Paul Bloom Returns

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.

[1] Experts on expert.

[2] I'm Dan Shepard.

[3] I'm joined by Lily Patman.

[4] Hi.

[5] How are you?

[6] Good.

[7] Returning guest, one of our favorite guests.

[8] Yeah, really fun expert.

[9] Oh my God.

[10] The one and only Paul Bloom.

[11] Paul is a psychologist and a professor at Yale University.

[12] You see how much struggling I'm doing.

[13] Yeah, and also because you have to hold the phone so close to your eyes.

[14] I thought the whole point was.

[15] Okay, no. He's glad.

[16] are hard.

[17] Okay.

[18] They really are.

[19] I feel like I could get in a bulldozer and immediately operate it.

[20] Like, it could drive anything in fucking operating these glasses.

[21] It is.

[22] I'm learning.

[23] I'm learning.

[24] Okay.

[25] Poor Paul Bloom.

[26] He's our favorite.

[27] He is.

[28] He is.

[29] I mean, I think he's the most brilliant psychologist still alive.

[30] He is beyond for me. He is.

[31] We cover a lot of fun, different topics in this, which I really like.

[32] Mm -hmm.

[33] That's what's so fun about him.

[34] dance in any genre.

[35] He'll go with you.

[36] He will.

[37] He's got a bunch of great books.

[38] The Sweet Spot Against Empathy, just Babies, How Pleasure Works.

[39] He's a new book out right now that I loved called Syke, the story of the human mind.

[40] In essence, this was his Psych 101 class.

[41] That was the most popular class at Yale for years.

[42] He would then do that in a spoken word version, and now he's written a text, and it's really incredible.

[43] I rec.

[44] Please enjoy Paul Bloom.

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[47] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[48] No, it's just enough pages.

[49] Hello.

[50] Oh, my God, you're here on an amazing day.

[51] Dax is wearing a jumpsuit for the first time in his whole life.

[52] My whole life.

[53] And Paul, it's a little too snug, but I ordered it.

[54] It came.

[55] I'm wearing a jumpsuit.

[56] Yeah, and it's plaid.

[57] It's really cool.

[58] It looks good.

[59] Do you say that sincerely or as out of just politeness?

[60] Yeah, that's a jumpsuit.

[61] Yeah.

[62] That's something.

[63] Yeah.

[64] It does look good.

[65] You pull it off.

[66] Yeah.

[67] Okay, okay.

[68] Brad Pitt wears skirts now, so Dax has to keep up.

[69] I had to do something, Paul.

[70] Guys are wearing skirts.

[71] He wore a skirt to premiere.

[72] I'm very interesting perversity.

[73] So I use this example.

[74] And when asked why, he did it, he says, we're all going to die someday.

[75] So let's mix it up.

[76] Yeah, I love that.

[77] Okay.

[78] Did you buy that explanation?

[79] I don't know.

[80] Some people can pull this off.

[81] Me, I got a new blazer, which is green.

[82] Also very nice.

[83] For me, this is pushing the envelope.

[84] This is my jumpsuit.

[85] This is my skirt.

[86] There has to be some psychological studies that try to find some ingredient.

[87] that makes people adventurous in their wardrobe?

[88] Is there some principle out there?

[89] I think it's one of the big ways people are different.

[90] I would say you were both probably very expression -dating psychics is open to experience.

[91] And that personality level, you're open to experience.

[92] Do you have an area of your life that you're flamboyant where you're almost like, you think people might look at you and go like, oh, wow, this guy drives a yellow miata?

[93] Do you have anything in your life that could be described as flamboyant?

[94] There's some line by Flobert about artists being bourgeois and, everyday life so they can be flamboyant in their work.

[95] And sometimes my work gets flamboyant.

[96] My life is actually, I will just admit it to you and to the 10 million other people listening.

[97] It kind of stayed.

[98] I have two older children.

[99] I'm happily married.

[100] I ready a job.

[101] That's nice.

[102] Yeah.

[103] Sometimes I drink some whiskey.

[104] You know, it's whatever.

[105] That's the dream, really.

[106] Your work is flamboyant.

[107] I guess you save your provocativeness for your work, which I guess we're all grateful for.

[108] Thank you.

[109] Some of it, I think, is childhood.

[110] This whole thing, this jumpsuit you're seeing me in.

[111] It's the plaid jumpsuit, which is really striking.

[112] You're right.

[113] I have kind of a mechanic one I wear as well.

[114] No one really notices.

[115] So it's actually not my first jumpsuit.

[116] Because it's fit.

[117] It's like a piece.

[118] It's too small.

[119] Yeah, we covered that.

[120] Well, no. When you did this last time, I thought this was the preamble to the podcast.

[121] And I had to talk to all sorts of, really embarrassment.

[122] And now I know this is the real thing.

[123] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[124] Yeah, we have a saying here, ABR, like from ABC Always Be Closing.

[125] It's ABR always be recording.

[126] So it's recording before I enter the space.

[127] Yeah.

[128] So you were telling me about your jumpsuit.

[129] Yeah, I was just going to say that early on I decided, oh, I'm going to choose clothes and hairstyles to be a distraction from my face that I don't like.

[130] It was a tactic.

[131] It was a lane I picked.

[132] And then I just got stuck in it.

[133] I think that became my identity so young that now if I'm not doing anything, I just feel like I'm no longer myself.

[134] So even when you're at home, by yourself, you'll go for the more flamboyant.

[135] It's more of this.

[136] I'll just go like, boy, you haven't really made an effort at all in a long time.

[137] Are you withering on the vine?

[138] What's going on?

[139] Who have you become?

[140] Yeah.

[141] Okay.

[142] Last time we spoke a year and a half ago, we were all conveniently watching that marriage show.

[143] But the infidelity scenes from a marriage or something.

[144] Oh, yeah.

[145] Yeah.

[146] All three of us were really intrigued.

[147] by it.

[148] Jessica Chastain.

[149] Yeah.

[150] And Oscar Isaacs.

[151] You know, I watched another couple of episodes and it got so grim, I just stopped.

[152] It was so sad.

[153] It was too much.

[154] I would say to people, go ahead and watch it, but certainly not with your wife or your husband.

[155] The acting's worth observing.

[156] It's off the charts, but maybe not the best thing for a husband and wife to watch.

[157] Did they have a scene where the whole thing is like in the bedroom and she's explained to him and says, I'm leaving you.

[158] I'm leaving you for this man. I had fell in love him.

[159] We had crazy sex.

[160] We didn't leave our hotel.

[161] for three to it.

[162] And he's just listening to this and begging her to stay at it.

[163] Yeah.

[164] It's heartbreaking.

[165] It just kills me. Yeah.

[166] Yes.

[167] In fact, that's the exact thing we talked about last time.

[168] So I guess I wanted to just be trivial for a second before we launch into Syke and just I'm curious, what are you watching now?

[169] And I'm praying you've watched this one thing Monica and I're obsessed with so we can get your take on it.

[170] But what are you watching now?

[171] The Last of Us.

[172] Okay, great.

[173] I haven't done that yet.

[174] I'm watching that.

[175] Yeah.

[176] I don't know the video game, but it's beautifully acted and extremely well done.

[177] Does it come from a video game?

[178] Yeah.

[179] Oh, my gosh.

[180] This may be the first one that was a good transfer, I guess, having not played the game.

[181] What are you two watching?

[182] Okay, there's a documentary about Sarah Lawrence.

[183] What's it called?

[184] It's called Stolen Youth.

[185] It's on Hulu.

[186] No. Oh, fuck, Paul.

[187] This cult that kind of emerged out of Sarah Lawrence, having nothing to do with Sarah Lawrence.

[188] Yeah, just poor Sarah Lawrence.

[189] It happens to be the setting for this.

[190] But in a nutshell, there's seven or eight students living in off -campus housing.

[191] one of the girl's father gets released from prison, he comes to sleep on the couch, and then he develops these relationships with all eight members of the house, ultimately getting four or five of them to move into a one -bedroom apartment in the city with him.

[192] And then years of this psychological abuse and kind of Stockholm -y stuff happens.

[193] It's bonkers.

[194] The point of me bringing it up and why I wish you had seen it is it's a really, really, really, acute look at how fragile the human psyche is.

[195] Like, I think way more than any of us would ever want to believe how someone can be broken.

[196] Yeah, there's a line.

[197] I think it's from the Joker, the graphic novels, something to the effect of, in a day, somebody could be transformed and lose older humanity, become a monster.

[198] And maybe it's not a day, but where we are, in a sense, more fragile than we think we are.

[199] Yeah, this is kind of pretty well documented, right?

[200] We think our identity is cast in concrete or something.

[201] but tell us about some of the factors that might shock us and how easily this happens.

[202] Maybe one of the most famous psychology experiments is the one by Stanley Milgram took place at Yale, where I used to be, where he got these people to come in.

[203] He said, you're going to do a learning experiment.

[204] And there's another guy in a room.

[205] You get to meet him, shake hands with him, nice, big Irish guy.

[206] And then if he makes a mistake, I got to give him a little shock.

[207] Yeah, we know.

[208] Yeah, this is a good one.

[209] You've heard this.

[210] So the shocks keep going up, right?

[211] Ultimately, what Milgram found was that just by being.

[212] instruct.

[213] These guys come off the street.

[214] They end up killing the guy.

[215] They end up believing they kill the guy.

[216] He screams.

[217] He begs for mercy.

[218] The people say, can I leave?

[219] Can I stop?

[220] The experiment says, experiment must go on.

[221] The point is, I ask intro Sykes -to -it's all the time.

[222] What would you do?

[223] And they all say, oh, I wouldn't go on.

[224] I wouldn't shock the president.

[225] I'd need the exception.

[226] You're white.

[227] What would you have thought of slavery?

[228] And they say, well, I would have been against it.

[229] We have no conception of how we can be influenced often for the worst by forces.

[230] We We probably are not the people who would rise up against Hitler.

[231] We probably were to people who would just do what we're told.

[232] Yeah, I know.

[233] It's such a bummer.

[234] I know people hate when I point this out.

[235] And by the way, I employ lots of Latino workers.

[236] So I'm not claiming to be holier than now or self -righteous.

[237] I'm simply asking the question to family and friends.

[238] Do you think in a hundred years from now when they look back at Los Angeles and they just say the simple statement, brown people did manual labor and white people didn't?

[239] How do you think the future is going to judge that?

[240] Like, do you think the explanation we currently have is going to hold up in 100 years?

[241] It really ignites them.

[242] They're really angry when I make this point.

[243] Well, that's better than they had in Guam.

[244] And I'm like, yeah, that's what slave owners said.

[245] It was better than the jungle they pulled them from.

[246] You're right.

[247] It's weird, isn't it?

[248] Because we can ask each other, what do we do now that 100 years are they going to say horrible?

[249] Like our prisons, the savagery towards non -human animals, not just that we eat them, but the tortures we put them through.

[250] And people like me say, oh, man, a hundred years now I'm going to say, it was monstrous.

[251] How did they do it?

[252] And then tonight I'm going to eat the snake.

[253] Yeah.

[254] Me too.

[255] I'm not claiming to be above it.

[256] Just I bet it's not going to look great.

[257] Yeah.

[258] We live of these hypocrisies.

[259] That's no excuse.

[260] Maybe we should live a lot better.

[261] I'm really into, you know, we talked about this last time, into an idea of rationality and how smart we are and how we're able to come into moral insights.

[262] But often when push comes to shop, we do what everyone else does.

[263] Yeah.

[264] Everyone else I know eats me, everyone else you know, employs people from other countries.

[265] You do it.

[266] No one's yelling at you for doing it, so you do it.

[267] I almost think it's evolutionary because if you're the one, you're at risk of getting kicked out of the group.

[268] If you're the one always calling people out.

[269] Challenging the agreed upon system.

[270] Yeah.

[271] That's absolutely true.

[272] I have a part of my book where I talk about conspiracy theories and people who believe crazy things.

[273] And I say, it's not necessarily irrational to believe crazy things because we're social creatures.

[274] So if everybody around me thinks global warming is a hoax, well, if I don't want to lose all my friends, if I don't want to be a pariah, then exactly what you're saying, Monica, it makes sense at a certain level for me to say, global warming is a hoax and believe it.

[275] Now my life is so much better.

[276] Nobody wants to be an outcast.

[277] This gets me to my last question, but I don't mind going there first.

[278] Yeah, this already landed me at the very last one.

[279] But just in a nutshell, psych the story of the human mind.

[280] You've taken what was one of the most popular courses of all times.

[281] I'm at Yale, your intro to psychology class, and you've kind of put it down in book form with more stuff, I'm sure, than was in that class.

[282] Oh, more stuff.

[283] Yeah, yeah.

[284] But in general, that is the conceit of the book.

[285] There's so many wonderful topics in it.

[286] But my last question was going to be, if you had to identify the single most powerful force that explains our behavior, as you might guess, I have one.

[287] But I'm curious if you do have the single most powerful, because I think we were just dancing around it.

[288] Yeah.

[289] I think the single most important force is our capacity for reason.

[290] This is how come I'm in Toronto.

[291] You're in California.

[292] We have these machines.

[293] We're communicating.

[294] We have laws.

[295] We have rights.

[296] We have societies.

[297] It's what shapes the world.

[298] It's what makes humans so transcendently special.

[299] I think that's the most important.

[300] The most powerful force, I think, is our emotion.

[301] and particularly our social emotions, gratitude, shame, guilt, romantic love, sexual love, parental love.

[302] I think they drive us in powerful way.

[303] So what would you put first?

[304] Well, I guess it works in concert with that, because I would say under that, those emotions, those are all adaptive things to facilitate social cohesion.

[305] I think that we're social primates, and as much as we look at dogs and we're like, oh, I can predict everything a dog's going to do because they have a pack mentality.

[306] I can get them to do this or that.

[307] We accept that.

[308] And I think for some reason, we think we have transcended that.

[309] And I think we live in this very precarious time where it's like we have transcended the need for a group.

[310] But our bodies know it's life or death.

[311] That's right.

[312] Right?

[313] As a species, we know we have got to be in concert with our peers or we'll be excluded and will die in the jungle.

[314] And I think that force is so powerful and completely ignored.

[315] and or we live in a technological time where you don't need one.

[316] So it's this weird paradox.

[317] A lot of people pointed out that we started these Stone Age minds that have evolved for tribal living.

[318] And now we're stuck in a world with Facebook and Twitter and super highways and billions of people.

[319] There's such a clash.

[320] I remember the first time I ever published an article was on Slate.

[321] And so it was about, our atheist, better people, or worse people.

[322] And it's as complicated.

[323] I look at the comments in the very first comment was, old in caps, you are a dumb ass.

[324] So the fact that I'm telling you this story, so many years, they said, what?

[325] And so I immediately said, I'm not a dumb ass.

[326] Smarter people said, don't do this.

[327] You're an idiot.

[328] Don't need the comments.

[329] But here's the thing.

[330] Back in a world where we lived in a tribe of 30 people, 50 people, 100 people, 200 people, somebody who thought it was a dumb ass, that is serious business.

[331] This person is going to be living day by day.

[332] It makes total syndicate it seriously.

[333] But that part of the brain hasn't shut down, right?

[334] So a stranger says somebody, some jerk cuts you off.

[335] You Google yourself and you find some awful thing.

[336] The most reasonable thing is to say, it doesn't matter.

[337] But our minds go back to a different time where it did matter and we think it matters now.

[338] When we are confronted with that, that we responded to someone who called us a dumbass.

[339] I think conventionally, you accuse the person of just vanity, right?

[340] Like, oh, get over your vanity.

[341] And I think it kind of discounts the actual force that's happening and how it is existential.

[342] And it's okay that that was your response.

[343] And, of course, we want to have tools.

[344] But what's curious to me is how we don't have a better set of tools that is known by all to address this huge force in our lives.

[345] Yeah.

[346] And you're right.

[347] It's not vanity.

[348] I think the only people who don't care what other people think about them are either psychopaths or saints.

[349] And as long as just the person, you care what people think about you.

[350] I mean, it's critical.

[351] It's like caring whether you have food and water.

[352] You know, people try to do other systems.

[353] There's Buddhism.

[354] It's a system which recognizes that everything is suffering and intransient and don't get too attached.

[355] There's stoicism.

[356] We try to construct systems that are ways to get our minds to say, don't take it so seriously.

[357] But it's hard.

[358] Yeah.

[359] To me, I always just see it like the antidote is shaming the person for having been self -centered or vain.

[360] I just think, well, that's just incomplete.

[361] It doesn't give full credit to the force at work.

[362] Okay.

[363] another thing I figured out while going through your book was, do you just love Behave by Sapolsky?

[364] Yeah, excellent book.

[365] Yes.

[366] Oh, I'm sorry.

[367] That's not the one that I realize.

[368] The weirdest people on the planet's the one that you quote quite often in the book.

[369] I do by Joe Henrik.

[370] Yes, that book just absolutely blew my mind.

[371] I'm sure you were already aware of all these principles, but did even you find yourself reading it really feeling peculiar about us in the West?

[372] Yeah.

[373] In fact, I edit a journal, Behavior and Brain Science, where he and his colleagues first coined the term weird, which is Western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies.

[374] And their line was so much of psychology, all the work I do, studying this fairly narrow population, and this is the population we live in, where we're rich, we're Western, we're educated, but most of the world isn't like that.

[375] And, of course, most of the world is never like that.

[376] So what Henrik and that bunch argue is that we're studying the psychology of fairly unusual people.

[377] And in his book, he points at all different ways, which we are.

[378] unusual.

[379] We're very individualistic, while other societies tend to be more collectivists.

[380] Yeah, even the practical way when he points out, like, if you were to ask someone from, I don't know, North Korea, I'd to tell you about themselves, they would mention who their parents are, their siblings are, what village they're from.

[381] The list would be quite long before they said, I'm an economist.

[382] That I could look at and go like, oh, yeah, that's quite clear.

[383] The piece that you took from weirdest people in the world or one of them was in getting into social psychology and maybe a bit of a crisis that we're in, which I couldn't be happier that you've dedicated some time in your book to.

[384] So this is the little section from weirdest people in the world.

[385] A randomly selected American undergraduate is more than 4 ,000 times more likely to be a research participant than is a randomly selected person from outside of the West.

[386] Yeah, that's rough.

[387] My book is like a celebration of psychology.

[388] This is what we know.

[389] This is some great findings.

[390] Some of the findings we have about memory, for instance, I think are really important and really deep.

[391] But at the same time, our field is in a big crisis.

[392] You put your finger on one aspect of it, which is the weird problem.

[393] We claim to be studying the whole world, but we're studying this a narrow part.

[394] Another part which I talk about is a lot of our findings, a lot of them don't replicate.

[395] A lot of them can't be trusted.

[396] So what I want to do in my book, among others, is to celebrate psychology, but also tell people you've got to be skeptical of a lot of it.

[397] Yeah, you say one project looking at 100 psychology studies published in top journalism, found that only about 40 % of the replications got significant results.

[398] But yeah, that of 100 in top journals, only 40 % could be replicated.

[399] Seems really dangerous because you must see it.

[400] We see it because we're in this business where someone has a cool finding.

[401] It's a headline in the news.

[402] Someone writes an article about it and then it comes across our desk.

[403] It almost launches this rivulet, which just then people hop on with their opinions and just watch it take off.

[404] and it just takes up all the space for six months or so.

[405] And you just wonder like, boy, I hope that finding was right or consistent in other areas.

[406] It's just deeply concerning.

[407] I have a rule to have to think about this, which is never, ever, ever believe in a single finding.

[408] Just say, okay, somebody found it.

[409] Wait until there's finding after finding after finding after finding after finding after finding.

[410] And then when you get all that, then change your mind.

[411] Single finding say, eh, because there's all sorts of ways that single finding may not be representative.

[412] So there's stuff like if I told you that social connections make people happy.

[413] You could take that to the bank because there's literally hundreds of studies showing it in all sort of ways.

[414] If I tell you, you know, standing on your head for 10 minutes every morning makes you happy because somebody found it.

[415] Well, I never.

[416] Just wait until that's confirmed.

[417] Yeah.

[418] So even when you say the social connections is powerful, I go straight to at some point somebody wrote in one of their papers that you'll die earlier of loneliness more than you were a smoker.

[419] That's actually right.

[420] Apparently loneliness is worse than smoking and obesity.

[421] Now, that's terrible, but you've got to wonder who did that calculus, and that one really took flight because it's a good story.

[422] Someone stumbled upon a great analogy or anecdote.

[423] But this is demoralizing, because what do you believe?

[424] And life is boring if all these articles are not real.

[425] Is the meta -analysis one of the tools we have?

[426] Yeah.

[427] So a meta -analysis is when you take a bunch of studies, like 100 studies or 500, and you put them together and you see what the broad story is.

[428] And I think they're really powerful tools.

[429] But there's kind of a garbage -in -garbage -out problem where if the studies are manipulated in well -intentioned ways to get good results, lousy sample sizes, poorly done studies.

[430] You put in a lot of crap, your meta -analysis will give you crap.

[431] It can't do better than individual studies.

[432] There's no substitute for doing things right.

[433] But I want to sort of defend my field, we're talking to negative.

[434] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[435] We do have really robust findings.

[436] Sometimes because they're done by big studies.

[437] So some of the happiness studies are done with over a million people.

[438] And you do all of these analyses and very powerful findings, sometimes because there's convincing experiments after experiments after experiments.

[439] So one thing I'm into, I talk in my book, is about memory.

[440] One of the findings that's really important and is sort of solid is the reconstructive nature of memory.

[441] There's a folk view that when you live in the world, you record things, like you're holding of your iPhone and it's just recording.

[442] And you have a full recording in your head.

[443] They get hypnotize you, you get it back, go through therapy, you get it back.

[444] And psychologists think, and I think we're right to think this, it's just not true.

[445] example in your book is like a guy in a crime novel, hypnotizing a guy and telling him to hit Rewind on his, he's like now using his brain as a VCR.

[446] That's right.

[447] That's right.

[448] It's Michael Connolly.

[449] These guys have the Hieronymus Bosch series.

[450] He has a scene where this guy's a witness that he hypnotized him.

[451] He says, okay, so play it back.

[452] Keep playing it back.

[453] And then freeze it on a license plate.

[454] Zoom in.

[455] That's not how memory works.

[456] If you can't remember something from the past and I hypnotize you or as your therapist gets at you, you make stuff up.

[457] There's so many evidence you could reconstruct the story.

[458] What's worse is, and this is some really good stuff by Elizabeth Loftus, is asking people questions can shake their memories of the past.

[459] So typical studies show you a movie of some event, and I'd say, hey, did you see the school bus?

[460] No. And then you're sure you didn't see it.

[461] And then later on I asked you to describe the event, and poof, there's a school bus in it.

[462] This is like false confession stuff where they're like sort of a splanting.

[463] So what Loftus did in one of her studies was she implanted false memories in people.

[464] It's inception.

[465] And there's sort of moral reasons why you don't want to put somebody's head to decadmit or murder or rape somebody or was a victim of a terrible crime.

[466] But she had this story, for instance, where he said, when you were a kid, you went to a wedding and you spilled punch all over the bride's mother.

[467] Never happened.

[468] But you ask people the questions.

[469] And for some people, not everybody, a little while later, they remember it.

[470] Oh, my God.

[471] Is there an ethical way that a therapist might implant some counter memories to help you?

[472] I guess you can make a moral argument that maybe some false positive memories could get you in the loop.

[473] In the book, you're saying this, memories are most accessible.

[474] Like one example you give is like, if you study a little buzzed, you'll probably do better if you take the test a little buzzed.

[475] If you're sad, all of a sudden, your recollection of memories of other times you've been sad are very salient.

[476] Yeah.

[477] And then conversely, if you're happy, so to me, when you find out that's an aspect of it, then it seems a little self -perpetuating.

[478] So if one can get themselves in a happy state, then they're going to be remembering more happy states and so on.

[479] So would it maybe be ethical for a therapist to implant some happy?

[480] Wow.

[481] You go to the therapist, you say, I've had a terrible childhood.

[482] Can you fix that for me?

[483] Yes.

[484] Can I have like a happy child, a happy child of memories and everything?

[485] Maybe happy couples do this where you're lying in bed, your partner and you're talking, and you're going over some event in the past.

[486] And if you're happy, you're in a good relationship, you don't go over to the bad events.

[487] You don't go over to fights, the periods of bored and the sadness.

[488] You say, hey, remember when that happened?

[489] Yeah.

[490] And pretty soon, your head starts to fill itself the positive things and negative things go away.

[491] When I lived in New Haven, we had on our wall going up the stairs pictures of our kids and all doing happy stuff of our kids, you know, in a swimming pool on vacation, the kids cracking out, great pictures of all of us.

[492] And I'd always look at the pictures going up and down.

[493] And I think because of that, all my memories of my kids when they were kids are happy because they're all the pictures.

[494] Yeah, you never say grab the camera when the kid's bawling.

[495] That's right.

[496] Remember when a kid had explosive diarrhea?

[497] We have pictures of the room.

[498] Yeah.

[499] The data set's totally skewed.

[500] You're only documenting certain types of times.

[501] But you're pointing out that maybe sometimes if you consent to it, fiddling with your memories could be a good thing.

[502] I think we naturally do that a little bit.

[503] Even thing that's benign as trying to think of the good stuff.

[504] God, you're making me think.

[505] of i get a text for my sister -in -law it's like don't listen to that message i butt dialed you so naturally i've got to immediately listen to this message and it was adorable they were outside talking and they were kind of my brother was saying yeah well you know where you really crushes when you went to the other job and you said this and blah blah blah i was listening them talking it was really interesting because it was just like a fly in the wall i guess i was seeing a little bit of mirror how i do that too in my relationship They were just taking this time to go over the past and kind of compliment each other on the moves that happened and that they were grateful for where they were at in life.

[506] I think probably they were embarrassed because I guess from the outside, you could say it was bragging.

[507] But I, of course, just identified with how nurturing this was to one another.

[508] And it was quite sweet.

[509] That's incredibly sweet.

[510] Yeah, I really liked it.

[511] And it's not just memories.

[512] It's the person you are.

[513] So if you're in a loving relationship, that person will bring out in you the very best parts and see the best.

[514] part of you.

[515] And who's to say that they're wrong?

[516] Like, we do have the best part.

[517] I had read your memory chapter.

[518] And so even you saying that someone wrote dumbass is very telling.

[519] That's a huge clue.

[520] There was probably 30 plus positive comments that you have no idea what they were.

[521] And then we kind of get into the biochemical nature of your brain.

[522] You're getting a stronger signal.

[523] Can you tell us what's happening biochemically with negative and positive?

[524] One of the finding, this is an unfortunate thing going against what we're talking about is humans possess a negativity bias.

[525] The negative is more powerful than a positive.

[526] This makes total sense.

[527] Think of the worst thing that could happen to you right now.

[528] You're following me the worst thing.

[529] Now think of the best thing that could happen to you.

[530] The worst thing is much worse than the good thing is good.

[531] True.

[532] What are you going to do?

[533] Like, oh, somebody's in love with you.

[534] You want a billion dollars.

[535] You want a big part.

[536] That's really nice.

[537] The worst thing, I can't even say what the worst thing would be.

[538] And there's an evolutionary logic to this because you want to really be on guard for badness.

[539] It's really more important to know whether the person in a room of you is going to kill you versus they're going to be really nice to you because if you miss out on one the niceness, eh, too bad, but if you miss out on the danger, it's really important.

[540] And this shows up in memory.

[541] So you're exactly right.

[542] I remember that dumb -ass comment.

[543] I'm a professor.

[544] You get student evaluations.

[545] And it's a teacher okay course, so I get a lot of nice things to say, but I could review back from memory every nasty, mean comment.

[546] Yes.

[547] Do you think maybe the bias is logical and reasonable in that don't you think there is a natural asymmetry between elation and agony elation doesn't actually exist so when you say like when a billion dollars i think people have a fantasy of what that is and they can imagine elation but i've ended up getting way more than i ever thought and i had a fantasy that i achieved and there was no accompanying elation so elation is very limited supply on planned earth but agony and suffering is very real you can have chronic pain and terrible things happen to you just terrible.

[548] And the terribleness doesn't really go away.

[549] But then for good things, they call a hedonic treadmill.

[550] For good things, you get used to them.

[551] Wow, I have a lot of money.

[552] Be nicer if I had more.

[553] Right.

[554] Yes.

[555] I had this success, but now I haven't had a success in a while, and we're constantly frustrated.

[556] And so you're right, the good things are not as good as the bad and no one's ever been diagnosed with chronic euphoria.

[557] You hear about chronic pain all the time.

[558] I've never heard of the case of chronic euphoria.

[559] What a great disease.

[560] Yeah, like, oh my God.

[561] Doctor, I'm just titillated at all times.

[562] Do you have anything on repressed memories?

[563] Are they real?

[564] I don't think they're real.

[565] There was such a big talk about them and so much emphasis.

[566] This sort of satanic panic 30 years ago maybe where psychiatrists got children to say, oh, they were molested by their parents, but they didn't know it.

[567] And they came back through hypnosis and through stuff.

[568] And also satanic rituals and cannibalism and so on.

[569] Sometimes bad things happen to us.

[570] Sometimes there's really bad things, and we simply forget about them.

[571] because we try not to think about him.

[572] And sometimes you get to remember them back.

[573] But the idea of a force of repression where something bad happens, you know, systems in the head shut it down and submerge it, doesn't seem to exist.

[574] If anything, when bad things happen to us, we tend to think about them too much.

[575] You take somebody who had trauma, and they don't say, oh, it's disappearing from my head.

[576] It's so magical.

[577] What they say is, I can't stop thinking of it the damn thing.

[578] I want to shut it off somehow.

[579] I don't think repressed memories do exist in that sense.

[580] Oh, wow.

[581] That's a big one.

[582] I mean, I even know someone who came to him later in life that his father had molested him his whole life.

[583] That might have been more a willingness to actually say it more than it was didn't exist.

[584] Right.

[585] So it's good to be careful about these things.

[586] One thing is you could genuinely forget something.

[587] Maybe something which would be very significant to you as an adult.

[588] But when you were a kid, it wasn't that significant.

[589] And an adult, you think back, oh, my God, that was really serious.

[590] That was really wrong.

[591] So that could happen.

[592] You could also think about things in a different way.

[593] A kid might think, oh, this is a natural way for my uncle, my aunt.

[594] aunt, my mother, my father treat me. And then he goes, hey, that wasn't right at all.

[595] That's messed up.

[596] And then rethink it in a different way.

[597] But what doesn't happen is you have these histories of horrific abuse and you just wipe it from your head and think it never happened.

[598] And then boom, you see a therapist and then it pops back.

[599] I don't want to say things never happen.

[600] There's always like one in a million things.

[601] But the idea that this is a psychological process.

[602] It doesn't meet with common sense.

[603] We all as adults have really bad things happen to us.

[604] Our first instinct isn't to wiped them from her head.

[605] Again, it's to think about them too much.

[606] Oh, yeah, yeah, to ruminate on them.

[607] I still remember the dumbass comment.

[608] And there's stuff a lot more sitting around in my head.

[609] If I whisper in your ear on your deathbed, if I'm lucky enough to do so, what was the first comment you read?

[610] You'll be with you to the day you died.

[611] It was all in caps.

[612] Well, can I share with you this experience I've been having with memory, which is I've been trying to write about my childhood.

[613] And I stumbled upon one really cool technique.

[614] And maybe you can tell me a little bit about what I'm harnessing, which was, if you had asked me to tell you all the stories about my neighborhood, maybe off the top of my head could have come up with seven or eight or whatever it is.

[615] The concede of it was, I'm leaving my driveway on a bike ride with my family.

[616] So in my mind, I leave my driveway, and it's like, oh, I immediately see the Bowden's house across the street.

[617] And then I know about 10 stories about them.

[618] And then I get to the next house.

[619] Oh, that guy had a fish, a gar, and it bit his finger.

[620] If I travel in my mind through the physical space, hippocampus on campus, you taught me that.

[621] There we go, very good.

[622] Yeah.

[623] That's a trick to remember what your hippocampus is for, spatial relation.

[624] You really read my book, I appreciate this a lot.

[625] It just came out.

[626] I've done the best I can.

[627] I'm not going to claim to have read every word of it.

[628] But listen, hippocampus is on your campus.

[629] So if I travel through my neighborhood, all of a sudden, these stories to start popping up.

[630] So that's one cool thing I discovered.

[631] And I had advised other people who are writing to put themselves in a physical space and take a walk.

[632] What's happening there?

[633] Associations.

[634] You walk back to your old school.

[635] You haven't been there for many years.

[636] Some memories can come flooding back.

[637] Sometimes people want to open up a yearbook.

[638] Oh, that guy, that club I was part of.

[639] And things start coming back.

[640] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[641] What's up, guys?

[642] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season.

[643] And let me tell you, it's too good.

[644] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

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[660] Okay, so now here's where I found like a little red flag went up in my head, which is I get to the beach.

[661] I have now dialogue between my mom and my brother and myself.

[662] Now, that's impossible.

[663] No way do I remember a verbatim conversation from the time I was seven years old.

[664] But what's tricky about memory is I know how my mom talks.

[665] I know how my brother talks.

[666] So I actually can recreate that conversation with extreme confidence, even fooling myself, because I know what my mother would say and I know what my brother said and I know their patterns.

[667] I'm aware of it because I'm actually writing it down and I'm putting quotes.

[668] But were I not in that exercise, I wonder how much of my memory I've done exactly that.

[669] I know something about the present I apply to this past.

[670] You're unusually honest about the process.

[671] Most people would say, oh, my God, I have a perfect memory of this dialogue 10 years ago, which is impossible.

[672] So acknowledge it.

[673] Say, this is a reconstruction.

[674] I know there was a conversation at some sort.

[675] Of course, I'm not going to remember the words back and forth.

[676] You're not going to remember the words back and forth of a conversation an hour ago, a little alone here.

[677] But this is how they talk.

[678] This is what they would have said.

[679] You may be writing the one honest autobiographical book in history where you say, all of these stories are false.

[680] Yeah.

[681] Every story is false because memory doesn't work that way.

[682] And if I ask someone else who was sterilizing it, but I'm going to give you my best reconstruction.

[683] And this reconstruction will not only tell you about my past, it'll tell you about my presence.

[684] Yeah, what I want to say as a foreword is like, I'm going to tell you the story of my life as it is in my head.

[685] This is the story I believe.

[686] That's my commitment.

[687] I believe the story.

[688] But there's no factual basis for it.

[689] It's just the story I'm telling myself.

[690] What drives me nuts is so somebody says something about having a couple years ago and there's a huge scandal because it gets some facts wrong.

[691] Getting facts, it's just the norm.

[692] Yes, yes.

[693] After 9 -11 happened, I was at Yale, and I had colleagues who studied memory.

[694] So they did something immediately.

[695] They asked people, where were you when the plane's hit?

[696] Then went back to them many years later and said, where were you when a plane's hit?

[697] And the people said, I know exactly how they tell stories.

[698] Yeah.

[699] 9 -11 is a funny case because people often talk about and tell stories about where they were in place.

[700] They start remembering their stories.

[701] I say in my book, I once was at a party, and I said this really funny thing that happened to me. And after a party, driving home, my wife was nice enough to say, you know, that actually happened to me. Oh, that happened to your wife.

[702] But also, who's right?

[703] There's a story kind of my head.

[704] Maybe she's wrong.

[705] That didn't occur to me. Now, if you had that weird moment where it's like you already have dedicated your life to psychology, you understand it from its origins to the clinical practice of it, all these aspects.

[706] And then you have your real anecdotal life where I imagine things become incredibly clear to you.

[707] And I wonder if raising kids for you, that's another red flag for me is, I've now observed my children telling stories about themselves, as if they're memories.

[708] But I know they're retelling the story.

[709] We have been telling them about themselves.

[710] The family lore is being passed on, and I now hear them out in the world sharing it as if they actually remember it.

[711] And of course, once you observe that, you go, well, fuck, what percentage of my stories are my mother's recounting them to me?

[712] how trustworthy is she is a narrator.

[713] Oh, my God, this whole thing's a house of cards.

[714] Yeah, that's really interesting.

[715] There's a generational aspect of history and a generational aspect of how people think of themselves.

[716] So how much of the way I think I am as a person is shaped by how my parents thought I was.

[717] Yeah.

[718] And my kids, my book came out today, and both my sons call me. They're both adults now.

[719] Very sweet to talk to them.

[720] And I often think about what influence I had on them and what I didn't have on them.

[721] I talk in the book about there's substantial role of the genes in shaping how we become.

[722] And also a substantial role of the accident.

[723] You get sick on a day of a big exam.

[724] You have a toured romantic affair while on vacation.

[725] You get picked on by a bully.

[726] And these chance events, not the genes, not the parenting, shape us a lot.

[727] Yeah, you can't plan for those.

[728] You can't manipulate those.

[729] When you have kids, I think everybody comes to appreciate how much chance comes in, how much randomness.

[730] It's also really interesting to think about as a parent the stories that you do choose to tell.

[731] If you're always telling stories about when the kid fucked up or spilled something, then that does infiltrate the way they will see themselves.

[732] Oh, I'm a person who does this.

[733] That's right.

[734] And you know when you see it, it's not clear how much people take that into the world, but when they get back together with their parents or their families.

[735] I've seen people who are confident, tough, ambitious, charming people.

[736] I've seen them with their families with their parents and they go back to being submissive, shy, because that's how the parents see them.

[737] We take different roles depending on who you're with.

[738] That's sort of common sense.

[739] But there's a sense which we're different selves.

[740] And the self we are at one more with the people who raised us is a very different self.

[741] I couldn't identify with that more.

[742] In every family reunion, I by the end of it, am exhausted with the role I played as a middle child as I was the peacemaker.

[743] And I'm so hyper -focused on everyone's temperament at all times and who needs regulating and I got to prevent this from all exploding and by the end of a Christmas break I'm like fuck I don't want to be the middle child at all yeah and the inside of psychology is you go into real world you're not necessarily middle child man but when you get back home it clicks into place yeah okay now we're going to go kind of chronologically so this was all upside down but I want to say your book because it was based on your intro to psychology class.

[744] We learn the history.

[745] We learn how the brain actually works.

[746] And the first thing I want to talk about, Freud is, you know, commonly a laughing stock now.

[747] You point out that you're actually probably never going to hear a theory of Freud's as a psychology major.

[748] You're more likely to bump into it as a literature major or something.

[749] Let's own some shit about Freud, but then let's talk about some stuff that maybe was worth remembering.

[750] I own that shit.

[751] Freud was in his personal life's interaction is often a terrible man, viciously ambitious, often incredibly cruel to people, narcissistic.

[752] Cocaine addict, that's relevant.

[753] Though very productive.

[754] I don't want to make a commercial for cocaine.

[755] I was a user for 10 years, and I did a lot of stuff.

[756] Trust me. I think his real wrong was cigar addict, which killed him, got cancer in the mouth, and even to the very end, refused to give up cigars.

[757] So, crazy character, some of his views are insane.

[758] It's saying that every girl gets penis envy because she notes that her father has a penis and her brother might have a penis.

[759] She has no penis.

[760] And this messes her up dramatically.

[761] The idea that every boy in development decides he wants to sleep with his mother and some amorphous sense that edit up his complex.

[762] Then comes to go, oh no, my dad's going to get back at me. What my dad's going to do is going to chop off my penis.

[763] And all of that shape, everyone, no exceptions.

[764] The idea that parental separation makes a boy homosexual.

[765] The idea that one of the most significant events in the developing kids' life, is the primal scene.

[766] The primal scene is when the kid sees or fantasize about his parents having sex.

[767] And this all sounds crazy because it kind of is crazy.

[768] There's like no evidence for any of this.

[769] Oral stage, anal stage, it gets complicated and not very good science.

[770] So that's the case against Freud.

[771] I'll say three things in favor of Freud.

[772] One is he's a great writer and a brilliant person.

[773] You read, I recommend civilization and it's discontent, just fill of good ideas.

[774] The second thing is, although he was very odd about sex, he had in some ways a very liberal attitude.

[775] Not everybody had really weird, perverted desires.

[776] And because of that, there was more sympathy for people, like at the time, like gay people, who really did have unconventional desires.

[777] So, you know, the line I say is something like, if everybody's a pervert and nobody is a pervert.

[778] Yeah.

[779] And Freud has also opened the idea of female sexual desires, something very forbidden at the time.

[780] Yeah, it's seen as hysteria back then, right?

[781] Like, if they were horny, they were hysterical.

[782] Yeah.

[783] It's actually hysteria often involved tremendous female desire for better lovers, for satisfaction.

[784] The main thing I'm in favor of Freud is Freud did not invent the idea of the unconscious.

[785] This was around long before.

[786] But Freud ran with it.

[787] Freud really had an articulated theory of the mind about the powers of the unconscious mind, arguing that I ask you why you two have a podcast, and you'll tell me some sort of story.

[788] You know, well, it was interesting.

[789] I like to say, I get this out of it.

[790] And Freud would say, that's your story.

[791] You might be wrong.

[792] You might be doing the podcast for entirely different reasons.

[793] Why do you have the romantic partners you have?

[794] Why do you have the friends you have, the enemies you have?

[795] Well, you can answer that.

[796] Freud says, you don't know what's going on in your head.

[797] And of all the insights, this one's lasted.

[798] That's humility.

[799] And it's so relevant.

[800] We talk more about the story than any other concept, I think, on this show.

[801] And with other guests we have.

[802] And it's so real, your story.

[803] And then now we have some more tools that have been confirmed by random controlled trials, which is we have confirmation bias.

[804] So if our story is your wife is cold to you, you will only see the coldness at the exclusion of all the warmness.

[805] Like, we know now the mechanisms by which the story plays out, but he fundamentally had that right.

[806] Yeah.

[807] He had the idea that these are stories that we construct and that real motivations might be hidden to us.

[808] And I think that that's a real insight.

[809] Other people had it before, but he really built on it.

[810] And now we live in a world where a second.

[811] Psychologists could say, suppose we want to know why people voted for Trump or voted for Biden.

[812] Well, one way he asked them.

[813] It's not bad.

[814] You get some idea.

[815] But psychologists, I think we're right to say, even if people answer honestly, you can't necessarily take their word for it.

[816] They might do it for reasons they don't know about.

[817] And this is an insight which pervades our everyday life.

[818] Sometimes when I'm talking to me is that, how did you become a psychologist?

[819] Of course, I have to blah, blah, blah, blah.

[820] I don't know if it's true.

[821] Right.

[822] You've just been telling it for so long.

[823] now.

[824] Yeah, that's right.

[825] There's a great scene.

[826] I think it's in a dark night.

[827] This is the second time I mentioned the Joker.

[828] Yeah, people are going to think you're at Comic Con when you're not doing studies.

[829] But he says, you want to know how I got these scars and he tells the story and it's a very moving story.

[830] But then he encounters him and he says, you want to know how I got these scars and it says a totally different story.

[831] It's so creepy.

[832] And it's so chilling.

[833] But it's also an insight.

[834] These are just stories.

[835] Yes.

[836] Ugh.

[837] Okay.

[838] Now, you give Freud a little moment in the sun.

[839] I appreciate it.

[840] And I think it's crazy, yeah, that he wouldn't be some significant part of the initial education and psychology.

[841] But you also attack some widely accepted theories in the field that are probably wrong.

[842] So what are some that probably everyone has kind of taken on as some kind of social science fact that probably is not right?

[843] So one of them is the idea that memories of direct recording.

[844] I think another thing that we get wrong is that babies are blank slates, that babies start knowing nothing.

[845] It makes so much sense.

[846] You know, you look at a baby and you think the baby doesn't know anything can't talk.

[847] But there's these real brilliant studies, and I spent some time talking about them, where you find that, this is an idea from Plato, from Immanuel Kant, also from Chomsky, who's still around, the noted linguist, that a lot of the knowledge of the world is pre -wired.

[848] Very clever studies find that babies understand how physical objects move through space.

[849] They understand math, one plus one equals two, three minus one equals two, that sort of thing.

[850] They understand people.

[851] So I did some work where you show these nine -month -olds, one -act plays, where a character is trying to help another character up the hill are pushing it down.

[852] And what you find is that the youngest babies, you test, like the good guy.

[853] Oh, my God.

[854] One who helps and don't like the bad guy.

[855] Wow.

[856] So that's one.

[857] Yeah.

[858] I'll tell you one more that people have, which is people think that there's an enormous role of parenting on your personality.

[859] What your parents do do to you, make you an extrovert, make you an introvert, make you smart, make you stupid.

[860] And there's definitely some role, but it's nowhere near as much as people think it is.

[861] Again, it's back to the stories.

[862] I ask somebody, how come you're such an expert?

[863] Where did that come from?

[864] Oh, because my mom and dad did this and my mom and dad did that.

[865] The best evidence we have suggested that something like this has a lot to do with your genes, a lot to do with your life experience.

[866] Parenting doesn't matter in shaping personality as much as people think of this.

[867] Interesting.

[868] Okay.

[869] Again, it kind of circles back to the maybe just great.

[870] advice is like some humility.

[871] So I'll give you the one that combines what we were just talking about story and then this genetics thing.

[872] So I have always been frugal.

[873] I've always been great with money, Paul.

[874] No matter what I made, I saved at least half.

[875] So proud of that.

[876] And if you ask me why, I would tell you, oh, my father filed bankruptcy twice.

[877] We were in a state of financial insecurity all the time and blah, blah, blah.

[878] I have two daughters.

[879] They've both grown up in way too much privilege and one of them if you give her $10 she spends 15 like my wife does and then the other one has saved every penny she's ever been given and I look at that and I go oh I was genetically a hoarder of resources like I didn't do anything I didn't compensate or react to anything I was born this way she's born this way this is not a feather in my cap yeah it's pretty disappointing because the story is I've adapted people say that anybody who has more than one kid realizes how little parenting matters in some ways.

[880] So I have two sons and they're both terrific kids and they get along very well.

[881] But in some ways, they're as different as can be.

[882] They're both super smart, but one went to Harvard Law School and very scholarly and everything.

[883] The other one is also super sharp philosophy degree, but loves me outside.

[884] When he called me, he's telling me that he went skiing with a friend on a ski trip and they kind of got lost.

[885] So they spend overnight skiing, trying to find your way back home.

[886] He has frostbite and everything.

[887] Oh, my God.

[888] And me, I go in a bunny, yo.

[889] Yeah.

[890] Where does that come from?

[891] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[892] You certainly didn't teach him that.

[893] I did not teach him that.

[894] Some crazy roll of the dice jeans.

[895] And some people hear us and say, well, if I don't influence my kid that much, isn't that bad news?

[896] And I don't think of this.

[897] I think we should love our kids and support them and let them thrive and get over ourselves in some way.

[898] We're not molding them.

[899] Yeah, I mean, the.

[900] The nature -nurture thing becomes a really powerful debate when you have kids.

[901] Because you want to believe you're having a great impact on them.

[902] You're certainly putting in a lot of effort, making a lot of sacrifices.

[903] So you want to believe it's not for not.

[904] We watched that great documentary.

[905] I know if you saw three identical strangers.

[906] Did you see that?

[907] Oh, what a documentary.

[908] I love that.

[909] Yes.

[910] Right.

[911] And then the first half of it, you're like, oh, it doesn't matter what you do.

[912] They smoke the same cigarettes.

[913] They went to the same school.

[914] But come to find out, no, one of them committed suicide.

[915] there's this huge gap in how they all turned out.

[916] And so you're also really confirmed that nurture is a huge part of it.

[917] That's right.

[918] Or at least environment, what happens to them.

[919] So identical twins or triplets are so amazing to study because they turn to be so much alike.

[920] Even when separated that birth, an amazingly weird event.

[921] But then they're not perfectly alike.

[922] If it was only genes, identical group to be basically the same person and they don't.

[923] They diverge.

[924] So something else is happening.

[925] Yeah.

[926] And it lays in perfectly with the confirmation.

[927] bias is when people start studying these separated twins or triplets, their first curiosity is the similarities.

[928] That's the most exciting thing.

[929] Our story brains, that's the headline.

[930] They're just ignoring the trillions of things that are not similar.

[931] That's right.

[932] You've got to do careful studies where you're ahead of time you sort of neutrally observed in a very small bit.

[933] It's an example problem that pervades all of psychology, which is you have a theory.

[934] You look for confirmation for it and you ignore what doesn't fit into it.

[935] Yeah.

[936] Okay.

[937] So is there really such thing as right -brain people and left -brain people?

[938] No. No. That's a nervous psychology.

[939] I've bribed myself.

[940] I'm being right -brain.

[941] Tell me, Paul.

[942] Why, you're good with language, though.

[943] That's left -brain.

[944] I'm left -handed.

[945] Is it my right brain is controlling my left -hand, and I'm creative?

[946] Your right brain is controlling your left -hand.

[947] But the two -half -brain are somewhat specialized, so language is not always, but typically in the left -side of the brain.

[948] So if you have brain surgery and left -side, you'll be very careful not to cut into that part.

[949] Sometimes creativity and face recognition is in your right side.

[950] Are you good with faces?

[951] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[952] Maybe too good.

[953] What do you mean?

[954] Well, first of all, I see other actors and other actors all the time.

[955] You don't happen to watch Stranger Things, do you?

[956] I've seen some strangers.

[957] Okay, well, you know the lead of Millie Bobby Brown.

[958] And then do you know the actor Tom Wilkinson?

[959] He's not in Stranger Things.

[960] You might remember him from my very favorite movie, Michael Clayton.

[961] He's the one having a psychotic break.

[962] That guy's great.

[963] Oh, he's one of the best performances of all time.

[964] I've never seen two people look more identical, yet one's male, one's female, and they're separated by 50 age.

[965] By God, they're the same person.

[966] You can see it.

[967] It was when he said that the three of us were watching, and Kristen and I were like, what are you talking about?

[968] But then we did a side by side.

[969] We put them next to each other in a frame.

[970] It was pretty good.

[971] Well, we have a friend, David, who can't recognize faces.

[972] He has that facial recognition issue, yeah.

[973] So that's interesting.

[974] I got a bit of that.

[975] I got prosopagnosis, not clinical, but sometimes they have problems.

[976] when it's out of context.

[977] Yes, that's his thing.

[978] So how do we debunk the left -brain -right -brain thing?

[979] So people have clusters of abilities.

[980] Some people are really good of language.

[981] Some people are really good at face recognition, bad of face recognition.

[982] Some people are good at math, good at art. But it doesn't cluster.

[983] It's not like some people, for this half of the brain, they're just really good.

[984] And for this half they're down.

[985] There's no sense in which some people are all the right side.

[986] They're really good, no, the left side or vice versa.

[987] It's just different abilities.

[988] It's not like someone has like two standard deviations above on the, right and two below on the left that's right brain and right brain are one thing that went away also learning styles it's a convenient way of talking some people like this and the people like that but idea of these clearly delineated learning styles like visual we go into that i'm not sure i don't know what the stereotypes i think some people are supposed to be visual learners so you've shown pictures they do better but some people are verbal learners so you tell them stories it doesn't go much beyond that so i'm dyslexic and i'm left -handed to me common sense says oh this makes sense I'm neither side dominant.

[989] That's the fucking problem.

[990] The neuroscience dyslexia is really interesting.

[991] It's not something I know much about.

[992] A lot of people have problems with reading.

[993] And reading is interesting because reading is not something we're born with.

[994] So language is natural.

[995] Speech is natural.

[996] It's every society everywhere.

[997] Reading is a modern human invention.

[998] And so we struggle with it.

[999] English is very challenging to use the reading system.

[1000] There's better reading and writing systems than English.

[1001] But there's so many people who are in your boat in one way or another who struggle we're reading.

[1002] It's a very unnatural activity.

[1003] It's more of a miracle we can do it at all.

[1004] Well, this was a great chapter and weirdest people on the planet, which is when we learned to read and Martin Luther got these significant portions of the population to be literate, we actually gave up some stuff.

[1005] It was a tradeoff.

[1006] Our facial recognition went down because that part of the brain dedicated to reading was taken up with that.

[1007] That's right.

[1008] We built in what they call the letterbox in the head.

[1009] Again, it's back to this point of humility, which is you might think, the argument architecture to brain, well, that's just something we're born with.

[1010] But apparently, a lot of how to brain is structured has to do with experience and cultural experience.

[1011] The invention of reading changed our brains in a profound way.

[1012] Yeah, the structure is so fluid of the brain.

[1013] You look at stroke survivors who relocate whole sections.

[1014] Better to do it when you're young.

[1015] A friend of mine, I think his niece as a baby, had a full hemisporectomy.

[1016] One hemisphere.

[1017] No. Entirely thin away.

[1018] No. Oh, my God.

[1019] And now if you see her, he says.

[1020] I think it's like 14, 15 now.

[1021] She's cognitively fine.

[1022] No. If you're very young, the other parts of the brain take over.

[1023] Now, if one of us would get a hemisoractomy, you'd be so screwed.

[1024] Yeah.

[1025] Well, you have a guy in your book, H .M. was his initials.

[1026] I forget his real name.

[1027] Harry Molison.

[1028] They kept it anonymous until he died, but I think it's Molison or something.

[1029] Yeah, so he had surgery to confront epilepsy, and they cut out just tons of his brain, and he was perpetually stuck in the present.

[1030] We talked about this last time.

[1031] I'm drawn to, like, kind of poking at these commonly held things.

[1032] So living in the present seems so aspirational, right?

[1033] It's Eckhart Tolley's work.

[1034] It's all these people want you to live in the present, as if you could achieve that, you'd achieve self -actualization.

[1035] But explain the problems one has when they can only live in the present.

[1036] Well, H .M literally only lived in present.

[1037] You couldn't form any new memories.

[1038] You ever seen a movie Memento?

[1039] Yes, yes.

[1040] It's a very good depiction of that.

[1041] You don't accumulate anything.

[1042] So H .M., this professor, Suzanne Corkin, who I knew from graduates, would come visit him like every day and every day he would introduce himself it's like 51st date sure that too is exactly true barry more and adam samler that movie was so sad yeah she had to relearn every day of her life the great discovery from hm though was they got on to play this game you take a pen and you put it in front of a mirror and you have to draw something while just looking at the mirror draw shape like a star it's really tough yeah you're really slow and he's trying to He had to HM, HM, so what's this?

[1043] So you had to explain it to him.

[1044] But H .M. got better, even though he had no memory of getting better.

[1045] And this was one of the great discoveries of neuroscience and psychology, which is that the part of the brain that stores, oh, I'm meeting you for the first time, hello, and so on, is separate from the part of the brain that learns motor skills.

[1046] Right, right.

[1047] And so HM illustrates it, but it's true for all of us.

[1048] It just works differently.

[1049] Learning how to ride a bike is different from the memories you're tapping for your autobiography.

[1050] Yes, and this is present in all.

[1051] Alzheimer's patients who can play the piano.

[1052] Yes, that's right.

[1053] Right?

[1054] Because that's all stored in the fine motor control area, and they don't know why they know the song, but their brain can play it.

[1055] That's so fascinating.

[1056] To some extent, we're all like that.

[1057] If you had no how to ride a bicycle, you hop on and you just start riding.

[1058] You don't know how you wrote it.

[1059] You can even forget you know how to ride it, but you just know how to ride it and it's stored differently.

[1060] I was talking to somebody he said to me, like, so how does thinking work?

[1061] Which is kind of a good question, but I realized, it's the wrong question to ask because how you learn to ride a bicycle is different from how you make a decision over what foods to eat, which is different from why you get jealous in some occasions.

[1062] The brain has many parts and they all have their own story.

[1063] Yeah.

[1064] Why do we get jealous?

[1065] I'm curious.

[1066] That's really interesting.

[1067] There's been a lot of very controversial work on sex differences in jealousy.

[1068] A very simple story, which I think has some truth to it, it's debatable, is that men are more struck by sexual jealousy.

[1069] So you ask a man to imagine his partner, a heterosexual man, a female partner, having sex with another man. And even, even, you even if she has no connection with that man. It's like a one -night stand.

[1070] And often men find that very upsetting.

[1071] Women find it upsetting to imagine their partner with another woman, but not as much if it's just sexual.

[1072] Then you flip it.

[1073] You ask both sexes, how would you feel if your partner was in a deep romantic relationship with somebody else, but not sex?

[1074] Their women get more upset than men.

[1075] Anecdotally, I got to say, I've had lots of female friends that have been cheated on, lots of male friends.

[1076] And the questions are 100 % predictable.

[1077] When the man's been cheated on, he'll ask the woman how big as dick was, and did she come?

[1078] It's the first two questions, 100 % of the time.

[1079] The woman's first question is not, did you come?

[1080] Did she have nice breasts?

[1081] It's, do you love her?

[1082] Yeah.

[1083] To me, what that says is like, oh, you learn a lot about our fears by those questions.

[1084] Men walk around with this cloud over their head that their dick isn't big enough and that they're not good in bed.

[1085] they're insufficient, they're insecure in those ways, and women walk around this cloud that I'm not lovable.

[1086] So that's one way to see it.

[1087] That may be right.

[1088] There's an evolutionary account here, which is for men, it's very important since they want to be raising children who are their genetic children, that their partner is not having intercourse of another man. For a woman's point of view, they know their kids of their kids.

[1089] There's never a worry about that.

[1090] But there is a worry about losing their partner's care of their children.

[1091] Right.

[1092] The resources that love is going to dictate.

[1093] I want to be conscious because a lot of people been arguing about this for a long time, whether it's true.

[1094] But I think there's some truth to it.

[1095] And I think the evolutionary story has some weight.

[1096] I mean, the psychologies of men and women are different.

[1097] This doesn't preclude the fact that it's individual differences.

[1098] Men are on average taller than women.

[1099] Not a lot of women taller than average man. A lot of men shorter than average woman.

[1100] On average, men, if you ask them, how many sexual partners you want to have before you die, they'll give you a bigger number than women.

[1101] And this was done across dozens of different countries.

[1102] It's done it in Africa, it's done in South America, it's done in Asia, and always men give on average a bigger numbers.

[1103] But you also find cultural differences, where in some countries, like some parts of like Eastern Europe, the numbers are very high.

[1104] Everybody's giving a high number.

[1105] Yeah.

[1106] In other places, like Africa, actually, the numbers are fairly low.

[1107] They're all giving you low numbers.

[1108] So you see both cultural and individual differences.

[1109] Yeah, the nature and nurture thing is present around every corner, whether it's kids or us.

[1110] That's right.

[1111] Somebody asks you, is it nature, is it nurtured?

[1112] say yes, they both play a role.

[1113] These are not incompatible.

[1114] They can all exist in the same headwork.

[1115] Evolved creatures, but also cultural creatures.

[1116] Well, since the theme of this conversation is somehow circling humility, I think another great part of the book is talking about that people generally think they are above average.

[1117] There's great numbers.

[1118] I don't know if you can remember them, but you tell us how ubiquitous this is that people do think they're above average and chess players think they're underrated.

[1119] Like 70 % of them think they're underrated.

[1120] It's like astronomical.

[1121] It goes back to what you're saying before.

[1122] about wanting to nurture good memories, which is somehow it might be useful to have a better impression of yourself than is warranted.

[1123] Sometimes it's going to be very harmful and get you in a lot of trouble.

[1124] But in general, the above average effect is that we tend to enhance ourselves and we're psychologically healthy.

[1125] So you ask people, how good are you as a friend?

[1126] How good a driver are you?

[1127] How good are you a chess?

[1128] And people say better than average.

[1129] But everybody can't be better than average.

[1130] Right.

[1131] Unless they're from Lake Wobiegone.

[1132] That's right.

[1133] You even ask people, Do you think you're about average in being vulnerable to these biases?

[1134] I said, no, no, I'm above average.

[1135] I'm not very vulnerable at all.

[1136] Somebody I know, Ayla, who is on Twitter and is a researcher and studying sexuality, and this poll, is your penis larger than average or smaller than average?

[1137] Overwhelmingly, and an anonymous poll, people say larger than average.

[1138] Everything you want to be better at, people say, I'm better in average.

[1139] What's the benefit?

[1140] What's the consequence of that?

[1141] The benefit is that it might.

[1142] motivate us to try things and explore and take chances where it's better to try and sometimes fail than not try and risk missing out an opportunity.

[1143] In fact, this has been studied for heterosexual men with women, which is heterosexual men tend overwhelmingly to think their chances are better than they are.

[1144] Oh, sure, sure, sure.

[1145] And now, from a standpoint of heterosexual women, this sucks.

[1146] Yes.

[1147] There's always guys thinking like, hey, I see you're interested in me. I'm very sexy.

[1148] Here's a picture of my penis.

[1149] You know, that sort of thing.

[1150] But from the guy's point, of you, from a cold -blooded point of view, the cost of rejection, that's kind of bad.

[1151] But the benefit of success is great.

[1152] There's an inherent optimism that can keep one going forward.

[1153] And confidence.

[1154] That's right.

[1155] If we were realists, we'd never go on a diet.

[1156] We'd never try to recover from an addiction.

[1157] We would never open up a business because the doubt is a failure, always high.

[1158] But we're optimist, and then sometimes we succeed.

[1159] You also ask me about the bad side of it, and there is a bad side of it.

[1160] I have this quote from The Wire where somebody tries to kill Omar, and then he does this retaliation, and he says, you shoot at the king, you best not miss. When it comes to confrontations, you don't really want to overestimate your chances if the cost of failure is disastrous.

[1161] Then you want to underestimate it.

[1162] Yeah.

[1163] Oh, boy.

[1164] It goes back to questions about the emotions and issues of fear and anxiety.

[1165] This evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nessie has a really good discussion.

[1166] We always tell people with too much fear and anxiety.

[1167] They end up going to a psychiatrist's office.

[1168] They end up taking pills.

[1169] they end up reading self -help books.

[1170] We never talk about people of too low anxiety.

[1171] People to do low anxiety end up in prisons and mortgents.

[1172] If you're too fearless, obviously they're serious problems.

[1173] Fear is useful.

[1174] Anxiety is useful.

[1175] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[1176] I don't know if you heard the Dr. Death podcast.

[1177] It was absolutely incredible, but this completely incompetent spinal cord surgeon in Texas at Baylor who decapitated people.

[1178] So confident in his skills, terrible.

[1179] You can learn his history.

[1180] He's the guy that he didn't make the football team, but he's no, I'll try hard enough.

[1181] Tell me, coach, what do I need?

[1182] You know, could never accept.

[1183] He didn't have the prerequisite skills to do the things he wanted to do.

[1184] So that's the downside of it.

[1185] You don't want an overconfidence spinal surgery.

[1186] Yeah.

[1187] Yeah.

[1188] How does that track interculturally?

[1189] That must vary in more collective societies.

[1190] That's a wonderful example of the Joe Henry point we're talking about.

[1191] earlier where it varies a lot.

[1192] You don't even have to go to exotic non -Western cultures.

[1193] Some cultures have a tall poppy syndrome where the tall poppy gets chopped off.

[1194] And I'm currently in Canada, which has a little bit of that compared to the States.

[1195] You're in California.

[1196] You don't have any tall poppy syndrome.

[1197] The taller the better.

[1198] That's right.

[1199] Keep trying, keep striving.

[1200] But in some societies, if you make too much of yourself, you get punished.

[1201] For those societies, it pays, and there we get nature and nurture again.

[1202] You want to take anything to dial it down.

[1203] Okay.

[1204] The one last thing we got to talk about.

[1205] In truth, it was the chapter I didn't get to, but I do want to know about, is everybody a little racist, which is the Q. What point is that from?

[1206] Avenue Q. So that was a song in Avenue Q, right?

[1207] True story.

[1208] The things began with all the lyrics of Avenue Q, and then my publisher, Rownley, employs a lawyer.

[1209] And the lawyer said, take that away unless you want to get sued by Avenue Q. So is everyone a little bit racist?

[1210] And what I did read, I thought I might have a counterthought.

[1211] But tell us.

[1212] So boring answers, it depends what you mean by racist.

[1213] There's kind of an awful aspect of ourselves where we're very groupish.

[1214] We break the world in groups and out groups, us versus them.

[1215] There's these studies where you put kids into different t -shirts, blue t -shirt, red t -shirt.

[1216] No, plaid jumpsuit, not plaid jumps, and then you find out that you prefer your own group.

[1217] They want to give money to your own group, and their own group is better.

[1218] Then when you get to real groups like black people and white people, Jews and Arabs, where there's real history and everything, there's a natural.

[1219] animosity towards others.

[1220] That's one part of it.

[1221] Another part of it, with psychology, along with an interest, is stereotypes.

[1222] Stereotypes is kind of an evil word, but stereotypes just means you pick up information about the world.

[1223] So you have a stereotype of Dutch people that are on average taller in Japanese people.

[1224] You have a list of stereotypes in your heads.

[1225] Often they're true.

[1226] We have a bias to be categorical, too.

[1227] That's right.

[1228] That's part of the problem.

[1229] If you then think, you know, wow, all Jews are lawyers, all Asians are karate masters, then you're in deep trouble.

[1230] Yeah.

[1231] And a world of foolishness.

[1232] But people often understand this.

[1233] You know, if I meet a gay person from New York, I might think Democrat.

[1234] If I thought has to be Democrat, then I'm wrong.

[1235] But we categorize people.

[1236] And I think that that degree of categorization, I think it's too harsh to say it's racism.

[1237] I think it graduates to racism if you refuse to go beyond that.

[1238] Yes.

[1239] If you refuse to say, well, I am I stereotyped about people.

[1240] And I'm not going to learn more about individuals.

[1241] But often many of us, not all of us, are well.

[1242] willing to take individuals as individuals say, these are the base rates, this gay NYU student from New York, if I assume right now, somebody's liberal.

[1243] But I get to know him better, maybe he's conservative.

[1244] I think what we're going to do, and you have a quote about this, is it's going to be a precarious time because we're going to be able to hide behind algorithms.

[1245] So we as individuals can't say we are pretty good at guessing whether the person's a Democrat or not.

[1246] But you have this one study found that a facial recognition algorithm tested on images of over.

[1247] 800 ,000 people on dating sites could predict political orientation at a ridiculously high rate of 72%.

[1248] So I do think we're going to employ computers to say the things people aren't allowed to say.

[1249] What do you think of that?

[1250] I think we are.

[1251] There's big issues of algorithmic bias or it comes under different names.

[1252] And there are questions of truth here, like how accurate is it?

[1253] And maybe it's pretty accurate.

[1254] And then there's questions of morality.

[1255] And the questions of morality often say, There's statistics here, but don't use them.

[1256] I'm a psychology prof. I have a lot of graduate students.

[1257] And typically, you know, there's more graduate for development or more graduate students apply who are women than men.

[1258] And I've had some really successful female graduate students.

[1259] What if I say, well, make the process simple, I'm just going to interview women.

[1260] That's awful.

[1261] You can let statistics govern these choices, let alone people who'd say, I'm not going to look at anybody from a certain ethnicity because they're more likely to commit crimes.

[1262] That's awful.

[1263] But we have to separate the thing is, is this statistic true?

[1264] Sometimes it is, sometimes it is.

[1265] And is it moral to use it?

[1266] That gets into that bell curve debate.

[1267] Is this relevant?

[1268] Even if it's real, why do we need that information?

[1269] How is it helpful?

[1270] So sometimes we use it.

[1271] So there's stereotypes about ages, for instance, which is why you don't have a five -year -old drive or a 10 -year -old.

[1272] You say, well, because it's true.

[1273] It's true.

[1274] Five -year -olds can't drive.

[1275] What about a 17 -year -old going into a bar?

[1276] Well, we're going to make an arbitrary cutoff.

[1277] Insurance companies will pay.

[1278] attention to all sorts of facts, including how old they are, their history of driving.

[1279] They're just using stereotypes.

[1280] But we say, okay, you could use them.

[1281] I think if they use racial stereotypes, you probably say you can't use them.

[1282] Yeah.

[1283] Racial profiling by comps is there's two questions here.

[1284] One is, are they accurate.

[1285] Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't in a generalization.

[1286] But other thing is this a moral thing to do.

[1287] You might say, yeah, it's true that stomping this kind of group, say young men in this community is a better way of catching criminals than just doing it at random.

[1288] But the negatives of this is you make some people feel terrible, particularly as young black men.

[1289] And you're probably perpetuating the issue further.

[1290] So if your ultimate goal is to not incarcerate a whole generation of people that will then create another generation of people, maybe it's not just not the best approach, globally speaking.

[1291] That's exactly right.

[1292] If you pull aside everybody with sort of an Arab sounding name at the airport, maybe you catch more criminals or whatever, but you also get a whole group of people feeling that, They're not welcoming your country.

[1293] And then what comes out of that?

[1294] You can say the cost of that is greater than the benefits.

[1295] Yes.

[1296] So the important thing here is to separate, finding it that they're right does not end the story.

[1297] There's all sorts of moral reasons you may say, yeah, don't use it.

[1298] What's crazy is these algorithms that they even try to correct so it won't segregate people into race.

[1299] I read something about a algorithm that was assessing loan applicants.

[1300] And they specifically forbid the algorithm to acknowledge race.

[1301] But again, the algorithm has no morals, and it figures out how to identify race without identifying race.

[1302] You can get the pool at the end of the day, and they have the information of what music you listen to.

[1303] You're going to end up finding asymmetrical group of black people.

[1304] That's right.

[1305] If you have enough facts about something, you get their ethnicity pretty downright, get whether a man or woman, straight or gay or whatever.

[1306] Yeah, there are things that go with it.

[1307] And these algorithms often, you say, can't look at it directly.

[1308] The algorithm basically said, fine, I'll figure it out another way.

[1309] Now, you started in linguistics, so I think this might interest you as well.

[1310] The part I read out of this chapter was someone saying, you know, I can acknowledge, even if we quantified it, I've got a three out of ten bias.

[1311] But that doesn't mean I'm racist.

[1312] To me, what's interesting about when we talk about being racist, it's the weight of the word racism and racist that precludes anyone from, like, I'm racist.

[1313] Now, out of ten, Hitler was a ten, am I a two?

[1314] Do we have a latitude for people to acknowledge I'm a two or a three?

[1315] I'm aspiring to get down to two this year, whatever the case may be.

[1316] But it's almost a shell game to say, I'm four out of ten biased, but I'm not racist.

[1317] I don't know, you get into the weight of the linguistics there.

[1318] You do.

[1319] And I think it's a reason to be conscious about using terms like racist too broadly, which is, everyone still worries about it's not nice to people to call them racist.

[1320] But there's another problem, which is if Dak Shebrer's, racist.

[1321] What I'm going to say about David Duke?

[1322] He's racist, too.

[1323] Okay, but that doesn't seem that bad because I know Dax.

[1324] He's like a decent guy.

[1325] Right.

[1326] But David Duke's super racist.

[1327] Right.

[1328] Yeah.

[1329] He's an ex -games racist.

[1330] He's like extreme backflips racing.

[1331] I mean, I would say as a person who has deemed some people racist and some people not, one is hateful to me. The other is a societal issue that has bled in that I think can be a drug.

[1332] worked on.

[1333] To me, they are different bias and racism.

[1334] I don't think everyone is racist.

[1335] When you say I'm a racist, you're not.

[1336] You may have biases and things that you try to counteract, but it's a much different experience I've had with you than with racist people that I have experienced.

[1337] It's not a good catch -all word.

[1338] But, you know, I grew up in a society that has a baseline level of racism that I acknowledge I have with me. Yeah, and I just think we need a richer vocabulary because you're right that there's something we do call structural racism there's ways in which society is this structure which really penalizes say people of color without anybody's bad intent we've got to be able to talk about that as a bad thing yeah but if you put in the same category as david do you lose an important distinction that's worth making and a lot of people say well if i'm racist then i guess there's nothing wrong racism i don't mean anything bad by it yeah it's like oh if everyone's racist then i guess it's just something that happens i guess it just is And that goes against trying to combat it.

[1339] Why combat it if it's just everywhere and everyone has it?

[1340] That's right.

[1341] Another way to think from a language point of view is to pull apart a little bit categories for people like racist, misogynist, which are sort of, that's the kind of person you are.

[1342] I think some people deserve those labels, but that's heavy duty stuff.

[1343] As opposed to, you say it's really demeaning to women, you could be misogynist sometimes.

[1344] I can be racist sometimes.

[1345] Yeah.

[1346] And I think it may be a better way of talking about it, putting aside strong.

[1347] racial racism issues, then saying, you're racist or not a racist, as opposed to saying that stuff you're doing and you're thinking is pretty unfair and pretty cruel and pretty racist.

[1348] Yeah, and it speaks to how appealing, definitive, binary things are to the human brain.

[1349] We hate nuance.

[1350] We hate some percentage.

[1351] We hate that.

[1352] It's uncomfortable.

[1353] Yeah.

[1354] Psychologists are as guilty about this as anybody else.

[1355] My second and last chapter before I get to happiness is about mental illness.

[1356] schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression.

[1357] This speaks to exactly what we're talking about because many psychologists and psychiatrists think that categorizing people, this isn't like a moral issue, this is a practical issue, is the wrong way to think about it.

[1358] Rather, something like depression is a continual.

[1359] Anxiety is a continual.

[1360] Even things like psychosis can be seen as a continual.

[1361] A little bit's fine.

[1362] And there's no magical point where somebody says, oh, God, you're a depressed person, you're an anxious person.

[1363] It's just where you draw the lines.

[1364] And as it gets worse and worse, it gets more and more of a problem.

[1365] But seeing these things as continua, as opposed to discrete categories, maybe helps us think about it better.

[1366] I remember learning in anthropology that when we give someone that designation, we say she's schizophrenic, right?

[1367] Not she has a cold.

[1368] When you say she has a cold, there's some implicit notion that she'll get out of that cold.

[1369] In Africa, they don't do, or at least the area that was being compared, they don't have those permanent labels for mental states.

[1370] It's all occult.

[1371] It's like currently they're under a spell even, sub -Saharan Africa, right?

[1372] So yeah, just the permanence of our labels are a little dangerous, aren't they?

[1373] There are cultural differences in how we think about mental health.

[1374] Listen, every culture acknowledges are people who really need help.

[1375] This isn't another way of being.

[1376] This is trouble for them.

[1377] They're miserable.

[1378] It's destroying our lives, people around them.

[1379] But you can see this as this is a kind of person now versus this person as if they have COVID or AIDS or a cold.

[1380] This person has a problem, which could be recovered from.

[1381] And it's a very different way of the thing meant.

[1382] Unless I think it's one we would do well to adopt.

[1383] Yeah, the deframing is so destructive because it's so defeatist.

[1384] It's like, that's that.

[1385] Now we could maybe hope to mitigate the symptoms.

[1386] Yeah.

[1387] Okay, I adore you.

[1388] I told you last time.

[1389] You're just one of my favorite people.

[1390] I'm going to try to ensnaring you in one thing, Just because it came up in my mind, I want your opinion because you're smarter than me. I have a friend in town.

[1391] She's a lawyer.

[1392] She's in North Dakota.

[1393] There's all these measures right now.

[1394] You can't call a kid by a pronoun other than he or she.

[1395] There's all these kind of draconian trans legislative issues in North Dakota right now.

[1396] I guess it's kind of the epicenter for this stuff.

[1397] And she's, of course, working on the side to prevent a lot of this.

[1398] And we're talking.

[1399] Very awesome, level -headed, brilliant woman.

[1400] She and I have talked about trans stuff many times in the past.

[1401] Well, let me preface it by saying, I think a kid should be called whatever they want.

[1402] That's my position.

[1403] But now this cycles back to some of these studies.

[1404] So she said there was a psychologist giving testimony in court the other day that showed, demonstrated that the structure of the male brain and the female brain differ in some web -like component of the structure.

[1405] And that this study proved that there were preteens that were born.

[1406] biologically female that had a similar webbing to the males my knee jerk I find that impossible to believe that there was some announcement countrywide calling all preteens that identify as trans let's study your brain there's no way the sample size could have been more than 10 15 people I can't imagine this says anything what are your knee jerk on that I hadn't heard of that study putting aside trans issues just for a sec yeah there are studies which ask the question are male brains people identify as male different and female brains They don't tend to be larger because males are larger.

[1407] Your brain scales up.

[1408] Forget about that.

[1409] Scale in the same size.

[1410] And if you look at any specific part down, there's no. But if you do the whole thing and you do them sort of machine learning, just looking at a picture of a brain, you could figure out whether it's a man or a woman to about 90, 95 % accuracy.

[1411] Really?

[1412] There are different structures of the brain.

[1413] This doesn't show it's innate.

[1414] Males and females have different life experiences that could shape their brains in different ways.

[1415] So the study that you described seems really interesting.

[1416] If it were true that, say, trans women or trans girls had female brains, despite having, say, male genitals.

[1417] Yeah, X, Y. That would be really interesting.

[1418] I just don't know about the studies.

[1419] There's some deep issues here.

[1420] I find that a lot of these laws incredibly cruel and overbeaching.

[1421] That's not a psychologist, I mean, just an moral opinion.

[1422] I think the evidence is very strong to have young children who are, say, natally male, they have penises, they have testicles, who are, to all intents and purposes psychologically grown.

[1423] And who want to dress as girls, they want to be girls, they want to present as girls.

[1424] You would think that gender socialization would mean that would never happen.

[1425] But just like kids grow up to be gay, and no one's telling them to be gay.

[1426] Sometimes they're gay in societies where that's savagely, you know, punished.

[1427] There are people who are physically male who feel that they're women and people who are physically female feel detrimental.

[1428] I've seen these cases and they're very dramatic.

[1429] Yeah.

[1430] My other critique of it was it's trying to play both sides.

[1431] Again, I'm very pro trans rights.

[1432] the initial premise is forget the science, forget X, Y, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X. We're throwing that out because gender's a social construct.

[1433] Okay.

[1434] I'm with you on that argument.

[1435] And now you're saying, but no, here's this biological, physiological thing I'm demonstrating in the brain that should somehow also now be integrated into this debate.

[1436] Part of me goes, well, hold on now.

[1437] Now we're playing by different rules.

[1438] It's all really complicated and new, and I guess there's lots of stumbling.

[1439] It's really complicated and new, but I think you're making an excellent.

[1440] point, which is that the existence of trans children, to me, is very powerful evidence that gender isn't merely a social construct.

[1441] If it was a social construct, there shouldn't be this.

[1442] It shouldn't happen.

[1443] Just like the existence of gay kids shows the sexual orientation is something above and beyond how you're raised.

[1444] The existence of trans kids shows that there's something in the brain that identifies your gender that might not always match your sex.

[1445] Right.

[1446] And I think these are real cases.

[1447] The existence of trans people as a real phenomena.

[1448] People deserve respect who are that way for reasons outside choice is real.

[1449] But to then say, oh, my gosh, and gender is a construct.

[1450] That's just confusion.

[1451] Yes.

[1452] And I think just really easy for the opposition to start blowing holes right through.

[1453] But the reason all this is happening is because there is so much opposition.

[1454] If everyone was just like, sure, whatever, let people do whatever they want to do.

[1455] This wouldn't be happening.

[1456] It's just everyone now feels box into a corner.

[1457] to prove.

[1458] It's out of protection of people's rights.

[1459] It's just tricky.

[1460] It's hard to think of an issue where people are as stupid as this issue.

[1461] Not the doctors who work on it, not the psychologist, but the people on Twitter, on Facebook, in the newspapers.

[1462] You have one extreme who says trans people should not exist.

[1463] This bizarre view, then you have other people who might say, take an extreme case, say that a rapist who is physically male can go into a prison and say, I'm a woman, and then it should be by three these magical wars be put into a woman's prison in the case is like in the UK.

[1464] I think trans people and trans -wave people say, that's crazy.

[1465] You can't do that.

[1466] Yeah.

[1467] And that's intellectual debate in our time at its worst.

[1468] I blame Twitter.

[1469] Yeah.

[1470] It's a good place to blame.

[1471] I'm just going to recommend this to you and I'm going to let you go.

[1472] Malcolm Gladwell on his revisionist history podcast says this incredible episode about Will and Grace.

[1473] I don't know if you've heard it.

[1474] Oh, yeah.

[1475] I have not heard the episode, but the argument, maybe he might be.

[1476] one he's making is it has a transformation how Americans thought of by gay people.

[1477] Well, that's indisputable, right?

[1478] We have the data pre -show, post -show, its references in society.

[1479] But what he points out is that happened in an era where you had three channels to choose from.

[1480] And there's all these incredible political science studies that back in the 80s, you could predict someone's political leanings based on how much TV they watched.

[1481] And in fact, if you watched a ton of TV, you were going to track centrist.

[1482] And you were going to have a lot in common with the guy on the bus next to you.

[1483] because everyone had watched the cheers finale and that power that existed in our culture.

[1484] And then you get rid of the networks and you go to this fragmented streaming service and you have oranges the new black.

[1485] You don't have to make any compromises.

[1486] It's as hardcore as it gets.

[1487] But it doesn't move the needle because it's not a consensus.

[1488] It's not being viewed by the masses.

[1489] And so, yes, Twitter, I think.

[1490] But even something as innocuous as that is like going from three networks to 3 ,000 has probably had a really profound effect on us.

[1491] We're all in a world now where we could choose our own information sources, our own news sources and entertainment sources.

[1492] So somebody who is very trans -positive might choose a show, which is trans -positive.

[1493] Someone who isn't is not going to choose that show.

[1494] We can now choose whatever most fits our prejudices.

[1495] Yes.

[1496] Even this started with me asking you what you're watching, and the odds that we weren't watching the same thing were quite high.

[1497] But if I asked you in the 80s, we certainly were all watching cheers.

[1498] Right.

[1499] In some ways, it's very positive.

[1500] But from the standpoint of social change and community, we really lose that.

[1501] Yes, yes, yep.

[1502] We've lost some of these pillars, these monoliths.

[1503] It's just confirmation bias times a thousand.

[1504] You can just choose your own adventure through life where everything is confirmed.

[1505] Yeah.

[1506] I love that way.

[1507] It is all now choose your own adventure.

[1508] We just choose our own.

[1509] Well, Paul, man, this was number two.

[1510] I pray there's a number three.

[1511] You're spectacular.

[1512] I love your book.

[1513] It's intro to psychology.

[1514] It'll take you from point A to point B. It reminded me of Behave.

[1515] I just thought Behave was insane.

[1516] It's like, well, here's everything we know about the brain.

[1517] And this one's, I think, a lot more approachable and accessible and fun to read.

[1518] So I think it's like all those great same tenets and foundation, but really digestible.

[1519] You're such a brilliant, effortless writer.

[1520] And it's a great, great book.

[1521] I hope everyone checks out, Syke.

[1522] And a pleasure to talk to you, and I really hope we get to do it again.

[1523] I just love talking to two of you.

[1524] They do what we get to do it again.

[1525] Okay, keep writing books.

[1526] Or just if you see a new TV show you want to talk about it, we'll talk to you about that.

[1527] I watch the Sarah Lawrence one.

[1528] Oh, yes, please do.

[1529] Do a deep cut.

[1530] You must.

[1531] You must, because we have to talk about it next time.

[1532] All right.

[1533] Be well.

[1534] Good luck.

[1535] Bye, thank you.

[1536] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1537] Oh, my God.

[1538] Pop out.

[1539] It came.

[1540] Yeah.

[1541] What do you think?

[1542] Whoa.

[1543] It's messing with me because I know those glasses as your sunglasses.

[1544] Mm -hmm.

[1545] So it feels, but they look nice.

[1546] They look really nice.

[1547] I really like how they.

[1548] Yeah.

[1549] That's exciting.

[1550] A lot of change.

[1551] It's almost like you have a different co -host now.

[1552] Between the chair and now the glasses.

[1553] It's true.

[1554] Different glass.

[1555] Does it make you feel more, though, that you're doing an NPR show?

[1556] Well, um.

[1557] Not the, not the chair, but the glasses.

[1558] Let's mix messies.

[1559] Let's see.

[1560] I'm putting it back on.

[1561] No. No. It makes me feel like.

[1562] You're about to get on your motorcycle.

[1563] Yeah, because the only time I wear clear glasses is to get on the motorcycle.

[1564] Yeah.

[1565] Well, I've had the same favorite sunglasses for a decade, leisure society, this particular frame.

[1566] I love them.

[1567] And when I finally surrendered and admitted I had to get reading glasses, I thought, well, I wonder if I could get my sunglasses.

[1568] Yeah.

[1569] Turns out I could.

[1570] Good hack.

[1571] Yeah, my bro Shane hooked me up, okay?

[1572] Okay.

[1573] These are transitions.

[1574] Tell me about, tell me about.

[1575] I don't even know that's the real word.

[1576] They're not prescription up top.

[1577] Oh.

[1578] And then from the mid down, so now when I look down at this piece of paper, it's like, fucking banging.

[1579] Oh.

[1580] But then when you look at me, no. There's no prescription.

[1581] Weird.

[1582] Yeah.

[1583] I think it's going to, like, first of all, it's great.

[1584] It's also going to take some getting used to it.

[1585] It's like what angle.

[1586] Like, if I go like this, now and look at you, I'm looking through prescription.

[1587] But if I'm there, we're good.

[1588] And do you ever do half?

[1589] Yeah.

[1590] I don't know if it just feels like you've lowered yourself under water a little bit.

[1591] Yeah.

[1592] Weird.

[1593] A whole new you.

[1594] Look at this.

[1595] Oh, my gosh.

[1596] An educated man. You don't think you're not vibing smarter.

[1597] I can feel it.

[1598] I mean, I don't think.

[1599] Glasses make someone look smarter.

[1600] It depends.

[1601] These don't look right on me. You don't know.

[1602] No, I think they look great.

[1603] Oh, okay.

[1604] But smart isn't the thing I'm getting.

[1605] Okay.

[1606] Are you getting safer?

[1607] No. No. I'm telling you what I'm getting.

[1608] I'm getting you're about to go on a motorcycle ride.

[1609] Oh, right, right.

[1610] Like, Clark Kent.

[1611] Okay.

[1612] Because you can tell he's still Superman underneath?

[1613] Yeah, Clark Kent.

[1614] Yeah, I think it's because you're still you.

[1615] Like, I still see your tattoos and your body.

[1616] And so.

[1617] It doesn't look safe.

[1618] Trying to be a little dorky, maybe.

[1619] No, that's what I was going to say.

[1620] I need you to get, like, well, can you help me with my groceries in my car?

[1621] and then I'm Jeffrey Dalmer.

[1622] It's not convincing enough.

[1623] Right.

[1624] Because I didn't take time to even wear a long -sleeved shirt.

[1625] Yeah.

[1626] I was like, oh, glasses, handles everything.

[1627] They'll do all the work.

[1628] I wonder if cannibals, when they would look at you, if they would, because there's not a ton of meat there.

[1629] Sure.

[1630] But I also think they would think, like, this is a delicacy.

[1631] Oh, a delicacy?

[1632] Because of the boobs.

[1633] No. Oh.

[1634] No, everything.

[1635] Oh, that's nice.

[1636] Because I'm put together?

[1637] Yeah.

[1638] Yeah, you're just, you know, like you could be a really high -end appetizer for a cannibal.

[1639] That's sweet.

[1640] Yeah.

[1641] I do think it would be high -end because there's a lot of, it'd be a fatty.

[1642] Oh, okay.

[1643] Right.

[1644] Because of the boobs.

[1645] Because the boobs would be in there.

[1646] Yeah.

[1647] It's, again, mixed messies because there's some fat.

[1648] But also.

[1649] But generally lean frame.

[1650] Yes, correct.

[1651] With a fat pop -out.

[1652] Oh, yeah.

[1653] A pair of fat pop -outs.

[1654] Yeah, okay, so I'm scared to ask, do I look worse?

[1655] You look the exact same because I'm looking at you through no prescription.

[1656] If you look at me the other way.

[1657] Well, then you're just a Vaseline.

[1658] You're a Vaseline person.

[1659] What's that mean?

[1660] If you imagine smearing Vaseline over the lens of a camera and then looking through it, that's what you look like when I go like this.

[1661] It's just a blur.

[1662] These are close up.

[1663] Oh.

[1664] Yeah, yeah.

[1665] Which make the far -sightedness.

[1666] I see.

[1667] This is probably what you see.

[1668] And I love it.

[1669] It works great for you.

[1670] Okay.

[1671] So you can't tell me. Okay.

[1672] That's good.

[1673] I like that.

[1674] I like that I've...

[1675] There's no change.

[1676] It would only be if you were really close to me. I could then see you now.

[1677] Should we try it?

[1678] Absolutely.

[1679] I think that's called progressive lens.

[1680] Okay.

[1681] It's the different.

[1682] The transition is the light changing if it like tints when you're scared.

[1683] It's like a bifocal, I think, is when there's two prescriptions.

[1684] Two prescriptions, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1685] How close do I need to get?

[1686] Well, you look great.

[1687] You look great.

[1688] Okay, when you go low, you're a little blurry there, a little magnified.

[1689] Come closer, come closer, closer, closer.

[1690] Oh, yeah, yeah, crystal clear.

[1691] Oh.

[1692] Yeah, wonderful.

[1693] And you hated it?

[1694] No, no, no, no. Feels like you did.

[1695] It feels like you hate me. Now that you've seen, you know, closed.

[1696] And you finally have seen me. It's taken 10 years and you saw me. And I'm going to stick around.

[1697] Okay.

[1698] That was the verdict.

[1699] I feel vulnerable.

[1700] I think that's how Rob and I feel about if you ever wear your glasses.

[1701] Because we know you're blind, right?

[1702] And so you could scream when you saw us for the first time.

[1703] Yeah.

[1704] You're like David, Farrier.

[1705] I know what you too look like.

[1706] You're both so handsome.

[1707] You'd be shocked with how Caucasian Robb looks, knowing that he's 43 % Filipino.

[1708] Okay.

[1709] Wow.

[1710] What a day.

[1711] What a ride.

[1712] Who's this on?

[1713] Paul Bloom.

[1714] Oh, boy.

[1715] Our friend is back.

[1716] Yes.

[1717] He is so smart.

[1718] We love talking to him.

[1719] Too smart?

[1720] He is, but he's not.

[1721] He's approachable.

[1722] He's approachable.

[1723] And his book is incredibly.

[1724] inviting and not esoteric at all.

[1725] Yeah.

[1726] But when I talk in front of them, I'm way more insecure than I ever am.

[1727] You did not come on.

[1728] It doesn't come off.

[1729] I'm like, if I reference this thing I'm 70 % sure on, there isn't a topic he won't know about it.

[1730] Oh, that's funny.

[1731] Right.

[1732] It doesn't read that way.

[1733] Oh, okay.

[1734] Although, this is a good ding, ding, ding, ding transition is.

[1735] Okay.

[1736] You told me something yesterday and you said, oh, we should have talked about it on the fact check.

[1737] And so here we are, another fact check.

[1738] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1739] We're doing a lot.

[1740] We're both going on vacation.

[1741] Yes, that's right.

[1742] Spring break.

[1743] We're piling up a little bit.

[1744] ADHD?

[1745] No, but we will.

[1746] I thought that's what you were going.

[1747] We will.

[1748] I do have that written down.

[1749] Okay, okay, okay.

[1750] You brought up something interesting about Letterman.

[1751] Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

[1752] Because you were talking about with Paul, like wanting to be smart or needing whatever.

[1753] And this is sort of similar.

[1754] Adjacent.

[1755] Mm -hmm.

[1756] Yeah.

[1757] Okay.

[1758] So I think if anyone who's listening listen to the Letterman episode and then more importantly listen to the fact check after, you would have heard that I had had this kind of intense period of craving immediately after.

[1759] That went away the next day.

[1760] And my explanation at that time of the fact check was definitely that I just wanted to celebrate or I deserve something or what it's my reward.

[1761] That was my conclusion.

[1762] Continue the feeling sort of.

[1763] extend the high, commemorate.

[1764] So then, and I, there would have been no reason for me to add this detail.

[1765] During the eight hours of craving, I also very much wanted to send Jimmy Kimmel a text.

[1766] I was thinking, like, God, if anyone would know, I mean, half of Jimmy and I's friendship is based on our mutual love for Letterman, Stern, and Yacht Rock.

[1767] Like, that's half of our conversations.

[1768] So I just, I really wanted to text him and then I, I just kept convincing myself that it would be really self -indulgent and maybe even come across as a brag like, oh, I just interviewed a letter.

[1769] I don't know.

[1770] I couldn't think of a way it would not seem indulgent to send it to him.

[1771] So woke up the next day, as I said, Craving was over.

[1772] But I had gotten an email from Camel the very next day.

[1773] In my assumption, or at least I know from his listening pattern, if he's going to listen to us, it's generally.

[1774] He's on a road trip with his family.

[1775] He's driving up to Idaho.

[1776] He doesn't have a long commute and he works nonstop.

[1777] So it's like he can't, he's not listening.

[1778] No, he can't.

[1779] Anyways, Wednesday morning, he sent this incredibly beautiful email to me. And it was just so special in so many ways and very validating and all these many things.

[1780] And then I responded and thanked him profusely and was really excited he had heard because I had wanted to, you know, blah, blah, blah.

[1781] So then I was in therapy.

[1782] on Friday post that fact check and then exploring it with my therapist he kind of said what do you think if let's assume it wasn't self -indulgent how could he have responded that would have fulfilled whatever yeah and I said uh you know I guess I wanted like a dad to call and have him say he's proud of me I think I was really desiring that and I think Kim well in many ways is that for me. I've known him for 20 years now, and he's always been incredibly protective and generous, very big brothery.

[1783] Yeah.

[1784] He's like a paternal figure in some ways.

[1785] You look up to him.

[1786] Big brother slash dad.

[1787] Yeah, I totally look up to him.

[1788] I respect him a ton.

[1789] And he's, I just know his character.

[1790] He's really an exemplary human.

[1791] So, yeah, I guess I figured out that that's what I was craving and I was Kimmel's who can give it to me and ultimately I want to avail myself to him a lot more to be my big brother dad I love that it's so pure it's so like of course all you want is a dad to say good job yes and one that kind of you kind of want selfishly too for them to understand what the magnitude yeah yeah yeah and I think it's Nice because before it just feels like we placed that into like your addictive brain.

[1792] Yes, yes, yes, of course.

[1793] First explanation is always got to be that.

[1794] Yeah, like, oh, that's kind of how you operate.

[1795] Yeah.

[1796] And it's nice to see there's other parts at play.

[1797] Yeah, and I will say, I think we may have talked about this in the past, but my dependence on AAA was too much.

[1798] I think there's a lot of room for other stuff because it does, it did explain so much.

[1799] much of my life for, I don't know, 15 years, AA.

[1800] Yeah.

[1801] It was like, oh, God, this is the first thing that's ever truly understood exactly who I am.

[1802] But then also there's this, this Kimmel thing that has nothing to do with that.

[1803] And you really need, or I really need that other element.

[1804] Yeah, all the pieces.

[1805] Yeah.

[1806] Well, I think it's really sweet.

[1807] Yeah, I think he is so fucking sweet.

[1808] I think you, being able to acknowledge that is very sweet.

[1809] And I think you should tell him because I don't know if he'll listen to this episode.

[1810] This is, again, as you said, he's busy.

[1811] He's very busy.

[1812] He did say that in our short interaction when he was my best friend and my wingman.

[1813] The other day.

[1814] A civilian.

[1815] Just a regular old guy who hosted the Oscars a week before.

[1816] He was saying, like, you know, that Letterman episode was so great.

[1817] And I said, I think it meant a lot to Dex that you reached out.

[1818] Oh, you did.

[1819] Oh, that's nice.

[1820] You know how I actually knew it was the key to the whole thing was that when my therapist asked me to tell them what it would have meant, I said, as I was saying, be proud of me, I guess I wanted a day.

[1821] I started crying.

[1822] Yeah, of course he did.

[1823] Yeah, so I think that's always a pretty big clue.

[1824] I've gotten a bull's eye when I'm assessing why I did something that I did.

[1825] Yeah, it's one of those things in therapy.

[1826] It happens, I think, rarely, if you're a you type or a me type, where you say something and you're surprised by it.

[1827] Yes, totally.

[1828] It's like, oh, like you are real time figuring something out about yourself.

[1829] Yes.

[1830] And I uniquely in there have that experience where I get abnormally emotional in the middle of something that I couldn't anticipate was going to send me that way.

[1831] Yeah, it's the only time, really, that that.

[1832] I mean, I'll be, like, mad or sad other times, but, like, crying only happens, but there's, like, something unexpected that happened, which is that I, in saying something, I learn something.

[1833] So, yeah.

[1834] It's a pretty wild experience.

[1835] As you said, it's not like it's super frequent.

[1836] Yeah.

[1837] But it happens enough that you're like, yeah, this is a very wild, wonderful experience.

[1838] Yeah, it's helpful for sure.

[1839] I did cancel today.

[1840] Oh, okay.

[1841] Great.

[1842] Okay, ADHD.

[1843] And it is a ding, ding, ding, actually.

[1844] He talks about getting a bad comment on a thing he wrote.

[1845] And it's like all caps, you're a dumb ass.

[1846] Oh, yes, yes.

[1847] We talked about that for a fair amount.

[1848] And it's a ding, ding, ding.

[1849] Because yesterday we put out a Lightless Bird pickleball.

[1850] Great episode.

[1851] Yeah, should be innocuous.

[1852] Shouldn't create a lot.

[1853] Pickle ball.

[1854] How could pickleball be a problem?

[1855] One would say.

[1856] And you pop in for that.

[1857] You came up to like drop something off.

[1858] We were in here.

[1859] Didn't know you were recording.

[1860] Yes.

[1861] I was carrying a lamp or something.

[1862] Yeah.

[1863] You were carrying an equipment piece, like a thing.

[1864] Oh, it's mic stand.

[1865] And you came, you sat, you chatted.

[1866] It was so fun.

[1867] David met Frito.

[1868] He hated that.

[1869] That was very fun.

[1870] In it, David.

[1871] sort of haphazardly says my friend thinks I have ADHD and that I should get it checked out, diagnosed, whatever.

[1872] Me and you pretty quickly say, why would you do that?

[1873] Right.

[1874] You don't have ADHD is what I think I went so far as to say that.

[1875] Maybe you said that.

[1876] I don't even know if you said that.

[1877] Actually, I don't know if you said that.

[1878] I think we were just like, why would you do that?

[1879] What are the consequences?

[1880] Like, what is the reason?

[1881] What symptom are you?

[1882] treating.

[1883] Exactly.

[1884] And I, and then, okay, we put this out.

[1885] Some people are very upset by this and they're taking it very personally.

[1886] And I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was in my 30s.

[1887] We are not saying, first of all, we're not saying ADHD isn't real.

[1888] We're also not saying ADHD is shape.

[1889] Like there was a few people who were like, I had a lot of shame around it.

[1890] And so that's why I didn't look into it.

[1891] And so this feels like you guys are shaming him.

[1892] The ones I read were like, you said Dax is basically saying that we can't be productive.

[1893] That is not what I said.

[1894] Yeah.

[1895] Well, also, look, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind me saying this because he talks about it all the time on his podcast.

[1896] But Elizabeth and Andy, Andy got diagnosed with ADHD like last year.

[1897] Okay.

[1898] And he is a music producer.

[1899] He's very good at his job.

[1900] He's very prolific.

[1901] He works really hard.

[1902] Yeah.

[1903] But there are pieces of his life.

[1904] that felt like unmanageable slash yeah there were parts where he was like I don't understand this about me yes sure which is why he looked into it it had nothing to do with the work it was more actually like personal life stuff so you know I do think it can manifest in a lot of ways and never would I say Andy why would you go get that checked out you're successful and productive if he's like yeah I'm having issues X Y Z Yes.

[1905] Then I'm like, of course get that checked out.

[1906] David wasn't saying I'm having issues with this.

[1907] Yeah, he wasn't complaining about a list of symptoms and then the person concluded you have ADHD.

[1908] Like, oh, you might have ADHD.

[1909] This is a general observation, I think, about David's disposition.

[1910] Right.

[1911] Which felt like to me that's so different.

[1912] And it's just to clarify.

[1913] And we're just talking about David.

[1914] Just David.

[1915] There's my only opinion I have about someone that has ADHD is David.

[1916] We have no. And there's no judgment on our end around ADHD.

[1917] I'm pro ADHD.

[1918] I've sat on here a thousand times, you know, when you give them the bees, that medicine, they don't go out and find you pollen.

[1919] And I, I mean, this is the thing that hurts my feelings when I read those things.

[1920] Really, on your behalf, I think if you listen to this show, you have to know that you, me, but especially you, are not in a shame game and not trying to bring someone down or.

[1921] Stigmatize anything.

[1922] Yes.

[1923] It's like we're fighting against that all the time.

[1924] time that's like a huge tenet of what we do is like what we do and look I'm also open I am open to because we do fuck up of course we fuck up yes and we've said sorry for fucking yes so I am open for people being like actually you guys did kind of miss the mark here we were talking about a very specific situation David ferrier in front of us who we know very well yes and he again was not complaining about anything and David also is David he's like throwing shit out there he got bit by a squirrel like this is him he's a cartoon we love him yeah but like we're not saying anything blanketly about ADHD anywho so I just wanted to address that and I'm always upset if people are hurt by us I mean that's really also what if there's a piece of it yeah every time I go on that thing I'm just like does anyone like they don't like me or you which is insane I mean, but they do.

[1925] Well, sure, certainly the majority do.

[1926] Yeah, and I...

[1927] It's a hugely successful show.

[1928] Yes, it's a very successful show.

[1929] So I don't think...

[1930] I'm not going to let that be the narrative.

[1931] Like, I don't believe that is true.

[1932] Right.

[1933] I just think it's really funny to see hatred pointed at you and I. There's something...

[1934] Yeah, it hurts.

[1935] There's something bigger.

[1936] I don't know what it is, but...

[1937] Yeah.

[1938] Yeah.

[1939] Yeah.

[1940] I mean, it's going to hurt our feelings.

[1941] Like, again, circling back to this whole episode, that the negativity bias is strong.

[1942] So when those are at the top.

[1943] Yeah.

[1944] Someone wrote, like, David hated Frito and Dax wouldn't stop.

[1945] He wouldn't, he had told him many.

[1946] It's like literally starts sounding like the Me Too moment that David experienced with Frito.

[1947] And this was the very first thing you ever had heard.

[1948] And you've never heard any of us.

[1949] Yeah.

[1950] You could maybe construct that.

[1951] That's the thing.

[1952] It's like relationship has to be part of the context.

[1953] Like, there's a relationship between the three of us.

[1954] We're all friends.

[1955] Yeah, it's, yeah.

[1956] It's interesting.

[1957] It's interesting.

[1958] I do, yeah, I will not speak for you or him, but I'm sorry if you were hurt by what we said.

[1959] But I am clarifying that we were not talking about you.

[1960] And we are not talking about ADHD as a general thing.

[1961] We are talking about...

[1962] Whether David or not.

[1963] Yeah.

[1964] Our friend.

[1965] Yep.

[1966] Yeah.

[1967] Who I love you guys, but we know better than you do.

[1968] Is that.

[1969] All right.

[1970] So something else that I assume we might get some comments on.

[1971] Okay.

[1972] Is Paul...

[1973] It's his belief that repressed memories aren't real.

[1974] Oh, right.

[1975] Yeah.

[1976] And I'm sure a lot of...

[1977] people believe that they are.

[1978] Well, we have since interviewed somebody who is telling us about theirs.

[1979] Yes.

[1980] Post hearing this.

[1981] Yes.

[1982] And we're not saying, oh, actually, those aren't real.

[1983] Nope.

[1984] Yeah, I mean, I think there's room for all of it.

[1985] But when I look up repressed memories, like I started to do some research on it, it's all about some psychologists believe, some psychiatrists believe.

[1986] There actually is not consensus on repressed memories.

[1987] So I don't feel bad about keeping that in because it's not like a thing.

[1988] of the...

[1989] Yeah.

[1990] And he did say, he said, can't say it hasn't happened.

[1991] Right.

[1992] But it's not what our brains are trying to do.

[1993] Right.

[1994] Mechanically, that's not a function our brain has been observed.

[1995] Yes.

[1996] Yeah.

[1997] Yeah.

[1998] I mean, I do think some things are so hard for us to, like, admit to ourselves.

[1999] Confront.

[2000] And confront that we do put them in boxes.

[2001] Oh, yeah.

[2002] But I don't think that mean they're not gone.

[2003] And then all of a sudden they come in.

[2004] It's you can choose to open the door.

[2005] You've just really locked it and put it away.

[2006] And again, as we talk about so often on here, your story is so real that anything, any evidence in the contrary has got to be ignored.

[2007] Yeah.

[2008] Mm -hmm.

[2009] Okay, I did a tiny experiment.

[2010] Oh, fun.

[2011] Because we talked about the cool tests they did were they asked people right after 9 -11 to, like, share.

[2012] their experience.

[2013] Oh, right.

[2014] And then went back.

[2015] Like a year later, five years later, whatever, and it keeps changing.

[2016] Also, Malcolm referenced that also on one of the revisionist histories.

[2017] I think the one about Brian Williams.

[2018] Oh, right.

[2019] Right, right, right.

[2020] I think it was on that one.

[2021] That was a great one.

[2022] Yes.

[2023] We all left liking Brian Williams, right?

[2024] Like, again, humans are humans and fallible and all of it.

[2025] So, Callie and I were together during 9 -11.

[2026] Okay.

[2027] And so I asked her what her memory.

[2028] was oh fun okay this is what she said okay my memory we were in third period miss rosen and watching the internal dhs news dhs delus high school sure best network best network in deluxe the internal dhs news even that i would never say that like that like i don't even know it's called that what but she was on broadcast so that probably is what it was called Anyway, internal DHS news And they mentioned there was an attack Then we turned on the actual news and watched Kevin was pretty nervous about his dad at the Pentagon Then I remember going to fourth period math And she wouldn't let us watch the news And insisted we take a quiz instead Which was so wild Mine isn't so far Dissimilar off of this But I guess I'm want to ask her is because I believe that we watched live the second tower go down and I don't know if I'm making that up let me ask her I wonder because our yeah if you're my age that moment was the space shuttle uh -huh that blew up that we were all watching I think every kid in America was watching and that happened real time you saw real time yeah but that's something that I could imagine is maybe falsified because I've seen it so much.

[2029] Yeah.

[2030] And they were replaying it, obviously.

[2031] Yeah.

[2032] But to me...

[2033] Yeah, that's the most seared in part of it.

[2034] Yeah.

[2035] More than the planes even.

[2036] To me, it was like the first one happened and then they told us to turn on the news and we did and then we saw the second one.

[2037] And I told you I have a journal entry from...

[2038] That day.

[2039] Yeah.

[2040] You should have read it.

[2041] I wish I would have known.

[2042] Also, I'm glad I didn't because it would have been such finding us to find this.

[2043] I wonder what your thoughts were.

[2044] Do you think there were any racist ones?

[2045] No, no, no, no, no. Mine was very libertarian.

[2046] I was like, I can feel right now that this country's going to react so passionately and reactively that civil liberties are about to go away.

[2047] I could just, I just was like, oh, we're going to watch the whole moment.

[2048] machine.

[2049] Oh, interesting.

[2050] Government kind of has a lot of control.

[2051] Wow.

[2052] I mean, the Department of Homeland Security, that didn't even exist pre -9 -11.

[2053] And it's now the biggest agency, I think, financially.

[2054] I know.

[2055] That's crazy.

[2056] Yeah, that's a result of that.

[2057] I could feel, yeah.

[2058] And airport security, all of that.

[2059] I mean, that I can't, I feel like I can't remember a time before airport security was the way it is.

[2060] But I was in ninth grade.

[2061] So obviously, I'd been on many trips.

[2062] Yeah, yeah.

[2063] And I was traveling nonstop with doing the car shows.

[2064] So, yeah.

[2065] It was radically easier.

[2066] It was, so our friend Molly, her daughter just visited, and she's 13.

[2067] She just visited her brother in Oregon.

[2068] Uh -huh.

[2069] And she was showing me this video of her little niece, like being excited for Lily to come.

[2070] She pulls it up to show me And I was like Are they at the gate?

[2071] And she was like, yeah How?

[2072] Like my brain was fritzing out I was like how did they get to the gate And she said if it's a minor Coming off the plane They figured out a way To get them To the gate Which but felt crazy Right That used to be normal We were watching a video Oh my God And then I said I used to always pick up Aaron from L -A -X and I would go there with a 12 -pack.

[2073] You could also just bring fucking a 12 -pack of beer into the airport.

[2074] Yes, L -A -X.

[2075] And then I would sit there and pound beers and smoke cigarettes, waiting for him to arrive, and then he'd get off, and I'd be five, six beers deep.

[2076] He'd hand him one, we'd drink in the airport.

[2077] Oh, my God.

[2078] Drink at the baggage claim.

[2079] Yeah.

[2080] Yeah.

[2081] I would just go party at his gate.

[2082] I mean, quite literally.

[2083] So weird.

[2084] Yeah.

[2085] I'll go early.

[2086] Oh, I'll bring a 12 pack.

[2087] Treat it like a fucking picnic area at a park.

[2088] There's nuts.

[2089] Yeah, but, okay, she hasn't responded.

[2090] But, yeah, our friend Kevin, who was, like, hot.

[2091] Like, he was, like, a popular boy.

[2092] Hot shot.

[2093] He was a hot shot.

[2094] He, his dad worked at the Pentagon.

[2095] And I do remember that being Prince.

[2096] Someone came and got Kevin and, like, took him out.

[2097] Put him in a helicopter.

[2098] Yeah.

[2099] And that was like kind of exciting.

[2100] Of course, made him hotter.

[2101] Yeah.

[2102] Oh my God, something's happening with Kevin.

[2103] Yes.

[2104] He's, oh, I got to go out.

[2105] I got him to protect him.

[2106] It's so hot.

[2107] He's getting hotter and hotter.

[2108] His dad's in peril.

[2109] Oh, my God.

[2110] Oh, my God.

[2111] That really, that's how it does happen.

[2112] It's not much of a embellishment of what happens.

[2113] With me?

[2114] All of us.

[2115] Yeah.

[2116] I think, isn't all of us?

[2117] I think if you're the hot boy in school, I think most of the girls are feeling like, oh, no, Kevin.

[2118] Yeah, yeah.

[2119] Yeah.

[2120] And then, of course, that does make him hotter.

[2121] Now he's, like, got drama.

[2122] Yeah.

[2123] Okay.

[2124] So, towards the end of the episode, we talk about racism a little bit.

[2125] We talk about the term.

[2126] Uh -huh.

[2127] And it was ironic because you said, you know, I am racist, and we talk about, like, the scale.

[2128] And then I said, you know, I don't think you are.

[2129] Mm -hmm.

[2130] I gave my reasons for that, mainly being I have fear around labeling everyone blanketly a racist because then I'm worried that's just like, okay, I guess that's just what we do.

[2131] So it's fine.

[2132] Right.

[2133] Like, nothing to fix.

[2134] Uh -huh.

[2135] But then a few days later, I'm at this event.

[2136] The documentary.

[2137] Yeah, yeah.

[2138] Yeah.

[2139] And, of course, at the very beginning of the doc, they ask everyone who's racist here.

[2140] And, you know, most people know to raise their hand.

[2141] Some people don't.

[2142] But it was just funny because it had come so quickly after I had let you off the hook.

[2143] Right, right, right, right.

[2144] I see.

[2145] Yes, we are, because we're all part of this system.

[2146] And there's stuff like that we are.

[2147] Yeah, yeah.

[2148] It's too late.

[2149] You're brain, you already presented.

[2150] I don't like too late.

[2151] That's the part that's...

[2152] No, no, I mean, too late, that was your childhood.

[2153] Every time a black person was on TV, they were robbing a white woman.

[2154] Like, do you think that isn't in your brain?

[2155] Right, it's there.

[2156] Yeah, unless you had tons of contact to counter that depiction that was ubiquitous.

[2157] Yeah, and it's a matter of just, like, working hard after the initial thought to bring yourself morally back to.

[2158] down right bring that frontal lobe into it yeah yeah and encounter it with some challenges yeah so anyway I just thought that timing was sort of interesting that was anyway that's all oh wow what if you like popped us up with that little email that you just read but we we can't read out loud I got a really cool email in the middle of this that I've now cut about a guest yeah potential guess potential guess uh and we didn't It's not been a man. You don't have to worry about that.

[2159] Oh, wow.

[2160] Okay, great.

[2161] It's exciting.

[2162] Okay.

[2163] Well, congratulations on another great fact check.

[2164] Thank you.

[2165] Being a part of another chat with Paul Bloom.

[2166] Yeah.

[2167] Congratulations to you.

[2168] Neither has deserved a chat with Paul Bloom for two hours.

[2169] What a racket we've got.

[2170] We're running here.

[2171] This is a fucking crime syndicate.

[2172] I think you deserve it.

[2173] No, no, no. That's when you say, I think you deserve it.

[2174] Yes, you deserve it.

[2175] Well, if I deserve it, you do deserve it.

[2176] No, no, no. But do either of us deserve it?

[2177] I hope you have a great vacation.

[2178] You too.

[2179] Get out in that sun and worship it.

[2180] I will.

[2181] I will.

[2182] We'll probably do a fact check from the vacation.

[2183] So you guys stay tuned for that.

[2184] Yeah, just hold on the line.

[2185] We'll be right back.

[2186] All right, love you.

[2187] Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[2188] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

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