207 Jesse Lawler | Cognitive Bias: Evolving From Physic Injury

Yeah. One thing that's really useful is to. To really try to either make yourself or invite in somebody else to the conversation to make the strongest pro and con argument that you possibly can. It's like if you're thinking you might want to try something but you're not so sure about it, don't just hear from the person that thinks it's a great idea. Find somebody that seems smart and articulate but that hates these idea and have a conversation with them, too. You know, the marketplace of ideas is what we want going on inside each of our heads so we can be, you know, smart shoppers.

That's Jesse Lawler, and this is episode 207 of Wellness Force Radio. What's up, my friend? It's your host, Josh Trent. And welcome back to another episode for your weekly access to global experts in all things wellness as we discover the physical and emotional intelligence we need to live life well. In this episode, we're welcoming back Jesse Lalor, my friend and podcast host from Smart Drug Smarts, for his 3 Pete appearance on Wellness Force. And we're talking about something today that most people have a huge blind spot about, and that is cognitive bias and its relationship to psychic injury. These things that happen in our past that shape our current reality and if left unchecked, our future, well, these can be directed from this evolution of psychic injury. And it's a fascinating topic of which Jesse is a profound expert. In hundreds of episodes as the host of Smart Drug Smarts and Decades Studying Human Cognition, this episode is exploring the deeper recesses of the conscious and subconscious mind so that by the end of the show, you'll be able to do the work in uncovering your own cognitive biases and beginning the healing path from psychic injury that may have been imprinted to the mind. This podcast is brought to you by our partnership with intelliskin. They make human technology, which is this smart compression that pulls your shoulders back throughout the day. You've probably seen photographs of athletes like Kelly Slater, multiple NBA teams, and recently we had our early surf movement masterclass photographs that were released where Dr. Tim Brown spoke about how critical posture is. And if you've been on the fence to try this human technology, the smart compression, give it a test drive. Over at Intelliskin.net, use code WF20. They give you 20% off your entire order. That's Intelliskin.net for 20% off using code WF20. That actually helps you breathe more from your belly. Deep breaths are so important. It helps you pull your shoulders back Whether you're at the sitting desk or the standing desk, it's incredible. I know you're gonna get so much from this smart compression. Give it a test drive over@intelliskin.net now. If you listen to the previous two shows with Jesse, which are linked in the show notes, we talked so in depth about cognitive performance and enhancement with nootropics and more of the neuroscience and biology of axons, neurons, action potential. You know, the super kinda cool sciencey, geeky fun stuff like dendrites and motor cortex. But what I love most about Jesse is his desire for this continual frontier. You know, the one place we're all going. We explore this on the show today and cover topics like the replication crisis in research, the bandwagon effect for different diets, vegan, paleo, vegetarian, keto, the power of looking at pros and cons in decision making and the dangers of group think. How to avoid this. We also talk about the role of psychedelics in healing and re imprinting past tragedies and what Jesse believes we all can do just a handful of things every single day to improve our emotional intelligence by exploring these cognitive biases. Show notes from today are wellnessforce.com207. Make sure you give Jesse a shout on social media on the interwebs. Let him know you heard him here on Wellness Force Radio. All right, let's step in right now with Jesse Lawler. So we know that lies can be something we tell ourselves, but. But we also know that lies are something that once we tell ourselves that lie, other people tend to believe it. This emotional contagion, we've talked about this with Gretchen Rubin on the show, but today we're bringing back Jesse Lawler for a three peat. Third time on the show we're talking about cognitive bias evolving from psychic injury. Jesse, welcome back to the show, man.

Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me.

People already know you, but if they don't know you, if they haven't gone back in the annex of Wellness Force, give people just a quick and skinny on Jesse and why he's so fascinated with the brain.

Shucks. Well, I am a computer software developer by training and that sort of led me down the road of all things cognitive optimization. And I've always been into science and stuff and so the two sort of naturally go together. I've been for the last five plus years now running a podcast called Smart Drug Smarts, which started kind of as my personal dive into looking at nootropics and drugs that we can take to improve the workings of our brain. And at this point has kind of feathered out into a lot of neuroscience related research and just, you know, looking at how our brains work, how they can be made to last longer and, you know, preserve them in health as long as possible. And also what we can do for sort of, you know, short term upticks to, you know, make them function in an as needed basis as well as possible.

Smart drug smarts. Every episode I hear it's like this ultimate masterclass in all things cognition, brain health, and honestly, man, human optimization. Since you started the show, has it gone in any different directions that you never even knew it was gonna go since from the beginning?

Well, you know, it's like I started the show thinking that I was not going to get bored of the brain. It wouldn't be something I was going to, you know, want to bail on after, you know, 10 or 20 episodes, but I wouldn't have necessarily predicted that I would be 200 episodes deep and counting, which is where we're at now. I think it'll be episode number 226 this week. But, you know, there's no lack of research going on. In fact, I think the amount of brain research going on now is probably, you know, greater than at any point in human history. A lot of that's because there's more scientists now than at any point in human history, which is kind of a interesting and unsung fact that I feel like a lot of people aren't really aware of. And then the other thing is just technology has improved so much in the past couple of decades that things that used to be social science experiments are now much more actual neuroscience experiments where they're looking at what sections of the brain are active and how active. What's the blood flow like to the medulla when I do wiggle my pinky toe or whatever it is?

Yeah, and there's so many tools out there too. It's like we know that there's the headphones you can wear that'll activate your motor cortex. We know that there's human charger, which will shine light into your ear. And then we know that there's just good old fashioned human touch. So all these things can really uplift what our brain's already doing, which is have these connections fire how many times per second? I don't know, maybe you'll know. But along that process, we also understand that the way we see things, Jesse, like they're not always the truth and they're stories that we tell ourselves. And really, this is why I'm excited To talk to you about cognition and some of these fallacies, these biases that we evolve over time. How would you define this, man? What's a cognitive bias for people that.

Don'T know, we feel like logic is something that's obvious. Like, well, you know, a two year old has logic and that's not really true. Logic is actually something that accrues over time as we get experience working with the world. And there are certain ways that our brain is almost kind of balanced to not be logical. Where it has been advantageous for us to be overly cautious about certain things or less cautious than we should be about other things. And so where we're basically not on an even playing field, where our brain doesn't predispose us to think rationally, where our brain actually predisposes us to think irrationally. So I'm sure we'll be talking all about that. But probably the classic example is attributing agency to things that aren't necessarily there. If I'm walking on the plains of whatever continent I live on 50,000 years ago, when I hear a rustle in the grass and I'm maybe out on a hunting party by myself and no homies are around me, then it's better for me to assume that this might be a tiger hunting me and be wrong about that than to assume that's probably just a stick and not be wrong. It's like the cost of failure on not thinking that this might actually be something that doesn't have my best interests at heart is really high. It's like, I'm probably likely to get eaten. Whereas, you know, being wrong and like, oh, you know, it was nothing, you know, no big deal. Maybe I'm embarrassed. Maybe it's, you know, somebody that jumps out at me and it's just one of my friends. But anyway, there's just a really unbalanced, you know, success or failure ratio there on what is factually true. And so our brain is sort of, you know, wired us to. To not worry about the facts, but just be more worried than we should be. And something like that is probably why we tend to attribute intentionality to all sorts of things. You know, whether that's, you know, seeing ghosts or, you know, believing in supernatural deities or whatever it might be.

Yeah, and the fascinating part is that not only have you talked about this in episode 220 with Dr. Richard Nisbet, but he talked about really, like, we're sometimes winging it, right? Like, winging it. It leads us to feel that we are just kind of like in a space where we're doing the right thing, but yet our intuition, it doesn't always steer us the right way. And you guys both talked about this in a 30 minute interview. It has really no predictive value of anything at all on how people will work together. Is this a definition? Is this an example of cognition and its bias?

Yeah, that was a fascinating point that he made there, which is it just flies in the face of all of our intuitions. Basically he's that the standard way that people do hiring for businesses of, you know, having the last step in the process be this sort of all important make or break interview where the candidate for the job comes in and meets the people and talks with them for a while and sort of, you know, says why they want the job or, you know, why they'd be good for it or what their weaknesses might be. All of that has almost no value compared to what was already sent in on their, you know, one or two page resume at the very beginning of the process. The amount of predictive value that you get from the resume as to how they will actually do in the job versus what you think you get from this, you know, really detailed seeing the color of shirt they wear, hearing how they pronounce their words, all that stuff from the 30 minute interview, it just has, has almost no predictive value. Even though it really feels intuitively to us like it would.

Because people aren't necessarily being themselves or maybe they're being a version of themselves that's attached to some way of being or thinking that they believe there's a bias that they have to do in order to be successful. How many actual biases are there? Are there more than a hundred? I've seen reports. There's 20, there's 58. I mean, what's the jury saying, man? How many cognitive biases do we have?

I think this depends on which scientist you're going to ask because I mean, a lot of them are probably related to one another and just depends on how fine you want to slice and dice. But there are a lot of ways that we are not naturally inclined to think strictly rationally about things.

I love that you brought up the fact too about being in the field. That bias kept us alive. There's this zero risk bias I was looking at before we came on the show here. And sociologists have found that we love certainty. Even if it's counterproductive, it eliminates risk entirely, meaning there's no chance of us ever being harmed. But then we also don't grow. I Mean, that in my example is probably the worst bias. I think human beings entertain.

And that one is really interesting to look at how it changes over a lifetime. Because when you think about it like a baby takes all sorts of risks and really enjoys it. I mean, learning to walk is something that, you know, any human kind of needs to do and it's just this really important thing. So despite the fact that falling down might hurt, it might be embarrassing, it might be whatever, and we obviously fail a whole lot in falling down a whole lot before we're ever able to master toddling around, it's just something that there's this inherent joy in getting it right because it's so important that we do in order to be able to move on to the next developmental steps. You know, once you're like a 16, 17, 18 year old, you probably kind of know everything you really need to know. And at that point, like learning new stuff, I mean, there's, there's only a limited number of things you need to learn once you know how to hunt and gather and you know, what, what songs you sing in your village and stuff like that. There's not this whole wealth of, of world of knowledge out there. So at that point it kind of makes sense to really retrench and get much more risk averse and become kind of reactionary in your outlook because there's nothing more to learn if you live at that stage of history rather than the baby that has all sorts of stuff that they sort of need to learn on the way to becoming a functional adult in your pre modern society.

We're wired certain ways, you know, the first imprinting on our nervous system and you know, really in the deep recesses of our brain ages, you know, 0 through 10, conception through 10, they really channel our personality tendency types, our ways of being, how we interrelate with other people. I remember in our last episode, number 97, you said optimists tend to be stronger responders to placebos. I'm curious if we could contrast nocebo placebo and then also these cognitive biases. How do you think these three interrelate?

Yeah, that's a great question. And unfortunately they've done a lot more placebo versus nocebo studies. So I think it's sort of an unbalanced study map out there right now. But placebo is basically a, a false expectation that something, you know, good will happen or whatever happens won't be as bad as it actually will be. But it's kind of like an optimistic but irrational expectation which can kind of take on a weight of its own in the human mind. Nocebo is just the opposite. Nocebo is, is when you're sort of falsely brought to expect that something will be worse than it probably will be and that that negative expectation actually makes it worse than it might be. And we're subject to. And both of them have definite huge power over the human brain. But we've just done a lot more study on. On positive studies like placebo than on. On nocebo studies.

I think for me, when we look at Joe Dispenza's work, I mean, he studies this in detail, in depth, which he would be a phenomenal. I would love to hear you interview Joe Dispenza. Have you ever considered that?

Yeah, I'm not super familiar with his work. I mean, it does ring a bell.

But he has this entire dialogue around the power of thought. And it's for some people, a little esoteric, a little woo woo. But, you know, he's also grounded in hardcore, in the analytics and the data that come from watching someone's brain on a PET scan and seeing what happens during the power of thought. We also know, Jesse, that when it comes to bias, there's so many people out there, especially in health and wellness, they seek all this information, but I think their subconscious knows they're not actually going to do anything with it. And actually, there's a lot of studies out there that show more info is not always better. Like, less info. People can often make more accurate decisions and predictions. Do you feel the same way or do you differ in that regard?

And have you had an episode on your show where you've talked about the. A study looking at varieties of. It was like Cheetos or something like that in a grocery store where, like, if you give people three choices, they analyze the options available to them and they make a choice, but you give them like 35 choices of the same thing. And even though everybody intuitively we think, oh, more choices is good, like, we believe that's what we want. But if you actually present us with that, it's like, oh boy, that's. I don't want to read each one of these 35 containers. And then you wind up either just not making a choice, like opting out entirely, or making just grabbing the first one and making a completely uneducated choice versus at least looking over the top three.

Oh my gosh. And it's almost like in a way, the dovetail of placebo, nocebo and cognitive bias, how they kind of dance together. I almost Feel in a way that gathering information is a way for people to get so exhausted by decision fatigue that they know they're not going to make a decision because they're, quote, so exhausted.

Yeah, there's a book recommendation and I'm going to throw out this recommendation even though I haven't read the whole book. So word of warning called algorithms to Live by, and it's written by a computer scientist, mathematician type, basically looking at ways that people can use algorithms. Which algorithm is basically just like a recipe for behavior is all that means. It sounds like a big word, but it's not, but sort of a recipes for behavior that can help fight some of our natural biases. Like, you know, one of them is when. When you are trying to make a selection on something that there's potentially an unlimited amount of choices on. Like, you know, a dating website would be a great example. You know, oftentimes one of the better things we can do is kind of set out our, our minimum viable set of expectations and then, like, you know, wait until we get over that set of expectations three times. And once we have three things that are over that set of expectations, just pick the best of the three and assume, like, it varies from one domain to the next, but your chances of getting something that are way, way, way better than anything that is beyond like that first group of three that have made it over your minimum rung for success is probably just going to be wasted time. And of course, you know, some of these things, it depends like, what the time horizon on making a decision is. It's obviously if you're, you know, looking for a marriage partner and you're 17, that's a different sort of constellation of choices than if you're looking for a marriage partner and you're 87 and. Yes, but yeah, algorithms to live by would be a really interesting one for anybody to check out.

At some point. Every human being gets what science calls psychic woundage. And I think really this is an imprint that kind of further perpetuates a bias that we have, this psychic wounding. I mean, is this just trauma? Is it something that we're perceiving as trauma? What actually imprints the psychic wound in our mind?

Yeah, well, you and I were talking offline a couple of weeks ago about a book that I read a while ago and I thought was fantastically interesting. This was actually written before either of us were born, but it was called the Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim. And it's actually talking about fairy tales, like, you know, kids, fairy Tales and why they have stuck around. And, like, why kids, like, when they fall in love with a fairy tale and they want the parent to read it, like, five, 10, 20, 30, 100 times. And the parents just bored out of their skull, like, what is it about this story that keeps this kid so engaged? But oftentimes, stories that engage a kid at a certain point in their psychological development is like, there's a really important, you know, underlying something or another about how that kid, as a young being, sort of fits into society that they're grappling with. And anyway, I just found it a fascinating book. And one of the theses of his book, and I'm hoping I can do it justice here in a short time, is that every human being at some point between, you know, first being born and popping out into the world and becoming an adult within their society has sort of a first big moment of reckoning where something really lets them down, really violates their expectations that they're this little, you know, God king of the universe. And if you grew up in, you know, a really stressful surroundings, you might get that on day one out the womb. Whereas if you're kind of, you know, put on a pedestal and you've got a really, you know, loving, supportive family around you and you're really, you know, nurtured and protected, you might be, you know, 16, 17, before something, like, really, really comes crashing down on you. Like, you know, maybe the first person you fall in love spurns you. And, like, that was the first time that the world didn't, like, live up to your expectations of what you were taught to expect. But anyway, the gist of Bettelheim's thesis is that the developmental age that a person is at, when they have their first big scrap that they lose with reality, really kind of sets in motion, sort of the psychic trajectory for the rest of their life is, like, trying not necessarily to address that wrong, although oftentimes it is that. But at least trying to, like, kind of understand, you know, how was it that I misunderstood the world so much that it came and smacked me in this particular way?

Yeah.

And, you know, the difference between somebody that receives a psychic wound when they're. When. When they're two and is still trying to, you know, figure out, like, the most important thing in the world is, like, how do bathroom things work? Like, what is poop versus, you know, the psychic wound that appears when you're, like, you know, 14 and first starting to feel, like the feelings of love and romance. It's like, those are two different People and the way that they are going to, you know, probably address psychological things and what's going to motivate them going forward throughout their life.

Basically, I think that we all get imprinted and we have events that happen through us, to us or for us, however you want to look at it. And then we spend the rest of our adult life working through those, using those to our advantage. But I think a lot of people are either scared of that or they just don't even know those things are there, those events, those imprints. Do you believe that people get confused or what is people's general kind of like understanding of cognitive bias?

Well, I guess in general people really don't understand how pervasive it is or they think that cognitive bias is something that everybody else suffers from. But not me personally. I mean, I think honestly that's probably how most of us go through the world. It's worth maybe making a quick diversion to talk about optical illusions because I feel like optical illusions are something that we've all experienced and that we see them. We look at the MC Escher painting or whatever, like these impossible shapes or the thing where the two lines look of like they're different lengths and then you measure them with a ruler and you prove to yourself that they're not you. Regardless of what you know to be factually true. You cannot unsee an optical illusion if it's, if it's one of that type of illusion. And being aware that we, you know, our perceptual systems can just, you know, misdeal us information in that way, I feel like optical illusions present a really compelling argument that we're probably doing the same thing in all sorts of non perceptual ways. Things that aren't like, you know, what color is this dress or you know, what is the comparative length of these two lines. We have much more, like we said, cognitive biases that don't show up in the perceptual realm, but do show up in the, you know, the realm of human relationships. You know, one that there's probably, I guess maybe the great grandpappy of cognitive biases is something called the fundamental attribution error. And that's one actually that I spoke a lot with Dr. Richard Nisbett about also. But what that is is essentially kind of the, you know, walk a mile in somebody else's moccasins error, where we are always completely aware of the context of our own decisions, which is why they seem reasonable to us. Not realizing that just cause they seem reasonable to us won't you know, that won't be worth a glass of water to anybody else, and vice versa.

How do we explain these flat Earthers, then? Like, what's their bias? Like, we know the earth isn't flat, it's round. We have photographs of the people. What's the deal with that?

You know? You know, it's funny if flat Earthers, people have been talking about them a bunch recently. I want to meet a flat Earther. Like, I wonder if, like, flat earthers are a conspiracy theory. Like, I don't know anybody that actually purports to be one. So I feel completely like I'm beating up a straw man. If I try to, you know, talk about what they're thinking just because. Yes. I don't know anybody that thinks that.

Let's contrast this then. Okay, so we're in the World Wide Web. We're connected. We're talking. You and I are talking through the World Wide Web. What is the Internet's impact on cognitive biases for people?

Oh, wow, okay. Boy, that's a great question. You might have accidentally, like, uncorked my head from something that will keep me talking for the next 25 minutes, but so I came up with this. Everybody's heard of peak oil. I think I coined the term peak reality a couple of years ago. And I think we've already probably passed peak reality. I think peak reality was probably sometime within the past 10 years. But. And so much of the information that each of us get day in, day out now is coming through some sort of digitally mediated stream rather than from our own direct senses. Whether it's this conversation that we're having, you know, as you, as you say, over the Internet, or, you know, news that we're reading that somebody else heard, it was written down, it was transmitted to us, blah, blah, blah. If you lived, you know, 200 years ago and you were a gentleman farmer or whatever, it's like you got a lot of your information through, like, the work of your own hands. It's like, I know how the soil works because, you know, I dig the soil with my own shovel and stuff like that. You had, like all this first person experience with the world, and you might not know a whole lot, but the things that you did know, a lot of it, you knew from direct experience. It was not mediated by any third party. You, you know, you got the source on your hands from, from doing the stuff yourself. And I feel like that is. Is. I mean, it's good that that's changing because we're not all gentlemen farmers anymore. But on the other hand, it's like we're getting so and our information and what we build our belief systems on from stuff that we directly participate in, and that will only continue to be the case. It's like if think of all the different scientific studies that are going on now, and people that are really pressing the ground forward on any one of those domains are so specialized with so many years of study in that particular subdomain of the subdomain, that really they can only talk intelligently within that domain on other people that are vetted experts in that field. And they kind of have to throw bones back to the rest of us like, hey, here's what we found out. And you kind of have to take our word for it to a certain degree. And so I just feel like the fact that so much of the information that we get is via third parties, hopefully trusted third parties, but not always. It's just gonna lead to a proliferation of kind of confusion and open room for doubt. I mean, not necessarily justified doubt, but certainly room for skepticism on almost all the information we get now. And I really think it's fair to say that the greatest overarching challenge for humanity at this point is to come up with a system of verifying factual claims in a way that will be accepted by the majority of the people. Because if we, if every conversation about, you know, he said, she said or public policy or anything else needs to just turn into people yelling at one another because they can't define their terms correctly or you can't agree to a definition, it's like, then we're just going to get nowhere. I mean, it becomes a shouting match.

And, you know, wow, there is so much to unpack there. Jesse. Okay, let me pull the E break, because when you first started talking, we understand that there's peer reviewed studies, but then we also know that these peer reviewed studies, they have certain biases, even if they are peer reviewed. Like, what if your peer reviewed studies are from the peers that are in your same field that maybe get paid by the same pharmacology departments or the same sponsors, whatever it is, that's the first question is the how do we actually know what's on the Internet is really true? And don't you think that it's our responsibility, it's our increasingly powerful responsibility to have a vetting mechanism within our own cognition that's not biased on anything and just seeing information for how it truly is?

Yeah, I think, yes. But the question is like, how is that actually tactically accomplished in real life? And honestly, I don't feel like we have a good answer to that question yet. I feel like, like we're all struggling to kind of come to grips with that of like, you know, how can I verify that the sources of my information today, you know, are correct? And even if we're talking strictly about something like science rather than politics, which we would like to think, you know, if it sort of comes down from the hallowed halls of research science, we should take it fairly seriously. But there's something called the replication crisis that's been sort of abuzz in the science news for the last few years, where a lot of times a study will come out and becomes news and hey, you know, such and such was discovered, but then somebody else tries to rerun the exact same study or what they believe is the exact same study, and they come back with a different result. And you know, fairly important scientific findings, or at least ones that were fairly widely publicized, when they've tried to rerun those under laboratory conditions in different labs elsewhere, they aren't able to sort of back up the original claim. And even some groups of replication attempts have found like, shockingly few replications actually go through as planned, which is really scary. And there's sort of some, some built in problems with sort of the scientific vetting process there because there, there's not a whole lot of scientific accolades that go to the me too scientists who just rerun somebody else's experiment to confirm or deny it. It's like they're not credited with the discovery or, you know, their face on, you know, the COVID of the big scientific publication or whatever it is. If they just, just say, yeah, that guy, that, that, that thing that that other group of scientists found out a couple years ago, that still seems to be true. It's like that just doesn't make much of a headline. But on the other hand, the cost of not having things verified, it could also be quite high.

The bandwagon effect. This is a huge bias. It's like, you know, some group of people, whether it might be paleo or keto or vegetarian or vegan. We see this so much, Jesse, in the diet world where there's a bandwagon effect. This contagion of, well, it worked for my neighbor, so it has to. That is where I believe we really start to self destruct with these biases. Like what are in your mind, the top ones that we should really be aware of, these biases that can actually harm us, our health.

Yeah, I guess jumping in too soon on something because our hopefulness alarms are ringing hard and kind of like, hey, this worked for my neighbor, or my neighbor said this worked for him. It's like none of us really know unless our neighbor was in a peer reviewed study exactly what it was our neighbor is doing. If our neighbor is anything like we are, then we know that in any given day in our lives, there's not just one variable, there's a whole slew of variables going on. So oftentimes to reduce what's going on in our theoretical neighbor's life down to exactly one input can be really premature. I mean, on the other hand, sometimes a major life change, like switching to a ketogenic diet in your example, it's like that probably will have effects. It'd be strange if it didn't. But on the other hand, I think, you know, pre educating oneself on both the good and the bad potentials of anything that you're going to be trying, you know, whether that's going to affect you physiologically or personally or whatever is probably well worth doing. I think as far as fighting cognitive bias, I guess to tie it back to sort of the root of the discussion a little bit is to really try to either make yourself or invite in somebody else to the conversation to make the strongest pro and con argument that you possibly can. It's like if you're thinking, thinking you might want to try something but you're not so sure about it. Don't just hear from the person that thinks it's a great idea. Find somebody that seems smart and articulate but that hates the idea and have a conversation with them too. It's like really having the marketplace of ideas is what we want going on inside each of our heads so we can be smart shoppers.

I love that. That's a great analogy. The marketplace of ideas. Sometimes we're purchasing crap.

Yeah, well, I think I stole that one from Thomas Jefferson. That is not a law or original.

Sometimes we purchase the correct things though. And I found too, just to kind of piggyback on your actionable, it's like, listen, if we're a men's group or women's group or some type of group where we're not just getting information and a mirror of how we're showing up from one type of person. A good example is I'm in a men's group. And so in my men's group there's seven other people. They all have different backgrounds, some have family, some don't. And so when we share in the group about what we're up to personally in Our business, in our lives, in our love life. We get feedback from other individuals who are at different stages in their life. I feel like that is a way to wash out some of these cognitive biases, you know, these blind spots that are talked about in emotional intelligence training so much that we don't even know. We don't know are there. Have you seen this be something that the literature or people on your podcast have been talking about? This work with other human beings to wash out the biases that hurt us?

You know, that's not really the type of thing that we would go into so much on my podcast. But my own personal take on that is that it's really useful. But I'm also a little bit suspicious of groups in that because I think groupthink is definitely a danger. It's like if you're in a group of 10 or 12 people, what the first person says, sort of that primacy effect or priming can really affect what everybody else says. It's like, if I spill my guts on, hey, here's a problem I'm having, how should I address it? And the first person to speak up is sort of one of the more dominant members of the group and holds a lot of social capital among that group and they voice their opinion on one side of it. It becomes harder for the other people to each voice their opinions if that's something that' going to conflict. So I guess my own leaning is to try to seek out, not to not get a group of people giving me advice, but to try to get advice from that group individually so that they're not coloring one another's, you know, what they might be saying.

Ah, so even sitting in the same space with people could then bleed over for contagion. You know, the bandwagon effect could be possibly in the group.

Yeah, I mean, it really depends on the group dynamics of that group. And some groups are going to be more like that than others. But especially if there's sort of an established dominance hierarchy in that group and the leader hasn't made it clear that, you know, he or she really, you know, prefers that. That adversarial ideas be brought to the table to kind of be batted around. Yeah, that. That can really squelch dissent before you even get a chance to hear the dissent. If. If a dominant member kind of says, hey, here's what I think.

Yeah, this takes some really special and honestly, people who are doing their deepest work too. And this is why I feel like we need at that young age this, you know, the conception through 10. We need our parents so much because that's going to shape how we show up in groups or even in conversation and people in public. This is really how our self awareness and our consciousness is formed so that we can learn and understand what love is and even understand what it feels like when we're in a situation that we should not be in that is unsafe to us. That's dangerous. What do you see for kids getting all these certificates and medals just for participating? Do you feel like we're setting kids up for a world that will kind of smack them when they grow into an adult by giving people participation medals and gold stars just for doing kind of normal activities?

Yeah. Prediction is a dangerous business. And the problem with saying what type of world we're setting kids up for today is nobody knows what the world's gonna be like in 15 years. I feel like a lot of what kids get today is not setting them up for the world that I grew up into, the world that we are in now. But that doesn't mean that the world is something that we make. And it might be that if we're giving everybody participation awards feeling like you're the specialist snowflake in your class just by virtue of being there, that doesn't necessarily set them up for today's world, but it might set them up for the world that exists in 20 years when if you feel bothered by anything outside, you just plug into virtual reality where all of a sudden you're the star of your own television show and it's like sort of a Truman esque world where every kid really is the star. Which is sort of a dystopian version of the future. But that might be exactly what we're kind of creating, the on ramp for kids that are so habituated to not having to deal with real conflict that all of a sudden like 17, 18, 19, they pop out into the world, they find that there is real conflict and they're like, holy shit, I want to go back into my little virtual cyber shell where everything is reaffirming.

I remember I was dating a woman in the past and I had just hung out with her family and I understood kind of her context. She was very sheltered when she was growing up and it was actually a reason why Jesse. I couldn't connect with her because I wasn't sheltered. I mean, I was thrown to the wolves at a age and so it was hard for me to connect with her. For people that are working right now, you know, that's why they're here on the podcast for their emotional growth, their emotional intelligence growth. What is one thing about cognitive bias that they really get to take away from our conversation?

Understanding of cognitive bias is a great inroad to self acceptance of your own having made bad decisions, because it is something that we are all saddled with, every single one of us does. It's, you know, it's one of those things that was a feature, not a bug, when, you know, we lived out in the wild and were cave people, you know, tens of thousands of years ago. At this point, most cognitive biases are bugs, not features. But just understanding that that exists, it could, I think, keep us from kicking ourselves when we're down quite so much if we've made bad decisions in the past that have gotten us to a place where we're not happy with now. Just recognizing that, like if you lose the debate, you really win if you recognize you lost the debate because at that point you've recognized why you were wrong and presumably you won't be wrong the same way next time. So, yeah, I kind of feel like overall it's a nice message that cognitive biases are a thing and that actually they're as well understood and a lot of them as well recognized as they are. Because even though it is sort of a built in problem with the human mind, it's also something that, you know, everybody else is set up with the same set of biases. And if you're 20% less likely to make that kind of mistakes than the average person, that's actually a giant leg up for you. It's like you're still going to make mistakes, but proportionally you might do better than your average Joe because you're going to make less than you will.

And the actionable for me too is explore what these might be. Do your work, understand that this podcast is just a spark. So this is going to be maybe a turning point for you where you can actually start vetting, setting what things you have in your psyche that are memories from the past, injuries from the past. Jesse, we get so many emails about people that have old stories, right? So the story is that when I was this age, this thing happened to me. And ever since then I haven't been able to trust a man, I haven't been able to trust a woman. It literally imprints in our nervous system, our cns, to be in this fight or flight state. Have you explored this part of cognitive bias, how it kind of wires people to just drop into that same story? That's not of service.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that we do actually get into, on my podcast quite a bit is the study of learning. And you know, learned behaviors is like your brain is a learning machine. I mean, that's what we're doing. And we talk about, you know, getting more dopamine in the brain that accelerates learning and it kind of, you know, primes our brain to start laying new neural pathways. But you know, most things, whether it's things that we're overly fearful of or things that we become addicted to, I mean, these are all situations where something that we've learned has sort of gone wrong and taken on a life of its own and we've accidentally trained ourselves to behave in a certain way in certain situations. Yeah, I've got kind of a silly thing about myself, but when I was a really little kid, I grew up in Oregon and we had slugs in the backyard. I mean, that's just a thing you have. It's a state with a lot of greenery and anyway, I thought slugs were kind of gross, but slugs are kind of gross. It was not that big of a deal. But I remember I was a little kid and I told my dad, slugs. And he's like, why are you so worried about slugs? Like, you're bigger than they are, whatever. And my dad, well meaning dad at the time, he's just like, why don't you step on one and kill it and you'll see it's not such a big deal. So like little, you know, three, four year old me, whatever I was, I stepped on the slug and you know, splattered this disgusting thing that then was like stuck to the bottom of my baby foot and I couldn't get it off and it was just all slimy and gross. And it went from being like, slugs are kind of gross to you. Oh my God, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to my four year old self. And like to this day, slugs just like, I freak out, I get the chicken skin, you know, kind of reaction when I see a big slug. And you know, it's something that if it were that important, I could probably work through it and do, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy or whatever. But because, you know, slugs can't outrun me. It's never been that major of a problem. But it is definitely one of those things where because every time for the rest of my life since then that I've seen a slug, it's kind of, you know, given me the wheelikers and I shy away from them. I'm sure that has become a self reinforcing thing. And now I cut a wide swath around slugs, which really makes no sense for an adult male to do.

Slugs are not that fast. They're actually fairly slow. I'm thinking about the way that this imprinted for you though. And I think about my own life where I've done the work to unravel some of these events, to see them now as an adult, where they don't have any more charge on my nervous system. And this is really my exploration of consciousness, you know, different states of consciousness. Now on your podcast, you talk about meditation, smart drugs, cognition, but also, Jesse, you dive into and you've had some amazing guests from the MAPS organization and this is a exploration of altered states of consciousness. Do you feel like in this explorative space of consciousness, these deeper levels of consciousness, can we do some imprinting there, some re imprinting that will help to alleviate the pain of cognitive bias?

Well, I love the fact that you can just drop the acronym MAPS and not even need to define it, that that's how well versed your audience is in the Multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies.

It's a mouth.

Yeah, it is, yeah. And I believe that Dr. Robin Carhart Harris is probably at the forefront of the active research on this. He's a researcher over in the UK doing a lot of looking at what the brain is doing under the effects. Most of his studies have been on lsd, but I believe some on magic mushrooms now as well. But what seems to happen a lot of the time with people that are using psychedelic drugs is that regions of the brain that don't typically talk with one another all that much begin talking. It's like you start getting sort of, you know, crosstalk among regions that have sort of been, you know, segregated apart from one another since somebody was a baby. You know, babies have very. All parts of the brain kind of chatter with everything else while they're getting themselves wired up to know, like, you know, this is how I wiggle my left arm, this is how I laugh, this is how I raise my eyebrows, that kind of thing. But then as we get better at operating, you know, our physical apertures, you know, our brain does a lot of pruning of connections amongst itself while we're in adolescence. And to a certain extent, firewalls go up that help us operate efficiently.

Yeah.

And you know, one of the things that makes psychedelics so interesting, both from a neuroscience perspective and also from an experiential perspective, is, is that we get Ideas coming to us from the wrong perceptual systems. You know, sounds seem to have like a color to them or things like that. Just things that wouldn't happen in sort of normal perceptual reality. And, you know, along with that, I think, is the ability for doing a lot of fresh learning because your brain is kind of in this childlike state for at least that period of a few hours where it is behaving in a really unusual way. And that allows the potential for, you know, starting to lay down new tracks of sort of learning grooves the, you know, synapses, the fire together, wire together ideas, idea just by kind of initiating that process. Now, of course, if you don't necessarily follow up on some of those ideas, just the experiences of a psychedelic trip in and of itself might not get you anything. Which is probably why when you've talked about psychedelic studies previously, you've probably mentioned how it's important to really think afterwards, when you've sobered up, about what it was you experienced, what it might have meant, and how you can apply some of these ideas in everyday waking reality without integration.

It's just honestly, more novelty for the brain. And we know the brain's so hungry for novelty all the time. It's like this psychedelic experience, though, for all of us if we choose to go that route. And it's not for everyone if we choose to go that route. It's so important, probably equally as important in my experience and from people that I've talked to, that I respect that you take just as much time to integrate, to journal, to do the work of first having the conversation with yourself that probably nudged you, that brought you to that arena of. Of exploring through psychedelics. It's just as important to do the integration. And I've found too, that there's people that kind of experience things just for fun, and then there's the rest of us, you know, the people that are really interested in doing their work and experiencing psychedelic states, these deeper states of consciousness, so that they can take the lessons back to this current world where, let's be honest, Jesse, there is cognitive biases being thrown at us all day long. It's like a cognitive bias soup as we drive around and as we go into our Starbucks, right? So we're constantly under attack by all these people in society's cognitive biases. What are some tactical things as far as health, emotional health, that people can take away from the show? In other words? So we understand cognitive bias, and it's something that we're talking about so that People have a deeper dive into understanding what this actually means. So once they found out, okay, I'm raising my hand. I have some type of a cognitive bias that I really want to do some work on. What does the health practice look like that for them to jiggle it out and allow it to free.

Yeah. Well, I guess it comes back to, you know, practice doesn't make perfect, but practice does make permanent. And you've probably talked about the book the Power of Habit and I forget what the new, the new book by that same author is, but.

Charles Duhigg.

Charles Duhigg, thank you. Yeah, that, that was a fascinating book. It's like if you were to do, I guess maybe like the one, two punch takeaway punch number one would be learning about and identifying what cognitive biases might particularly prey on you. Like where have look back at your five biggest or most recent mistakes and what category of bias might they fall into. And then part two of that would be looking at how to sidestep that sort of thing in the future. Is there a way that you can kind of short circuit that behavior when it starts to happen? And the Power of Habit is an amazing book for helping to, to not just get rid of habits, but kind of rewire habits. So when whatever triggers habit A starts to happen, you kind of redirect that energy into habit. Be a habit that you'd like to have or that would accomplish some of the scratch the same itch without the same second order consequences in my practice.

Too, along with understanding, like you said, once we identify it, this Byron Katie's work, she has four questions. And these questions can be applied to really eradicate, just incinerate most biases, probably not all, but most. And there's four questions. The first one is is it true? Is what I'm thinking, is what I'm going that direction I'm going, is that actually true? The number two is can you absolutely know it's true, yes or no. And then the third is how do you react? What happens when you believe that thought? And then the fourth and honestly I believe the most powerful question is who would you be without the thought? Who would you actually be without that thought? This inventory is really a tactical way to dig into some of these cognitive biases, honestly screw up our life and keep us in this space of hurting and a lack of being in touch with who we really are in ourselves. I'm curious how you're going to explore this. For you, Jesse, are you into any different states of exploring who you are? I mean, I feel like so many people that have podcasts, and you're one of the OGs in the game when I very first started. You're already doing it for a long time. Are you still exploring who Jesse Lawler is through your podcast?

Yeah. It hasn't been such a self experiment. Like, honestly, for me recently I've been doing a huge amount reading in a bunch of different domains because one of the things that I've sort of realized about who my heroes are in life, one of the common elements that they have is that they've managed to synthesize information from several different domains in a unique way. And so I've sort of been letting myself go kind of wild in my Amazon and Audible accounts, getting books on a bunch of different things and sort of doing a deeper level of. Of just knowledge gathering than I guess I might have in the past and tried to be breadth rather than depth in some areas of my knowledge, with the idea that you don't necessarily know what you're looking for, but it might give you the ability to tie things together in a really interesting way later. Because again, like I say, there are people I can think of that they didn't know what they were looking for either, but the fact that they had such a wide breadth of knowledge allowed them to see connections where other people might not not have.

Yeah, this connection piece, too. It's always easy looking in reverse, right? It's like, yes, hindsight is 20 20, but we're living in the now. And so I just want to acknowledge you, Jesse, for putting out so much trustable information. I mean, gosh, I don't think there's any other podcast out there that's putting out so many resources and tools. And you do such a great job on your podcast, man, which is why I was stoked to have you on wellnessforce. Where can people learn more about you? Where can they download the podcast and how can they dig into. I think you have a Brain Breakfast that you send out, which I love that name.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much for all the kind words. There was a lot, but yes. So my podcast is called Smart Drug Smarts, just like it sounds. And you can find that@smartdrugsmarts.com and in the footer we've got. You can sign up for the RSS feed or itunes or Stitcher or whatever. And yeah, SmartDrugsMarts.com Newsletter is where you could get signed up. If you want to get the Brain Breakfast newsletter that I do on a. I like to think a weekly basis, but it's probably more like every two weeks. It's kind of whenever I've got something that I've just got to get off my chest.

Since we talked about brain power and consciousness and nocebo placebo on 97, here we are. Man, this is going to be in the 200s. What can you say has changed? Or is it the same when you define wellness? What is Jesse Lawler's definition of wellness in his current experience in his meat suit as we spin in a rock in the middle of space?

I would say wellness is rational reason for optimism. Like to be optimistic and have some good solid foundation for why you're optimistic. I'd say that's a pretty good definition for me of wellness.

Well, thank you for keeping us on that edge. Always curious man. I want to quote you actually, and it was about experimentation from 97 before we say goodbye and it was regards to n equals 1 which people know you as a huge self experimenter. You said one of the greatest advantages of experimentation is just realizing that you can do it. It's a continuous reminder of our power to start changes in our own lives when you're just screwing with something else to see if it works in your own life. It's a constant reminder that we're always in flux and flux can't change, but at least you can direct it.

Wow, that sounds pretty good. I'm going to put that on my list of things to quote myself on.

Thanks for keeping us curious man.

Change a word.

Okay, cool. Hey, we'll have you on the show for the 4 Pete at some point in 2019 because at that point there's probably going to be flying cars.

I look forward to it. I will have at least one more really weird self experiment between now and then that yeah, we can rattle on about.

Thanks man.

Thank you.

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