The Joe Rogan Experience - #1653 - Andy Norman

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

Andy Norman teaches philosophy and directs the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites and the Search for a Better Way to Think," available now. http://andynorman.org/

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Hello, Andy. Hey, Joe. Nice to meet you, man. Thank you very much for coming here, and thank you for bringing me a signed copy of your book, Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think.

Boy, could we all use this. Thank you. Forwarded by the great and powerful Steven Pinker. Yeah, I was a lucky guy to get that. That's very nice. That's very nice. Boy, but we could all use that, right? It feels like the last year has been incredibly taxing.

Sounds like you get the basic premise. Mind parasites are spreading over the internet like crazy, and we need protection against them. We need resistance. How do you define mind parasites? We were actually talking before the podcast started, and we were talking about a few things, and I was like, we got to stop. We got to stop talking, because I don't want to waste any of this.

One of them we were talking about was UFOs. And now, until recently, over the last few years, I would have put that in the mind parasite category. Yes. I would have said most of that's nonsense. But new information has changed your view on it. Yeah. Yeah, it has.

There was a big 60 Minutes piece last night that aired and talking to Christopher Mellon, who used to work for the Defense Department, talking to Commander David Fravor, who is the guy who piloted that jet that I was telling you about that encountered that craft off of the coast of San Diego in 2004. There's been quite a few of these pretty spectacular videos that have come out that were released by the, well, I don't know, some of them were leaked and then confirmed by the Pentagon. Well, that's the kind of evidence that should change your attitude from skeptical to, you know, hey, maybe there's something here, right? I mean, I think, I mean, you've already indicated that you get the basic premise, one of the basic premises of the

book, right? Falsehoods are mind parasites. And more generally, bad ideas, all kinds of bad ideas are mind parasites. And I can tell you why if you like. Yes, please. But it takes kind of a shift in the way you look at things to get it. Okay. But once you get this idea, it can change your entire worldview. So think about what makes a parasite a parasite. It requires a host.

It infiltrates. Let's say a regular parasite, right? Infiltrates your body, creates copies of itself, induces something like an infection-spreading sneeze so it can get to other bodies, and it's often harmful of the very thing that hosts it. Now, go down the list with bad ideas. A bad idea requires a host, a host mind, right? It can infiltrate a mind. It can get that mind to spread it to other minds, and it can actually harm the person that carries it. So basically, bad ideas check all the boxes for parasites, and there's kind of a worldview shift going on, even within science, that basically says, you know what? This has always seemed like a kind of a worldview shift going on even within science that basically says you know what this has always seemed like a kind of a crazy analogy but there's

actually more here than meets the eye mind parasites might just be real yeah I mean it makes sense and isn't that kind of what voodoo is like what voodoo is you tell a person that they're cursed you You hex them, and then they believe it, and it changes the way they think, and they're terrified. Oh, kind of like a negative placebo. Yes, or a nocebo. A nocebo. Actually, I think that's the official term for it, right?

Yeah, which is nocebo is very real. And powerful too, right? There was a guy that got administered. He was a part of a test for SSRIs. And he went to the hospital and said he mistakenly took the whole bottle of these pills. And he dropped the pill bottle on the floor. His heart was racing. Blood pressure's through the roof.

They're like, oh, my God, this guy's dying. He's pale. And they checked the bottle of pills, found the physician on the bottle, contacted the physician, and he told them he was a part of the study. The physician came down to the hospital, informed him that he was actually in the placebo group. Within five minutes, his heart rate came down to normal. His blood pressure came down to normal, and he relaxed, and he was subsequently released from the hospital.

He thought he was dying released from the hospital. He thought he was dying. That's the power of the mind over the body, right? That's the voodoo. Yeah. Have you had Rutger Bregman on the show? No, I have not. New book out called Humankind. And he basically argues that nocebos harness or basically trigger the power of negative expectation.

I'm going to write this down now. What is his book called? Humankind. Humankind? Uh-huh. A Hopeful History. Humankind, A Hopeful History. And his name is Rutger Bregman.

He's a Dutch journalist who's written a couple of bestsellers now. It's a great book. Oh, here, I'll just take a picture of that. Yeah, there it is. Thanks, Jamie. You're the man. Bam. Okay. Where's that fellow at? He's in is. Thanks, Jamie. You're the man. Bam. Okay.

Where's that fella at? He's in Holland. Amsterdam, maybe? Tough to get those people from all the way overseas over here now. I imagine he'd make the trip for you. Well, I hope he can. I mean, what are the rules now? Is everything relaxed in terms of international travel? Do you know? Beats me. I have not been following it. So,

his premise is? The larger thesis of his overall book is that human beings are a whole lot kinder than we tend to think. I think the thing that's fucking us up is social media. I think people are way kinder in person. That's certainly a big part of the story. And then the part of the story I tell in my book is that we've been actually neglecting and abusing mental immune systems for decades. And this makes us unduly suspicious and angry of each other, which is causing a huge decline in trust and creating all these negative expectations that become a self-fulfilling

prophecy. Mental immune system. So abusing mental immune system. I guess we should start off with what made you write this book? What was the motivation for doing this? Yeah. So I'm a philosopher by training. And philosophers have always been kind of really eager to invest, to test ideas and try to weed out the bad ones. That's kind

of what we philosophers do. And a lot of times that doesn't make us particularly popular. But I argue in the book that the philosophical method of belief testing called, say, the Socratic method, right, famous process pioneered by a Greek philosopher thousands of years ago. Basically, if you test ideas with questions and then toss out the ones that don't withstand scrutiny, that's a way to strengthen your mind's resistance to bad ideas. So here's the kind of the skinny on this. And I think that the people who get this concept are going to be the thought leaders of the next few decades. We know our bodies have immune systems. And their job is to hunt down parasites and pathogens and eliminate them.

And some of those antibodies actually consume pathogens in our body. Now, the new information, which is just now coming together in philosophy and in the sciences, is that our minds have immune systems just like our bodies do. Only a mental immune system's job is to hunt down and remove mind parasites or bad ideas. Never seen you speechless before. No, I'm not speechless. I just didn't know if you were done with your sentence. I understand that the mind parasites can ruin your mind and that the concept of mental immunity,

of some sort of mental immune system. But like what kind of mental immune system are you talking about? Are you talking about meditation? Are you talking about a specific way of addressing issues and problems? And how do you factor in things like emotions? Yeah. So let me start simple with a little thought experiment. Maybe you can play along with me here. So this is kind of a story. So imagine we are sitting around a bonfire, tossing back a few beers. And I say, hey, Joe, reach into the fire there, grab me one of those hot coals and hand it to me. What do you say? I say, I'm not really interested in doing that, Andy. Okay, good. And what went on in your head that made you say that?

It seems like I'd get injured doing that. Yeah. So you ran a little simulation in your mind and you concluded that that would be harmful. Yes. Right. That was your mind's immune system at work. That simulation run, so basically I was serving up an idea, a suggestion. Hey, Joe, do this for me.

You ran a little simulation in your mind. You identified that idea as a bad one. Your mind's immune system was strong enough and well-functioning enough to spot this bad idea. And you came out, fuck you, Andy. Reach into the fire and get your kid. I didn't kill that hard, Andy. That's true. I'm just trying to speak your language is

that my language okay I might say that if we were in front of the fire honestly remember like hey man fuck you but yeah I see what you're saying so but how do you but it seems a little bit more complicated when you're addressing ideas because one of the problems with these ideas is some of them are very attractive yeah you know like I was watching the dumbest video yesterday where people were thinking that when they were getting the COVID vaccine that they're getting microchipped and they were proving it with magnets.

They were sticking magnets on themselves and the magnets were clinging to the area where they got the COVID shot. And they were, from this, they were concluding? That you're getting microchipped and that somehow or another this magnet was being held in place. So I take it you would call, you would think of that as a mind parasite? I don't know what that is. I mean, I think it's either a hoax or- How about a conspiracy theory? Can we go there?

Yeah, sure. So let me tell you a second story. So our first example there was a of your mental immune system functioning properly to spot a bad idea and say, nope, you're not welcome here. Right. Right. Now let's take an example of a mental immune system misfiring. Okay. All right. So this is a story about Fred the Flat Earther. So Fred dies. He goes to heaven. St. Peter meets him at the pearly gates. He says, come on in, Fred.

You're our lucky customer number 100. You get a chance to chat with God. So Fred marches right in to God's inner sanctum and says, so God, I've been a conspiracy theorist my whole life, a flat earther my whole life. I got to know, is the world flat or is it round? life, a flat earth in my whole life, I got to know, is the world flat or is it round? God shakes his head, does a face palm and says, I'm sorry to say, Fred, but the world is very round. Fred's face registered shock and then recognition. And he said, this conspiracy theory goes higher than I thought. That's probably exactly what they would do too. Especially flat earthers. Well, and what does this joke tell us about the conspiracy mentality? And you say that's exactly

what it would do because I think you understand something about conspiracy thinking, which is that a conspiracy theory infected mind becomes so good at generating antibodies to fight back against even good information that those antibodies will attack the good information. So here's God telling you the truth, right? And Fred's mental antibodies just rush in and dismiss it as part of an even deeper conspiracy. So questions, doubts, suspicions, those are the mind's antibodies, all right? And they can go nuts. They can go on hyperactive in the same way that the body's immune system can go haywire

and attack your body itself, your mind's immune system can go haywire and your questions and your doubts and your suspicions can attack your mind. I think one of the problems with conspiracy theories and people that believe foolish things is that they don't really seek the truth. They seek something that confirms what they want to be true yes and they ignore things to the contrary and there's even a word psychologists have a word for this called confirmation bias right now I'm sure you've heard of it yeah it feels good to be validated and so yeah a lot of times we come to a belief that makes us comfortable, that feels good to us, and then we just seek out information that confirms it. And we actually dismiss or ignore or diminish anything that might conflict with it.

But the problem is that'll send you down a rabbit hole. Oh, yeah. Have you been? Down a rabbit hole? Yeah. You ever done one of them YouTube rabbit holes? I have not done a YouTube rabbit hole. No, or just a Google rabbit hole where you're just searching out some wacky stuff?

Hollow Earth Theory? You ever heard of Hollow Earth Theory? I think I've caught wind of it. It's in the movie King Kong versus Godzilla. I'll have to go back and check it out. I have never been down a conspiracy rabbit hole that I know of. Really? But I've been down philosophical rabbit holes.

Oh, okay. Well, those are – I've been down some astrophysics rabbit holes and astronomy rabbit holes. Yeah, there's some interesting rabbit holes to go down. But the thing about the conspiracy theory rabbit hole is you get to shittier and shittier designed websites. Like, further you go, you get to, like, those shittier designed websites. Like, further you go, you get to like those GeoCities websites, remember those? With like spinning GIFs of Earth and stuff like that. And you reach this, when they get shitty enough,

you start to realize, wait a minute here, maybe this isn't true after all. I had a friend try to tell me he believes astrology's real. Not just believes astrology's real, but he believes that, like he doesn't travel unless he checks with his astrologistist and he cancels trips. It's so sad. It really is, right?

So I was telling him, I'm like, listen, man, this is nonsense. The idea that there's an alignment of the stars that can be accurately assessed and that will determine whether or not this will be a successful trip or a dangerous trip is so fucking stupid Yeah, and wouldn't you be way better off and much more successful if you knew this information and you were actually applying it to your Life aren't you disappointed in the results so far and did that break through for him? He did not he actually this is where my brothers up because he sent me a website Yeah of this guy who he goes to that's an astrologer and it was the dumbest fucking website oh that is sad and in the website is actually talking about how this guy like had some other career and it didn't work out well for him and then he found astrology and realized this is his calling you might try this on your friend i'm not trying shit

but go ahead there was a time in the history of the West when astrology made a certain amount of sense. So back when philosophers and theologians thought the Earth was at the center of the center, center of the universe, and that all of the stars and the planets revolved around it, the stars and the planets were thought to live in crystalline spheres that rubbed against one another. So the idea that the position of the stars could, through the rubbing of adjacent spheres, work its way down and affect things here on Earth kind of made a certain amount of sense because there was a causal story like the position of the stars and the fates down here on Earth. But then, of course, Copernicus came along, turned the solar system inside out. We learned that space is not full of crystalline spheres, but empty space. And ever since, astrology has just been silly.

Would you mind pulling this just a little bit closer to your face like I've got here? Yeah. You're very soft-spoken. Sorry. No, no. Don't apologize, please. I think astrology is interesting. I should clarify. It's interesting in that there apologize, please. I think astrology is interesting. I should clarify.

It's interesting in that there are these constellations, and it's interesting is that people have been studying these, and they've been looking at Orion and, you know, cancer and all these different, you know, looking at all these different things in these images that they see in the sky, and that they've been, you know, people look for patterns. They've always looked for patterns in things. And we know this about our brains is that they're pattern recognition engines that generate many false positives.

Right. That's a good way to put it. It's not that it's not an interesting practice. What I'm saying is I don't believe that there's anyone that can determine what's going to or not going to happen in your life. Right. I think you determine what happens in your life by many factors. happen in your life.

Right. I think you determine what happens in your life by many factors. Fate, just sheer luck, bad fortune, willpower, fortitude, discipline, focus. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of things that can determine your future, but it's, I don't think it's. And one of the implications of astrology is that everybody born on the same day should have the same fate. Yeah. And that's just clearly falsified.

I don't think they think about it that way, honestly. I think it's like every minute of every day is a different fate. And I don't think they think – we're not doing their – I'm air quoting – their discipline justice. Because I think if you talk to an astrologist that really studies like the ancient astrology, because I think if you talk to an astrologist that really studies the ancient astrology, I mean, they literally have it down to what hour of what day and where the sun and the moon and everything is at the moment you've popped out of your mom. Yeah. There's a lot going on there.

But the point is that this guy that I knew had a parasite, and he was infected to the point where he was unwilling to travel unless he consulted his astrologer. And he was even canceling certain trips if the astrologer shook his head and said the magic says no. Well, and that's got to harm your life prospects. So when you base your core beliefs on things that are not reality-based, on things that are based on wishful thinking. So a lot of people get into astrology because they want to believe that there are fates out there that are going to look after them or whatever. And if you indulge in wishful thinking that way, the evidence now shows you actually compromise your mind's immune system. So when you believe things because you want to, you want them to be true, your mind's immune system gets weaker. And there's actually now empirical research that indicates this.

So if you, for example, accept that clinging to your articles of faith, no matter what, is a virtue, you're less likely to change your mind when evidence comes along. Right. And when that happens, you become more susceptible to conspiracy thinking, more susceptible to divisive political ideologies, more susceptible to science denial, your mind's resistance to bad ideas starts to decay. You can actually damage your mind's immune system by indulging in wishful thinking. That makes sense. Do you highlight specific strategies in your book for looking at things accurately and looking at things objectively?

Yeah. I mean, so science is clearly a shining example of what's possible in the way of idea testing and the way of validating things with evidence. So, you know, scientists are especially good at testing things in laboratories or with experiments. Now, philosophers have always gone in for a kind of a related but slightly different kind of idea testing. Philosophers don't have laboratories except the ones between their ears. And basically, we test ideas against each other, and we test ideas with questions. And we test ideas against our intuitions about right and wrong and try to figure out what makes sense. That's a complementary kind of idea testing that scientists go in for,

and it's one that has done a huge amount to educate and enlighten us over the centuries. And so what I try to do in the book is take things from this cutting edge science I call cognitive immunology. It's the science of mental immunity. You combine that with ancient wisdom about how to pursue wisdom, how to find wisdom, and you actually get some really powerful ways to strengthen mental immune systems. In like what ways? What do you use personally? Do you need it or you've been sort of indoctrinated into the world of objective thinking to the

point where you don't need any systems that you follow? Well, I try not to think that I have all the answers and that I've got it all figured out. Look, humility. We know this. Humility is really important for a well-functioning mental immune system. For everything, right? Well, yeah, yeah, sure. Let's go with that. My research specializes in trying to understand how the mind develops resistance to bad ideas. And once you think you have all the answers, you stop learning, and your thinking starts to go haywire. So you've got to maintain that humility or you're just compromising your own mind.

Humility, specifically. Humility is important, Fair-mindedness. So a lot of people do this. They ridicule or deride other people's ideas for failing to meet basic standards, but then they don't apply those same standards to their own views. Right. Do you have an example of this? Sure. Well, I think a whole lot of political rhetoric has this character, right? Slam the other side, ridicule it as sloppy thinking or as ideologically driven, but never examine to see whether your own views. That's a perfect example of it, right? And politics is probably the very best example

of how people do this. They get super tribal. They only look at the other side as being bad and their side, they find justifications for every questionable behavior, every weird scandal, every, you know, everything that doesn't fit the narrative. Yeah. And I'd say that politics is probably the best example, but religion and ethics and sometimes economics or others. So wherever values come into play, people get very attached to their ideas. We all want to think that we're right and true and virtuous. So whatever ideas we've already internalized as beliefs,

they have to be the virtuous beliefs. And any new incoming information that challenges them from the other side of the political aisle or from another religion or from those damn atheists over there, that's the enemy. And then your mind's immune system attacks that information and you never become and you never gain the fair mindedness needed to learn. Have you ever had a sit down in a long form discussion with someone who does believe some wacky stuff? So I actually facilitate difficult conversations with people across the political spectrum, across the religious spectrum every week at my university. So that's my day job. And you facilitate this how?

So you invite them in? Well, there's a core group of students at Carnegie Mellon, where I've worked for many years, that meets regularly to discuss issues that we just pick as they might have to do with contemporary political phenomena, might have to do with religion or culture wars or, you know, controversial economic theories. And we just, we invite people in from the local church. We invite people in from the Christian fellowship and we dialogue. We actually practice the art of having fair, open-minded dialogue in an attempt to learn from one another. So we don't always hit the sweet spot, but we try.

And we think that practicing the art of difficult conversation and testing ideas in a mutually respectful way is the key to overcoming these divisions that are... It's helped me tremendously to talk to people that have different ideas than I do. Over the years I've been doing this podcast, I think early on I was way more argumentative. I just wasn't very good at it.

I wasn't very open-minded. And as time went on, partially from listening to myself, like sometimes you listen to yourself and you go, oh, that sounds shitty. Oh, I know what that's like. Clunky. Yeah, it's the worst. And I realized along the way that I wasn't doing a good job of listening, that I was, you know, in the beginning especially, I don't have any training in this.

Yes. I've just sort of done this along the way. I've kind of gotten better along the way. And along the way, one of the things that was sort of a residual side effect that wasn't anticipated was it's made me way more aware of kind of all aspects of the way I think. It's been an amazing education that accidentally. And I really admire this about the way you conduct your podcast. You are a fantastic listener.

Our world needs listening. Thank you. Like crazy. And you're a role model for a lot of us out there. Thank you. That's very nice of you to say. I worked really hard at it. Well, think about this, right?

So there are four main ways, four main skill sets involved in communicating with fellow human beings. Reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Which of those ones is not taught in school? Listening is definitely not taught. Which one do we use the most? That one.

Listening. Yeah. The one we need the most and need to be best at is the one we don't teach. Yeah. I've always said that like ways of thinking should be a primary focus of education. That just there's specific ways of addressing ideas and problems. And oftentimes you get ways of addressing problems when it comes to mathematics or maybe if you're talking about specific philosophers, you talk about how they address certain things, you can get something out of that. But to give people a way of identifying issues, looking at them, and then reassessing them, perhaps looking at them from an objective outsider's perspective, like how would someone

who's not you look at this? How would you look at this problem if you didn't have an investment in it with your ego and the time that you spent arguing? Because that's one of the hardest things when you know you're wrong and then you have to like stop and go, oh, wait a minute, I'm wrong. Right, right. Go ahead. I was going to say it's one of the things that I try to tell people that I've learned myself, and this is really important I think, is that you're not your ideas. You're you. Oh, that's beautiful.

Yeah. I love it. And when an idea comes along and you adopt it, it's not like a dog. You don't have to keep it because you love it. Yeah. If you adopt an idea and you go, oh, this idea is terrible. Oh, no, I'm wrong. You have to say it.

Because if you don't say it, you're never going to trust yourself. If you don't admit fault, if you don't admit that you're incorrect, then you'll never trust your own mind when it comes to different ideas that pop up. Because you're not willing to accept reality. You're so invested in your ego being nurtured that you're not willing to accept the fact that you made a mistake. So you are a core set of values, and one of those is honesty. You have to have honesty. Beautiful.

It's a big one. And honesty not just with other people but honesty with yourself. So when you look at something and you have this little problem, you've got to go, okay, well, what is this problem? So I actually think you're on to something really deep here, Joe. So when you practice meditation, you try to sit there quietly and empty your mind. But then ideas keep jumping into your mind and, oh, shoot, I got to add this to the grocery list or whatever, right? And what you do with practice is you learn that

the ideas that are flooding into your mind, they're not you. You actually develop a distance between you and your ideas, and it gives you a kind of peace of mind, and it gives you a kind of autonomy from just sort of your knee-jerk mental habits. So meditation has a long history of helping people develop a kind of freedom from the ideas that just flood into their mind without thinking, right? I think the exact same thing can be applied to, well, I like to put it this way. Don't treat your beliefs, don't identify with your beliefs. Because if you do, you'll start to see challenging or interesting new information as a threat.

And you'll shut it down. Your mind's immune system will kick in and attack it. Instead, you can actually think of your beliefs as like house guests that are maybe welcome to stick around for a while but might wear out their welcome. So keep your beliefs as long as they're working for you. But always check to make sure that they're not serving you poorly because when they do, it may be time to say sayonara. Yeah. In my past of the more embarrassing moments was when I've become personally invested in ideas

and will argue with them, argue for them with emotion and use tactics and talk over people, shout people down, that kind of stuff. It's one of the more embarrassing things when I think about my own belief system when I was younger, in particular, that I would want to win, right? Oh, can I build on that? Yeah. Because that's beautiful. This is one of the things I concluded from having studied the mind's immune system.

This is one of the things I concluded from having studied the mind's immune system. When you start using reasons as weapons, you're actually subverting your mind's immune system. So when culture wars break out, people start grabbing onto reasons and using them to club people on the other side. Or they use them as shields to protect them from club people on the other side. Or they use them as shields to protect them from the attacks on the other side. But it turns out that you lose the ability to be fair-minded when you start treating reasons that way. And the alternative is to always check that you're using reasons to guide people's attention to genuinely relevant considerations, to honestly relevant considerations.

If you're doing that, your mind's immune system is functioning properly. But if you're just wielding reasons as weapons to win, you're fucking with yourself as well as with the other guy. Wielding reasons as weapons to win. That's beautiful. I like that. Don't do it.

Yeah. You want to heal your mind's immune system? Pay attention to whether you're using reasons that way. Yeah. And if you find you are, cut it out. Yeah, and I really think that it does, you have to recognize it as an actual strength to be able to abandon your ideas.

Absolutely. It's a strength. It's not a weakness. It's not weak that you were incorrect. Beautiful. They're just ideas. And one of the key ideas in my book is just that when we're willing to yield to better reasons, that's the mark of wisdom. Always be ready to yield to better reasons.

So you might have a bunch of reasons why you believe some things, and maybe the reasons on the other side aren't enough to dislodge them. Pay attention to them anyway because they eventually might accumulate to the point that would tip the scales. And if you're not ready and open to that happening, you're going to remain stuck where you are and unable to grow. I think there's also a problem with some of these ideas, and especially when you take into account confirmation bias, that a lot of conspiracies are not binary. It's not like there's no conspiracies. This is part of the problem, like Enron, classic example, a legitimate, real conspiracy that was facilitated by multiple individuals for extreme amounts of profit and it was a real thing. People do conspire.

Yeah, they do. It happens. It's a real act. It's not like it's impossible. Right, exactly. And the term conspiracy theory is almost poorly chosen. When was that developed? There's a history to the term conspiracy theory that started getting developed to dismiss – I forget what the – there was a story that was in the news that they were trying – Jamie, I'm sure, will pull it up.

But it became a narrative. It became, oh, they're a conspiracy theorist. Just like the JFK assassination or something like that? Might have been that. I think you're correct. And that's one that like, whew, you go down the rabbit hole on the JFK assassination. Might have been that. I think you're correct. And that's one that like, oof. You go down the rabbit hole in the JFK assassination. You ever done that?

I have been down that rabbit hole. I hadn't remembered that before, but yeah. Yeah. I read the Mark Lane, the Rush to Judgment. Okay. That had me thinking, absolutely, JFK. It had to be a conspiracy. I'm still not sure I'm over that one. Yeah, I'm not over that one.

The big one for me is the bullet itself. That magic bullet is nonsense. I mean it is fucking nonsense. You talk to any person who's a person who's shot things into things, bullets don't come out like that. They just don't, especially not when shattering bone. And the fact that they found it conveniently on Connelly's gurney and the fact that the reason why they had to have that bullet was because they had to

account for a guy who got hit by a ricochet under the underpass do you know that story makes no sense at all i've seen the move the movie and oh the movie's a little weird and read the book oliver stone was an interesting cat i had him in here and talked to him boy was he smart he's a fascinating dude yeah really fascinating but that his version of that movie he like, you know He had a theatrically take something that legitimately should have probably been a Netflix miniseries Yeah, you know of like 10 or 11 episodes. I tried to jam it in jam it into one movie with Kevin Costner You know, and it's right not easy And I think, you know, you have some mechanisms that you utilize to do that. Well, so people do sometimes conspire.

And we need to be able to investigate that and find the truth. And the idea that there's a giant conspiracy behind all of these random seeming things in our lives is incredibly seductive. And it can hijack your mind in a way that makes you interpret every new piece of information as just confirming the conspiracy, like with Fred the Flat Earther. Right. So it's a dangerous thing to indulge broad sweeping conspiracy theories. I mean, the QAnon nonsense. QAnon sense, to coin a term.

Yeah, I was what is this James? Early 1870 is all I got. Oh, but the term conspiracy theorist? It does, it says it was also mentioned in like 1909 but the Wikipedia does say that it was

picked up in the Warren Commission to try to discredit conspiratorial believers. Oh, okay. So it really was the JFK assassination, which was the Warren Commission. By the way, there's a great book on the Warren Commission. It's a book by David Lifton. It's called Best Evidence. And he was an accountant.

And he went over the Warren Commission. He's like, he went over the warrant he's like he went over you know the warrant commission's massive there's a massive amount of stuff to read and he found all these inconsistencies in the warrant commission that uh he he found to be incredibly telling and then he started doing an investigation of his own into the assassination he found out all kinds of wacky shit yeah it's just it's one of those ones where you'll never get the answer and you found out all kinds of wacky shit. Yeah. It's just – it's one of those ones where you'll never get the answer and you'll always be like searching for more data and more information. It is a rabbit hole. And this – I'm probably not going to endear myself to any of my liberal friends

by saying that I still think that – I do not think the JFK assassination was a lone wolf. Why would your liberal friends have an issue with that? Do you think liberal people are more inclined to dismiss conspiracy theories? At the moment, I think there's a lot of fear about conspiracy theories on the left. But why when the military-industrial complex is something that the left is very concerned about? You make a good point. I think maybe the conspiracies that worry liberals the most nowadays are QAnon. The science, climate change is a hoax.

Right. These are the ones that are just present at the front of our minds. Did you see that there's the one famous guy who stormed the capitol building who uh he had a buffalo helmet on and his open shirt and there's a video of him see if you can find this video of that guy talking about q anon because someone interviewed him outside the capitol building where with his fucking crazy makeup on and the mask and all that jazz yeah and this guy it's like someone spouting out sports stats you know like someone who could tell you about sandy kofax and you know how you know reggie jackson did this and you know muhammad ali did that and you know how guys are like really good at sports stats yeah and there's a all right so what's really important no worries there's a

pleasure that they get in being able to sound intelligent. I know that pleasure. I've done that myself. Listen to this guy. Listen to this guy. I don't know if this is the... Yeah, yeah, it's perfect. Perfect.

Yeah, Q sent me. He's got a sign. It says Q sent me. And as well as in the banking cartels. So all over the globe, countries are occupied by central banking institutions that loan the government money at interest and this enables them to own all the other socio-economic and geopolitical gears in the country okay and then what they do is they use their billions or trillions of dollars to create a bunch of deep

underground bases where they have all this like highly top-secret technology going on okay and they are like figuring out how to do things like create infinite energy or do things like Antigravity technology or inertia propulsion. They're learning how to do things like Cloning and all sorts of crazy stuff. We've heard enough. Yeah perfect Perfect example see how he's doing that like that guy's listen to me and with all due respect to that guy He's a fucking loser, And I don't mean that. I'm not trying to be mean. If he was me, I would say, damn it, I'm a fucking loser.

And what I mean by it, the guy was living with his mom. He's like a 30-year-old guy. Yeah. Right? Didn't really have a lot of job prospects. Shit wasn't going that well. He's got bad tattoos. I should talk.

Mine are actually good. He's got bad tattoos. He's got a fucking American flag painted on his face. He's wearing a Buffalo helmet on. He's got no shirt and he's talking about underground bases where they're creating infinite energy. I couldn't agree with you more, but let me give you a scientific way of saying the same thing. That guy's mind, his mental immune system has been compromised. Deeply, deeply frightening. And look, you can tell from even that small clip, he's not dumb. He's clever. Right. He knows a lot of misinformation. Right. He's able to wield it in interesting ways that make him feel like. Like sports stats. Yeah. Yeah. He's rattling off information in the way he's saying it. He's getting pleasure out of forming these sentences and informing this guy about how much he knows.

And here's the thing, right? Think about how this applies to our political situation right now. You've got people on the left who basically say the people on the right are dumb fucks. And you've got people on the right saying those people on the left are dumb fucks. And the fact is we've got smart, smart, well-informed people on both sides. That believe dumb things. That believe dumb things because our mental immune systems have been compromised by a culture that has been weakening them for decades. Yeah. That's a good way of looking at it.

And we can understand how these mental immune systems work. The science is teaching us how to make them work better so that we can actually create a new generation of people who are much more resistant to cognitive contagion. How do we do that? Through the right kind of education. By buying my book. By buying Mental Immunity. It's available now.

Did you do the audio? Is there an audio version of this? There is an audio version, but we got a real pro to do the audio. You don't want to do it? I don't think I have the chance. Maybe you'd be my voice. Nope. Nope.

Not going to do it. No. So, I mean, a lot of people wanted to just, you know, what should I do differently? What are the practical implications of this? Yeah. And I've already hit on a couple of them. Always check to make sure that you're using reasons to guide attention constructively, not as a weapon. That's one, right? Avoid willful belief. When you're believing things because you want to believe them, that's going to mess with your mind's immune system.

mess with your mind's immune system. Here's one that's not well understood. So for 2,000 years, philosophers have been fascinated by the idea that what makes a reasonable idea reasonable are the reasons that support it. Sounds kind of plausible, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the mental- What makes a reasonable idea reasonable is the reasons that support it. Or the evidence that supports it. Okay. Right.

So that's a plausible understanding of what makes beliefs, ideas reasonable. Right. Right? And philosophers have taken it very, very seriously for a very long time. There are a couple problems with that idea, though. One of them is that it exacerbates confirmation bias. So if you have an idea and you kind of like it and you want to know, gee, is this reasonable? I should do my due diligence on this.

Well, check to see if I can find some reasons for it. So you look and, of course, you find them because you can find reasons for fucking anything. Right. And then you say, OK, I believe it. Right. And then you say, okay, I believe it. Right. So the picture of reasonable believing that has been pre-installed in all of us by Western civilization actually makes us more prone to confirmation bias. Really? Really.

But we can trade that in for a better picture of reasonable belief that increases our immunity. Why does our picture of reasonable belief make us more susceptible to confirmation bias? Well, so imagine you have the mental habit of just checking to see if you can find underlying reasons. So a question arises, is this a good idea or a bad idea? And you don't want to buy into it unless it's a good idea. And assume that you accept that the true measure of an idea's goodness is whether there are supporting reasons. So you go out looking for those supporting reasons. You find a couple. reasons. So you go out looking for those supporting reasons. You find a couple. Okay, it's a good idea. And then you believe it. And then all of a sudden you're infected with the mind parasite.

Well, one of the things you see people doing online, it's a funny thing. They try to find sources. And then if people are battling on Twitter about an idea, you'll see they'll pull up an article that supports that idea. And someone will go, daily mail? Really? Is that what you pulled up? And then they'll pull up an article that supports that idea and someone will go, pfft, Daily Mail, really? Is that what you pulled up? And then they'll pull up the Washington Post. They're like, oh my God, you believe that liberal rag? And then they'll start going back and forth, oh, fucking CNN, really? You know, they'll do that kind of thing.

Exactly. Well, you can find, on the internet, you can find information to support anything. Almost. Right? Yeah. And so the real test isn't can you find reason for it? The real question is can you turn away all the reasons against it? Right. Act like a defense attorney. Yeah. Cross-examine the claim and make sure that the claim can withstand or the belief or the idea of the claim,

make sure it can withstand questioning and good questioning. Good questioning. Scrutiny. Scrutiny, right. So this takes us back to an ancient concept of reasonableness that predates Plato, one of my philosophical heroes. Socrates basically questioned things. And if they didn't withstand questioning, we didn't withstand scrutiny, he'd say, I can't be right. Chuck it.

And he was right. We need to bring back the Socratic picture of reasonable belief, because it's one of the most powerful mind inoculants ever invented. We've forgotten how to use it in our time, but we can take this new science, cognitive immunology, we can enhance the Socratic method and achieve levels of immunity against cognitive contagion that our species has never had. Isn't one of the impediments to cognitive immunity just ideology in and of itself? Like, as you were saying earlier that your friends on the left would get upset at you saying that you tend to lean towards a

conspiracy theory from the killing of JFK. Like, well, why? Why? Like, why would it be the friends on the left? And why would you even consider the friends on the left? Well, because you and I are in a group. We're in a group called liberals. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So we know this about thinking, which is that we're a highly tribal animal. Yeah. And we will gravitate towards ideas that keep us in good standing with the people close to us. And we'll turn with hate and derision on ideas that threaten our little communities of support. And this tends to fuck with our thinking in all kinds of ways.

So you actually have to work to overcome tribalism to become a clear and fair-minded thinker. Yes. It's very important. And what's interesting is like, even if you have, like, I belong to a group called liberal because I ascribe to a series of beliefs that are in that group, like, you know, women's rights, gay rights, civil rights. Um, I believe in climate change. I believe in, I have a lot of things that, they might not even be good ideas. Right.

Like, I don't know if universal basic income is a good idea, but I tend to support it. Because I would like people to not have to think about money as much as they do. And I don't know if that's really possible. But when I talked to Bernie Sanders, he said it was. And he's got this idea that nobody on the right seems to think is a good idea. Yeah. And maybe even a lot of people on the left think it's a bad idea. So I have a lot of ideas that fall in line with liberal thinking.

So I'm technically a liberal. And you and I are alike that way. Yeah. But I also have guns. I'm a cage fighting commentator. There's a lot of like things that people go, no, you're not one of us. Yeah. I'm like, well, okay.

I hunt, you know, and there's, I believe in hard work. I believe in discipline. And I think that you have to hold people accountable for hard work and discipline. It's very important. And there's a lot of people that want an easy way out. They don't want accountability. They don't want, they don't want to be personally responsible for their own future in terms of like just going out there and and hustling and they don't want to instill that sort of personal responsibility in other people. They want to maintain or at least cultivate a victim mentality which I think is incredibly detrimental

to everyone and I think it's detrimental to the people that you're talking to, it's detrimental to the people that adopt it. It's like you are responsible for so much more of your own destiny and there's so many success stories of people that have pulled themselves up from the terrible position that they find themselves in at some stage in life

and then become a happy, healthy, productive member of our society. And I don't think that victim mentality is good for anybody. So in that sense, sometimes I get labeled as a right winger because, oh, you're conservative and you look at things that way. Well, maybe I am conservative in some regards. Yeah. And I'm happy to say that about myself as well, right? In fact, so much of what you say resonates with me. A couple of things. Number one is you said many of your views correspond,

put you in the liberal category. Yeah, most of them. Most of them. And if you choose to then identify as a liberal, you're hitching your identity to a set of ideas. And then challenges to those liberal ideas start to trigger a mental autoimmune reaction. So I mean, I also identify, for the most part, as a liberal. But I try to hold that identity really loosely so that I don't overreact to criticisms of liberalism. So anytime you hit your identity to any set of beliefs, you're setting yourself up for possible mental immune disorders. So you need to be really careful about it.

So I actually think, recommend that instead of hitching your identity to beliefs, hitch your identity to honest inquiry. Honest inquiry is a better idea. Yeah, that sounds like a lot more. And if honest inquiry shows us that liberalism is wrong about X, Y, and Z, then to heck with X, Y, and Z. The problem is some of these concepts haven't really been applied or tested. You know, I mean, some have. Like, there's a lot of people that believe in socialism, right? And a lot of people believe in even Marxism.

Yeah. But if you look at the history of that, it's a fucking bloody disaster. Yeah. It's pretty terrible. Certainly for communism. I'm not sure the track record on socialism is equally bad. Not so good. But people are like, it hasn't been done correctly. And you're like, okay, well maybe. Maybe it hasn't because democracy had never been done correctly until 1776.

So maybe there's an argument there. Maybe as we evolve, we can figure out a way to do it and take into account the fact that people need incentives. Because this is one of the things about people. People do need motivations and incentives for them to innovate and for them to work hard. And when they feel like there is an inequality of outcome, no matter what effort you put in, then you're not going to get an equality of effort. Good. I like that. Because there get an equality of effort. Good. I like that. Yeah. Because there is an inequality of effort.

That's one of the things that people don't take into account when they look at people that are extremely successful, right? Like if you look at some crazy business person who's just like working 20 hours a day and they have this, they've amassed this empire and people go, well, that's not fair. That person has an exorbitant amount of wealth and they have a disproportionate amount of financial success. And this is all, this is wrong. It shows you the system is wrong. Right. has an exorbitant amount of wealth and they have a disproportionate amount of financial success and this is all, this is wrong. It shows you the system is wrong.

But you have to take into account this guy has probably been grinding for 35 years. He's a psychopath. He's probably on Adderall every day and you know, and this is his life is accumulating numbers and running up the score and that's how he gets his juice. That's how he gets excited. I understand you're pretty hard-working too I'm not that way though I'm not a business person you know I make money sort of accidentally okay you know doing what you love that's it the things that I'm doing whether it's stand-up or this podcast or doing UFC commentary I really

genuinely enjoy those things so beautiful so I'm doing it because I enjoy it and also because I make money doing it. All right. But there's a lot of people that just think about the money. They're just about the fucking deal. I've got to make this fucking deal. Yeah, and I don't understand that. I don't understand them either, but it's legal.

I went into philosophy for the money. Will you believe that? Did you? No, of course not. Nobody goes into philosophy for the money. You might have said, well, there's a way, right? What would be the way? Name me a philosopher who's gotten rich doing philosophy.

He's probably a cult leader. He's probably not really a philosopher. He's probably a philosopher masquerading. That's almost an anti-philosopher almost. There's a lot of those though, right? Isn't that what happens when people start paying attention to you too much? There's an inclination towards believing in your own extra power over folks. And there's a reason for this. I've got a calling. I suppose this show might put me on a

slippery slope then. A little bit. If people start paying attention to what I say. A little bit. They'll start to notice all the nonsense I spout. Yeah, you're a soft-spoken guy. You'll be fine. You seem like you got a handle on yourself. Can I bring you back to this accountability thing? Please. So I'm a liberal who also values accountability. And most of the liberals I know also care a lot about accountability. Turns out there's an idea at loose in our culture that undermines cognitive accountability. And it's this idea that almost all of us have been brought up

with, which is everyone is entitled to their opinion. So I actually call this idea a mental immune disruptor. And here's why. So imagine growing up. So what happens when a kid grows up entitled? Becomes spoiled, right? So entitled kids start to just assume they're entitled to everything, right? You grow up in a culture that says you're entitled to think whatever you damn please, you become kind of, you develop an attitude of entitlement towards belief. And then when somebody comes along and says, yeah, but that's really not a responsible way to think about things. Check out all this evidence.

They go, I'm entitled to my belief. Go away. Right? Yeah. This idea has wide currency in our culture, and it serves to shut down thinking. And it's one of the things that has weakened our mental immune systems. Because, yes, our cognitive rights matter. And government shouldn't be telling us what we're entitled

to believe. To the extent that we're entitled to our opinion is a claim about our political rights, fine. But when we misinterpret it as a claim about what we're morally entitled to believe and think and say, then you've crossed a line. Because I'm not morally entitled to misogynistic delusions and white conspiracist fantasies, and neither are you. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. So we need to get rid of this idea that we're all entitled to believe whatever we damn please.

We have rights in the way of thinking, but we also have responsibilities, and we've got to bring them back into balance. Because right now we live in a culture that tells us we can all indulge in crazy-ass thinking if we want, and we're not being called back towards our cognitive responsibility. I think you're making some very good points. But the problem is those points, there's a justification for denying people the opportunity to express bad ideas. And that's where things get slippery. Because thought police.

You don't want to invite thought police. white supremacy and a lot of these other like QAnon type things, a lot of very soft minded ideas that get bounced around out there. And people want to shut those ideas down and they want to silence people. Right. And then social media platforms have this incredible ability to do that. They just step in and go, this is wrong. We're going to stop it and silence it and shut it down. The problem is once you give people the, well, they have the ability to silence opposing views. They've decided they're the arbiter of truth. When it comes to arguable philosophies, when it comes to political positions, philosophies, when it comes to political positions, when it comes to religious beliefs, when it comes to morals and ethics, people don't always agree. And you have to see who's right. And the only way to see who's right is to allow people to talk it through. But a lot of our

problem is that we have an election cycle. So if someone's going to talk it through but a lot of our problem is that we have an election cycle so if someone's gonna talk it through but November's two weeks away like Jesus Christ we can't well these fucking people to talk it through hide the hunter Biden stories right now hide them it'll fuck up the narrative it's gonna be like Hillary Clinton with the emails we're gonna ruin this Jesus Christ this is this is bad censor it yeah and that's what they did. Yeah. So there's a danger that by promoting cognitive immunology, as I do, that I'm inviting censorship and thought police. And some people worry, I think, with some reason that I might be pushing us towards a slippery slope here, right? I am not an advocate of thought police. and i devote a chapter in the book to saying how do we how do we regulate our own thinking um without you know either policing

our own thoughts or trying to police each other's thoughts while allowing debate and while allowing debate in fact the debate is the correct way to test ideas and to weed out the bad ones. Right. The best way to counter bad speech is good speech. Yes. And I think this problem is genuinely difficult when we have a media environment that lets, say, hate speech propagate like a virus online. Lets it. online. Let's it. Well, so right now, anybody who wants to can post a slick website that promotes any idea, whatever. And some peddlers of disinformation are using this to take advantage of immune compromised minds. Conspiracy theory Q is basically exploiting people's mental immune weaknesses and hijacking Do you know how that started out?

Q claims to be a government insider. He's been doing drops. Didn't it start out as a goof? Wasn't it like an 8chan thing? A 4chan or 8chan thing? I don't know. I did hear about 8chan. I don't know.

I think that was the original. I don't know that it did hear about 8chan. I don't know. I think that was the original. I don't know that it was a goof, but it was someone was posting on there because that was the best place they could post without getting it deleted. Oh, so it might not have been a goof. And they could post anonymously. That was the Bain reason. Yeah. Yeah. The thing is, like, someone could just start a crazy conspiracy like that for fun.

Right. And then a lot of other people, like our friend with the buffalo helmet on just start believing in and quoting it and a lot of people who aren't involved can get harmed yeah that happens right so conspiracy theories and crazy ideologies have proliferated through human populations for thousands of years and they cause wars they cause political dysfunction they cause people to hate and they've caused genocides. And as Mark Twain told us, you know, a falsehood can get around. He said a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.

What he's saying there is that this dialogue, this conversational attempt to mitigate the spread of falsehoods isn't always fast enough to prevent the harm. Which makes the solution you and I both favor, let's talk it out, a good one, but not always the one that acts fast enough. The problem is, though, the alternative is censorship. And censorship is power. To have that power. And then who is doing the censorship? Then you have another real problem because you have like Twitter, you have their trust and safety council.

So you have a bunch of people, reasons to delete posts, reasons to silence and suspend people temporarily for things that they deem to be inaccurate. In fact, a Harvard epidemiologist was recently suspended from Twitter because he said that these masks do not provide the kind of protection that people thought they did with COVID-19 and that so many people were getting too close and they were not socially distancing because they felt like these masks gave them more protection than they really did. Interesting. And that they were catching COVID-19 because of that.

So this man is not a mask denier. He's an epidemiologist. Yeah, he knows his shit. Twitter suspended him for saying this. And that clearly seems wrong. Exactly. It is clearly wrong because we all know that there's a lot of these masks where you've got these gaps on the side. Now, you're breathing air, right, and COVID particles.

I think I do absolutely believe that masks provide protection. How much protection? I don't think it's been established. And the masks vary wildly. Like some people just have bandanas on, which I think do very little. Some people have N95 masks that are very form fitted to their faces. I think those do much more. And clearly, if you look at the flu season this year, it's way less than ever

before. Colds, way less than ever before. Which shows that masks do reduce transmission. Something's going on, whether it's that or the fact that people are staying away from each other a little bit more than they have in the past. But what this Harvard epidemiologist was saying was that he believes that they don't work enough to allow people to be around infected people. And that this idea that you and I could talk really close to each other if one of us was infected because we were both wearing masks, he's like, that's not true. But they censored him for doing that. They suspended him for Twitter. Suspended him.

So that is a powerful example to force me to think more deeply about this. I mean, I like that because what I was trying to say a minute ago is that, yes, for the most part, dialogue, mutually respectful dialogue is the way to weed out bad ideas. And information can now spread across the internet at lightning speed and huge harms can happen before dialogue has a chance to do its winnowing work. Yeah. Right? That's a good point. So how do we stop that? So how do we stop that?

Well, I seem to be saying that there needs to be some sense. I mean, I don't want to say it this way, but I think a minute ago maybe you were hearing there needs to be additional regulatory mechanisms in place beyond mere mutually respectful dialogue to keep harmful mind parasites from spreading across the internet. To keep people from just straight up lying. Right. But imagine that the CDC actually used that exact same reasoning to crack down on this Harvard epidemiologist. Right. And that clearly has an unjust down on this Harvard epidemiologist. And that clearly has an unjust outcome in this case. I don't know the details of the case, but I'm taking it.

Yeah. I'm not sure if I know the details either. I just know that I was reading a story about overreach and they were saying that this man is obviously, he's very qualified to talk about this very specific issue. So I'm happy to accept that as an example of overreach. And I wonder if there isn't also underreach. Okay. So you're in charge of Facebook. Okay. And you've just learned that the Trump campaign has weaponized Facebook to hijack an election.

How'd they do that? Well, through Cambridge Analytica and thousands of Russian Facebook sites that have been spreading misinformation. Internet Research Agency in Russia, that kind of deal. Yeah. Right. But I know some of the news stories on this. We're coming down the— Homestretch.

The homestretch towards the election, right? Home stretch. The home stretch towards the election, right? And you're Mark Zuckerberg, and you're realizing that somebody is weaponizing your platform to steal an election or win an election. What do you do? Well, I think that if you can find out that there are, like, are you familiar with Renee DiResta's work? Uh-uh. like, are you familiar with Renee DiResta's work? Renee DiResta, she did an analysis, a deep dive on the internet research

agency and all the various fake sites that they have. Fake pages, fake Instagram, fake Facebook and all the different ways that they've manipulated discourse in this country and it's really fascinating. They've created hundreds of thousands of memes. She said some of them were very funny and they also

Organized events and they organized events right next to other events that they organized that had opposing viewpoints Yes, like they had Some pro-muslim event that was across the street from a Texas Separatism event in an attempt to create clashes and civil unrest. Exactly. And then they would infiltrate other pages and pretend to be someone who speaks for Black Lives Matter or pretend to be someone who speaks for white nationalists.

And they would battle it out. So think about this, right? So imagine we took a free speech fundamentalism view towards the kind of problem you're talking to here. We're just going to say, oh, well, if the Russians want to create civil unrest by organizing these competing, and chaos is spreading through the streets, do we mitigate, do we start to moderate our free speech fundamentalism? Let me put it to you. Do you think we need to moderate free speech fundamentalism? It's a very good question because then the question comes up is, is anonymous posting an issue?

Because the only reason why this works is because it's anonymous posting. the only reason why this works is because it's anonymous posting. If I find out that Jamie Vernon and Jamie's fingerprint is on it and he used his face ID to make that post and his name is, you know, young Jamie Vernon on whatever social media platform that he utilizes. Then we can hold him accountable. Well, we know it's him. We know it's not some Russian bot. We know it's not some person in China that's pretending to be a white nationalist. It's an actual person. Here's the guy. Here's where he lives. It's one of the things that differentiates Facebook from other platforms, right? Because you actually use your name,

supposedly. Yes. But it's not 100%, right? It's not real. It's not impossible to fake that you have an account. That's right. And lots of fake accounts do exist. Say if I was mad at you and I wanted to write a book about where you stole all your information for this book and you're a bad person. You've done all these evil things. Someone could do that. They could just make a bunch of fake pages.

And if they were really psycho and they had a lot of time and they were dedicated, they could make up a bunch of fake things about you. So how do we handle that? Right. So I think the problem you're describing is one where people have influence without accountability. So anonymous Twitter accounts, anonymous Facebook accounts can be used to spread disinformation. And when you try to trace them back and hold the peddlers of the disinformation accountable, they just don't exist. Or they're being, they're a front for some person who's actually trying to sow chaos.

So, I mean, we know this about power without accountability corrupts. Yes. And the internet is now handing out lots of power to people, and we haven't figured out how to hold people accountable for the power of the soapbox, basically. And when we're talking about Cambridge Analytica, and we're talking about the Internet Research Agency, we're not even talking about people. We're talking about employees of groups that are designed, I mean, they're set up to propagate propaganda. I mean, that's what they're doing.

It's not even a person who's like spreading lies. That's right. It's an actual organized entity that is specifically targeting a desired result. How do you handle that? Exactly. Well, I don't think we can allow organizations like that to flourish unchecked. I think we're finding right now at our moment in history that we can't simply be free speech fundamentalists and just say it'll all work out

in the end if we do. Right. But here's the real problem, problem right is that there's a profit incentive for allowing these people to propagate this shit because there's so many clicks involved right that's the thing is the algorithms whether it's Facebook or a lot of these other social media platforms the algorithms favor anything that's gonna cause conflict because conflict inspires discourse and then people are engaging the engagement is very high on these these algorithms but it's interesting too that my friend Ari he had a study a test rather than he did he had a theory and his theory was that everyone's saying that these

algorithms encouraged disc they encourage conflict and he was like is and his theory was that everyone's saying that these algorithms encourage disc they encourage conflict and he was like is that or is that just what people do and so what he tried to do is he only looked up puppies on YouTube yeah and that's all YouTube would recommend him was puppies all right he's like look it's not that they're you're looking for it. It's not that YouTube's algorithm is fucking you up. You're fucking you up because you're just constantly looking for conflict. If you go to my YouTube, my YouTube is professional pool, Muay Thai fights, muscle cars. It's the dumbest YouTube ever.

You're not going to learn shit from my YouTube. My YouTube, because I use YouTube mostly for entertainment. Dumbest YouTube ever. You're not going to learn shit from my YouTube. Like my YouTube. Because I use YouTube mostly for entertainment. Occasionally it will be like the Dark Horse podcast, like some Heather Hying and Brett Weinstein. It will be really entertaining. Lex Friedman, very intense intellectual discussion. There's some of that in there too, but most of my feed is nonsense because that's what I like.

Go for entertainment. And kitten videos spread like crazy even though they're not doing anybody any good, which means that our minds are easily hijacked by stuff that's not good for them. Yeah, but is that not good for you, those kitten videos? They're pleasing. People enjoy them. They watch kittens play with curtains and shit, and they that's hilarious well so i wouldn't call that a harmful right actively harmful but say but going down the queue and on rabbit hole that is yes that is

harmful but if you're a knucklehead and that's what you're interested in that the problem is that's what you're interested in the problem is not necessarily the i think the idea that the algorithm is poisoning people is like the idea that sugary foods are poisoning people. You're sure they are. I see, yes. But the real problem is that you're eating those fucking things. The real problem is not that like ho-hos exist. The real problem is that's what you gravitate towards instead of an apple.

an apple. So this makes perfect sense in light of... So philosophers have noticed for a long time that our cravings can often lead us to do self-destructive things. Right. Lust can lead you to cheat on a spouse and destroy your marriage, right? Yes. Your craving for fatty foods can lead you to have heart disease. Yes. Right? So our minds actually crave all kinds of things that aren't good for it, at least in the quantities that we crave them. Right? And so going all the way back to ancient Greece, philosophers have said, you've got to modulate your desire with reason. And, you know, Socrates, Plato, my my ancient philosophical heroes they're all basically saying if you let your desires control you if you let the ideas that just swarm into your head unbidden to control you you will be a slave to them your whole life but if you actually develop

your capacity to reason to test ideas in dialogue and the way, you can have the dialogue within your own head, kind of like, or you can have your dialogue with others. But either way, that kind of dialogue teaches you how to develop a kind of freedom from these forces inside of your own mind that can enslave you. Does that make sense? It does. It does. But I think for many people, they don't know how to start. Like maybe you're listening to this right now and maybe you have had moments in your life where you've just been hijacked by stupid ideas

and you don't know exactly what to do. I have a friend, I've talked about her before on the podcast. She used to be a Mormon all of her life and then one day she snapped out of it and they left the church and the whole deal yeah and she had a very interesting point she said she finds herself to be very susceptible to like bullshit because she believed in things without questioning them her whole life. Until she was like in her 40s. So like all of a sudden she finds herself now trying to navigate the waters of reality

without like a rock solid belief system that she can fall back on. It was, yeah, it was a big wow because. That's a poignant story. Because she's a very smart person and she lived a kind of a dull minded life when she was just believing whole, you know Part and parcel whatever the Mormon ideology was like she was locked in that's what she you know She's definitely gonna get a planet when she dies and everything's gonna be awesome

And I'm gonna wear these magic underwear and Jesus is looking out for me. We're all good. That was her thought process and now she's not like that at all. So she had to like sort of recognize that she had some real flaws in the way she looks at reality itself because she's susceptible.

That story is so much like the story, so I once got a call as a philosophy professor. A woman called me and she basically said, I was brought up in a deeply fundamentalist Christian sect and I was taught about hell and I've lived my entire life just scared as shit that I'm going to be sent to hell. And then, but my college professors, they're actually encouraging me to think for myself. But whenever I actually start to think critically about God's existence, I'm seized by this kind of panic. And she said, even though I know hell

is an illusion, I know that hell is just an idea that was created to control behavior of children. And she said, even though I've outgrown those ideas, I still can't stop the sense of panic. This poor woman, her mental immune system had been crippled by her upbringing. Right? Something in the way she was brought up, her fundamentalist training had actually made it so that she was seized by irrational fear when she tried to think for herself. That's wild. It's like you can't stray from the path or demons are waiting for you. Exactly.

Yeah. And when you grow up with that thought that that's what's on the other side is demons and hell and Satan. Satan's tempting you. I mean, good luck becoming an independent thinker, right? I mean, this raises some really tough questions. Should everyone be allowed to raise their children into any religion they want, no matter how crazy? I mean, it's not a crazy question to ask. I mean, it might sound like I'm itching to become a thought police here. I'm not. The problem with what you're saying is all of it's crazy.

All of what? All of religion's crazy. You won't get any argument from me? You'll find crazy if you look. And it's the same problem with censorship itself. Because if you decide you're going to censor the really fucking nutty ideas then what about the kind of nutty ideas what about Oh astrology is bullshit let's censor the astrology page Oh chiropractors do you know the history of chiropractors well

that's bullshit too well and then you start going down the line those psychics no one's fucking psychic you fraud and then next thing next thing you know, you're censoring everything. Well, fair enough. But remember, I'm not calling for censorship. What are you doing? That we don't need to censor anyone to become – to have herd immunity to crazy cognitive – to mind virus. The problem is some people, religion is a fundamental principle that allows them to live their lives with like structure. They have like – it's a scaffolding for their morals and their ethics. And it's helped them tremendously

And you remove that structure and I know a lot of people like that who are really good people that happen to be Christian And they follow the best aspects of the Christian religion They really do and so to tell them that oh you need to think critically And you know do you really think someone came back from the dead? No, do you really think somebody walked on water? Do you really think someone came back from the dead no do you really think somebody walked on water do you really think someone turned water into wine is that real to you because if it is real to you we've got a real problem here because that doesn't make any sense not not with anything we know so at one point in time there was a magic person so there's never been a magic person since but at one point in time there was a magic person he happened to be the son

of god and he had all this information he tried he tried to tell us, and someone hung him up on a cross and killed him, and he came back three days later. You're like, hey, hey, hey, slow down. But if you say, that doesn't pass critical thinking, you're not allowed to think that, we can't have that in our platform, that you got a real problem on your hands because that's a large percentage of the people. And they use that even though they don't necessarily believe it hook, line, and sinker. They use that to live better lives. Well, everyone on earth understands that some religions are toxic and dangerous.

What's the good ones? Let's go there. How about that? Let me answer this other one first. We'll get there in a second. So even the most devout Christian will claim that some forms of Islam are dangerous and toxic. Some will. Yeah. Maybe some.

Sure. But it's not hard to find examples of religions that are problematic not just for their followers but for others as well. And so we need to approach this problem together. It's not hard to find examples of religions that are problematic not just for their followers but for others as well. Right. And so we need to approach this problem together. What are we going to do about it? Right. I think we can actually – so you can try to solve the problem of toxic religious beliefs at the source end, at the supply end or the demand end. religious beliefs at the source end, at the supply end, or the demand end. You can try to censor the religious information or the information that comes from a toxic religion, say.

Or you can try to build immunity to bad ideas and let the chips fall where they may. I'm advocating the second approach, not the first. So this is where there's a very important difference between censorship-based approaches to dealing with our disinformation problem. It's supply-side disinformation regulation with demand-side information regulation. Do you see what I'm saying? I do see what you're saying. That's why my book is, I think, fundamental to how the only enlightened way we can possibly address this disinformation problem is at the demand end by increasing resistance to bad ideas so that people freely, without coercion, reject them. But this would require mass adoption of your book. I mean your book would literally have to be like the new Bible. Well, that's why you're helping me bring about a new age here.

But you know what I'm saying? It's like what you're saying makes a lot of sense. But some people would say that's not good enough. QAnon is on the rise. We need to start censoring these pages right now. We need to block these people. And that's what I think Facebook's approach was. That's what YouTube's approach is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know the best approach to stopping QAnon. You would be such a genius if you did. I mean, right. I mean,

I don't have any quick and easy answers. I don't have a silver bullet answer. But I will tell you this. There's a new science emerging in our day and age that's teaching us how mental immune systems work. It's teaching us why they fail and how we can make them work better. And we can make them work better by strengthening them in ways that philosophers have long taught and that the new sciences of psychology are saying actually help us become more independent and more autonomous thinkers, which is, I think, a different approach to dealing with our disinformation problem

than censor the sources. But again, it comes to this point where the only way this is gonna work is you get a lot of people to adopt it. Right. So first and foremost, we get the willing. The willing. The willing to help develop mental immunity. So each of us has to develop our own mental immunity first and foremost.

And then we can begin to help our families and friends. So you know how you're supposed to put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then help your kid? Right. Same thing with mental immunity. You develop your own mind's resistance to bad ideas. You learn the habits of mind that will largely inoculate, well, or that will inoculate you against many kinds of mind parasites. against many kinds of mind parasites. And then you gently, in a non-combative way, introduce the people you love to the process of loving idea testing,

of collaborative idea testing. And they kind of have to see it in you as an example. Like you have to express these principles. And live them. Yeah, and live them so that they see you and they go, oh, Mike used to kind of be full of shit, but over the last few years he's really gotten it together. How have you done it, Mike?

This is what I did. I recognized that I was full of shit. I recognized that I was thinking in a very piss-poor way and I wasn't using facts and logic and critical thinking. And Mike go on to say, you know what, it's really not rocket science. Right. What you do is you sit down with a bunch of friends and you say, hey, I have this idea. I'm kind of enamored of it, but I need you guys to help me test it.

You know, just guys, tell me what you think of this idea. Do you see any downsides to this idea? Help me test the evidence. of this idea. Do you see any downsides to this idea? Help me test the evidence. And so David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, said the truth emerges from arguments among friends. He hasn't hung out with my friends. I'm just kidding. Well, you get together with people you trust. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. You get together with people you trust and you help each other spot each other's mind viruses and you gently help them let go.

Yes, yes. You gently help them let go is a good way to put it. And I think that, like we're saying, someone who leads by example, that's very important, is that you're best served by doing your best work. And if you do, like I've had friends that have lost a lot of weight and a lot of the people around them that see them lose a lot of weight then they start losing weight too because they realize like oh if he can do it like look how great he looks now look how healthy he is I'm gonna try that too and they realize there's a path to do this the power of example yeah and the weight one is a simple one because it's not not simple

it's actually quite complicated right because we because we all eat and it's hard to not overeat. But it's simple in the fact that it's a real clear in and out, right? Good food in, you know, and then results. Yeah. And then cut out calories and, you know, add exercise, add good sleep, and then you get results. Whereas, I think it's more complicated to cleanse your thinking patterns. And I think people, they cling to those like a security blanket, like a kid has one of those blankets that they don't ever want to let go. Our beliefs feel the same way.

Yes. blankets that they don't ever want to let go. Our beliefs feel the same way. Yes. Let me give you an example along those lines. So I was brought up in a household that practically worshiped Martin Luther King. So Martin Luther King was practically a saint, a secular saint in my family. And then years later, I learned that King was a serial philanderer. He just cheated on Coretta Scott King time and time and time again. Now, when I first heard this, I was like, no way, you know, J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA made that shit up to smear him. I just didn't want to believe it. So when I look back on that moment, I could see that antibodies were mobilizing in my own mind to fight off threatening information.

But it was fighting off good information, true information. So this is what happens when you embrace something as nearly sacred. as nearly sacred. Right. Embrace something as sacred, then when information comes along that threatens it, you'll reject it almost before listening to it or before really hearing it out. That's the mind's immune system overreacting

to a perceived threat. By the way, there's a famous experiment in the history of immunology. A Russian zoologist in 1882, he takes a starfish, he stabs it with a thorn, he sticks it under a microscope, and what he sees are thousands of white blood cells rushing to the scene of the injury,

engulfing the tip of the thorn, and devouring it. He was the first human being ever to witness the body's immune system in action. I'm saying I witnessed my own mind's immune system overreacting to information about Martin Luther King. Yeah. And you can do this yourself. Imagine somebody, you log on one day and find that some jerk out there has been assassinating your character, has just been tearing you down online.

What happens in your mind? You get mad. You get mad. You think, who is this jerk? You think, where the heck is he getting his information? His logic must be screwed up. His character must be flawed, right? All of these thoughts swarm to the scene of the injury and try to neutralize the character assassination.

That's your mind's immune system reacting. Is it? I mean, that's just – if you know that you didn't really do those things, I mean, that's not really your mind's immune system, right? That's just—who is this fucking crazy person making shit up about me? I guess I would say it's not the mind's immune system overreacting, but it is the mind's immune system kicking in. Reacting. Reacting in your defense.

Okay, I see what you're saying. So the mind's immune system reacting incorrectly would be your Martin Luther King analogy. And then you could use that JFK is another example. It's very similar. Right. And so the mind's immune system can be a finicky thing. It can attack the wrong information and it can actually defend. So your mind's immune system can mobilize to defend false beliefs, and it can mobilize to attack good information.

Did you, when you were a young person, did you start off on this path of thinking this way? Did you start off with meditation? Did you start off with recognizing some flaw that you had, like the Martin Luther King thing? Did that set you off? You know what it was? It was just having dialogues like this. I just loved having long form conversations with people I really cared about and just like shooting the shit with my buddies after school and exploring ideas, testing ideas. I just found that I loved that idea and I decided to devote my life to

promoting dialogue, honest, truth-seeking dialogue. That was my kind of core conviction. And so I went to grad school, studied philosophy, and I tried to understand how reasoning dialogue works and what's the difference between dialogue that works well and dialogue that goes off the rails. And that's one thing that I could say is sorely lacking in most people's lives is long-form conversations. Everyone is doing tweets and text messages, and, you know, you don't have much time to yourself, and you definitely very rarely just sit down with no distractions for several hours at a time just talking to people. And talking about the things that matter most is really important. Yeah. So my philosophical heroes going way back say,

you got to think about what's important in life and you got to talk about what's important in life and you got to examine your values and consider updating and refining them day in and day out. And when you do that, when you spend time on that, it can transform your outlook on the world and it can transform your sense of well-being as well. So it's not the kind of meditation that involves sitting quietly, but it's a kind of meditation that involves thinking sometimes with others. Yeah, that's a big part of it, right? sometimes with others. Yeah, that's a big part of it, right? Because you have to think how another person's thinking and like accept their thought and go, is that right? How does that go? And a lot of times other people's minds will spot mind parasites that you can't see. Oh yeah. Right? So if I can, if you can help me spot my mind parasites and I can help you spot yours, both of our mind systems gets mental immune systems get stronger.

Yeah. And not even just mind parasites, but just alternative perspectives or perspectives based on their own unusual experience. Someone can tell you something, maybe they grew up in Hungary, or maybe they did this, or maybe they did that, and they can say something to you and you're like, oh, okay. Well, that's why you hate communism. Or, oh, okay, that's why you think it's important to exercise it. And a lot of times you get a much more complex and nuanced understanding of our world when you go down that path. And the farther you go down that path, the less likely you are to become a simplistic ideologue. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, that should be enforced. Yes. Yeah, that should be enforced. Like that's something that, I mean, if we really want to do this government or this country rather as a service, our government should actually be saying that to the people. Like this is one way we can make our country stronger. Yeah. If we have less ideologues, we have less people that are completely connected to one narrative and will fight tooth and nail. You know, like you see these Twitter political battles.

I mean, there's so many of those where it's like, God, boys, let it go. Yeah. So girls, everybody, whoever's getting after it. So a minute ago you asked how to start. How do you start down this path? Imagine this. So you're teaching kindergarten, right? And so the kids are off, all playing, doing their thing.

And you say, hey, kids, come on over to the story rug. And they all gather around and they sit cross-legged there. And Joe, you say, guys, little Johnny over here, you know, he just followed the rules and ended up hurting little Susie. Did Johnny do the right thing or the wrong thing? And the kid's going to think about it. Well, he followed the rules, so he must have been do the right thing or the wrong thing and the kid's gonna think about it well he followed the rules so he must have been doing the right thing another kid no but he hurt little susie he can't can't be doing the right thing so what do you think guys is does just following the rules always always the right thing to do well the real question is who's making the rules well yeah sure why are they making these rules and if you can get kids asking, you know, coming to that conclusion, you've started

them down a path towards growing morally that's going to serve them well. So you can get kids interested in philosophical questions. You know, is Nemo real or is he fake? I watched this wonderful video online from a dad who's into street epistemology. Have you heard of this? No. So there's a bunch of philosophers and people who are kind of inspired by philosophy who go out onto the streets with a cell camera and they walk up to somebody and just say, hey, do you mind if I ask you some questions? And if they give consent, you say, all right, I'm going to.

And then they ask them, you know, tell me about a cherished belief. And then they ask gentle, clarifying questions to kind of explore that belief. And in a very non-combative way, they get people to think really deeply about their values. It's a fascinating process, and it was inspired by Socrates. But it's kind of a phenomenon now that there are hundreds of people all over the world who do this. But it's kind of a phenomenon now that there are hundreds of people all over the world who do this. They're just out there having deep conversations about right and wrong and about core values with strangers. So they just have to find someone who's willing to engage for – I would imagine this is going to take a long time. Well, a lot of times they put a five-minute clip up on YouTube and you can browse them. Five minutes is pretty quick.

It is. And if you're really good at it, you can actually have a deeply meaningful conversation in that time. Really? Yeah, you can. And some of the people out there are doing really good stuff. I must not be good at it because my good conversations take fucking forever. I don't feel like five minutes in, I'm barely even knowing the person. But also, I know I have time, so I'm just sort of slowly.

But I also don't want anybody to be on their heels. I don't want anybody, like, defensive. Right. I want you opening up, so I want you to be comfortable. And you're really good at that. And so this street epistemology video I come across online, right? It's a dad. It's a guy who does street epistemology, and he decides to use

it on his two daughters, who are like seven and five. He sits them down with a bowl of strawberries, and he says, hey, kids, do you think Nemo is real? You know, Nemo, the character from the fish from the Disney thing. And one of them goes, yes. And the other one goes, no. And they said, well, why do you think yes? And one of them gives her reasons well why do you think yes and one of them gives her reasons why do you think no because fish don't talk and these two kids are like actually working through what it is to think clearly about reality right and you're watching them like their minds just start to open right in front of your eyes it's a brilliant little demonstration of the power of conversation about what's real, what isn't, what's good, what's bad, what's knowledge, and what's mere opinion. These are the questions

philosophers have been exploring for thousands of years. And if we have even kids exploring them from a young age, we could rebuild our society in a beautiful, beautiful way. Yeah, and sometimes it's just one good teacher that poses a question to you. Yeah. I had a teacher in seventh or eighth grade. I'm not exactly sure which, but I was in Boston. I was in Jamaica Plain, and this is a crappy school, but this one teacher who is a science teacher really interesting guy and he was talking about space and he said do you really want your head to hurt he goes just go

outside and stare into the night sky and think about the fact that there's no end to that but there's no end just imagine just keep just go as far as your brain can imagine and there's way more than that you can't imagine how far space goes very cool and he planted that in my head when I was I guess I was 13 or something and I remember going holy shit Wow like it goes on forever and I remember like laying holy shit. Wow. Like, it goes on forever. And I remember, like, laying in bed at night thinking that. Like, I never thought about it that way. Did you suddenly feel the world?

Did you get vertigo with the sense that we're spinning through space? I just always knew space was big, you know? But it was just inconvenient to spend so much time dwelling on it. There was no reason for it. The world was confusing enough. I didn't really have to, I looked, oh, look at the stars. I didn't ever think, oh, there's literally no end to this. That's a powerful story. I love that. So Carl Sagan, the late astrophysicist, was really good at getting people to think about the vastness of space and how tiny our little

blue planet is. And the humility that comes how tiny our little blue planet is and the humility that comes with that and the sense of perspective and the sense of awe and the sense of wonder that comes with that i think can be transformative and sagan is one of my heroes as well yeah demon haunted world is fantastic oh man yes yeah he's um he's one of the original science educators. Like was or what's the best way to say it? Science populist guy. Yeah, public intellectual scientist. But there's like a – I don't want to use the term propaganda, but it's like he propagated. He was so entertaining and interesting the way he discussed the things.

Billions and billions. Billions and millions of dollars. Also a big time cannabis advocate, by the way. Was he? Oh, yeah. I didn't know that. Loved the weed. Who would have thought?

Guy was into space and smoking weed all the time. I learned something new every day. Yeah, he was a huge cannabis advocate. But he was a guy and with his work really changed the way people thought about space. Yeah. Changed the way people thought about the cosmos and really. And my favorite way he did that was at the beginning of a book he titled Pale Blue Dot. Yes. It's titled Pale Blue Dot.

Yes. So Sagan was on the team, the NASA team, that piloted the Voyager spacecraft, which made its way past Mars and Saturn and Jupiter. And way out there near Saturn's rings, he convinces the team to turn the Voyager spacecraft around and photograph Earth when Earth was just a tiny blue speck in the distance. And he caught this image of the Earth from the farthest reaches of the solar system. And he says, think about that one pixel blue dot in that picture. Everything you've ever cared about is played out in that one little blue dot. Every war that's ever been fought on that blue dot. Every bit of suffering you've ever heard of,

every joy, every civilization has lived or died on that little blue dot. Let that be an inspiration and a source of humility for us all. I just love that. Back to humility. Yeah, I don't think there's anything more humility-inspiring than space itself. I've been to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Have you ever been up there? I've heard about it. I'd love to go sometime. I've been there a few times, but I got lucky once. And what I mean by lucky, we caught it on the perfect day where there was nothing to block the stars. Oh, like no light pollution? Right. Well, there's never light pollution.

The way they have it set up is they have diffused lighting on the Big Island, and it's because of the observatory. They make it so that the light pollution doesn't get all the way up to the Keck Observatory. But one time I got up there and it was a full moon, and that was a mess. pollution doesn't get all the way up to the the Keck Observatory but when you when one time I got up there and was a full moon and that was a mess I was like oh you don't want to be up here in a full moon because the moon itself reflects the Sun and then it becomes a problem where you can't see the stars got it you want to get up there when the moon is not out yeah and then the stars are magnificent I still to this day sometimes think about it when there's a

nice star filledfilled night. I'm like, yeah, this is okay. This ain't shit compared to what I saw in Hawaii. You see, I saw the full Milky Way. Like you see everything. It's amazing. There's photos of it, Jamie. See if you can find the night sky from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Oh, I'd like to see that. You go through the clouds. That's what's interesting. It's up on top of it. Yes, it's above the cloud layer. So as we were driving, I was like, oh, no, we picked a bad night. That's what it looks like. It really does look like that.

Oh, man, that's gorgeous. Can you go full screen with that? But I'm telling you this ain't shit compared to being up there. That is spectacular. This is like a drawing. That is spectacular. This is so, this is like, it's like a drawing. If you saw, if you were up there, it's so crazy that the way it looks makes you think you're in a spaceship.

Wow. It doesn't, that's what it looks like. Oh, man, look at that. It doesn't seem like, like this is, how is it possible that all this is up there and I don't see it? And so before electric lights, our ancestors saw that every night. Every night. And imagine how that would change your outlook on the world, right? Change the Mayans and change the Egyptians and all these different cultures that they look to the heavens for the patterns that they use to establish their cities.

Like the Mayans in particular, they mirrored the cosmos in their, in many constellations in their designs of their cities. Amazing. Yeah. And I mean, just the sheer awe that you would have in looking up at this thing that you didn't know what it was. And awe is the spark that lights so many minds alive, right? Yeah.

I've got a friend who teaches astronomy at Carnegie Mellon University, and she's on this big crusade to end light pollution or to dramatically reduce light pollution. And it always struck me as this kind of kooky little project of hers. But she's actually probably been to Keck Observatory. She's actually seen how awe-inspiring the heavens can be. And she thinks that if all of us got to experience that, it would make us more enlightened and more tolerant, more humble. I think that could be a real problem with our civilization is that for the most part, most people experience a tremendous amount of light pollution every day.

Most people don't ever get to see stars like that. It's only people that live in extremely rural places. I mean, maybe if you live in the middle of Montana, out in the middle of nowhere, your night sky looks like that. Most people don't see that. And I was listening to one of your podcasts with a sleep expert who talked about how electric light is messing with our sleep.

Yeah, Dr. Matthew Walker. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely doing that. It's messing with us in more ways than one. It's certainly messing with our concept of our perspective of our position in the universe. Like our perspective is that we're on Earth and that, you know, I got to go to work. And this is it. And I'm doing this and I'm doing that.

And I think we get humble when we're around spectacular examples of nature's beauty, right? Like people that live near the ocean, for example, are more chill. And I think one of the reasons why they're more chill is like how can you take yourself seriously when you're faced with this vast quantity of water that could just wash over your city and just – I mean you're at the edge of this insane volume of water and it's very – And the power of it in the waves that come in. And redwood trees do that for me. Yes. Yeah, like Mendocino up in northern California.

Dick and Muir Woods. Oh, it's up Crescent City up near southern Oregon. Okay. Oregon, California. Yeah, all that stuff. For me, it's the mountains. The mountains are the most awe-inspiring for me, like Colorado or places like that where you're up there. Everything's so beautiful.

It's just so pretty. It's like the most beautiful artwork you've ever seen, but it's nature. Especially on a sunny day after the rain when everything's vibrantly green and the clouds are parting and you see the birds chirping and you're like, God this is pretty. It's so pretty. Would you call that a spiritual thing? I think there's something spiritual about it in that it's humbling and I think one of the aspects of spirituality is humbling yourself in the face of the Lord, right? Like admitting that you are powerless and giving yourself into the divine.

Well, humbling yourself before God or humbling yourself before nature, are you treating those as one and the same thing? Well, they're similar, right, in that there's like especially space because space is the nature here times infinity, right? Because that's really what it is. Like when you're seeing those stars, those are stars that are the center of other solar systems and other solar systems that contain other planets and other planets that might have mountains. And those mountains might have streams at the bottom of them

with birds and alien beings. And it might be very simple. There might be an infinite number of those examples that you're seeing down here on Earth. It's all throughout the sky. So it's that spiritual experience you get when you do see a gorgeous lake and a fish jump and an eagle fly times forever, times infinity, times what my science teacher in eighth grade was trying to explain to me. Yeah. Just never ending. And a lot of my nonbeliever friends are almost allergic to spirituality talk.

But I actually think that there's a place for it in this world because there are things that words don't capture. Yeah. And we need to be able to direct our attention to them and try to cherish them properly. The non-believer friends that I have that don't like spiritual talk, it's either because they've been around too much of it where it's nonsense. Yes. There is a lot of nonsense spiritual talk. Yes. Like fake yoga people, that kind of deal.

Yeah. Or they've never done psychedelics. The people that have done psychedelics generally are more likely to be open-minded towards the possibility of some sort of a spiritual realm and spiritual thinking and that there's something more to this. And that what's going on with most religions is they're trying to figure out, they're trying to grasp and put down on paper what these transcending experiences are. Transcended, yeah. Yeah. These experiences that take you out of the norm, whatever the trance is. Right.

And that transcended experiences are real. They can happen, and they can happen because of love, of, you know, you just have a moment in time where you're with a person and you're holding hands and just you feel like the world's a different place or the birth of a child or. Or you're connected to the redwood forest around you. Sometimes for some people it's even near-death experiences bring about it. Yeah. But there's moments in this life where you kind of get it for a brief moment and then you

just get sucked back into the drone of the grind of the day-to-day existence of being an ant. And some of the ancient Eastern philosophy traditions suggest that as soon as you try to affix those transcendent moments with words, you've already lost the game. Right, right. We somehow need to get past our idea that we can control these with words that stand for things. That's the real problem with the psychedelic experiences, that people can't put them into words. I've tried, but they're terrible. They're just pale

facsimiles. They're not the real thing. It's a shitty representation of the actual experience itself. You're making me want to do some experiments. You've done none? None?

I've done none. I've been a choir boy. How dare you. But I'm saying I'm None? I have done none. None? Zero? I've been a choir boy. How dare you? I know. Sorry. But I'm saying I'm ready to open my mind to that. Well, there's a real problem with illegality. If they were legal and they were readily available with trained, qualified experts and professionals who are educated in correct dosages and how

to administer them we would have been way further off as a society those two things right light pollution if we eliminated all that and psychedelics were more readily available it would completely transform the way human beings communicate with each other that that and and cognitive immunology principles applied yeah cognitive immunology principles applied. Cognitive immunology principles applied and also recognition of the established methods of alleviating physical stress to relax the mind. Whether it's through yoga, meditation, exercise, mindfulness, all those different things that are absolutely real. But practiced by a minuscule percentage of the population. Do you think what percentage of the population actually practices those things?

Even just the exercise part. Do you have numbers on this? I mean, what percentage of people regularly exercise? Let's guess. You and I guess. All right. I'm going to say, let's go with America. What percentage of America regularly exercises?

I'll say 25%. Yeah, I was going to guess close to that. I'll go a little higher. I'll say 25%. Yeah, I was going to guess close to that. I'll go a little higher. I'll say 35%. Oh, you rebel. I love it. All right, let's see. What percentage of America regularly exercises?

The CDC says fewer than one in four. So 22.9% met the federal. Well, that's different. What is that? I typed in the exact question you said and what it gave me was this. It says that they meet the federal physical guidelines. It doesn't say about exercise. So they would have had to answer a question that says, do you exercise?

What are the federal physical guidelines? Let's see what this says. You have a shirt on that says the question is the answer. Yes, I do. You like fact check people in real time, don't you? Yeah, well, it's fun. The CDC studies found 22.9% of adults nationally met the federal physical activity guidelines. The percentage varied widely by state from a low of 13.5% in Mississippi to a high of 31.5% in Colorado.

You were spot on, Joe. Yeah, I took a wild guess. I always love Colorado. Those people get after it. You go to Boulder, everybody looks great. They're all thin, hiking and shit. So how are the people in these states meeting these guidelines during the colder winter months? Indoor activities.

So what are the guidelines? Does it say what the guidelines are? No, not in this article. That's why I was going to try to find something else. So it must be just a certain amount of regular activity that's physical. We can get a good sense of it. So that must be what it means. Right. This is almost what you're actually asking for here. Age adjusted percentages of adults 18 through 64 met both aerobic and muscle strengthening federal guidelines through leisure time physical activity by state.

Oh, look at that. Okay. 25% in my state, home state of PA. Florida, significantly lower than the U.S. average. Texas comes in greater, but not significantly different from the U.S. average. And then California, significantly higher. Look at Mississippi. Alaska, too. Where is Mississippi? Is it fucked?

They're fucked. 13.5. Ooh, that's real low. Poor bastards. That's the lowest. Yeah, well, you know, some people are just not encouraged to do it. California is like a super encourage-y, exercise-y place. But look, Colorado is super high.

32. They're the fucking kings. 32. Yeah. Oh, it is. Rhode Island is real high. 25. New Hampshire, 30.

I would have never guessed that. And I bet these numbers correlate well with just well-being and happiness. Mm-hmm. Idaho, 31. I bet that's a lot of people just doing outdoor shit. Yeah. Wyoming, 28. Yeah, it's outdoor activities.

Yeah. Well, those blue ones, that's the place you want to be in terms of the numbers. Hawaii? What's Hawaii got? Does it show Hawaii? Alaska? Oh, Hawaii's not that good. Well, it's okay.

It's like Texas. Alaska's out there kicking ass, though. They're out there hustling. Yeah, look at that. Now, see, that's a guide to where to go if you want to be surrounded by healthy, happy people. Because you can always do it yourself wherever you are. That's true. Right, yeah.

It's easier to do it, though. I think, like, when you go to Boulder, Colorado, that's one of the places that I've gone where I'm like, God, everybody's so fit here. They're all, like, out there hiking and doing things. It's a very, I think, like, in terms of, like, do surveys of people who are outdoor active, Boulder's very high on the list. I do remember straying from my choir boy ways in Boulder, Colorado. Oh, smuggling away from it. A little bit. And then headed up to the Flatirons for a beautiful hike.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, it's so gorgeous there. That's the thing. I went to Boulder for the first time, I think it was like in the early 2000s. There was a jujitsu seminar that a friend of mine was doing when I was working in denver and he did a seminar in boulder and so we drove up to boulder and i remember thinking man how pretty is it to live here i know like you like you can't help but be in awe you're surrounded by gorgeous nature everywhere you look like there's something

substantial about that inspirational yes yeah pitts Pittsburgh doesn't have that, I'm afraid. No. I love my community in Pittsburgh. A lot of cool people there, though. Got to get out west, though, for the inspiration. Pittsburgh is a good-sized city. It's not too big. It is.

It's actually a really nice sense of community there. How many people live in Pittsburgh? Well, the city itself, like only a quarter mil. But the metropolitan area, one and a half. See, that's why I like it there. That's, I think, there's a healthy number that you could get to, a couple million people, whatever it is. When you get bigger than that, that's one of the things that I love about Austin in particular. It's like it's not that big.

But it's growing like crazy, right? Even if it grows like crazy, there's like a million people here, you know, and then there's a million on the outside. So there's like 2 million overall in like the greater Austin area. Still got some charms. It ain't shit compared to LA in terms of traffic and overpopulation. It's like people here are still friendly. They haven't looked at other human beings like a nuisance. And that's, I think, the same thing with Pittsburgh. Oh, yeah. I'd say that is true. Yeah. I'm told that newcomers to Pittsburgh sometimes don't feel welcomed right away.

Pittsburgh has another thing going for it, though, the cold weather. The cold weather makes a heartier people. Well, and maybe a crankier people. A little bit angrier. Yeah. Not quite as active. I definitely get cranky, you know, February, crankier people. A little bit angrier. For sure. Yeah. Not quite as active. I definitely get cranky February, March, April. It's not good for you.

You'll catch me in a good month because of the springs here. Well, I mean, it's like folks that live in the Pacific Northwest tend to be a little bit more depressed. And there's a real physiological aspect to that. They're not getting any vitamin D. It's terrible for you. Seasonal effective. Seasonal effective. Seasonal effective. I mean, vitamin D can help you a little bit, but really you need sun. Yeah.

You know, you don't, just taking a vitamin is okay, but there's a feeling that you get where there's a reward that your body's like, yes. When that sun hits your face. Oh my goodness. Yeah. You're supposed to be out there. Basking in sunbeams. Yeah. It's like, ah, you're supposed to be out there basking in sunbeams yeah it's like ah you're supposed to do that it's good for your body yeah and of course we live indoors so much now that we don't get enough of that and then we go out we put fucking sunscreen on it's disaster yeah there's a lot of uh things that we in as like when you think about the patterns that we follow as a society, it's not good for happiness.

It's not like we overwork, we undersleep, we eat shit, we don't exercise for the most part. I mean, just look at that number. Three quarters of us are not exercising. That's nuts. Well, and obesity levels are crazy high and headed in the wrong direction. Yeah. And that was clearly exposed by the results of the pandemic, right? Like the people that suffered the most were the obese folks.

I think you're right. 78% of the people that were hospitalized or died from COVID. Wow. Would you call that a comorbidity factor or something like that? Is that what the experts are calling it? Yeah, it's a comorbidity. It's the most common comorbidity factor. Wow.

It's awful because it's avoidable. You know, that's one of the most awful ones. But it's so hard. Well, what if we built a culture, though, where it wasn't so hard to get good exercise, where it wasn't so hard to have good deep conversations? We could do that. I think the way to do that is what we're doing right now, talking about it and making it an attractive thing. I had a guy come up to me yesterday,

and sometimes some people come up to me, it's overwhelming. This guy was like, he grabbed my hand and shook my hand. He was very thankful and telling me how much it helped him and how much it helps people. How much the show is. Yeah, these conversations, he's like, please keep doing it. You know, you made me change the way I eat. You changed the way I exercise.

And, you know, and my, my wife is the same way. We're out, we do things now. We eat healthy. That's good to hear, you know? Yeah. And we, we love like listening to intelligent conversations and we're, you know, we're, we're getting books on tape. We're doing things so much differently.

And he told me like a few years ago, he started listening and just changed his life. Man, keep, keep tape. We're doing things so much differently. And he told me a few years ago he started listening and it just changed his life. Man, keep doing what you're doing. But it's a very, you know, I don't know what to do when that happens. I kind of freak, because I kind of, it sounds crazy, but I kind of forget people are listening. Like I get locked into the conversation

like you and I are just talking. It's just you and me. And I'm peripherally aware that other people are listening. That might be one of the reasons you're so successful because people want to hear good conversations and learn from them, and you're fully present. A lot of times people, you're in the conversation and they're half there and half checking their phones.

Yeah, that's not good. When you're here, you're completely here. You have to be, but it's also you gotta kinda not think about the fact that people are listening. You know, like sometimes Jamie and I will have a conversation. People are talking about this and people are talking about that. I'm like, oh, I've got to get out of here. I don't think about it because if I do think about what people are thinking and saying, then you're going to think about that while you're doing it.

You won't speak your mind. Paralysis by analysis. You'll get stuck. And then you also start thinking, like, maybe I should change and maybe I should be more like what they want Or maybe I should you know, but you got to accept criticism because it's people's perspectives Yeah But you can't take too much of it in

And you got a kind of like know that people are watching because you want to do a really good job You don't want to be lazy. You can't just do it for yourself because then you'll have a lazy conversation You have to know that people are listening, but don't think about them. It's like this weird dance that you have to do to do a podcast. So, I mean, we want people to be candid and open and willing to try out things in conversation. And yet we live in this cancel culture world where people will jump down your throat for the slightest transgression. Yep. will jump down your throat for the slightest transgression.

Yep, and they'll take things and decide that they're slight transgressions, even if you didn't necessarily mean what you, especially when you're tweeting something, right, because so much is open to interpretation. And that's a terrible way of communicating, period. You know, we were talking about your friend that wrote the book about kindness, about most people are kind. There's an aspect to this when you're not experiencing the person's social cues,

you're not looking them in the eye, you're just tweeting or texting or emailing each other, whatever you're doing. It's so impersonal. It's so easy to be a shithead. And it's so hard to be a shithead in person. How many times have you had a conversation with a person? Like, you know, hey, I remember when you said this and that.

And you're like, oh, did I? I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. And then you see them relax. But if you were just going back and forth, you'd be like, fuck you. I didn't do that. Like, yes, you did. Like, ah, your memory sucks.

Your fucking memory sucks. And then, you know, next thing you know, it's worse than ever. Whereas if you're in person, you know, you go, I don't remember that. Tell me what happened. And then they'll tell you. And you're like, well, I remember you did this. And then I go, oh, yeah, I did do that. And then you go, well, we both kind of fucked up, did we?

Yeah. All right. I'm sorry. But you're not whoever you were in your worst case scenario either. Like the worst experience that you've ever had. Yeah. I mean, when you, when you have a conversation to win the momentary battle of ideas or whatever,

a lot of times you're selling your relationship down the river. Yep. Right. You're selling yourself short too, because you know, you're a piece of shit for doing that. You know, it's, it's a terrible way to talk to people. And I did it most of of my life I did it forever until I think I stopped doing it as I got kind of older that helped just get more maturity more recognizing when I felt good or bad after conversations and why and being sort of ruthlessly introspective so as I got in my 30s I started realizing what I was doing wrong yeah but then I think the big one was starting the podcast because as I started the podcast it made me go what am I doing like. But then I think the big one was starting the podcast because as I started the podcast, it made me go, what am I doing? Why do I talk this way?

Or why do I think this way? This is all accidental, but it's been the most spectacular education the way my own mind works. And I think a lot of people are listening to you and realizing that this openness you have, this willingness to listen and learn, and that if they follow you in that, they can become better people. But they don't have to follow me. Just do it. Anybody can do it. It's obviously not my idea.

It's a really common idea. It's just not that well adopted in practice. And it's because I've had to have these long-form conversations and thousands of them. Hey, so can I riff on this for a second? So I'm a philosopher, right? And philosophers for a long time have engaged in this really rough and tumble form of idea testing. So you get trained pretty early. If somebody comes after your idea and comes after it hard, you don't take it personally. They're attacking your idea, not you. And you and your ideas are different things. So when you embrace that ethic, you can go in for some serious ass belief testing and idea testing. But when you're really going after each other's ideas, you can spot a lot of the flaws in ideas rapidly.

Problem is you can lose your friends if you do that. Sometimes you have to lose your friends. There's certain friends that you have to lose. Sometimes you do. Now, I mentioned Socrates earlier, the ancient Greek philosopher. He was so good at this. He was so good at using questions to gently make people realize, oh my God, all this stuff I've been saying, it doesn't make any sense. And he embarrassed so many powerful people in ancient Athens that they sentenced him to death and made him drink hemlock. Yeah, that's a real problem. So we philosophers have been getting ourselves into trouble this way for a long time. It takes a long time to steer someone away from their own ideology and their own way of thinking. And some people are never going to steer away. So if that person is your friend,

obviously in Socrates' case, it was worse because it wasn't his friends. It was the powerful leaders. Right. But if you are in contact with a person and you're trying to get them to shift the way they think and behave, it's extremely difficult unless they're motivated to do so. And your approach where you take the time to really have a long conversation where you really understand just, I mean, from what I've seen of your approach, you're just really good at getting people to open up and share their worldview. And you ask the kind of clarifying questions that get people to do that. And a lot of times, if you just get people to open up,

they'll start to see where their own worldview can use a little bit of modification themselves. Right. And your approach is much gentler than Socrates was. Well, the thing is that this is one of the reasons why I want people to wear headsets is because this is very unusual where your volume of your voice is the same as the volume of my voice and it's in our ears. And all of that's controlled by the soundboard? Well, it's not just that.

It's just the fact that you have headphones on, right? So you're aware that we're one. It has that kind of psychological effect. Right, because it's harder to talk over each other if you hear the person's voice like literally in your ear. Fascinating. Yeah. So the other thing is it's real easy if you don't have a set thing that like this is what I'm going to do from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. or whatever you have scheduled.

If you don't have that, it's real easy to go, yeah, we've talked enough. Let's get the fuck out of here. I got to go eat. I'm hungry. I got to check my text messages. I got to do this. I got to do that. That's what we do most of the time. So to just sit down in a podcast format in a room. Dedicated time. Yeah. In a soundproof room, right? So in the soundproof room and you have this dedicated time period of three hours where

you're just going to talk. Maybe we should all do this. It would be very beneficial to a lot of people to do it sometimes. It's very hard if you have a regular job to find this kind of time to do it every day. So I had the privilege of doing something similar. When you're a philosophy professor, you basically go into a classroom and you just get to talk big ideas with a group of 15, 20, 25 kids for an hour. And it's a dedicated time. Cell phones are off and you're engaged in really intense listening and learning from one another. Similar, but not quite as long form.

Yeah, it's similar. You're kind of doing the same thing. There's an exploring of your own humanity when you're talking to people because, you know, we've all had conversations where we didn't do such a good job. You know, conversations are like everything else. It's like playing a game. You get better at it the more you do it. Right? If you're playing chess or whatever it is, you get better at it if you do it often.

And conversations are the same thing. And I call the philosophical process of testing ideas the reason-giving game. So back when I was teaching critical thinking, I used, so when you teach critical thinking using a standard textbook, you basically teach kids like the 101 ways that reasoning can go wrong. And you say, this is a fallacy, and that's a fallacy, and that's a fallacy. And so be on the lookout for all these fallacies, kids, right? And then what the kids realize is they end up going, oh, fuck, man. Thinking is a minefield. I don't want to do that. Right?

It has the opposite intended effect. It was completely. Oh, no. So I was doing this. I was turning my kids off, my students off of critical thinking. And then I came across this idea that minds have immune systems and that we can actually use them to spot mind parasites. And I said, what do you think, guys? Does this make sense that minds can get infected by ideas? And they were like, minds infected?

Do you mean brains? And I'm like, no, I mean can your mind become infected? And I was like, yeah, which of your beliefs are mind infections and which ones are legit? And they were like, damn. And I said, all right, well, here's what we're going to do. I want you to spend the next two weeks researching how the body's immune system works. And then we're going to try to do that for our minds. And we threw out the textbook. We took a totally new approach and they realized hey this idea testing thing it's kind of like a game I said alright well here's the game I'm going to write up the rules

you're all players here are the kind of moves you can make you can ask questions you can pose reasons you can pose counter reasons and if you do that in a structured disciplined way a lot of times you'll deepen your understanding and sometimes you'll get the answer. So I actually think one of the best things we can do to strengthen mental immune systems is to teach

kids how to play the reason giving game. I think it's a far and away better approach, better approach to teaching critical thinking. Because otherwise it's too daunting? Otherwise too daunting or you absorb the critical thinking skills and you just weaponize them for your ideology. Right. That is a problem. And the other problem is that particularly for young men, young men seek to win things. They seek to win conversations because every win validates them.

We're competitive by nature, right? But it also, it's like if you need validation, it's a great way to do that because it's common. So it's a common thing you engage in. If you don't have enough personal validation, if you don't have enough, if you're not looking at your life as being successful as you'd like it to be, you're constantly looking to some validation yeah and conversations take place all the time and and if you think you have to validate yourself by tearing somebody else down you just become the person nobody wants to talk to it's also just doesn't work it's like you know what it's like it's like name dropping you know when people name drop it doesn't impress anybody because everybody goes oh there he goes again but it just doesn't work it's a weird one where people do it like who the fuck gets impressed by name dropping i was

hanging out with leonardo caprio people like what yeah were you yeah like no one basically like you just labeled yourself somebody who's insecure enough to have to name drop exactly no no one gets excited by that but it's a thing that people do because they think people are going to like it. And so you could respond the same way when somebody basically tries to tear down your idea by acting superior and smug and more smarter than you are. Yeah. You're like, you're so insecure you have to tear me down to build yourself up? Exactly. Go away.

Like when someone insults you instead of like changing your mind by giving you a better example of something. Be positive. Yeah. Give me an alternative. Yeah. But it's so hard for people to accept better versions of ideas than the one they're currently harboring. You know, it's just – we got to learn how to do that. So one of the things my – so I'm founding a nonprofit think tank to teach people how to do just that.

How does that work? I love that term, think tank. Think tank. You know what a fucking think tank is? Like how does a think tank go, Jamie? I have ideas but I have no idea. That's what I'm saying. I pay a bunch of people to think about some shit.

But if you think about how many times you and I have had these conversations and you've been in the room while people have, but the think tank is like one of them things where it's like, oh, what the fuck is a think tank? It's a think tank. I want to say that though.

I'm a part of a think tank. Hey, you're here in the tank with Jamie. You guys think together. That's a think tank, right? I want to be a part of a think tank. That's my new goal.

It's basically just a bunch of people who like to think and research stuff. Do you guys get together? Is it an email list? This is a brand new nonprofit. So I'm just starting to bring together the researchers who are going to help make it happen. So it's called the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative, CERCI for short.

Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative. Right. I like that. Right. Oh, cognitive immunology research collaborative. Right. I like that. Right. So I think if we take this Socratic method I mentioned before, like this idea testing kind of a structured way, you use something of your deft, soft touch in terms of gentle questioning to get people to open up.

That's kind of step one. Then you ask the kind of questions that say, well, how do you really know that what you're saying is true? Like, so what's your source on that? And, you know, are you sure that that source is reliable? That's kind of step two. And then at step three, you kind of gently nudge people towards an alternative way of thinking about it that serves their own needs even better than the beliefs they had. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. I did that really fast, so I'm not sure. No, no, no, no. You make a lot of sense. It's a good structure. I was thinking immediately. I got something for you on that. Oh, man, I left it back at the hotel.

I'll send it to you. Son of a bitch. I was thinking immediately when you were saying that that that very structure is what's lacking in a lot of these really frivolous arguments that you see on social media, particularly on Twitter. They're not doing that at all. They're not doing any of those steps. Exactly. Yeah. You know what it's like?

It's like people who are fighting and they don't know how to do martial arts. They're just swinging wild in some Waffle House parking lot. I'm not familiar with this phenomenon, but go, you tell. But you know what I'm saying? There's a difference between someone who understands technique and strategy in martial arts versus someone who's just brawls.

I'm sure you've seen a drunken brawl, like those late night McDonald's drunken brawls that are on YouTube. And to the well-trained philosophical mind, half the conversations going on right now feel like just drunken brawls. Drunken brawls, yeah. Or like bullies, like an asshole is being a bully to some person and that person is trying to bully them back and they just, fuck you, fuck you. Flame wars and online canceling. A lot of it's like that and it's so unfortunate and so unnecessary and so destructive.

And it's also bad for you. It's bad for your mental diet. Yes, absolutely. That's a big part of what is happening with people. You're filling your mind up with this kind of discourse, and it becomes commonplace. And when it becomes commonplace, it's like that's your go-to move. I wonder if you're... That sounds to me like you're onto something really, really profound, which is that if our information diets involve disrespectful flame wars,

our minds go downhill fast. Alan Levinowitz put it best. He said there's, everyone kind of widely understands that bad food, processed food, is bad for you. But he looked at social media, and he was like, this is like processed information. So it's very similar. It's more like like cheese whiz for the mind it's bingo cheese was pretty good though cheese was have preserved it must have preservatives

yeah whereas we should be eating you know health food like Terry Terry Black's barbecue that's right I don't necessarily think you should eat that every day but definitely eat it when you want barbecue it's just there's a smart way to like to nourish your own mind and the smart way to nourish your own mind

is not going looking for arguments to win on Twitter that shit is not good for anybody yes and so I mean deep, mutually respectful conversations about the things that matter most, that's what we all need more of in this day and age. For sure. Yeah. So I have this little sort of side hustle.

I'm a philosophical counselor. So people who are struggling with existential questions that often underlie their depression or other things basically say, I'm trying to figure out what the heck to do with my life. You know, Andy, you study philosophy. Can you help? Right. And, man, people are just so hungry for these conversations. They just want a space where somebody listens to them. Yeah. And that helps them clarify their own thinking about right and wrong and what's

important and what's not important. And man, if we just, I mean, everybody can get this from a good friend if you just make the time to practice it. Well, you're also experiencing healthy user bias, right? Because people are coming to you that actually want to know what's wrong and how to handle things. Whereas many people have never even, they never even internalized this to the point where they've tried to figure out what could be done better.

Fair enough. That is true. So you've got to want to change. You've got to want to be happy. And you've got to make the effort to. Experience some light that comes through the clouds. If you're in that Pacific Northwest constant gray blanket over your head, you're like the world fucking sucks, man. I don't know what you're talking about.

We got to burn it all down, man. So what's the cognitive and analog of the Pacific Northwest and their gray skies? Well, those fucking people are so depressed. And if you look up there, they're always rioting. Right. Like over the last year, everything ramped up. Yeah. It ramped up yeah it ramped up

so hard up there and i think one of the reasons why it ramped up so hard over there is they're already depressed and then on top of that you have this economic despair that came for the year everything was shut down and covid yeah and then you also have like this you know you have a high degree of people that are you know fresh out of the universities where they're being taught these sort of radical leftist ideologies. And then they try to apply those in real life. And then they want to take down all these businesses. And they're not doing – like one of the things that I was saying, remember when they had that thing in Seattle where they had the occupied zone? Yes.

They had this area – what did they call it again? Oh, free zone. Something occupied zone. Yes. They had this area. What did they call it again? I'm trying to think of it. I don't know. Oh, free zone. Something free zone. Some fucking ridiculous thing. Well, they basically said no cops allowed here. Yeah. I just remember they said it actually wasn't called that, though, because they got mad people were calling it that.

Listen, other people called it. Whatever it was. So this is an area where they took over this whole area, like six blocks, and they weren't letting people in there, and they're smashing windows and taking over stores. Yes, the autonomous zone. But meanwhile, I'm like, this is a good example of people not thinking ahead and just thinking like children.

Because if you do this and you decide you're going to take over all these buildings and you're going to smash these windows and you're going to occupy these streets, what you're not recognizing is you didn't build any of this shit. You didn't earn any of this shit. You're playing by the rules of the brute. You're going in and you're deciding that you can take over this area. going in and you're deciding that you can take over this area and you are opening yourself up for someone deciding to do that to you with greater force and greater power. You're becoming a warlord. That's what you're doing. Yeah. So here's, so a lot of this was motivated by the, by the police shootings of young black men, right? Yes. So you can understand why people might be really furious and upset at what they were witnessing. And yet when they conclude that we have to create an autonomous zone with no cops allowed, that's clearly turned out to be a bad idea.

Well, they started doing the exact same things that a dictator would do. They were beating people up for filming things. People got shot there. They were enforcing their own rules and law with force and violence. So lots of bad ideas all kind of ganging up there. Well, it was a lot of confirmation bias, right? They wanted only ideas to be accepted that made it look like they were doing the right thing. There wasn't a lot of people thinking about like, hey, guys, let's play this out.

Like how does this end? So, see, you're calling attention to a really interesting aspect of proper idea testing. So ideas, when they take root in our minds, often create behaviors which can affect our well-being, right? So one of the features, one of the things you have to be mindful of before you buy into an idea is what might happen if you do, right? How are you going to affect the future if you buy into this idea? The other, so that's kind of, I call those the downstream consequences of an idea. Because once you latch on to them, they start to affect the world, right? But scientists have always looked not at the downstream consequences of ideas, but at the upstream evidence for the ideas.

So ideas like stand in the middle of a stream. There's upstream evidence and downstream consequences. of a stream. There's upstream evidence and downstream consequences. And the religions of the world say, I believe this because it makes me a better person. They're looking at the downstream consequences of, say, God belief. Right? Right. Scientists are saying, meanwhile, but there's no evidence for God exists because they're looking only at the upstream evidence or its lack. I'm actually, it turns out that if you go and take a philosophical deep dive on this issue, it turns out that both sides have a piece of the truth. Science is right that upstream evidence matters.

And religion is right that the downstream consequences of our beliefs matter. We actually need to test ideas and pay attention to both. We need to be mindful of both. And in principle, this insight could allow us to adjudicate the centuries-long dispute between science and religion and arrive at a concept of responsible believing that ends this huge cultural divide. That's chapter six of the book How is it possible though that science and religion could come together and have some sort of mutually agreed upon? acceptance of reality well

They both have to be able to let go of of the ideas that dialogue reveals to be problematic Right, but science doesn't have reveals to be problematic. Right. But science doesn't have ideas that they're holding in terms of like what dialogue reveals to be problematic. Like science is just data. Science is data and testing and then a bunch of people that have a background in this discipline examining the results and hopefully, especially to the layperson like myself, relaying an accurate synopsis of what the testing has revealed. Right. Well, it turns out, I mean, even scientific idea testing pays attention to sort of the

downstream logical consequences of an idea. So even mathematics. Okay. So there are mathematical claims or equations where if you assume they're true and you follow out the consequences, you end up in a contradiction. Oh. If you assume they're true. Right. So one way to prove something in mathematics is to assume that it's true and then see if you can derive a contradiction. Okay. And if it turns out you can derive a contradiction, then you've just shown that it's false. Right. Because no truth should generate a contradiction.

So that's called, the ancients had a word, a Latin word for this, reductio, reductio ad absurdum. So if you can reduce something to absurdity, you get rid of the thing that led to the absurdity. Okay. And that's an example of how even the most mathematically rigorous scientists will sometimes look at the downstream consequences of a claim because, hey, it leads to a contradiction. It can't be right. It leads to, meaning downstream of the idea, you end leads to a contradiction. It can't be right. It leads to meaning downstream of

the idea. You end up with a contradiction. So even scientists don't just look at upstream data or upstream evidence. They're also to some degree mindful of what would our situation be like if we bought into this? What would be the downstream effects? Does that make sense? Yes. So there's a lot more attention to downstream effects in science than we're led to believe. Now, some scientists can do their thing saying, I'm going to prove this to be true or I'm going to prove this to be false, and I don't care what happens to the world if everybody believes it. But I'm actually saying wisdom requires that we look at

upstream evidence and downstream consequences and consider them all. But if a scientist is just examining data and they want to prove something to be true or false they can't really take into consideration what the consequences of proving something to be true or false are. Don't they have to just... I mean, because if they do that, then it's all open to interpretation and open to influence. And so then human personality and societal concepts and ideas, culturally relevant concepts come into play.

Like, how does a culture feel about things? Is the culture, you know, is it influenced in any way by religion? So many factors come into play when you're not just looking at hard data. Well, yeah. I mean, I think there's an illusion that scientists live in this kind of bubble where they can focus purely on data and not be affected by their confirmation bias, not be affected by social pressures. Well, here's an example, right? Here's a good example, a most extreme example. Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, right? Yeah, good example. It might be the best, right? Because that was a thing that they kind of had to do, but yet when it was detonated, it was such an extreme event. I'm sure you're aware of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita when it happened, which is one of my favorite videos of all time because he talks about it. And you see this super intelligent man who is contemplating the results of his own work and saying, I am, behold, death, the destroyer of worlds. Wow.

What have I done? I am, behold, death, the destroyer of worlds. Wow. And, of course, Einstein, who was part of the same group of scientists who helped, who understood that atomic weapons were possible, wrote a letter to the president saying, hey, you know what? You got to know that atomic bombs are possible. We understand the science behind it. And for years afterwards, after the atomic bomb was invented, Einstein said, that might have been the biggest mistake of my life. Even though it helped us win World War II.

Yeah. It's a great example of the possible consequences of just following the data and the science. Because if you have a goal, and here's the goal, the goal is to figure out a way to split atoms in a weapon and detonate it, and this is the goal. Like, okay, well, we're just trying to figure out how to make a weapon. Okay. But no, then the weapon gets used. And the genie's out of the bottle. And once the genie's out of the bottle, then hundreds of thousands of people instantaneously get obliterated. Wow.

And then there's mutually assured self-destruction that somehow or another stops us from using it again. Because the Soviets haven't pointed at us and the Chinese haven't pointed at us and we haven't pointed at them. Like, fuck. Like, what a terrible way to ensure peace. Like, the worst way where you're both holding a gun at each other. Yeah. Well, and I mean, there's some serious downsides to the development of nuclear weapons, right? I mean, possible obliteration of. Yeah. And we've come close, at least twice, right? Very close. Very close twice to accidentally starting nuclear wars. I know the Cuban Missile Crisis.

there was some sort of a systems glitch and they thought that missiles were en route and they had a decision to make and they decided not to do anything and it turns out it wasn't real. And some Russian guy decided not to push the button and it was his refusal to push the button even though

the flock of geese that had triggered the radar or whatever was actually he might have saved us. I think there's more than one of those now that I'm thinking. I think there's at least two or three of those moments throughout history where we almost fucked up. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, in a way, I mean, the entire story is a validation

that we need to pay attention to the downstream effects of the beliefs we have. I mean, to have a truly... So in the book, I basically say, let's set aside our political differences. Let's set aside our religious differences. Let's investigate together what responsible believing looks like. Let's come up with a set of shared standards

that make good sense to us. Let's apply them and let the chips follow where they may. It may be that your religion, aspects of your religion have to be modified. It may be that science will actually have to develop more sensitivity to the kind of effects they're having on the world. But we can't continue to indulge in irresponsible thinking or just assume that we're thinking responsibly without investigating the matter philosophically and coming up with better answers. Now, when you put together a book like this, do you have like an end goal? Are you hoping that people adopt it as sort of a guidebook? Are you hoping that it just spurs critical thinking and

gets people interested in exploring ideas in a more objective and analytical way? That's a big part of it. It's not a simple how-to book. So I'm still – there's still a whole lot of scientists who need to understand what cognitive immunology is and understand that it's about 60 years of evidence for the mind's immune system. It's out there and we can talk about it if you like. Is it widely openly accepted or is there a debate? It's only begun to be debated because I've coined the term cognitive immunology. Oh, it's all you.

I've connected the dots and basically said this science is coming. And I was on a call with about two dozen scientists a couple days ago and they were like, damn Andy, yes, this science, we need to build out this science. Let's go, how can I become part of your thinking? It's a great term, it really is. And when you say it, it makes you apply it

to your own thinking and you go, oh yeah, that is what it is. I think it's dead right. Well, I mean, not only – I mean, we know that our bodies had to develop immune systems to avoid falling prey to pathogens. It turns out our minds had to evolve mental immune systems to avoid falling prey to stupid ideas. The wrong idea could get you killed. It can still get you killed. Still. Yeah. So we all have some aversion to some bad ideas. We're all pretty good at weeding out

right from wrong, truth from falsehood, but we can all get a hell of a lot better. In fact, I would venture to say that our mental immune systems are functioning at a fraction of their capacity. And here's the true test. How many people in your life would you call deeply wise? A handful. A handful. Yeah. I know a lot of fucking really smart people.

And everybody else has work to do to get wiser. Yeah. I know some really smart people that are fucking dumb, you know? Or compromised? Or mentally immune compromised? Yes, mentally immune compromised. Or enchanted by the spell of the ego.

That's a problem as well. Ego is a major disruptor of good mental... I've talked to some brilliant people on this very podcast that you listen to their thoughts and what they're trying to say and you go oh my god I see what you're what you're doing but I see where you're getting it you're falling into a pit there's a there's a pitfall there there's a thing that's happening yeah and it's hard to understand and explain I mean if you're

if you have one foot in one of these pitfalls it can be hard to see it yeah It's like I think you have to have done it yourself to see it in other people too. It's like one of those things like, oh, I could see myself doing that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. There's a – I think – I mean one of the takeaways for me is that none of us has a perfectly well-functioning mental immune system. perfectly well-functioning mental immune system. Every single one of us harbors falsehoods, false ideas, and every single one of us turns away some true ones. But if we can get better at spotting and removing the bad ideas, our mental immune systems get stronger. Right? But we're not born with well-functioning mental immune systems get stronger. Right? Yes. But we're not born with well-functioning mental immune systems.

Think about the six-year-old little girl who will believe in the truth fairy. Did I say truth fairy? Did I say truth fairy? Did I say that? You need to coin that phrase, too. I like that. Trademark. Let me trademark it.

I like that. I like the truth fairy. I think I meant – okay. I meant the tooth fairy. What does it mean about four-year-olds and six-year-olds that they believe their parents when they tell them the tooth fairy exists? You said tooth fairy that time. Okay. I got it right.

That time you got it right. Tooth fairy. It's like it's haunting you right now. I know. I can't. You've got a mind parasite. I can't. Ah.

I like the truth fairy though The truth fairy is pretty cool So the I think the fact the kids are so gullible Yeah instead of lying to them about Someone dropping off money for their teeth Maybe they should get some money for telling the truth I'm with you

Oh I got a story on that There's a truth fairy Little Monica you told the truth I'm going to's a truth fairy. I got a truth fairy. Right? Like, little Monica, you told the truth. I'm going to leave a little money under your pillow. The truth fairy came and rewarded you. You've just made this, you've given substance to this. That's a good idea, honestly. Like a little kid, like, how did this get broken?

How about we trademark it together? Yes. No, you can have it. Yeah. It's yours. You put meat on the bones. Yeah, but it's good. There's something. Just get out there can have it. Yeah. It's yours. You put meat on the bones. Yeah, but it's good. There's something.

Just get out there. Get it out there. The truth fairy. I like it. So check it out. My younger son, I take him to a Christmas party at his daycare center when he's little. And there's a guy in a Santa suit. And so far, his mom has insisted Santa Claus exists.

Right. She doesn't want to deprive him of the magic of Santa Claus. Of course. So we've been telling this kid Santa Claus exists. My kid checks out this guy in the Santa suit, and then he disappears for a couple minutes, and he comes back, and he says, Hey, Dad.

I said, Yes, Kai, what's up? He said, I don't think that's really Santa Claus I said why is that he said I just looked outside there's no sleigh or reindeer I'm like attaboy I was like that's my little critical thinker you go boy yeah I remember having explained to my kids that these are not real Santa Claus this is someone dressing up like Santa Claus because it's fun. Not the real Santa Claus. The real Santa Claus. Nobody ever sees him. Okay.

And I remember them going, I smell bullshit. See? Their mental immune systems are stronger than we realize. Slowly but surely. You have to, I just fucking hate the idea

of it all together. I was like, listen kid, I'm buying you these presents. We get you these presents because we love you and we want you to be happy. I don't think you need to lie and think there's some magical person that's sliding down

your fucking chimney. In fact, you're probably undermining your own credibility. You are most definitely, and it's more common than not that you do that. I mean, who doesn't tell their kids about Santa Claus other than folks that don't practice that religion? You know?

Can I tell you another story? Sure. The same kid. This is from the opening pages of the book. So my kids went to school, preschool at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Oh, is that? Same one. The same place.

It's where Barry Weiss, her family was from there as well. Oh, she's a Pittsburgher. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure your listeners all remember the horrific shooting at the Tree of Life. That's just a few blocks away from where I live. So my kids went to daycare in the same building. And one day my, I think, four-year-old son, Kai, comes out. And I pack him in the car, buckle him into a seatbelt. And I said, how was school, buddy? And he said,

fine. We met God. And my wife and I look at each other and go like, whoa, what, huh, what? I said, holy cow, kiddo. And he said, yeah, God came in and he gave me a high five and then he left. It's no big deal, Dad. So we make inquiries. We ask his teacher, what? God came to visit you? And she thought about it. She said, oh, she said the rabbi who's got a big beard.

He stopped in. He stopped in. I introduced him as a man of God. And he connected the dots, right? Oh, man of God. That's hilarious. God in male form. Right.

Wow. Yeah. So, I mean, talk about pattern or eagerness to find patterns, right? This guy had a beard. He was described as man of God. It must be God. Kind of weird that God always has a beard. I guess why would God shave?

Wouldn't he? Yeah. Yeah. Don't you think it looks? Wouldn't he? Yeah. Yeah. Don't you think it looks distinguished? Well, it kind of does, but if I see someone with a big, crazy, long beard, I usually think they're either

like a special forces guy or some crazy person. Or a homeless guy. Yeah, like most of the people that I know that have big, crazy beards are kind of psycho. I know a few philosophers who actually, I guess guess they qualify in both

counts. Yeah, I mean how many people have long beards that are normal? God had a long beard, but all the other people, if you looked at the ancient depictions of religious figures, very few had

a long, distinguished beard. Doesn't God almost always have a long distinguished beard is that to like signify age like what is that wisdom age wisdom maybe sick because so wise he has a stupid beard that he gets all his food in he's gotta eat right see if i was bearded right now and i was stroking my beard wouldn't that make me look wise it does i've only had a like a real legit beard one time ever in my life. I grew a big, fat, thick beard. But it was because a man I knew died

and a bunch of us online, we just decided to grow our beards like his. Yeah. His name's Evan Tanner. Kind of a tribute to him. Yeah, yeah. He was a UFC fighter and he had this big, crazy beard

and he was an adventurous person and went on, I guess, what you would call a walkabout and died in the desert. No kidding. Yeah, he died in Death Valley. Not on purpose? No. We don't know. We don't think so, though. The thought is that he went out there to just sort of have an adventure and find himself.

He was into that. He was into doing that. Wow. And everybody grew a beard so I grew this big fucking crazy beard it went like all the way up my cheekbone I'm trying to imagine what she'd look like look like me with a big crazy beard yeah post a picture for your face I'm sure it just went out there this well I think there's one of me at a UFC weigh-ins where I'm a big crazy beard yeah there it is there's me have a big crazy beard. Yeah, there it is. There's me with a big crazy beard.

Okay, there you go. Yeah. That's wild to see, man. I kind of forgot about that. That's wild to see. This is back when you were an announcer for? I'm still an announcer. Still are.

Yeah, I just did an event this weekend. Oh, good. Yeah, but that's me with a full crazy stupid beard. Yeah, I grew that for a few months. I don't remember what the time period was, but we all decided to do that. That's a nice tribute. Yeah. He's an interesting person. He was a guy that didn't value money.

He valued life experience. And he was very interesting to listen to when he talked and just really inspired a lot of people. Do you ever read the book Into the Wild? Yes. By Krakauer? Yeah. He talked about a kid who had a very similar set of values, just wanted to be out in nature and sort of explore different experiences and ended up dying in the wilds of Alaska, not Death Valley. But it sounds like there were some similarities there. I think there's a lot of people that just find the life that we're living, that most people live, to be very shallow and meaningless and unfulfilling,

and they just want something different. They don't know what it is. But they see the trap that so many people are falling into. It doesn't seem our culture makes it easy for people to find meaning. Well, it's hard because you have to eat. You have to eat and feed yourself, and it's very difficult just to pay the rent. Well, but imagine a world where the jobs available were profoundly satisfying of our need to matter. You're going to imagine like a Dr. Seuss world because the world has to be completely different.

I mean this is an imaginary world, right? It is, but why not start moving us in the right direction? There's another counterpoint. The contrary position would be you need shitty, meaningless jobs to inspire you to do something good with your life. It tests your will to improve upon your position so maybe every kid should do shitty meaningless jobs and help me yeah most certainly helped me what shitty meaningless jobs did you do oh I had a lot of them but I think just being a kid working I worked at like this place

called Newport Creamery and another place called Papa Gino's these restaurant chains and you know I delivered newspapers and I worked a lot of construction jobs and just a bunch of different things. I delivered pizzas, a bunch of different things where it's just like day in, day out. And then when it's over, you're like, thank God it's over. And then you're like, how do I stop this? How do I get out of this job? How do I make sure that this doesn't become my life?

Yeah. I remember I was driving limos yeah it's one of my jobs and there was this guy who uh they were looking at as an example of who we could be and i remember this guy was overweight and like his back was bad but he had a cadillac they always talk about his cadillac and they're like you know you could be like tony you know t like Tony. Tony, he's got an easy job. Tony's working 60 hours a week driving limos. But they were talking about how much money he makes and this and that. He's doing great. And I'm like, 60 hours a week? This guy's just driving around.

60 hours a week. And I was looking at this guy, and he's in his 40s. And I was like, his life has already gotten to this. And they were letting you know that you too could compromise your dreams and be like this guy if he just droned in and just showed up and just kept doing it day in and day out it's a trap though right it is unless that's what you like unless you like just driving people around I'm not like shitting on the job I did it but it's I just wasn't

good for me for me was I don't want to do that I gotta get out of here well I guess what I mean is I don't mean to dump on that job either I just mean that when you set aside your passions and your sense of purpose and just just do work you don't even enjoy to get the bills paid and that can become a trap most certainly and so many people in today's world are feeling trapped by work you don't even enjoy to get the bills paid, that can become a trap. Most certainly. And so many people in today's world are feeling trapped by that. Yeah.

Well, and then you get obligations, right? Then you have a mortgage or a lease and your place to live. And then you have car payments. Wife and kids. Wife and kids. And then you can't take chances. Or husband and kids. Yeah.

Either or. And you can't take chances. If you can't take chances, then you're really fucked. Because then you have to figure out what to do with your time when you're off work. Right. And I've given this advice before. I'm like, you have to think about that time off work like you have to save your life. And that you're working to save your life. Like, whatever it is.

Whatever you're trying to do, you have to do it like you're trying to save your life. Because you are. So find the energy in those down moments to reorient yourself and to find your path. Right. But then we're talking about all the other issues that people have that we talked about before, like the lack of exercise and good diet. Those things rob you of your physical vitality. And if you don't have physical vitality and energy, it's very difficult to motivate yourself to do something. So you've got those problems. Yep. It seems like to build a really good life, a lot of things have to go right.

A lot of things have to go right. And our culture doesn't seem to make it easy to align all those parts, those pieces. Yeah. That's one thing that i i don't think i recognize enough when i was younger when i was younger i was like just fucking work hard i worked hard and i did work hard but i was also really lucky i've been lucky a lot but but also when i got lucky i took advantage of it and and ran with it yeah it's like some people get lucky and then they fuck it off and they don't follow through. Following through is very important.

The follow through, the grind, but also luck. Luck is a big factor. It is a big factor. Man, I feel like I've been really fortunate too. Sometimes bad luck is good luck. Say more. Because bad luck makes you angry at your circumstances and it forces

you to change. Sometimes too much good luck, too much good fortune, you get soft and lazy. Yeah. Everything's going so great. Or you start to feel like entitled to stuff because everything's falling on a silver platter. Imagine winning the lottery at 19. Imagine being a 19

year old guy. That could mess you up. What if you won like 100 million dollars and you're 19? Oh, my God, you'd be a loser. There's no way you wouldn't be a loser. Isn't it funny? Guaranteed to screw up your life. You've probably come across this fact that three years after winning the lottery, lottery winners are on average no happier than quadriplegics or something like that.

Something like that, yeah. No, I would imagine, first of all, winning the lottery is also like, say if you start a business and that business becomes successful and then you start doing well, people are going to ask for money, but they're not going to ask for money the way they ask for a lottery winner's money because the lottery winner is like, bitch, you didn't even earn this. You just got lucky. Give me some money. If you really love me, you're my friend.

I'm trying to start a business. And all of a sudden you're starting to question your best friends and motives. Oh, yeah. For sure. And so you end up getting alienated from them. For sure. That's most certainly going to happen. And this happens to a lot of successful young athletes, right?

They suddenly have money and then the people close to them start asking for handouts. Oh, yeah. And then they start to question they're friends or real friends, true friends. Sure. And a lot of them aren't. That's another thing. A lot of them, they look at you differently because you're successful now. They said something like it's some crazy number of NFL players within X amount of years after they stop playing are broke. It's really crazy.

It's like they go bankrupt within three years, I think. It's something nutty. And it's like a high percentage. High percentage. So part of that might be that they're just not taught how to manage or save. There's that. There's also the culture of expressing how much money you have through material possessions and the keeping up with the joneses from billy corbin's documentary broke

on espn 78 of former nfl players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress financial stress within five years of retirement two years oh excuse me five years of retirement. Two years. Oh, excuse me. Two years of retirement. 60% of NBA players are broke within five years of retirement, and then 78% of NFL players are broke within two years. Here's the thing about NFL players you have to take into consideration. Also, head trauma. They're getting hit in the head a lot.

Which might account for the difference between the NBA and the NFL. I think it does. So you have the culture of keeping up with the Joneses with most pro athletes like nice things, right? You grow up poor. You hustle. You become a badass. You're a pro athlete. And now you want a nice car and a nice house and all these nice things.

Can I share a personal story on this? Sure. So I used to run a summer camp for kids, character education summer camp for kids. And it's all based on the sport of ultimate Frisbee. Oh, okay. Sure. So I founded this small company. In a few years, I had hundreds and hundreds of families sending their kids to me to learn the sport and to learn basic character, things like resilience and a positive attitude and teamwork, things like that. and a positive attitude and teamwork, things like that. And so one day we're up in a local park running camp, and who should be running laps around the track is Antonio Brown,

the NFL wide receiver. You heard of this guy? Sure. Former Steeler, right? This was before he was like a first or second year player, hadn't really emerged. And I walked over to Antonio. I said, hey, Antonio, can you come over and say hi to some kids, maybe sign a few Frisbees? And he says, sure, let me finish my

workout. He comes over after. He's a perfect gentleman, terrific guy. He signs some t-shirts, signs some discs. And I said, hey, Antonio, my kids here want to teach you how to catch. And so three of my kids, three of my best campers line up, and I chuck the Frisbee 40 yards down the field, and the kids just run, run, run, run down, and they pancake catch it. Right. Right. So Antonio watches this, and I said, all right, Antonio, do what the kids did.

They're teaching you how to catch. And Antonio takes off. I just chucked this Frisbee as far as I freaking could. I mean, I sent it 80 yards down the field and he just zooms down under it. And of course, instead of, he just catches it just the way the kids teach him to. The next year, he becomes the NFL's best wide receiver. I taught Antonio Brown how to catch. I don't think it works that way. I taught Antonio Brown how to catch.

I don't think it works that way. I taught him how to catch a Frisbee. I love the story, though, man. It's a good story, but I'm pretty sure he was pretty good at catching. Yeah, you're probably right. It's kind of part of the game. You're right. Yeah. But I'm sticking to it anyway.

It's a rough sport in terms of the damage that it does to your body and your head. And Antonio, and this happened to Antonio, man. He got his bell rung so many times, and he's had a hard life since. Most guys do. Most of those guys that get out, they have a really hard time. It's just, you know, your body's not designed to get into car accidents every day. You know, and these guys, they're basically giving each other car accidents in training. And I understand that they're more cognizant of that now in the NFL,

particularly after that concussion movie that came out with Will Smith. That doctor who was... Diallo? I do not remember his name. He's a Pittsburgh guy. Is he? Yeah. But his work with CTE and just popularizing this notion that this is happening to so many players, it's a real problem.

It is. And I both love the sport and hate what it's doing to the athletes' bodies and their brains. Yeah. It's rough. I mean, the same can be said about fighting. I just watched some brain damage this weekend. You know, I was there live. Switch to Ultimate, man.

It's easy on the brain and also a beautiful sport. Save it. Listen to it. It's not the same, buddy. Try it. You'll like it. No, I'm sure I would like you watching it and stuff. I mean, that's Marcus Brownlee.

Yeah, you had him on your show. Yeah, he's a killer at it. No, I'm sure I would like it, watching it and stuff. I mean, that's Marcus Brownlee. Yeah, you had him on your show. Yeah, he's a killer at it. He's fantastic. Played in some videos and everything. It's a beautiful sport. It does look fun. It does look fun. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm sure. So someday I'll meet you out there. Maybe not. I'll teach you how to catch. Okay. Teach me how to catch. Now, disc golf is different. Disc golf is like,

is that a frisbee? Yeah, frisbee, it's just how many throws does it take you to get from one spot called a tee to like a metal basket. But is it an actual frisbee? Yeah. A similar frisbee or the same frisbee? So in Ultimate, we use a wide, flat

disc that has a lot of stability. And in golf, there are many, many different kinds of slimmer discs that will go farther, and then you can curve them around trees and stuff. Oh, okay. I think calling it a disc is better. A frisbee is like a toy. You play discs with tools and, you know. Well, frisbee is a brand name.

Yeah, yeah. And so disc is the term we try to use. So you call it Ultimate Disc? Because they have putters, drivers. For golf. For disc golf. Yes. But not Ultimate Frisbee.

Just one disc for Ultimate Frisbee. Is Ultimate Frisbee a frisbee or is it a disc? It's not made by the Frisbee company. It's made by a company called Ultra Star. It's a disc. So the Ultimate Frisbee people, the Frisbee a Frisbee or is it a disc? It's not made by the Frisbee company. It's made by a company called Ultra Star. It's a disc. So the Ultimate Frisbee people, the Frisbee people, they get off light. They're killing the game without even, you know, they don't even have to be a part of the sport. It's named after them.

That's right. Yeah, we try to get over it. That's kind of crazy. We try to avoid to use the word Frisbee. What do you call it? Well, Ultimate Disc is one way to do it. Do you really say that? I'm out there playing ultimate disc and people go, what the fuck is that?

The pro league calls it ultimate disc. But ultimate is the short term. But a lot of times people don't know what you're talking about. Well, if you say ultimate, people think ultimate fighting championship. That's not what I think. No? That's what I would think. If you're going to watch the ultimate this weekend, I'd be like, yeah, man, I'm commentating.

And you'd be like, do you commentate on Ultimate Disc? I'd be like, wait, what are we talking about? Do you follow any other sports besides football and disc? I'm big into hockey right now. Are you really? My pens are in the playoffs. That's another sport where people get some serious brain damage. That's true.

Do you know where they get their brain damage from? The crashes into the boards? Yep. The board checks? Isn't that nuts? It's just the rattling of the body. It's not even the hits to the head. I'm guessing the head's kind of stuck back. Doesn't even have to. No, there's a guy that

I've had on multiple times that I'm friends with. His name's Dr. Mark Gordon and he works with a lot of traumatic brain injury patients and especially soldiers. You know, guys who breach doors, and some football players and fighters as well. And he said people get brain damage from jet skis. What? Yeah, just this brr, brr, brr, brr.

He's like that constant rattling of the brain gives people CTE. Wow. Yeah, if you do it a lot, yeah. So the the brain gives people CTE. Wow. If you do it a lot, yeah. So the brain is actually much more sensitive. Very gentle. Rapid accelerations and decelerations. It's not just rapid acceleration and deceleration. It's the shaking.

It's the impact. Okay. It's like, that's why soccer players get it. Sure, with the heading. The heading of the ball. Exactly, yeah. What about like, I don't know, driving an ATV over rocky terrain? For sure. 100%. Yeah. He was detailing all the different ways that

the pituitary gland gets damaged. And the pituitary gland apparently is a very sensitive gland. And the way it happens is when you get impacts and a lot of these things happen I'm obviously butchering this but the way he was describing is as it gets injured it inhibits its ability to produce hormones and then you find these people get very depressed very moody and one of the ways they fix that is by exogenous hormone injections and it's one of the reasons why they fix one of the ways they fix a lot of depression in former combat sport athletes and former football players, former soldiers.

No kidding. Yeah, veterans. I did not know any of this. Yeah, they give them testosterone injections, human growth hormone injections. And then when you exogenously introduce these hormones and they get them back to their normal healthy levels all their suicidal not all of them you know a lot of the depression goes away yeah a lot of the problems that these people are having is just this extreme feeling of fatigue and lack of stamina

and lack of energy all traceable to pituitary damage? A lot of it is traceable to TBI, traumatic brain injury, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Oh, wow, you can pronounce that. Yeah, I know a lot of it. I've seen a lot of people with it. Right, right. Yeah. I think my only contact with the concept of the pituitary was,

did you know that the philosopher Descartes learned a little bit about the brain's architecture? And there was a little gland in there that nobody knew what it did. So his hypothesis was the pituitary is like the wormhole between the physical brain and your mind. Oh. Isn't it weird when you think about these ancient theories that they had about how things worked and why they worked? It is. And sometimes we philosophers dwell too long on it. There it is. Oh, pineal gland.

Oh, I got it wrong. Thank you, fact checker. Well, I was going to bring that up next because the pineal gland is they believe that in ancient Egypt, you know that, what is that? Is it Horus? Is that what it is? Yeah, he was a poet or something. The imagery? Yeah, but there is a, compare Horus to the pineal gland.

Yeah. See, that image, the eye of Horus, they believe is actually symbolic of the pineal gland. Because if you look at the way Horace sits, where it is, it really looks like it could be an image of the pineal gland. Look at that bottom one in particular. I mean it's so similar.

Look at even how it dips down. I mean so much of the architecture is very, very similar. So the image on the right here, it looks like an eye with, I don't know. Yes. And so does the one on the left, the actual physical pineal gland. Then the thing about that that makes it really interesting is that that is also the place where psychedelic chemicals are produced. That's where the dimethyltryptamine is produced. And this is like an Egyptian hieroglyphic on the right? Yeah.

Yeah. There's an amazing series of videos by a man who is now deceased. His name is John Anthony West. He'd been on my podcast a couple of times, once remotely and once in person. And he was an Egyptologist. And he made this uh series called magical egypt and he really explored like deep deep deep into the the history of these hieroglyphs and what the interpretations of them are and how these structures are all uh like the temple of man

is an intro or temple in man temple in man um, I think is one of the temples is literally it represents the various parts of the human being. And in like the pyramid or the temple. I think it's the Temple of Luxor. Is that where it is? What is Temple in Man? I might be saying it wrong but in the documentary it's just it's amazing when you think that these people that live thousands and thousands of years ago had this incredibly complex way of designing these structures that we still to this

day don't exactly know how they did it. And they were so interested in preserving this story of, here it is, temple in man. Okay, I did get it right. And so the ideas of this temple is supposed to represent a human body and that various parts of the temple, according to the hieroglyphs, sort of depict various aspects. So it is Luxor. It is the temple of Luxor. Okay, and so incredibly sophisticated thinking went into the architecture of these things. Yeah, so sophisticated, it's fascinating stuff.

And you mentioned like the Mayans and the Aztecs and their incorporation of astronomy into their architecture. Yeah, well you gotta to think they're staring at these incredible images in the sky every night right i mean that that would have to be so motivational like we want to like especially if you had deemed certain stars and certain constellations sacred you know we want to represent those down as heaven on earth you know and when you go to like stonehenge or something doesn't the light coming in on the summer solstice like shine right through a gap

between or something yeah that's in Egypt as well there's there's there's certain pyramids where as the light goes through it goes through and illuminates these corridors and if you catch it on the right time of the year as the Sun rises it rises perfectly through these two pillars oh man so you you know these people studied the motions of the planets and the stars yeah we don't know enough about it unfortunately because a lot of their records were burned in the library of alexandria when that was burned oh yeah yeah pivotal moment in history by the way yeah there's so much stuff that they did that we just have to kind of back engineer and guess.

I actually think that that burning of the library of Alexandria was one of the key reasons we descended into a thousand-year dark age. So when information technologies come along and help people communicate better, societies begin to flourish and when you destroy what when you either weaponize new information technologies the way we're seeing and the way we talked about before or when you destroy enlightening technologies like the library right and by the way some of the same people who burned down the Library of Alexandria we're also busy closing down all the universities throughout Europe. And there's a reason why we entered a dark age was because respect for learning was just trashed by people who were benefiting from stubborn orthodoxy.

Yeah. That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Because it could be applied as religion or political, right? It's like ideologies, they become a problem. Exactly. And I worry sometimes that we could enter a new dark age if the stubborn orthodoxies and ideologies continue to flourish online. We could be in for a really rough time in the future. We need to strengthen mental immune systems.

It's certainly possible, right? It's certainly possible. And my fear, more than anything, is a power blackout. My fear is the grid going down and something happening where we can't access the information that's on these disks and hard drives. It'd be financial chaos. Yeah, we have so much information on hard drives. We have so much information that relies on the Internet. And as time goes on, we move more and more of our stuff into the digital realm. And as that happens, like think about what we have now from ancient Egypt.

The best stuff that we have is all carved in stone, like the Rosetta Stone that showed us how these different languages, how the translations of them. And then we have all these hieroglyphs carved in stone. We have these incredible structures that still exist thousands and thousands of years later, again, made out of stone. If they had hard drives back then, they would have long be gone. There'd be no way to access that information. And also imagine just what would happen to us with a few generations of darkness, right? Think about how long the ice age was and think about how it plunged so many civilizations into this like completely different way of life where you have to deal with extreme cold and just most of North America, like half

of it was under a mile of ice, right? Totally different world. As I understand it, the last ice age was about 15,000 years ago? I think it's a little less. A little less than that? I think it was a little less. Yeah, I think it ended around 12,000, somewhere around. Okay, but most of the civilizations we talk about have happened

since that last ice age. Yeah, they think, but here's another, there's another theory. It's the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, and this is Graham Hancock and Graham Carlson, or Randall Carlson, rather. Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, and a few other people, including Dr. Robert Schock from Boston University, he's a geologist. They're entertaining this idea that there was some sort of an impact somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000, 12,000 years ago that ended the Ice Age, and that these impacts that hit particularly in North America and throughout Europe they've

left behind core if you did they when they do core samples you can find this I think it's called trite night it's nuclear glass and the nuclear glass you find it at test sites like you know where they do detonate nuclear bombs alamos you've right or you find it where asteroids have impacted. And they find this stuff all throughout the core samples in that range of like 11,000, 12,000 years. So just as a meteor impact wiped out the dinosaurs, a meteor impact helped to bring about the warming that ended the last ice age?

Yes. That's what the theory is. And this theory is being more and more widely accepted. It was really dismissed just a few years ago, just a decade or two ago. But now it's widely being, because of the core samples in particular, because they find this nuclear glass.

And science is amazing. It's amazing. It's amazing stuff. So the speculation about Egypt in particular is that there was more than one era of this construction and that perhaps there was a reset. Oh, some older civilizations that we're only beginning to learn about. So, yeah, that's the idea. And one of the more compelling theories is uh based on the water erosion around the great sphinx because the sphinx around the great pyramid has um the temple the sphinx has

these deep fissures around it that seem to indicate thousands of years of rainfall the problem with that is the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9,000 B.C. So that predates the supposed construction of the pyramids by 7,000 years. You just blew my mind. Yeah, it's pretty heavy shit. You should see, pull up images of the water erosion evidence

around the Great, around the Sphinx. And the thing about this is Robert Schock is, you know, he's a real geologist from Boston University. And it's a very controversial idea. And he's been much more – it's much more accepted now because of Gobekli Tepe. Because Gobekli Tepe, which was discovered in Turkey, was more than 12,000 years old. Okay. This has been proven by carbon dating because of the surrounding area. It was covered up somewhere intentionally around 12,000 years old.

And so it used to be the thought was where are these ancient structures from 12,000 years ago that would indicate that it would be possible for a civilization from that time period to create something so magnificent. Well, now they have this. This guy's theory helps to explain it. Well, not this theory. Now they have Gobekli Tepe. Gobekli Tepe is most certainly. So you see those things on the right-hand side? Uh-huh.

Yeah. That is the indication that's according to Dr. Robert Schock. The way those things have been eroded, that would indicate rainfall did that. Okay. So you see how his theory is sort of like that? Oh, look at that. So the opposing theory is that that was done with wind and sand. And he disputes that.

He said, no, there's no evidence of wind and sand being able to do that. And you see the difference between the way wind erosion erodes things and the way rain erosion does it. So you see on the left is evidence of what he believes is water erosion versus the right, which is wind erosion and sand erosion. Fascinating. Fascinating shit. So if he's right and if Randall Carlson's right and if Graham Hancock's right and Graham has written books on this and had many, many, many, many discussions with people that disputed it or agreed with it. And he believes that there was probably some sophisticated civilization similar to ancient Egypt that existed 10, 15, maybe even 20,000 or more years ago, and that was wiped out by the Younger Dryas impact.

And the Sphinx dates back to that earlier? They think the Sphinx could be thousands of years older than the current idea of what it is. The current idea is like 2,500 B.C. They think the Sphinx is around the same time as the Great Pyramids. You want to hear something really crazy? Yeah, I do. Cleopatra is closer to the invention of the iPhone than she is to the construction of the Great Pyramids. And that's, oh, man.

How about that? It just clashes with the cartoon in my mind. That's not even like crazy speculation, Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, Robert Shock stuff. That's just fact. Amazing. Egypt is a magnificent civilization. And so ancient. So ancient.

And at one point in time was where it was all going down Wow yeah did that Cleopatra crazy right see that's true 99.9 percent true not are certain rather it's true nuts yeah wild shit dude I think we did three hours already nope that that went by like yeah it's almost four o'clock is that true with the uh cleopatra shit i'm looking through like one of those qr things where someone asked that and then someone else has came through and is giving them all the evidence i'm trying to find the year where it says cleopatra did but it does say that that is a fact yeah pretty sure it's a fact cleopatra lived closer to the creation of the iPhone

than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid. Is this true and how? Everyone has already explained that Cleopatra did, in fact, live closer to the iPhone launch than the building of the pyramids. The question remains how. We typically associate both Cleopatra and the pyramids with the height of ancient Egypt, but both of these are false. Oh, the Egyptian empire went through three stages

where civilization thrived and then fell and then thrived and then fell and so on. The first was the Old Kingdom, which is 2686 BC. So either way. Either way, it's true. Wow. This is the Egypt that built the Great Pyramids. So Egypt is far older than we think.

And then if you add in Robert Shock's theory about the construction of the Sphinx, he is theorizing that it is at least – so it would be thousands of years of rainfall. The last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley, the climate was very different, somewhere around 9,000 B.C., which is 7,000 years older. And you have to think, well, it's got thousands of years of rainfall on top of that. So now you're like at 10,000 BC or something, or 7,000, 9,000. It's like 9,000 BC, which is 7,000 years earlier than they thought. But if there's thousands of years of rainfall that would have caused that erosion, if that's

true, then you've got, you know, who knows how many thousand BC, 10,000 BC, 12,000 BC. And there's so much. So, right. History, recorded history is what? 2,000, 3,000 years old? Pretty young. I mean, if you count hieroglyphics, it goes back.

Cuneiform is like, what is that? 6,000 years old? I think that's Mesopotamia, Babylon, Sumer. Now, phonetic alphabets are like 2,000, 2,500 years old. I think that's Mesopotamia, Babylon. Now, phonetic alphabets are like 2,000, 2,500 years old. It's all nuts. Much younger. And, wow, but the way in which archaeologists and stuff are opening our eyes to the deep past is just fascinating. It's amazing. And what's really crazy is that's not that long ago.

That's what's really crazy. I mean, phonetic languages several thousand years ago, several thousand years is nothing. Yeah. No? Well, let's see. We supposedly diverged from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees about 7 million years ago. Apians, as opposed to some of the other Homo species that have since died out, just emerged, what, in the last 200,000, maybe possibly 400,000 years? It's nothing.

Yeah. It's crazy. This is what I would—I used to have this bit about the creation of the United States. People think it was a long time ago, 1776, so long ago. Like, people live to be 100 years old, right? That's three people ago. Wow. Wow.

Actually, I think I misspoke a minute ago. The Homo sapiens were closer to 70,000 years ago. It's Homo heidelbergensis and some others that go back to 400,000. That's even crazier. Yeah. Yeah. So I mentioned Socrates a few times. 2,400 years ago, that's almost exactly 100 generations. Yeah.

I mean, it only took 100 generations to go back to basically the beginning of my discipline, philosophy, as we understand it now. It's just 100 generations. That's it. Nuts. That's so recent. And it's all hurtling by faster and faster. And then think about how much the world has changed. How old are you?

57. I'm 53. So within our lifetime, think of all the change that we've seen. If you go back to your lifetime, like when you were a child, the Civil Rights March was going on, right? My mother was pregnant with me in the days leading up to Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech Wow she wanted to go but because I couldn't go cuz of me you fucked it up for fucked it up for my dad got to go and I was born five days after the I have a dreams that's crazy now think of now go a

hundred years before that, you have slavery. How crazy is that? That's right. You go 100 years before that. That's in this country. You have muskets. And no indoor plumbing. You have none of that.

No electric light. That's so recent. That's so recent. We get this kind of myopia when we look back at our past. It's hard to even appreciate how deep the past is. How deep the past is and yet how shallow

and yet how recent. And how recent the things we take for granted are. Yeah, I mean, the change that's happened so fast. Now take into consideration the change that's happened in our lifetimes

with the invention of the internet. And it's sped up another tenfold or more. And, you know, if we go 200 years from now, it's unrecognizable. Then you're in the matrix. If we can last that long. If we can last that long. Well, we need some critical thinking. And the way to get that is mental immunity.

Available now from Andy Norman. Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate you coming in here. I really, really, really enjoyed it. Thank you. Great conversation. Real pleasure. Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate you coming in here. I really, really, really enjoyed it. Thank you. Great conversation. It's a real pleasure. All right.

Bye, everybody.