Behavioral Scientist: Stop Giving Power To The Extremists! How to Leave Victimhood + Be Empowered

We can't speak our minds. We can't just be honest with our friends, our family and our peers about what we think is true about the world. And I think everyone's sick of it. One thing I see in my data is that so many people are self censoring their own beliefs. And I think it is based on this sort of unwarranted fear of what might happen to you if you were to be honest and speak what you truly think openly around people who might disagree with you. Dr. Corey, Jane Clark is a behavioral scientist who has been featured by the BBC and New York Times.

We've lost the art of navigating conflict. We've lost the art of hearing someone else's perspective.

Is there a beginning to unravel the solution for this bifurcation and war among people that are offended and people that just want to live their lives in power?

When you have people who identify strongly with a political in group on the left or right, they start to become very afraid of contradicting beliefs that are strongly held by their in group. One thing that's really central to human psychology is a strong fear of being ostracized. Our brains evolved to be really averse trying to avoid saying anything or behaving in any way that potentially could get us ostracized from our social group. And so we're giving so much power to the extremists within our own group when they're probably most of the time not the people to be listening to.

What are the forces behind this narrative of victimization? And how are people unknowingly weaponized by.

It and then consequently monetized to buy.

The things that'll make them feel better because of that narrative in the first.

Place, I assume that.

Hey everybody, it's Josh. Thank you for being here. And do me a quick favor, please. If you love this podcast, if you love what we're sharing, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. It just takes a second and your little act of generosity reaches lives that you could not even imagine. Thanks for subscribing Corey Clark. Welcome to the podcast. I'm here to talk with you about so many important things, but the one that comes top of heart, top of mind, is this psychology of victim mentality. With your work in behavioral science and something I find utterly fascinating, you actually help professors and scholars get along, which we'll talk about. Give people a high level view. Don't, don't go into all the specifics of what you do, but just in the construct of our conversation. Just share with people a little bit about your work and why it is you feel so passionate about the topics.

Yeah, so I, as you said, I'm a behavioral scientist and I sort of started off being interested in biases and, you know, everyday human beings. And we study all these things about how our moral commitments and our political. Political commitments interfere with pursuit of truth. But over time, I started to realize scientists are just normal humans as well. And so, of course, if we're going to say that everyday people are vulnerable to these kinds of biases, then scientists probably are too. And I got really interested in how our various group commitments can influence how scientists pursue their work and also how they treat other scientists. And so that really is what got me to the Adversarial Collaboration Project. And now I'm trying to help scientists resolve their empirical disagreements and hopefully do so in a way where they're treating each other kinder and taking each other more seriously than they do in sort of the traditional norms of scientific disagreement.

Wow. It sets up the conversation beautifully because many people on social that have really hard views are not scientists. They're just working off of their own anecdotal life experience. And I am not a scientist, so I'm always very fascinated by the scientific mind and really the Socratic method. I just love the Socratic method. But one thing that I've been noticing a lot, especially with the advent of AI, and I'm sure this comes up in your work so much, you know, artificial intelligence, yet it's still intelligence. But the, the construct and the source that that intelligence is fed is coming from everyday people to start the conversation. Really, this, I guess, amalgam of rational thought, intuitive thought, scientific modalities, and then anecdotal experience. If we put them in a hopper and we shook them all around, how.

Do we even learn to trust AI? And how do you see AI shaping the conversation about biases and victimhood?

Yeah, it's going to be challenging because there are a lot of accusations already that AI is biased. And that's not, I'm not saying it's not biased. It would be biased and it should be biased essentially according to how it is trained. So if it's trained on, you know, specific data from humans and the humans have these biases, then it should just, you know, mirror back the biases that humans have. And there was a study that just came out the other day that was looking at different sort of assumptions in AI trained in English and in Chinese. So we'll not only get potential political differences within specific cultural contexts, but Also between different countries, which will be really interesting. So in terms of trusting AI, I don't know, I don't know how we trust AI, whether we should trust AI, certainly not completely. But I would say the same thing of humans. We shouldn't trust humans completely, we shouldn't trust experts completely, we shouldn't trust scientists completely. The hard part is figuring out how much to trust different experts, which experts to trust. And of course we're in a not a great environment right now where people radically disagree on who they should be trusting and how much they should be trusting them. And my goal is really to help make scientists more trustworthy because I personally, although I support science and scientists and I want people to trust the science, I'm also very aware that people shouldn't trust scientists all the time and that we often act as though we're more. We act as though we deserve more confidence in our conclusions than we really do deserve. And we communicate that to the public and we ask the public to listen to us. We're the scientists, trust the science, and we honestly don't deserve that much trust all the time. So my hope is helping scientists become more trustworthy and then the public sort of naturally reacts to that deservingness and then eventually comes to trust scientists the amount that scientists deserve to be trusted. So maybe something similar could happen with AI, where AI can work itself, I guess with the help of engineers and scientists on being trustworthy. And when it is trustworthy, people will trust it more.

You know what's quite fascinating to me is especially we saw this during the lockdowns in 2020 were these phrases that were really dogmatist in their approach. They would say things like, well, I'm a scientist or trust the science without any curiosity or any open heartedness or open mindedness to others point of view. And I remember I was interviewing a gentleman named Daniel Schmachtenberger. He's a super brilliant mind, he's been on the Joe Rogan show before. And when I sat with him at the Qualia headquarters in Encinitas, he looked right at me and he said the.

Way to live so you can be.

Balanced and so you can actually have a great quality of life is to always see the world from someone else's eyes.

To have an understanding that your perspective is not the only perspective. Even when your nervous system and your.

Neurology is shouting at you and saying.

No, your way is the only way. I feel like there's this deep dark bifurcation right now, whether it's Democrat, Republican.

Fight this Heal that there's so much narrative around righteousness, this almost psychology of self righteousness.

If you look back in human evolution.

Where does the psychology of self righteousness even stem from?

That's a big question. I was going to start with saying that I really don't like the phrase trust the science because it falsely implies that there is a the science to trust and there isn't one. Scientists disagree all the time. And so to assert that there is the science is misleading about how much disagreement there is among the scientific community regarding really any contentious issue. Maybe there's certain things we're not debating anymore because we all generally agree, but those aren't the things that people care about. And that's not what people talk about. So anything that we're, that people care about and that we're talking about, it tends to be stuff where scientists disagree. So I think trying to demand that the public trusts whichever scientist is saying trust the science, that's probably not going to be helpful when it comes to the self righteousness. That's actually really interesting. And it's something I'm looking at. So one thing I've observed in my work, and not even really on purpose, more just like across tons and tons of different studies, what you see is what people want to believe is true correlates very strongly with what they do believe is true. And so we have these sort of moral beliefs. What is morally wrong? If something is morally wrong, I believe it's empirically wrong. If something is morally right, I think it's empirically right. And that's super interesting because there's, I can't, at least right now in this moment, I can't think off of the top of my head of any reason why, like, nature would make it be the case that what humans want to be true would be what is true. And so our brains do all kinds of crazy things that help us sort of make sure we're holding these morally desirable empirical beliefs. And we really do like genuinely sincerely believe that, you know, if we think something's true, we really do believe it's true. But sometimes we believe it's true because we're scared of being ostracized, because we're scared of like something contradicting, like a deeply important belief that like, shapes my sort of whole worldview.

Yes, yes.

And so in terms of like, where does the self righteousness come from? I think it's kind of a reaction to the same sort of thing. If someone's attacking my empirical beliefs, that's often also threatening my moral Beliefs and my standing within my social group. And so it would make sense that I would use all kinds of strategies, anything I can think of, to try to shut down information that's sort of challenging to me. And one way you can do it is by hurling moral accusations at other people. And if they contradict what I believe, they. It must be that they're bad people. There are two things. You can say they're stupid or you can say they're bad. And people do both. They say that other people are both empirically wrong, but they're also morally bad people. And that's the only way I could possibly explain what they're telling me is true when I know they're so wrong. So I think it's actually just like a suite of psychological tendencies that come out when people's core beliefs are threatened. And that's just one way people can challenge information they don't want to believe.

Well, news flash to myself and everyone. A lot of our beliefs that we inherited are completely not loving and not evolving us in the right direction. So a lot of the beliefs that are called traditions are really meant to be broken. I think there are some great traditions in this world, right? Like. But then there are also traditions that are very harmful. If you look across the span of religions and different sociological factors, many people act in certain ways because that's just how they were trained, essentially. But what's really, really harmful right now, in retrospect, I can think about. Just last week I was. Someone sent me a clip on social media and it was about this woman screaming at someone and just going complete ad hominem on him because he disagreed with her. It was on a college campus. And I'm sure you see this quite a bit because there's not too much wisdom when people first come into college, right? That's why they're going to get higher education. But a lot of times that doesn't stop when they leave college and they take that into the workplace. That, that way of almost dominating the conversation instead of giving space and really curiosity to someone else's point of view.

I wonder how that leads into being a victim and victim mentality, because, gosh, it's so easy and it's really so rewarding. In a very cynical way, it's rewarding to be a victim. And it really doesn't advance our humanity. It doesn't advance our society. It sure as hell does not advance a family. I have two children. If I myself get stuck in victim mentality, everyone around me suffers. But there's something really powerful that I think you could share with us about why victimhood is growing so rapidly and social media's impact on that. Because, case in point, if we're a victim, we get attention. And even if that attention is bringing a swell of energy that may be harmful or dangerous to ourselves and others, we're still getting attention. We're still getting some kind of a payoff. Can you go into that?

Yeah. So there are a few things going on. One is, I think virtually all people. I don't know if I shouldn't. Maybe I shouldn't even say virtually all people, but it's very, very, very common for people to feel like they're the victim, like they're being persecuted. Everything's stacked against them. Like, there's even, like, surveys of people asking, like, how often do you get what you deserve? And everyone feels like they're getting the short end of the stick. So this is just something people do. And so then you have to ask, well, why? Why do people have this tendency? And it's. And it's likely because it's a useful way of extracting resources and attention and status from other people. So if I can convince other people that I have been mistreated or I've been shortchanged, then I might receive some kind of compensation for that. So there's literally this incentive. And I mean, it's complicated because you can look at, like, from an evolutionary perspective, but you can even look at a sort of like a right now cultural moment, and their incentives align in both cases. So one thing that's happening now is given that we live in a society where we're all, like, anonymous to one another. You don't know what's going on in my life. I don't know what's going on in your life. We can both complain to one another about how the world isn't treating us fairly. And I am nice to everybody, and everybody's mean to me, and I work really hard and everyone else just takes advantage of me. And maybe you'll feel sorry for me, maybe you'll defer to me, maybe you'll give me some status, Maybe you'll try to help me in some way, because you have no way of verifying whether anything I say is true. And so when we live in these, like, large, anonymous societies, it's even easier to get resources from claiming victimhood. And it's not. There's so many social. There's so many social benefits. So one is just like, people give you financial resources, so you imagine, you know, any Kind of charity that's asking for money in some sense, that's saying like, we need, we're doing something good and we need your resources to do the good work we're doing. But there are also other things. So people defer to victims morally. So if you have a particular viewpoint that I think might be wrong, but you say, well, I have this viewpoint because of my really hard upbringing, then I'm like, oh, and all of a sudden I understand you. I'm not going to judge you for having a belief that I think is wrong. And I might just be like, okay, and like, defer to you in that context, so you get power. But then also if you've been wronged by a specific person, you can then justify treating that person terribly. And I'll let you get away with it because I'm like, well, this person did something horrible to him, so he should totally be able to treat them like crap. And so you can, like, get away with things too. And so we view, we view victims as morally good people and morally righteous people, even if they're treating other people really poorly. So it has all of these different kinds of benefits. And then when you, when you live in a society that's incentivizing victim behavior in so many different ways, it. People are going to behave that way. Like we are incentivizing people to have grievances, to complain about other people. And so it shouldn't really be so much of a surprise to us that so many people do now. But there are lots of other complicated things. I used to think about this in a. In a simpler way, but I've continued to collect data on it. And, and I'm now seeing that sometimes these claims of victimhood are like people trading their sort of like, reputation, their desirability as a social partner in order to get these other benefits from other people. So I'm starting to realize there are true costs to it, but there are also benefits. And people might not be aware of those costs, but we'll see.

I wonder if, and I don't know how deep or even accurate the data would go. In the early 1900s to the 1950s, there was some extreme hardships that, to be honest, most people in my generation or your generation have never felt like the world wars and people rationing food during World War II. And those were real challenges. And it feels like, I wonder how you see this from both a personal and scientific perspective. It seems like the victimhood culture and the cancel culture is really a byproduct of affluence and of people having more financial capacity, more technological capacity.

Even the poorest of the poor typically has an iPhone.

And I wonder, if you look back across generations, is victim and cancel culture.

Really a byproduct of affluence and of.

Wealth in our modern times compared to early in the 1900s?

Yeah. So I think affluence is part of it, if I am complaining. So if we think, if we look back throughout history, let's say we're in a group and we're fighting for our lives, we're starving to death. Death, we're competing against other groups that are trying to kill us. If I sit around whining about how, how like my circumstances are terrible, my group's gonna just leave me behind and I'm gonna die.

Exactly, exactly.

You have to put yourself up by your bootstraps because they don't have the resources, the time to take care of you. But when you're in a group where things are going really well, everyone's fine, everyone's comfortable, everyone's fed, everyone's fed so much. We have an obesity epidemic in this country. People have so much money and so much stuff they don't need. This is the kind of a group that you would want to appeal to for resources because there are so little like actual. And I don't want to say that, of course there are tons of concerns. You know, there are people with cancer, there are lots of problems in the world. But like in our day to day interactions, we're dealing with a lot of people who have, like, more than enough, yet people still feel they deserve more. And so I do think when we're in this environment where everybody's relatively comfortable, there isn't much danger. That is precisely the context in which it would be advantageous to claim, no, I can't contribute anything. Because if I don't contribute anything, it doesn't matter to claim like, no, I'm suffering more than everyone else and I need resources. Because people have enough resources, they can, they can part with resources. People donate money all the time. And then there are other. There are other. Like, there's a psychologist called concept Creep. They've specifically looked this in the context of harm. So harm, that word has changed in meaning over time to mean increasingly trivial things and increasingly unverifiable things and psychological things. So harm at one point would mean like physical harm, that I can see with my eyes, you're bleeding, you lost your leg. And increasingly it means just people saying, oh, well, I'm offended, or that hurt my feelings or you're making me feel unwelcome. And because we're not confronted day to day with like real, you know, serious harms that we can, we can see, we now take those things more seriously. So, yes, I, the, the affluence component, I think is one reason why we seem to be observing the victimhood mindset potentially just as much or more than we would have decades ago. Because you're not going to pay a price for claiming victimhood and you might even get benefits.

Yeah, but the benefits are short lived. And in my opinion, the benefits are hollow. They're not authentic. They're given almost from a place of empathy or feeling sorry for someone else. It reminds me, and by the way, I'm not here to negate people's real challenges. Everyone has problems. We all have problems. We all go through hard times. And it's really the resilience factor that I train on that. This whole podcast, you know, wellness and wisdom is based on the five sides of self. The physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial nourishment that we give ourselves or we starve ourselves from. And at the end of the day, I truly believe that it's our responsibility. And nothing will teach you stronger about this than being a parent. I don't know if you are around kids too much or if you have kids, but it is so. Okay, so you know this, right? When, when a child is hungry, nothing else matters.

You do what needs to be done because they're hungry. That's a real genuine need. But when someone sees a social media post that is offensive to them because they're not identified as a cat, and they develop an entire business plan about being offended because they're not identified as a cat, we're really dealing with a mass disillusionment. You know, I had Dr. McCall on the show and he talked about people that march in lockstep to this mass psychosis. We've also had Pa Levy, a 40 year Buddhist meditation teacher and practitioner, talk about Watiko or the Native American mind virus. And so there's many contemporaries and also ancient masters that have warned us about the very science that you're studying. And I wonder how you see this playing out. You know, is there a high level, if you were to float 30,000ft above all these really manufactured concerns, concerns that come from affluence, being offended by everything and everyone.

Where do we go from here? It's such a complex question. I mean, it's such an incredibly complex question. Is there a beginning to unravel the solution for this bifurcation and war among people that are offended and people that just want to live their lives empowered.

Yeah. So first I wanted to say that you're right about, I don't know if I would say necessarily shallow, but I would say it's short lived I think is the right way to think about it. Because if you look at studies on victimhood, there are often these short term benefits. So if you signal your victimhood, I might give you some money, I might not challenge you, I might let you get away with little things here and there. And so in that sense you have some kind of power and you're getting resources from other people. But what we're also seeing is people who signal their victimhood over like these trivial kinds of offenses. You know, somebody wasn't nice to them at work or, you know, they're getting advice with other people and they're always saying it's another person's fault. But generally even just claiming like, oh, I have like this really specific dietary restriction and everyone's always not appreciating my dietary restriction and like putting me in these. But like people who complain about these kinds of things, other people will give them like certain kind of status and deference and will listen to them and will take their, their, their complaints seriously. But they don't want to deal with those people anymore. They don't want to be friends with them, they don't want them in their social circle, they don't want to have to interact with them. And it's because anytime someone is appealing to someone else for resources, they are now taking advantage of that other person. They've created an imbalance between themselves and that person where I'm saying, no, you have to give me special treatment because of X, Y or Z. And so now I've taken something from you, but I've given nothing in return. All I've done is say like, you should give me this because I have this terrible circumstance that's not even your fault, that's it. And I, and I give an example that I think is kind of maybe an example that probably a lot of people can relate to is we've probably all passed a homeless person on the street and they were asking for money and we gave them a few dollars or something, but we didn't invite them to be our best friend, we didn't invite them to come to dinner, we didn't want to incorporate that person into our lives permanently introduce them to our children. We now, we've helped this person, we've given them something, but we now have Sort of identified that as someone who's taking and not giving. And people in general don't want to have permanent relationships with people who take and don't give. And so anytime we take, even if we get the stuff we're asking for, we are now signaling to other people that we're not good reciprocal social partners who are going to, you know, help me, then I'll help you, and that's the way the relationship's going to work. So you do pay this long term social price where you can get what you want right now. But in the long run, you're not setting yourself up to have like a strong social community that you're contributing to and that people will continue to help you in the future. So I do think some people don't think about the fact that when they're asking for third party assistance from someone else who didn't wrong them. It's not my fault you have this dietary restriction or it's not my fault that 20 years ago you had a really terrible childhood. If you continue to use that to request non reciprocal benefits from other people over time, it's going to wear down your goodwill with those people. And so I think it's important to sort of reflect on the fact that even if we feel like we're getting what we want right now, we might not be getting what we want in the long run. And so I'm hoping like an awareness of that helps. I also think the more people observe other people doing this kind of thing and feel like they're being taken advantage of because other people are signaling victimhood about relatively trivial matters, the more they won't incentivize it anymore. So it could have a sort of shelf life on its own. That this was a really common thing people did and it was sort of trendy, but eventually everybody got sick of it and we're not going to entertain it anymore. So that's a possibility. In terms of not falling into it yourself, that's really hard because people who feel like victims really do sincerely feel like victims. And if people don't give them what they want, then they just continue to feel even more and more and more and more victimized because other people aren't meeting their needs. And so you fall into this kind of like cycle where once you have a grievance, if the rest of the world doesn't agree with you that you have a grievance and therefore we ought to treat you better than we treat other people, you can just feel more and more and more victimized over Time and hold more and more grudges, dislike more and more people, feel more and more sorry for yourself, which only pushes people further and further away. And you get kind of trapped. And getting over that, I can imagine, would be really, really hard because you'd have to just accept, I'm not going to get anything that I want right now and nobody owes me anything and I have to take responsibility for my own suffering and start giving rather than taking. And then maybe that's how I'll finally get the reciprocation I want from other people. If I give to them, then they'll give back to me.

But it's hard to do so much there. And it reminds me of. There was a section in a book, and I'll speak to the men in the audience and also the women who support men. There was a section in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, where he talked about the different archetypes from a psychological perspective that men go through on their way to becoming a king. Their definition of a king is someone who's responsible, who's embodied, who has good virtues and values, and who does practice what you had. Shared reciprocation. Because what I heard from you in so many words, is that the crux of victimhood relies on not reciprocating, asking, yet not giving. Did I hear you correctly? There's yes. And so in the book, what Gillette and Moore talk about is the high chair tyrant who demands and demands and demands because they get just like a child. And I know this because I'm a father. When my children demand something, we're teaching them how to ask for it in a peaceful and respectable way. But it's hard to police 2 billion people on YouTube or, you know, however many billions of people there are on Instagram. It feels like we need a parent to step in for all the parents that really fueled this epidemic of victimhood. Parents that were off working where their children were on screens or laptops, which begets the question, what is the role of social media specifically?

And if we could even slow down the pace of conversation, because this is.

Such an important point. I mean, when I look at the factors of social engineering and the fact that Rupert Murdoch and, you know, I think there's six or nine media companies that run all programming in the world. What's happening is people are falling prey to narratives that are actually monetizing them by weaponizing victimhood. That's what I see. And I wonder how you see this.

Playing out just so people can become aware of it. I think people have an inkling of what I'm discussing with you, but really, what are the forces behind this narrative of victimization?

And how are people unknowingly weaponized by it and then consequently monetized to buy.

The things that'll make them feel better because of that narrative in the first place?

Yeah. So I think social media makes things worse because of the. Because it's anonymous and because it's relatively costless for people. Like, sometimes you'll see someone post a story about something bad that happened to them and maybe they'll get hundreds or thousands or millions of clicks, likes, comments, I'm so sorry, like, whatever. And that can feel, to the person receiving that, that can be. That can feel like a huge incentive. I'm, well, this is how I'm going to get attention in the world. This is how I'm going to get the clicks and the likes. And I'm competing with all these people are doing all these other things. People who are great dancers, people who make really great cooking videos, people who take really cool trips or whatever. And if you learn that the way you can get attention is by portraying yourself that way, that's going to incentivize people to do it more. And it's, it's so costless to the people who are incentivizing it. Oh, all you gotta do is go, boop, like done, Move on with my day, forget about it. I don't even know that. I barely remember engaged with you, but if a lot of people do it, it can feel like this really big incentive. So I think that's a way that it makes it worse. I don't know a whole lot about how, like, the whole monetization thing thing works on social media. Like, that's outside of my area of research. So maybe you could tell me how people. I do know there are a lot of, you know, different kinds of, you know, people who promise certain benefits to people, and then you can make a career that way. But people are catering, I think, to different groups of people. So I assume some people take a certain strategy and other people take the. No, like, work hard, be disciplined, be nice to other people. And that's the way to turn your life around. But other people, I'm sure, are taking a different approach and there would be a market for that because that might feel easier. Oh, I don't have to work harder. I don't have to work on myself. I can just essentially feel sorry for myself and other people will, you know, step in and take care of me. So you're probably better suited to answer that question than I am.

Well, yeah, and maybe you can piggyback on this, because when I look at social media's role really fueling the victim mentality, there seems to be a pretty strong narrative that we have to accept everyone's truth as objective truth. But subjective and objective are fundamentally different. And you don't need to study Carl Jung or even your work to know that. Right? When I believe something is subjectively true, that's my truth. But objectively, we all believe that, you know, heinous things happen to people and that can be sad at times. That's an objective truth. So objective reality versus individual reality is really the crux I'm talking to you about. I think there's a subset of people specifically, and I want to be gentle when I describe this because it's a sensitive topic and it's funny that I even have to pre frame that, that I can't just say it, because in our world of cancel culture, if things are delivered in a way, even from a place of curiosity like I'm doing now, one can be labeled as anti subject or anti whatever I'm speaking of. So I'll be cautious about how I share this. It breaks my heart. It absolutely breaks my heart that children.

Who can't even pick their meal or.

Drive a car or being empowered to.

Cut off their genitals by parents that are do gooding and virtue signaling. It breaks my heart that so many things are happening to kids around the world where their parents are really falling in lockstep with a narrative of extreme progressive, extreme progressivism. And I mean, look, there's extremes on both sides, right? But I wonder, when we look at monetization, I think the way that they're.

Being monetized is through tribalism and through this tribalistic standpoint. If you're one of us, then you believe our virtues. You believe what we say is true. Oh, well, if you're one of us on this side, then you believe what we say is true. I would like to create clarity. Where's the middle? Because in the middle we're not monetizable. We're monetizable on either extreme because then we're so beholden to the narrative of the group that we tribally are affected by that we'll literally do anything. We'll spend as much money as we need to, we'll sacrifice anything. We'll dye our hair blue, we'll shave a stripe down our head, we'll put a donkey tail on our back and let our children eat from A dog bowl because they think they're a dog. Do you see what I'm saying? And so what happens is you get this group of people that want to accept and stand for everything, but really, I believe when you stand for everything, you fall for anything too. Because you can't be a person that has conviction and constitution in your own heart based on your own life experiences unless you have things that you resonate with and things that you don't. In other words, I'd like to find the place in the middle where someone can still have virtues and values that they believe in and not have to be tribally affected by either extreme side, whatever that side is. The case, though, that I'd love your input on is specifically this gender dysphoria, this dysphoria of just the soul, where these young children are being just completely disempowered by parents that are essentially virtue signaling because of their affectedness by tribalism.

Yeah. So I'm not an expert on gender dysphoria. However, I have studied tribalism in the context of politics, and it is true that when you have people who identify strongly with a political in group on the left or right, they do tend to adopt a full set of corresponding beliefs and attitudes and values, and they start to become very afraid of contradicting beliefs that are strongly held by their in group. And one thing that I find to be particularly interesting is so you're talking about a specific subset of people. So there are people who will kind of go all in on an ideology and they will pay a huge price to go all in and to signal their commitment to the group. And that kind of thing does happen, of course. And sometimes it can be absolutely devastating the consequences of going all in on that ideology. And sometimes, as you're pointing out, it's not even always the person going all in who's paying the price. In the context of, like, people using their children to make a political statement, which has happened. It can happen with gender identity, but it happens with other things too. I remember there was a little. I think it was a picture of a girl. She was young, one or two or three or something, and she was holding up some sign about her white privilege. And you're just like, this is like a little tiny girl, and she's already like being told that she's not a good person because of her race. And so granted, I'm sure that little girl grew up fine. I don't know if that's gonna be a traumatizing. It's certainly not a permanent Permanent change to her body. But parents do use their children to kind of get status for themselves. But what's interesting to me is that that happens on the extreme ends. And one thing that happens with people who are identified with their political in group, but they're still. They're not moderate and they're not like, in the middle. But they're also not like, drinking all. They're not chugging all of the Kool Aid. But they get really intimidated and afraid to speak up and. And acknowledge when their own group is doing something that's like, too extreme, it's gone too far. So you get like, large chunks of people who actually all share a more like moderate perspective on an issue. I think gender identity is actually a really good example because a lot of people on the left, they would never say so out loud, but they do have more moderate beliefs about issues surrounding gender identity. But they're too afraid to say anything because they're afraid of getting, as you're talking about, afraid of getting canceled from their own group. And one thing that's really central to human psychology is a strong fear of being ostracized. And what's interesting about this strong fear of being ostracized is that very, very, very, very long time ago, if you were ostracized from the group, you might die. You can't live in the wilderness on your own in the cold without the ability to, like, get all of your own food and clean water, get taken care of if you get injured. And so ostracism, like our brains evolved to be really averse. They're really like, like trying to avoid saying anything or behaving in any way that potentially could get us ostracized from our social group. And we still have that fear. But we now live in a world where, honestly, if you get ost. I'm not. I'm not saying people don't get canceled or whatever. Their livelihoods aren't affected. They are. Some people actually have gotten canceled, like, so extremely that they've taken their own lives, which is. Tells you something about how important not getting ostracized is to people. More commonly, what happens is if you get ostracized from one community, you just get taken into a different community. Like, you can find new people. It's not the end of the world. You're not going to die. It might be really painful. You might be really stressed for a while. Probably similar to, like, going through a breakup. You know, like, there's a grieving process, but you can still land on your Feet in the end. And so I think people are really afraid of contradicting beliefs in their own political group that they think have gone too far. They're too extreme, and they know they're too extreme, and they know all their close friends think they're too extreme, but they're still afraid of the extremists in their group kicking them out for not being loyal enough like political group members. And so I think what's interesting to me is that these people that we associate with, you know, being in these political groups often do have more nuanced beliefs and values and perspectives than we realize, because everyone's too afraid to say so out loud. And everyone just repeats, you know, what the extremists say is right. And so we're giving so much power to the extremists within our own group when they're probably, most of the time, not the people to be listening to.

I mean, if someone could just play that back if they're. If they're in the middle of two illusionary halves. Because I believe that all of this is happening for our evolution. I truly believe that. And if you look at behavioral evolution and psychological evolution and technological evolution, I think it was Ray Kurzweil that was proved Moore's Law 10, 20 years ago, the technological evolution was a hockey stick. I mean, it just went through the roof on the data set. But human evolution and even the way that our brain and our prefrontal cortex and even the limbic system for reward and ostracization from tribe, that hasn't changed that much.

Corey, you know, really long time.

It's. It's. It takes a super long time for our hardware and our wetware to actually. Actually adapt to modernity, yet modernity is.

Going at such a breakneck pace. This is my deepest concern. I'm not necessarily worried about it to the point where it keeps me up at night, because I know what I'm focusing on for my family with our podcast, with my business, and with our vision and message. And that is, I know that when we have strong values about family and about human health, emotional health, and really just practicing this art form of disagreeing with someone, hearing them out, I just feel like we've lost the art of navigating conflict. We've. We've lost the art of hearing someone else's perspective. You know, that's why in high school, they have debate teams, right? I'm sure you're on a debate team in high school.

But.

But this.

This approach, to be able to even hear someone out is really what I think our focus must be on. Because if we focus on what we don't want, I know it's a very reductionistic way of explaining it, then all we're going to continue to get is what we don't want. Right? To quote many spiritual teachers, energy flows where attention goes. So my question to you in this realm of I guess both science and spirituality, that's where my question is coming from. And really morality, objective morality for human beings and families, is it really just a focus on building strong families, having great virtues with mothers and fathers, being mindful about technological use and really imbuing our children? That's the turning point. Because it's very hard to change the mind of an adult where the thoughts have already been baked in for so long. Do we start with the kids? Do we start with the teenagers? Where do we even begin?

Yeah, that's a good question. One thing that I was thinking when you're talking about not being willing to listen to other people, is that the reason for that, I think is that people use this guilt by association strategy. So I've seen this in the Abashoa class collaboration project that I'm running, which is that people will actually judge people on their own team, people on their own side of a particular conflict. If someone on their own side is willing to engage with someone in opposing side, they will want to ostracize that person. That person's viewed as not a committed member. And so it's this thing that we would view as virtuous in many contexts. There's oh wow, they're willing to listen to people who disagree with them. They're willing to treat people with civility. They're willing to engage with like new ideas and new information that should be viewed as a good thing, but it's viewed as a bad thing from the in group perspective. So you're a traitor now. You're making it look like we should be listening to those bad guys and so people can actually get punished for that. And that's one, one problem. And so we do need to find a way to make it so. Well, do we need to find a way? There might not be a way to do it, but it would be helpful if people actually did value engagement with different perspectives and people who disagree with them more than they currently do. And I don't know how you change that when it comes to. There's a lot of research on parenting. And although obviously to a certain degree parenting matters a lot, I think when you're in like a certain cultural Context, it's hard to, it's hard to, you know, it would be hard to instill some value in your child if that value is going to be punished by their peers. Because just like all humans, they're going to want to be accepted by their peers. They're not going to want to be ostracized either. And it would be really hard to tell someone, oh, we'll just care less what people think about you. Who cares if you're not popular? Who cares if people don't like you? You know, who cares if your best friends won't talk to you? Like, you can't do that because you're fighting human nature. And so I do think focusing on the culture is important. I think being kind to people, if we're capable people who disagree with us and people who agree with us but are engaging with our intellectual opponents, don't kick them out of the club just because we feel like they're threatening the core of the in group. But this is not easy for people. And not only is it not easy for people, I'm not even sure all people are capable of doing it, but there's variation. Some people are more capable of doing it. And so what I would like to see is those people rewarded more and punished less because that's something that we can't control a little bit.

What makes a person more capable of having an open mind in conflict resolution than others?

There are a lot of debates that you're the person in this situation. How much of this is individual differences versus is there anything we could do to this social environment to make people more capable? And I do think there are things you can do. There's a social environment. If you knew that I wasn't going to punish you for engaging with other information, then you'd feel freer to do it. So there is a social component, of course, but I also believe that there are individual differences, so probably something we can all relate to, or at least I certainly can. Sometimes we're engaging with like a piece of information and it doesn't feel the same as other information. This is specifically something we don't like, something we don't want to be true, something that contradicts our beliefs, something that comes from the out group and your heart starts beating faster and maybe your face gets a little hot and you can tell you're having like a physiological reaction to that piece of information. And that's crazy because it's not like you're face to face with a lion, but we have a physiological reaction when we're confronted with information that we might feel challenged by. And that to me is super interesting. And people will feel that to different degrees. Like some people, when they're confronted with something they don't want to believe and it's a really important belief to them, they may as well be face to face with a lion. Right? Like, that's how intense that feeling is. Is. Whereas some of us, I'm not putting myself in the, in the category of perfect virtue by any means, but some people, when they're confronted with that information, they can kind of acknowledge, oh, you know, I don't like this, but okay, you know, too bad, I'm going to read it anyway. I'm going to talk to this person anyway. I'm going to engage in this issue anyway and kind of push past that. So I think we can focus on like the situational context and what we're doing to, to, to pressure other people to self censor or to avoid contradictory information. But I do think there are also individual differences and I suspect some people just to them, like, the, the, the costs are too high, the, the fear is too great. And I'm not sure there's a lot you could do. Somebody who's like, we probably all know these kind of people, someone who's really, really, really dogmatic or the person who gets in a fight with every single person who challenges them on this one specific thing that' and those people, you know, everyone else is going to give up on them anyway because, well, last time I tried to talk to this person, they screamed at me and hung up the phone. And we haven't, we didn't talk for a year. So I'm not going to bring that up again. I think there are situational components, but I think there are also individual differences where some people are better able to have disagreements in a calm, civil way and other people, they just get into a screaming match and ruin their relationships over these beliefs.

Well, and that's what I want to push back, actually. I don't know if I'm pushing back. Maybe just pushing on this concept of.

Oh, no, it's a lion.

I know. Did you feel your heartbeat increase? So the way I see it, I struggled with hyper vigilance for a long time. My mom was manic bipolar and my dad left home very young. And so I had to really do honest work to train my nervous system through many modalities, which is essentially a gift because it drove me to do this podcast where I could show up with my children and my family and the people that I love more emotionally regulated. And that emotional regulation comes with a huge reward for everyone, including me, because I don't get sick as much. I have greater health. And it's something that I had to practice over time. There are some people, though, that are just innately born with this skill. Maybe they don't go through as much trauma. You yourself, you know, you think you were seven years old and you were.

Like, the Santa Claus isn't real, you.

Know, so you've always been a bit of a contrarian in your life.

So maybe looking back on what you.

Do now, and also your childhood and.

Your scholastic endeavors, there had to have.

Been something in your heart where you.

Thought to yourself, I'm going to do something noble to bring people together that have opposing views. I'm going to be a contrarian in the world. Not because I'm a rebel without a cause, but because you would like to.

Be a rebel with a cause.

Has that ever come across your psyche?

I assume that I might be a little bit less concerned about fitting in than other people. And I only assume that because from relatively early on, I was willing to say things that my group didn't agree with, and I have paid a social price for it. But I do know I care. Like, I know that when a large group of people dislike me for a particular empirical belief, it really does bother me. And when you, when you real. When you feel that. When you feel that you're bothered by it, you learn something about yourself, right? Because I'm aware that I'm not in a dangerous environment, and I'm aware that not everyone has to like me. And I'm aware it's perfectly fine if tons of people hate me. But being disliked doesn't feel good. But I think it doesn't feel good to a greater degree for some people, maybe for most people, in my case. And then for some people, maybe they're okay. They really, genuinely are okay with it. But it's a weird thing because it's like, on the one hand, this can make you really open to other people and other ideas, but maybe on the other hand makes you a little bit of a curmudgeon because you're like, well, you know, I'm gonna, like, engage with the people and the ideas that I think are, you know, interesting, even if that means that not everyone's gonna love me. And maybe there is something to being, like, so sweet, so nice. You won't say anything that upsets anybody or engage in anything that anyone finds distasteful. Like, you know, that's a different kind of virtue, I suppose. But, you know, you're. You're probably right in that you probably can work on it. But I think the will to work on it also would be an individual difference. Like, I think not everybody would want to work on it. Like, some people are so sure of their own, like, righteousness that to change would be bad. Like, to consider other people's perspectives to calm down in the heat of the moment, that's actually undesirable. So there might have been something in you that was already, like, open to that to begin with that led you to pursue change. And I don't think everybody would want to change so well.

I wonder for yourself, though, when you look back, was there a viewpoint, either current or past, that you really. And it's hard for you, I'm sure, because you have one foot in science and one foot in just being a human being, having a human experience, right? So in order for you to speak, do you ever feel that you double clutch and you have to speak as a scientist? Or do you ever fight between speaking as just a human being, a woman having a human experience versus being a scientist? Do you hold both worlds when you speak? I mean, how do you do that?

It really depends on the context. I think I probably turn on the science in my, like, social relationships sometimes more than I should. And I realize, like, people aren't always asking for the data. You know, like when they say, when they assert something that's like an observation in their own life and they provide some kind of, like, empirical explanation for that observation, I'll be like, well, actually, that one. And sometimes that's not what people want. When I'm a scientist, I think I'm probably myself and a scientist most of the time. One thing that I try to do, I try to catch myself and stop myself from doing if I can, which I'm sure I fail to often, is to be, like, tentative in how I talk about things. So I can tell you what I know of research, what studies show, what. What I found in my own research. But maybe this ties back to what we were talking about at the start of this conversation. It doesn't mean that what I know as a scientist is definitely right. It could be wrong. I might be interpreting things the wrong way, or I might be unaware of other data that contradict my own data or what I've read about. So I think that as a human, there's a tendency to want to assert what we know as though those things are facts and that they're done the Belief has been formed and it's over. But as a scientist, the belief has to be on its way all the time. It's never done. And so that's something I try to, I try to overcome my humanness when I'm trying to be a science, a scientist, and not assert that what I believe is true, is definitely 100% true, and everybody should believe me.

This is the part that sometimes is irritating to me about scientists, and it's not a knock on scientists, but at the end of a research paper or even reading, which I want to go over before we get off this, your Don Corleone principle, which is utterly fascinating, I get to the end of these research reports and I've taken in so much information and it would be so beautiful if the scientists would just say, hey, from my human perspective, this is what I really feel. I wish there was more of that in science. Hey, I understand the data sets. Here's the research, here's the empirical evidence. Now, as a human or as a mother or as a person, put aside my science hat this is how I actually feel. I wish there was more of that in science. I understand why there isn't. But how do we make that more apparent where people can trust the science? Because that is one of your gifts and goals, right? Is you want to make science more trustable. You had said that earlier in the conversation. Do you find that, that in your own life there could be more of.

That where you actually share your own personal views? Would that be powerful to the science as well? Would it humanize the science more?

So that's a good question. And I feel like you kind of get that on social media when scientists talk about their science. Because in science and the peer review, peer reviewers are often like, like, pretty rough, you know, like, they don't want you to say anything that's potentially unjustified by your data. And if you try to extrapolate beyond your data, not always. Like, sometimes peer reviewers like, like what you're saying, and so they're just like, go, go, go, let you get away with whatever. But a lot of the time they're, they're really trying to, you know, reel you in and make sure you're, you're only saying exactly what your data show, which is probably good for the science. But when scientists take their signs to social media, they often start to include their other, like, beliefs and perspectives and, you know, interpreting the meaning and what, what this finding says for whatever current controversy is happening right now. And I, I have very, like, mixed feelings about that. Because on the one hand, I think it's great for scientists to be able to communicate with the public. I think it's important to understand their real perspectives. And I myself, like, I enjoy being able to say, I don't know this for sure, but this is what I think. This is what I think my data show. This is what I think, this is how I think it's relevant. I could be wrong. So I enjoy that. At the same time, it does cause, I think scientists to often overstate their findings, the broad applicability of their findings, and a lot of the time that doesn't really matter. But sometimes it does. Sometimes it really does matter. So yeah, I don't know, I think we get a little bit of that when scientists go on podcasts. They probably start to over interpret their data because you're not telling me what I can't say. Maybe a peer reviewer listening to this conversation would be like, yeah, she, you know, she's making too much of that thing. But no one's regulating this conversation. So you do get that. But yeah, not in a science paper usually.

Well, the reason is because there's the rational way of thinking and then there's the intuitionist perspective. Do you feel there's a value in both? I mean, why would science exist unless there was the mystery of spirit?

Well, an intuitionist perspective is the idea that people's judgments are guided in part by their intuition and in fact even that, that a lot of the time we use science and data and facts to try to justify our intuitions. And sometimes those intuitions are right and sometimes they're wrong and sometimes they exist for really good reasons and we're not even aware of what those good reasons are.

Yes, yes.

And so we might appeal to some kind of scientific explanation for why we have those good, why we have that judgment. But really there's something happening naturally inside of me that's like more wise in the sense that it's based on human evolution and like the way human minds have come to work. And so I know it's a knowing level. Yeah. And it, yeah. So you have this gut level reaction that's causing you to judge something a particular way. And, and one thing that's interesting about scientists is like sometimes if you can't find the scientific or the fact based justification for that feeling, they dismiss it and say, well, thus it's a bad intuition, it's a bad judgment. And I think there should be like more reflection on, you know, when we do have those intuitions that we seem to not be able to justify. You want to reflect on, well, what is the potential reason why we might have them? What is it serving? And then a lot of the time I think you'll find that it is serving something, it does have a purpose. And then you have to think, well, should we think about it in terms of its like, intuitive purpose or should we challenge it because we don't have a good justification for the intuition? And that's a complicated thing. That's like more a normative debate, I guess, than really a scientific one. But yeah, that does happen.

Yeah. And I can feel how it is challenging for a scientist to be trustworthy, especially in our modern world. Like, look at all the things that support science. When we look at financial interests, pharmaceutical, big food, tobacco, there's so many scientists on either side of a correlation that are getting paid for the results they find. And so, gosh, it's just. This is many more podcasts, right. That need to be dove into for this concept. But one thing that I would love to end this podcast with is this concept of blame, because I came across a paper that you did and like I said, I wish that you just said, well, this is the way that I feel, but that's not what a scientist does. But it's utterly fascinating. I'm a huge fan of the Godfather. I love that movie. I think there's a lot of really cool corollaries between wisdom. Obviously there's things in there that don't apply to life at all. They're just, you know, it's just theater. But this, this Don Corleone principle, what is it for a 10 year old, you know, if you were to explain it to a 10 year old and why is it important for us to know?

Yeah. So maybe for. Well, I don't know if this is for a 10 year old, but maybe it's for like a 14 or 15 year old.

Okay.

There's this effect and I'm going to give like sort of the, maybe one of the first and one of the most popular versions of it. This is Josh. No, he's a philosopher. He discovered this where if you ask people, you tell them the story about a chairman of a board who wanted to start some program and he found out that it was going to harm the environment. They said, oh, if you do that, it's going to harm the environment. And he says, oh, I don't care about harming the environment. Go ahead and launch the program and you ask people, did he intentionally harm the environment? And almost everyone says yes. But if you're in a different condition. You didn't see that one. And you read about the chairman of the board, and people say, oh, if you launch that program, it's going to help the environment. He says, I don't care at all about helping the environment launch the program. And you ask people, did he intentionally help the environment? And almost everyone says, no, no. So it's the same context or the same. Yeah, the same situation. In one case, he doesn't care about harming and launches the program, one because he doesn't care about helping and launches the program. But we think this was intended and this wasn't. And this effect has been replicated across all kinds of judgments of responsibility. How much control did someone have? Did they choose it freely? Were they compelled by external factors? When people cause bad things to happen, we say they're more responsible even when they're in the exact same situation, and they cause the good things to happen happen. So we have this bias toward attributing responsibility for bad things. When we want to blame and punish people, we find someone to blame and punish. And that's not so. When good things happen. When good things happen, we don't have the same sort of search for an agent. And why this happens has been debated by so many different people. There's so many different explanations. But there's a theory in psychology by Marty Hazelton and David Bowman us called error management theory. And the idea is that when costs were asymmetric throughout evolutionary history, our brains should have developed a bias. And so in this context, if there's a morally bad agent and you don't detect that morally bad agent, you could be harmed, you could be killed. So it's really important to not screw up and say that that person doesn't have bad intent toward me. If they do, I should always detect it. Whereas if someone doesn't have ill intent toward me, and I assume they do, well, I might miss out on a relationship here, a buddy, but I'm not going to be killed, right? So the cost of getting it wrong and assuming somebody's good when they're bad is worse than assuming someone's bad when they're good. And so our brains should tend to assume there's like a morally bad intention when there isn't more than making the opposite mistake. And I call this a Don Corleone principle, because Don Quilt, there's a great scene where he says that even if his son were to be struck by a bolt of lightning, he would blame somebody in that room. And what he's essentially saying is like, don't fuck with me. If anything bad happens, even if it looks like a mistake, somebody here is responsible and I'm going to get revenge. And it's really intimidating. It intimidates other people. And so if you can create this impression that you're. I think I call it in the chapter. I think I call the chapter the Evolution of Relentless Badass. Right. So if you can persuade people that you're like a relentless badass, they're not going to mess with you. And so, yeah, we. We have this sort of tendency toward blaming people, and people have it to varying degrees. But on average, all humans have this bias toward identifying morally culpable agents that they can blame when bad things happen.

I love it because it's one of my favorite movies. But it also ties into hypervigilance as well. And, you know, the cause for hyper vigilance is obviously trauma. It also could be genetic predisposition or epigenetically expressed because of a lineage and passed down in utero to the mother, depending on the stress that she had. I mean, there's a lot of factors for hypervigilance, but I get an essence of extreme hyper vigilance in the Don Corleone principle. Is that true?

Yeah. So it's about hypervigilance, about other people having bad intent toward you or toward other people, but people demonstrate. So I have another paper called Harm Hypervigilance. And people have this tendency more in general, where they think bad things are going to happen more than they probably will, and they think good things are less likely to happen. And so they have this bias toward assuming bad things. And that probably causes people to interact with other people and information in all kinds of ways that really aren't optimizing, like, positive opportunities. It's really aimed at avoiding negative ones but not pursuing positive ones as much. And yeah, in modern society, when there are so few actual threats to our safety, our real, genuine safety, it probably comes at a cost of a lot of good that we could otherwise obtain.

I assume you have no data sets for what I'm going to ask you, and that's fine. But if you had to guess, not as a scientist, just as a human, how many people do you think struggle with hyper vigilance and they're unconsciously living out this Don Corleone principle on social media. In life, do you have a guess as to how many people that might be?

So I. I don't have a guess as to how many people, but I do know, or I shouldn't say no, because I'M you know, being a scientist, in my data it is the average tendency. So the average person. So because of essentially what the error management concept shows is that on average humans have developed certain psychological biases and harm, hypervigilance and also this blame sort of hyper vigilance by immoral agents. It is the average human tendency. So probably most people show it, but again they show it to varying degrees. So some people might do it a really massive amount, whereas other people might do it a tiny bit. Some people, some people might not do it at all. I, I guess I actually could reanalyze my data and look at how many people go above the sort of true estimate. So I actually probably could give you a number I don't have in front of me. But, but on average people do. Yeah.

This is, this is why I love science.

Very, very normal.

I love science and I love spirituality. And I think there, there has been both at the table in the conversation. Obviously you're a behavioral scientist, so there's very heavy academia behind you. And it's a good thing, I think that the war of science and spirit doesn't exist. I think that they can completely interplay together. I think that one actually feeds the other. There's many things that science can explain. Right. And there's many things that science can explain which gives us greater spiritual development. It's a paradox. It's very fascinating. It's very interesting. I've loved the conversation. I know we didn't go too deep into victimhood, but honestly, the way you cover it, I, I thought was perfect. Y' all do your best to not be a victim. That's essentially it. Because the ramifications both on a psychological level, on a societal level are massive. Do you have any parting guidance for people around censorship and victimization? I think they go hand in hand.

Well, one thing that I would like to see, so one thing I see in my data is that so many people are self censoring their own beliefs. And I think it is based on this sort of unwarranted fear of what might happen to you if you were to be honest with honest and speak what you truly think openly around people who might disagree with you. And I think this is based on a sort of outdated psychological tendency. And so I would like more people to try just a little bit to have more courage. Because I think if everybody did a little bit, then it could change things to make things a little bit even more safer to speak openly and then on and on and on and then we could radically change because I think think most people are kind of tired of the current environment we're in where we feel like we can't speak our minds. We can't, you know, we can't just be honest with our friends, our family and our peers about what we think is true about the world. And I think everyone's sick of it, and I don't think it has to be that way. But what it takes is for everybody to have like a little bit more courage. And then over time, that can accumulate into an environment where you don't need as much courage.

So, yeah, beautifully said. I had a person who wrote to me and she was like, my sister had all these complications, really life changing, very, very deleterious changes to her body because she took it in the arm and she said, I'm so grateful for you to have courage to have on someone like Dr. McCullough. And we actually designed the episode so that it wouldn't be censored. We have to be aware of that because, you know, the technocrats at YouTube are very smart. They have AI that go through every piece of content. So we had to be very smart. I also think just to add to. Yes. And to what you're saying, I love that you said courage. We all get to have more courage. And I say get to. It's not like we have to. No one's forcing you to have courage, but your life is a byproduct of that courage. And I think, like you said, if all of us can choose to just have like 10%, 20% more courage in moments where it really matters most. Can you imagine what kind of world that would create? It would create such an incredible world.

It's a collective action problem. If everyone would do it together, then there wouldn't be anything for people to fear anymore. But it's because so many people are holding back that that fear has to.

Be there as we say goodbye. What's something that you've been courageous about that you received flack for that just fueled your courageousness more?

Oh, gosh. I don't know what's the biggest thing, but I'll say the first thing. The first thing was just looking at political bias in science and saying out loud that I think there is a lot of left wing or progressive really bias among scientists, and it's caused them to forward all kinds of counterproductive policies and interventions that cost tons of money and don't work. And once you start speaking up about that kind of thing and you start getting people who don't like you and they Tell other people they don't like you, and they'll post online that they don't like you. Once you kind of get comfortable with that and you kind of realize these are the people who are going to appreciate me speaking up about things. These are the people who are never going to like me if I'm. If I'm really honest. I don't need to make these people happy because I can't say what I believe around them anyway. I don't need them to be my fans or my friends. And I would like these people to be my friends, the ones who actually will support me even if they disagree with what I'm saying. So I think in my case, it did take me from a place where I had maybe a broader general group of people that were my peers. But over the course of getting more and more courageous over time and saying more and more things over time that I do believe to be true, I've found myself among a group of peers that are way more open and way kinder and have a much way more diverse set of beliefs and perspectives. But we all respect one another anyway. And so it's been a wild net positive in my life, even if the transition to get there was painful.

Yeah. Pretty uncomfortable though, huh?

It can be people, people you've never met. Calling you names on social media is an unpleasant experience, but, you know, I.

Celebrate that for you, and it's intuitively why I wanted to spotlight your wisdom on the show. I think we all deserve more courage and more conversations where we can disagree with each other without ad hominem and attacking each other. I think that's the beauty of this conversation. So y' all share this conversation if you feel like it's worthy of sharing. And Corey Clark, thank you so much for being my guest.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay. Until we see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness.