 Hey, this is Mary Lee Johnson with the 21 Report here at the 21 Convention 2014. You just got done speaking. Eric Daniels, and you spoke on... Please, go ahead. No, I was... No, no. I bet you can explain a lot better than that. Yeah, basically on essentially cognitive habits, cognitive techniques for being a better thinker. With the specific focus on, I would say, how not to fool yourself. It's really easy to say, oh, these people out there are wrong, and I know better, and I'm not going to believe everything I read, but it's also about being internal about it as well. If you want to maximize actually getting information and understanding the world, you have to be very, very careful about what you think and how you think so that you're not committing the same kinds of errors. Yeah. And you talked about several things that I just love. You've mentioned some authors that I love, and you were talking about in the very beginning how brain shortcuts become biases. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. The way that we think is in order to survive, in order to flourish, which is the goal of everything that I'm talking about, is how do you use your brain, how do you use reason in order to flourish at whatever you want to do, career, romance, anything in life. You have to be a very, very meticulous thinker, but you can't do it in a way where you say, oh, you just need to be more aware and more deliberate because there are lots of decisions, lots of judgments in life where you have to act. You can't sit there and say, OK, I'm going to make a pro and con list and spend two weeks thinking about this. There's something that's pressing. You need to do it. Or it's just that would be burdensome. So we program our brains to have these automatic ways of thinking, and the problem is that very, very few people do it consciously, the programming. So it's like thinking about your brain as the hardware, the programming as the software, and it's just operating. And you didn't write the software. You got it from your parents. You got it from your schools. You got it from the culture. And a lot of the ways that people program their brains, I mean, it's dominant in the culture. The ways that people program their brains actually short-circuit getting the right answers. There are things that make people feel comfortable. There are things that make people feel good about themselves. But that aren't actually the right answers. And it leads them to bad results. It makes them unhappy. It makes them unsuccessful. And if you want those successes, it's not enough just to say that you want it and try to consciously pursue it. You also have to make sure that your automatic thinking pursues it and that your automatic thinking actually leads to that. Because if you don't, then you're just going to be falling back on your own habits and, in a sense, undercutting your own progress towards succeeding at whatever you want to do because you're going to make those same mistakes. If you can look at those, actually be conscious of them, make sure that your program is right. And I used the example in the lecture of simple arithmetic. We program our brains how to do simple arithmetic. We don't think through how to add two and two. But if we kept finding out that we were doing calculations wrong, we would slow down and make sure that our programming wasn't making mistakes. And if it was, we would correct the programming. But when we do that with things like being biased about authorities or being biased about statistics or misunderstanding risk and randomness, a lot of people don't stop and think, well, my brain's throwing up these automatic answers that I need to go back and double check that they're actually right. And that's what it's about. It's about, that's a process of self-improvement as well. Making sure that your automatic programming works as well as your conscious thought. How about when news organizations get a headline by going, this is the latest data from Harvard and this is the new study and this is going to change everything? Or did you know smoking is actually good for you? Or something that has just one study and no correlation and then everybody else is like, no, I saw that study. I saw it and it's real. Yeah, and that's, I mean, one of the big things of that is just it's the illusion of authority if you can put a big university's name or a scientist's name or if it's in a prominent publication. I mean, even some people just, well, if it's in the New York Times, it must be real or if it's on Fox News or anything, any kind of authority as a way of saying that that must be trustworthy information without actually checking. This was a study with seven people and these seven people happen to have really unique characteristics that made it such that if we gave them one cigarette a day, it actually made them live longer. Say, well, that's curious. But then you take seven other people and it's the exact opposite result. But those studies aren't the ones that get reported. The sensationalism of media and the latching onto and scientists used to complain about this. All the media distorts what we say. But in reality, it's the scientists now and the marketing offices of universities, they're all part of this game. In order to get the grants, in order to get the funding from the NIH, the FDA, whatever it is, go chase this government money, they actually try to encourage that process of almost hyperbolically hyping their results. And the problem is that nobody ever stops to say, is this, it's not even just statistically significant. Is it actually a real effect? Is it something that affects my life? For the people who might be reading these studies or might be consuming these, did they study women? Did they study men? Did they study children, old people? Nobody ever asked that. They just see the headline, more wine, fewer cigarettes, eat this kind of food, do this kind of exercise. It may be a real result in a certain group of people, but nobody asks those questions, does this actually apply to me? And how would I know, right? That's the biggest issue is not just don't trust the media. How would I know whether to trust the media? It's kind of a meta cognition point where you have to say, how am I gonna be critical in a way that will help me sort through this and say, doesn't apply, does apply, need to think about this more, can ignore this, can ignore this, can ignore this, save this for later. It's really that top level sorting, kind of executive management in the sense of cognitive executive management of knowing when to shuttle things off as being irrelevant and not worth the time to think about. And then when to say, okay, this takes more deliberate thought, let me go investigate that. And so it's really learning those cognitive management techniques that will help you not, not paying attention to the media is a good way to do it too. That's my strategy, just don't pay attention to that stuff and then you're never gonna have to worry about it, really. Technically we're the media though. Yeah, so we are. Yeah, but I mean, it's the idea of if you're just reporting on someone else's work, you guys are going to the source, you're getting people who are experts talking about it, interacting with them, actually looking at the evidence. Totally different thing from just Dr. Ross says this, okay, I'll go do that. And then it turns out, he was just blowing smoke. Well, okay, what do I do now? He's got this new solution. It's the process of figuring things out for myself rather than just waiting for the next solution in a way. So yeah, it's just being, it's the kind of vigilance as it were of cognitive vigilance, I like that, I should have said that. I didn't have that exact wording but that just occurred to me and I really like that, so yeah. Yeah, yeah, short simple answer. So what's then the danger of somebody who has a bias, who's like, I don't believe anything that my government tells me, but I believe everything that the conspiracy theorist tells me, you're the opposite. Yeah, no, and this is, I find that this is a pretty common result. There are people who can become, they reach the first level of being critical about information, but they direct that critical eye only to certain sources, only to mainstream doctors or only to government reports or whatever. But then instead of saying, okay, I'm not one of those fools who just believes everything because a mainstream doctor tells me, but my alternative doctor can do no wrong. You say, okay, you're just adjusting the bias. You're just taking the bias from one group and you're applying it to another group. What you need to be doing is saying, I'm gonna see whether what this person says is true or not. I'm gonna evaluate it in my own context. Do the cognitive work to, you can't become an expert in every field. You're not gonna learn medicine, you're not gonna learn exercise or cardiology, you're not gonna learn all of these things that you want to do in your life, but you are going to be able to learn enough to know when to trust the experts and when not to trust the experts. And the way to do that is, I mean, certain things is evaluate what their training is, how specific their recommendations are, what kind of evidence they have. Because even if you don't understand how to do the medical interventions, you can understand, are they actually gathering evidence that's quality evidence or are they just cherry picking? Are they just finding the studies that support what they do or are they just using subjects that support what they do? A lot of times people, whether it's mainstream or not, the doctors will find subjects who are, it's like they're ready made for the intervention, oh, this is gonna work on these kinds of people. So let's just recruit a bunch of these kind of people. It's definite results, I mean you find a bunch of guys that are a little bit overweight but have a kind of natural physiology that's gonna be really susceptible to body weight training. And so you put them on a diet and you do body weight training and they all get better. So that's great, does that work for everyone? Well, we need a variety of people, we need a random sample. But what do we think randomness is? If we don't understand that, then we're just gonna say, hey, this is great, we're gonna do this. So you have to be very careful not to just take those biases away from certain sources and let them happen to other sources. Because otherwise you're just, I mean, you're just going from guru to guru then, oh, this guy, you found out this guy's wrong, you're really, really upset, then you go to the next guy and you just trust everything he says. Because he knows how to criticize the last guy. But that's not gonna work. He knows how to criticize the last guy, that's good, but you should be able to do that. What he needs to do for you as an expert is to be able to provide you that context and that information that you yourself can't gather, but in that kind of cognitive division of labor, you can benefit from if you have the right trade. And the trade is you have to process and think about the information as well as find the right sources. So you spoke last year at the- Two years ago, actually, yeah, in Austin. At the 21 Convention in Austin. And now you're speaking this year. How are you finding it this year? I mean, I really enjoyed the Austin Convention. I thought it was a great combination of topics and speakers. Same thing here. I mean, it's really interesting to me. I really like the format of having what I consider to be a kind of intimate conference. It's a small number of people. I mean, it's a good number of people, lots of different backgrounds, lots of different interactions, but it's intimate enough that you can, you basically over the three days, you have a chance to talk to everybody. And you really, and that's one of the things that's different about this from a lot of conventions, a lot of conferences that I go to, where it's big, big large audiences and you never get to connect with the people and you never get to connect with the other speakers. And it's just this thing where you kind of show up, there's a big audience, you do it, you're done. You get a few questions afterwards and then you're just so overwhelmed that you don't get a chance to have those conversations. This year I've had some great conversations, some great interactions, learned a lot of things from some of the attendees, from some of the other speakers. It's that kind of interactivity that to me really sets it apart. That you get to have that one-on-one contact or small group discussion and hear people arguing and kind of sorting out ideas together that just doesn't happen. And it's a unique value that the convention provides. Thank you so much for coming down. Thank you for speaking. This has been Mary Lee Johnson with Dr. Eric Daniels from the 21 Report. See you next time.