough that they go, what? Because they understood that the ball should have fallen. Right. And I would love a book of like,

try this around this age and see what it changes like a little like fun baby psychology people would say it's unethical like put your baby in a box for three years and see like do are they scared of you no but that's good because like when i was in undergrad like when they i took a few developmental psychology classes and the professors would like bring in their like four- old kid and be like, we're going to try some psychology experiments on my kid. And they would do like live demonstrations for us basically. What kind of thing?

Yeah. Let's see. I forgot what they were at that age, four years old. This is why I want you to have a kid. Oh, I think, okay. I think it was like conservation so i think kids at whatever age i mean this was many years ago i think they didn't realize that like when like water is in a tall glass they think it's like more water than what it's in like

like a shallow bowl so basically if you like pour like water from the shallow bowl into the tall glass you're like is is there like more water now? And they're like, oh yeah, there's like more water. So they don't know that there's the same amount of water. They think it's like more. That's so. So it's things like that. I would love if I had a kid like that feels like no one get mad.

I'd love to have a kid where like the one day where I do it and I would film it. Yeah. And he'd be like, there's more water. And then the one day that he like kind of knows. and i would do it every morning so i could find it i could find the one day where he goes i think it's more and i'm like oh my god he's almost uh you go super viral make a new account for this listen if they if if i ever had a kid sag after would have to interfere because i am turning that baby into more content than you can imagine. I already got the baby cam on him.

Why not hit record? Make compilations. I interrupted you earlier. Did you remember what you wanted to say? I don't. I worry about this couch that it's too cozy. It's too comfy. So I did Pete Holmes' part.

Oh, I do. I was going to say, oh, just about what you had mentioned earlier. that it's too cozy. It's too comfy. So I did Pete Holmes. Oh, I do. I do. I was going to say, oh, just about, you had mentioned earlier, you know, where you had asked about like colleges in terms of hiring a TikTok. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I feel like I would rather hire a famous like person. Like I would rather hire a TikTok psychology person because i'm like they want money to those colleges you know what i mean it's a selling point i feel like that's all i was gonna say i feel like yeah you should not be afraid of it because you're like they can market that

and it doesn't take away but it's also dangerous because they know like god forbid you go on tiktok one day and you go like you say anything controversial and then they got to deal with a fucking headache of of like you getting dragged and and then they got to deal with the fucking headache of of like you getting dragged and then fox news because harvard sucks what was that do you remember there was a recent like psychologist who it was something about pedophilia that they had like a book and they got like in big trouble vaguely i think i saw some twitter stuff about it i think whenever people and this is what sometimes i i think the problem with science communication the struggle of it is like yeah i let's just say i can imagine

that it was related to like the lack of free will that people have inclinations yeah and i think like even for a psychologist to admit i mean my r kelly joke was basically about these psychological terms are not used right because collectively people just go, no, you're a pedophile. Like, it's a psychology joke. So I could see why it would also be dangerous to hire, like, a famous. Yeah. I don't know how colleges prize fame. Yeah, I mean, so the thing is, I've been, like, encouraged to not emphasize the science communication part.

Of course, I mention it in my job application. But the people who would be hiring me for a professorship position would be essentially other professors. It wouldn't be the college administrators and stuff. It would be other professors. And oftentimes, they're more senior professors. And sometimes, the more senior professors are skeptical of those who popularize science. And, you know, sometimes those who do popularize science do dumb it down or they go, you know, Jordan Peterson, they go off the deep end. He was a psych professor at Toronto.

Was he ever respected or was he always a weirdo? So my current advisor, Professor Jayvon Bavel at NYU, he was at Toronto when Jordan Peterson was there. And he says that like Jordan was like really respected when he was there. Like he taught classes that people really liked. And if you, if you look at some of his original like YouTube videos where he's just teaching classes, he actually seems like a good teacher.

He seems compelling. But of course that's like, it's kind of gone out the window recently as he's become like more, more like partisan and just, like, more just, like, anti-climate change. But that's the thing about, like, becoming a figure where, and I don't even know what he earlier professed. I barely know what he, but, like, now it's beyond corrupt in the sense of, like, it has to, oh, the Sports Illustrated cover, I got gotta weigh in on that it becomes so someone told me a comedian told me the version for stand up comics

to do it because part of it is like you know sometimes I we record this in advance and it's like sometimes I'm like I gotta get it in the moment

so we can weigh in on the cultural things because the algorithm supports it but on the other hand it's like but then it's garbage you wanted to hear

like when the Chris Rock got slapped. Also, there's no way, like by the time you're even sitting down to record, almost every sort of take or thing has already been captured. And you have to have a take. Do you know what I mean?

Sometimes you're just like, sometimes you're just like. That's the annoying thing. You have to have a take. I don't care. Most of the time. 95% of the time, I'm like,

I don't care enough about this. I'm fooling myself into caring because it's easy to get riled up you see people having these impassioned takes on on either end of the thing and you're like ultimately you're like do i actually care about this sort of tv show or this thing no i don't you know do you ever wish that you could do like does it ever feel like social media research is more uh boring than putting a baby on a glass sheet and seeing if they walk across? Like, that seems like a more fun day to me than numbers, numbers, numbers, tests. Like, it feels like the same way that Freud got to, like, kind of talk about everything and big sweeping artistic statements

because it was so new yeah that like now freud would talk about everything now you got a psychologist you're like i specialize in children who who lost their moms at two and it's like yeah it becomes so specific you don't get to do these kind of like yeah big sweeping theses yeah yeah i mean so personally i do actually love it i love the like big sweeping theses. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so personally, I do actually love it. I love the, like, I like the stats. I like the coding. I like the data analysis. And I do like the social media research. And you do kind of have to specialize as a psychology researcher. It's just this implicit rule of the field. I don't know why you have to, but it's also like, you know, you have to become an expert on something. It's really hard to be an expert on multiple things

and keep up with the literature and everything. So you kind of have to be an expert in one thing. But like, I like being an expert in the social media stuff, just because I'm like, I am interested in social media and what it's doing to our world. And I am also very active on social media, interested in social media and what it's doing to our world and i am also very active on social media both sort of as a consumer and as a creator and stuff so i like that i think that actually sounds more fun than running in-person participants that's actually like takes forever and like now with i just want to be with babies i think yeah yeah i just want to experiment with babies uh but in your TV show when you write yourself

as a psychologist you will be like you will make yourself a baby researcher it's gotta be because the other thing is not a researcher baby

oh I think if I'm a psychologist I think this is the thing I will put in the show just so you know you're gonna hate this

I have to leave in 10 minutes oh my god I know I have a sound check At 6.15 I just realized And I was 15 minutes late It's gonna work

I know I'm just telling you It's gonna work Let me call Titanic Call Titanic Just trust it It's broadway to the point But it'll still be

Because it's longer Yeah okay I understand Okay then let me We'll close it out We don't have to rush uh okay valentine's day we're talking about love uh i want to do astrology but let's let's let's get there naturally um any any great studies about love romance couples um so let me do one of the most uh this is a famous psychology study

i've talked about it in one of my tiktoks but i do like this one it's on something it's called um misattribution of arousal so it's a very um this is they did this study on a, um, a scary bridge. So one group of like, and this was done like back in the, you know, seventies or something. It's an old study, but I think the general premises behind it tend to replicate. So, um, they had like one group and these are heterosexual participants, like heterosexual men cross, go across either a scary bridge or a, um, there was like really steep and rickety or a sort of not so scary bridge like you know one really low to the ground and then they sort of like had the experimenter was sort of you know an attractive woman and she sort of she said to the person the

men either on the scary bridge or the low to the ground bridge. She's like, here's my phone number. Call me if you have any questions about the experiment. And apparently, according to the study, the men on the scary bridge, they were more likely to call the experimenter after the experiment. And the reasoning behind this was, is essentially that we misattribute our arousal. So they were feeling arousal or sort of like, you know, adrenaline in their body from the scariness of the bridge. And they interpreted this feeling of arousal as being like, oh, I'm attracted to this woman, essentially. So, I mean, this can be in everyday things.

Like if you're on a roller coaster or if you're having a cup of coffee or something and it makes you like feel sort feel jittery in your body, you might misinterpret that as a distraction. Is that why people go on dates to scary movies? No, I think that might be part of it. And also coffee dates as well. Coffee dates is like, you know, because the coffee makes you jittery and everything.

And this is also just kind of a general premise in psychology is sometimes like we uh come up with like you know rationalizations of like feelings that we have in our body like oh i'm feeling this because of this that's called like attribution essentially and oftentimes our attributions of feelings in our body might be wrong and this is could there be anything connected to like oh god i almost died what have I done in my life? I need to find a partner. Like, you know what I mean?

Like, is there anything there? Maybe it's existential. Yeah. She was attractive too. Like that was part of the, that feels stressful. Like what if the experimenter was like, oh, and I'll play the attractive woman. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. We're going to throw these results out. I think you'd have auditions. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Well, you go also, I could see calling. we're going to throw these results out you'd have auditions sure I could see calling it's really funny to imagine the researcher being so clearly not a researcher just like

hi hi I'm a Harvard psychologist oh yeah you're going to go across the bridge oh that's hot that's a Russell character so I could also could see You're going to go across the bridge? Oh, that's hot. That's a Russell character. So I could also could see like they called and did they did they take into account like did they hit on her? Or I would have called and been like, how dare you do that to me today?

That bridge was so fucking scary. I screamed. Don't please if please delete that recording. I could see, to his point, there could be other motivations behind that. And my question is, did the study test at all, if it lasted? Or did it imprint on you at all that forever you misattributed? Or did you just misattribute for 12 hours? But I think it's like we always misattribute. I don't know.

Every time I hear a psychology test, I'm like, you could take that test a thousand different directions. You could, a week later, see if they ran into her, if they were flirtatious. You could see a month later, a year later. How long does it last? There's so much. No, totally. And I mean, there are budgetary and time constraints, of course.

But like, yeah, and I And I mean, there are budgetary and time constraints, of course. But like, yeah. And I guess I don't know the answer to those questions, except, yeah, I guess just the general principle of we misattribute things in our body. Like, even if we're like, you know, hungry or something. Like, did they follow up? Did they like see if like a roller coaster operator got more pussy than he should have given? Like, he's always there all the time i would do that

like right like whenever people got off roller coasters i do a study like a roller coaster that went upside down versus one that just went up and down that at the end when people got off and say just so you know there's a free room here would you like to borrow it for an hour you could just no listen that's a great study you could just do i could get funding for that you need to be a psych researcher people that went on a roller coaster versus people that didn't go on a roller coaster, and then find out who got some in the next 24 hours. Sure. There's a million. And like, now tell me this.

Like, it feels like both those examples. Yeah. You could do them. Yeah. It's not any crazier than what they did. A scary bridge. That's just an idea someone had. Yeah. That's not any crazier than what they did. A scary bridge? That's just an idea someone had.

Yeah, I will say, so psychology studies in the 60s and 70s, way more fun. They were way more wild. A study like that probably wouldn't be done anymore, except to maybe replicate that initial study. The studies now are a bit more boring or careful. More controlled. More controlled. Yeah, and they're usually better science. boring or careful more controlled more controlled yeah and they're usually better science like think of like the stanford prison experiment or some of those like crazy studies that they did in um

like the 70s and the 60s and stuff we're just in a way this co-hosting relationship is kind of like the stanford prison experiment um what's the most unethical study that's ever been done in america i guess uh yeah so i did a video on the top five most unethical psychology studies um i mean the stanford prison experiment has to be one of them that that was in my top five what was the worst thing that happened they were just mean or did they hit them did the fake guards no it was unethical for like a number of reasons so it was done in uh so it was done at stanford actually where i took my stanford intro psych class there's like a plaque there because we took the class in the basement so it was done in that exact basement where i took my intro psych class um by this guy uh philip zimbardo who yeah he basically wanted to show that people could become evil based

on like the roles that they were assigned yeah he got a bunch of like uh like college age like men together and put them in like in a basement and said we're gonna like simulate a prison half of you will be prisoners and half of you will be prison guards he knew to make it all men uh at least to not make it like a yeah co-ed jail right and and there were follow-up studies that show that people who respond to an advertisement that says like come to a prison simulation they tend to be a bit more on the aggressive side come be a cop but yeah yeah yeah Yeah. What's going to happen? Yeah. They show that people who want to have guns on their waist tend to be a little more violent. Yeah.

Whoa. Yeah. But, okay. So one of the actually most unethical things about this study is that, so it later came out because there were recordings from this experiment that were like unearthed later showing that um uh so what philip zimbardo said happened in the experiment which wasn't really the truth is that just spontaneously because of the rules they were assigned uh these prison guards started sort of like acting like abusive and kind of torturing the prisoners in this prison simulation and they had to shut down the experiment it got so bad but later these recordings showed that philip zimbardo was essentially coaching the prison guards to act this way like he wanted this result from the experiment yeah so yeah it was it was basically

it was kind of a commentary on him it wasn't like a commentary on the yeah the social roles was it very mendacious he knew exactly what he was doing? Or do you think it was subconscious? Like, go over there. Make sure they're in line. Make sure they're in line. I don't know. I think that's debatable. Is he still alive? I would see him around Stanford occasionally. He's a retired professor.

Is there shame around his name now? He has a little mustache. A bit. People view him a little bit as a kind of sketch sketchy character i think i mean he's done some of the most famous studies out there but people i think he has kind of a reputation from the prison experiment sure and maybe other things as well to you know again what's the thing books have been written yeah like, policies have been made off the stamp for prison experiment. Oh, yeah. It was one of the most influential experiments of all time. And a lot of it wasn't real, I guess.

Do you ever feel cynical about your whole profession that it is so tainted that... It obviously, it has to be useful. Like, for example, not to go back to just the... Maybe the bystander effect was the only effective study ever made. But, like, that's obviously useful. There's kernels of something in all of this, but it's filled with that study, the thing we talked about earlier,

about the 30% or whatever being replicable. Yeah, so the thing is, there is like really, really good research being done. So one thing is like in the past 10 years, research practices have improved a lot. And now there are really high standards in psychology social psychology almost more than in other fields just to have high powered samples and really like rigorous statistics and everything do you have to go i'm so sorry okay yeah so sorry no no worries yeah no just getting free tickets to

titanic i would love to see titanic but I, but I can also pay for it. Unlimited tickets. I've heard such good things about it. Like people have said amazing things. So yeah. Yeah. He came into the show later. So yeah.

Okay. So yeah. So yeah. I just wonder if you ever feel like any kind of, or whether like, I don't know in science, whether you're allowed, whether if you say you're a scientist next to a physicist they roll their eyes yeah so i went to a physicist i went to a physics conference over the past like uh so i was

there thursday through uh friday wednesday through friday and i spoke to these physicists about psychology basically and science communication on a panel. They seemed to have a lot of respect for psychology, and they seemed to think what I was doing was cool, which I wasn't necessarily used to. I think physicists are actually really cool, quirky people. That was my impression from the conference. Do the fields really have a physicist are like this, geologists are like this? Are there overarching things that you you like physicists are quirky yeah so i i've heard a lot of social scientists talk about how like psychology sometimes has physics envy like psychology has tried to make itself a really empirical science and i think it has done that

to sort of imitate other sciences basically and try to you know make become really falsifiable have these theories use like sort of advanced statistics and stuff but that's of course hard to do with behavioral data so i've heard that in terms of stereotypes of the field yeah i don't know i see that a bit but i don't know again often my stereotypes are wrong. The physicists turned out to be different than what I expected them to be. Sure. So, yeah.

I know we, well, let me just, let's touch on astrology. Okay, yes. I'm ready. I find it very frustrating. Yeah. We also, we had, at one point, we had someone who said they were, uh, uh, a psychic on the show and I'm very, I'm very, but like Russell, this is where I was bummed to lose Russell. We're like, he, he's not going to say he believes it, but he's moved by it. Whereas opposed to me, I went through my phases.

I, I, I read my, uh, what's his name? Michael Sherman. Was he, uh, he's like the skeptic guy. Yeah, like he was, first there's the amazing Randy. There's that old like atheist crew. And then there's like, yeah, Michael Sherman would like go to war with Deepak Chopra. And they'd have things about quantum mechanics. But astrology I find particularly bad because partially it's part of my,

my liberal world that like, it's, it's still, it's, and there's a comedian named Jeffrey. It's really trendy. Yeah. There's a comedian named Jeffrey Asmus.

He had a tweet once about like, you can't get mad at others for not believing in global warming if you believe in astrology. And I think like, that's totally fair. Yeah. And I think, uh, you're never going to make everyone scientists.

Yeah. But with the vaccine, we certainly witnessed a like something's wrong in science education. Yeah. And it's hard to know what healthy skepticism is. I mean, I admittedly did very little research of the vaccine. did very little research of the vaccine. I just generally go, if the scientific community generally accepts this and the people telling me to get it also got it,

we're fine. But that's fair to trust the consensus. You can't go out there and do your own research and you shouldn't either. Sure. And yeah, but so I hate astrology. I find it, it just interjects itself. It's become, and it's become almost cliche for a man to like be like astrology's stupid.

And I'm not saying it's just men and women. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What are your, and I also have the thing of, I'm sorry, I know I'm rambling, but like Huffington Post, the horoscopes are in the women's voices section. And like, to me, that should be a cause of offense. Yeah. But talk to me about astrology so i have kind of complex uh opinions on astrology actually uh first of all so astrology is fake just uh yeah um and uh i've i've done a lot of like videos on my tiktok sort of like

debunking astrology uh and and people mad. And people do get mad. And I think that's made me more frustrated with astrology recently. Because back, I think early college, I was actually kind of into astrology. But I was never into it in a way where I like thought it was true. I was like, this is fake, but it's kind of fun to talk about like being an Aries. I don't understand that. I've heard it. I'm not saying like i understand it but i don't understand it because i'm like go do anything else yeah you're

mingling with people who do believe it and that's weird to me yeah but i don't know i wasn't really i feel like a lot of like when i talked about it with my friends back then it was more ironic but i think like yeah sometimes when i talk to like more of gen z i see like this sincere belief in astrology and yeah i have gotten a lot of i will say the astrology folks and then the manifestation folks when i debunk my girlfriend my girlfriend is your girlfriend into manifestation yeah again, it's that world where I think if you put her in a courtroom, she'd go, no. But I think believing in it influences the decisions you make so that you really seek out that thing. I think what she really believes in is articulation of what you want. But she calls it manifestation and and will

like kind of jokingly in a way where she might say she doesn't believe it but i would argue but you kind of do believe it something in you again but what's a belief yeah but i i yes yeah i have things to say about manifestation too because there are studies on how if you simply, like if you manifest being rich, just simply like thinking of your goal and what it's going to be like if you achieve it, like studies show that that doesn't help anything. What does help is if you think of your goal

and then you think of your obstacles to achieving it, if you think of an active plan, that stuff works. So if you say that manifestation is like a placebo effect that works, it really isn't in the way that people are currently doing it if you are if you are actively thinking about obstacles and how you can overcome them to reach your goals then that's better but not just the manifestation so yeah um it's interesting your frustration with that seems higher than your frustration with that seems like my frustration with astrology yeah maybe it's because i like

i think astrology is kind of fun and it's because i like i think astrology is kind of fun and it's also part of like the queer community a little bit and like gay culture yeah it's interesting that it's both like sort of the women's voices thing and like gay culture is like is there any reason behind that and you think there's any i read once that it's like something that's alternative from a mainstream point of view i I don't really know why. I read something about with the higher percentage of women, and again, I don't know if this was debunked, but it was the idea that in a patriarchal society, when you have less autonomy available to you,

you look towards outside things that influence your behavior. Okay. And I guess one could say that about the queer community in a homophobic society. Maybe. That you would be, that maybe, that's why it latched on. Yeah, I mean, and there is a study that shows that people go to like psychics and astrologists in times when they are like suffering in life. So there is something like if you feel uncertainty in life, you will go to something that makes you feel more uncertain um but yeah i don't know why it's become part of i mean maybe that

theory is true i but i don't know it's hard to test i know that i read that it was a study that said that and that's why it's it i know that it's a higher percentage of women than men in america yeah yeah um yeah but um my experience when i've like taught when i've debunked manifestation astrology on tiktok those communities have come after me in sort of a very frustrating um way and and yeah no i've also been called like a white man for talking about like how like manifestation and astrology is fake and uh and it's so hard because there's a part of me that i'm like okay okay but it is fake though yeah yeah and um yeah what i don't like is when it's so sincerely believed in this dogmatic way to the point where you are not going to accept like actual forms of like legitimate science like yeah when you become anti-science because you believe in these things

like that is what frustrates me i think there's a way to do it in like a fun way but once it starts like once you start believing in the stuff at the expense of science then that that is really frustrating and what i've seen is some of these communities on tiktok the astrology and manifestation folks they've been more they've been some of the more dogmatic communities i've interacted with i think but i think my argument is that and again i'm not saying you're disagreeing entirely but i'm like you you can't live in a world where people kind of believe in a fun way and something you will always have people who sincerely but but they're but but i'm saying like astrology it's always gonna there's always gonna be a huge swath that actually believe it yeah and it's gonna affect the way yeah i mean it's like you know this is this it all ties together with misinformation

and social media we're like psychology almost becomes useless because anyone can undermine it at any point and science and communication of science like the news promoting the study about red wine being good for you right this that and the other right sensationalized it and and it's not turning back anytime soon yeah that why would anyone believe anything a scientist says anymore because they've been they've they've been lied to in so many different ways i think that's like my i i there is a part of me that understands why a government mass rolling out a vaccine would stress someone out given that you hear the government lied in all these different other instances and and it's because it's an avenue for irrational people to have a system where they can be reinforced by other people who have that irrational belief and then ultimately believe in something that isn't real. And they use it to dictate their lives.

Ronald Reagan's wife, Nancy? Yeah, Nancy Reagan. lives. Ronald Reagan's wife, Nancy? Yeah, Nancy Reagan. Nancy had an astrologist that Ronald would listen to and even if he didn't fully believe in it, it might have decided his nuclear plan.

So to me, that stuff is bad. I'd rather have everyone have their own individual irrationalities than a collective one. I see. Where they're able to reinforce each other.

Yeah. Okay. I like half by what you say. Because, yeah. No, I think the hardcore belief in it is bad. I think a little bit. Because I think we can have half beliefs, essentially. A lot of people report believing in some kind of superstition i

don't know if you have superstitions around like performances like when you go on stage okay yeah i mean i try to fight them too number if i see the number 13 or whatever sometimes i'm like i want to avoid them like no do it yeah it is not anything yeah no i i i try to fight it too i i think it's in the more i've been in science i think the more i've tried to um fight it but i but i think it's a natural thing especially when you're in a place of anxiety or if you just like want to have fun a bit to be superstitious and i also think with the decline of like um like religion or things in society that people are often turning to things that aren't religion but instead are

like tiktok witchcraft or astrology or manifestation it's kind of replacing that impulse i think a lot of us i mean like that impulse yeah i think other things that are maybe worse other political conspiracy theories things like that i think people have many i don't think everyone has this religious or spiritual impulse but many do and uh ideally you find an outlet for it that isn't are you an atheist just struck i am an atheist yeah uh-huh are you uh no i think i'm uh uh there's a term called a fideist uh martin gardner yeah he martin gardner who was like part of that big skeptic movement he said i believe in god because it feels good to do so

Oh yeah And then the challenge would be like so you don't believe in God He said no I do Like I don't know if I'm that I have flowery views about consciousness being A panpsychist I like panpsychism Oh yeah panpsychism is becoming like popular

Among like philosophers and Even like neuroscientists For some reason It's kind of the idea that everything is conscious, but, but like not to get carried away. It's like, it's not saying that like an Adam's like,

hi, my name's Adam. It's saying that like consciousness, like, like dimension or volume or weight or whatever is a fundamental thing of the universe. And, and it's been so long.

But the idea is that some people think consciousness consciousness is an epiphenomenon right where just there's some it's like accidental basically it's accidental and it comes out of the brain but then there's other people go like well that doesn't make any sense how does non-consciousness become consciousness it must be actually part of the whole thing yeah and. And it can be like, you know, then there's the arguments called the combination. I really do. I miss some of this stuff. You're like really into this. The combination problem is the idea of,

okay, let's say every atom has a degree of consciousness or you might call it proto-consciousness. How do they all combine to make one I am? How does a brain combine to make one i am how does a brain combine to make one thing oh but i was so i was like really into this in college i would write a lot of research papers on it and take classes and yeah one of the big theories at that time was um like integrated information theory it was one of the panpsychist theories basically the idea was like when information essentially becomes integrated and combined and interacts with each other in a very complex way it becomes conscious

so like they thought that you know that's why like the brain was conference because it's conscious it's this very complex system of integrated information um it had all these paradoxes though like could the internet become conscious because it's like sure integrated information that was really popular i'm not sure if that one's still as popular but people were leaning very into like like neuroscientists and stuff were leaning into these panpsychist theories and in there yeah i find uh it's obviously i i i try to be optimistic about it that's the faith part where, I try to be optimistic about it. That's the faith part where I like try to be like, but I think in there, I'm like, there's more to the picture.

And I fight that urge to be like, and we know what it is. But I think I'm always connected to, there was some, and he's quite the atheist, I believe. There was some, and he's quite the atheist, I believe, but he was basically like, some people think the consciousness is a problem that human beings are incapable of solving, which kind of feels like a cop-out. But this guy was basically saying like, a dog could never conceive of algebra. And in that same sense, human beings can't conceive of all this consciousness. But at the same time, he believes that, but still believes it's an epiphenomenon. So I think that's kind of like, it's like kind of having your cake and eating it too in a way. Yeah. But I think in there, that's where I'm like, I'm not a strict atheist, I think, in that sense.

And I'll think kind of fruitily when I take my shrooms and I do various drugs. I think like, oh, like we're part of a thing yeah and that's about as far as i can go yeah no i i think i have agnostic leanings certainly and i think i like do see like the like awe and mystery and things but i just i feel like i'm atheist in the strict sense it's just the easiest way to I don't know what label you used exactly, but yeah, it was just. Yeah, yeah.

Fideist, but then you explain and people go, I would say probably like a pantheist, but then people think something very specific too, where it's like a mother

like hugging everybody. Oh, okay. And so it's like, well, it's not that. Yeah. It would be nice. But I think that's just why astrology bugs me. And I feel like it's become like socially so acceptable to, to like, be like, what's your sign?

And it bothers me because I feel like it puts me in the position to either not express myself honestly, which is, oh, I don't think that's anything like it. It forces me to either like, be like, I'm a Leo or be rude. Are you a Leo? Cause like my, so my theory is sometimes that people who have bad signs are the ones who don't like astrology.

So funny. And so I'm an Aries, which is like, I think one of the, you know, good signs when you read it, but I would also think Leo would be a good sign. Yeah.

Well, but that's what they go. You're courageous. I'm like, well, you're already off the mark. But yeah, I think it just bothers me. The reason it bothers me is because I have to confront it more often. Yeah. You know, I also don't like it when Hasidic Jews approach me and want me to do the Tefillin. Like, I'm like, I feel like you're forcing me to be rude.

I don't think this is a thing. If you want to wrap this around your arm and do the thing, be my guest. But I don't like that you force me to go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right.

Let's go on to just our next quick segment. This has got to stop. This has got to stop. Do you remember the email? Oh, yeah. I do remember the email. Is there a this has got to stop? I do quick segment this has got to stop this has got to stop do you remember the email oh yeah i do remember is there this has got to stop i do have a this has got to stop so do you remember um brene brown and the whole being vulnerable thing like remember what it was like really in to be vulnerable this was like in 2013 2015 okay whatever like there there was this like she was like uh she had a ted talk um on she i think she's a psychologist or social worker on the power of vulnerability you really have you

not heard of the i for some reason i thought it seeped deeply i mean i i certainly went through the ted talk i remember talks were the thing oh yes oh my god uh this is so millennial of us too yeah um yeah this whole Yeah, this whole, there was this whole craze where like being vulnerable was like really popular and how it was like so, it's so good to be like vulnerable

in your relationships and everything. And I think that there is like a level of truth to that, but I think it's been taken a little too far. And I think now we see in like the Gen Z era uh people turn being vulnerable into oversharing on the internet and just constantly being vulnerable and sharing these

parts of yourself all the time and i think one thing that should stop is maybe we should not be so vulnerable all the time like i think vulnerability has a place in personal relationships for instance i don't know if it has a place on the internet and i think we should be very selective with what we share about ourselves on the internet is it is it a a kind because as a comedian i mean i share a lot about my life in a jokey way yeah but i certainly have to as a comedian the rest of us don't but like i see that you have to for material also just as like uh i'm a first person artist where like i don't even have the capability to i just like writing about yeah that's just where my thoughts go uh-huh um what's a very leo of something so what so very leo of you uh so like what's what's something that you're

like someone shared like is it that i'm feeling really sad today okay so i so i had a personal experience story that maybe illustrates this um so i was on a podcast uh a little bit earlier this month and um the pod the podcast hosts i like her a lot but she wrote this like um for her like sub stack she wrote uh this piece about me and my tiktok where she commented on like how my tiktok brand is like so so neutral she was like he was so neutral i wondered if he was even gonna have a personality when i talked to him and this she she sort of just made these comments about like me not having a personality and i sort of jokingly responded to it on tiktok and we we chatted about it so like no hard feelings uh to her but um but

in my response on tiktok i kind of talked about how like it can sometimes feel nice to have this level of distance from my audience where I am not like oversharing, where I am not like saying things about me personally. Instead, I'm just talking about the science and I, I inject pieces of my personality into it. But, um, but yeah, no, I feel like a lot of like young people especially feel like kind of pressured to overshare to go viral on the internet and there are all these like TikTok trends where people are like you're like disapproving of a result or like like they want you to have your opinion on it yeah and I I throw that in sometimes but uh I I try to make it less about like my hot takes and more just like about the science and I feel like it's feels better for me too to have that level of distance that way I can like actually you know deal with

having that many like TikTok followers and stuff without feeling like oh god they're all they're all like judging me for me instead people are commenting on the science they don't often don't talk about me and I maybe that's um maybe that's also just me i probably couldn't do what you do the crowd work the being a comedian the everything like that like that's people that but i thought it was yeah one of your videos you you were talking about uh free will and you're basically it felt like and i could be misinterpreting you were like you were trying to leave room for free will to possibly be there but you kind of said lots of studies have shown most of it is predetermined and in a way it felt like cake and eat it too to a degree of like if you were to go on full-on a determinist and go

hey guys there's no such thing as free will so here's a study about it that you would get a lot of pushback our whole society is based on the concept of free will arguably we can't even think without believing people have free will yeah yeah but it felt like you were trying to leave the room for the people who do want to believe it you were like well we haven't proven it entirely well but we haven't like i mostly wanted to be scientifically accurate because like i there kind of isn't a way to disprove free will at this point there's ways to argue that a lot of things are based on genetics or based of our environment and to say, where's the room for free will early? But, you know,

who knows? We could discover something about the brain or consciousness, which we still know very little about, that shows that, yeah, maybe there is some free will in that explanation. So, no, I can't disprove. But, like, I guess what i was trying to get at is like a lot of like neuroscientists just don't believe in free will because i think once you've spent a lot of time sort of looking at these findings you're like i don't really see where it fits into the explanation so that's kind of what i was getting at but but yeah sorry i don't know no no it's just like yeah i just noticed i think one of the struggles of science communication is there was some book again this was like a phase of my life that was really deep in it.

And then, you know what? It was someone who was getting like a PhD in philosophy at Columbia was like, come to one of my lectures sometime. People can pop by. And I went there and I was like, oh, I'm stupid. Like it was about like time and slices of time. And I swear I didn't understand a fucking word that was said and i think i felt so stupid i said oh i will only be able to understand maybe the level above the layman but i will never be able to understand the intricacies of what anyone's actually talking about.

And thus, I will always be like, did you see the menu, the movie The Menu? No. There's some scenes, some guy is a big foodie. Yeah. And the chef kind of forces him to cook in front of, he's like, oh, you like cooking? Cook a meal for us. And it's like this, and then he's so humiliated, he kills himself essentially. Oh.

Oh, spoiler. Okay. But it's like, it's that same thing where it's like, if I talk to a philosopher, they talk to me the same way someone comes up to me after a show, like, my friends say I'm funny. And I felt something about the, like, being stupid. I think that's what it was. That's, yeah. I mean, it sounds like she probably wasn't communicating properly for our audience. Because if she had something open, like, to the public or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I mean it sounds like she probably wasn't communicating properly for our audience because if she had something open like to the public or whatever like if it was to other

Experts that it might make sense that you don't understand because you're not you're not stupid like like it just we finally got Well from what I can tell sure you you seem very intelligent I'm gonna walk into the door when this is done, just bang my head by accident. But yeah, it seems like she wasn't communicating properly. And something I try to do is I practice as much as I can communicating to just very general audiences. Because it's the curse of knowledge. You forget the more that you study something that certain terms aren't known by regular people like the at the physics conference i was throwing around like this term heuristic and everyone was like what's heuristic and i was like oh you guys don't know

that and like or even words like define heuristic for our listeners and okay yeah heuristic is essentially like a mental shortcut it's like some sort of process that you'll use to um uh like some sort of cognitive shortcut you'll use to sure sure yeah um i'm trying to think of a a good example um one is like um uh like yeah i think the heuristic example I was using, because we were talking about trust in scientists, is that as a heuristic for ourselves, we will trust the scientific consensus around, if you do trust scientists, around what they believe instead of going out there and researching yourself. That's a heuristic for us. So that's a popular term in psychology. Even words like in-group or out-group, because I do a lot of research on sort of group dynamics. So in-group is like the group you're a part of. So if you're a Democrat, other Democrats are your

in group. Republicans would be your out group. Sometimes I learn people don't know those words. So it is sometimes like, I forget that people don't know certain, like, like, I forget that these aren't words that are just part of like general discourse and that they're like more academic words and everything. So I think you you really if you want to be a science communicator you have to just be really actively talking to just regular people and people on TikTok. All right let's go to our last segment. You better count your blessing. You better count your blessing. It's where we say something that we're uh we're thankful for is there's something it can be specific broad something that you feel good about

i'll go mine's super specific my super came by my kitchen sink the water pressure has sucked so much for like two years now and i finally called the super he came over and 10 seconds later he must have moved something changed the head and it's like my whole life is different oh wow i and this won't happen after this but i am literally excited to do the dishes with this new water pressure wow just to see how much faster it is and uh ramon i don't think you'll listen to this podcast, but I appreciate you. You're a very good super.

Yeah, it's the little things like that. It's the little things. That matter. And sometimes these poor supers, it's the landlord's the shitty one and the super is great. Okay. And the super is like

that middle person that gets caught in the crosshairs. And Ramon, I think I gave him a $200 tip for the holidays. I thought that was nice. Oh, wow. Okay. I think that's good.

I don't know what's normal around tipping in New York with supers. I was normally doing $100, and then Tova moved in. And so I said, like, okay, we got $200. Okay. I mean, that seems very nice to me. I don't know. You're like, oh, fuck. I got to go to the super.

I'm like, should I? Well, because it's like NYU is dealing with nice to me. I don't know. You're like, oh, fuck, I gotta go to the supermarket. I'm like, should I? Well, because it's like NYU's dealing with my housing, so I don't... NYU can tip the goddamn super. How much money did they take? Jesus Christ. Yeah. But I don't know what I'm supposed to...

What the people do. But yeah, no, that was nice. I guess my count my blessings is I was home in Portland with my family for the last five weeks. And it was really nice just to be with family and also to be away from the craziness of New York, especially in the winter. Just to skip January in New York. I mean, now I'm here in Februarybruary which is like also you know it's those two months it's never november december i always i always remember i've had my worst days

the coldest days in february yeah yeah no february is like a sad month but yeah it was just nice to be around family nice to be kind of where the air is like fresh and there's like more green and stuff like yeah it just this is my first like winter in new york i was visiting here last summer for three months and summer in new york's just like incredible like i love it but winter is tough so um all right so this is coming out valentine's day i know you're not a comedian but is there anything you want to plug? I mean, your TikTok, your handle? Oh, yeah. Sure. You can follow me on TikTok. It's Steve Psychology.

My Twitter is SteveRathJ2. So, yeah. Just check me out there. Hell, yeah. We will put all this in the show notes, the links. For me, this is a big week, guys. Remember, if you're not in these places I'm performing, you can tell your friends who live there to go. I am going to be headlining for Valentine's Day, West Nyack.

It's called Levity. It's a great comedy club. Then Thursday night, I will be headlining in Vancouver for JFL Vancouver. And then the 17th through the 19th, I'm doing Laughs in Seattle. So it's a big, big show weekend. Tell your friends to come on out. We have another live downside recording on February 27th, 7 p.m. at Sesh Comedy Club. Tickets are just $10.

Our live recordings have been so good. If you saw the clip with Dusty Ray Bottoms from RuPaul's Drag Race, that was from a live recording. Leah Janine's coming out soon. Come to that New York City Sesh Comedy Club. Ticket link in the description. And if you can't make it, you can watch it in full or listen to it. Patreon.com slash downside. And, you know, I'll be the one to say it, ladies and gentlemen.

There is no such thing as free will. This is the downside. One, two, three. Downside. You're listening to The Downside. The Downside. With Gianmarco Ceresi. you