Andy Norman introduces Mental Immunity, framing "mind parasites"—like conspiracy theories or science denial—as infectious ideas exploiting confirmation bias and identity-driven belief systems, akin to autoimmune disorders. He contrasts free speech absolutism with the need for cognitive accountability, citing Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of platforms like Facebook and Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff’s suppression for questioning COVID-19 mandates. Norman advocates for the "reason-giving game," a structured dialogue method to test ideas upstream (evidence) and downstream (consequences), while Rogan links it to societal polarization, comparing unproductive debates to processed information harming mental well-being like junk food. They debate ancient Egypt’s timeline—Cleopatra’s era (~30 BC) is closer to the iPhone (2007) than to the Sphinx (~10,000 BC)—highlighting how modern progress masks humanity’s vast, unrecorded history. Ultimately, Norman’s framework offers a science-backed way to resist cognitive contagion without censorship, urging cultural shifts toward disciplined inquiry and humility. [Automatically generated summary]
Thank you very much for coming here, and thank you for bringing me a signed copy of your book, Mental Immunity, Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think.
There's a big 60 Minutes piece last night that aired, and talking to Christopher Mellon, who used to work for the Defense Department, talking to Commander David Fravor, who is the guy who piloted that jet that I was telling you about that encountered that craft off of the coast of San Diego in 2004. There's been quite a few of these pretty spectacular videos that have come out that were released by the—well, I don't know.
Some of them were leaked and then confirmed by the Pentagon and— Well, that's the kind of evidence that should change your attitude from skeptical to, you know, hey, maybe there's something here, right?
I mean, I think you've already indicated that you get the basic premise, one of the basic premises of the book, right?
Falsehoods.
Are mind parasites.
And more generally, bad ideas, all kinds of bad ideas, are mind parasites.
But it takes kind of a shift in the way you look at things to get it.
But once you get this idea, it can change your entire worldview.
So think about what makes a parasite a parasite.
It requires a host.
It infiltrates, let's say a regular parasite, right?
It infiltrates your body.
It creates copies of itself, induces something like an infection-spreading sneeze so it can get to other bodies, and it's often harmful of the very thing that hosts it.
Now, go down the list with bad ideas.
A bad idea requires a host, a host mind, right?
It can infiltrate a mind, it can get that mind to spread it to other minds, and it can actually harm the person that carries it.
So, basically, bad ideas check all the boxes, For parasites.
And there's kind of a worldview shift going on, even within science, that basically says, you know what?
This has always seemed like a kind of a crazy analogy, but there's actually more here than meets the eye.
Like, what voodoo is, you tell a person that they're cursed, you hex them, and then they believe it, and it changes the way they think, and they're terrified.
And he went to the hospital and said he mistakenly took the whole bottle of these pills and he dropped the pill bottle on the floor.
His heart was racing.
Blood pressures through the roof.
They're like, oh my god, this guy's dying.
He's pale.
And they checked the bottle of pills, found the physician on the bottle, contacted the physician, and he told them he was part of the study.
The physician came down to the hospital and informed him that he was actually in the placebo group.
Within five minutes, his heart rate came down to normal, his blood pressure came down to normal, and he relaxed, and he was subsequently released from the hospital.
And then the part of the story I tell in my book is that we've been actually neglecting and abusing mental immune systems for decades.
And this makes us unduly suspicious and angry of each other, which is causing a huge decline in trust and creating all these negative expectations that become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So I'm a philosopher by training and philosophers have always been kind of really eager to invest – to test ideas and try to weed out the bad ones.
That's kind of what we philosophers do and a lot of times that doesn't make us particularly popular.
But I argue in the book that the philosophical method of belief testing called, say, the Socratic method, right?
Famous process pioneered by a Greek philosopher thousands of years ago.
Basically, if you test ideas with questions and then toss out the ones that don't withstand scrutiny, that's a way to strengthen your mind's resistance to bad ideas.
So here's kind of the skinny on this, and I think that the people who get this concept are going to be the thought leaders for the next few decades.
We know our bodies have immune systems.
And their job is to hunt down parasites and pathogens and eliminate them.
And some of those antibodies actually consume pathogens in our body.
Now, the new information, which is just now coming together in philosophy and in the sciences, is that our minds have immune systems just like our bodies do.
Only a mental immune system's job is to hunt down and remove mind parasites or bad ideas.
And what does this joke tell us about the conspiracy mentality?
Right?
And you say that's exactly what it would do because I think you understand something about conspiracy thinking, which is that a conspiracy theory-infected mind becomes so good at generating antibodies to fight back against even good information.
That those antibodies will attack the good information.
So here's God telling you the truth, right?
And Fred's mental antibodies just rush in and dismiss it as part of an even deeper conspiracy.
So questions, doubts, suspicions, those are the mind's antibodies, all right?
And they can go nuts.
They can go on hyperactive – in the same way the body's immune system can go haywire and attack your body itself, your mind's immune system can go haywire.
And your questions and your doubts and your suspicions can attack your mind.
I've been down some astrophysics rabbit holes and astronomy rabbit holes.
There's some interesting rabbit holes to go down, but the thing about The conspiracy theory rabbit hole is you get to shittier and shittier designed websites.
Like, further you go, you get to, like, those GeoCities websites.
Remember those?
With, like, spinning GIFs of Earth and stuff like that.
So I was telling him, I'm like, listen, man, this is nonsense.
The idea that there's an alignment of the stars that can be accurately assessed and that'll determine whether or not this will be a successful trip or a dangerous trip is so fucking stupid.
And wouldn't you be way better off and much more successful if you knew this information and you were actually applying it to your life?
And in the website, it was actually talking about how this guy had some other career, and it didn't work out well for him, and then he found astrology and realized this is his calling.
There was a time in the history of the West when astrology made a certain amount of sense.
So back when philosophers and theologians thought the Earth was at the center of the universe and that all of the stars and the planets revolved around it, the stars and the planets were thought to live in crystalline spheres that rubbed against one another.
So the idea that the position of the stars could, through the rubbing of adjacent spheres, work its way down and affect things here on Earth, kind of made a certain amount of sense because there was a causal story like the position of the stars and the fates down here on Earth.
But then of course Copernicus came along, turned the solar system inside out.
We learned that space is not full of crystalline spheres, but empty space.
It's interesting in that there are these constellations.
And it's interesting is that people have been studying these and they've been looking at Orion and, you know, cancer and all these different, you know, looking at all these different things and these images that they see in the sky and that they've been, you know, people look for patterns.
I don't think they think about it that way, honestly.
I think it's like every minute of every day is a different fate.
I'm air quoting their discipline justice.
Cause I think if you talk to an astrologist that really studies like the ancient astrology, I mean, they literally have it down to like what hour of what day and where the sun and the moon and everything is at the moment you've, you know, popped out of your mom.
He was unwilling to travel unless he consulted his astrologer, and he was even canceling certain trips if the astrologer shook his head and said the magic says no.
Well, and that's got to harm your life prospects when you – Yeah.
So when you base your – Your core beliefs on things that are not reality-based, on things that are based on wishful thinking.
So a lot of people get into astrology because they want to believe that there are fates out there that are going to look after them or whatever.
And if you indulge in wishful thinking that way, the evidence now shows you actually compromise your mind's immune system.
So when you believe things because you want to, you want them to be true, your mind's immune system gets weaker.
And there's actually now empirical research that indicates this.
So if you, for example, accept that That clinging to your articles of faith, no matter what, is a virtue.
You're less likely to change your mind when evidence comes along.
And when that happens, you become more susceptible to conspiracy thinking, more susceptible to divisive political ideologies, more susceptible to science denial.
Your mind's resistance to bad ideas starts to decay.
You can actually damage your mind's immune system by indulging in wishful thinking.
Yeah, I mean so science is clearly a shining example of what's possible In the way of idea testing and the way of validating things with evidence.
So, you know, scientists are especially good at testing things in laboratories or with experiments.
Now philosophers have always gone in for a kind of a related but slightly different kind of idea testing.
Philosophers don't have laboratories except the ones between their ears.
And basically we test ideas against each other and we test ideas with questions.
And we test ideas against our intuitions about right and wrong and try to figure out what makes sense.
That's a complementary kind of idea testing that scientists go in for, and it's one that has done a huge amount to educate and Enlighten us over the centuries.
And so what I try to do in the book is take things from this cutting-edge science I call cognitive immunology.
It's the science of mental immunity.
You combine that with ancient wisdom about how to pursue wisdom, how to find wisdom, and you actually get some really powerful ways to strengthen mental immune systems.
Do you need it or you've been sort of indoctrinated into the world of objective thinking to the point where you don't need any systems that you follow?
Yeah, and I'd say that politics is probably the best example, but religion and ethics and sometimes economics or others.
So wherever values come into play, people get very attached to their ideas.
We all want to think that we're right and true and virtuous.
So whatever ideas we've already internalized as beliefs, they have to be the virtuous beliefs.
And any new incoming information that challenges them from the other side of the political aisle or from another religion or from those damn atheists over there, that's the enemy.
And then your mind's immune system attacks that information and you never gain the fair-mindedness needed to learn.
So I actually facilitate difficult conversations with people across the political spectrum, across the religious spectrum, every week at my university.
Well, there's a core group of students at Carnegie Mellon where I've worked for many years that meets regularly to discuss issues that we just pick as they might have to do with contemporary political phenomena, might have to do with religion or culture wars or controversial economic theories.
And we just we invite people in from the local church.
We invite people in from the Christian fellowship and we dialogue.
We actually practice the art of having fair, Fair, open-minded dialogue in an attempt to learn from one another.
So we don't always hit the sweet spot, but we try.
And we think that practicing the art of difficult conversation and testing ideas in a mutually respectful way is the key to overcoming these divisions that are...
And I realized along the way that I wasn't doing a good job of listening.
In the beginning especially, I don't have any training in this.
I've just sort of done this along the way.
I've kind of gotten better along the way.
And along the way, one of the things that was sort of a residual side effect that wasn't anticipated was it's made me way more aware of kind of all aspects of the way I think.
I've always said that ways of thinking should be a primary focus of education, that There's specific ways of addressing ideas and problems.
And oftentimes, you get ways of addressing problems when it comes to mathematics, or maybe if you're talking about specific philosophers, you talk about how they address certain things, you get something out of that.
But to give people a way of identifying issues, looking at them, and then reassessing them, perhaps looking at them from an objective Outsider's perspective, like how would someone who's not you look at this?
How would you look at this problem if you didn't have an investment in it with your ego and the time that you spent arguing?
Because that's one of the hardest things when you know you're wrong and then you have to like stop and go, oh wait a minute, I'm wrong.
I was going to say, one of the things that I try to tell people that I've learned myself, and this is really important, I think, is that you're not your ideas.
And when an idea comes along and you adopt it, It's not like a dog.
You don't have to keep it because you love it.
If you adopt an idea and you go, oh, this idea is terrible.
Oh, no, I'm wrong.
You have to say it.
Because if you don't say it, you're never going to trust yourself.
If you don't admit fault, if you don't admit that you're incorrect, then you'll never trust your own mind when it comes to different ideas that pop up.
Because you're not willing to accept reality.
You're so invested in your ego being nurtured that you're not willing to accept the fact that you made a mistake.
So you are a core set of values, and one of those is honesty.
So I actually think you're onto something really deep here, Joe.
So when you practice meditation, you try to sit there quietly and empty your mind.
But then ideas keep jumping into your mind and, oh, shoot, I've got to add this to the grocery list or whatever, right?
And what you do with practice is you learn that the ideas that are flooding into your mind, they're not you.
You actually develop a distance between you and your ideas, and it gives you a kind of peace of mind, and it gives you a kind of autonomy from just sort of your knee-jerk mental habits.
So meditation has a long history of helping people Develop a kind of freedom from the ideas that just flood into their mind without thinking, right?
I think the exact same thing can be applied to, well, I like to put it this way.
Don't treat your beliefs.
Don't identify with your beliefs.
Because if you do, you'll start to see challenging or interesting new information as a threat.
And you'll shut it down.
Your mind's immune system will kick in.
And attack it.
Instead, you can actually think of your beliefs as like house guests that are maybe welcome to stick around for a while but might wear out their welcome, right?
So keep your beliefs as long as they're, you know, working for you.
But always check to make sure that they're not serving you poorly because when they do, it may be time to say sayonara.
In my past, the more embarrassing moments is when I've become personally invested in ideas and will argue with them, argue for them with emotion and use tactics and talk over people, shout people down, that kind of stuff.
It's one of the more embarrassing things when I think about my own belief system when I was younger, in particular, that I would want to win, right?
This is one of the things I concluded from having studied the mind's immune system.
When you start using reasons as weapons, you're actually subverting your mind's immune system.
So when culture wars break out, people start grabbing onto reasons and using them to club people on the other side.
Or they use them as shields to protect them from the attacks on the other side.
But it turns out that you lose the ability to be fair-minded when you start treating reasons that way.
And the alternative is to always check that you're using reasons to guide people's attention to genuinely relevant considerations, to honestly relevant considerations.
If you're doing that, your mind's immune system is functioning properly.
But if you're just wielding reasons as weapons to win, you're fucking with yourself as well as with the other guy.
I think there's also a problem with some of these ideas, and especially when you take into account confirmation bias, that a lot of conspiracies are not binary.
It's not like there's no conspiracies.
This is part of the problem, like Enron.
Classic example.
A legitimate, real conspiracy that was facilitated by multiple individuals for extreme amounts of profit and was a real thing.
There's a history to the term conspiracy theory that started getting developed to dismiss—I forget what the—there was a story that was in the news that they were trying—Jamie, But it became a narrative.
Well, so people do sometimes conspire, and we need to be able to investigate that and find the truth.
And the idea that there's a giant conspiracy behind all of these random-seeming things in our lives is incredibly seductive.
And it can hijack your mind in a way that makes you interpret every new piece of information as just confirming the conspiracy, like with Fred the Flat Earther.
So it's a dangerous thing to indulge broad-sweeping conspiracy theories.
It says it was also mentioned in like 1909, but the Wikipedia does say that it was picked up in the Warren Commission to try to discredit conspiratorial believers.
And I'm probably not going to endear myself to any of my liberal friends by saying that I still think that – I do not think the JFK assassination was a lone – Why would your liberal friends have an issue with that?
So all over the globe, countries are occupied by central banking institutions that loan the government money at interest.
And this enables them to own all the other socioeconomic and geopolitical gears in the country.
Okay?
And then what they do is they use their billions or trillions of dollars to create a bunch of deep underground bases where they have all this like highly top secret technology going on.
Okay?
And they are like figuring out how to do things like create infinite energy or do things like anti-gravity technology or inertia propulsion.
They're learning how to do things like cloning and all sorts of crazy stuff.
Like, that guy's, listen to me, with all due respect to that guy, he's a fucking loser.
And I don't mean that, I'm not trying to be mean.
If he was me, I would say, damn it, I'm a fucking loser.
And what I mean by, the guy was living with his mom, he's like a 30-year-old guy, didn't really have a lot of job prospects, shit wasn't going that well, he's got bad tattoos, I should talk.
Mine are actually good.
He's got bad tattoos, he's He's got a fucking American flag painted on his face.
He's wearing a buffalo helmet on.
He's got no shirt, and he's talking about underground bases where they're creating infinite energy.
And we can understand how these mental immune systems work.
The science is teaching us how to make them work better so that we can actually create a new generation of people who are much more resistant to cognitive contagion.
So the picture of reasonable believing that has been pre-installed in all of us by Western civilization actually makes us more prone to confirmation bias.
So this takes us back to an ancient concept of reasonableness that predates Plato, one of my philosophical heroes, Socrates basically questioned things, and if they didn't withstand questioning, didn't withstand scrutiny, he'd say, that can't be right.
We need to bring back the Socratic picture of reasonable belief because it's one of the most powerful mind inoculants ever invented.
We've forgotten how to use it in our time, but we can take this new science, cognitive immunology, we can enhance the Socratic method and achieve levels of immunity against cognitive contagion that our species has never had.
Isn't one of the impediments to cognitive immunity just ideology in and of itself?
Like, as you were saying earlier that your friends on the left would get upset at you saying that you tend to lean towards a conspiracy theory from the killing of JFK. Like, well, why?
Why?
Like, why would it be the friends on the left?
And why would you even consider the friends on the left?
And we will gravitate towards ideas that keep us in good standing with the people close to us, and we'll turn with hate and derision on ideas that threaten our little communities of support.
And what's interesting is like even if you have – like I belong to a group called Liberal because I ascribe to a series of beliefs that are in that group like women's rights, gay rights, civil rights – I believe in climate change.
I have a lot of things that might not even be good ideas.
I don't know if universal basic income is a good idea, but I tend to support it, because I would like people to not have to think about money as much as they do.
And I don't know if that's really possible, but when I talked to Bernie Sanders, he said it was, and he's got this idea that nobody On the right seems to think it's a good idea.
There's a lot of things that people go, no, you're not one of us.
I'm like, well, okay.
I hunt.
I believe in hard work.
I believe in discipline.
And I think that you have to hold people accountable for hard work and discipline.
It's very important.
And there's a lot of people that want an easy way out.
They don't want accountability.
They don't want to be personally responsible for their own future in terms of just going And they don't want to instill that sort of personal responsibility in other people.
I love it.
They want to maintain or at least cultivate a victim mentality, which I think is incredibly detrimental to everyone.
And I think it's detrimental to the people that you're talking to.
it's detrimental to the people that adopt it it's like yeah you are responsible for so much more of your own destiny and there's so many success stories of people that have pulled themselves up from the the terrible position that they find themselves in it some stage in life and then become a happy healthy productive member of our And I don't think that victim mentality is good for anybody.
So in that sense, sometimes I get labeled as a right-winger because, oh, you're conservative and you look at things that way.
Yeah, that sounds like a lot more— And if honest inquiry shows us that liberalism is wrong about X, Y, and Z, then to heck with X, Y, and Z. The problem is some of these concepts haven't really been applied or tested.
You know, I mean, some have—like, there's a lot of people that believe in socialism, right?
And a lot of people believe in even Marxism.
But if you look at the history of that, it's a fucking bloody disaster.
That's one of the things that people don't take into account when they look at people that are extremely successful, right?
Like if you look at some crazy business person who's just like working 20 hours a day and they've amassed this empire and people go, well, that's not fair.
That person has an exorbitant amount of wealth and they have a disproportionate amount of financial success and this is wrong.
This idea has wide currency in our culture and it serves to shut down thinking.
And it's one of the things that has weakened our mental immune systems because, yes, our cognitive rights matter, and government shouldn't be telling us what we're entitled to believe.
To the extent that we're entitled to our opinion is a claim about our political rights, fine.
But when we misinterpret it as a claim about what we're morally entitled to, To believe and think and say?
Then you've crossed a line, because I'm not morally entitled to misogynistic delusions and white conspiracist fantasies, and neither are you.
Because even though you're right about a lot of the things, particularly like white supremacy and a lot of these other, like QAnon type things, a lot of very soft-minded ideas that get bounced around out there, and people want to shut those ideas down, and they want to silence people.
Right.
And then social media platforms have this incredible ability to do that.
They just step in and go, this is wrong.
We're going to stop it and silence it and shut it down.
The problem is once you give people the – well, they have the ability to silence opposing views.
They've decided they're the arbiter of truth.
When it comes to arguable philosophies, when it comes to political positions, when it comes to religious beliefs, when it comes to morals and ethics, people don't always agree.
And you have to see who's right.
And the only way to see who's right is to allow people to talk it through.
But a lot of our problem is that we have an election cycle.
So if someone's going to talk it through, but November's two weeks away, like, Jesus Christ, we can't allow these fucking people to talk it through.
Hide the Hunter Biden stories right now.
Hide them.
It'll fuck up the narrative.
It's going to be like Hillary Clinton with the emails.
And I devote a chapter in the book to saying, how do we regulate our own thinking Without either policing our own thoughts or trying to police each other's thoughts.
And a lot of people who aren't involved can get harmed when that happens, right?
So conspiracy theories and crazy ideologies have proliferated through human populations for thousands of years, and they cause wars.
They cause political dysfunction.
They cause people to hate, and they've caused genocides.
And as Mark Twain told us, you know, a falsehood can get around—he said a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.
The problem is though the alternative is censorship and censorship is power.
To have that power.
And then who is doing the censorship?
Then you have another real problem because you have like Twitter, you have their Trust and Safety Council.
So you have a bunch of people, a lot of them fresh out of universities, that really don't have a lot of life experience and maybe have some very rigid ideologies of their own and they want to enforce those and they come up with reasons to censor people, reasons to delete posts, reasons to silence and suspend people temporarily for Things that they deem to be inaccurate.
In fact, a Harvard epidemiologist was recently suspended from Twitter because he said that these masks do not provide the kind of protection that people thought they did with COVID-19.
And that so many people were getting too close and they were not socially distancing because they felt like these masks gave them more protection than they really did.
Something's going on, whether it's that or the fact that people are staying away from each other a little bit more than they have in the past.
But what this Harvard epidemiologist was saying was that he believes that they don't work enough to allow people to be around infected people.
And that this idea that you and I could talk really close to each other if one of us was infected because we were both wearing masks, he's like, that's not true.
So that is a powerful example to force me to think more deeply about this.
I like that because what I was trying to say a minute ago is that, yes, for the most part, dialogue, mutually respectful dialogue is the way to weed out bad ideas.
And information can now spread across the Internet at lightning speed and huge harms can happen before dialogue has a chance to do its winnowing work.
Well, I seem to be saying that there needs to be some sense.
I mean, I don't want to say it this way, but I think a minute ago, maybe you were hearing there needs to be additional regulatory mechanisms in place beyond mere mutually respectful dialogue to keep harmful mind parasites from spreading across the internet.
I just know that I was reading a story about overreach, and they were saying that this man is obviously very qualified to talk about this very specific issue.
And then they would infiltrate other pages and pretend to be someone who speaks for Black Lives Matter or pretend to be someone who speaks for white nationalists and they would battle it out.
So imagine we took a free speech fundamentalism view towards the kind of problem that you're talking to here.
We're just going to say, oh, well, if the Russians want to create civil unrest by organizing these competing and chaos is spreading through the streets, do we mitigate, do we start to moderate our free speech fundamentalism?
Let me put it to you.
Do you think we need to moderate free speech fundamentals?
It's a very good question because then the question comes up is, is anonymous posting an issue?
Because the only reason why this works is because it's anonymous posting.
If I find out that Jamie Vernon and Jamie's fingerprint is on it and he used his face ID to make that post and his name is, you know, young Jamie Vernon on whatever social media platform that he utilizes.
Say if I was mad at you and I wanted to write a book about where you stole all your information for this book and you're a bad person and you've done all these evil things.
Someone could do that.
They could just make a bunch of fake pages and if they were really psycho and they had a lot of time and they were dedicated, they could make up a bunch of fake things about you.
So I think the problem you're describing is one where people have influence without accountability.
So anonymous Twitter accounts, anonymous Facebook accounts, can be used to spread disinformation, and when you try to trace them back and hold the peddlers of the disinformation accountable, they just don't exist.
Or they're a front for some person who's actually trying to sow chaos.
So, I mean, we know this about power without accountability corrupts.
And the internet is now handing out lots of power to people, and we haven't figured out how to hold people accountable for the power of the soapbox, basically.
Well, I don't think we can allow organizations like that to flourish unchecked.
I think we're finding right now at our moment in history that we can't simply be free speech fundamentalists and just say it'll all work out in the end if we do.
Is that there's a profit incentive for allowing these people to propagate this shit because there's so many clicks involved?
Right.
That's the thing is the algorithms whether it's Facebook or a lot of these other social media platforms the algorithms favor Anything that's going to cause conflict because conflict inspires discourse and then people are engaging and The engagement is very high on these algorithms.
But it's interesting, too, that my friend Ari, he had a study, a test, he had a theory, and his theory was That everyone's saying that these algorithms encourage conflict.
And he was like, is that or is that just what people do?
And so what he tried to do is he only looked up puppies on YouTube.
But if you're a knucklehead and that's what you're interested in that the problem is that that's what you're interested in The problem is not necessarily the I think the idea that the algorithm is poisoning people is like the idea that Sugary foods are poisoning people you sure they are But the real problem is that you're eating those fucking things.
The real problem is not that like ho-hos exist.
The real problem is that's what you gravitate towards instead of an apple.
So this makes perfect sense in light of – so philosophers have noticed for a long time that our cravings can often lead us to do self-destructive things.
Your craving for fatty foods can lead you to have heart disease, right?
So our minds actually crave all kinds of things that aren't good for it, at least in the quantities that we crave them, right?
And so going all the way back to ancient Greece, philosophers have said, you've got to modulate your desire with reason.
And, you know, Socrates, Plato, my ancient philosophical heroes, they're all basically saying if you let your desires control you, if you let the ideas that just swarm into your head unbidden to control you, You will be a slave to them your whole life.
But if you actually develop your capacity to reason, to test ideas in dialogue, and by the way, you can have the dialogue within your own head, kind of like, or you can have your dialogue with others.
But either way, that kind of dialogue teaches you how to develop a kind of freedom from these forces inside of your own mind that can enslave you.
But I think for many people, they don't know how to start.
Maybe you're listening to this right now, and maybe you have had moments in your life where you've just been hijacked by stupid ideas and you don't know exactly what to do.
I have a friend, I've talked about her before on the podcast.
She used to be a Mormon all of her life, and then one day she snapped out of it and they left the church and the whole deal.
And she had a very interesting point.
She said she finds herself to be very susceptible to, like, bullshit because she believed in things without questioning them her whole life until she was, like, in her 40s.
So, like, all of a sudden she finds herself now trying to navigate the waters of reality without, like, a rock-solid belief system that she can fall back on.
Because she's a very smart person, and she lived a kind of a dull-minded life when she was just believing part and parcel whatever the Mormon ideology was.
She was locked in.
She's definitely going to get a planet when she dies, and everything's going to be awesome, and I'm going to wear these magic underwear, and Jesus is looking out for me.
We're all good.
I mean that was her thought process and now she's not like that at all.
So she had to like sort of recognize that she had some real flaws in the way she looks at reality itself because she's susceptible.
A woman called me and she basically said, I was brought up in a deeply fundamentalist Christian sect, and I was taught about hell, and I've lived my entire life just scared as shit that I'm going to be sent to hell.
But my college professors, they're actually encouraging me to think for myself, but whenever I actually start to think critically about God's existence, I'm seized by this kind of panic.
And she said, even though I know hell is an illusion, I know that hell is just an idea that was created to control behavior of children.
And she said, even though I've outgrown those ideas, I still can't stop the sense of panic.
This poor woman, her mental immune system had been crippled by her upbringing.
Right?
Something in the way she was brought up, her fundamentalist training, had actually made it so that she was seized by irrational fear when she tried to think for herself.
I'm calling for building a culture where idea testing is so normalized that we don't need to censor anyone to have herd immunity to crazy cognitive mind virus.
The problem is, some people, religion is a fundamental principle that allows them to live their lives with, like, structure.
It's a scaffolding for their morals and their ethics, and it's helped them tremendously.
And you remove that structure.
And I know a lot of people like that, who are really good people, that happen to be Christian, and they follow the best aspects of the Christian religion.
They really do.
And so to tell them that, oh, you need to think critically and, you know, do you really think someone came back from the dead?
No.
Do you really think somebody walked on water?
Do you really think someone turned water into wine?
Is that real to you?
Because if it is real to you, we've got a real problem here.
Because that doesn't make any sense, not with anything we know.
So at one point in time, there was a magic person.
So there's never been a magic person since, but at one point in time, there was a magic person, he happened to be the Son of God, and he had all this information, and he tried to tell us, and we, you know, someone, not us, someone hung him up on a cross and killed him, and he came back three days later.
You're like, hey, hey, hey, slow down.
But if you say that doesn't pass critical thinking, you're not allowed to think that, we can't have that in our platform, that you got a real problem on your hands because that's a large percentage of the people.
And they use that even though they don't necessarily believe it hook, line, and sinker.
But it's not hard to find examples of religions that are problematic, not just for their followers, but for others as well.
So we need to approach this problem together.
What are we going to do about it?
You can try to solve the problem of toxic religious beliefs at the source end, at the supply end, or the demand end.
You can try to censor the religious information or the information that comes from a toxic religion, say.
Or you can try to build immunity to bad ideas and let the chips fall where they may.
I'm advocating the second approach, not the first.
So this is where there's a very important difference between censorship-based approaches to dealing with our disinformation problem.
It's supply side disinformation regulation with demand side information regulation.
I do see what you're saying.
That's why my book is, I think, fundamental to how the only enlightened way we can possibly address this disinformation problem is at the demand end by increasing resistance to bad ideas so that people freely, without coercion, reject them.
I don't have a silver bullet answer, but I will tell you this.
There's a new science emerging in our day and age that's teaching us how mental immune systems work.
It's teaching us why they fail and how we can make them work better.
And we can make them work better by strengthening them in ways that philosophers are long taught and that the new sciences of psychology are saying actually help us become more independent and more autonomous thinkers.
Which is, I think, a different approach to dealing with our disinformation problem than, you know, censor the sources.
You gently help them let go is a good way to put it.
And I think that, like we're saying, someone who leads by example, that's very important, is that you're best served by doing your best work.
And if you do, like, I've had friends that have lost a lot of weight, and a lot of the people around them that see them lose a lot of weight, then they start losing weight, too.
Because they realize, like, oh, if he can do it, like, look how great he looks now, look how healthy he is, I'm going to try that, too.
So I was brought up in a household that practically worshipped Martin Luther King.
So Martin Luther King was practically a saint, a secular saint in my family.
And then years later, I learned that King was a serial philanderer.
He just cheated on Coretta Scott King time and time and time again.
Now, when I first heard this, I was like, no way, you know, J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA made that shit up to smear him.
I just didn't want to believe it.
So when I look back on that moment, I could see that antibodies were mobilizing in my own mind to fight off threatening information.
But it was fighting off good information, true information.
So this is what happens when you embrace something as nearly sacred.
Embrace something as sacred, then when information comes along that threatens it, you'll reject it almost before listening to it or before really hearing it out.
That's the mind's immune system overreacting to a perceived threat.
By the way, there's a famous experiment in the history of immunology.
A Russian zoologist in 1882, he takes a starfish, he stabs it with a thorn, he sticks it under a microscope, and what he sees are thousands of white blood cells rushing to the scene of the injury, engulfing the tip of the thorn, and consuming, devouring it.
He was the first human being ever to witness the body's immune system in action.
I'm saying I witnessed my own mind's immune system overreacting to information about Martin Luther King.
And you can do this yourself.
Imagine somebody, you log on one day and find that some jerk out there has been assassinating your character, has just been tearing you down online.
I just loved having long-form conversations with people I really cared about and just like shooting the shit with my buddies after school and exploring ideas, testing ideas.
I just found that I loved that idea and I decided to devote my life to promoting dialogue.
Honest, truth-seeking dialogue.
That was my kind of core conviction, and so I went to grad school, studied philosophy, and I tried to understand how reasoning dialogue works and what's the difference between dialogue that works well and dialogue that goes off the rails.
And that's one thing that I could say is sorely lacking in most people's lives is long form conversations.
Everyone is doing tweets and text messages and, you know, you don't have much time to yourself and you definitely very rarely just sit down with no distractions for several hours at a time just talking to people.
Someone can tell you something, you know, maybe they grew up in Hungary, or maybe they did this, or maybe they did that, and they can say something to you and you're like, oh, okay.
Like, that's something that, I mean, if we really want to do this government or this country, rather, a service, our government should actually be saying that to the people.
Like, this is one way we can make our country stronger.
If we have less ideologues, we have less people that are completely connected to one narrative and will fight tooth and nail.
You know, like you see these Twitter political battles.
I mean, there's so many of those where you're just like, God, boys, let it go.
And if you can get kids asking, you know, coming to that conclusion, you've started them down a path towards growing morally that's going to serve them well.
So you can get kids interested in philosophical questions.
You know, is Nemo real or is he fake?
I watched this wonderful video online from a dad who's into street epistemology.
Have you heard of this?
No.
So there's a bunch of philosophers and people who are kind of inspired by philosophy who go out onto the streets with a cell camera and they walk up to somebody and just say, hey, do you mind if I ask you some questions?
And if they give consent, you say, all right, I'm going to.
And then they ask them, you know, tell me about a cherished belief.
And then they ask gentle clarifying questions to kind of explore that belief, and in a very non-combative way, they get people to think really deeply about their values.
It's a fascinating process, and it was inspired by Socrates, but it's kind of a phenomenon now that there are hundreds of people all over the world who do this.
They're just out there having deep conversations about right and wrong and about core values.
And you're watching them like their minds just start to open right in front of your eyes.
It's a brilliant little demonstration of the power of conversation about what's real, what isn't, what's good, what's bad, what's knowledge and what's mere opinion.
These are the questions philosophers have been exploring for thousands of years.
And if we have even kids exploring them from a young age, we could rebuild our society in a beautiful, beautiful way.
So Carl Sagan, the late astrophysicist, was really good at getting people to think about the vastness of space and how tiny our little blue planet is.
And the humility that comes with that and the sense of perspective and the sense of awe and the sense of wonder that comes with that, I think can be transformative.
So Sagan was on the team, the NASA team, that piloted the Voyager spacecraft, which made its way past Mars and Jupiter, Saturn and Jupiter.
And way out there, near Saturn's rings, he convinces the team to turn the Voyager spacecraft around and photograph Earth when Earth was just a tiny blue speck in the distance.
And he caught this image of the Earth from the farthest reaches of the solar system.
And he says, think about that one pixel blue dot in that picture.
Everything you've ever cared about has played out in that one little blue dot.
Every war that's ever been fought on that blue dot.
Every bit of suffering you've ever heard of, every joy, every civilization has lived or died on that little blue dot.
Let that be an inspiration and a source of humility for us all.
The way they have it set up is they have diffused lighting on the Big Island, and it's because of the observatory.
They make it so that the light pollution doesn't get all the way up to the Keck Observatory.
When one time I got up there and it was a full moon, and that was a mess.
I was like, oh, you don't want to be up there on a full moon because the moon itself reflects the sun and then it becomes a problem where you can't see the stars.
Change the Mayans and change the Egyptians and all these different cultures that they look to the heavens for the patterns that they use to establish their cities, like the Mayans in particular.
They mirrored the cosmos.
In many constellations, in their designs of their cities.
I think that could be a real problem with our civilization is that for the most part, most people experience a tremendous amount of light pollution every day.
Most people don't ever get to see stars like that.
It's only people that live in extremely rural places.
I mean, maybe if you live in the middle of Montana, out in the middle of nowhere, your night sky looks like that.
It's certainly messing with our concept of our perspective of our position in the universe.
Like, our perspective is that we're on Earth and that, you know, I gotta go to work.
And this is it.
And I'm doing this and I'm doing that.
And I think we get humble when we're around spectacular examples of nature's beauty, right?
Like people that live near the ocean, for example, are more chill.
And I think one of the reasons why they're more chill is like, how can you take yourself seriously when you're faced with this vast quantity of water that could just wash over your city and just – I mean, you're at the edge of this insane volume of water.
The mountains are the most awe-inspiring for me, like Colorado or places like that where you're up there.
Everything's so beautiful.
It's like the most beautiful artwork you've ever seen, but it's nature.
Especially on a sunny day after the rain when everything's vibrantly green and the clouds are parting and you see the birds chirping and you're like, God, this is pretty.
Well, they're similar, right, in that there's like especially space because space is the nature here times infinity, right?
Because that's really what it is.
When you're seeing those stars, those are stars that are the center of other solar systems and other solar systems that contain other planets and other planets that might have mountains and those mountains might have streams At the bottom of them with birds and, you know, alien beings.
And it might be very simple.
Like, there might be an infinite number of those examples that you're seeing down here on Earth.
So it's that spiritual experience you get when you do see a gorgeous lake and, you know, a fish jump and an eagle fly times forever, times infinity, times what my science teacher in eighth grade was trying to explain to me.
And a lot of my non-believer friends are almost allergic to spirituality talk, but I actually think that there's a place for it in this world, because there are things that words don't capture, and we need to be able to direct our attention to them and try to cherish them properly.
The non-believer friends that I have that don't like spiritual talk, it's either because they've been around too much of it where it's nonsense.
There is a lot of nonsense spiritual talk.
Like fake yoga people, that kind of deal.
Or they've never done psychedelics.
The people that have done psychedelics generally are more likely to be open-minded towards the possibility of some sort of a spiritual realm and spiritual thinking and that there's something more to this.
And that what's going on with most religions is they're trying to figure out, they're trying to grasp and put down on paper what these transcending experiences are.
They can happen and they can happen because of love, of, you know, you just have a one, a moment in time where you're with a person and you're holding hands and just you feel like the world's a different place or the birth of a child or...
Sometimes for some people it's even near-death experiences bring about it.
But there's moments in this life where you kind of get it for a brief moment and then you just get sucked back into the drone of the grind of the day-to-day existence of being an ant.
And some of the ancient Eastern philosophy traditions suggest that as soon as you try to affix those transcendent moments with words, you've already lost the game.
If they were legal and they were readily available with trained, qualified experts and professionals who are educated in correct dosages and how to administer them, we would have been way further off as a society.
Those two things, right?
Light pollution, if we eliminated all of that, and psychedelics were more readily available, it would completely transform the way human beings communicate with each other.
Cognitive immunology principles applied and also recognition of the established methods of alleviating physical stress to relax the mind, whether it's through yoga, meditation, exercise, mindfulness, all those different things that are absolutely real, but practiced by a minuscule percentage of the population.
Do you think of what percentage of the population actually practices those things?
Age-adjusted percentages of adults 18 through 64 met both aerobic and muscle-strengthening federal guidelines through leisure time physical activity by state.
I went to Boulder for the first time, I think it was in the early 2000s.
There was a jujitsu seminar that a friend of mine was doing when I was working in Denver, and he did a seminar in Boulder, and so we drove up to Boulder.
And I remember thinking, man, how pretty is it to live here?
I know.
Like, you can't help but be in awe.
You're surrounded by gorgeous nature everywhere you look.
Well, I mean, it's like folks that live in the Pacific Northwest tend to be a little bit more depressed, and there's a real physiological aspect to that.
They're not getting any vitamin D. It's terrible for you.
Well, what if we built a culture, though, where it wasn't so hard to get good exercise, where it wasn't so hard to have good, deep conversations, right?
Yep, and they'll take things and decide that they're slight transgressions, even if you didn't necessarily mean what you, like, especially when you're tweeting something, right?
Because so much is open to interpretation.
And that's a terrible way of communicating, period.
You know, we were talking about your friend that wrote the book about kindness, about most people who are kind.
There's an aspect to this, when you're not experiencing the person's Social cues, you're not looking them in the eye.
You're just tweeting or texting or emailing each other, whatever you're doing.
It's so impersonal.
It's so easy to be a shithead.
And it's so hard to be a shithead in person.
How many times have you had a conversation with the person like, hey, I remember when you said this and that.
And you're like, oh, did I? I'm sorry.
I didn't mean.
And then you see them relax.
But if you were just going back and forth, you'd be like, fuck you, I didn't do that.
Like, yes, you did.
Like, ah, your memory sucks.
Your fucking memory sucks.
And then Next thing you know, it's worse than ever.
Whereas if you're in person, you go, I don't remember that.
Tell me what happened.
And then they'll tell you, and you're like, well, I remember you did this.
And they'll go, oh yeah, I did do that.
And then you go, well, we both kind of fucked up, did we?
And I think a lot of people are listening to you and realizing that this openness you have, this willingness to listen and learn and that if they follow you in that, they can become better people.
But if you are in contact with a person and you're trying to get them to shift the way they think and behave, it's extremely difficult unless they're motivated to do so.
And your approach, where you take the time to really have a long conversation where you really understand, from what I've seen of your approach, you're just really good at getting people to open up and share their worldview.
And you ask the kind of clarifying questions that get people to do that.
And a lot of times, if you just get people to open up, they'll start to see where their own worldview can use a little bit of modification themselves.
Well, the thing is that this is one of the reasons why I want people to wear headsets is because this is very unusual, where your volume of your voice is the same as the volume of my voice, and it's in our ears.
And I call the philosophical process of testing ideas the reason-giving game.
So back when I was teaching critical thinking, I used – so when you teach critical thinking using a standard textbook, you basically teach kids like the 101 ways that reasoning can go wrong.
And you say, this is a fallacy, and that's a fallacy, and that's a fallacy.
And so be on the lookout for all these fallacies, kids, right?
And then what the kids realize is they end up going, oh, fuck, man.
But also it's like if you need validation, it's a great way to do that because it's common.
So it's a common thing you engage in.
If you don't have enough personal validation, if you don't have enough – if you're not looking at your life as being successful as you'd like it to be, you're constantly looking to get some validation.
And I think if we take this Socratic method I mentioned before, this idea testing in kind of a structured way, You use something of your deft, soft touch in terms of gentle questioning to get people to open up.
That's kind of step one.
Then you ask the kind of questions that say, well, how do you really know that what you're saying is true?
Like, so what's your source on that?
And, you know, are you sure that that source is reliable?
That's kind of step two.
And then at step three, you kind of gently nudge people towards an alternative way of thinking about it that serves their own needs even better than the beliefs they had.
I was thinking immediately when you were saying that, that that very structure is what's lacking in a lot of these really frivolous arguments that you see on social media, particularly on Twitter.
I wonder, that sounds to me like you're onto something really, really profound, which is that if our information diets involve disrespectful flame wars, our minds go downhill fast.
And so, yeah, I mean, deep, heartfelt, mutually respectful conversations about the things that matter most, that's what we all need more of in this day and age.
So people who are struggling with existential questions that often underlie their depression or other things basically say, I'm trying to figure out what the heck to do with my life.
You know, Andy, you study philosophy.
Can you help?
And man, people are just so hungry for these conversations.
They just want a space where somebody listens to them and that helps them clarify their own thinking about right and wrong and what's important and what's not important.
And man, if we just, I mean, everybody can get this from a good friend if you just make the time to practice it.
And then you also have like this, you know, you have a high degree of people that are, you know, fresh out of the universities where they're being taught these sort of radical leftist ideologies.
And then they try to apply those in real life.
And then they want to take down all these businesses and they're not doing like one of the things that I was saying, remember when they had that, um, the thing in Seattle where they had the occupied zone, Yes.
So this is an area where they took over this whole area, like six blocks, and they weren't letting people in there, and they're smashing windows and taking over stores.
But meanwhile, I'm like, this is a good example of people not thinking ahead and just thinking like children.
Because if you do this and you decide you're going to take over all these buildings and you're going to smash these windows and you're going to occupy these streets, what you're not recognizing is you didn't build any of this shit.
You didn't earn any of this shit.
You're playing by the rules of the brute.
You're going in and you're deciding that you can take over this area.
And you are opening yourself up for someone deciding to do that to you with greater force and greater power.
Scientists are saying, meanwhile, but there's no evidence for God exists because they're looking only at the upstream consequences.
It turns out that if you go and take a philosophical deep dive on this issue, it turns out that both sides have a piece of the truth.
Science is right that upstream evidence matters and religion is right that the downstream consequences of our beliefs matter.
We actually need to test ideas and pay attention to both.
We need to be mindful of both.
And in principle, this insight could allow us to adjudicate the centuries-long dispute between science and religion and arrive at a concept of responsible believing That ends this huge cultural divide.
But science doesn't have ideas that they're holding in terms of like what dialogue reveals to be problematic.
Like science is just data.
Science is data and testing and then a bunch of people that have a background in this discipline examining the results and hopefully, especially to the layperson like myself, relaying an accurate synopsis of what the testing has revealed.
So that's called, the ancients had a Latin word for this, reductio, reductio ad absurdum.
So if you can reduce something to absurdity, you get rid of the thing that led to the absurdity.
Okay.
And that's an example of how even the most mathematically rigorous scientists will sometimes look at the downstream consequences I think we're good to go.
So even scientists don't just look at upstream data or upstream evidence.
They're also to some degree mindful of what would our situation be like if we bought into this.
What would be the downstream effects?
Does that make sense?
So there's a lot more attention to downstream effects in science than we're led to believe.
Now, some scientists can do their thing saying, I'm going to prove this to be true or I'm going to prove this to be false, and I don't care what happens to the world if everybody believes it.
But I'm actually saying, wisdom requires that we look at upstream evidence and downstream consequences and consider them all.
But if a scientist is just examining data and they want to prove something to be true or false, they can't really take into consideration what the consequences of proving something to be true or false are.
Don't they have to just, I mean, because if they do that, then it's all open to interpretation and open to influence.
And so then human personality and societal concepts and ideas, culturally relevant concepts come into play.
Like how does a culture fear about things?
Is the culture influenced in any way by religion?
So many factors come into play when you're not just looking at hard data.
I mean, I think there's an illusion that scientists live in this kind of bubble where they can focus purely on data and not be affected by their confirmation bias, not be affected by social pressures.
Because that was a thing that they kind of had to do, but yet when it was detonated, it was such an extreme event.
I'm sure you're aware of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita when it happened, which is one of my favorite videos of all time, because he talks about it, and you see this super intelligent man who is contemplating the results of his own work and saying, I am, behold, death, the destroyer of worlds.
And of course Einstein, who was part of the same group of scientists who helped, who understood that atomic weapons were possible, wrote a letter to the president saying, hey, you know what?
You've got to know that atomic bombs are possible.
We understand the science behind it.
And for years afterwards, after the atomic bomb was invented, Einstein said, that might have been the biggest mistake of my life.
There was another one that was an accidental, like there was some sort of a systems glitch, and they thought that missiles were en route, and they had a decision to make, and they decided not to do anything, and it turns out it wasn't real.
And some Russian guy decided not to push the button, and it was his refusal to push the button, even though the flock of geese that had triggered the radar or whatever was actually, he might have saved us.
So, yeah, I mean, in a way, I mean, the entire story is a validation that we need to pay attention to the downstream effects of the beliefs we have.
I mean, to have a truly—so in the book, I basically say, let's set aside our political differences.
Let's set aside our religious differences.
Let's investigate together what responsible believing looks like.
Let's come up with a set of shared standards that make good sense to us.
Let's apply them and let the chips fall where they may.
It may be that your religion, aspects of your religion have to be modified.
It may be that science will actually have to develop more sensitivity to the kind of effects they're having on the world.
But we can't continue to indulge in irresponsible thinking or just assume that we're thinking responsibly without investigating the matter philosophically and coming up with better answers.
I'm still—there's still a whole lot of scientists who need to understand what cognitive immunology is and understand the—it's about 60 years of evidence for the mind's immune system.
It's out there, and we can talk about it if you like.
I've connected the dots and basically said this science is coming.
And I was on a call with about two dozen scientists a couple days ago, and they were like, damn, Andy, yes, this science, we need to build out this science.
I've talked to some brilliant people on this very podcast that – You listen to their thoughts and what they're trying to say and you go, oh my god, I see what you're doing, but I see where you're getting hit.
Like, God had a long beard, but all the other people, if you looked at the ancient depictions of religious figures, very few had a long, distinguished beard.
Like, doesn't God almost always have a long, distinguished beard?
Yeah, yeah, he was a UFC fighter, and he had this big crazy beard, and he was an adventurous person, and went on, I guess what you would call a walkabout, and died in the desert.
He was a guy that, like, he didn't value money, he valued life experience, and he was very interesting to listen to when he talked, and it just really inspired a lot of people.
He talked about a kid who had a very similar set of values, just wanted to be out in nature and sort of explore different experiences and ended up dying in the wilds of Alaska, not Death Valley.
But it sounds like there were some similarities there.
Oh, I had a lot of them, but I think just being a kid, I worked at this place called Newport Creamery and another place called Papa Gino's, these restaurant chains, and I delivered newspapers, and I worked a lot of construction jobs, and just a bunch of different things.
I delivered pizzas.
A bunch of different things where it's just like day in, day out, and then when it's over, you're like, thank God it's over.
And then you're like, how do I stop this?
How do I get out of this job?
How do I make sure that this doesn't become my life?
I remember I was driving limos.
That's one of my jobs.
And there was this guy who they were looking at as an example of who we could be.
And I remember this guy was overweight and his back was bad, but he had a Cadillac.
They always talk about his Cadillac.
And they were like, you know, you could be like Tony.
You know, Tony, you know, he's got an easy job.
Tony's working 60 hours a week driving limos.
But they were talking about how much money he makes and this and that.
He's doing great.
And I'm like, 60 hours a week?
This guy's just driving around.
60 hours a week.
And I was looking at this guy and he's like in his 40s and I was like his life has already gotten to this.
And they were like letting you know that you too could compromise your dreams and be like this guy if he just droned in and just showed up and just kept doing it day in and day out.
I guess what I mean is, I don't mean to dump on that job either.
I just mean that when you set aside your passions and your sense of purpose and just do work you don't even enjoy to get the bills paid, that can become a trap.
You've probably come across this fact that three years after winning the lottery, lottery winners are on average no happier than quadriplegics or something like that.
I would imagine, first of all, winning the lottery is also like, say if you start a business and that business becomes successful and then you start doing well, people are going to ask for money, but they're not going to ask for money the way they ask for a lottery winner's money.
Because the lottery winner is like, bitch, you didn't even earn this.
And this happens to a lot of successful young athletes, right?
They suddenly have money and then the people close to them start asking for handouts and then they start to question whether their friends are real friends, true friends.
There's also the culture of, like, expressing how much money you have through material possessions and the keeping up with the Joneses.
From Billy Corbin's documentary, Broke, on ESPN. 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress within five years of retirement.
So I used to run a summer camp for kids, character education summer camp for kids, and it's all based on the sport of Ultimate Frisbee.
Oh, okay, sure, yeah.
So I founded this small company.
In a few years, I had hundreds and hundreds of families sending their kids to me to learn the sport and to learn basic character, things like resilience and a positive attitude and teamwork, things like that.
And so one day we're up in a local park running camp, And who should be running laps around the track is Antonio Brown, the NFL wide receiver.
This was before he was like a first or second year player, hadn't really emerged.
And I walked over to Antonio.
I said, hey, Antonio, can you come over and say hi to some kids, maybe sign a few Frisbees?
And he says, sure, let me finish my workout.
He comes over after.
He's a perfect gentleman, terrific guy.
He signs some t-shirts, signs some discs.
And I said, hey, Antonio, my kids here want to teach you how to catch.
And so three of my kids, three of my best campers line up and I chuck the frisbee 40 yards down the field and the kids just run, run, run, run down and they pancake catch it.
No, there's a guy that I've had on multiple times that I'm friends with.
His name's Dr. Mark Gordon, and he works with a lot of traumatic brain injury patients, especially soldiers, guys who breach doors, and some football players and fighters as well.
And he said people get brain damage from jet skis.
What?
Yeah.
Just this...
He's like that constant rattling of the brain gives people CTE.
He was detailing all the different ways that the pituitary gland gets damaged.
And the pituitary gland apparently is a very sensitive gland.
And the way it happens is when you get impacts and a lot of these things happen, I'm obviously butchering this, but the way he was describing it is as it gets injured, it inhibits its ability to produce hormones.
And then you find these people get very depressed, very moody, and one of the ways they fix that is by exogenous hormone injections.
It's one of the ways they fix a lot of depression in former combat sport athletes and former football players, former soldiers.
I think my only contact with the concept of the pituitary was, did you know that the philosopher Descartes learned a little bit about the brain's architecture and there was a little gland in there that nobody knew what it did?
So his hypothesis was the pituitary is like the wormhole between the physical brain and your mind.
There's an amazing series of videos by a man who is now deceased.
His name is John Anthony West.
He'd been on my podcast a couple of times, once remotely and once in person, and he was an Egyptologist, and he made this series called Magical Egypt, and he really explored deep, deep, deep into the history of these hieroglyphs and what the interpretations of them are,
and How these structures are all, like, the Temple of Man is an intro, or Temple in Man, Temple in Man, I think is one of the temples is literally, it represents the various parts of the human being.
I think it's the Temple of Luxor, is that where it is?
What is Temple in Man?
I might be saying it wrong.
But in the documentary, it's just amazing when you think that these people that lived thousands and thousands of years ago had this incredibly complex way of designing these structures that we still to this day don't exactly know how they did it.
And they were so interested in preserving this story of – here it is – Temple in man.
Okay, I did get it right.
And so the idea is that this temple is supposed to represent a human body and that various parts of the temple, according to the hieroglyph, sort of depict various aspects.
Yeah, well, you got to think they're staring at these incredible images in the sky every night, right?
I mean, that would have to be so motivational.
Like we want to, like, especially if you had deemed certain stars and certain constellations sacred, you know, we want to represent those down as heaven on earth.
And when you go to like Stonehenge or something, doesn't the light coming in on the summer solstice like shine right through a gap between or something?
I actually think that that burning of the library of Alexandria was one of the key reasons we descended into a thousand-year dark age.
So when information technologies come along and help people communicate better, societies begin to flourish.
And when you either weaponize new information technologies, the way we're seeing and the way we talked about before, or when you destroy enlightening technologies like the library, And by the way, some of the same people who burned down the Library of Alexandria were also busy closing down all the universities throughout Europe.
And there's a reason why we entered a dark age, because respect for learning was just trashed by people who were benefiting from stubborn orthodoxy.
And my fear, more than anything, is a power blackout.
My fear is the grid going down and something happening where we can't access the information that's on these disks and hard drives and It'd be financial chaos.
Yeah, we have so much information on hard drives.
We have so much information that relies on the internet.
And as time goes on, we move more and more of our stuff into the digital realm.
And as that happens, like think about what we have now from ancient Egypt.
The best stuff that we have is all carved in stone, like the Rosetta Stone that showed us how these Different languages, the translations of them, and then we have all these hieroglyphs carved in stone.
We have these incredible structures that still exist thousands and thousands of years later, again, made out of stone.
If they had hard drives back then, they would long be gone.
There would be no way to access that information.
And also, imagine just what would happen, which was a few generations of darkness, right?
Think about how long the Ice Age was.
And think about how it plunged so many civilizations into this like completely different way of life where you have to deal with extreme cold and just most of North America, like half of it was under a mile of ice, right?
And this is Graham Hancock and Graham Carlson, or Randall Carlson, rather.
Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, and a few other people, including Dr. Robert Schock from Boston University as a geologist, they're entertaining this idea that there was some sort of an impact somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000, 12,000 years ago.
That ended the ice age and that these impacts that hit particularly in North America and throughout Europe, they've left behind.
When they do core samples, you can find this, I think it's called Tritonite.
It's nuclear glass.
And the nuclear glass, you find it at test sites like, you know, where they do detonate nuclear bombs.
And one of the more compelling theories is based on the water erosion around the Great Sphinx.
Because the Sphinx around the Great Pyramid, the temple of the Sphinx, has these deep fissures around it that seem to indicate thousands of years of rainfall.
The problem with that is the last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9000 BC. So that predates the supposed construction of the pyramids by 7000 years.
You should see, pull up images of the water erosion evidence around the Sphinx.
And the thing about this is Robert Schock is, you know, he's a real geologist from Boston University.
And it's a very controversial idea.
And he's been, it's much more accepted now because of Gobekli Tepe.
Because Gobekli Tepe, which was discovered in Turkey, was more than 12,000 years old.
This has been proven by carbon dating because of the surrounding area.
It was covered up somewhere intentionally around 12,000 years old.
And so it used to be the thought was, where are these ancient structures from 12,000 years ago that would indicate that it would be possible for a civilization from that time period to create something so magnificent?
So if he's right, and if Randall Carlson's right, and if Graham Hancock's right, and Graham has written books on this and had many, many, many, many discussions with people that disputed it or agreed with it, and he believes that there was probably some sophisticated civilization similar to ancient Egypt that existed in You know, 10, 15, maybe even 20,000 or more years ago.
And that was wiped out by the Younger Dryas impact.
And then if you add in Robert Shock's The theory about the construction of the Sphinx, he is theorizing that it is at least – so it would be thousands of years of rainfall.
The last time there was rainfall in the Nile Valley, the climate was very different, somewhere around 9,000 BC, which is 7,000 years old.
And you have to think, well, it's got thousands of years of rainfall on top of that.
So now you're like at 10,000 B.C. or something, or 7,000?
It's like 9,000 B.C., which is 7,000 years earlier than they thought.
But if there's thousands of years of rainfall that would have caused that erosion, if that's true, then you've got, you know, who knows how many thousand B.C.? 10,000 B.C.? 12,000 B.C.? Who knows?
We supposedly diverged from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees about 7 million years ago.
And Homo sapiens, as opposed to some of the other Homo species that have since died out, It's just emerged, what, in the last 200,000, maybe possibly 400,000 years?