Brené Brown: Matt and Chris courageously embrace their vulnerability
Brené Brown is an American professor, lecturer, author, storyteller researcher, and podcast host. She's made it her life's work to help people rise strong, brave the wilderness, and dare to lead - all through overcoming shame and embracing their own vulnerability.So naturally Chris and Matt - being the emotionally unavailable, culturally stunted and cynical gits that they are - bemoan all this positivity and do their level best to try and drag her down to their bitter and petty level. Can you get the secret to self-actualisation in a TED talk? Or is it more a sequence of inspirational quote memes strung together? Or are these things one and the same?Perhaps Professor Brown is honing in on universal psychological truths. Or alternatively, she might be an unwitting expression of American hyper-individualism and self-obsessed culture. Well, you're gonna get the Irish and Australian take on that. Thanksgiving is obviously the perfect time for the hosts to tell their US listeners that American culture sucks and that kids shouldn't follow their dreams but prepare to be cogs in the machine.No, no, they don't do that. Well... not entirely.Well, what do they say? What is there take? You'll have to tune in to find out!LinksThe power of vulnerability (TED talk)Listening to shame (TED talk) 'If you want to heal yourself, WATCH THIS!' Brené Brown & Lewis Howes on 'The School of Greatness'Eric Weinstein: How Not to Formulate a Theory of Everything (Tim Nguyen)Live-tweet of Eric's Chicago Lecture by Sandro SharashenidzeBret and Heather Darkhorse 105: State Lies Coming Across
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown and with me is Chris Cavanaugh.
Hello, Chris.
No mention of your psychology qualifications.
No mention of my anthropology qualifications.
Matt, what are you doing?
This could be the first time people are listening, like, "Who's Matt and Chris?
Why do these guys have any right to talk?"
Yeah, I know.
We purely exist as credentials, Matt.
That's all we are.
According to internet folk.
No, we're real.
We have real qualifications.
I saw your very real, very impressive degree from Oxford, Illinois, and I'm overqualified and underdressed, as usual, so people should know.
It's an annual ritual sending you scanned copies of my qualifications because I know it's the only way that you'll deign to talk to me if you're reminded.
So this is the level of credentialism that we engage in.
You must send scanned copies in order to qualify for a Skype conversation.
Well, that reminds me of the kinds of people I do deign to talk to on Twitter.
And I often find myself regretting it.
I'm not a snob and I don't believe in checking people's bios and trawling through their mutuals and their history.
Looking for their pronouns.
Looking for the dirt on them.
They're looking for something racist in there so I can hit them with it.
But you were in this argument about Ivermectin and Japan.
Oh God, don't remind me of the Twitter idiots.
I know the guy you're talking about, a guy living in Japan who was waffling on about Ivermectin and trying to look impressive by sharing Japanese language articles about it.
In his case, I did have a little look at his bio and his mutuals and all of his mutuals were these exotic thirst type accounts with names like LovelyBaby69 and in their bios saying things like, send me your cum tributes.
I don't even know what that means, but it didn't reflect well on him.
And I was thinking, why am I arguing with this person?
That frequently comes up in my self-loathing spirals.
If I look at my Twitter activity, like, why did I talk to that person?
Why?
I do think it's fine to look at someone's profile because...
You sometimes get people acting like they're these kind of dispassionate scholars working through the issues of the day.
And you go to their Twitter feed and it's Jack Posovich and Mike Cernovich and the lies that CNN are spearing.
I'm like, okay, it's helpful to know where you're coming from.
So, yeah, I am relatively patient on Twitter, but just because lots of people on Twitter have no patience whatsoever.
But I am increasingly like...
Yeah, I'm not sure I should spend my time on this.
So, Matt, we're complaining about Twitter.
This is not things that people on Twitter like to hear off Twitter, on Twitter, off Twitter.
All right.
I'm going to mention something much more healthy, which I've been, I'm feeling good because I've been very good.
I've been hitting the pool every morning, every weekday morning, including this morning, and I'm feeling good about myself.
I'm feeling healthy.
But there's one thing I have to mention, right?
There's one thing about it that makes you feel bad.
I don't know what it's like in other countries, but in Australia, there's this little thing called swim squad, which is squad.
Now, what that means is a group of extraordinarily healthy young men, and women too, but in my case, it seems to be entirely men.
These are the hardcore people.
How to describe them?
They look like bronzed Adonises.
Have been lovingly crafted by a cohort of angels with a deep, deep appreciation for all the possibilities of the male form.
And I feel pretty good about myself.
I'm 46 now and I'm doing my best.
And I, if I suck my gut in, then I think, you know, I'm doing, I'm doing okay.
And then, then these guys.
They come and they show up your insecurities for them.
The deep wounds that they are, right?
It's not a competition.
Yeah, you should listen to Brené Brown.
She has a whole segment on the poison of making comparisons and these kind of things.
You should pay more attention to the material that we're covering this week, Matt.
You know, I understand that because I have the same issues, but it's just that people always compare themselves to me.
I'm feeling inadequate.
So it's in the opposite direction, but it's a dearly struggle whenever I go to the beach.
Just wow.
Wow.
See, I see heads turned.
And it's not just because of the reflective glare glistening from my alabaster skin.
Yeah, it's just a deep adoration.
I can sense it.
I'm sure.
Well, in my case, I just need to accept deeply that it's not about vanity.
It's not about competition.
It's just about Fending off entropy.
That's right.
You're there to make other people feel better.
I think I do make them feel better.
We all play our pieces in this world.
I do that for people online who want to feel well-adjusted.
So, you know, we all have our crosses to bear.
I'm beginning to think your Twitter activity is actually a liability for this podcast because I've seen so many comments of, yeah, I might give Guru's point of go, and then they go, oh, it's that guy.
Who says that?
I don't see any of that.
All this tells me is your Twitter feed is full of terrible people.
You're following the wrong people to see these conversations, Matt, but...
Oh, I'll do better.
I'll try to do better.
So, Matt, probably listeners can tell this morning, I don't know why.
I'm just feeling the malaise.
I'm not my usual chipper self.
And you as well.
We've been beaten down by the gurus for air.
And so to cheer ourselves up, what we thought would be a good thing to do is to talk about our favorite gurus, the Weinsteins.
Let's check in on how they're doing.
They're always having a laugh and they're never doing anything annoying.
So I wonder what they've been up to.
It's like a boomerang.
It's like a strange attractor.
They keep tucking us back in, but they're a never-ending font of fascinating activity.
Tell me what they've done now, Chris.
Tell me.
Well, Eric has, for his part, he got invited to an economics seminar at the University of Chicago.
I saw The Economist talking about this.
It was kind of like a planned trap, right, where they were inviting him because of the comments that he's made about calculating the Inflation Index or whatever it is, and his conspiracy theories around the Boskin Commission in the US and how it's controlled.
So they invited him to set out his revolutionary theory for calculating this index based on gauge theory, which is published so far in a chapter in his wife's thesis.
And the plan seemed to be to reveal him for the charlatan that he is when he has to deal with real economists and Penetrating questions.
So I saw some threads from grad students who live tweeted about it, and it went like you would expect, which was that Eric went, he waffled, he was asked various questions because it's a cross-examination style seminar,
and he gave confusing vague answers related to metaphors and folding of space time and so on, right?
Constantly told the audience that they wouldn't be able to follow the complex maps and physics.
And he did that, and he gave his talk, and the response from the students seemed to be like bemusement, right?
They hadn't seen someone do this kind of talk before, and they were relatively shocked that someone could do that.
They obviously haven't been hanging around Clubhouse.
So they were saying, why didn't he put up the equations and stuff?
He just kept talking about multidimensional gates theory and waving his arms a lot.
What's going on?
To some extent, I feel that the economists work naive because if they think that is going to harm Eric in the eyes of his audience, they're just completely misunderstanding what his appeal is.
For him, it's now on the CB that he was invited to a prestigious economics seminar series.
And that he stood up to the Chicago School of Economists.
He was invited and then he was treated as an equal and he went into the belly of the beast and told them.
And that's all he needs.
It doesn't matter if they think he's a fool or whatever, right?
Yeah, that's right.
It's a win-win scenario because if they're polite to him, which academics usually are, even to stuff they think is nonsense, then it's a win.
If they're mean to him.
Then it's also a win because it's another example of the distributed idea suppression complex at work.
So it's just part of that broader pattern of Weinstein revolutionizing science, Weinstein getting ignored or rejected, revolutionizing science getting ignored, and so on.
So yeah, it's a win-win.
If there's any kind of response that's even halfway respectable, it'll be complete validation.
As it is, I think it'll just be forgotten and everyone's going to move on and spend their time doing something more productive.
Which will also illustrate their close-mindedness.
Yeah.
So that's what Eric was up to.
Another fellow in his cap in an academic sense of somewhat embarrassing performance, but that doesn't matter.
And then the other younger brother, Brett, and his partner in crime, Heller Hayne, they're continuing on their ivermectin anti-vax roadshow.
And they released...
A new episode recently.
There's very little surprising in what they say now.
It's like a script that just keeps running through the same talking points about the dangers of vaccines and how the mainstream is ignoring things and trying to silence the free thinkers and blah, blah, blah.
But still, they're sometimes able to impress you with the depths that they could plumb.
In the rhetoric.
And there's a couple of examples from the most recent episode.
So I'm going to play a few clips.
This is some extracted clips created by Dan Gilbert, Bad Stats, where Brett and Heller are talking about their critics and what might be wrong with them.
And the idea is that what we are seeing are people behaving under something akin to hypnosis.
A kind of hypnosis that kicks in when these conditions attain.
And I must say, I don't feel that you and I are under this hypnosis, and I do feel that we are encountering a world full of people that is behaving almost as if they are sleepwalking, on autopilot, under some kind of hypnosis,
who are not, in many cases, acting according to their own character and values.
And so this is very alarming.
So anyway, yes, mass formation is well worth tracking.
I don't know that it's 100% accurate as a model, but I will say, if you walk around thinking, am I dealing with hypnotized people, and is that why they're behaving this way?
It seems to be more enlightening than it is confusing.
So anyway, keep tracking it.
And this is in reaction to people not agreeing with him or criticizing him for his anti-vaccine and ivermectin advocacy.
That would be correct, yes.
So the only explanation is that they've been hypnotized by sinister forces.
Yeah, this is such a common thing, isn't it?
I mean, you have the alt-right concept of NPCs, non-player characters, that all the normies out there are just kind of these...
Automatons wandering around in a daze.
And it's such a common thing with the other conspiracists like Chemtrail, 5G, and anti-vax for that matter, where they often have theories to explain why other people can't see what they're seeing.
In the case of Chemtrail people, they think the Chemtrails are kind of spraying stuff that is actually dulling people's critical.
The anti-vax people, of course, believe that the vaccines are kind of making you more docile and pliable.
So yeah.
Wow.
It's amazing, isn't it?
Yeah.
The level of self-awareness is not high, right?
It never was, but it feels like when you're getting to the point that all of your enemies are hypnotized zombies, there might be some cause for reflection there.
I just think my enemies are idiots.
I don't need to.
Imagine that they're hypnotized.
That's enough, isn't it?
They've really gotten worse.
And a friend Liam Bright, he just imagined this alternate history where way back in the distant past, that maybe if those evergreen social justice warrior students hadn't chased bread around campus and sent them both on this trail,
then there'd be thousands of people alive today who hadn't taken Ivermectin and maybe gotten the vaccine instead.
So it's interesting, this sort of alternate history to imagine a chain of events that get thrown into motion.
I know.
Although I think that whatever multiverse we exist in, that we were destined to have Brett become a public intellectual in one form or another.
He would eventually reach a scandal that would...
Propel him into the limelight.
I think it's one of these regularities across the multiverse.
You're basically describing like an Isaac Asimov psychohistory thing.
It is inevitable.
It's the point you cannot change.
He's a force of nature.
But I've got another clip, Matt, which is a nuller illustration of the remarkable level of self-awareness.
In this case, I think it's mostly Heller.
So let's see if she does a bit better than Brett.
For Brett, his enemies are Zombies.
And what's Heller's issue?
It's not there's everyone else, but that is one of the ways, that is one of the dichotomies that I am seeing now.
There's the smug, who largely, you know, are actually functionally innumerate, I think.
And, you know, who say things like follow the science, but don't actually, you know, wouldn't recognize a hypothesis if it smacked him in the nose.
And then there's sort of everyone else.
And yes, there are degrees to which everyone else have conclusions that they're certain of or not certain of or have investigated them as much as possible for risk principles.
But there is a degree of uncertainty.
The smug are inherently certain.
And if you're certain right now that the thing that got handed you by the CDC or MSNBC or anyone is simply true, On account of it got handed to you, then you're not doing your thinking for yourself.
And frankly, your smugness should evaporate right away because it's based on nothing good.
Yes.
Is she talking about us?
Is that us?
Are we the smug ones?
I mean, probably.
But Ma, the fact is, there is no one on this earth, I think, that can compete with the Weinsteins for the level of smug satisfaction that they emanate.
And seem to exist upon.
Them complaining about excess smugness is like me complaining about cynicism and sarcasm.
Like, oh, well, people are always so sarcastic and cynical.
How ridiculous of them.
You know, Stuart Ritchie said it about his book.
They're like so self-satisfied, so constantly smug.
And that notion that they're not certain, it's that fucking lip service.
It's such lip service because they're 95% or 99% certain.
And adding in rogue disclaimers about, well, we don't know.
We're just asking questions.
You have spent a year telling your audience that vaccines are very likely dangerous.
They're being underreported.
Look at all these cases.
You've had endless guests.
From fringe theorists talking about BB's brains exploding and about the cover-up of all these terrible things.
And they talked about flimerosols and vaccines and all of this shit.
And it's a complete smokescreen.
It's a complete smokescreen to claim themselves as, well, we don't know.
We're just, you know, we're just interested in the truth.
And they are remarkably, incredibly smug.
About the sense in which they are superior in their scientific knowledge, their scientific approach.
So I just can't map.
I can't deal with them.
They're getting worse.
They're getting worse.
They actually are getting a lot worse.
They're much worse than when we originally covered them and they weren't good then.
And to your point about smugness, they're quite explicit about this in the self-congratulation for being… Yes!
Really almost the only people who can see through the veil of lies and evaluate evidence correctly and do science properly.
Like they're explicit about it.
They award each other Nobel prizes.
I mean, come on.
I know.
I know.
Okay.
So we're going to get off them soon because it hasn't worked, Matt.
It hasn't improved my mood.
But there's two things that I want to just note.
Two more.
Clips, and I'll try not to rant about them.
I want to put a pin in this, because I think they're going to turn anti-mask.
Now that they were riding high on that they early identified the importance of masks, and we don't need to relitigate the mask yet 2020.
But just listen to this clip.
They don't dwell on it, but I'm putting my flag here.
There's an anti-mask turn coming.
You know, the waiter comes over wearing a mask, right?
And you're sitting there not masked.
And actually, my sense is, to the extent that this does any good at all, we're more or less morally obligated to put them on at that moment to protect this person, right?
It is only because I don't think this is a very effective remedy that I don't think this is a glaring error because it's, you know...
And that's what I was doing until I started to see all of this.
All of this work suggesting that they're not actually...
Particularly affected.
Yeah.
But anyway, yes.
A little bad signal that suggests I don't think this policy is all that well thought out is liable to put you in contact with others who have those doubts and are likely feeling very isolated about them themselves.
So the CDC or whatever were bright all along, Chris.
We've come full circle.
This is great.
This is hilarious.
That'll be, I'm sure that'll be their tick when it emerges.
But yeah, that's, I just, They don't dwell on that, but I think it's definitely coming.
Whatever the contrarian view is, that's what they're attracted to.
That's the secret.
And that's why they're always wrong.
I mean, statistically speaking, if they were just making random guesses on things, they'd be right at least some of the time.
But their ability to be consistently wrong about everything is because of what you just said.
Yeah, so even when they take a position which is You know, relatively correct that like masks are useful in the pandemic.
It's motivated by contrarianism.
It's not motivated by this parsing of evidence that they pretend they don't read the studies.
They don't know how to assess literature and look critically at it.
They've demonstrated that in a way that's undeniable with the ivermectin literature.
So their advocacy for masks was primarily promoted by contrarianism.
So that's a case of like getting a point right doesn't vindicate your approach or way of thinking about things.
A little while ago, my colleague described this kind of love for these mysteries and the idea that things are being hidden and you describe it as this sort of hidden world.
They just love a world where in which There are these fairies at the bottom of the garden in which all of these amazing or frightening things are happening.
But the main thing is that it's hidden.
It's, you know, other people can't see it.
I think some people sort of don't want a world in which what is plain and in front of your face is kind of all there is.
No, they don't.
It's more exciting to live in a world of mystery and intrigue and you uncovering it.
So I get the psychological thing and I have one more.
But I don't know if it's even like how this one is not so bad.
It's just illustrating this tendency.
I see all over the heterodox fear where people essentially, like some people have talked about it being love-bombed by the right or conspiracy fears or any group can do it.
But you take a stance that fits with what other people like and then they treat you nicely.
Brett and Heller, as with so many in this space, they kind of wax lyrical about that process.
I find no mystery to it because it's you tell people something that they want to hear and they treat you nicer.
Like, where's the mystery, right?
But just listen.
And we have lost quite a number of friends in recent times over calling it like we see it.
With respect to issues related to the pandemic.
Guess what else, though?
The other thing, though, what they don't manage to convey is that this causes a kind of upgrade in your social life, because the people who, you know, publicly chastise you in such circumstances are actually not high quality.
They may seem like it under normal circumstances, but...
When the chips are down, they won't be there, and that's actually a very important thing to know.
We learned this at Evergreen, too.
Right, but let's just be very clear, and I know the viewers who are long-time viewers who are coming here because they find something of value will not have made this error, but I could hear what you just said as suggesting that if you get critiqued, you know that person is doing you a solid and isn't worth having around.
No, no, a great friend will...
Critique you.
They will do it carefully.
But there's, you know, there's this public distancing thing that is of a very different sort.
And we saw this at Evergreen.
And, of course, the first time we learned this lesson when this happened at Evergreen, you know, there were lots of people who we had thought were our friends who turned out not to be up to the challenge.
But a great many people emerged.
And the point was the trade was very positive, right?
The upgrade in the quality of people that surrounded us was amazing.
What we would say at the time, in fact, was that there were surprises in both directions.
There's a couple of things, right?
One is that they've upgraded their social circles.
And in regards to the COVID controversy, like who they're condemning there is people like Sam Harris.
And who they've replaced him with are people like Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch.
And whatever you take on Sam Harris, I'm not sure that's an upgrade.
Now you're hanging with the anti-vax guys.
Yeah.
This characterization of being ostracized or canceled in some ways is something that's attributed to the left.
Probably quite fairly, I suppose.
But I mean, look at this recent story where Tucker Carlson is recently hosting a three-part series on this conspiracy around the Capitol building riot.
Called Patriot Purge.
It's just complete lies around stolen elections and so on.
There's a couple of writers for Fox News who have quit in response to that.
I don't think that their conservative friends are going to be saying, well done you, sticking by your principles.
I may disagree with you about this particular point, but good on you.
As soon as Brett and Heather depart from the anti-vax stream, if they were to do so, which I'm sure they wouldn't, then their anti-vax friends would.
Drop them like a hot poker.
Yeah, so that was a cheerful update.
A nice thing to pep our spirits up.
I had a story about going to the pool and you've brought me down just thinking about.
So Matt, we've waffled around, we've dwelt in the swamp of Weinsteinicity for long enough.
Let's turn to the guru of the day.
Who is it?
Who will we deal with this week?
We are dealing with Brene Brown.
Brene Brown.
So, she's someone you tend to see on TED, doing those kinds of talks.
She's been on Oprah Winfrey's show, a bit of a celebrity.
And her thing is very much self-help.
She does have a research background.
She's published papers on various negative emotions and how people deal with them.
She's written a bunch of bestselling books.
I might read them out because the titles actually give a good sense of who she is.
So we have The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead.
I like that one, Dare to Lead.
And also has a couple of podcasts.
Her TED Talk was called The Power of Vulnerability.
So she writes basically self-help books and talks about dealing with emotions positively and rising above various kinds of trauma and negative rumination on emotions like shame, vulnerability, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, the talks that I've clipped from are The Power of Vulnerability and Listening to Shame, which are two TED Talks, extremely popular.
The Power of Vulnerability, 16 million views.
Listening to Shame, 5.6 million views.
And also, she was interviewed by another kind of self-help guy, an athlete, who is also a podcaster, content creator, Lewis Howes, called If You Want to Heal Yourself, Watch This.
Brené Brown and Lewis Howes.
So these are the episodes that I've clipped from.
They're kind of interviews with her or the two TED Talks.
And I will say that whenever we were suggested to do her, one, we wanted to have a break from the culture war sphere.
And I think that is achieved.
She is not really dwelling that much on culture war topics.
And then the second thing was to take some, well, we're in our season of self-help.
She's definitely a self-help guru.
So she fits that.
But also, we actually got quite a few people suggesting her.
But the general comment from people was like, they had a sense.
That there's guru-ish content there, but they didn't think she was all bad or they were saying, you know, a lot of people are recommending her to me and I get a guru vibe.
So like there was a mixed sense from people that she would be a good person to look at, but reluctance to say that she's bad.
There's this mistaken perception, Matt, that all the gurus we cover must be bad.
And that is not the case, right?
That's true.
It's not the case.
I didn't know anything about Brene Brown before we looked into her, and so I came to it with absolutely no preconceptions or assumptions.
Look, I generally don't have a hugely positive view of the self-help literature generally, but I think there's value in self-help, as we said with Jordan Peterson.
So I think I was able to come to this pretty well.
But as she says in an interview with The Guardian, people will find a million reasons to tear your work down.
I have a feeling you might be.
Well, yeah.
There was a talk she gave to creatives, which I also listened to, and I didn't clip from a 99 conference.
And she talked about critics and how to respond to them.
I do have a clip that relates to that, and I put it in a folder saying, is this us?
So it's a bit of a random point to start, but let's hear this clip about critics.
A lot of people refer to it as the man in the arena quote.
And it goes like this.
It is not the critic who counts.
It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles.
The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat.
But when he's in the arena at best, he wins.
And at worst, he loses.
But when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly.
And that's what this conference to me is about.
That's what life is about.
About daring greatly about being in the arena.
Not seeing any blood or sweat on your face at the moment, Chris.
We're at the peanut gallery.
Yeah.
But on the critical side of it, to take my designated role, this is a convenient framing to essentially posit that critics are just there to tear you down and they do it because they cannot.
Do what you do.
So it's the people who dare to go out and make themselves vulnerable.
They're better than the people who would just criticize them for the effort.
And there's like validity to that, right?
Because you do get that it's easier for people to tell you, for example, how to do an interview with Sam Harris than if they had to do it themselves.
I'd rather have a peck from the air.
So I get that.
I understand why somebody who creates content would feel that way.
And I think there are malignant criticisms, but I also think there's a category of criticism, which is not that, which is properly engaging and that people can point out issues and flaws in your content in a reasonable way.
And even in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, but which is accurate.
Yeah.
It's reminded me of the skin in the game concept.
Yeah, of Nassim Taleb's.
Who's that?
Who's that?
A quiet, unassuming guy called Nassim Taleb.
I guess it's the same take really, isn't it?
I think there is validity in that.
The concept of betting markets and so on are kind of good in that you tend to get better information when people have put something at risk in order to participate.
And there's certainly a never-ending number of people who will make low effort.
Criticisms of things.
On the other hand, I'll offer as a Canada example, we could even link to it in the show notes.
A couple of researchers in my field, a fellow by the name of Paul DeFabro and another guy called Daniel King, they wrote commentary, quite a detailed paper describing in painful detail how my research was wrong, right?
How it was flawed, how it had all these problems with it and so on.
And that was an extraordinarily...
Positive contribution, I think.
I've since responded to it, telling them that they're completely wrong and given the reasons.
But it has inspired a lot more empirical work, which I think has comprehensively demonstrated that they're wrong.
But, you know, opinions vary, and that's what good inquiry is all about.
To her credit, though, she does acknowledge that there is that legitimate category of criticism.
And really, when she was talking about I got the impression because she gave some examples and it was people critiquing her appearance and saying various disparaging comments about her.
And I'm sure that's very common, especially when you have like a million view thing.
There is a value to tell people, don't listen to your worst critics, even though we have a negativity bias within us.
And actually there's a clip where she discusses.
Negativity bias without using the word, which I thought was quite good, seems relevant.
So let's hear her illustrate that.
Well, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss and she tells you 37 things that you do really awesome and one thing that you can't, you know, an opportunity for growth.
And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right?
Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well.
Because when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak.
When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded.
And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.
Yeah, we have a negativity bias.
We do have a negativity bias.
We fasten on to the criticisms and we often overreact to them.
And a different kind of person, or many people rather, can actually be demoralized by that kind of negative feedback or, as she talks about, avoid taking risks and avoid things like public speaking for fear of exactly that,
which is obviously not a healthy approach.
So I think the value of that, even though, like everything, it can be taken too far, I think the message of our podcast is always this golden mean type thing.
But given that people do have a bit of a tendency in the other direction, there is value in that.
Yeah.
There's also Americanisms, right, about the growth opportunities.
I can't remember how she phrased it.
And 37 areas that you're awesome in.
I've never heard that in an evaluation in the UK or Japan.
Nobody has ever called me awesome.
And that's something that I mentioned because it's kind of pervasive in this material and then self-help material generally.
A lot of the self-help gurus are American or they're into the kind of American,
I mean, I don't think we can entirely blame them because they are talking to an audience of Americans, but it's kind of spoken as if it's universal truths instead of culturally specific.
Maybe I'll give you an example of the kind of thing I mean.
So here's a little extract.
Yes, I'm very excited to be here.
We have an event called the Summit of Greatness every year, an annual event.
And the people on my team in our program write down the person that they want to have on the School of Greatness.
And most of our team is women, and most of them put your name down as the people, the person we want to have on.
So we're finally making it happen and my team can stop asking for Brene.
It's happening.
And I'm very excited about this because you have a new book out called Braving the Wilderness, The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone.
Make sure you guys get this book right now.
It's going to change the game.
And I got a chance to go through it.
Love everything that you write about in here.
And I feel very connected to you.
Yeah.
That's like her being introduced by the guy interviewing, right?
But the title of the conference, the book, and the kind of glowing recommendations, it burns my soul, Mark.
Yeah, I'm having to put aside my natural kind of...
At a cultural level, it all just rubs me the wrong way.
I should probably get that out of the way.
Yeah, me too.
We're bad people for this reason.
There's also the fact that he mentions that she is very popular amongst his female staff.
There is a clear thing in Brené Brown's work that it's popular with women.
And we aren't the...
I think we are the target audience as well because she makes it a universal thing.
But the thing that she's critiquing in a lot of her material is the cultural value that men should be emotionally unavailable and that people don't focus enough on themselves.
And these kind of things, which in a sense, it's kind of kryptonite, right?
Because I'm not just talking about with like men, but I have a general cultural value attached to not focusing so much on yourself in a self-indulgent way and not being strongly impacted by whatever your emotions are and that kind of thing.
So the thing that she's critiquing...
Is that culture that likely influences a lot of the way that I view things.
Yeah, yeah.
There's probably more clips that will make these points better.
And I've got some thoughts about the way in which her ideas exemplify American values around confidence, around risk-taking, around individualism, around growth.
Yeah.
I think that's interesting, but I think there's better clips that will speak to this.
Yes, that's right.
So let's see.
Which would you like to go to, Matt?
Vulnerability or shame?
Oh, let's go with shame.
Okay.
This is something we're both familiar with.
It is, yeah.
There's a lot of coverage of shame.
And maybe to start off before we get deep into what shame is about, there is her talking about the reluctance that people feel to address these topics.
Which we may be illustrating, right?
But here we go.
I thought, I'm going to leave that shame stuff behind because I spent six years studying shame before I really started writing and talking about vulnerability.
And I thought, thank God, because shame is this horrible topic.
No one wants to talk about it.
It's the best way to shut people down on an airplane.
What do you do?
I study shame.
Oh.
Ah.
And I see you.
You know.
Ah.
Yeah.
So, you know, just...
People don't like talking about shame.
But at the same time, while Northern Irish and Australian culture of values being what they are, being aware of being ashamed is not something I lack or guilt, right?
And people being unwilling to talk about it, it's a very common cultural topic, like Catholic guilt, right?
Or Catholic shame, for example.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, look, shame and guilt is the only reason I check my emails and read my graduate students' papers.
It's a great motivator.
But what does Brene Brown say about the role of shame there, Chris?
It's a bit more complex than simply saying, shame's a negative emotion.
It makes you feel bad.
So forget about that.
Just be super happy and confident and feel good about yourself.
That's not quite her take, is it?
No.
So, okay.
There's two clips, I think, that outline her view about shame.
So one is distinguishing shame and guilt.
Okay?
Definitions are important, so this is her kind of making an important distinction.
The thing to understand about shame is it's not guilt.
Shame is a focus on self.
Guilt is a focus on behavior.
Shame is I am bad.
Guilt is I did something bad.
How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, I'm sorry, I made a mistake?
How many of you would be willing to say that?
Guilt.
I'm sorry, I made a mistake.
Shame.
I'm sorry, I am a mistake.
There is a huge difference between shame and guilt.
And here's what you need to know.
Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders.
And here's what you even need to know more.
Guilt inversely correlated with those things.
The ability to hold something we've done or fail to do up against who we want to be.
It's incredibly adaptive.
It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive.
Yeah.
So this speaks to pretty common cultural values that are around at the moment, which is that you affirm individuals, whether they're children or adults, as being legitimate and good, etc.
And you focus on the behavior and you look at bad behaviors, look at problematic behaviors and look to change them and acknowledge that they're a problem without it being a reflection of who you are.
And the idea is, If you do that, what it does is it reduces resistance.
Because if you could sort of decouple your identity and your sense of self-worth from the problematic thing, it makes it easier to change that problematic thing.
Because obviously the hardest thing to change is something that you actually personally identify with.
So it all makes sense.
It reminds me also of the Christian concept of love the sinner and hate the sin.
It's kind of the same thing really in sort of New Age language.
But you know, it's not...
We should talk about emotions, I think, and their role.
Not our emotions.
I don't want to know about your feelings, but in an abstract sense, we could talk about them.
But it's not inconsistent, I think, with sort of practical applied psychology.
But what I didn't hear her talk about at all is just some of the more basic stuff about Why people even have emotions in the first place, what their functional role is, because they're not like a disease, whether it's shame or guilt or fear or whatever.
These things, I don't necessarily think she's saying this, right?
But in the self-help literature generally, there can be a tendency to think of all of those aspects of negative affect as being a problem somehow that you need to deal with.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, like you said, her take on shame is not just that it's inherently bad.
It's the not talking about shame, which is the issue, the unwillingness to acknowledge shame or that kind of thing.
Yeah.
I have a clip which highlights this a bit more, a bit more about her views on shame.
So here we go.
and it turned out to be shame.
And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection.
Is there something about me that if other people know it or see it,
be worthy of connection?
The things I can tell you about it, it's universal.
We all have it.
The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection.
No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you talk about it.
Yeah, that illustrates the idea, and it ties into her delineation of...
Shame being bad, guilt being good, that kind of thing.
But I think she neglects the role more generally of these negative emotions.
So just from a cognitive psychology point of view, all emotions serve functions.
We're evolved to have them and they're just a normal thing that humans and very likely a lot of other animals have too.
So one of the functions that emotions have is to modulate behavior.
As opposed to just being a purely rational brain in a box, making deductions and forming stratagems and so on, being in a state of fear, for instance, and having the fight or flight response is going to put you in a mode of behavior that is going to instigate and sort of adds the flavor,
if you like, to the cognitions in order to instigate behaviors that are more appropriate to the given situation, which could be a dangerous one.
Another aspect of emotion is in terms of Modulating interpersonal relationships too, because an awful lot of emotions are social emotions.
So, you know, she talks about shame.
That's a social kind of emotion that it's got to do with how other people view you and even the internalized aspect of it, how you view yourself, something that is not highly regarded, that's going to decrease your status in the eyes of others.
Being aware of that can modulate behavior in order to help you navigate social relationships better.
Feeling jealousy, feeling anger, feeling like you're not being recognized, whatever.
Again, you can easily see how these emotions are going to modulate social behavior and serve as a kind of a signal to instigate behaviors that will rectify a problem.
So pretty much all emotions have a valence.
There's a couple of schemes of emotions.
One quite neat one sort of organizes it in a two-dimensional kind of way.
So one dimension is a positive-negative valence.
Yeah, does it feel good?
Is it a signifier that things are going well and, you know, say the course because this is a good thing.
So feeling love and happiness and excitement and interest, that kind of thing, versus feeling, you know, fear and self-loathing and so on.
And then the other dimension is Got to do with sort of activity.
Is it an emotion that kind of heightens your arousal or depresses your arousal?
And this has got to do with using your energies effectively, right?
So emotions that put you into a heightened state of arousal are going to instigate more activity essentially.
It could be that you're feeling hungry.
Yeah.
Or you're feeling bored or whatever.
It's going to instigate you to sort of go out there and do stuff where you might be feeling satisfied and content and so on.
It's a signifier that everything's right in the world.
You can relax and take it easy and conserve energy.
So just with that general framework of emotions, I think is helpful because the self-helpy stuff, I think there's some good in it, but it kind of misses, I think, some of the useful functions of negative emotions.
So I believe you're talking about the circumplex model of effect, which I know well, Matt, because it was a core topic of my thesis related to rituals and dysphoric and euphoric rituals and the level of arousal.
So I just signed off.
I'm just saying, I'm just highlighting.
I know these effect models too.
I couldn't remember what the model was called, so you're one step ahead of me.
I bow to your superior wisdom, Chris.
That's right.
But I'm not so sure that she doesn't.
I think her work is like relatively nuanced in terms of the books that she has.
I would be surprised if she doesn't talk about positive functions that shame can fulfill or that kind of thing.
But it is true to say that her work is more focused on social work, applied counseling settings rather than Down at the level of cognition and evolutionary origins for emotions.
And I think we can see this in an example where she's talking about the kind of damage that a shaming experience in childhood could have on somebody's behavior in adulthood.
So here's like a story she tells.
And so I must have had fear on my face because my coach looked at me and said, don't be a PUSSY, get on the line.
And he said, that's the day that I learned that the way you deal with that.
Is you change that fear into rage.
And he said, and I just plowed over the guy across from me.
And then he said, then I spent the next 20 years plowing over my wife, my children, my colleagues, the people who worked for me.
He said, that's what I did with my fear.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't disagree.
I mean, I know what you're saying about that.
She's not talking to a theoretical psychology audience, right?
She's talking to people that.
Aren't happy with themselves or their life to some degree and are looking for some positive messages.
And look, there certainly are people, especially men, right, who will translate a negative emotion like fear or rejection or whatever very maladaptively into a kind of overreaching towards aggression and dominance or whatever.
Or alternatively, people can respond to it maladaptively in the sense of feeling cowed and sort of internalizing that and thinking that there isn't an option to rectify it.
I think you just have to be careful not to take simplistic messages from this.
Sometimes the correct response to fear is to be a little bit aggressive, you know, in an adaptive way.
Sometimes the response is to actually pull your head in and maybe not do that risky thing that is making you feel fearful.
Similarly, like eating cookies in a shower when you're hungover, there's a feeling sheen from that is, in some ways, It's good because you realize like maybe I've made the wrong choices or arguing with that person on Twitter in the middle of the night and then just thinking like,
what have I done?
Self-shame can be useful at times to make you realize like maybe that behavior wasn't good.
That's very true.
That's another random example that you picked there.
It is.
It's just something that could happen.
I'll divulge my own vulnerability that when I was a teenager, we'd go out to nightclubs in Belfast.
You were trying to get yourself significantly drunk before you went to the nightclub because beer is expensive when you're out.
Friends would come and we'd drink.
I do remember a non-glorious time when I didn't have very much time to prepare before going out, and I was doing shots of aftershock liqueur in the shower before going to a rock club.
So that's pretty bad, too.
Rock on, dude.
Rock on.
That's bodacious.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Respect, man.
No, it's not bodacious.
Aftershock is that impressive.
That was an honorable instance of you getting over your Northern Ireland emotional male repression and divulging that.
Thank you for sharing that with me, Chris.
That's all right, yeah.
But okay, so let's just check with Brene.
Would she agree with us here?
Is there any way in which her messages are kind of departing from the stuff we're saying?
There's stuff that we're saying that shame can be useful.
No, I think she does say that.
Maybe it's a good time to switch to talk a bit about, because the other thing that she talks about is vulnerability.
And she offers this framing about the way that people conceive of vulnerability normally as a negative thing and what it actually is.
Let's hear her talk a little bit about that.
So here's the power of vulnerability.
Vulnerability is not weakness.
I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty.
It fuels our daily lives.
And I've come to the belief, this is my 12th year doing this research, that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.
So is that how you think of vulnerability?
I mean, at least it's framed as counterintuitive.
I will say listening to your material did make me think, do I actually think that?
Or are you telling me that I view things like that, right?
There were some parts where she's like, people think like this, and I'm like, do I?
Do I think vulnerability is bad?
I'm not sure you do, or most people do.
There's that trope, it's an internet thing, so boomers cover your ears.
It's called Big Dick Energy, which in that kind of idea is that it's such a coarse term, but the idea with that is that people who are genuinely confident and not just sort of superficially confident with bravado and bluster and so on have a kind of Self-awareness,
self-confidence that allows them to essentially be vulnerable to use their language.
So, you know, just like you sharing your story about drinking the alcohol.
That was big dick energy.
Look, the thing I will say about that is I know what you're talking about with big dick energy.
I hate saying it.
Let's stop saying it.
Be the energy.
Be the energy.
Let's do that.
I will also, like, this is what I mean where I'm a little bit conflicted about things because I don't think she's recommending having BD energy.
And I also think when I see people who are talking about that, that they're not doing it in an ironic way.
They're actually saying, like, James Lindsay, it's sort of tongue-in-cheek, but actually he does think he's this impressive figure that's standing up and doesn't give a shit.
It comes across to me as remarkably weak and insecure, the opposite of the effect.
So you're saying that she is calling that out as well, saying that people who project that they are invulnerable and that they don't have weakness are actually insecure and the people who are vulnerable and don't feel strong,
right?
That it can be a kind of mask at times.
That's how I took it.
But I guess maybe that's one of the issues here.
In some ways, it's a tautology, right?
So people can take from what she's saying what they will, right?
You're right.
Your summary was what I took from it.
But in some sense, she's saying a tautology.
She's saying you can't be courageous without feeling fear.
Well, the very definition of being courageous is to be afraid and to act bravely.
If you didn't have any awareness there was any danger, then that's not really being brave.
So it's a tautology.
It sounds nice, but I'm not sure if there's much depth to it.
Yeah, and there is one bit where this happens.
It's a TED Talk thing.
It's also something people do in presentations that I wanted to highlight because it's not specific to her.
But this is a very common thing.
I'm always very suspicious when people do this about the level of research they put into the claim.
But she talks about the original definition of courage.
And let me just play what she describes.
What they had in common was a sense of courage.
And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute.
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language, it's from the Latin word cur, meaning heart.
And the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect.
They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly.
And the last was they had connection, and this was the hard part, as a result of authenticity.
They were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which is you have to absolutely do that for connection.
So I'll get your thoughts, Matt, but just, you know, there's this phrasing of...
I want to distinguish between seeking the truth and searching for the truth.
I got a Jordan Hall vibe where she said courage and bravery.
There's important distinctions there.
The definition of the word potato comes from pot, meaning small round object in the old Irish, right?
Or this kind of thing.
It's just a trope of presentations.
It's not her fault.
Lots of people do it, but it's a trope-ish.
So I wanted to flag it.
Well, look, I had the same thought and I think it is kind of her fault because I didn't really buy this big distinction between shame and guilt being entirely different things.
I don't quite buy that.
And the idea of courage and bravery being entirely different things.
You're making them different by giving them special definitions.
And then you're working with those definitions as if you've outlined a new theory.
But actually, with the shame and guilt distinction, all she's doing is saying you should have good self-esteem.
Because having decent self-esteem and not feeling huge degrees of self-stigma, that's actually a barrier to actually challenging negative things that you might be doing.
And that's a very anodyne point that kind of is just common knowledge.
And this courage and bravery thing as well, I'm just not sure that anything's being added here apart from packaging pretty good advice, but it's kind of just homespun wisdom.
I'm not seeing any new ideas in it.
No life-changing lessons, Matt.
Well...
Let's see if that's the case.
Here's some more on vulnerability.
This one, maybe you just need to be a bit more open, a bit more vulnerable.
The other thing that they had in common was this.
They fully embraced vulnerability.
They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful.
They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable.
Nor did they really talk about it being excruciating, as I had heard earlier in the shame interviewing.
They just talked about it being necessary.
They talked about the willingness to say I love you first.
The willingness to do something where there are no guarantees.
The willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram.
The willingness to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out.
They thought this was fundamental.
So did that alter?
The examples are pretty...
I think one of the things that she does well is when she gives examples of people feeling vulnerable or taking risks and how it can be a difficult thing to do, but a source of strength and that kind of thing.
But what about you?
No, I think it's excellent advice.
You know, when she's talking about courage, she's mainly talking about it.
In the realm of personal relationships and perhaps the tendency of many people to shut themselves down or avoid taking risks of various kinds.
And that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if two people are doing the same thing.
So look, it's obviously good advice.
I'm trying to think of it as something, anything more than that.
I'm impressed when people, when I look at the comments on our videos, the level of It was a really powerful reaction from a lot of people saying, "I'm so glad I saw this.
It's helped me so much."
And there are people sharing all these intimate stories, and I, like you, just have more of a reaction like, "Ah."
Yeah, I guess it is helpful to be like that, but it doesn't feel like something that I never considered.
That opening myself to another person or to the possibility of failure could be a strength.
I do remember, though, when I started looking about some of the psychology research on interpersonal relationships, that the discovery that a lot of things that build a relationship is about disclosure of information, right?
And information that you don't disclose to other people.
There are some studies about tricking people into creating Feelings of intimacy by staring at each other's faces and telling secrets, exchanging secrets, and that you can actually generate feelings of intimacy with relative strangers and stuff through this.
And to me, that was kind of insightful when you start to examine relationships through that framework.
And this is kind of related.
Yeah, no, it is.
It is just an interesting aside.
I've known people who did that.
Deliberately and in a very instrumental way because they knew that saying something that came across as being a very personal thing.
Manipulative narcissists.
Malignant sociopaths.
I don't think they were that malignant, but they were just very socially capable people who wanted a response and knew how to instigate it.
There's a fine line.
It's a fine line.
That's right.
Yeah, no, I'm with you.
This is the thing with self-help.
If you feel like you're basically fine, then you're going to be like us.
You'll go, "Oh, yeah."
That's good advice, I guess.
I don't think I'm basically fine, but I also think that knowing… I'm sure I'm self-delusional in this.
I'm complacent.
Put it that way.
I'm well aware of all my… Feelings and binds of neuroses that I carry around.
You don't want to get better.
I live in the darkness.
But I also think that knowing things and putting them into practical application is different.
And also that there is a sense in which I don't want to be the way that self-help people want me to be.
I don't want to.
I don't want to be an American, so I'm content for the maladjustment in some extent, but there's always things that you can improve with relationships with other people.
We've all got work to do, Matt.
We've all got work to do.
You've got to do the work.
Okay, well, I want to change gears here for a second because there's something I wanted to ask you about because one of the takeaways I had after listening to a lot of Brene Brown was very much how The messages she had for people were like extolling American values, as you said,
right?
It's about opening up, communicating, being yourself, growing, changing and striving and achieving greatness and being independent and not caring what anyone else thought, being that tall poppy and standing out from the crowd, right?
These are all very, very American.
Values.
If you go to Japan or Northern Ireland, say, right, there's a slightly different pattern of things that are considered healthy and good.
So in Japan, I think, well, it's changing now, but in traditional Japan, a lot of those values are like, no, you shouldn't do that.
Don't, you know, be a good member of the team and be respectful and you should feel shame, right?
When they're telling you you've done the wrong thing, you should feel bad about that because you need to be trying harder to fit in.
What do you think?
To what degree is it, should we be concerned about extolling a particular set of cultural values as them being universal psychological things?
No, there's definitely, there's a lot of stuff in this which is like very individualist culture focused.
And even within that, to some extent, a lot of the examples and stuff are fairly elite, middle class.
Kind of stuff.
I'm not saying that her work primarily focuses on that, but a lot just because of the nature of who she is, the anecdotes are about giving speeches at conferences and about taking business class flights and talking to people.
And there's a lot of reference to high school sports clubs and so on.
And it doesn't fit.
I'm a middle class person as well and have given conference presentations.
So I get some of the...
But I also think that there's an alienating aspect of that, that if you're talking to people cross-culturally, that a lot of it wouldn't relate.
I don't know the extent to which she intends for it to be a universal thing versus primarily speaking to an American audience, or at least a Western audience.
But I agree that in general with the self-help over,
There is this universalizing of American values and American individualist values, which grates a little.
And it's not to say that the other cultures, they just value that you slam your individuality into nothingness and you simply conform.
But it's more that your personal self is not all that matters in the world.
There's an interdependent network of relationships that you exist within.
For you to function well in those kinds of societies requires that you sometimes will put your self-development and the interest secondary to your network.
An illustration I can give from a personal example is that whenever my kids were born and at the time people were using Facebook and I would have been sharing pictures on there would be fairly normal.
in a UK context to do that.
But my wife, who's Japanese, had some concern about sharing pictures because it can make a lot of people feel bad.
But it's just a different focus.
The UK one is more individualist focused and America is more towards that than the UK.
Yeah, I completely agree.
Australian cultural values aren't that different from American ones, but they do value that risk-taking and entrepreneurialism and individualism and sort of self-prioritization and dare I say self-aggrandizement in a way that Australians would just sort of naturally.
We go along a fair bit of the way, but not quite that far.
So when I would hear sort of self-help-y type people on places like Oprah at length about how you need to focus more on yourself, stop thinking about what other people, about them.
You need to focus on yourself.
That was a really strong message.
And there's obviously some truth to that.
I'm not saying that's a completely wrong thing, but it did rub me the wrong way.
And I think just because of a cultural difference.
Yeah.
And so I have a clip that is talking about this and it's talking about belonging and fitting into groups.
And as we'll see, you know, there's good parts and there's parts I might take issue with, but here's a clip.
And that was my biggest fear was being alone.
Oh yeah.
Cause that's what, that's what teams and groups deliver.
They deliver this thing that you're not alone.
The problem is there's just, I was so shocked to learn in the research that the opposite of belonging is fitting in.
Because fitting in is assessing a group of people and thinking, who do I need to be?
What do I need to say?
What do I need to wear?
How do I need to act?
And changing who you are.
And true belonging never asks us to change who we are.
It demands that we be who we are.
Because if we fit in because how we've changed ourselves, that's not belonging.
That's not belonging.
Because you betrayed yourself?
For other people.
And that's not sustainable.
Yeah, you start to lose yourself.
You start to lose yourself, exactly what you said.
And so I think it's hard.
You have to show up as who you are.
How do we find out who we are?
That's the life's work, right?
That's freaking hard.
Do you know who you are?
Yeah, I do.
Who are you?
In what way?
Perfect clip.
I almost can't add anything to that because Brene has, I think, made my point.
Well, yeah, again, there's that parsing of belonging is different than fitting in, right?
I get what she's saying, the distinction she wants to draw, but they are in some ways synonymous.
It's not even a criticism, right?
It's just saying that this is a very American take on Belonging and being a part of a group.
It's a zero-compromise approach.
You do not change yourself or moderate yourself at all.
You're a force of one.
You need to find groups that completely accept your individuality.
That's not a bad or a good thing.
That's the interesting thing about cultural values.
They're just different.
Yeah, and we heard, Matt, the question about who you are, right?
And that this is the, in some sense, this is the most important question that exists on the earth.
And like, I, I, I, you know, it's just.
I get why people, I know, you know, everyone's thinking about themselves and their place in the universe and, you know, what kind of person they are.
And these things are...
I get why that's interesting, but at the same time, I also feel like how much time can you spend just so fixated on your unique self and what kind of beautiful butterfly you're transforming into through the various stages of your life?
Is there that much of a puzzle?
give it a I'll just give an alternative here so this is the interviewer asking her about who she is and
What makes you complicated?
I don't know if I'm complicated, but I'm complex.
You're interesting.
I hope so.
I think what makes me complex is, I think what makes everyone complex is the paradoxical nature of people.
So, you know, like I speak in public.
I love doing that, but I'm incredibly introverted.
I'm kind of a traditionalist around things.
My kids say yes ma 'am, no ma 'am.
But I also raise them to challenge authority every time they get the opportunity to do that.
But to be really polite when they're doing it.
So I think I'm unapologetically earnest.
I believe in the goodness of people, but I believe it's hard work to stay out of fear and stay good.
And so I think I understand people.
I think I have a lot of empathy, but I'm also not afraid of discomfort.
So I think there's just a lot of push and pull.
And I think that's true of all of us.
I do not like to be defined.
I was going to say, I feel like my entire life, I didn't want to be defined as well.
There's this thing called Barnum statements.
Sorry, I was just laughing at the expression on your face as you were listening to that.
Yes, Barnum Statements.
Horoscopes.
You know, sometimes you like going to parties.
You're introverted, but sometimes you like being around people.
And you're a private person, but sometimes you want to talk about how you feel.
As she said, everyone thinks that.
Yeah, I'm literally wrapped inside an enigma.
But the thing is that she's kind of saying it's not special to feel like that because everyone feels like that.
But I'm not sure she's really taking the lesson of that, which is that sense, in a way, it doesn't tell you very much because everyone has a mixture of values and feelings and so on.
And so again, the parsing of I'm not complicated, I'm complex.
I'm not a sense maker.
I'm a maker of sense.
Yeah.
This is, again, this is the cultural difference, right?
Cynical bastards like you and me, people describing themselves as this rich tapestry, as this person who's in a process of transformation into a beautiful butterfly.
And it's just got so many fascinating layers for people to delve into and explore that can be revealed to the world.
That's super self-helpy.
And for many people, it helps them feel positively about themselves.
But I think for guys like us, I feel like I have good self-confidence, but I just don't think I'm special in any of those ways.
I could point to a bunch of people that are pretty much a copy of, and I don't feel like I need to have all of that story, all of that background in order to feel okay.
Matt, so there's two clips that I want to play related to this.
One of them is, it is reiterating a point, so I'll make it briefly, but let me play the clip because I think it speaks to this exact point.
Yeah, you start to lose yourself.
You start to lose yourself, exactly what you said.
And so I think it's hard.
You have to show up as who you are.
How do we find out who we are?
That's the life's work, right?
That's freaking hard.
Do you know who you are?
Yeah, I do.
Who are you?
In what way?
If someone just said, who are you, Brene, what would you say?
Brene Brown.
Mom, partner, researcher, storyteller, Texan.
I don't know.
I ask them how much time they have.
Because, you know, the thing is that we want to...
Well, we ask people who they are and we want to know.
We'd like those really easy files to put them in.
Of course.
But I'm a complicated person.
Are you?
Yeah.
And so I think I know who I am.
Well, just that, but I just imagine meeting someone and saying, well, who are you?
Like, I would never fucking ask someone, but they just say I did it and they're like, how much time do you have?
I've got 30 seconds.
You've got 30 seconds before I lose interest.
I was just going to say before, I was just thinking about how Just focus on self-growth.
I don't want to.
I don't really care about that.
I think I'm good enough.
Chris, look, I pay my taxes.
My kids are fed.
I'm not committing any crimes.
I donate to a couple of charities.
That's enough.
That's enough.
I just want to have a good time.
I want to have fun.
Let's talk to your wife.
No, yeah, I get the point.
Look, we are completely aware.
I want to just flag this up for everyone that's listening and Americans who might be getting frustrated.
We are very aware that this is like us butting up against our insecurities or our cultural backgrounds or whatever the case may be.
But one, this is your fault for telling us to do this content.
I think that's important to just.
Make it clear that, you know, maybe we're wrong.
Maybe we're being defensive in some respect to it, but also maybe there is not a one size fits all for these kinds of topics and that there are things that different cultural values, different personality types, that there's value to be taken from the content,
but you don't have to buy into all of it and you don't have to make your personal.
Self-transformation, your life's work, your Michelangelo painting, we all do that anyway.
We don't have to make it our central narrative.
We all have autobiographies and we derive meaning from them.
I don't know if this is an unfair comparison, but it's Jordan Peterson, in a way, not reading this kind of importance to your identity and meaning.
And I really get how that It is important to people who are a bit lost or to people who are struggling to find themselves, especially when you go through adolescence or you're having a difficult time.
I get it, and I get why that's helpful.
I'm sure I could listen to this material, various health-help material, and gain benefit from it.
But... Yeah.
Yeah, but I just...
Well, Chris...
Yeah, there's a but.
I mean...
There's a but.
I'm not going to lie to you.
But yeah, yeah.
Look, I'm going to say something similar, which is like with reference again to Liam Bright, who I mentioned before, he's a logical positivist and logical positivists have this idea of verifiable statements.
Statements that can somehow be checked and verified logically and empirically and seem to be true or not.
And self-help is stuff like Brene Brown is not that.
It's like the stories we weave and the stories we...
Tell about ourselves in order to sort of construct a kind of meaning around our lives and give it a kind of a direction and a flavor and a narrative.
So that's fine.
But I guess what you're saying is that other options are available.
You could make a different story.
Brene Brown's is nice.
I don't have a problem with it.
And I can see it being very helpful to some people.
But it is, to a large degree, an anthem.
Of American values, the American narrative of being a good and wonderful and worthwhile person.
There's nothing in this which challenges self-help, spirituality, wellness industry.
This fits right in there.
There'd be no issue with Brené Brown talking to lots of the kind of spirituality gurus that we would look at, Brené Paltrow or this kind of thing, because it nestles into there quite nicely.
Also say, Matt, that you mentioned that you, you know, you're not that special and you're a dime a dozen Australian.
You're not that unusual.
And except for my character flaws, I would say I'm the CMU.
The character flaws might be more extreme than for some other people, but in other respects, you can find plenty of me in Northern Ireland.
Just go to the local bar, to the corner.
Throw a rock.
You hit it.
Yeah, misanthropic bearded man in the corner.
But that is not the way that Brene and the people that she's speaking to see themselves.
And there's an illustration of it here.
I'm always looking for, I don't know about you, but I'm always looking for the roadmap.
Like I want to find the researcher, storyteller, Christian, lover of all people.
Fighter of the resistance.
I want to find the blueprint of who's ahead of me believing what I believe in and doing it really well.
Mm-hmm.
But there's not really a blueprint sometimes.
We're all trying to figure it out.
Yeah.
We're all trying to figure it out.
I don't get to copy anybody.
And so it's hard.
Yeah.
It's still hard.
But here's a thing that has changed everything for me.
I belong to me.
So even when I feel alone and I wonder who's my crew and who are my people, I belong to me for sure.
For the first time in my life, maybe.
Yeah.
She doesn't want to work with that belonging idea.
Hey, and you can belong to yourself, then that completes the circle, really, doesn't it?
Yeah, the sneak is eating itself.
But it's the thing that they mention that you look for figures to idolize, but then...
The indication is that there's nobody that's quite blazed the path that she wants to walk on, which I'm not so sure.
That's the case for public inspirational speakers.
I also think there's value.
I don't want to sound too negative because the notion that feeling secure in yourself and accepting yourself for whoever you are, that gives you a strength that then you can forge out and be parts of groups, but you don't use that to define your worth.
That's a valid, valuable thing for people to realize.
It's hard to put into practice.
There's value in what she's saying, but despite the lip service paid to not fitting in and being okay by yourself and so on, there's still a lot of focus on finding your crew and the groups and how you'll be successful and stuff.
And there's talk about failure and the importance of failure, but there's...
And the people who are writing books about how to do well and stuff.
It's like a prosperity gospel.
I don't know if I'm expressing it well.
No, no, I think I know what you're saying, which is it's a bit like a prosperity gospel type of thing, you know, or the secret where you believe it and it'll happen sort of thing.
And the people saying that kind of thing are the people who have succeeded and say, you can be like me, right?
This is very much like the people who they could be selling you secrets to invest on
I do want to give her credit for one point because she does say when she's talking at the TED conference, she kind of highlights that the people who are successful there are people with a litany of failures.
So that being aware of that and not seeing them as just these hyper-successful people, it can be useful.
It can be humanizing because you can recognize that their success is built on the back of risks and failures.
I'll play the clip just so you can hear her say it.
You know what the big secret about TED is?
I can't wait to tell people this.
I guess I'm doing it right now.
This is like the failure conference.
Know what it is?
You know why this place is amazing?
Because very few people here are afraid to fail.
And no one that gets on the stage so far that I've seen has not failed.
I have failed miserably many times.
I don't think the world understands that because of shame.
Yeah, I think I could be being a bit uncharitable too.
Yeah.
I just like a tightrope to walk, right?
Yeah.
Uh, look, I think I'm struggling to say much about Brene because I'd like to have an inspirational speaker who, who really still is a failure and could talk to us about how people are dealing with that.
There's some anti-comedy that does that kind of thing, you know, comedians who talk about how terrible they are at being comedians, but it's sometimes funny and sometimes incredibly self-indulgent.
Uh, look, I think I'm struggling to say much about Brene because The advice is consistent with most of the stuff we know about what makes for healthy psychology.
But at the same time, it also feels like a huge procession of inspirational quote means.
It's like they're not wrong, they're not bad, but it's hard to find for me much to get my teeth into.
Yeah, I did have that sense at various times that there's a lot of pausing for dramatic effect after an inspirational comment.
And there's some triteness to the insights as well.
I think that's always a mixture in these kind of talks.
But at TED Talks, it's often framed as if this talk is extremely important and that I'm distilling for you.
The most fascinating thing that I've discovered in the past 18 years of laboring in the minds of research to distill this one crystal.
I'm going to give it to you and it's going to transform your life.
And it's not.
It's not.
It's just a talk that's interesting to listen to for 30 minutes that you might get some value out of.
Here, I'll give you an illustration.
I'm going to spend a year.
I'm going to totally deconstruct shame.
I'm going to understand how vulnerability works.
And I'm going to outsmart it.
So I was ready, and I was really excited.
As you know, it's not going to turn out well.
You know this.
So I could tell you a lot about shame, but I'd have to borrow everyone else's time.
But here's what I can tell you that it boils down to.
And this may be one of the most important things that I've ever learned in the decade of doing this research.
It's so TED talking, isn't it?
Let's tell a personal anecdote.
If I'm going to critique my specialty, that's American-style self-deprecation.
I thought it was going to change the world.
We all know how that's going to go, right?
Just subtle as a God's sad wit.
We're sorry, Americans.
Don't unstop, subscribe for our Patreon.
We love America.
It's going to be polarizing, isn't it?
But look, okay, I'm going to say something that I like, which I find quite American-y.
And a specific part of America, like Texas.
So she does a kind of folksy charm thing where she'll make reference to, you know, her upbringing or her traditional values.
And here's an example.
I like this one.
In surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule, not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing.
You got to dance with the one who brung you.
And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability.
I learned about these things from studying shame.
So she's going to talk about shame, even though it's not a topic that people like, because you got to dance with the one who brung you.
I didn't do a Texas accent, but I feel like if I do this thing with Northern Irish.
Aphorisms, is that the term for them?
Or idioms?
It probably doesn't have the same poetic quality.
Wind your neck in.
I thought, wind your neck in.
That's a good example.
That's actually a good example about the cultural value, right?
Because wind your neck in means don't get over your skis or whatever the equivalent is.
And a lot of things like that.
Well, exactly.
Yeah, I got a terrible memory for these sorts of things off the cuff, but I swear to God, two-thirds of Australianisms, they're all oriented around people who take themselves too seriously and people who think they're better than everyone else.
And yeah, it illustrates the cultural values of play.
And just thinking of Robert Wright, right?
And he made the important point.
This is not all American.
American really is very, very diverse.
But it's this sort of California morning news type.
Chirpy daytime television thing is kind of the dominant one.
I get the feeling that whatever Robert Wright's subculture is, it's not the dominant one in the media.
It's not selling the big books and so on.
Yeah, in terms of media coverage, probably.
But just to start thinking of counter examples like the popularity of Kirby Enthusiasm or that kind of thing, like Jewish neuroticism and so on, Woody Allen.
Yeah, it's still very much a subculture there, isn't it?
That's right.
If you had to pick one, you'd pick this one.
That is true.
Matt, this is probably shoehorning this in this clip, but I wanted to talk about it because we've stepped off the topic of vulnerability.
We're not going back there, but there's this one part where she's talking about sports team that was vulnerable versus one that isn't and which would have the better outcome.
I find it interesting as I'll explain.
This is to the sports thing.
Let's do it.
Okay, ready?
Okay.
Two football teams.
You're going to place a bet.
Okay.
Both of them have hurt quarterbacks.
Both of them are playing.
Well, both of them have hurt quarterbacks.
This team over here recognizes its vulnerability.
It's going to put in a second stream quarterback.
This team ignores its vulnerability and pretends like it doesn't exist.
Who are you betting on?
Hmm.
Depends on the injury.
Hey.
Because I played hard my whole life, you know.
Yeah, I would say that most of us would say you are more, you are less likely to win if you do not acknowledge your vulnerabilities as.
So even if you play your quarterback, you got to make sure your line is ready.
Exactly.
And you got to switch the plays up.
Right.
So a funny thing is that the guy that's interviewing is like a world-class level athlete who I believe played that.
So he was kind of like, yeah, you know, that's not what he was forced to say.
What was the track like?
So, Chris, have you seen a show called Ted Lasso?
Ted Lasso?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's a good...
It distills the...
I know it's good.
That's why I brought it up.
It distills it, right?
Season one is good.
And yeah, like the stuff we were talking about, the sort of cultural differences and so on, that's the point of this show, right?
This Ted Lasso guy, he's like her.
You know, and it's great, by the way.
I really like Ted Lasso.
And it's got this, you know, uplifting...
Season one, yeah, it's better.
Uplifting tone and themes and people learning to communicate and these sort of tough, cynical English soccer players, English people gradually overcoming their Englishness, which I fully support.
They should.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, that's kind of it in a nutshell.
He overcomes them with niceness and foxy charm.
But the thing that this makes me think about is, I don't know if this is me stretching, because, you know, the quarterbacks and all that doesn't gel.
I have no idea about that American sport.
But what I can translate it into is Karate Kid, where you have the fully Cobra Kai, don't show weakness, kill!
And then you have Daniel-san, who is Just trying to get by and he's helping the old man out and all this.
But in the end, even when he's injured, he's the one that can do it.
I suppose it doesn't really affect because he fights for an injury and beats the guy.
No, Chris, I think you're understanding.
It's the difference between courage and bravery, you see.
He's being courageous.
It's not being brave.
It's semen guilt.
That's the difference.
And actually, now they have a Cobra Kai series where they make it more complex that it shows the effect the whole thing had on the bad guy.
But, you know, let's not get into the lore of the Karate Kid.
Let's try to keep our cultural references current, Chris.
Karate Kid is...
Well, now the Cobra Kai, that's out now.
It's on Netflix, Matt.
But there's still a couple of points that we didn't talk about.
There's various talks and references to the amount of research.
That Brene has done to prepare for this.
And I'm not doubting that she's clearly published and spent many years working on these topics.
But it's, you know, when someone keeps telling me how many books they've read about climate change, or they keep referencing their evolutionary biology expertise, my suspicion begins to increase.
I want to see their data.
That's the thing that begins to percolate.
So she refers to herself as a researcher storyteller.
And then this dual thing where she mentions that she's mainly concerned with qualitative data, but she also presents herself as a very empirically minded person.
She just wants to base the data and put things down.
And if you can't measure something, it doesn't matter.
And all this kind of thing.
There was a bit where she described research and it just, I've never thought about research like this, but Listen to how she says it, Ma.
I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research, where our job, you know, the definition of research is to control and predict, to study phenomenon for the explicit reason to control and predict.
And now my very, you know, my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting.
This led to a little breakdown.
So my version of research is it's about understanding what's happening.
It's about producing knowledge about a phenomenon and like predictions and it's not like necessarily controlling phenomenon.
Controls are important to the experiments and that kind of thing.
Predictions are important if you want to have inferential models and all that kind of stuff.
But research is a pretty broad category and it just is like an approach to understand.
Things better.
Have I got like a weird definition of research?
Oh, look, yeah, you're right.
She does refer to her research and all the things she's like during her research and so on very much in that Ted Talkie way.
And here I am to show you all this wonderful nugget I found in my time in the mines.
But I mean, I get the sense that her main research is in kind of like that might give people the impression that there's this massive program of work with all of this empirical data and all these different studies and so on.
Just from a brief check, it seems more like a couple of qualitative theoretical kind of papers written in social work journals.
Yeah, but she is referencing thousands of data points.
So listen to this.
My one year has turned into six years, thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups.
At one point, people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories, thousands of pieces of data.
And six years.
And I kind of got a handle on it.
I kind of understood this is what shame is.
This is how it works.
Thousands of pieces of data.
I haven't been able to find it in Google Scholar.
Admittedly, I haven't looked super carefully and maybe it's there somewhere.
It would be more helpful if you had a Google Scholar page, but I haven't seen any massive data sets.
Well, you know, but like, it's not that surprising, right?
You do enough interviews, you do diary studies.
I mean, I get a thousand.
Well, thousands of qualitative data points is a little bit more unusual.
She was referring to people sending her in their stories, which happens when you have a public profile.
And I'm reminded of the owl guy who wrote stuff about synchronicity, where he put stuff out there asking for people about their strange experiences with owls.
And he also talked about the thousands of data points that he had and kept the conclusion that Ours were multidimensional creatures from outer space.
Yeah, or that crocodiles are cooperative hunters, as we've discussed previously.
But there's like this image, and this is something that you have to do if you give a TED talk to a certain extent.
I'd like to see someone who doesn't do it, but the image of the kind of lone researcher...
I'd like to hear someone come to TED and say, here are some thoughts I had in the shower.
No, I would like to say, I work in this research area.
Lots of people have done good work.
And here's me synthesizing it, right?
Yeah.
My role is it cogged in the machine.
That's not what people say.
And this is an illustration of it.
Here's her talking about a kind of research process.
So I had a Manila folder and I had a Sharpie.
And I was like, what am I going to call this research?
And the first words that came to my mind were wholehearted.
These are kind of wholehearted people living from this deep sense of worthiness.
So I wrote at the top of the Manila folder.
And I started looking at the data.
In fact, I did it first in a four-day, very intensive data analysis where I went back, pulled these interviews, pulled the stories, pulled the incidents.
What's the theme?
What's the pattern?
My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this kind of Jackson Pollock crazy thing where I'm just like writing and going in kind of just in my researcher mode.
It's the kind of model of, I'm not saying this does not happen.
People do go into hardcore research mode and dig into data and just blitz things for a week or whatever.
But it's also this image of the crazy genius with the notes thrown over the room, just putting things together and having this eureka moment where I've got it.
I know what it is that makes people connected.
And my view of research is different.
And it's more that people contribute pieces.
To a research program, which is cumulative over time and which relies on insight, but it isn't that each person is generating or they shouldn't need to generate an entire new theoretical system.
But people do like to do that.
But I think it's an unfortunate aspect and it's not reflective really of how a lot of actual research and science functions.
It is reflective of how people become popular.
It is.
Yeah.
So it relates to that guru quality of having these revolutionary theories.
And I think a lot of her stuff is fine and good, but to the extent that it is fine and good, it's congruent with stuff that is very well known.
And it seems to be packaged up in the self-help mold.
There's nothing wrong with that, which makes it more about inspirational quotes, but I haven't seen any evidence of it being a revolutionary.
I mean, looking at the papers, there is a lot of theory there.
There's a spiderweb in this one here, which has these two dimensions.
One dimension is who you should be, and the other dimension is what you should be.
And there's all these things, friends and magazines and media and stuff scattered around it.
That's what some people describe as theory.
It's a chaos dragon.
It's a chaos dragon, yeah.
I mean, and if you look at most of the prose, there's heaps of citations to all of this stuff, and it's fine.
But to the extent that there's new stuff, they talk about There is continuums, like the vulnerability continuum and the reaching out continuum.
It's very much written in the mold of critical cultural sociology.
We are showing our academic biases here in terms of the kind of research that we like.
But a point that I would emphasize, like the chaos dragon is demonstrable about this, is that people see the problems when these interpretive frameworks are woven by people who they...
Disagree with or find that they think might be having a negative effect, like Jordan Peterson.
So when he does these diagrams about dragons and metamaps and so on, people mock them as what they're supposed to mean.
But when it's more in a kind of self-help-y frame and more about breaching out and vulnerability and shame and so on, I think people are more willing to tolerate web-style diagrams or that kind of thing.
I'm not drawing that there's an exact...
Parallel, because I still think if somebody spends 12 years on the topic or 10 years or something, it's worth listening to them, especially social workers or counselors, right?
But that's also Jordan Peterson.
He had a clinical practice.
He counseled people and he draws a lot of his narratives, the legitimacy of them from his experiences.
So if you're going to allow that in as that's valid, then people can construct large theoretical models from that.
How you can quality control that well?
Because what's the test?
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think if you're going to have a go at Jordan Peterson for being abstruse, then you have to apply the same standards here.
To take just a random paragraph from one of Brene's papers, the concepts of critical awareness, deconstructing, normalizing, and contextualizing as processes to facilitate connection, power, and empathy.
essential themes that empower theory, critical feminist social work practice, and critical pedagogy.
Like SRT, these theories emphasize the need to increase personal power by understanding the link between personal experiences and social-cultural circumstances.
Now look, that's a bit unfair because it's just an isolated quote taken out of a technical academic paper, but that gives you a sense of the kind of language that you're talking about.
This is framed within that kind of literature where It's kind of okay to be pretty abstruse, whereas we've criticized Jordan Peterson for really being hard to pass and too abstract.
Obscurantist.
Obscurantist, and I make the same criticism here.
But I also recognize that's my taste, our tastes.
I don't generally like this kind of social constructivist, heavy-going, discursive academic literature.
Some people do.
Yeah.
I don't know what else I can...
There's other clips that I've got that illustrate various things, but I feel that they're all getting a similar point.
And we've already highlighted it repeatedly, so I'm just going to emphasize it one last time, is that I don't think that there's no value to what she's saying.
And I do think that to some extent, the response that we might have might be, To our own baggage about things and preferences about research and that kind of cultural stuff as well.
But there still are various guru type stuff that's in use.
And I basically, I don't want to dismiss everything out of hand, but I just want to say it's not really for me.
So yeah, it's not my style of thing.
Well, Chris, I'd like to just read you out some inspirational quotes.
Here's one.
This is just randomly from a Google image search.
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain.
Out of the mountain, this is another quote, out of the mountain of despair, a stow of hope.
Success is not final.
Failure is not fatal.
It is the courage to continue that counts.
If you've accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.
This sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?
Compared to what we've just been talking about.
I don't have a problem with any of those inspirational quotes.
I think many people could read those quotes and get something from them.
And I guess I feel the same way about pretty much all self-help, not even Brene Brown in particular.
And I agree with you.
I'm not saying there's no value in this.
And I didn't even say there was no value in Jordan Peterson.
I think if some people...
Need to hear these messages to help them with their lives.
And there's nothing wrong with being culturally localized to the United States.
I mean, she's American.
It's okay for her to be American.
So that's not a criticism either.
Yeah.
So, you know, I think we're in a grumpy mood.
We're in a grumpy mood.
I mean, Brenna, she seems nice as well.
She does.
She does.
And it's probably, it's a fortunate timing to be in a grumpy mood with material.
It's going to rub you the wrong way, but isn't fundamentally that bad.
I think it's just unfortunate.
Chris, if you want to succeed, focus on changing yourself, not others.
Yeah, shut up.
So hold on, Matt.
I'm going to try to change the energy.
I'm going to talk about a couple of clips that I thought were good.
Positive points about what she was talking about.
Just two examples.
So one, this is her talking about when she was asked about, you know, she talked about her upbringing and issues that she had and so on.
And then she was talking about people doing what they're doing wrong with raising kids and stuff.
But then she said this.
I know you did something on that this morning.
So I guess how can parents listen to this and be aware?
And be willing to move forward in a different way of learning something new when they're so stuck in their ways, potentially, that it's worked for them to this point to get to where they're at.
You know, I think...
I believe this with my whole heart.
I believe that 99.9% of parents are truly waking up every day and doing the very best they can with what they have.
Yeah.
I don't think there are a lot of parents who wake up...
And maliciously try to screw up their kids or hurt their kids or belittle or shame their kids.
I think we're doing the best we can with what we have.
And so I think to let go of the idea that if I have done something that I could have done better or that I could learn from.
Yeah, so you get the idea.
I like that because it was a message that we've probably been emphasizing on this, that people are all right.
And not everything is going to go right and so on, but not everyone can do all.
And fundamentally, people are trying to do what's right.
And I appreciated that sentiment being expressed on that kind of self-help thing.
Just telling people, and she does do this in her content, I think this is to her credit, is to say, you know, you're all right.
People are all right and you can do things better, but don't be so hard on yourself.
And I think that's a nice message.
Chris, there's no such thing as a perfect parent, so just be a real one.
And also, parenting isn't a practice.
It's a daily learning experience.
Where are you getting all these insights, Mark?
What are you quoting?
This is my point.
This is my point.
You could do a Google image search for inspirational quotes and type in parenting and you'll get exactly the same thing.
So, look, I liked that too.
You know, it's a good sentiment and it's a good thing and a positive thing to say to parents.
But I felt the same way about pretty much everything she said.
All of it was not a bad thing to say.
They're all positive messages that probably really couldn't do any harm and may well help people and make them feel better.
So yeah, I'm agreeing with you.
I'm just, I'm just laboring this point, I suppose that it's all the same.
And she did show, you know, she mentioned her weaknesses and stuff a couple of times and she was asked about her kids.
She did say this.
And so I think for parents, it's about understanding.
Giving yourself permission.
I'm not perfect.
I've never not been a researcher and a parent.
My husband's a pediatrician.
Our kids will be in therapy.
And the reason why I think that'll be so successful is there's only two kinds of kids you raise.
Kids who will ask for help when they need it or kids who won't.
And that's as good as it gets, is to raise a kid who will ask for help.
I like the notion that her kids will definitely be in therapy because of her partner's jobs, her lifestyle.
That's self-awareness, right?
That's nice.
Yeah, yeah.
Look, I'll stop being a cynical bastard.
You almost don't need to play quotes to illustrate my point because I find it really likable.
She seems very nice.
I like the folksy charm.
I like the Texan vibe.
We're kind of contrasting American culture with the cultures we're from, but I like American culture.
I like the positivity.
I like the lack of passive aggression.
Yeah.
I just don't want to present it as the model that we should all Aspire to follow.
Because you can't.
I don't think it's necessarily the one-size-fits-all model for all people in the world.
You have to walk your own path, Chris.
There's no one that can follow Matt.
There's no one that can tell me.
There's no one doing what I do.
Yeah, I guess part of my issue is in the people that we look at week in and week out, the problem is not that they don't have enough self-belief and that they don't have enough confidence in their own brilliance and willingness to ignore their flaws.
They have the exact opposite.
And you just had an American leader who was the embodiment of narcissism.
So whenever I hear people saying, you know, it would be good if people had more competence, if they focused a bit more on themselves, I'm inclined to say, maybe not.
Maybe you're okay.
Maybe we don't need everyone to think of themselves as the most important beings in the universe because we've had a lot of trouble with that in the world recently.
So that's my only...
The pushback, I guess.
Yeah, look, it is hard to articulate my pushback too, but I'll have a go.
One of these inspirational bits of advice that is very common and someone like Brene Brown would definitely agree with is that good advice to children is to follow your dreams.
Don't pay attention to the haters or the people that are saying that you're on the right track, but to have that dream because there's one real thing for you and you need to figure out what that thing is and then you need to do it.
Now, that can be positive advice, but as a very practical matter, there's a lot of people out there, young people, for instance, who have decided that their dream is to be a journalist or their dream is to be an architect.
And it can sometimes be bad advice, say, to keep barreling on with that without paying attention to the pragmatics of the world and what the world is actually needing right now.
And maybe the world needs, I don't know, statisticians, for instance.
That's not the kind of thing that a young person is going to sort of immediately spring to.
But the vast majority of people who are successful are often the ones who identify what's needed, where the sort of gap is, where the demand is, rather than looking inwards and following their dream.
Now, I may well be wrong about that.
You know, I'm sure you could think of hundreds of examples either way.
But my point is, is that the inspirational advice isn't always 100% right.
It might actually sound good, but actually...
Might not always be the best advice.
Maybe the best advice is a bit more messy sometimes, a bit more complicated.
Yeah.
I think that's a nice summary note to end on with Brene.
She's definitely a guru stock.
We sometimes look just at whether we regard people as being harmful or not overall.
I would say, in my assessment, she isn't.
You know, she's more the Rutger Bregman.
Side of the pool when it comes to gurus and that.
And yeah, and I apologize if the grumpy, snarky, annoying Australian and Northern Irish emotionally unavailable men have allowed our grumpiness to infect our analysis.
But we're all trying.
We're all just working to be better versions of ourselves.
And I accept me for who I am.
I belong.
So I don't need to try that because I'm a tribe of one.
I'm a tribe of one.
Look, I don't often say this, but you might need to grow a little bit.
Not that, just you specifically.
Yeah, maybe, maybe.
But yeah, so that's Brene.
Done.
Decoded.
Sense-meared.
We've done no duty.
Thank you, Brené.
It was nice to spend some time with Brené.
It was pleasant.
It wasn't the least bit awful.
So good on you, Brené.
No, definitely.
Keep it up.
Compared to many of the previous weeks and for coming weeks, it was a breath of fresh air.
So it's not her fault.
It's not her fault.
We are the people we are.
No, no.
Well, Matt.
So now we've done that, we're going to move to the little segment we like to call the review of reviews.
I just love to hear you say that.
Good.
Hit me with it.
A good one or a bad one to start?
Good one.
It's quite a long one, so I'll try to make the bad one shorter because, you know, we've got to revel in the good one.
But I enjoyed this, so I'll take you on the enjoyment ride.
And the title is The thrill and terror of Jurassic Park, but instead of dinosaurs, it's Eric Weinstein.
And this is by Lavelle, in Australia, Matt, at that.
Nice.
Or Laviel.
Anyway, academia can be a brutal and hyper-competitive environment, where those that succeed are often characterized by senseless overworking and impressive metrics, rather than the ability to produce original, meaningful, and robust research.
Even when such research is produced, any benefit to humanity is frequently undone by public figures wanting to make a quick buck.
As a graduate research student, this realization has crushed the naive vision of scientific research I once had and the motivation to pursue an academic career has been severely lacking.
Isn't that depressing, Matt?
It's depressing up till now.
Yeah, it's tough out there.
Yeah, let's see what...
The change is what brought the change, though.
However, this has all changed after becoming a regular listener of Decoding the Gurus, where two academics entertainingly dismantled the rhetorical devices and Twitter habits of Eric Weinstein and, on occasion, all our public figures.
This has been hugely inspiring and has reinvigorated my enthusiasm to pursue a career in scientific research.
I now see that my previous dreams of prying open the fundamental rules of the natural world to further noble causes such as the curing of deadly diseases are simply distractions from the true reward of a successful academic career running your own niche podcast where you get to talk to Sam Harris about tribalism for three hours.
Is that it?
Is that it?
That's it.
That's great.
I mean, this is what we do.
We inspire people.
It's not about changing the world.
It's not about having revolutionary theories.
It's about keeping your head down and grinding, grinding away, getting those metrics up.
And eventually you too can have your own podcast.
That's right.
And engage with Sam Harris.
He's agreed to that if you do it.
So just contact the Pizarro.
So the next one.
This is another five-star review.
I'm sorry.
They're all five-star reviews this week because that's all I've got available.
But there are two criticisms buried in the wall of Prius that we'll chisel out and explain why they're wrong.
So this is Five Stars by Your Basic Melissa and it's called Finding This Podcast.
I didn't know how much I needed a podcast analyzing contemporary voices who claimed they have cracked the code of life until I found it.
Listening to it is like medicine.
I love Chris and Matt's chemistry.
Listening to their podcast on Jordan Peterson was like getting a full-body massage in my head.
Yeah, it's quite an image.
I deeply appreciate the insight they have given me into Brett and Heller Weinstein, but I wonder why they are incapable of acknowledging.
That people admire Brett because he stood up to political correctness mania and paid the price.
And I wonder why they don't recognize that Jordan Peterson has gotten a lot of disaffected young men to clean their rooms and redefine self-respect.
But mainly, I am grateful for the disciplined pursuit of honesty.
That's so good.
You know, I'm not taking that.
That's a very positive review.
It's very nice.
So thank you very much.
You're basic, Melissa.
But there's two points in the middle there that stand out, right?
It was actually an admirable exemplar of a shit sandwich.
That was well done.
And it made me particularly receptive to the criticisms.
But you go first.
Yes.
Well, all I was going to say is that I do think we're capable of acknowledging that.
And I thought we had that Jordan Peterson has helped a bunch of people and his self-help work.
Lots of people find it meaningful.
And similarly with Brett.
Part of the reason he's infamous is because of how the Evergreen students presented next to him in the various viral clips that went around.
And you can talk about the extent to which he has over-exaggerated that situation, but it's fair to say that he has the public profile he does because he's regarded as having took a principled stand against wokeness run amok.
Yeah, so we acknowledge that.
You're basically Melissa.
You're right.
That's why people, at least initially, were interested in them.
Yeah.
Thank you, Melissa, first of all, for putting that criticism within the five-star review.
That's critical.
That's critical.
That's important.
Yeah.
That's important.
And some very nice praise there, too.
But yeah, look, I feel what we did.
But I appreciate in a very long podcast, some of those things can get lost amidst all of the criticisms.
But I definitely do, like we said as much in this Brene Brown episode as well, that...
Jordan Peterson's self-help is fine in the same way, and there are some people who need to hear those sorts of messages, and it can be beneficial to people.
With regard to Brett and Heather at Evergreen, look, as far as I could tell, it did seem pretty crazy, the antics of the students there at Evergreen, and they were probably hard done by, in some regards.
It's unclear to what degree.
Responses or behavior might have been less than ideal and make no judgment of it.
I'd just make the point, though, that having sympathy for that kind of backstory doesn't really accredit someone for any of their theories or takes or opinions going afterwards.
If I, for instance, was unfairly done by Verma University, maybe expelled from academia, I might well get a whole bunch of sympathy and support and a raised public profile.
It wouldn't make any of my positions any more or any less coherent or interesting or admirable.
So I think they're orthogonal things.
But yeah, just saying we agree essentially with those two points, though it may have been lost in the details.
Yeah.
So thanks for the feedback, everyone.
That's our review of reviews.
Good reviews this week.
Nobody said anything that annoying.
We got off lightly.
I'm still enjoying imagining Eric Weinstein as a dinosaur walking the earth.
Yes, that is an image.
That is an image.
That will be hard to not think about.
But the next thing we got to do, Matt, is give a shout out to our patrons.
Lovely, lovely patrons who we've been showering with content recently.
And I've got a bunch.
Of people to shout out this time.
So I'm going to do it.
Otherwise, we'll never get through every quote.
So we, you know, just bear with us.
So here's the conspiracy hypothesizers for this week.
We have Polly Darton, Millen Nigam, Rob W, Giovanni Dasa, Jake, Kristen Follensby, Sharon, Mark McElman, And Matthew Hatfield.
And now, Matt, if you could just repeat all of those names and give Wendy comments about all of them, please, that would be good.
Okay.
Well, thank you to Polly.
That's a pretty name.
Um, uh, Milan, Milan, Rob, Giovanni.
It's got a lovely sounding name.
Jake.
It's a bit, you know, it's a bit, bit, bit boring, but it's okay.
Uh, Christian.
I don't know if you're a real Christian or if that's just your name.
Either way is fine.
Sharon.
That's a good Australian name.
Good on you, Sharon.
Mark.
Yeah, Mark.
It's fine.
You know, that's what you can say about that.
Not good, not bad.
And Matthew, which is the best name of the bunch.
How's that?
Hi, did you write those down?
I've got this, you know, eudetic memory.
It's amazing.
I'm like a machine.
Yeah.
No, I wrote them down.
I wrote them down.
I wanted to let everyone know that every one of those people that give us lovely, lovely money is special to me, each in their own unique way.
Well, except for Tristan Follensby, who you referred to as Christian and made a pun about Christianity.
So, sorry, Tristan.
Sorry if you'd listened a bit better.
You might have had something more relevant to say.
You were going very quickly.
Well, they are conspiracy hypothesizers, so thank you very much.
Thank you.
Every great idea starts with a minority of one.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
Next, we have our revolutionary geniuses.
And for this week, we have Adam G, Amber Rose, Alex Gillette and Juha Vitamaki.
Oh dear.
Yes, I didn't do that well, but I think it's a Finnish name, maybe Juha Vitamaki.
It's not how Finnish people talk.
I love to have Finnish people.
So there you go, Ma.
Those are our lovely revolutionary geniuses.
Thank you to all of them.
Thank you to Adam, Alex, and the fourth one.
Thank you, fourth one.
Maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking.
What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.
Last map, the shining beacons in the guru sky.
The galaxy brain gurus.
Not better or worse than the others, but definitely more special.
Yeah.
So we have some people we've met in the monthly hangouts.
We have Leigh Kilgore, Patrick Collins, a good Irish sounding name there.
Some guy called Tim Nguyen.
Tim!
Yeah, rings a bell, rings a bell.
Itty bitty falls, I think.
And Ian Stangberg.
Also to add that Tim has written an article recently debunking some of Eric's claims, and it was very good.
So I'll add it to the show notes, but thank you, Tim, Ian, Patrick, and Leigh.
Yes, thank you very much.
And hi to Tim.
If you're listening, just read an article about you and it was good.
By the way, I just want to say, Leigh Kilgore, I like that name, Kilgore.
I couldn't remember why, and I realized it's the name of a character, Kilgore Trout, which is a fictional character by Kurt Vonnegut.
I'm afraid you were going to say it's a type of fish, a fictional fish, Kilgore Trout.
Well, there you go.
So, lucky lay.
So, thank you all.
Thank you all, your galaxy brain gurries.
What else can I say except...
You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard, and you're so polite.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
I kind of am.
Yeah.
I don't trust people at all.
There was someone asking that I don't play the clips.
And I was thinking, you know what?
You can skip this section.
We got little bookmarks.
And, you know, we make the podcast.
You just push the button, all right?
Exercise your free will.
We don't live in Sam Harris's deterministic universe in this podcast.
We have to now.
Precedents have been set.
It's now a DTG tradition.
But I love Patrick Collins' name.
That's great.
That's the guy that needs to be leading.
A kind of revolution.
An Irish rebellion?
An Irish rebellion, yeah.
What was the real name of Collins?
Michael Collins.
Michael Collins.
Yeah, Patrick's better.
Patrick Collins sounds better.
Don't be so stereotypical, Matt.
How dare you?
We're not all terrorists and revolutionaries, except on the mind.
That's all right.
You know, I'm just going on the small amount of popular media that involves you guys.
That's the limit of my knowledge.
Stereotypeocracy, in effect.
So, okay.
That's us for this week.
We'll try to be more chipper when we approach our next guru who will definitely not be annoying at all because we're looking at one Joseph Rogan.
Oh my God.
I've forgotten about that.
Did we agree about that, Chris?
He's a self-help guru.
He's part of our season of self-help.
He's a self-help guy?
I don't even know that.
I mean, he is.
He might not say he is, and other people might not refer to him as that, but he is.
Fair enough.
All right.
Joe, we're coming for you, mate.
Get your baldy head ready.
So we'll take care of him, and I'm sure it'll be a joy to listen to his 4R content.
So the things we do for you.
But we do have various places that you can follow us, should you be so inclined.
And we've mentioned the Patreon just now.
You can join that.
There's extra content on there.
And there's going to be a lot more too.
There's heaps of great things envisaged for that.
It's going to be more research goodness, interesting academic stuff this time for me.
And it's going to be, you know, like a journal club stuff where we talk about like interesting articles.
So it'll be enlightening.
Elucidating, invigorating, and inspiring.
And for every Patreon, Matt's going to do a 30-minute private consultation about any topic of your choice.
So just contact Matt.
You'll find his email.
Just, you know, look around.
But the email for the podcast is decodingthegurus@gmail.com, which we periodically check and sometimes respond to.
I do eventually respond to everything.
It just takes time.
And then we have the Guru's Pod account on Twitter.
We are on Instagram and we're also on Facebook.
So there's various options available and you can find us individually on Twitter at r4cdent and c _kabiner.
That's all our social media business.
If you're a Redditor, you could go to r /decoding.
The gurus?
Or the discord!
Or the discord!
How can we forget the discorder, people?
These are both unofficial, very unofficial, not sanctioned, not condoned.
We do not...
Rampant with racism and the various...
Misogyny.
Yeah, bigotry.
So, yeah, just be careful.
Be careful out there, guys.
Well, what was I going to say?
It was something fascinating, was it?
Well, we'll just have to wait till next episode to find out what that morsel was.
