 Welcome to the 21 convention Tampa Florida today. We are moving into a Philosophy and an idea that the 21 convention is very passionate about you know The being the ideal man and moving towards that has a total integration of self, you know, that's mind body your total expression and here we are going to bring on 21 convention returning speaker from Austin, Texas 2012 and actually Anthony Johnson the CEO of the 21 convention said it's one of his favorite speeches The Austin, Texas one and let's hope this one is to Eric Daniels. Let's do it. All right All right guys, hopefully hopefully you're fully caffeinated ready to go I know it's early, but Jolly looks ready to go. So let's go So the topic that I decided to speak on this year is I'm horrible at titles, but I kind of like this one unbridled rationality using reason to flourish So let me just unpack a couple of those terms before we actually get into presentation the idea of reason Right a lot of people use this idea be reasonable Al Gore says be reasonable use reason Basically, what I mean is the use of your mind in thinking Integrating what you get from the world thinking about it conceptualizing it making sense of it Rationality just means the habitual practice of that skill Right, just like you can practice skills in physical movement You can practice skills in intellectual tasks Rationality just means practicing that skill throughout your life and flourishing. That's easy. Right. It's not just about happiness It's not just about hey, I'm I'm doing all right. I'm not dying It's about flourishing right the idea that Aristotle came up with a eudaimonia that the whole person Human flourishing means that everything about you is maximized. So how do we do this? This is a skill you have to cultivate this. So let me just give you a little bit about my basic approach I'm a teacher, right? I teach young kids now. I taught in the university for I don't know about 12 years I was trained actually as a as a historian my phc is in American history But it's actually in intellectual history Which is a slightly different flavor of how historians do history not a lot of people do this anymore But it's a little bit similar without all the without all the craziness and the trauma It's a little bit similar what Doug McGuff was talking about yesterday with being an er doc An er doc as he said has to account for the traumatic situations in every medical specialty Fortunately, I don't have the trauma But as an intellectual historian what I trained as is someone who could very quickly Get acquainted with and understand the development of an intellectual field Whether that's medicine whether that's strength training whether that's physics whether that's law I did a lot of work in economics. I did a lot of work in legal history The whole goal of intellectual history is being able to get up to speed really really quickly So I taught for a long long time. I teach now. I'm teaching science now same kind of thing How do you teach science? I've spent a lot of time thinking about pedagogy How do people learn? How do you teach people most effectively? So my basic idea is Watch for characteristic errors. Where do people go wrong? When you teach especially when you teach college students even more so probably with younger students You learn a lot about how people make errors And if you're sensitive to that if you actually look at that for me What that's revealed is that there are a lot of characteristic errors Now I've done a lot of thinking about each of these fields Right. I say, okay, you know, what's going on? How do you do it? What does it work because guess what there's no users manual nobody says, okay? You want to get interested in strength training? Here's the only thing you need to read If you want to get interested in strength training You want to get interested in optimal health you want to get interested in anything There's going to be a thousand sources out there and they all disagree with each other How do you figure out what's best? How do you figure out what's useful for you? There's no users manual. You've got to do it yourself. So I've done a lot of tinkering in my life I've gotten interested in a lot of these things in optimal diet and optimal strength training I've gotten interested in all kinds of stuff Every time I get interested in one of these fields. I find that there is an enormous amount of bad thinking Right. You get into these fields. You find the good people, right? I mean Anthony's done this he's scoured around in the areas of interest that he has You find the people who actually know what they're talking about who have the right approach But it's hard. There's a lot of bad stuff out there and it's really really seductive bad stuff It's stuff that appeals to people it's stuff that has the illusions of being good for you When in fact, it's actually just short circuiting that thinking approach. So The most controversial claim I want to make today Brains are not for thinking Okay, the brain the human brain as it evolved Did not evolve primarily for us to think The human brain evolved out of neural networks and nematodes and all sorts of other primitive creatures Primarily as a way of giving us feedback about our external environment Connecting us up with what's going on both outside and then ultimately with the internal nervous system What's inside? Henry Ford, uh, you know a guy who Had an ability to say a thing or two about a thing or two Thinking he said is the hardest work which is probable reason that so few people engage in it So when I say brains aren't for thinking what I literally mean is obviously we can think our mind is used to think But the brain as an organ Doesn't really do all that well when it comes to a lot of thinking tasks So can computers can robots think Outthink us Sure spend five dollars on a calculator. It'll calculate faster than anybody in this room Probably about 50 dollars of chess software beats about 99 percent of the people who know how to play chess In fact, a little bit more than 50 dollars. You get a chess software package that can beat 99.9 of the guys right computers Heck that can even play jeopardy better than we can right just ask ken Jennings the ultimate jeopardy champ IBM can program a computer to answer questions read innuendo understand the subtleties of language Do all of those things better than human beings can? but I want to do a little test Everybody raise your left hand Okay, everybody focused on anthony. Go look just look at anthony. Okay. Now if you're sitting next to somebody shake their hand Okay, you just did better than any robot anybody has ever designed Right the actual things that the brain does for us the things like I say raise your hand. How did you do that? How did you actually raise your hand? I think well, I mean, you know my muscles contracted. There was a nerve sent a signal down to my muscles My muscles contracted it slowly raised. It's you know, you could kind of analyze that Focus your eyes on something. How did you do that? If you really try with some of these things with physical movement You can overcome physical movements You can you can keep yourself from doing things that you almost feel like you have an urge to do You can unfocus your eyes What what does George Washington look like? Right now in all of your brains I I I just caused you to think of some portrait of George Washington whether you wanted to or not I said his name Boom automatically it comes up in your brain. Your memory system is incredibly efficient Okay, but the thing about robots computers, etc the thing that they can't do when you shook that hand You knew exactly in response to the grip of the person next to you How tight to squeeze how to conform your hand Guys spend years if not decades programming computers and robots to try to do that Think about just getting up and you're walking down the street and all of a sudden you break and do a sprint Robots struggle with that stuff But what is the stuff that those robots are missing? What is the stuff that the brain does? That's the non-thinking part. Well brains are primarily organs of homeostatic regulation self-regulation Right the brain actually functions to keep us working as Creatures as human beings in a very sophisticated way. That's probably good for us Right, so I said vision memory Basic movement. These are things that are often within our control But that can also go out of control Right when someone loses their ability to recall George Washington To recall what does anthony look like things like that? It's very very difficult But these are things that you have voluntary control over but what about something like proprioception? Knowing where your body physically is in space Your brain processes more data Understanding where your body is in space. You don't have to open your eyes. You know where your hands are You're getting sense data feedback and it's really creepy when it happens to patients It occasionally happens where patients lose proprioception Guess what happens to their arms? They just start floating around. They don't know what to do And they look at their arm and it stops and then the other one's just floating around because the muscle control that tells it Stay in space where I want you to goes completely away It's really really hard to do emotion Right try to stop yourself from feeling something when you see or when you experience an intense emotion You can control your response to it But your ability to actually control the pleasure pain mechanism that is at the very root of our emotional system You're not going to be able to turn that off again same kind of thing people with brain trauma People with different problems who have that turned off have an enormously hard time doing things like deciding Right, there's a famous story a neurologist tells about a guy that basically had lost all affect He had all of his rational faculty there had lost all affect He couldn't make a decision you'd say hey, where do you want to go to dinner? And he would say well, we could go to the one restaurant But then again, there's that other restaurant and he would debate with himself For hours he had no way of having an afferent kind of response to say like let's do this This one's better than this one Respiration again, you can control this to some degree But if you try to control it for too long you try to hold your breath for too long You try to do something for too long ultimately your body is going to take over Your body controls this in a very very strict way You wouldn't be able to make these choices Imagine trying to process all of the sensory feedback 100% of the time to try to figure out how to regulate your respiration Should I breathe in more? Should I breathe in less? Am I getting enough oxygen? Am I hyperventilating? And then start to think about the actual complex systems of the human body that are regulated by the brain And to current an exocrine function Right, why don't you take conscious control of your hormonal system? Right, how much insulin do you need? How much testosterone do you need? The kind of homeostatic control that the brain actually operates Is within such fine parameters that if you were to actually try to consciously control this You would just go off the handle within minutes You would over adjust constantly your response would be like oh, let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this Your body would crash think about Your blood chemistry Think about cardiac function think about thermoregulation Right is my body cool enough? It's my body warm enough think about things like metabolic function digestive function Think about if you had to actually consciously choose how much should I urinate right now? How much should I you know? Should I is the peristaltic movement of the food through my elementary canalis? It's is it fast enough all of these things are outside your conscious control for a damn good reason You wouldn't be able to do it Your brain however can And that's one of the great things about brains and it's ultimately why as an organ The brains aren't particularly for thinking now that being said nevertheless I want to maintain that mind centered action or as I call it mind guided action Is the key to human flourishing? All of those things that the brain as an organ of homeostatic self regulation can do aren't enough Right the neural systems the brains the consciousness of other creatures is sufficient for their survival and indeed for their flourishing for reproductive success For finding food for creating shelter humans You don't want to rely just on those automatic functions of your brain You've actually got to assert conscious control of your brain to do any of the really important stuff that adds to the value of your life So if the brain isn't the best thinking organ It's probably because we're unable to survive via this auto regulation thinking however thinking in the way that I mean Slow hard Effortful consciously directed thought that in the end is uncertain Right now your your homeostatic regulator your brain can screw up sometimes It can oversecrete or undersecrete It can raise your respiration too much it can raise your heart rate not enough etc But generally speaking its automatic responses to the situations are appropriate Even if you're dysregulated because of some external stimulus or because of some internal pathology It nevertheless is responding in the way that it's designed to respond Thinking however is uncertain You can mess up You can think the wrong conclusions You can come up with the wrong answers and so you need to exert much more conscious control over how you do this Now thinking has to be deliberate and intentional unlike what most of your brain does and if you look at the real estate of the brain Right how much tissue is there how many neurons axons all the other the rest of their brain Very little of it is dedicated to this conscious thinking you have to be very very intentional about it and it's driven by your value orientation What are you actually seeking? Brains as I said in the absence of any kind of external Distortions or internal pathology brains as automatic regulators Are working in your interest They're actually choosing the things, you know, they're not going to throw your your blood chemistry off They're not going to throw your hormonal regulation off in the absence of any kind of bad stimulus or internal pathology They're going to respond exactly how they should respond thinking Man people can screw up what they're thinking and they can do all kinds of things that are incredibly bad for themselves I mean, you don't need to you know, when you guys fly out of here and you go to the airport You can just look visually a lot of the things people are doing Consciously are really bad for them So the reality is most people are pretty bad at the habit of actual conscious deliberate thought. Why? Well, because it's hard. It's effortful. It's uncertain But it's also because in a very fundamental way, this is not possible You just say okay. Well like let my brain take care of all those other functions Let me take care of the thinking everybody will be happy I'm like in the driver seat of this chariot. That is my you know, my body I'm going to do all the thinking but again, you can't A good example of this is One convention returning speaker from austin, texas 2012 and actually anthony johnson the ceo of the 21 convention said it's one of his favorite speeches Uh, the austin texas one and let's hope this one is two Eric daniels Let's do it. All right All right guys, hopefully hopefully you're fully caffeinated ready to go The two systems model Okay, and this is basically what i'm talking about with the the two ways that you can Forget about the auto regulation of the brain. That's primarily what the brains work. Once you start thinking There's really two systems. He says that you can think incredibly incredibly distorting so one of these is the illusion of precision Had this result and therefore it's going to apply to this group All right, you see this all the time and not the least of which is mice or you know lab rats or whatever comparing to humans But even different groups of humans with different ages different profiles, etc Friends businesses to great businesses published this book Claim that he understood everything that the ceo's and leadership teams did to make them great Published the book made lots of money and guess what?