Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are on-site in Los Angeles, in California. I'm really excited to be talking about all things related to skepticism, all things related to science, all things related to humanism, to biases, and to how to best move forward and prosper collectively. We have Dr. Michael Shermer joining us on the show. Not a simulation. That's the real flesh and blood. I have not uploaded my body and brain into the cloud yet. Yeah, it's the key there yet. And for those that don't know, Michael's background, he's the founder of the Skeptic Society, which has 55,000 members. He's the editor-in-chief of its magazine, Skeptic. He's a 214-time monthly columnist for Scientific American from 2001 until January 2019. And he's a presidential fellow at Chapman University where he teaches skepticism 101. He helped found and run, this is an interesting fact, the 3,000-mile transcontinental bicycle race across America. And he did 3,000 feet of elevation just today in how many miles? 40? Yeah, 47 miles, 3 hours. 47 miles, 3 hours. I'm a little slower than I used to be, but... It's a great way to stay healthy. I can't believe you have so much cycling experience. He's a 15-times author as well with New York Times bestsellers, why people believe in weird things, the believing brain, why Darwin matters, the science of good and evil, the moral arc, and most recently, Heavens on Earth. I'm really excited to dive into depth. Thank you for having us. You're welcome. Super pumped. I really think that your work is so crucial. We are, find ourselves as stewards of Earth now over a period of a long time. And now more than ever, it's important to realize how we've collectively learned as a society and how we've built this up and we've taught children and we've built up this collective knowledge. Yet, the last 500 years specifically have been so crucial due to the scientific revolution and us being able to really layer up this objective truth. And I want you to speak about the synthesis of what has happened over these last 500 years in the big history perspective and where we're at now with that current state of humanity. Because as you write in the moral arc, we are... It's arcing in the long term towards a more just world. I think so. And another way to come at this, this may be my next book, maybe, of Governing Mars. I'm thinking about calling it Governing Mars. I mean, we're about to colonize Mars and no one's talking about what kind of government we're going to have there. What kind of rules and laws and economic systems, who owns the oxygen that's produced and the water. I mean, this is not like Europeans coming to America where there's free air and free water, free food. It's going to be quite the challenge. And in a way, the way to think about that is, well, what have we done here on Earth that worked and what didn't work and what works better than something else or shades of spectrum of success or lack of success of governance and economics and all that stuff. And that's what the moral arc is about is, well, things have clearly gotten better. Unless you just want to denial the progress that's happened over the centuries, like the abolition of slavery and the slave trade and capital punishment and torture and the expansion of civil rights and civil liberties and women's rights and gay rights and now animal rights and who knows, robot rights might be next. We've made a lot of progress and poverty will be ended by 2030 is the UN projection. That's not to say that everybody's going to be wealthy, but not being impoverished is a huge, huge improvement. I mean, who cares about global warming if you don't have three square meals a day to eat, right? So to get people to care about curating the Earth into the future in a stable, sustainable way, you've got to have food and shelter in the basics of life. So that's kind of what I've been thinking about the last few years and going forward is I think this is probably the most important thing we could do. Whether we go to Mars or not is sort of secondary to, we should think about what we're going to do if we go there because the natal focus back on, well, what have we been doing here? Maybe we should do more of that. Like if I was in Venezuela, if I took over Venezuela now, we're talking on the day that there's a huge meltdown there, what would I do? If I wasn't going to be the typical dictator and just stay in power for as long as I possibly can by corruption and bribery and assassination or whatever, that's what everybody normally does in failed states. Maybe I'd look to the U.S. Constitution or the British Constitution or the French Constitution or whatever and go, okay, let's take the parts that work that we like. We don't like that tax system. We like this one. We like these kinds of bills of rights but not those or whatever and leave a legacy of, and why are we doing that? Because it worked over here. Let's try it here. So I think that's the best thing. And that really is science because it's an experiment. People don't think of like political science as a science or economics as the dismal science or whatever. No, no, don't think of it like an experiment that's run with results. We have 50 different states, 50 different state constitutions in the United States. They all have different tax systems, different gun control laws and so forth. Those are experiments. So let's look at the outcome. Like, okay, these kinds of gun control measures seem to work to reduce gun violence. These don't seem to work so well. So maybe we had to jettison those and try those. And that's the scientific method right there. This is exactly why I love you so much, Michael, because I have also spent a lot of time thinking about how to properly govern Mars. Yeah? Yeah, I spent a lot of time on this. Maybe I'll interview you for my question. I also really want to press Elon on some of these questions and as well as the next contenders because who, when we land there, what are, like you said, what are these best techniques of civilizational progress that we can bring to Mars so we don't have the same errors, the same hiccups? What are the best constitutional principles, etc.? And one of the things that are important to press is how are we going to collaborate? Are we going there as an Earth, as a unity, or are we going there as separate nations or as separate corporations? Right, right. How are we going to treat the other colonies that get there when China lands? How will the U.S. behave? Will we be helping each other with rovers and with water supplies, etc.? Yeah. And etc. So these are very pressing thought-experiments, simulations to run in our mind about what is going to happen when we move into interplanetary colonization, which we will absolutely be doing in the next couple of decades. I'm really happy that- Have you read this book on seasteading? Do you know about seasteading? Yeah, seasteading is exciting. I just finished the book, because I met the author at a conference recently, and when I first heard about this through Peter Thiel, I thought, oh, this is just insane. No one's going to do this. But really, now that I see what's going on, these are experiments, more experiments. Yeah, by all means, let's do more of this kind of stuff and see what happens. That's the best thing we can do, because the way science progresses is through trial and error. So Karl Popper famously described science, the scientific method as conjecture and refutation. So you're conjecturing. You're just spitballing ideas. You're throwing stuff out. Maybe it's this. Maybe it's that. I don't know. You come up with stuff. Screenwriters do this for television shows. They'll sit in a room and just throw out a hundred different ideas, maybe one or two or three are good. The rest are junk. That's actually the way it is in science. People that are outside of science, they think you guys are so close-minded. You can't accept radical new ideas, because look, this one was right and this one was right. It's like, dude, you have no idea. There were like 10,000 ideas like that. Most of them are just completely insane, and they're wrong. So we have to be kind of conservative in what we end up embracing as the truth with this multi, because most ideas are. So the only way to do it is open inquiry, free speech, free inquiry, open peer commentary and criticism, debate, disputation. And from there, it kind of winnows out the stuff that's probably not such great ideas that you end up with a handful that are better. Yep. And there have actually been some hugely missed opportunities. I'll get to that in a moment for that. With C-Steadding specifically, the idea of running these experiments of being able to live in very eco-friendly ocean dwelling communities is very fascinating and it's in international waters. There's a lot of cool stuff going on with trying these experiments out in governance and in prosperity. And then the missed opportunities that I was just speaking about earlier, Michael's a big advocate for, like you just mentioned, debate civil discourse on these ideas of running these experiments. And I think we had some majorly missed opportunities and we're continuing to miss them because, for example, rather than Google having James Timur and the other leading biologists, sociologists, scientists in a debate about the memo, there was none of that. And so we're missing that. And same thing right now with Peter, James Helen and the foundation of scientific truth being we're showing how we can't add errors to the foundation of scientific truth. And again, this needs to be on a national stage, on an international stage as a debate. That's how I wish we would do it. Well, it is done. It just needs to be done more and of all people to reject that, the left was always in support of that very process. So they've gone up the deep end with this business of hate speeches, violence and that then expands, mission creep. That expands to pretty much anything I don't like including somebody's theory about gender differences and cognitive abilities or whatever. But if you go online and type in Pinker, comma, debate about gender cognitive differences, there's a debate. I forget the woman, another Harvard scientist. And they go at it. What about this study? Well, this study, these findings were disputed. Well, why the methodology? And they go back and forth, back and forth. This is how it's done. And then you can judge yourself. But this idea that, you know, we're going to squelch the speech of people we don't like. Big mistake. Big mistake. Agreed. And when, you know, you speaking with Joe Rogan about this as well, have made it, have you guys both made it clear that there are some conspiracies which are true and it's very important for us to help pile on the evidence, make these scientific hypotheses, test them, figure out the truth, embed that into history and adequately move forward. What you've been teaching about scientific humanism has been very interesting to me. To me, I think a lot about how the universe is like code. And we can understand it better with math and with science. And these laws that govern our nature and even us as humans, that then by understanding it, we can build a better foundation of civilization. So I want you to speak on the importance of scientific humanism as we move forward. Yeah, I think the humanist movement needs to bifurcate a little bit or evolve or something. You know, it started really in the early 20th century, mostly leftists and liberals in a reaction to other political or religious movements. But then, you know, by the time I kind of got into it in the 80s, it was very strongly affiliated with a political movement. And I'm trying to steer it back toward a scientific movement. Because the problem with most such activists or social groups is that they splinter. You know, there's this kind of fusion fission. So you fuse and grab as many people as you can. Our like-minded people, here we go, we have a movement. And then they start to splinter apart and fission when there's disagreements over ideological differences. That you see, again, mission creep with that. Like, you know, who is the real feminist or the real humanist or the true atheist? Are you a militant atheist or are you one of those milk toast atheists, practically unagnostic? We can't have you in our group. It's like, dude, we are few in number.  Big mistake. But that happens, happened to the Marxists and the socialists and the feminists. Happened to the Objectivist, the trans movement. You know, when she died in 1982, famous students was like a dozen people at her funeral and hardly anybody really cared that this legendary figure had died in terms of her following because she had kicked everybody out as not being pure feminist or pure Objectivist enough. Write down to which movies you want to see, what music you like to listen to, which cigarettes you smoked or whatever. All this is in the biographies of her by people that were on the inside that got kicked out for various sins, right? This is a huge mistake and all social movements make it. I don't want the humanist movement to do that or the atheist movement. There was an atheist plus movement, the plus being social justice. What is that? I mean, that sounds good. I'm in favor of social justice, aren't you? Well, what does that mean exactly? And then all of a sudden we're not talking about science and reason and the supernatural and the natural and all that. We're talking about abortion rights or reproductive rights or whatever. These are political issues, which is fine, but again, we want a bigger tent. Just define ourselves by what we stand for. Science and reason and open inquiry and so forth. And then people can differ. They are going to differ. My own family, just four or five of it, we don't agree on anything about what we do. I mean, there's lots of disagreements about stuff. So you expand that to a social movement, to a state, a nation. So the point of a good governance system is that it's flexible and open to disagreements, to move forward, solve problems, to keep moving forward. It's a problem solving technology that acknowledges that there's this conjecture and refutation. People are spit-pulling ideas, boom, boom, boom. And they're going to differ. And that's just the way it's going to be. It's always going to be that way. I feel like we must get out of the us versus them mentality that this is an earth. This has just one civilization on it of all plants, animals, and humans. And then we have to do our best to identify these protocols, these resource frameworks that maximize flourishing. And like you said, bring those to the next steps. Eradicate malevolence, identify and eradicate malevolence. How we best do that needs to go through a process of discourse. And I'm curious, you know, you write about this a lot in the moral arc. It's really important that people embody the full realization that things have gotten so much damn better. Poverty down, diseases down. Baseline of electricity, food, water, education, healthcare up for everyone around the world. And we're bringing it more and more to the developing places faster and faster. They're leapfrogging. There are places in developing countries that are not going through the landline system. Right. They're going to just skip that stage. Perfect. Yeah, absolutely. But we really are fighting human nature. I mean, you just saw this. We're taping this right on the heels of this incident in Washington, D.C. with the Native American, Vietnam vet and the young 16-year-old Catholic schoolboy there. And initially it was just like a one-minute video clip. And everybody just jumped on this, you know, like and took sides and, you know, just was outraged, outraged on social media. And to the point where like Kathy Griffin said, you know, let's dox these little fuckers and really just destroy them.  You know, bam, wearing that MAGA hat. And then, you know, like two days later, everybody's like, oh, I'm sorry. I got a, I made a huge mistake. I didn't know that there was another video. More evidence. More evidence. So it's really hard, it's really hard to overcome that. I mean, I feel it, you know, when I see something online and instantly you just know the amygdala is kicking in, the fear response, the anger, you know, the tribalism and those are the bad guys and we're the good guys. It's just so natural. But we have, I don't know, we just have to combat it. We just have to, you know, say, put the brakes on, count to 10, let's wait, you know, and act like journalists, investigative journalists, but even a lot of journalists jumped on it. The Catholic school of that boy, they were going to kick them all out. They didn't even wait to see if there was other evidence. So that's what we're up against. I mean, it's really scary.  And I'm just like bouncing around, you know, and that's what I thought of with the whole Russian hacking of the election.  It's like, what happened to human agency and reason and, you know, self-control and all that. We need to develop those skills because they're there. This ability to slow down and think critically about a variety of sources, about a multivariate way of perceiving things instead of a unidimensional way of perceiving things, to desire nuance in all conversation, to look at someone else in the eyes and realize their humanity, have that emotional intelligence as well. That these principles need to be baked into us adults and our children of the future. Otherwise discourse will suffer, especially as we move into further into the exponential technology, echo chamber, biases, et cetera, bots, deepfakes, era. I'm worried about the deepfake thing that's really looking back because you could make anybody say anything that looks pretty close to real now. That's going to shake things up a lot in terms of evidence. What constitutes reliable evidence? On a small scale, you know, look, there's Bigfoot or there's the aliens and they look pretty good. You know, we're going to need more than that now and that's going to be the case with these kinds of incidences where there's marchers or protestors and something happens and what if somebody put somebody's face on there and you don't know. Or someone like myself that comments publicly a lot on things, I can easily be made to say something I never said. I got my Twitter account hacked a couple of weeks ago. Deepak Chopra's a friend, so he always sends me articles. Pretty much every couple of days he's sending me articles. Most of them are ones that he wrote but others just along the lines of what supports his position. So I get a little tweet, hey Michael, that's this great article in which I talk about you. Deepak mentioned me, I got to read this. So, you know, it's early morning, I'm just going to, you know, the BBC. Oh my God, Deepak wrote something from the BBC about me. You know, just type in your Twitter password and open the article. And I'm like, okay. There's like five minutes later, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, some of my other friends are going, Michael, I think you were hacked. I'm like, oh, oh. So I contact Deepak. He goes, yeah, I was hacked about an hour ago. I'm like, oh, how did I fall for this? And I thought, okay, I better do something about my account because whoever this is probably going to post stuff. Like, you know, my account is saying something super positive about Richard Spencer and the neo-Nazis or something, you know. Nothing like that happened. I really have no idea why this person did that other than just for the fun of it. But that's the world we're heading in. And, you know, I'm pretty savvy about these sorts of things, not to get fooled by scams and cons and stuff because it is what I do. And yet, boom, I just fell for it.  But there it is. And the people I've interviewed about this, security internet, security experts, they tell me everybody falls for these things. Not everybody. But it's pretty easy to fall for that. And I got lucky it didn't cost me anything. But I could see now how easy it is to manipulate social media. It's going to get worse, probably, I think. We need to grow up. We need to grow up our own morality first. Our own intelligence in critical thinking and reasoning in conversation. We need to start feeling like we were saying earlier with emotional intelligence as well. That sort of human-centric, heart-centric, unity-centric perspective will enable us to continue the moral arc forward through this mess of exponential technology as well as through the good things that exponential technology is going to bring. Okay. I think norms, social norms are a big factor. They're not laws. It's not top-down. It's bottom-up of just the way we talk to each other. The language we use. What's acceptable or unacceptable. The social media and the online community, it's still pretty early. And we don't have a lot of good norms set up yet. And all the social media companies are scrambling to figure out how to regulate their own business before the government starts doing it because it's going to happen pretty soon. So what kind of norms do you set of acceptable language? We're seeing people get kicked off of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram now because they use the N-word saying, okay, that's kind of an obvious low-hanging fruit one. But what other things can I not call somebody used as an adjective? Because that's going to expand. And when you see someone like Ben Shapiro as an anti-Semite it's like, what? You know he's Jewish, right?   So I think if we up the norms to say, just stop doing that. You can't do that anymore. Stop it. Either the person gets kicked off or better just or people don't retweet their or pass along their articles or whatever. And that's I think how social and moral change happens more than top-down laws. You need laws. You can't discriminate. You can't slave people, whatever. But you really want to change the hearts and minds of people. That happens from the bottom up through norms. What's acceptable and not. Dawkins makes the point that you can identify a novel almost down to the decade when it was written just by the language at least in English of how the author talks about women and Jews and black minorities. Just the way people are described. And it's like, wow, you would never use that language today. But that was acceptable in the 1920s and then it started to shift by the 40s and you kind of see the language change. That's where it really happens. That's actually being able to see the evolution of ethics of the human ethics. Be very careful as well as we move forward to not be so outrageous to dig back 10 years into people's histories and just try and shame them rather than have a discourse with them and see that, oh, they've evolved past where they were 10 years ago. The guy that was going to do the Academy Awards, what was his name? Kevin Hart. Kevin Hart. How many times has the poor guy have to apologize before he's let back out? That's another worrisome thing. The point doesn't seem to be justice and let's correct things in error correction. It seems to be we want to destroy lives. That's really scary because once it turns on, you may be into it yourself but once it turns on you and that's the fear. Once you have the apparatus set up that we can destroy the bad people's lives, then it'll expand to get everybody else including you. That's very dangerous. You also identify that the rise of democracy has been so critical for us that that has also caused people to see that voting is a sport that everyone participates in and that as we add new protocols trust based protocols moving forward it can make it even easier for us to participate in all helping make decisions. Also that the premise of of everyone being treated equally and having an equality of opportunity for people to pursue whatever brings the most meaning and actualization in life is really important. That's one of the most fundamental things that we care about helping people understand and incorporate into their lives and science has been sort of the best tool that we've had in the last several hundred years to build up on this foundation of maximizing prosperity and now and in many ways it's having issues with the foundation and we've been targeting some of these issues as we've been talking and really it's the science of morality that speaks to how to maximize both an individual's flourishing and the collective's flourishing. Teach us a bit more about that. Yeah I think yeah going forward it says kind of the big picture question. Yeah I do want to steel man the arguments on the other side for a moment. That is like I saw a short clip from an interview Martin Luther King gave 1967 which the interviewer was saying well why can't the blacks pull themselves up by their bootstraps like the Irish did and the Chinese did and the Germans did and the Italians did and the Poles did and you see all those you know Polish American German American Italian American communities in New York City there were little gangs essentially but then they you know got inculcated the American way and now we don't think of them as hyphenated Americans anymore they did it the Jews they were oppressed how come the blacks can't do they made the point well none of them were brought here against their will and enslaved for centuries and the Jim Crow laws and so on and so forth that he was then fighting so I have to say that even though as a kind of classical liberal libertarian I tend not to like big government programs to pull people up because it's kind of condescending to them like you can't make it without our handout and those programs tend to grow and big and then there's a lot of corruption and abuse of the system I don't like that but you know President Johnson's point you can't bring a man to the start line of a rate you know I'm an athlete and they've had no training at all they had no practice these put them on there and say go you're free to compete against all these other athletes that are professionals and trained and at all these opportunities that's not actually fair so when we say we definitely don't want equality of outcome because that's that's a failed experiment but equality of opportunity has a little bit of a hitch that not everybody has the same backgrounds so I do think you know we have a moral obligation to help people train them get them up to the starting line how that's done you know through private non-profits or through government agents you know that's a debatable point but education of the children into the world Jonathan Haidt makes this point he and Greg Lukianoff in their book The Coddling in the American Mind they have an example of the US Army in the 50s I think it was decided we're going to integrate the Army now and blacks will have all the opportunities whites have but they were not doing as well the integration system was not working why because the blacks could simply not compete in the tasks that they had to do why because they had such crappy educations as children so the Army said okay we're going to get them up to snuff here through extra trading and work and sure enough they did and then the opportunities were open and much more equality of opportunity was really there so that's a good example that it can be done whether bottom up top down whatever can be done so I think we do we have a ways to go in terms of the moral arc we have a ways to go of that I just wrote an article for Collette on the role of luck in how lives turn out you know it's much bigger than you think if you have to expand the idea of what you mean by luck so it's not just you know I got lucky and I met you today and through you I meet some producer and the next thing I know I have my own hit TV show on NBC or something like that I said boy that was luck but but but not just that just that you know I was born white middle class my parents sent me well I went to public schools but they were nice public schools and my parents helped me out with my college tuition at Pepperdine for example and and also my parents were had a lot of energy and intelligence and were hard working now they didn't go to college at all but but I inherited those characteristics from them genetically and socially environmentally in the home and so I got to think about that because in terms of checking your privilege well that I have to say that I was pretty lucky in that sense because when I see people that like poor black kids born to a single mom in the ghetto you know and say go out and make yourself what you want it's America yeah well this poor kid is probably not even thinking of you know taking the SATs and then going to Harvard and then getting you know this doesn't even enter their mind because they don't have that cultural background or those inherited personality traits you know and so on and basic needs yeah yeah so I think there's a lot there we should be empathetic to those the liberal arguments there we should steel man those and acknowledge yes those are actually really good points I think maybe you go too far in the affirmative action you know enough is enough now you know now we're discriminating against Asians at Harvard or whatever okay this isn't right but for sure the program you know started with you know good intent because that those things are true about the different backgrounds that's a really important point and we're actually seeing the largest as we're hockey sticking in population and capitalism is evolving we're seeing more and more maximization of shareholder values and then we're realizing whoa whoa whoa actually we need to do a new model of a moral corporation one that does help shareholders but also helps not only the employees of that corporation but also provides benefits to the rest of society to want to help them raise that baseline so this is that next evolution and we're now seeing more and more people mark Benioff step forward and talk about solving the inequality issues and actually make progress there and then Gates and Buffett and Dalio have all stepped forward and said we've benefited greatly from this we want to help address how to do capitalism 2.0 what's our next step here and that's very exciting yeah this is an example I think of bottom up norm shifting rather than top down say taxing the rich that's such a kind of 19th 20th century way of thinking of how we can help people that need help well just take the rich successful people and just take as much of their money as you can above a million a year 10 million a year whatever it is how about we shift the norms such that all billionaires want to give away at least 50% of their money well they've kind of done this themselves they have this sort of club there's that the giving pledge the giving pledge okay so if you're not a member of that club you're like well I better I want to get a member of that club look how much attention they're getting and recognition and that feels good 5 billion is going to be enough for me and my kids I can give the other 5 billion away something like that so that actually is more effective because when it's their money someone like Gates especially you know he's a scientist thinking about well what's what can I get for every dollar you know in terms of the outcome like how many lives am I saving through potable water and vitamins and vaccinations and mosquito nets and things like that is unbelievably more effective than just say you know tax the rich and they will put it in the government coffers and hope there's not too much corruption there well we know historically what happens with that so I like the new techniques better yeah there's no better way to evolve one's own spiritual presence on the planet once they reach that billionaire threshold than to help other people even when you only have basic needs met it still brings you so much pleasure light happiness to help other people okay I want to talk about how science's mission is protopia this is very interesting how incremental progress towards improvement rather than perfection is this premise that we want to build on and I want to know how exactly we do that because we just mentioned all these you know billionaires yada yada there's I believe 3,000 or so of them on the planet 2,000 ish and so do we enable the world leaders that are currently at Davos in Switzerland do we currently at the world economic form do we let them guide the future of civilization do how do we enable 7.7 billion people to have a say in what happens on the planet is that the best way yeah for sure and I think I think the internet social media all these avenues that are opening up to everybody you know it's just a matter of years before everyone on the planet has a cell phone access to Wikipedia for example and pretty much access to all human knowledge for free instantly you know we're pretty getting pretty close to that that's more empowering than anything else you could do once you've particularly ended poverty and where they can actually have a cell phone three square meals a day a roof over their head and so on those basics that people like Gates are working on how to give them a voice well democracy is better than autocracy and theocracies and so on what kind of democracy you want you can play with that but just the people having a voice where there has to be checks and balances against the corruption like in Venezuela now but that's the only way to do it and I don't know of another way you know anarcho-capitalist friends of mine tell me oh just get rid of all government and just everyone will have their own voice everyone's a citizen of the globe and so on you know you don't have to dig very far into history to see what happens with failed states I was just I just read Rachel Kleinfeld's book a savage order a savage order and I had her on my podcast and she has a dozen examples in this book of what happens when states fail when the government the central authority the police the military when they're gone and it's not good you know yes new order does spontaneously erupt from the bottom up they're called gangs and mafia and they impose order for sure but it's a savage order it's an order that is accompanied with violence and increased homicide rates and corruption and there was a story in the early times yesterday about the trial of El Chapo going on now in New York City and I had no idea almost nobody did how many billions of dollars this I mean don't think of this guy as a drug lord or a thug or a thief or something he's more like a captain of industry essentially in charge of a multi billion dollar international corporation that's really the way to think about it but instead of investing in lawyers and research and development teams and things like this he's investing in assassins and bribery and you know he gave the president of Mexico a hundred million dollar bribe you know and how much money he spent as having people assassinated okay so where there's not a free market there's a black market and the black market is very ugly so you need some regulations some law and order most of the people don't want to cheat they don't want to assassinate they don't want to bribe they want to be good just like athletes don't want to dope and use drugs most of them don't but the moment somebody else you think somebody else is then you kind of have to like in Georgia it's almost like if you're not in on the corruption you're a sucker because everybody's in on the the corrupt system and if you're trying to play by the rules sucker and it's like okay we don't want that right so the sea studying thing will be interesting to see if this develops what kind of law and order they're going to have because you got to have some so to your point empowering people you got to have property rights a banking system a stable political economic system you got to have people that are running the regulation regulatory agencies that are trustworthy trust is huge yeah those were all really good points and this is a huge part about designing our future now I want to talk on the cognitive biases I want to talk about the foundation of science there's a lot that it has been that we've been struggling with in terms of it's really difficult to do things like replicate studies especially in really nuanced biology or physics or wherever chemistry and that makes it difficult to understand if that science study on neuroscience can be replicated then there's all of the then we have what happened with Peter James and Helen with you know with manipulating gender and fat studies and still seeing those be published and then we and then we also see this you speak a lot about this the subjective experiences that people claim that they have had some sort of interaction with some sort of of a metaphysical supernatural experiences but that is a subjective experience and that we need to scientifically figure out how to probe that to replicate these so we speak on that foundation of science and how we're dealing with all of these accidental ways of corrupting it yeah well it's all data it's all way of trying to answer questions about the world most of us think of sciences you know physicists or biologists whatever but as I said you know economists political scientists so on they're running experiments in the real world we can't manipulate variables you can't have one country be an autocracy for five years and then one next to it be a democracy and see what happens naturally like North and South Korea is a prime example you can see the difference from space one's lit up and alive and active and they have a high per capita GDP they're four inches taller on average than North Koreans they live I think it's like 10 years longer and all this just gets gets down to diet and money and just the basics of life delivered by a democracy better than an autocracy or dictatorship so there again we just think of those as experiments and you know the grievance studies papers hoax you know I support that as I did with Pete's and James's previous the the penis is a construct hoax the conceptual penis is a concept because it's a way of sort of checking the checkers it's sort of an internal regulatory system or method of seeing if the people that are peer reviewing are paying attention or if the whole system is such that you can't tell the difference between a real and fake paper so at the time that the conceptual penis paper came out there was another one on the feminist glaciology that I was sure was a hoax and I wanted to comment on it I thought oh boy I'm going to be made a fool of because it turns out this was a fake so I actually called the University of Oregon for which the lead author was a professor there and checked with their PR department and they go no no this is real I'm like okay you know I can't tell the difference when that case then there's a problem in the area but this is just I think part of the kind of normal checks and balances that go on in science just like they do in democracy although theirs was intentional fraud as a hoax to make a point more subtle and worse is just when the whole field is kind of gone off the rails and there's nobody telling them you know what we have no idea what you're talking about this is insane go back to get back under the path here so we have some idea what you're doing the problem is the academy is something of a cloistered monks in the ivory towers you know and they're siloed off from the real world for the most part in part that's it's institutional and structural in the sense that you go through K through 12 undergraduate graduate postdoc you get your professorship you've never worked in the real world so I have academic friends I don't know anybody that voted for Bush or Trump it's like really because half the country did 50, 60 million people voted vote Republican every no matter who it is if you don't know one then you're in a bubble so this is a problem you got to get out get out a little more go out and mingle among the common people anyway so I think that's an issue and and I want to hone in on this we are we got to remove the hubris and we got to admit that we are just human animals that we have we're apes we have to admit this because then we can realize that we have biases then we can realize that our pattern detection systems have these biases speak to the pattern detection malfunctions yeah so the you know what's come out of cognitive psychology in the last couple of decades starting with the pioneering work of Tversky and Kahneman that we're not rational calculators we're not homo-economicists we're not utility maximizers we're not you know Mr. Spock we're not and you know brains are more like lawyers than scientists we just want to win the case for our client our client in this case is our beliefs so you gather evidence to support what you already believe and you ignore the disconfirming evidence confirmation bias or the hindsight bias self-serving bias there's a whole bunch of these now and now programs being tested like how can we make people alert to these cognitive biases so you give students little tasks or you know teaching tools like here's the top ten cognitive biases look out for them here and here and here and they learn to do it they're pretty good in other people but then now there's one so it's called the what is it the height no no it's the oh I forget the bias bias essentially I can't see it in myself but I see it much better in other people again you have to have other you have to engage with other people who you don't agree with you because that's the only way to find out if you know you do have a bias most of us can't see it it's really hard to see it in yourself I mean when people say well what are your biases if I knew I would do something about it you know I'm sure I have them I mean I do kind of try to force myself to read op-ed pieces that I know I'm not going to like some far left or somebody politically or economically different from me just because I just got to try to see if I can articulate their argument so the steelman I really like the steelman as a counter to straw manning it's really a great idea it's hard to do you know it went by in debate circles really centuries or thousands of years you know just can you articulate the other person's position in a debate or like flip a coin you're going to be pro-life or pro-choice you don't even know you've got to come to the debate standard college student debate techniques it was one of the most important aspects of my development was that debate because you do have to immerse yourself in the opposing perspective and steelmanning is so crucial in all our discourse you got to be able to sum up the other person's perspective in great nuance and detail where they say wow yeah you did a good job and then you can break it down or then you can even build it up I think I could make a case for creationism, intelligent design creationism, pro-life the holocaust denier because I know those areas pretty well I can articulate their arguments I'm not sure I could sell it emotionally because I don't believe it but I think I could articulate that's hard to do for most of us and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence yes it's a great phrase often attributed to Carl Sagan it was actually coined by a guy named Marcello Truzy who was a sociologist of science that was one of the co-founders of the first skeptic magazine called Skeptical Inquirer for Skeptical Magazine in America but basically it's re-articulating Hume's principal proportionality you should apportion your confidence in something to the evidence lots of evidence, lots of confidence not much evidence, not much confidence so Carl's point you know extraordinary claims aliens have landed that's an extraordinary claim something like it's sunny in California today that's not an extraordinary claim don't need a lot of evidence just look up but you know aliens put whatever so you gotta have a lot of evidence for that and as we detect patterns we have to be willing to admit the misses not just the hits it's a crucial part of science I wanna ask you about what do you think are these most important aspects of life to critically think about how do we develop our cognitive faculties for greater critical thinking and teach children that well I mean that's what we do for kids middle school, high school I teach a course at Chapman University these are incoming freshmen they have to take one of these freshman foundations courses mind skepticism 101 how to think like a scientist that's the subtitle what does that mean okay so I use all the fun topics from skeptic like aliens and conspiracy theories and bigfoot ghosts, Atlantis you know there's hundreds and but really it's a way of teaching how science works because if Atlantis isn't real or bigfoot isn't real how do we know what is real what do you believe why do you believe the big bang or theory of evolution but you don't accept the creationist model why not it's not just because I'm close minded or dogmatic no there are reasons well what are those reasons okay let's go through that and we should take that all the way down to the early childhood just thinking about the world through fun examples that was you segue right into that next point that I wanted to ask in your 40 years now of professing you've how many thousands of students now and skepticism 101 now in this course I want to give us a synthesis what have been some of these profound takeaways from you from teaching well again most people don't come into it thinking they don't have to think critically even critical thinking is kind of a clunky phrase that sounds kind of pedantic academicish boring it's better than you know in philosophy like a course in logic you know people's student's eyes is glazed over with some of those things that which is why I think some of the fun examples are current current events are a way to think about that and you know sort of tap into something they're interested in I have my students they all have to do an 18 minute TED talk so it forces them to be able to speak in front of an audience that's hard to do but it's good and you know organize your thoughts around a single thesis just have a point what's your point what are you arguing have an opinion they also have to write an opinion editorial for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal we don't submit them but it's like as if they're going to do it and there they have to in a brief make their case point point point point conclusion okay and sometimes I haven't do debates to pick the other side and argue that case anyway those are all just tools I don't know if I know what I'm doing any better than anybody else but you know I think the more of us that do that and that and the skeptical movement has grown just astronomically in the past 25 years because there's there's an interest in a market for people really want to know what is the explanation for fire walking for example we had a fire walk right here yeah good back in the 90s yeah you can do that Tony Robbins and that's right that's right the power of the mind well no it's actually physics but in any case you know just just those kind of demos and hands on people want to know I'm very critical the media they think the general public is stupid and has a short attention span not true you know just again with these long form podcasts like what we're doing now or Joe Rogan show for three hours people go in depth and you know Joe appeals to you know MMA fighter fans you know boxing fans comedy fans science fans tech fans everybody and you know he's millions of people watch his show for three hours two three hours unbelievable that TV producers they're wrong they got it wrong they think six minutes is the most you can have any two or three people maybe four or five screaming at each other oh that's great television this is terrible television those guys are wrong and they're going to go out of business if they don't catch on to what's going on in podcasts for example where you know the numbers for some of them are bigger than they are way bigger than say Anderson Cooper on CNN you know that's the reality don't underestimate people's intelligence which is why in part we got Trump because you know the left made fun of the flyover country the deplorables all these ignorant fundees and Christians and they're all stupid no no they're not and they're certainly smart enough to know when they're being made fun of so in a way is kind of a fuck you pull in the voting booth and that's what we got so don't do that and I would go as far as to say that it may take several months of retraining people into new careers as we talk about automation and artificial intelligence and the way that we are going to see a lot of the existing job infrastructures disappear new ones of course emerge but it takes a period of multiple months if not years to sometimes retrain people in depth to become designers or engineers etc no question off of that is what would you recommend the parents to teach the children going into the automation age right well that's the tension there now is how much time on a screen per day you know some of the data on this there's not a lot but there's some research on this is summarized in height and Lukyanov's book Coddling of the American Mind maybe three two to three hours tops per day on a screen that can be used very effectively because there's some great material online I rarely watch like when I'm traveling in a hotel I never turn the TV on and not so much at home except for just fun time with my wife watching some fun shows but most of the time the content online is so much better than it is on television so it's good but not eight hours a day ten hours a day or six hours a day that's too much so you know parents are trying to figure that out psychologists are studying it now it looks like two to three hours per day is about max and that's probably about right for consuming educational material in any case that you're going to absorb and remember yeah and you know the whole educational system you know kids in rows with an instructor at the front with a chalkboard you know that's that will eventually I think disappear so it's good to be go to a brick and mortar place where there's other kids your age I think that's good but the educational structure can we need more experiments agreed and I want to touch on the touch on God and this is a bit on heavens on earth the theory of evolution does not imply that there is no God and I want to see what you have to say about this because God can be so many different definitions for example what happened pre Big Bang so if you do take an evolutionary perspective with a God one can potentially say that God is all that is or that God may be infinity it may be divinity it may be all of these consciousness it could be all of these different things and that everything is rooted with some sort of a consciousness yeah so part of my and we can scientifically probe that totally well we can certainly talk about it here language makes a big difference now it's been my privilege to meet a lot of different people like Richard Dawkins is a good friend Deepak Chopra is a good friend Jordan Peterson is a good friend now Dawkins is an atheist as am I you know Deepak you know Deepak no no no there is a God Michael there is a God now any Christian would look at Deepak and read Deepak and go this guy is an atheist he doesn't believe in God or you know Jordan Peterson does he believe in God or not I have no idea and I've tried to ask him so a Christian would probably look at Jordan and go well like some of his values but he doesn't mention Jesus in God enough he doesn't really believe in God so it depends on what you mean by God for Deepak it's like the cosmic consciousness consciousness is the I'll use his language it's the sort of fundamental principle of the whole universe it's the ground of all being you can't get underneath it you drill down into atoms to subatomic particles to quarks to strings and there's conscious no no no it's all consciousness very Buddhist so part of the problem we have in science is you need to define your terms very carefully and when you're talking about things like well what was there before the Big Bang you can't even actually answer that question it's a nonsensical question because time began with the Big Bang there is no before before it's like the analogy is what's north of the north pole you get to the north pole go further north I can't it's south in every direction okay so at some point we hit an epistemological wall I don't know and you don't either I saw a bumper sticker militant agnostic I don't know and you don't either it could be you know we'll figure out some come up with some model black holes are very interesting black holes could give rise to new universes and the multiverse of its various so we can probe and figure out what potentially is pre Big Bang yes that's right now of course atheists can always say but what's before that the thing you just postulated to give the Big Bang where did that come from now of course they're going to say God but then we say well where did God come from well God is that which does not need a causal explanation how about the universe could be that which does not need a causal explanation here we're now just splitting hairs over language and you know we have certain limitations cognitively based on the words we use or the metaphors we use to try to grasp something that's so difficult to grasp like string theory and every documentary they always show violence like there's anything to do with string theory it doesn't but they're trying to transport the literal meaning of metaphors to transport from one place to another you know this esoteric impossible to understand idea of string theory into my brain that understands violins but not that level of physics so I think it's you know it's good to keep an open mind but again like with the afterlife I don't know and I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised if you know when I close my eyes here for the last time I wake up and Carl Sagan and Steven J. Gould and there's my friends my parents you know okay you know assuming it's not like as Hitch described it to celestial North Korea you know we have this dictator that knows everything and controls everything you do that doesn't sound heavenly to me but if it was something nice I guess yeah totally open to it but that's different from it's probably true I can't say that I mean if anything it looks like it's probably not true but willing to be surprised and we are I think building out the tools that we can better hypothesize on these scenarios I think and another one is the what happens after death what happens before birth these are really interesting questions to explore where is the seed of consciousness originate what would you how would you answer that well I don't have a great explanation for consciousness more than anybody else does because nobody does but in terms of the hard of how you get neurons swapping chemicals it's just chemistry into doing the kind of thing we can do this kind of feeling like there's something floating off of that mechanical physical system that is not physical in a platonic kind of way like what is beauty and truth and a triangle or a perfect circle where is that there is no perfect circle in the physical world it's an idea okay there's no material in the idea how do ideas actually come into contact with with the mechanical system to tweak it this is deep box point I think a certain thought it caused my blood pressure to go up how does that happen this is just a thought according to the materialist it's just neurons swapping chemicals you know well to me it's a feedback system and your blood pressure goes up or whatever but anyways I don't have a good explanation I think it's going to be bottom up it's going to be neurons it's going to be a complex adaptive system that emerges out of a simpler system like economies do something like that it's a hard problem best argument for cryonics is I'd like to be frozen and come back 500 years to see how all these things turn out oh consciousness we figured that out in the 22nd century no problem here it is oh that was it yeah that's one of the benefits of the exponential technology ages being able to potentially have the generation that's born today be the ones that medical technology outpaces there well yeah the takeoff point where the average lifespan increases more than one year for every year and then you get to live forever not I don't buy that argument completely I hope it's true but it's like retaining youthful homeostatic capacity so you feel like a 16 year old 16 yen and maybe 25 would be better more evolved yeah something like that yeah I when I listen to people like Ray Kurzweil read his books and so on it's very hopeful I like the big thinking the inspirational but often feels like religion to me I often feel like I'm back in church we are the chosen people we are the ones that get to live forever are you sure because you know they always said that and they're always wrong so maybe but to that point I say look okay don't you want to live 500 years okay look just get me to 90 like without prostate cancer get me to 100 without Alzheimer's and senility then we'll talk in other words protopia solve little problems one at a time so that you live longer at a higher quality of life even if we all hit the wall at 120 or whatever it's over at least more of us made it in that upper window there of a quality life okay that's pretty good if we could do that and as you talk to other people about God and all these other nuanced concepts that we aim to have discourse on to build a better world you make this really interesting point that we must retain an extremely high level of skepticism as we look at our especially social feeds with bots and deepfakes we retain a really high level of skepticism but at the same time we need to retain a high level of openness to new ideas evidence for these new ideas this balance is super important yeah Carl Sagan called it the burden of skepticism a lecture he gave here in Pasadena that I went to in 1988 that inspired me to start the magazine and become a professional skeptic as it were that is you have to be open minded enough to recognize and accept radical new ideas but not so open minded that your brains fall out and you believe every crazy thing that comes along it's hard to find that that balance it depends on the field the area the evidence and so on everyone is different but that's what we want to aim for yeah so now couple last questions on the way out we're hockey sticking in terms of population we're hockey sticking in terms of experiential technology we really haven't been at this type of a point in civilization before what are your thoughts on this inflection point that we're at well population wise I'm not terribly worried because if you follow the curve out it's at a plateau it's stabilized around 2050 at about 9 and a half and so at the end of the moral arc I sort of carried out some calculations just taking the conservative U.N. projections you know by 2100 we'll be kind of back close to where we are now with much better technology and distribution of food such that everybody will have plenty to eat and then because of social effects of like empowering women and educating women in birth control technologies family size just naturally goes down you know and it's already below replacement level 2.1 children per parent on average replacement level and many many country dozens of western countries are below that ok so they're going to face a birth dearth much you know the overpopulation problem is I think it's already been solved just have to just carry it out out of the 7.7 billion humans that currently are here and we're going to ramp up to 9 and 10 billion are we ready for transhumanism have we evolved morally and ethically for I think we're on the verge I think we can get there think of these extra couple billion people as brains thinking about how to solve problems more people working on a problem more creativity more creativity this is good more people to buy my books whatever no but I mean this was Julian Simons point in his debates with Paul Ehrlich is that you know Ehrlich thinks of people like cattle or animals that have to be dispensed with and get rid of and eliminated and reduced like like their disease contagions rats over running the system it's a very unhumanistic way of looking at people whereas Julian Simon you know he was like billions more people thinking and producing and working and living full life this is really good and I'm more on the Julian Simon side and really he's won most of those bets well all the bets I mean Ehrlich has been wrong about pretty much everything and yet he's still pounding the drum of the population well go to Africa and work on it there because but really there's no magic to it again if you empower women give them freedom, economic empowerment they make family size decisions about reproduction and children and the birth control technologies available and cheap it just takes care of itself okay Michael what would you say is a core driving principle of yours well I want to know it's true hit with a small T and you know I don't like obfuscation and bullshit and you know I'm just trying to understand the world myself and make a little bit of a difference in terms of like pushing the moral arc just a little bit up this idea of pro-topia I'm not a utopian thinker I'm never going to run for president or you know I'm never going to be a world changing figure like that but that's not where real change happens anyway it happens from all of us regular folks doing our thing in a way that makes the world slightly better today than it was yesterday slightly better tomorrow than it is today just incremental change that's where the real change comes from yeah I love that and each one of us embodying that is how we can build a better future I love that how would you rebuild civilization from scratch how would you design it well I'm kind of thinking about that because we go to Mars that's kind of what we're going to do I think the experiments we ran here are pretty good you know the constitution Declaration of Independence Constitution Bill of Rights and I've been re-reading the Federalist Papers you know Madison Hamilton all these Franklin all these guys we're thinking this very question here we go we have an opportunity what do we do how much power do we give the state governments versus the federal government and what about a military what about police what about the economic system with trade what about banking do we need a central bank these are all super hard questions and there is no single answer to be found there's just better or worse on a scale of solutions to problems that work or don't work as measured by just human prosperity health longevity you know it sounds crude to say we want people to make more money but money buys you things if nothing else time and security plus of course food and travel and things like that you know so you got to get that right John Adams famously said I have to study the science of politics so my children can study the science of whatever you know the different fields that he listed so that their children can study poetry and music and art I think naval architecture was one of the ones he said so that their children can study architecture you know like the Greek pillars or whatever and I think that's right if we don't get it right you know nothing else will survive science art music this is all wonderful but if you don't get the political system right you don't get those so you know I'm more interested in biology and psychology and so on less interested in economics and politics but I study it because I feel like I really need to understand that because it kind of precedes all these others we're not going to get to do those if we don't have the right political economic system I highly recommend others to dive deep into the Constitution the Federalist Papers, the Bill of Rights, etc this is a good way to understand the foundation of what we have here so many even just diving deep into history into big history and just looking back thousands of years and just trying to look into the eyes of the humans that helped build the houses, hospitals schools, governments the resource flows that enabled other people to have increased baselines of food and water just really doing that process can be so humbling and so important okay last two here are we in a simulation? no I don't think so I've read the arguments and the Bayesian probability arguments which I think are problematic because we have no reliable numbers to plug in there it's not impossible but it's just so unlikely it doesn't really pass the reality check I don't see any buffering signs or pixelated skies or whatever so I think probably not alright but you are in favor of the universe being math well I know Max Tagmark and I read his book and some of that to me is sliding over into kind of metaphysics and I'm a little out of my league there what do you mean that the universe is mathematical it's like when there's a scene in this documentary about Ray Kurzweiler he's at the ocean, he's watching the waves and the producers he's worried about it it was like a computation the molecules in the water those are computational molecules what is he talking about what the hell are you talking about to me this is a little it's fun and interesting I'm not sure what the takeaway is from that so what if it's mathematical okay and now what does it produce testable hypotheses that we can decide this is a better model than that one to explain the cosmos or whatever it is you're trying to explain and I think Max does say it's kind of speculative and I know mathematicians and physicists that don't agree with them okay let them hash that out because I'm really way out of my league there I think an easy way maybe to help people with this thought experiment is to run our own simulation once we have the adequate computing power and code to press play on the big bang and fast forward 13.8 billion years until this exact moment where we're sitting here having this conversation we see that and we go whoa maybe often when I watch Star Trek with the holodeck the virtual reality is so real you can't distinguish between real reality and the holodeck virtual reality but they're always doing fun things like Shakespeare no no they do uh what's this name Sherlock Holmes or Warf is doing battle games or whatever my fear is that it would all just devolve into basically a porn movie that everybody's just having sex all day long in this virtual reality and that's it civilization basically comes to an end because we're apes right I mean the number one most watched videos ever anywhere is there's pornography it's just staggering you know it's like oh really this is what it's come down to 21st century our civilization it's pornography come on is our next evolution to make artificial general intelligence well again these big questions is it going to be a threat to us let's just solve specific problems like how can I get my Tesla to self drive better than it is now in the next upgrade it's slightly better than it was this upgrade that's it let's just keep going in that direction you know we get to the point where I punch the thing I go navigate LAX and it drives up on the sidewalk because there's traffic and a mose down pedestrian you know this is one of these scenarios how many times do you think that's going to happen before federal regulators come in and go Elon your company is over you can't do this whatever they would do I'm not worried about those kinds of things it almost though gives us a sense of letting go and surrendering to the fact that our next evolution is to make this artificial general intelligence and that may feel a little more at ease potentially Picker makes the point that it's sort of self refuting these arguments that you're saying we're going to make a computer so smart that it can cure cancer but it has no idea it's so dumb that it just kills everybody in the process of curing cancer really I mean you can't it doesn't even make sense there's more nuance okay the last question is Michael what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world well my wife and my son and my daughter and my family beyond just you know the personal thing I would say what gets me up in the morning every day is just how lucky we are to be alive I mean the chances that you and I were even born is astronomically low and that we get to live in a country where it's relatively safe I get to eat every day and so to me that's the most beautiful thing it's just life it is such a blessing that we're here totally and living we could have been born cows in India or something maybe that would be so bad in Texas that would be bad part of me does feel like there's a bigger experiment happening on earth than we may realize and on other rocks orbiting stars around the universe maybe that would be interesting and then we play through these flesh vehicles the game well this was Sagan's argument for searching for the SETI program searching for extraterrestrial intelligence if they're there I mean somebody else made it through this kind of stage we're in you know rapid accelerating technological development with our eight brains somehow they got there and did it without nuking themselves global warming their planet whatever that I have to agree that would be that would be good this has been such a pleasure oh you're welcome thank you Michael thank you for coming onto the show another example of you know in depth deep dive into important topics that people like to think about yeah absolutely and everyone huge thank you for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we would love for you to comment below with your thoughts on some of the things we talked about let's get the community chatting go and talk to other people about what we chatted about also check out Michael's links below in the bio as well and we are really appreciative of your support enabling us to do cool things like come out to Los Angeles and talk to great minds like Michael join us below as well and go and build the future everyone go and manifest your destiny into the world build the future we love you so much and we will see you soon peace very good that's it great good job


In our Walmart Distribution Center, it's our job to receive, process, and handle freight to ship it out to the over 100 stores that we service here in the Menominee and Minnesota area. My name is Marcia Weiss. I'm the general manager here at the Menominee Walmart Distribution Center. We have an over one million square foot facility. We employ over a thousand associates. It's really an exciting time. We're investing at record level. We are remodeling our facility and introducing automation. It's exciting to partner with technical schools in the area to think about how to work together to transition the current skills, which is a lot of handling of cases and placing labels into higher technology roles of the future. One of the values we see with CBTC is the combination of technical knowledge and hands on ability. We have instances where students are going to school part time or full time and working in the DC at the same time. So upon graduation, there's a good opportunity for them to move into the DC as both a technical leader and also someone with on the job training. The number one thing that struck me as an outlier with CBTC is the technical hardware that's available. It's truly a world class facility with millions of dollars worth of equipment that you don't even find in some larger companies. So the ability to work hands on with that equipment in a learning environment is a huge benefit both to the students that are going to CBTC but also the industry partners that are in the area. We're excited to see resumes come through our doors from the technical colleges and from Chippewa Valley Tech knowing that they have what it takes that they're bringing those skills to us from the training that they've already received. Walmart engineering and Walmart in general puts a value on people that have done the job or worked hands on in an area. CBTC puts an emphasis on hands on learning and that's a value of Walmart.


On to the earth took time to celebrate water with the harvest moon celebration. The event was held at the rail river folk school in Bemidji and featured a feast of seasonal food and a night of music. Blues artist Corey Medina opened the evening with a few songs that got the crowd on their feet. He was followed by a sister singing duo called Rising Appalachia who came all the way up to Bemidji from Georgia because they believe in the cause of On to the Earth. So we're here because this is an event to celebrate our water and water protectors. Our band Rising Appalachia has a lot of music that has to do with lower Mississippi river and the level of pollution there and you know what we know is that music heals and music reminds us of our humanity. Now be sure to join us here on Lakeland News tomorrow night and we'll have more on the harvest moon celebration in our infocus segment. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


The reason for this is because they need you, they need you to function. Whatever you are given to them or however you are making them feel is the reason why they're still with you.  The Narcissist may act as though they can't stand to be around you, but they're actually very comfortable in these situations, they are comfortable in dysfunctional environments, it gives them the opportunity to express their own self-hatred and project it onto someone else through devaluing and degrading you. Their family or friends would not tolerate what you have to deal with, they would not accept the words or names that you are called every day, they might not even believe that you are in a relationship with a narcissist, they are very good at deceiving people, just as they deceived you, the narcissist may act as though they can't stand to be around you, but they will not leave you, they will not leave you because they cannot deal with failure, if they were to leave you that would mean that they made a mistake, it's too much for them to deal with and they need to keep you on a string where you are constantly trying to meet their impossible expectations, so that they then have a reason to be bitter and resentful towards you. The narcissist cannot accept that someone who is good is not perfect, in the narcissist mind everyone has a rank according to their relative status or authority, you are either above their status or below it, if they believe that you are above them they will envy you and treat you as though you are beneath them, if they genuinely believe that you are beneath them they will still treat you with disrespect, this is due to their poor emotional development, they struggle with whole object relations, they lack the ability to form integrated, realistic and relatively stable image of themselves and other people that simultaneously includes both liked and dislike aspects, both strengths and flaws, they lack the ability to see our state of being whole, what brings us together and drives our sense of humanity as a collective, whole object relations is what allows us to see another person's qualities and abilities in a way where they are combined to form an integrated and realistic whole, this is where we can accept that people can be good yet still do mean or hurtful things, we can forgive people who act in ways that are not to be desired or approved of because we understand that we are all human, we understand that we all do things wrong from time to time which is why we often forgive narcissists for what they do to us, even things that should never be forgiven, the narcissists cannot comprehend this, they have a dualistic mentality, black or white thinking, where they see people as all good or all bad, in the narcissist mind and if you are no longer special or important to them, you now have a low status, you are now beneath them, they will now see you as one of the most worthless people in society, the lowest of the low, this is how they can go from making you feel like the most important person in the world to making you feel like you are completely worthless, where they now believe that there is nothing good about you, there is nothing to counteract or correct your negative qualities or traits, they see you as being inherently bad or defective, they believe that this means you now deserve to be truly or unfairly treated, they don't believe that they can have a stable relationship with you if there are setbacks, conflicts or disagreements, they struggle with object constancy, if you make a mistake or do something to hurt them, even if it wasn't intentional, they will still feel as though you are out to get them, this is why it is so easy for them to devalue and degrade you and treat you as though you are beneath them, but they know that you see them differently than they see you, they know that you do have object constancy and this is something that they will take advantage of, they know that you will stay with them despite the abuse, because you will remember that good side of them, the false character that they displayed to you at the beginning, they know that you will remember the times when they did treat you right, even though it wasn't real, even though it was nothing more than a deceptive outward appearance, it's just a part of the cycle of the abuse, they keep you hooked on them like a drug and hoping to see the good side of them again, even when they are being kind or friendly, it's still a part of the abuse, it's still designed to keep you locked into the abuse of cycle, the narcissist's objective is to keep you locked into this cycle of abuse, to keep you locked into this cycle of abuse and fake affection, this is what they were really looking for when they targeted you, this is their ideal relationship, it satisfies their conception of what is perfect or most suitable, they will promise you that they are going to change, they will act as though they do appreciate you, but this is just a part of the abusive cycle and it is designed to keep you around, they will give you false promises and use future faking, it's never real or genuine, they have no intention of changing anything, if you could look into the future and see what it would be like with them, five, ten years down the line, you would see that nothing has changed, if anything, the abuse would likely have escalated, they would probably be even more controlling and manipulative towards you, they don't want anything to change and they don't believe that they have to change, they see themselves as a victim, so they believe that it is you who needs to change to accommodate them, they will never see things in the way that you do, they will always see you as their rival or opponent, someone who they need to keep beneath them, and that is why they are always in opposition to you, whatever you like or are interested in, whether it's a song or a tv show, a favourite colour, they always have to be in opposition to you, they always have to go against whatever you like or are interested in, they can never be on the same page as you, they cannot allow you to exist in your own power and strength as a sovereign individual, they don't want you to have your own moral or natural right to bodily integrity and to be the exclusive controller of your own life, that's why they are always in opposition to anything that you like or are interested in, that's why they always have to disagree with anything that you say, they cannot be around someone who is confident in their own likes and interests, their own values and beliefs, so they have to be opposed to anything that you are doing, it creates self doubt, it makes you lack confidence in yourself and creates a backwards person who needs constant validation and reassurance, which then keeps you locked into the cycle of abuse with a narcissist, it makes you feel as though you can't just live without them, as though your only option is to stay and be abused by them, you have to leave them and never look back, it doesn't matter how they've defined you, or if they've told you that you don't deserve anything greater, you deserve so much more than what they're given to you, you deserve to be admired and appreciated, you deserve respect, you may never get this from the narcissist, but you can give it to yourself, the first step towards respecting yourself is to walk away from the abuse, understand that you deserve better, understand that you deserve respect, thank you for watching, I hope this video resonated with you, please like, comment, share and subscribe, click the bell icon to receive notifications for my future videos, if you would like to donate, my paypal link is in the video description, coaching enquiries, acneema me and ask for other coaching at juma.com, thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.


Good morning and welcome to this interactive session on the eve of the launch of this important open course that we are offering online. I would like to begin with greetings for the new year. So, I wish all of you a very happy and prosperous new year.  As you are aware, we have been constantly incorporating online components in our teacher training program. In fact, we ran a particular T10KT workshop for technical communication using one week of online work and one week of offline work. In a sense, this particular program which is primarily meant for teachers takes it further to see if we can do the entire training online. Of course, some interaction is important. This interaction is ordinarily provided through discussion forums in online courses, but thanks to all of you, it may be possible to arrange for some face to face interaction through the remote centers, at least those which are interested and willing to participate in this. First of all, I would like to thank all the heads of the institutions of these 39 odd remote centers who have taken time off from their busy schedule. In fact, one of you, Dr. Mantha is personally present here although his remote center is far away in Uttar Pradesh near Aligarh. The reason I decided to share my thoughts with all of you is to suggest that teacher's training in the conventional sense has been going on. IIT Bombay has been doing it for several years and you have been participating. All the courses in the past have been subject specific. So, the training program would be either in physics or in thermodynamics or in applied mechanics. Such specific subjects were taken up for training. We have realized off late that a fundamental change in the attitude of our teachers is required by telling them about the advantage of exploiting technology for education. Educational technology is maturing very rapidly and in fact has become the cornerstone of effective teaching learning processes today. I would like to inform you that we will soon be changing the shape of our T10KT program to offer very specific modules. We have decided on three modules so far. One of them is called a foundation module which will be a training program designed to expose all our teachers in different elements of educational technology. The second course is a pedagogy course which will train our teachers in use of online and blended education for their students because increasingly more and more learners will start adopting pure online courses. So, how to guide them in using the online courses and how to run a flip classroom in your own colleges so that the teachers can actually ensure that students benefit a lot more. This particular program is the preliminary designed teacher's training program. We are not offering this currently as a teacher's training program as you know and as has been announced by Professor Sridhar Ayer and Sanna Murthy that this is actually a MOOCs course primarily meant for teachers. A massive open online course can be attended by any people not necessarily teachers alone although the course is primarily meant for teachers. What I would like to emphasize to you is if you could encourage largest number of teachers from your own institutions at least and also from neighboring institutions to participate actively in this program we would begin this new year with a band reaching out to much larger number of teachers. Ordinarily you are familiar with our T10KT workshops wherein the participating teachers get a certificate recognized by ISTE which is useful to them in their own career advancement. Although this course was not announced to be a T10KT workshop I have just discussed with Professor Sridhar Ayer and Sanna Murthy and we have agreed that although this course will run as a MOOC for anybody and everybody and there will be of course assignments and online quizzes etc which must be completed to deserve a certificate which we call an honor course certificate as has been announced. But additionally we have decided that those teachers who A confirm that they are valid teachers employed or working with some institutions such as yours and we agree to submit an additional assignment including a possible AVU interaction at one of the remote centers would be eligible to get an IST T10KT workshop certificate also at the end. Appropriate clarifications will be put up on the site very shortly by my colleagues. So let me tell you my dialogue with AICTE particularly with Chairman Professor Anil Sastryapudde both of us believe that as I said earlier all our teachers required to be trained in these new methodology to be adopted in the light of emerging educational technology usage on the large scale both by students and teachers and towards this end we shall be creating three training modules. These training modules incidentally are expected to be delivered to over 5 lakh teachers across the country over next three years that is the vision of the new AICTE chairman. Of course the MHRD funding or AICTE funding will not be available for this all of these courses therefore will be self-financed courses where participating teachers or the institutions where these teachers were will have to food the bill for training these teachers. Why I am mentioning this is that when we will launch that program sometime in March April all the teachers doing these courses will have to pay for participation. This particular instance however is the first instance where there is no payment involved the course is completely free including the T10KT workshop certification which we are adding it will be completely free for those teachers who join. There is another important point that I would like to make in this context unlike in the past where we offered training programs for teachers and we left the teachers alone after the completion of the training program this time we have decided that we will also try and create a very large body of contributors and enthusiasts among these 5 lakh teachers who we trained. So that may be 10 percent of them about 50,000 teachers emerge as contributors to open educational resources to additional quiz quizzes problems explanations tutorials what have you. These will have to be edited these will have to be moderated and there will be a requirement about 5000 moderators or editors who will constantly view the large submissions being made from the crowd which will include not only submissions from teachers but even from their students. So that individual subjects will be enriched through the contents which are created not just by the few experts in IIT system but by teachers all across the country including teachers from your own institutions.  I do expect remote centers to participate more actively in this there is a scheme that I have suggested to IIT chairman that special recognition be granted to those institutions from which largest number of teachers come forward and make meaningful contributions as a result not only these teachers but even their institutions will be recognized. I am very happy to note that 39 of our remote centers are participating in this endeavor and I have no doubt that all these 39 institutions if they casual their teachers to participate actively not just in this particular course but in subsequent years these institutions and their teachers will form the backbone of academic leadership of the entire Indian higher education system in the coming years. Before concluding I would like to mention that the concept of teaching learning has undergone a lot of change all of us for years have tried to improve our teaching without probably spending enough time to realize that whether that effective teaching is translating into effective learning or not. Of late you will notice that notions of active learning of discussion sessions of participation of students actively into all aspects of discussions on a subject has become extremely important because it has been proven there is only the active participation by students which enhances their learning. In IIT Bombay many of our colleagues have been trying the flip classroom for decades now and we know by hard research that engagement with students increases to as much as 80 percent from an average 40 percent when you use active learning when you use think-pair share and when you use discussion sessions and problem solving sessions rather than delivering lectures. It is therefore extremely important for our teachers who are all used to just delivering lectures because that is the standard mode of teaching to convert themselves into effective facilitators of learning it is extremely important that they all understand what is active learning what is flip classroom and what is the associated pedagogy. This particular course has been designed by Professor Cedar Ayer and Professor Sanamurthy after years of research years of participation and we believe that this course will go a long way in reorienting the mindset of all our teachers and train them appropriately in the use of this new pedagogy. I once again request all of you as heads of the institutions to ensure that the largest number of teachers from your own institutions to begin with and as I said from some neighboring institutions if you could casual them into action please ensure the largest number of participation. As I said it will not only help these teachers but these teachers and their institutions will have a chance of becoming early leaders of the entire game which will unfold in coming years. I will now request Professor Cedar Ayer to take over and continue this dialogue. Thank you very much.


There's an interesting component where it's like also the hard part, right?  You know what you're, specifically what you're capable of in a lot of different ways. Not only is it just in a physical setting, but it's also in a mental, I mean, there's a real mental toughness that you have to find that you lose yourself to find yourself. You've done that. And so what happens is for me, the hard part is I want everybody to do that, right? Part of this podcast and inspiring entrepreneurship through truth is I want everyone to go explore what they're meant to do. And I put that responsibility on everyone, probably unfairly, but I do that. I've done it to make a million times. And so it's this thing of like, it's hard, right? Like for you, is that, is that something you deal with? Well, you know, it's funny. You bring up something where I say, does everybody want to explore their potential? Does everyone want to, you know, open their eyes and figure out what life is all about and what their life is all about? I'm not sure. My buddy Bonnie, who Nick is a Yukon graduate, so I, you know, gotta throw that in there once. Fellow alumni. She's a husky. She's a husky. I say Bonnie, honestly, and it doesn't mean, I mean, she was by my side as the head handler, the head of the Cuban expedition through all these things. She was very focused and she was the number five racquetball player in the world for a long time. Today, she hasn't been somewhat driven and chosen things and worked at them. On the other hand, day to day, whereas I wake up just in a, in a froth. Every day I just wake up, I play my bugle. I play rave-a-la-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Like get up, go chase the tail of the tiger, you know.  She doesn't think that her life is all about becoming everything she can be, you know. She has more peace to her than that. And I'm attracted to people who are not necessarily chasing that dream. But what I am glad to service, if I can, is people who want to chase that dream. They feel they've got passion and they've got discipline, but they're not even sure what dream to chase. A lot of young people say that to me. You know, kids who are just out of college whatnot, they hear me speak somewhere and say, I've got that kind of fire. I do. I would throw myself, but I don't even know what to throw myself at. And I try to use that old gir to sort of, you know, phrase of, there's magic in beginning things. You don't have to know every step you're going to take, but rather than sitting still, take a step somewhere. Maybe it's the wrong thing. Maybe you start some PhD and you figure after a while, that's not for me.  That will lead you to taking another step and another step.  I tried this and this and this. You know what means the world to me is springboarding from what you said in the beginning, Diego. And that is that I didn't swim across that ocean to inspire other people, but we all work on multiple levels at one time. And there was even the Cuban-American connection. I got to go to Cuba with President Obama in his entourage in 2014 because I was an emblem of someone who went off one shore and touched the other shore. Couldn't we come back together? So there were a number of things happening during that swim, besides the actual swim, but what means the world to me is when I do finish a talk or people write me, you know, maybe a fan letter type of thing. And they have nothing to do with swimming. They have nothing to do with sports at all. Can't relate to it, aren't involved in it, but they've been through cancer or they've been raising a disabled child or they've just been in a difficult life situation. Somebody's been in prison for a long time and they're out and they're free, but they don't know where they're going. They're lost.  I'm just, you know, Tony Robbins has made a lot of money. Maybe I should have gone in that direction, but I don't. I don't send up and say, now here's the way to live a winning life. You know, number one, you do this, number two, you do this, and number three, and then you're there. So I just tell my own story in a, in a kind of organic way. And hopefully that, you know, has tendrils that go out, but it sounds like a sports swimming story, but in the end it really has to do with dreaming big and failing, you know, the courage to fail. If you shoot the bar high, it might not make it there, but on your way there, that journey, you discover everything you are. And maybe you will make it there one day if you just don't quit. So that, there's another part of it that people, there were thousands of people on that beach at the end. 25 million people followed the final swim across. And you know what, they weren't sports fans. Very few wrote me and said, oh, yes, I followed the other swimmers who tried this before and no idea.  Every time we failed, almost died one time, no hyperbole. We didn't say, never doing that again, never going back there, dangerous. We got the next level of the learning curve, the science, the technology, how to tap the human spirit maybe better the next time.   And when you go in the next time, you might fail again. Then you up your game again and eventually you get there. So that's the story and it's the real story that I lived out loud. And I like to think I live it out loud every day now. That swim, honestly, in my 60s was meant not to break that record. That was, that's nice. But you know, I don't care if somebody else breaks it now. Maybe I do a little, I'll probably follow that, but I'm, but that swim, I did to wake myself up to say to myself, am I living the largest life I can every day? I'm not. I've kind of receded back into a, just take it as it comes. But I knew that that swim, because I know that swim, is the toughest swim in the world. The best have been trying since 1950, men, women, young, strong, fast. Nobody's ever made it for a lot of good reasons. That swim woke me up to putting myself into my life every day. So I'm retired now again. And I'm not going to do ocean swims. I could look at the four fifths of the globe as blue and I could say, well, I could, you could swim there or there or there, a thousand million places you could swim. I just want to live that same life of never give up, dream big, have the courage to fail, you know, be awakened, alert every minute of every day. That's the life and that Cuba swim woke me back up to that. That's what it was all about.


Hi everyone, it's MJ, and we're looking at the introduction to the final course of phase one of statistics, which is on ANOVA. Now, what is ANOVA all about? And we see here that it's connected to this idea of optimizing processes. And ANOVA, it's very interesting because it stands for the analysis of the variance, but in a sense what we are trying to compare is the mean. So, some people get a little bit tricked up by that. You know, why are we comparing variances when we want to actually compare the mean? Because the ANOVA in a big way is an extension of some of the stuff we did in an earlier course. So in earlier course, we could compare two types of treatments. So when we could compare two types of treatments, we look at the stuff that we did in earlier courses. ANOVA, however, lets us compare multiple things, whether it be three, four, five, gosh, we could even compare 10 different things with ANOVA. And this is great when it comes to optimizing processes, especially around farming. That's where this course came from. There was a bunch of farms and they wanted to try out different types of fertilizers or different types of treatments. And they wanted to see which one was the best or if there was actually a difference between the various treatments. And that's where a lot of the maths came from. It came from trying to improve farming. And it was very, very successful. And it is something that a lot of people at the PhD level or a lot of research, or if you're doing your masters or a thesis or something like that, you might very well come across ANOVA. And there's a lot of stuff on the internet telling you how to do ANOVA. But what you're going to learn in this course is you're going to understand why you use ANOVA, where does it come from, and why are we looking at variants when we're actually trying to compare the means. So it's a lovely course. It's a lovely section. It's not that difficult once you get your head over it. But yeah, I think it's a nice way to end off phase one of statistics which deals with this as the big picture. Anyway, if you've got any more questions, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll see you in the course. Keep well. Cheers.