How to Have Impossible Conversations when Facts Don't Matter! Peter Boghossian

[00:00:07] You know, it's election season and guess what? Everybody is annoyed right now. You know why? It's not that their opinions are annoying. I could care less. But everybody wants to know your opinions on everything. And you know what? It's a dangerous time right now.

[00:00:23] You could have opinions about who should be president. You could have opinions about Israel. You could have opinions about Ukraine. And you see people had opinions and you're like, okay my friend has this opinion, I have a different opinion. That's not true anymore.

[00:00:36] Now people hate you for your opinions. Whether you're on the left or the right or whatever. And even worse, nobody ever believes that you're just not interested. That you're neutral. Like I've written for the past 15 years what I think of the presidency.

[00:00:52] Heck, I've written, I'm even running for president. And people say it's impossible for you to be neutral or not have an opinion on Joe Biden and Donald Trump. If you go to FEC.gov, I decided I could completely not have an opinion if I run for president myself.

[00:01:11] So I filled out all the paperwork and I'm running for president officially. Not seriously really, but still to the point where if anyone asks me my opinion I can just say I don't like either of them because I'm running against them.

[00:01:22] So anyway, it's very hard to have difficult conversations. Which is why I'm so glad my friend Peter Boghossian wrote a book How to Have Impossible Conversations. And this is valuable stuff to listen to during election time. Here he is. How to have impossible conversations.

[00:02:01] You ever have one of those conversations? Like I have this, I have this with my kids all the time. They'll come in and say something like, I don't know, like rioting is okay in a protest because Martin Luther King said rioting is the voice of the unheard.

[00:02:17] Which is taken completely out of context. But it's impossible to explain that. And I don't even know how to have, but I've learned through my children and also through social media thankfully or unthankfully how to have impossible conversations.

[00:02:31] Today I have with me Peter Boghossian who along with James Lindsay wrote a book How to Have Impossible Conversations, a very practical guide. And Peter, I think you were referring to these types of conversations from what I'm reading in the book.

[00:02:44] Correct, correct. Thanks for having me on James. So I love this book because this is so important in today's society. We all have been having impossible conversations and for bad and good. Like you have a conversation about some really politically hot topic

[00:03:01] and you know you're not going to get anywhere. It's not like anyone has ever said, thank you for changing my mind. Like that has happened never. And one of the things you say in this book and we'll get into some

[00:03:12] of the techniques because I've folded over like half the pages in this book. But one thing that you've said in this book and I've already quoted you in conversation is that don't use facts. Correct. And that's, and it's, I almost thought that was funny.

[00:03:29] Like I laughed, I LOLed at that, but it's really serious and you're really right. And I mentioned it to a few people and they're like, yeah, that's totally true. You can't use facts. So maybe give an example of a conversation where you've tried to use facts

[00:03:42] and it didn't work out because I noticed in this book, you're the bad guy in many of these conversations. Right. So let me talk before I do that. Let me just speak to why you don't want to use facts. So there's something called the backfire effect.

[00:03:55] And when one uses facts, they hunker down to their beliefs even more so. Right. So, so if I, if you say for instance, if someone's pro-life and another person's pro-choice and the pro-life person says it's murder and the pro-choice person says, no, it's not.

[00:04:13] There's, there's no evidence that there's a human being alive there. And the pro-choice pro-life person will using facts will just kind of strengthen the pro-life person. Right. So that's already the mistake right there. Cause they've delivered a message. They've used facts. If using facts changed people's minds,

[00:04:30] then everyone would believe the same thing according to the facts. Yeah, that's a really good point. By the way, I just want to mention the pro-life pro-choice example is just an example. My business partner for 20 years is pro-life. I'm pro-choice. We've never once had an argument because Peter,

[00:04:47] we've used many of the techniques kind of maybe instinctively in this book. Yeah. Great. And, and so I think it's important to, to remember, I don't know if you saw the Bill Nye, Ken Ham debate. No. Okay. Well, uh, Bill Nye is a Bill Nye,

[00:05:02] the science guy and Ken Ham is creationists. And they were talking about the biblical, the arc and evolution. And, and at the end of the debate, they were asked what would change your mind? And Ken Ham said nothing would change my mind because people don't.

[00:05:18] Which is honest by the way. Oh yeah. Which is honest. The more emotional valence or moral valence an idea has, the more important it is to not use evidence. So if you don't care about something one iota like the diameter of a

[00:05:33] hamburger bun in comparison to a burger, a burger, I said, we have Burgerville's here that like a humane, um, McDonald's analog. If you don't care about that, then you can present facts. But as a general rule, you, those aren't impossible conversations. In fact, those aren't even difficult conversations.

[00:05:51] Never want to present facts or evidence. Right. And I like how you take this sort of, you refer, you refer to a Socrates quite a bit. You take the Socratic view that ask them questions,

[00:06:03] let them come up with kind of the reasoning one way or the other of their thinking. Because you're basically asking someone if they agree with themselves and most people, they simply, I know this is a weird way to think about it, but they simply don't agree with themselves.

[00:06:17] I've been doing this for well over a quarter century. Now I did my dissertation in prisons. I've worked with religious hardliners. I've gone up and, and we are not taught how to ask targeted questions about what people believe and expose the methods of knowing. And so usually conversations,

[00:06:36] people deliver messages and I'm advocating a completely different way to conceptualize a conversation broadly based on the historical Socrates view. Historical Socrates, the way he talked. I know there's the bias that the backfire effect that if you present facts,

[00:06:50] people are going to be more defensive, but if they're actual facts, why don't they acknowledge like, like if so-and-so politician says X and you say, well, politicians said X and then the response you often get,

[00:07:03] I often get is no, they didn't. And I'm like, here it is. He says it. No, he that's wrong. He that's just the media reporting. And so, so why is it that people don't? And by the way, I have,

[00:07:16] I'm not talking any political bias. I just want to qualify that. But on either side, nobody believes facts. Like, like if it's a fact, why don't they believe it? Right. Well, because we bend facts and narratives. So people don't formulate their beliefs in the basis of evidence,

[00:07:29] their story tell. We like stories. Our brains are not hardwired for double blind peer review. They're simply not. They're hardwired for narratives. They're hardwired for social relationships. They're hardwired for communities. Excuse me. That's the other thing that it's important to understand is when you're talking about someone's beliefs,

[00:07:47] you're only ostensibly talking about their beliefs. What you're really talking about is their moral community. And you're talking about their sense of belonging and you're talking about the sense of relationships they have. So you're saying let's take the top five strong beliefs that people have,

[00:08:04] let's say whether it's for president or climate change or abortion or gun control or trans bathrooms, trans bathrooms, you know, so there's all these issues that have been, you know, Israel, Palestine, there's all these issues that have been in the media, obviously,

[00:08:18] or masks, no mask. You know, there's all, there's all of these issues by the way. And it's odd that all these issues are, are oddly correlated, even though they have nothing to do with each other, that 75 million people believe all of the same uncorrelated issues and the

[00:08:31] other 75 million people believe all of the other uncorrelated issues the opposite way. That's an evolutionary mechanism. And so we've more or less divided into tribes and the fault lines in this culture war are pretty clear, but I interrupted, please continue with.

[00:08:45] No, no, but that's, that's the question you're saying. We basically get our strong beliefs from these huge amorphous tribes. You know, like a tribe historically has 30 people in it. Now you're saying a tribe could have 75 million people in it or however many

[00:09:00] people in it or however big. So you're, you're saying what, why have we in some ways devolved as opposed to evolved into having the same beliefs automatically as 75 million other people? Well, it's a, it's a really interesting question.

[00:09:15] Part of it has to do with social media. Part of it has to do with memetic warfare, which means have won out. We don't really think in terms of the evolution of ideas, but ideas have a very specific evolution and trajectory and sticking point.

[00:09:30] And so the question is for me, it's less the Genesis of how did this happen? Although that's a cool thought and people, I just read Neil Ferguson's book. He's talked a little bit about this, about how we deal with doom and pandemics, et cetera,

[00:09:44] but it's less that and it's more, how do we navigate this reality in the world? Given that people hold their beliefs so tenaciously and they're not willing to change. How do we get along as a society? You know, and,

[00:09:59] and let me give you another something I've been thinking about. So can I put you on the spot? Yeah. In 2019, how many unarmed black men were killed by police? Like the exact number. Yeah. What's the throwout. Just give me your best guess. Don't Google it.

[00:10:15] Okay. I'm not Googling. I'm going to do a, I'm going to do a legit guess. How many unarmed black men were killed by police? I'm going to go with less than 20. Wow. That's really good. So to me, that tells me you're living in reality.

[00:10:30] I asked one of my neighbors that she told me 22,500. Well, there's the, the, the issue is there's 40 million African Americans, black people in the country. And so if you, but if you work off that number, the number's too high, you,

[00:10:44] you'd be the, we would always have a black man. Every day in the news, we would be hearing about this and we, we did it in 2019. Yeah. Well, so it's, so that's a really good example of if people have incorrect information coming out,

[00:10:58] coming into them, then the output for that information, their actions would be like, this is an outrage. We need to, you know, I see, I live in Portland. I see everywhere. Spray painted ACAB. Are you familiar with that? No. Good.

[00:11:10] It means you must live in someplace that's not a crime scene. It's on it's spray painted on walls. It's on concrete. And the consequence, if somebody has an incorrect piece of information, that's why when people would say to me when I was in the new atheist

[00:11:23] movement, well, why do you care so much about this? Like, why did, why is this such a big deal? And it's such a big deal because as someone starting information is incorrect, that will cause them to create a reality around themselves and not just

[00:11:36] the information that they're getting. And so that's why I think it's so important to have a good, a good conversation with people about how do we navigate that? Because it's so important for people to create a reality around themselves.

[00:11:48] And to make circumstances in their community in which they think will lead to their flourishing, but will not. Right. So the question is, how do we navigate that in terms of a conversation with people? Given that we cannot. Put in introduce facts to them.

[00:12:04] Cause look, this is a great example. You asked me for an example. Let's say that. I'm going to give you a very specific number on our, it's a very specific number, by the way. On our black men were killed by police in 2019.

[00:12:13] If I say, you know, no, that's, that's just not true. Here's the evidence. She would say, well, there's a coverup. The body cams didn't catch at all. Or the court systems adjudicate in the favor of police. I mean,

[00:12:25] it'd be any one of a number of defense mechanisms to keep the belief in place. So there's a vested interest to not dislodge the belief. So instead of providing evidence, which is almost always, if not always a mistake,

[00:12:40] the best way to do it is to ask people very gently how they came to that conclusion. Oh, that's, that's really interesting. How did you, how did you come to that number? Would you, would you get that figure?

[00:12:53] And then, right. What did your neighbor say? Well, I didn't ask that. I asked another question that we haven't talked about. This is once you get a even basic facility with this, this will rocket your conversations to a whole new level. And it's,

[00:13:09] it's in the book, it scales. You ask people to put their belief on a scale. So I said, oh, that's, that's really interesting on a scale from one to 10. How confident are you in that? With one being,

[00:13:20] I plucked it out of the freaking air five being maybe seven being I'm pretty sure 10 being I'm absolutely confident. I'm completely certain that that number is she said to me seven. Okay. So once you get that number of seven, actually, I think she said 7.1, but,

[00:13:38] but once you get that number, whatever the number is, that will tell you or inform you about the next set of questions you should ask, which is so look, so people have well-rehearsed responses and defense mechanisms for their conclusions,

[00:13:54] but they have virtually nothing for their epistemologies. In other words, for how they came to knowledge. And so by simply asking a few probing questions, you can get them to ask themselves if that number 22,500 makes any sense. Yeah. So what did, so after seven, after she said 7.1,

[00:14:12] what did you say to her or what would you say to her? I said, oh, that's so every time you do that, you always have to reaffirm somebody's position. Oh, that's really interesting. Oh, that's, that's cool. Um, how did you, how do you know that?

[00:14:26] It's Socrates's question. It's just, it's the most basic questions. The simplest question in the world. I'm sure it predates Socrates's life, but Socrates who's certainly the popularizer of that question. He became famous asking how, how do you know that that's his, that's his key,

[00:14:39] you know, his pathway to fame. And they killed him for the question. Yeah. They killed him for two. Fortunately we have other techniques that we can add to prevent you from being killed. Um, so it's not just a Socratic method.

[00:14:52] It's based upon a suite of techniques from cutting edge literature, but, but so, so I would say it's really interesting. And then she started talking about the media and I just drilled down on those claims. Well, where you, you know what, I'm just curious.

[00:15:03] The other thing you can do with scales. So I want, I want to make sure in this conversation that people walk away from this, having things they can use. So the moment they walk into a conversation, boom, they're good to go. So here's something you can say.

[00:15:15] So somebody says something you're or that either you find bizarre, which increasingly happens to me, or I was somewhat just parenthetically. I was at a, I was drinking last night and, um, with some friends, uh, everybody's happy that the society is opening up again.

[00:15:32] And somebody came up to us and said, um, uh, Oh yeah. That's if they wanted to play a drinking game, which was hipsters are homeless. And when people walk by in the street, we would guess if they were here,

[00:15:48] I just, I just, that really cracked me up. But anyway, sorry, getting back to it. So, so people will have well-rehearsed defense mechanisms for their conclusions. Um, but, but not for the processes that they came to for those conclusions.

[00:16:03] So what almost invariably will happen is they'll overestimate their confidence based upon their, the evidence that they have. Right. So, but what do you do if she says, okay, well I got this from XYZ news, you know,

[00:16:17] and she named some famous newspaper and she says they're always reliable as opposed to ABC news, which is never reliable. Well, that's a great question. Um, so then you'd ask, you can ask a bunch of other questions. So you could say, so there,

[00:16:31] she didn't say that, but here's an example of if she said that say, Oh, well, well that that's, that's really interesting. Uh, can you think of any, anyone on the other side who, who would have a different figure and why, why would someone come to that?

[00:16:46] Here's another thing you could do with scales. That's really interesting because I'm at a two confidence on that, on the one to 10 scale. And I'm wondering if you can help me get to 10 or excuse me, 7.1. Like what am I missing that would get me there?

[00:17:02] And then she'll just spell it out. Well, this is it. So she gives you a guided tour of her, her epistemology or her methods for knowledge. But she can be so confident at every level. She could say, well,

[00:17:12] you probably listened to, you know, blah, blah, blah news, which is, you know, I know a lot of people listen to it, but it's all lies. Yeah. Okay. So right there. So the, so that's why it's really important that you don't make a claim in these

[00:17:26] conversations. So you don't make any claim. So if you want to make a claim, always put it on a scale. Okay. So, so when she says to you, oh, well you probably listened to blah, blah, blah. Well, first of all,

[00:17:38] no almost no one's going to say that to you unless you've tipped your hand or shown your cards about what you believe. But if you don't do that, there's no way she can know what you believe. And you'll see,

[00:17:49] the other thing that's really fascinating having literally done this with tens of thousands of, I mean, I don't even know how many people at this point. I don't think I've ever seen a single person in the unbelievable number of times I've done this become defensive.

[00:18:05] When I've asked them questions about the method they came to knowing nobody, hardcore Muslims. I mean, nobody, literally nobody. When you use the scales. Well, no, in fact, quite the contrary. Not only do they not become defensive, they want to tell you about how they know they're in.

[00:18:24] They're excited to tell you about their beliefs. People love to talk about their beliefs because they want you to believe what they believe. Right. But what if they kind of, so you're saying there's no, if you say you're a 2.1 on the scale or a two on the scale,

[00:18:39] won't they believe I would instinctively believe that you are against me cause I'm seven and you're two. So you're, so that's why I would say make the assumption that you listened to like the wrong news. Yeah, that would be a faulty. That would be so,

[00:18:55] so here's what I would say. So if someone said, well, you know, you must listen to X news. That's actually the good thing about, I don't really almost listen to any news at this point. I've wiped it all out.

[00:19:05] No, me, me neither. Yeah. I would just say, no, I'm just someone who's genuinely curious, which is the, you always want to be truthful in these conversations too. So I am genuinely curious about how people come to knowledge.

[00:19:15] So I would say that the other thing is people have a pretty good bullshit detector or I should have asked if I could swear on your show, but no, you can. Oh yeah. So people have a pretty good bullshit detector.

[00:19:25] And so if you're going to bullshit someone, they're going to pick it up. But as long as you're always sincere in the types of questions you ask and you spend a few minutes in the rapport building stage,

[00:19:33] which we haven't talked about how to build rapport. Um, it just, it's just not going to happen. So basically one of the ways you build rapport is you try to go up as our, our friend Brian uses a word in physics, superordinate identities.

[00:19:45] You try to find commonalities that you have with people instead of what we currently try to do is constantly break people down in the base of race or sexual orientation, really irrelevant things. Um, and when you can build commonalities with people and change some of the words

[00:20:00] you use, like, you know, how could we find this out? Or, uh, so you use collaborative words. It's amazing. People just totally open up. Right. You say, you, you don't say you believe this. Um, why you say we want,

[00:20:14] obviously we all want to figure out the right number so we can solve this problem. Help me get to the same confidence level as you. I'm excited to learn or something like that. Help me, help me get there.

[00:20:24] Show me what you got. Cause I'm genuinely curious. Help me get there. And almost everybody, when you ask them for help, we'll give it to you. So this, I like, there's so many techniques that you write about that I like. Um, I mean,

[00:20:37] there's, I don't know how the number of techniques, I think it's like over 20 techniques in here. 36. Thank you for reading it so carefully. I appreciate that. Oh, no problem. Um, okay. The, the, the, let your friends be wrong. I really like that. And I really liked, um,

[00:20:53] uh, yeah, that was in the same chapter about the use the we instead of the you, but let friends be wrong. I like that. It reminds me of something actually I once heard a long time ago in couples

[00:21:05] therapy, uh, which is basically let your wife say the last word in an argument. Right, right. So, okay. So let's talk about let friends be wrong. My coauthor of the book, James Lindsay thinks that this is the most important

[00:21:18] thing in the whole book. Uh, I disagree with that profoundly, but I understand why he believes that given our current cultural moment, you don't have to believe everything someone else believes and they don't have to believe every, everything you believe to have friends for, to be your friend.

[00:21:33] If that were the case, not only would you have a very boring life, but you'd have literally no friends. So what difference does it make? What difference does it make if now there are definite deal breakers, you know, if someone's a genocidal maniac, that's one thing,

[00:21:46] but there are definite deal breakers that almost never will you encounter. But the problem is that the threshold for being offended is so low in the threshold for wanting to kind of wall ourselves up against bad ideas.

[00:22:01] I mean, I've lost friends over the last few years because of my activities, then it's been extremely painful to me. Me as well. It really, it really is painful. Like it's in my mind almost every single day and, and you know,

[00:22:17] some days I avoid it, but most I don't. And have you tried to reach back out to them? Yeah. And in some cases that's worked. Uh, and in some cases, you know, just silence. Can I plumb that for a minute? Can I ask you questions about that?

[00:22:31] So what was the thing that caused you to lose the friendship? Okay. And in 2012, I think, or 2013, I wrote an article on July 4th that said no war, or it was actually on Memorial day. I said no war has ever been justified and uh, meaning, you know,

[00:22:52] in general, I'm against any military activity that might involve killing civilians. And of course a lot of veterans were upset, but I was trying to say, I'm not upset at veterans. I'm upset at the leaders who send children to shoot children. Right.

[00:23:09] And people would say, well, the revolutionary war. And I would just dispute everything. And there were some things I just didn't know. Like, I really don't know enough about wars in history to say it. And I admitted that,

[00:23:19] but I lost a friend because he thought it meant that I approved of slavery because through implication, I think that I must think that the civil war was not justified, which must mean I'm for slavery, which is obviously not true.

[00:23:32] And, and he stopped talking to me for about eight years. We only just reconnected last year and I really, we were best friends. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm sorry that happened. I, I know firsthand how painful that is. So let's, can we, let's break that down if you might.

[00:23:47] So I think that the mistaken way to think about that is the word you use is dispute. Like they say something and you dispute that all that's going to do is that's going to drive them at a deeper wedge between you and they're just

[00:24:00] going to think you're a Dick. Right? Yeah. So, so the better way to put it, maybe think about this framing. This is the framing I personally would use and I'm not saying you should use it, but I would say, if you believe this, of course,

[00:24:13] I would say there's no war in which I would ever send my children to. And if I wouldn't send my children to it, I don't think it's justified for me to vote to send someone else's children to it. That's a great response. And I,

[00:24:27] and I did want to ask you this after, you know, you talk about a lot of your conversations and a lot of your painful conversations in the book. It occurs to me that you're very intelligent and coming overrated. I'm overrated, bro. No, no.

[00:24:41] But coming up with what you just said, that's, that's not a technique. That's an intelligent response. And I wish I had thought of that. So I could have all the techniques in your book and I still won't have that response. Yeah. But that's, that's, that's,

[00:24:54] respectfully, that's just not true. And the reason it's not true is because it just, it just, there is no special like you know, brain cell for conversation. There's no like neuro neurological connector for that. It just like literally anything. It's like jujitsu. I do jujitsu.

[00:25:12] And I was just the guy I was talking about last night, I was hanging out with John Frankel who's a renowned jujitsu expert, but, but it's just like anything else. It's just a technique. That's, that's all it is. Right. But like my version of that, I, cause I,

[00:25:24] here's what I think I did say is I said, look, I don't know enough about history. I'm happy to read any books, but I just feel like, uh, I don't like, you know, all the civilians who die mindlessly in, in any of these wars.

[00:25:37] So I don't know enough about the civil war, but I'm assuming there's some way in which it's not justified. Okay. So, and obviously I'm against slavery. Okay. So that's a good response. So here's the thing. Often when people respond to you,

[00:25:49] they may not be responding to you on the basis of the response you gave in terms of it's in philosophy. We say epistemic adequacy in, in terms of whether or not to good response, but from their own personal shit inside them. Let me give you an example.

[00:26:03] So a few years ago I was, uh, teaching at nights and literally I would do this all day. This is all I would do all day long. And I would just sit there and I would just sit there and I would just sit

[00:26:13] there and I would just sit there and I would do this for a few hours and then I'd get up and I would do this for a few hours and then I'd get up and I'd do it again at night. And literally I would do this all day.

[00:26:22] This is all I would do all day long. And then I pulled up in a gas station and a woman came up to me who was on some kind of drug and she had puss that was on her face. And, uh,

[00:26:35] did you kiss her? No, no, no. But she, she did come up to the car and she said, can I have a ride? I need a ride. I said, I would give you a ride. But the last time I gave a woman a ride home,

[00:26:47] my wife stabbed me and she looked at my stomach. She's like, Oh, okay. Um, but that's a good intelligent response. Well, well, yeah. But if you do this, it's this again, this is, it's like jujitsu. It's if you do it enough, you get good at it.

[00:27:01] Like you don't need, if you care about this and you follow the template in the book, you will be excellent in no time. So that's the other thing. So I watched this, I started this, uh, thing called street epistemology from my first book,

[00:27:13] a manual for creating atheists and somebody popularized it named Anthony Magna Bosco. And you can see his stuff on YouTube. It's he's phenomenal. Oh, and you have, you have one of his conversations in here about, um, specifically Noah's Ark. He's the one arguing about Noah's Ark, right?

[00:27:29] I mean, we are not arguing, but conducting an epistemological intervention like asking people how they know that figuring out their beliefs and you can watch his stuff at, um, mag YouTube, Anthony Magna Bosco, M-A-G-N-A-B-O-S-C-O. But one of the things that, that is interesting.

[00:27:47] Why did I start talking about that? I totally spaced why I started talking about that. Um, well we're talking that you were talking about the woman who's came up to your car and how it's like a muscle. Yes. Okay. So,

[00:27:57] so here's the thing because you asked that has to be, you have to be intelligent to give that response. Not really, not really because I've, he, since that book came out on what? 2012 or 13, his videos came out, read nice.

[00:28:09] Wonder now there's like thousands of people all around the world doing this. And every once in a while I watch a bunch of these videos and I'm thinking to myself, Holy shit, these people are like,

[00:28:18] they are just as good at this as I am. And I do this all the time. And so what they did is that they just stood on the shoulders of giants and they just got, everybody just got better.

[00:28:27] And the thing about this is the learning curve is not that steep, but what you do is here's what I would do. The book is written in sequential order. I say repeatedly, don't just jump to the latter chapter. Start and start like it's,

[00:28:41] it's fundamentals, beginners, intermediate, advanced expert, master, something like that. So start and work yourself up. And if you do this just a little bit every day and maybe watch some videos that come out with it, I actually put videos of,

[00:28:56] I've set up a booth in the table when I was in LA, people have impossible conversations with me and I put out the bad videos too. Most, they're mostly bad videos where I make mistakes. That's when people learn the most from that, right?

[00:29:08] When they see me make mistakes and other people make mistakes, say, Oh, Bogosian did this, maybe we should do this. But honestly, I'm telling you, there's nothing particularly special about me or this. It's just sticking to the template and doing it.

[00:29:25] Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcatraz, gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

[00:29:39] Even though you just said don't skip. And I agree with that because there's a lot of good advice in the early chapters. I do want to skip. Let's do it. And the advanced skills, you talk about vaccine deniers and you say first do no harm.

[00:30:00] And the reason I bookmarked that is one time I did have a conversation about vaccines that got really out of control. It started out as a Facebook thread on my personal page and ended up with thousands of comments.

[00:30:11] And I was neck deep commenting until a friend of mine finally called me and said, shut down the computer. You need to remove yourself from Facebook. But, and then I was talking to another person who writes about conspiracy theories

[00:30:23] and he was telling me that basically people believe something, whether it's anti-vax or, you know, belief in huge conspiracy theories where people believe something, if some large institution they feel has betrayed them at some point in their life and then they don't trust any institution after that.

[00:30:41] And so that's often a source of these impossible conversations. Like how do you deal with that when they're, they're just never going to change? That is a great question. It's a great question given the particular context of our age where I've

[00:30:55] written about the fact that I think we're in a legitimacy crisis right now. I think there's a large scale crisis of trust in our public institutions, in our judiciary, in our, certainly in our university systems, the ACLU, the SPLC, uh,

[00:31:10] the police to a certain extent among certain particular elements of society. So it's really difficult because you usually we would have ways, you know, people we could go to trusted sources. We could go to, you know, when I grew up on 54, almost 55,

[00:31:26] we had Dan Rather, CBS, Tom Brokaw, we had ABC, CBS, NBC. And those were trusted. We trusted those, but we don't really have that anymore. We have highly politicized fractured news, which acts more as a media media echo chamber to push a particular narrative.

[00:31:44] So operating within that paradigm is so difficult. And that's why I would claim, I would argue that it's actually more important to stick to how people know things and where they get their information from.

[00:31:59] And one of the best techniques that, that I use in the older I get, if there were such a thing as a unified field theory of rationality, I would think that this would be a constitutive element of that. It's called defeasibility, but the,

[00:32:13] but my publisher wouldn't let me put that in there. They made me change it to disconfirmation. So disconfirmation is basically the idea of the feasibility is the word that they use in philosophy. Disconfirmation is the idea that,

[00:32:26] how could a belief be false? Like we do that in science all the time. We try to falsify scientific propositions with disconfirmation. How could a moral belief be wrong? Like, Oh, I think, you know, we should let in immigrants or I think trans women,

[00:32:42] no trans women in boys sports, or I think, you know, nobody should own a gun or everyone should, whatever the point, doesn't make any difference. You have to ask them under what conditions, would you be willing to change your mind about that? Like what would,

[00:32:55] what would the world have to look like? What would you have to see? You know, what would you have to, Oh, I hate Joe Biden. Okay. What would he have to do? And then someone usually tell you something crazy, like, you know, bomb Toronto or whatever.

[00:33:07] But once you know the disconfirmation criterion, you're good to go. You're good to go. Like you can then navigate that conversation with so much ease and there. What if, what if they say nothing like that guy about Noah's ark?

[00:33:19] Okay. So there are only four. So this is the other thing. There are only four things people can say to you. They were literally four things. I suppose someone could just start seeing the alphabet, but there are only four responses that could hitch to that.

[00:33:30] One is the best one, which is the ideal. Oh, here's the, here's the disconfirmation criteria. And they just tell you that. The second one is they can say, Oh, there is no doubt. There is. I will not change my mind on this. Like abortion would be a common.

[00:33:45] I just won't change my mind. The response to that is, Oh, that's really interesting. Again, do you see how I propped up the claimant? Right. It's like Tyrone Lannister says in game of Thrones, every the only thing that matters is what came before the butt, right?

[00:33:59] You're always want to just encourage and push up. You never want to butt someone you want to and somebody. And I say, Oh, that's interesting. So there's no condition. There's no information that would cause you to change your mind. No, nothing. Oh, that's interesting. So,

[00:34:12] so then the belief isn't formulated in the basis of evidence. Well, what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, to form a belief in the basis of evidence means by definition that there has

[00:34:22] to be some evidence that could come in that would cause you to change your mind. But if there's no evidence in the belief, isn't formed the base of evidence and form the base of something else. Okay. And so what, what have they say?

[00:34:35] So that's, that's two. Let me give you a member. I said four. Yeah. Okay. Let me just run through the other two. So again, there's only so many things people can say to you. They say, here's the evidence. They say there is no evidence. They say, geez,

[00:34:47] I don't really know what the evidence would be. Those are my opinion. Those are the most interesting conversations, but okay. And then they could, they could give you a wildly implausible disconfirmation condition. Those are interesting in religion.

[00:35:01] I used to get when I asked people under what conditions would you be willing to revise your beliefs about Jesus being the son of God? People would, the stock answer that fundamentalists give is the bones of Christ. If you presented me with the bones of Christ,

[00:35:14] that would mean that Christ didn't rise to heaven. So you should, you show me the bones of Christ and I'll stop believing now they know that I cannot produce the bones of Christ with all due respect. Neither can you produce the bones of Christ.

[00:35:27] But no matter what category they fit in, again, it's a roadmap for the future questions you would ask. I see. So, so, but, but again, if they say nothing, Oh, but then you ask, you know, really, there's no evidence at all.

[00:35:43] And at some point they get confused because like you said, people are more about the goal rather than the, what led to their belief. Hold on, hold on. Not confused perplexed. Right now the goal of that line of questioning is not to make people become

[00:36:04] perplexed or perplexity as a consequence of the line of questioning. Right. It's, it's, uh, it's interesting. I mean, I'm sure people listening to this could think of so many, uh, conversations that they've had with their friends and neighbors that fit this category. Yeah. Let me, let me,

[00:36:22] let me give you a quick example. So I wrote, I published a paper about this. I used to teach a critical thinking and, and, uh, I don't know if he knew this or not, but this is true. This is testable. You can take an egg.

[00:36:33] It's only it's not one of those thin shelled eggs and you can drop it out a two or three story window. And as long as it drops onto grass, it won't break Buckminster Fuller designed the geodesic dome after this.

[00:36:46] And so I would take an egg and I would ask people if they thought it was going to break when I dropped it out the window and they looked at me like as a fucking lunatic.

[00:36:53] And then I drop it and they wouldn't break and they would be perplexed. But my goal was not to make them perplexed. My goal was to show them that dropping an egg out of a window,

[00:37:05] as long as it doesn't drop on the concrete is not going to break. Yeah. Okay. So you're making them, so the perplexity is a consequence. It's not a con you're not trying to make them confused. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You're trying to make,

[00:37:19] you're trying to help them understand what they believe and make it clear to themselves to see if it's justified. But you're playing the role and authentically you're giving them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they're talking about so that they can answer

[00:37:33] these questions without feeling stupid. Right? Because the whole, the, the, ultimately this is a selfish endeavor. And the selfishness is if they know something, I don't know. I want to know it too. I just need to make sure it's vetted.

[00:37:49] That's why the other technique we give in the book is change your mind on the spot. Yeah. So, so a lot of people don't do that, but I find it very effective when I do change my mind in the middle of conversation because people are surprised. Yeah.

[00:38:03] Surprise would be one way blown away would be another thing, especially if it's in real time. You'll just, people will be utterly blown away by that. And so I think that's, you'll just, people will be utterly blown away by that. And the more moral it is,

[00:38:15] the more blown away there will be that you change your mind. So there's one point in the book or a couple of points where you say, you know, give the other person some outs, like make sure they're not a fool. And by the end of the conversation,

[00:38:27] right, that's one of the golden rules in hostage negotiation. And it's, it's a, it's a, it should be a golden rule of any conversation at a golden, we call it from the Harvard negotiations project, build a golden bridge.

[00:38:42] And a golden bridge is an opportunity for people to cross over and revise their beliefs. So here's the opposite of a golden bridge. You freaking moron. It took you long enough. Yeah. No. And then people, people are going to invoke a defensive posture.

[00:38:58] You want to make sure that everybody, nobody ever has a defensive posture. That's key in practice. How would you do it? Like, let's say you're having the, let's say you're pro-life and you're having a conversation with someone who's pro-choice and you want to give them,

[00:39:11] even though you're strongly believe in pro-life, like this is coming from your belief in God. It's, it's, it's your family's belief. It's your generation of belief. How would you let a pro-life person approach choice person have an out?

[00:39:24] Oh, well, you, you, you, usually it's I'd say something like, you know, this is a really difficult conversation. Oh, I want to just add one thing to that. Almost nobody will change. Cause you mentioned saving face.

[00:39:37] Almost nobody will change their mind if they're with a friend or someone from their moral community, because that's why Mormons go to the doors and twos, right? That's why people don't change their mind. That's why we went cult indoctrination and cult exiting.

[00:39:53] They grabbed them as one person and not a group of people, right? That's what keeps people in cults and it helps remove people from cult. So an example of a saving face would be, and again, this,

[00:40:04] this is even more important to clean up if it's two people. But if you do this, it's always one on one is best is wow. You know, this is super, super complicated, like crazy complicated. And I know I thought exactly like you did until I had this information.

[00:40:21] It was like, Oh wow. Like I had this thing and I, I realized this and then you tell them what you realize. So that's a way to build a golden bridge. They could, well, I won't feel stupid because he believed it too. So he'll be empathetic to me.

[00:40:35] Oh, I love this. Uh, use outsourcing to bring outside information into the conversation, which is, which is basically you've discussed that, but you're basically kind of outsourcing to the person. Tell me what I should know to get your confidence level.

[00:40:51] So that's, that's the outsourcing technique. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's more than that as well. I mean, we talk about there are lots of things that you can do and it depends on the intelligence of the person with whom you're speaking.

[00:41:04] So if it's a complicated thing like, you know, healthcare, socialized mess, something complicated, you say, Oh, well give, give me the names of three people you consider to be experts on the other side and what are their arguments? Most people won't know three.

[00:41:18] If they do know three, then, then that's really interesting. That you can get a nice lesson and then you can say something like, well, that's, that's interesting. Cause, and so you, you wouldn't, you would not say, well, if you don't know three experts on the own,

[00:41:31] on that, um, three experts who hold different beliefs than you, then it's unclear that you can even know what you're talking about because that will invoke a defensive posture. They won't revise their beliefs, but you could say, well, you know,

[00:41:44] I'm thinking about myself and I'm thinking about the, the, if I personally don't know expert, experts who disagree with me and what those arguments are, I hold my belief in less confidence. I'm less confident. And that gets back to the scale thing again. Do you, what do you,

[00:42:04] is that reasonable of me? But you're not really asking them if it's reasonable of you, which seems reasonable to me that it's reasonable to you. You're asking them if it's reasonable to them. Right? So in other words, in other words, if they don't know it, shouldn't they be,

[00:42:19] shouldn't they hold their beliefs with less confidence? I mean, look, dude, doesn't it bother you that people walk around cocksure of the stuff they believe in that everybody has a grossly over an estimated confidence in their beliefs. No, but it's true.

[00:42:36] And the fact that they can't validate those beliefs bothers me even more as I'm sure it does you. That's why you write, wrote this book. Like I was having a, how would you deal with this? Like I was having a conversation with somebody about a particular election,

[00:42:51] not, not the most common election that we're thinking of. But I said, okay, you hate this one candidate so much. Tell me three laws that he's passed or three things he's done in office that

[00:43:05] were bad because he was just going on and on trashing this candidate and he couldn't give me one. And I said, if you give me one, I will completely change my vote and he couldn't give me one at all.

[00:43:18] Even though he was just trashing this person nonstop as a politician, as a leader. So if that were a personal friend of mine, I would say to them, and I wouldn't do this for any other conversation lest a friend of mine, I would say,

[00:43:32] do you think it should bother you because you can't name a particular policy proposal that you feel so strongly? Do you think that there's a disjunct between your feelings and the evidence? And, you know, in the Republic,

[00:43:45] Plato talks about how reason should be the kind of chariot with the, the horses, you know, reason should always be the lead horse of the chariot and desire, emotion, et cetera behind that. And as long as reasons, the first horse of the chariot, you're good to go.

[00:44:02] But maybe, maybe it is reasonable to not know anything. Like you could simply say, listen, I know a lot of people who know a lot more than me and they all hate this person. So I'm just going along with them.

[00:44:13] Yeah. But other people know people who know a lot more than them who look at an opposing candidate and have the same feelings. So how does an independent person adjudicate between those things? Because even in that case,

[00:44:26] it would seem to me that the confidence you have in this belief is not justified, but what's important for our relationship, I would think, you know, Aristotle talks about the highest form of friendship between being between two virtuous people. I would think that you'd be the,

[00:44:41] this is little alter casting from the book. You would be the type of person that it would, that would bother you. It would bother you that your beliefs are out of alignment with reality. Yeah. So that makes sense. Again,

[00:44:57] I wish I had these techniques for like half the conversations I've had over the past five years or 90% you're a young guy and you got him now. No young guy, I'm the same age as you. Are you, are you kidding me?

[00:45:09] I mean, you're a young guy then. So see how stupid I am. I just accused you of being old when I should have been. I should have said you're no, you're as young as me. Are you 54 53 and a half. Awesome. Wow.

[00:45:23] You look awesome with just a lot of vegetables. I mean, you don't even have any gray hair. No, I have gray hair just for some reason with the sun in back of me. I don't know. People say that when I'm on a squad cast here that,

[00:45:33] but I have like about when I look at the mirror, it's like 50% gray about, um, well not what I've seen so many. There's so many, uh, bookmarks here. Uh, okay. You say these things, this thing about don't shoot the messenger or,

[00:45:49] or it's, it's a well-known fact that people shoot the messenger. So don't deliver a message. Correct. And you define what a message is. And, and I think I'm guilty of delivering messages often. Like I'll rationally make an argument.

[00:46:01] I'll say something for instance, like nobody should go to college and I'll present a rational argument. And I believe that as well. Well, there you are. You're a professor. So that's, that's saying something. So, and, and unfortunately I have kids going to college,

[00:46:14] so it ruins my argument a little bit, but I also don't want to be a messenger. I think I was the messenger and I delivered a message and no matter how rational it was, and no matter how much just math and finance knowledge and whatever I used, Nope.

[00:46:27] If people had the opposite view, i.e. If they had gone to college, so they have a cognitive bias to, you know, confirmation biases. What is what they're going to do? And that's what I'm going to say.

[00:46:37] I'm going to say that I believe that my kids will need me more later. And I don't want them to hate me now, but that's another story. But I think I was the messenger and I delivered a message and no matter how

[00:46:46] rational it was, and no matter how much just math and finance knowledge and whatever I used, and no matter how much just math and finance knowledge and whatever I used, and I'm going to say that my kids will need me more later.

[00:46:55] So, but I think I was the messenger and I delivered a message. And I don't want them to hate me now, but that's another story. I mean, I'm impressed with you because I'm going to give you a message. I'm not saying that you, you know,

[00:47:07] confirmation bias is what is what they're looking for, not an argument. I mean, what is a message define message? a good technique for writing is present their arguments before they do and answer them. So I do all this, but I'm still delivering a message.

[00:47:23] And I might even have a story in it about my own experience. A message in an article isn't a conversation. I see. And if you want people to be more receptive to the message that you're gonna deliver, give the most charitable spin

[00:47:39] and say, this is where they're right. Yeah, I see. I think I've definitely been guilty of delivering messages in articles. And then people will comment, oh, you're just trying to be controversial. And I'm like, no, I have actually very few opinions. But so talk about Rappaport's rules

[00:48:00] because I like this as well. And again, this is a, I feel like this is out of couples therapy, Rappaport's rules. Yeah, what page are you on there? Well, you mentioned Rappaport's rules in a couple of different sections. I think the first time it might've been-

[00:48:12] It's chapter five, I think. Yeah, five advanced skills for contentious conversations. I learned about Rappaport's rules from Dan Dennett's book, my friend Dan Dennett, Intuition Pumps. So Rappaport rules are, they're just fantastic. This is one of the few things we should actually read in the podcast.

[00:48:29] One is attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, thanks, I wish I thought of putting it that way. And also it shows that you're listening to them. Correct. In Hoxha's negotiations, people have written a whole book

[00:48:44] about the phrase, that's right. You're looking for that's right. So if someone says, so let me just be clear about this. I just want to make sure I know what you mean. And then you restate their position and you get their go ahead.

[00:48:57] That's by far, in my opinion, the most important of Rappaport's rules. Second, you list agreement. Third, you mentioned what you learned. And fourth, only then do you have rebuttal or criticism. That's the Rappaport's rules. And the rebuttal or criticism is still epistemological,

[00:49:17] as you might say in the book, where you're asking questions, well, what's your confidence level? Correct. What's the evidence? So it's always about questions. You read Paul Johnson's biography of Socrates? No. It was very good. That's how I learned about Socrates. Paul Johnson's the historian.

[00:49:41] It was very good. Yeah, yeah. Right. And then I feel like, you know, ultimately a lot of these skills, you're getting more and more technical about how to apply them. Like the principles are the same. Correct. Which is listen, repeat back, don't be contentious.

[00:49:58] Don't call someone a moron. And figure out kind of like more subtle ways to bring up your topic. Here's a difficult conversation I had. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was on the podcast. And as you probably know, he says he's pro-vaccine, but his message is very much anti-vaccine.

[00:50:19] And I did not want to get into that topic with him on the podcast, but he got into it. And it was about a 20 minute just spiel about his stance on vaccines. And he's someone who lost his trust in institutions. He saw his uncle get shot.

[00:50:36] He saw his father get shot. He assumed it was by the FBI. And so after that, he was all conspiracies all the time. And how would you, and here's the thing. I don't know the information about vaccines. I don't know anything.

[00:50:49] So even though I'm kind of like pro-vaccine, I didn't know how to respond to him at all. Yeah, and that's 100% fine too. So here's one of the things you can do. If it's a podcast, I mean, again, so these are different than conversations.

[00:51:06] The question is, what should you do in terms of a conversation? Here's what I would do if I were you. Michael Shermer from the Skeptic Society is one of my best friends. I can connect you two and you can have him on. Oh yeah, I love his stuff.

[00:51:18] Yeah, he's great. Yeah, yeah, more than happy to have. So someone can come on and they can give their opinion. It's an unlettered opinion. I don't think he has any particular skillset in vaccines. I don't really know anything about Mr. Kennedy,

[00:51:31] but you can offer somebody who actually does know on the other side an opportunity to speak with you and have your audience listen to that. Yeah, yeah, I thought about doing that. That was a good idea. And I also like this idea that you have

[00:51:46] about kind of Zoom out is the way I would put it, where you kind of say, okay, well, obviously we care about people. We equally care about people's health and we want people to live longer and we don't want people to get- Right, commonalities. Serious diseases.

[00:52:04] You just found commonalities, correct. So I think that's very, very important. And I do like the idea of when they give evidence of at least acknowledging what you didn't know and thanking them for that. So for instance, in Robert F. Kennedy,

[00:52:21] in his conversation with me, he said something which is that maybe one vaccine might be good here and there he doesn't know, but when you have to take 37 and they never studied the interactions between them, it makes it confusing, the whole issue of vaccines.

[00:52:38] And I agreed with him on that. Like that was something I didn't know that they don't really test the interaction- Wait a second, wait a second. It's not something you didn't know. It's something you hadn't thought about. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. What's the distinction though?

[00:52:51] Like if I hadn't thought about it, I don't know it. But knowing it assumes that there's something true about it. You don't know enough to know that it's not true. Right, I see. So maybe they do test the interaction by just getting one way or the other.

[00:53:06] Right, yeah. I don't mean to be pedantic when I do that, to be pedantic, but I think that the words we use are really important because they trap us in ways of thinking or not, you know? So I think it's-

[00:53:19] Like when you said that, it was accurate, but not precise. Right, so I think that's very important. So, and this is like your master techniques, the moral reframing, like bring it back to a moral stance, everybody assumes they're moral. So you're both, there's some level which you'll find

[00:53:38] where you're both the same. And starting from that, you could kind of build up knowledge or at least know what they think and understand a little bit more about what you think. Yeah, that's correct. And as Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist says, people don't knowingly do wrong.

[00:53:56] Nobody gets up and I'm like, you know, I'm a horrible person, I'm gonna fuck over, you know, I'm gonna genocide a bunch of people that, no, nobody gets up. Everybody thinks that they do something because they're good people. Yeah, so, okay, now if you actually,

[00:54:14] if your goal is actually to change their mind, what- Ah, so- And the other question I have is, why would you wanna change their mind? Like, why do you care? Well, let's take a look at that. I don't think it's about changing someone's mind.

[00:54:31] I think it's about instilling doubt. I think it's about giving someone the gift of doubt. And I can't think, I can think of very few circumstances where it's not a good thing to be more humble about what it is that you claim to know.

[00:54:43] Although I'm certainly can give you those examples, those exceptions if you want, but it's a really good thing for people to have their beliefs in alignment with reality. And it's a really good thing for people to be more humble about what it is that they claim to know.

[00:54:59] Because we live in a democracy, we all vote, right? We all participate in the society at some level. I actually don't vote. Well, then you're subject to the votes of other people. In fact, I might even say you're held hostage to them.

[00:55:14] So we live in a society which we have daily, even in a pandemic, we have interactions with other people who make laws. So it would be a really good thing if we formed to the best of our abilities, we had accurate information coming in, which we do not.

[00:55:31] But again, if I could wave a wand and say, what are some of the things I'd like? Well, obviously I would like no disinformation or fake news or what have you. But when information comes in, we formulate our beliefs in the base of that.

[00:55:44] We make our decisions on the base of that and then we act accordingly. So I see. So a lot of this is really about creating a skeptic as opposed to creating a changed mind. Yeah, it's about creating a person or help. No, it's not about creating.

[00:56:02] It's about helping people to live, to do Socrates' question, the unexamined life is not worth living. It's about helping people to live more thoughtful, examined lives. And also it seems like it's also a emotionally safer way for you to have conversations with people

[00:56:23] that you otherwise might be angry at. Correct, yeah. I wanna piggyback off of two things. It's also a way for you to lead a more reflective and examined life, right? So that's- Right, because ultimately this whole thing really is a selfish endeavor. But even beyond that,

[00:56:43] so what you just said before, repeat what you said, because I really liked it. It's a way for you to have an emotionally safer, you won't be angry all the time at these people. And when you begin your conversation and wonder, thinking like, wow, that's really,

[00:56:59] like why would someone believe? That's really interesting. Like what, why does someone believe that? Like I genuinely wanna know why someone believes that and start asking questions about why people, how they came to that conclusion. That's a pretty remarkable and intimate interaction. Here's a question.

[00:57:35] What if people do have legit facts and evidence backing up their opinion, but you have a different set of legit facts? Like you're giving value to different sets of facts. So for instance, gun control laws. People who think that everyone should have guns say it deters crime.

[00:57:51] I just bought two guns today. Another AR in hand and another Glock. Right, so you probably think like many do that the reason there's not a lot of crime in Texas say is because everyone has a gun, you can't get away with it.

[00:58:07] But other people might say there's a reason there's a lot of crime elsewhere is because everyone has access to a gun. And they're both right. They both have correct set of facts, but they're just using a different- Isn't that awesome? You just got a lesson. Yeah.

[00:58:22] You just got a free lesson and then it give you things to think about, maybe read about it, gives you stuff to ponder. Next time you have a conversation, it'll be easier for you because you would have already heard those arguments. It's a win-win. You lose nothing.

[00:58:37] But I feel like what if you wanna press the point further? Like let's say you're pro gun control and you say, but could you say, but what do you think of the fact that where guns are everywhere and easy access to guns, that there's actually less crime?

[00:58:51] What does that mean to you? Could you push further? Yeah, you could. I mean, the first thought that came to my mind was Somalia. There's guns everywhere, easy access to guns, but I'm quite confident that the crime rate, well, maybe not the crime rate,

[00:59:05] but the general murder rate. Nigeria would be another place. Nigeria has one of the, the whole country is basically an organized crime syndicate. But yet when Nigerians come to this country, they exceed their, one of the most successful groups of Americans along with Cubans, et cetera.

[00:59:21] But so it's not clear to me that that's always the case. So in that example, what I did was I took what you said and I thought of a counter example. Can I think of an instance of a thing that would make that false?

[00:59:34] So it's a way of habituating yourself when someone says something, and again, this is nothing special about me. You just follow the template in the book and you'll be fine. So in that case, you're disagreeing with yourself a little bit by bringing up the counter example.

[00:59:50] Maybe you're saying in this discussion about gun control, maybe you're saying that there really is no stable set of evidence that could provide their opinion. Or maybe you're saying like, wow, I was harboring a belief that was false. Good thing I ran into this person

[01:00:08] and had a conversation with him. Now I won't have to believe something that's not true. Right, right. And so what are some other difficult conversations that you've had? I've been telling my difficult conversations. What are difficult conversations you've had? That's a really good question.

[01:00:23] Emotional relationship things are somewhat different because you're bringing so much history. Conversations with kids could be difficult. I find the most difficult conversations with people who are rooted in this new moral orthodoxy that has come up, in which they believe that race or gender or skin color

[01:00:49] determines your access to truth. Okay, let me question that because, and your coauthor James Lindsay had an excellent book. Cynical Theories. Yeah, Cynical Theories where he discusses a lot of this. And if someone is a female black lesbian, then there's civil rights, but then there's intersectionalism

[01:01:20] where there could be civil rights to black people like, oh, you can't have separate this or separate that. But that still doesn't get to the heart of the problem when you have an intersection of minorities and you go for like the lowest,

[01:01:34] in some hierarchy, there's the person who's the most, there's the intersection that's the most oppressed and they're allowed the loudest voice. And so that's the difference between thinking about equality as opposed to thinking about intersectionalism. And those are very hard discussions.

[01:01:51] Like people are very firm on those things. And he wrote an excellent book about this and- Should be required reading if people haven't read it with Helen Pluckrose was the first author of Cynical Theories, phenomenal book. And so again, like sometimes you do wanna change

[01:02:10] people's minds and you do wanna point out, so, okay, you were saying, you've had discussions with this new moral orthodoxy and I could see either points, like maybe someone who is a black male might not understand the problems of a black lesbian.

[01:02:28] And so do you change the laws accordingly or- No, I think I wanna go back to your comedy again about changing minds. It's really not about, it really isn't about changing minds. I don't know, I actually do know some techniques to change people's minds.

[01:02:43] I didn't put them in the book cause they're so unethical. One we put in was alter casting and we call it ethically murky. But the book isn't about changing anybody's mind. The book is about increasing someone's on the scale of confidence, it's about decreasing their confidence levels.

[01:02:58] It's about giving them instilling doubt, helping them become more doubtful about what they believe. And so back to the intersectionality thing. Yeah, sure, there are experiences of people to like a black trans lesbian, being in a wheelchair. I don't have those. I was trying to think of another,

[01:03:20] someone who detransits. I was trying to think of another oppression variable. It's my friend- And they're an astronaut. Yeah, they're an astronaut. Well, that's not an oppression variable. It's my friend- Why you have to put them in a room. You have to put them,

[01:03:31] you lock them in a room floating in space. That doesn't sound pretty impressive. Yeah, especially if it was against their will. So the prerequisite for any... Okay, so even let's take a step back. It depends on your, you talk about this in chapter two,

[01:03:47] what's your goal in the conversation? You should really try to clarify that upfront. And you can change that as you go along. But often the goal is not to, is it to just kill time? Is it to impress someone?

[01:04:00] Is it you like a girl or a guy or she likes you? Or in classes I found that people don't ask a question because they wanna know the answer. They'll ask a question because they want you to think they're paying attention

[01:04:12] or they're up with what's going on or how smart they are. So you have to figure out what you want out of that conversation. And once you get that, you can work backwards. And so one of the things that's difficult about those conversations about critical race theory

[01:04:28] intersectionality is that they start from points of view that are fundamental departures from the norms of rationality. And when you do that, you're dealing with an individual who does not participate in either norms of civil discourse or kind of rules of logic that have traditionally applied

[01:04:49] from the pre-Socratics up to the present day. Right, so, and let's say this is happening on social media. This is one of the reasons why you can't argue with social media. So you say don't have these, don't have important conversations on social media

[01:05:05] which is where most of these conversations take place. Well, we say, so we talk about knowing the platform and knowing what's important. People often post on social media, not because they want their views rebutted, but because they want them confirmed.

[01:05:18] So know why, like when you said your friend called you cause you were going nuts on Facebook, like what is your goal with that? Was it to change people's minds? Was it to let people know how smart, like what, like once you figure out your goal.

[01:05:32] My goal was not to prove how smart I was. My goal was to prove how stupid they were. Yeah, okay, so if you want to do that, so you're already talking about, I'm not sure about the validity of the goal or the meritoriousness of it,

[01:05:48] but let's say that that is your goal and you want to know how to proceed. That's all the more important to not deliver a message. Yeah. Anytime you deliver a message in that, it's going to backfire and make you look like you're stupid.

[01:06:02] Plus the other thing is, but one more thing on that, let's say that they are really stupid and that you're engaging them. What kind of a person engages with stupid people? I think, I think you're quoting Obi-Wan Kenobi right there. Oh, am I? I don't know.

[01:06:16] I'm not a Star Wars fan, but. Who's more the fool, the fool or the fool who follows him? Yeah. So you can say, who's more the fool, the fool or the fool who argues with him? Right, right. So probably not a good use of time

[01:06:26] and you strike me as a smart guy, so. So here's my problem though, is that maybe once every two years, I'll have an opinion and I'll write an article about it and I won't think much about it, but it'll stir some controversy.

[01:06:39] Like a lot of people won't like that. And I get a lot of heat on social media. And like you say, an article is not a conversation, but then suddenly a million people want to have a conversation with me about it. Then what do you do?

[01:06:51] And by the way, so this happens a lot, like Jordan Peterson, this happens too, even much more than me. Yeah, sure. Okay, so this is something that I find particularly interesting. So in order to help us keep our beliefs tethered to reality,

[01:07:08] we need feedback about what we believe. We need to hear the best arguments against it. You know, when I was talking to the sound engineer, Jay, before we went on, he said, you're a very hated man. And I had to really chuckle about that.

[01:07:21] I'm called a Nazi 10 times before breakfast in the morning or some kind of heinous thing because of a position I've taken. And so you have to kind of figure out whose voice is not worth listening to. Is the, and the answer to that is if by definition,

[01:07:38] most people are average in something, then by definition, they're not worth listening to. So like if I, just to keep it on people's names, we mentioned like, so if I wrote something and Shermer calls me or Richard Dawkins calls me or Peterson, I've become friendly with,

[01:07:57] someone calls me or my friend Gad Saad calls me and they said, whoa, Bogosian, like what the, like what, this is like, you've really, okay, that means something because I respect them. They have an intellectual gravitas, et cetera. But if a random, you know,

[01:08:16] 6969 retard or whatever on the internet, you know, the username comes and they start criticizing me about something. Why should I listen to them? What substantive contribution do they have domain specific expertise? They're like an anonymous guy with a vulgar Twitter handle. Like, why should I listen to them?

[01:08:36] Right, so there's, let's say there's three types of people who argue with you on Twitter. There's the trolls and random people who you don't care about. And then, but then there might be the experts who you do, they don't know you, but you do care about their opinion.

[01:08:51] And then I find the most painful category is the people who do know you and they're addressing you like in the third person, like, oh, I know him. He's wrong all the time or whatever. How do you personally deal with that? Well, two things.

[01:09:06] So, you know, when we wrote this book, I sent the last chapter, which is based on John Hite's work to John Hite. And I said, how is this? He said, yeah, it's great. Works really well. At this point, I almost listened to nobody anymore

[01:09:18] because I have no mechanism to weed out the lunatics from the non-lunatics. You know, and the thing is when we did the grievance study stuff in 2018, I just got hit piece after hit piece after hit piece. I mean, it was, at one point it was like

[01:09:33] they were coming out daily. And at first I started, you know, I wrote to Salon, I emailed Salon, I called Salon, Slate, I wrote to them, called them. I called all these, can I come on? Can I have a plug? Can I rebut these?

[01:09:44] Nothing, nothing, nothing, not one. So, you know, and my colleagues at work who have a pathological hatred and disdain for me, they're just opinion, it just doesn't matter. It's totally wrong. Why should I listen to them? Who cares about, I couldn't possibly care.

[01:10:03] What substantive accomplishments do they have? Now, there are rules of the game that we play by, all right? So there are certain, like the coin of the realm in academic publishing is my friend, Bruce Gilley is doing this now.

[01:10:16] He wrote the case which has brought to Bruce this morning. He's the guy who wrote the case for colonialism at the third world quarterly. And the journal received credible death threats. They wanted to take his PhD, they wanted his job. They had a petition circulating about him.

[01:10:33] I tell Bruce all the time, he's the second most hated man in Portland State University. And so what they should have done in that situation, there's no need for any of that name calling, infectives or anything. What they should have done is say, you know what?

[01:10:47] Bruce Gilley is wrong. I'm gonna humiliate him in the public square or his arguments. And they should have rebutted his arguments. But they did not do that in third world quarterly. They did that in other journals. And then Bruce wrote a response to that.

[01:10:59] That's how we participate in civil, that's how civil societies advance the knowledge base. That's also why I said there's a legitimation crisis because we have a lack of trust in our institutions. So now if someone makes an argument, you find odious, you have a mob come after them

[01:11:16] and threaten to take away their PhD as opposed to doing the intellectual work to engage their arguments. But how I- Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. No, you go. No, well, how do you personally deal with that? Yeah, okay.

[01:11:27] Did you see what I did right there in our interaction? Yeah, you said, and this was in the book, you said, you go. Yeah. And then I said, I started to say, you go. Then, you know, you go. And I know that exact conversation happens in the book.

[01:11:39] There you go. That's one thing people can take away from this. If you speak at the same time and say, go, no, you go, almost everyone will go. But you told me to go because you read the book. So now I'm gonna go.

[01:11:49] So I think I just wanted to linger on that because I think that's, again, something people can use. It's like when you walk into a door at the same time and you bump into each other, you should step back and just let the person pass through.

[01:12:00] The way that you deal with that is it depends what your goal is. Like, what's your goal for engagement? At this point, I almost engage, I went around the world repeatedly and I had talks in front of actual people, not people from the audience. You can see these,

[01:12:17] I don't even know how many of these are on YouTube at this point. And I would always say in the talk, always, if you disagree with me, you go to the front of the line and I wanna hear from you first.

[01:12:27] And I take those and I would urge other people to do this. I don't want an echo chamber. I wanna challenge. That's the only way that I can make sure that I can have justified confidence in what I believe. Oh, that's the other thing that you said before.

[01:12:41] You used a phrase. You said, gosh, you said confident. I can't remember, but the word should have been justified confidence. But anyway, sorry, I shouldn't cut. Jay just cut that part out right there. But okay, so let's say my goal is,

[01:13:05] my goals are mixed in that I have an opinion that I wanna be able to express and I usually research my opinions pretty thoroughly when it's sufficient enough to write them. Doesn't mean I can't be wrong, but I'll have more research than the average next person.

[01:13:20] But so that's what my one goal is to express an opinion freely and to convince people that my opinion's right. The other goal is I don't wanna lose friends. And those goals don't match very well. Okay, so I am gonna suggest something to you.

[01:13:36] I don't know you very well. I think, how well do you know Brian, by the way? Pretty well, I mean, we've had, you know, a couple dozen conversations. Oh, okay. And we've known each other over the past year. So I would feel confident saying this to Brian,

[01:13:49] I don't know you very well, but I'm gonna suggest something that may be radical. I would suggest that, let me rephrase that. I would question whether or not those friends are authentic friends to you. That's what everyone says. Like, oh, if they're gonna abandon you on just this,

[01:14:05] they weren't really friends to begin with. And that might be true, but I just have a hard time believing that. Well, it's a testable hypothesis. Well, okay, how do you test if someone wasn't really a true friend to begin with? Well, you just be genuine and authentic

[01:14:19] in your relationships and say what you mean. Yeah, all right. Yeah, and if someone's like, I can't believe you believe that. Now, people take authenticity to mean a whole bunch of things that it doesn't mean. Like if you're attracted to your friend's wife,

[01:14:36] you know, you don't say to her, I wanna sodomize you with a cucumber, right? So you have to have some kind of a, being authentic doesn't mean just brain dumping every single vulgar impulse that you have, right? Every base desire. It means being honest with yourself and others

[01:14:52] and speaking in a forthright and clear way. The Greeks called that parrhesia, speaking truth in the face of danger. I would argue to you that if you began this immediately and you started weeding out your friends, you would have some,

[01:15:05] you would know almost immediately who your friends were and who they weren't. And that the quality of your life personally would go up dramatically. I believe that, I guess it's just a surprise factor when yet another person sort of reveals who they are

[01:15:20] as not being, you know, what I thought they were. But isn't that only better for you that they're, the sooner people reveal themselves to you as not your genuine friends, the better. So that's even more reason that you just should start immediately. Yeah, no, you're right.

[01:15:37] That's absolutely right. I mean, my solution was to basically get off social media pretty much completely and to kind of hide a little bit, and that's worked as well. But that's not as good an answer as your answer. Well, I don't know.

[01:15:54] I mean, what's your goal in doing, I mean, is your goal to, is this how you make your money through the podcast? No, but I like to do it because I do have very strong beliefs about many things.

[01:16:08] Not as many as like the full Democrat or Republican platform but a few things that are important to me about living a better, more peaceful life, which is important to me. And some of that actually involves not having opinions about some things and some of it is about,

[01:16:26] don't make a bad financial choice with college if you're feeling strapped or if your kids are feeling strapped. My goal is really to help people with these opinions, but when people disagree, particularly because of some cognitive bias they have, they really disagree.

[01:16:44] And I've lost friends over the college thing. Right, and that's okay too if they disagree. But what I don't, I guess what I don't understand is why would that cause them to not be friends with you anymore? I don't know. Now I'm thinking about it and I'm sorry,

[01:16:58] this is about all about my losing friendships. No, please, sorry, it's important. Like I wrote an article, I wrote several articles about, and even a book about why kids shouldn't go to college and here are some alternatives

[01:17:12] that could be even more valuable in your life and so on. And I had one set of friends who had went to a very good school and they didn't agree with me and maybe I became too much the messenger instead of,

[01:17:27] I mean, I bet if I had used your techniques, I probably would have still been friends with them. But then I noticed at one point that they had unfriended me and. Yeah, but that's the thing too. Do you really wanna walk on eggshells around your friends?

[01:17:40] Yeah, no, that's a good point. And you're right, but it's hard to switch. It's like, it's not like it's, you're making it seem like a light switch. Like, okay, I'm turning that friendship off. I'm turning it on. Like, is he not a good friend? No, no.

[01:17:53] There's like a lingering light. No, if I gave that impression or if I articulated myself unclearly, I apologize. It's not that, it's just that like, I have a friend like Matt Thornton is a good friend of mine. He's my jujitsu coach and we played Dungeons and Dragons together.

[01:18:09] And he was the guy I went out with with John Frankel the other night. And I have pretty substantive disagreements with him and I feel that I can completely voice those and that our friendship is never in danger because we disagree about some thing, like some stance.

[01:18:30] And I, go ahead, you have a thought. I think that's, and I will take your invitation to go ahead. I think that's the critical thing is that when you don't feel, like no matter what you express, you don't feel like you're in danger with that friend.

[01:18:43] And maybe before I qualify someone as a friend, I should first have that feeling. Yeah, so maybe they're a friendly. Yeah. So you're married. Yeah. To a woman. Yes. And in your relationship, you need to be honest and authentic

[01:19:03] and you need to not be able to feel like you're walking on eggshells, but you also have to be careful to a certain degree. It's a thread the needle thing, right? You have to give a little bit of thoughtfulness to how you articulate yourself to,

[01:19:20] sometimes we have a tendency to become so comfortable we just pour things out instead of thinking about someone's feelings. I mean, again, I think some people think that being authentic means you can be an asshole because that's your true self. Right, that's like the radical honesty

[01:19:36] version of authenticity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's all interesting and look, the techniques in this book are really gonna change the way I have conversations with people. And by the way, if you enjoy debates, these are also great debating techniques.

[01:19:54] I wonder if you've thought of this one technique, which has come up a lot for me in particularly in debates or intense conversations. It's a technique I call labeling, which is let's say I'm arguing about voting. So the main reason I don't vote

[01:20:08] is I like to be really neutral. I have a podcast. I wanna have Democrats and Republicans on my podcast. So I try to be neutral. And I think when you vote, it gives you a bias towards whichever party you vote for. And I don't wanna have a bias.

[01:20:20] The other reason is I know my vote doesn't count because 150 million people vote. So it's easy for me to buy my neutrality without it really affecting the election in some sense. But I had a debate with someone who was very much,

[01:20:36] who basically thought it was very un-American to not vote. And at some point during the debate, and it was an official debate, like people were watching it. And at one point during the debate, he said, in this election in particular, if you don't vote, then you're a racist

[01:20:52] or you could be thought of as a racist. And so I have this technique I call labeling, which I said, look, are we debating racism? And which I'm happy to debate about, but that's a different topic. Or are we debating the 250 year old institution of voting,

[01:21:10] which is a different topic. So I labeled his comment as not relevant to the conversation. It was a comment about racism as opposed to about voting. Correct. And I find that useful. Yeah, it's really good. We in the book, we also from hostile negotiations,

[01:21:27] they call it emotional labeling. And you don't ever wanna say, oh, I can see you're upset or I can see you're angry. You would say that must be so frustrating. And even capturing that in that word frustrating can be helpful. It's also a type of empathy,

[01:21:46] but you can capture it emotionally, capture if you wanna say label, you can emotionally label things to help better guide you through that conversation. But again, the whole point of this is that you can have better relationships. You can clean up your belief life

[01:22:02] or at least have somebody have people to bounce it off. And if someone knows something you don't know, how freaking awesome for you, right? That you just, you get to not live in delusion any longer than you have to. I mean, it's really a win-win for everybody.

[01:22:17] It's great. I mean, one thing that's an idea that's related to this, the topics in your book is the concept of steel manning your argument. So you should know your opinion or your stance so well that you could argue the opposite side better than they can.

[01:22:33] And I find that to be very useful as well. Yeah, and that's the one thing I think that we're sorely lacking in almost all of the humanities today. People don't know, they look at the university as some kind of a great big Catholic catechism

[01:22:49] where you go in with questions and you have pre-recorded answers that you kind of regurgitate. And you have to know the other side of an argument in order to be justified in the confidence you have for your own position. Well, all of this has been so interesting.

[01:23:08] Peter Rogozian, you wrote this with James Lindsay, he's also one of my favorites from his cynical theories book. How to have impossible conversations, a very practical guide. My guess is everyone listening to this, the couple of hundred thousand people listening to this

[01:23:24] have all had many impossible conversations this past year about economics, politics, pandemics. I always find on social media that everybody suddenly brings out, I didn't even know that this local gym teacher has a PhD in epidemiology until I read his comments on Twitter. Everyone's an expert on,

[01:23:43] they're either a general or an expert on the Royal family or all of the above. And I think this is really valuable advice because not necessarily to have a great conversation with somebody, although that will be the result, but to also just feel better.

[01:24:02] It's better to not be agitated in the middle of a conversation. Yeah, I think so. And so I hope that the book, again, as my first book, we went right to paperback. So there's no hard cover. It's not about making the cash.

[01:24:15] I just want to move society in a better direction and hopefully that will help. I hope you do. And again, there's very practical techniques. These are techniques you can literally use like an hour after you read this book. I'm gonna go talk to my wife right now

[01:24:27] and start an argument and then use these techniques to make everybody feel better. Well, thank you. I'm innocent in that. Well, I appreciate you having me on. Thank you, James. I really appreciate it. Yeah, Peter, next time you're on, let's find something to argue about

[01:24:41] and then we could use your technique. We could both use your techniques. Oh, I see what you're saying. It's a win-win. Yeah. All right, Peter, thanks so much. I really appreciate you coming on. My pleasure, thanks.