I'll get a team. Welcome to another installment of my favorite podcast. Well is it? Look it's definitely in the top five, maybe not definitely top ten. This is definitely in the top ten of my favorite podcasts. Now people are going to email me tip, say what's number one? Roll with the Punches? Of course? Oh I see what it did there. That'll be ten dollars, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome anyway, Welcome to the You Project, everyone. Tiffany
and Cookers over there at typ Central. It's early in the morning, per It's nine point thirty four in the am here in the thriving metropolis of Melbourne. She is normally punching people in the face at the gym because she's a pugilistic thug. She's a mover and a shaker. Why are you not at the gym punching people in the face?
I have been, I have been already, and I've I've just swooned in for a quick party and then I'll be off doing it again after this.
Somebody asked me recently, does tiff still fight? Does she still get in the ring and have your days of actual boxing? Punching poor unsuspecting women in the face, and the odd man. I know that happens unofficially, but that's just Saturday night in the car park outside the pub. But have your official days of boxing been hung up?
I actually punch more blokes than ladies currently, and I don't know if there'll ever be a time in life where I will say, Yep, I'm done. There's definitely no more fights, really, and I think a lot of boxes in combat sports people would agree with that philosophy. It's always lurking, not far behind. It's just life, you know, taking priority most of the time.
Well, and also cognitive health and brain health. You know, I worry about your brain. Could you please stop getting hit in the face. I know, I know you do most of the hitting. But doctor Bill Sullivan, I bet you're not a big fan of CT or being punched in the head in general, are you.
No. We wrote about that in my book. It's generally a bad idea to take repeated blows to the head.
It's funny that it's funny that, Tiff, are you listening?
I might go, I might just pull that client and tell them what usual time I'll see.
A good thing.
Well, I didn't want to.
This is like, this is this is why I don't get invited back on a lot of stuff.
I tell people the truth.
I tell them what they don't want to hear, like, yes, you are abusing your body, Yes you're doing something you shouldn't and yeah, and they don't call me back, And then I wonder why.
Well, it's I mean, it's funny, isn't it. More broadly, I mean everyone that I was, including tif that getting punched in the face is bad for a Brian. But you've mitigated that, really, haven't you liked You're not getting hit in the head these days much, are you?
No? No, definitely, I definitely. It was a big concern for me for quite a while, and I stopped doing it at all, and then I just weighed things up and went, well, you know, in life, we always have to have a happy medium. You got to do what you love and just manage the risks as best you're comfortable with.
Having said that, don't get in the ring again properly, will you please? But it's funny you say that, doctor Bill, because in terms of I was thinking about the one we're going to talk about science communication today because I've got a little bit of a story I want to
share that I want your thoughts on it. But like a lot of the messages that we need to hear, perhaps let's put that in inverted commas need to hear around our health and our lifestyle and our behaviors and our habits, they're not always the messages that we want to hear, right, And so you as a scientist, researcher, communicator, educator, and me not in the ballpark of you, but I
still do. I stand in front of lots of audiences and it's like sometimes I say, I can tell you the thing that you want to hear or the thing that you need to hear, what you refer and I reluctantly say, okay, tell us what we need to hear. And it's just because some of the stuff is just like creating improved health and function and operation and new habits and new behaviors and a new lifestyle. It's sometimes it's just hard, uncomfortable work, right.
It can be very challenging.
Like you said, when you get new data, it often changes lives and a lot of people get set in their ways or they enjoy certain activities that you know inflame our dopamine system and give us a lot of pleasure, and we have to balance, you know, how well we want to take care of our physical and mental well being with how much short term pleasure we want to experience, you know.
And I get it. You know, people, some people.
Who really like to live for the day aren't really too concerned about the future. But a lot of people, I think, when they get to the future, look back on those old days and wish they would have behaved differently. But one of the strategies I used, Craig that I've developed rather recently when people give me a hard time about yeah, you really shouldn't eat that third doughnut, or yeah you shouldn't get regularly kicked in the head, or yeah you should get this vaccination.
It's going to protect you and those around you.
These are things that, maybe inconvenient disrupt people's lives, and they don't want to do it themselves. So I ask, okay, well, think about this, what would you tell your children, you know, how would you encourage them to behave.
And nine times out of ten.
A lot of them would tell their children something different than how they're behaving right now in the moment. So like they will tell their children to eat better, Yet they themselves will not follow that scene advice, so reframing it, taking the issue off of them and talking about their children can really make a difference sometimes definitely.
And also, yeah, that makes complete sense. And I think the challenge is that I think for a lot of people, like in the micro of the day to day, like today, oh yeah, today, I've got to get through this. And I'm like, it's almost like nearly everyone has this intention that they're going to change something soon. I'm going to stop that soon. I'm going to do less of that and more of that. I'm going to deal with that shitty behavior. I'm going to make better decisions, do better things,
create better outcomes. And I'm going to start Monday, not today, but I'm going to start Monday, or I'm going to start January one, because that's the stuff starting day, you know. And I think sometimes in the day today micro, we forget to zoom out and just go all right, well, let's look at me at this point in time on my journey. You know, I just turned sixty and let's say hopefully I've got ninety years. Who knows, I could have sixty one, We don't know. But if I go
all right, well, I'm sixty years old. What do I want my body to work like, feel like, function like when I'm sixty five, Let's hope I'm still around. What kind of lifestyle do I want to have? What kind of behaviors do I want to be embracing, What kind of relationships, what kind of situation and environment? What kind of work do I want to be doing? All of these kind of big picture questions, and then zooming back to now. So what do I need to do now though?
To make that likely? What decisions do I need to make? What things do I need to acknowledge? Because I think to an extent, I think, to an extent, doc we live in this kind of almost groundhog day and then we go, oh shit, and now I'm sixty or now I'm fifty.
Yeah, those are great questions.
Getting out getting yourself out of the day to day route teens can be a real challenge, especially if they are routines that you have built up over years, maybe decades. Those are hard habits to break. There's a lot of tools out there now, however, that can hold you accountable
to the goals that you want to achieve. And I liked one of the things you said Craig, you talked about your future self, you know, your sixty five year old self, and what that person is going to be like, what they would kind of come back and tell sixty year old Craig to do or not do in order to be better. And that's a really great strategy. You know, we have this very powerful capacity for imagination, and a lot of times we don't use it.
You know, if we.
Envision ourselves in the third person as like a friend in the future, Okay, what is my future self going to feel like about the behaviors that I'm doing today? Would they condemn them or would they praise them? And that's a good way to frame, you know, the behaviors you're undertaking on a day to day basis, and if your future self is not going to approve, that should
give you some incentive to dissociate yourself from that habit. Now, in terms of breaking those habits and making new ones, you can basically take advantage of the same system that's in the brain in order to change bad habits. One of the first things you have to recognize are the emotions that swell up right before you engage in that bad habit, like before you eat that third doughnut, or before you go out for a cigarette or have like, you know, another beer, you want to think about, do
I really want to do this? Recognize that emotion that you think that's going to give you pleasure, and it probably will in the short term, but you have to envision what the long term effect is going to have.
That can be a powerful way to break it. You need to you need to think about your emotions.
You need to put a space in between when those arise and what sort of action you take, and try to build new healthy habits around that.
I think also like the idea I love that, but also the idea of when I say to people, don't overthink this, but what are your values? What are some of your values for life? And then people will often go, oh, you know, my quality time with my family, you know, mental health, physical health, you know all these great things. And then I say, great, let's jump those down and now let's do an inventory or a stock take or
an audit on our current behavior. Like is the way that I typically live in alignment with ice with the things that I say are my values? Like if I didn't know you, but I just observed you, would I know that phiz mental and emotional health was a priority based on how you live, and people go, oh, yeah, well maybe not. You know, so it's not about how to walk, it's not about condemnation or criticism. It's about awareness, you know, because you're not going to accidentally end up healthy,
You're not going to accidentally end up successful. You know. It's like you need to recognize the thing that you say really matters. And then you know, I think being able to turn down the emotion a little bit and be brave and courageous and say am I full of shit? Or am I an example of the things that I
want my kids to do? Like even for me, I have a pretty big platform, and I write a lot and teach a lot, and sometimes like there were periods in my life where I owned gyms, Like I owned multiple gyms, and I had five hundred staff working for me over a period of time. And there were times bill where I was telling people to do stuff that I wasn't doing, you know, and I was living out
of alignment, and it it. You know, I was kind of operating on this fraudulent level where I wasn't trying to be a fraud, but I was teaching people how to live and make decisions, and you know, human optimization and nutrition and then secretly eating crap and dealing with all my the same you know, human bullshit. So you know we're all prone.
You sound like one of those television evangelists.
You know, they're.
Talking about the Bible and don't do this and that sin, and then boom they're out doing that very thing.
So like Socrates's kind of sad, you know, they self right.
You got to take stock of your actions every single day and if they're out of alignment with the virtues that you want to possess, you know, don't eat yourself up about it. Everybody makes mistakes, but you take that knowledge and do something productive with it for the next day and say I'm going to I'm going to do better tomorrow.
I wanted to talk to you about. I sent you a few ideas I wanted to talk about, and one was the idea of you know, most of our listeners, we have a great audience, shout out to you, audience, love you. About seventy percent of our audience a female, about thirty percent male for whatever reason, and I would think it's it's you know, a very curious, very engaged audience,
but not not disproportionately higher in academics. So I don't know, maybe ten percent fifteen percent academics, but eighty five percent ninety percent not academics per se, which is not a judgment either way, but trying to, trying to, I'm always thinking about how do I share these messages? How do I get the bill on who's an academic and a scientist and in my opinion, a genius and share ideas,
thoughts and information. So here's two parts. How do we share this stuff in a way that's not only relatable and understandable, but maybe a little bit inspirational. But then my next question is how can those of us who are not perhaps scientists or don't really understand the jargon or lingo, how can we implement science in our own life? How can we I don't know, I guess, run our own studies? How can we do how can we be an equals one in the middle of our own little
kind of experiment? And is that a good idea of what does that look like?
There's a lot to unpack there.
Yes, sorry about that. That was thirty questions, so good good luck?
Yeah, how much time we got so let's deal with the last question you asked, and if there's elements that I didn't address, we'll come back to them. I'll be happy to fill in in a holes that I leave.
But when you're asking something about how non scientists can maybe embrace a more scientific lifestyle or more evidence based lifestyle, even though obviously they don't subscribe to the scientific technical journals and understand a lot of the heavy jargon that's out there, I don't understand a lot of it myself, to be honest. I mean, there's very narrow fields of
science that we specialize in. So while you call me a genius, I kind of laugh at that because there are I know far less about many more things than the some.
Things I do know about.
You know, So you know, you need to start with an intellectual humility, which surprisingly a lot of people do not have. Goes back to what we were saying earlier. We get stuck in our ways, we have our habits and think we're you know, we think we're living well and right. But you've got to start with the humility that you could be wrong about things and let life surprise you, let you know, go where the evidence takes you. So in my personal opinion. Note to answer your question,
I think we're all kind of born scientists. Humans are evolutionarily wired to look for patterns in nature and in their lives and in their human interactions in order to try to formulate predictions because we don't like uncertainty. It creates chaos in our lives. And back in the day when we just climb down from the trees and survival was everything, you needed to be really cautious and formulate good models about how the world works, or that was
the end of your genetic line, you know. So those behaviors are woven into the very fabric of our DNA. So we're naturally curious and we look for these patterns, and that's pretty much what a scientist is. So I've been curious all my life. It starts with this, Hey
I don't know this, I'm curious about it. So I'm going to formulate a hypothesis, which is an educated guess as to what might happen if I do X, or what might happen if I do Y. And then you conduct that experiment and you analyze the results and you try to see if your guest was correct or not, and.
If it's correct.
Maybe you hit upon the truth, maybe still could have missed something, But if you can't falsify the hypothesis, that is a signal that you're on the right track. And that's how science works. It's really that simple, educated guest do an experiment and then analyze the data.
Now, what's beautiful about science?
I advocate science all the time as the greatest method humanity has devised. Yeah, that can get us as close to the truth as possible. Okay, it can give us the most accurate representation of what's.
Out there in the world. It just works.
I mean, it has great merit, it's a rigorous system, it is self correcting, and it's democratic. And what I mean by that is that other people can do the same experiment that you performed, Okay, and if they repeat your results, that's further evidence.
That you're on the right track. But if someone can't get.
The results that you did, maybe you need to revisit your experiment or your ideas and reformulate them. That's why I think science is so beautiful, and you can apply it to just about everything in your life, you know, And I think evidence based living is what I championed
in the book. Please to meet me, and that system is a great way to go about making decisions in your life because you know they're rooted in reality, you know they're based in evidence, and you can move forward not only to make a better life for yourself and your family, but hopefully to have better interactions and make the world a better place.
Yeah, so let's I love all of that. So let's say somebody says that makes sense to me, Doc I want to start, I don't know where to start. Here's an idea, tell me what you think of this. So I was talking to somebody recently and it was about the whole very typical weight loss, health, fitness, fatness, in shape, out of shape, longevity, health span conversation, and I said too,
it was a lady. I said, here's my idea. This is a question I ask a lot of people that they don't think about, is how many calories do you drink a day? And they're like, what, I go, how many calories do you drink a day? And so when we broke down calories that are in liquid form for her, it was on ad about eight hundred calories a day, and I said, well, over a thirty day or Yeah, let's say a thirty day period a typical month, that's
twenty four thousand calories. So why don't you try this, Why don't you try one month with no liquid calories so you can have some tea or coffee, no milk, you can drink water of course, anything that doesn't contain calories. Leave your food the same, you know. And I've done this with lots of people, and I go leave all the other variables the same, but just change that, just so that there's not a multitude of things we're changing, and then we don't know exactly what's working and what's not.
And anyway, so she's started that, and she's dropping some fat and weight, which is good, and she's happy, and she's surprised. What a simple protocol. That's not her word, that's mine. But how easy that is to do? Do you think that's a good way to start? Is just doing a period of time and trying one thing and changing one thing? Is that a good kind of starting or step off point?
Well, I can certainly tell you from a scientific perspective, ideally you just want to work with one variable at a time. Same goes for medicine. You know, when you're looking at you know, the effects of different drugs, whether they work or not, what side effects might arise. You have to do what we call very control, well controlled experiments. In other words, you only want to analyze the one
variable that you're testing. Otherwise what we call confounding variables can come into the equation and cloud our interpretation of the data. So I really like your approach there, not only because on a scientific level it's like a well controlled experiment, but I also believe that if you're trying to initiate change in someone's life, particularly as it pertains to diet, changing just one small thing is a lot easier than a tremendous upheaval and all of their habits all at once.
So I think that has a much greater chance of success.
And then you know, maybe the next round you can try dropping out one other high calorie item from their lifestyle and see even more improvement.
You think. Also, so even putting aside the physiological you know, the energy and out component, and you just think about the social, the behavior or the emotional and the psychological stuff that's wrapped around in this example food, You know, so many of us have been eating a certain way
and choosing a certain way for so long. It's very unlikely that we're going to undo that programming in four weeks, you know, especially when we're talking about thirty or forty or fifty years of thinking and eating and kind of
operating in a certain way. Yeah, but I think having that clearly defined kind of product while I'm doing one thing and I'm doing it for this long, I think that I like working in short blocks too, like a month or thirty days, twenty eight days, whatever it is, because for me, it seems like it's it's short enough to stay pretty focused, but long enough to get some some data, you know.
Yeah, I think not long ago, maybe a couple of years ago, there was a great book written called Dopamine Nation, and it speaks to some of these principles. Humans can become addicted to pretty much anything. Okay, so when we ingest certain foods or you know, a lot of sugar, a lot of fat, for example, very similar analogous things can happen in our brain at a molecular level to that compared to someone who is basically hooked on drugs
or alcohol. You know, the brain changes to expect and accommodate this massive amount or this unusually high sugar amount that you're putting into your body. So if you start giving that up, you know it has to be done gradually or else your body is going to go into I guess what you would analogously call withdraw and you're going to need to combat those symptoms of withdrawal by re engaging in the bad habit that you're trying to remedy. So stepping down from things is probably a wiser route,
you know, if it's at all possible. And in the case of drug and alcohol addiction, scientists are trying to devise similar molecules that work the way the drug does. It binds to the same receptors, but can do so in a non addictive fashion, so you can get the person weaned off the drug without experiencing the harsh withdrawal symptoms and kind of let the brain recalibrate itself, getting back to this what we call homeostasis. Okay, that's kind of like the baseline of where your.
Brain should would be.
When you start overindulging and getting addicted to things, whether it be something in your diet, alcohol, or drugs, the brain is going to adapt to those and weaning yourself off can create some very serious problems.
It's almost like DOPA means the addiction, but we just take different paths to get there.
You know, it's likely, Yeah, I'm addicted.
To that feeling, to that biochemical reaction, and gambling or booze or drugs or pawn or whatever. That's the conduit. That's the door that opens the response for me. So I'm going to keep opening that door.
That's right, and that hits upon the thesis of this book. You can become addicted to psychological things as well. The author of the book herself admitted that her addiction was like teenage romance novels or something like that.
She just couldn't stop reading them.
Very benign addiction compared to someone on on crack or cocaine, But nevertheless, it illustrates that the same brain pathways, the same transmitters are involved, and the same deprogramming steps are as effective. So yeah, you just basically kind of got to get your brain back to homeostasis. And the hardest part, the biggest challenge is coping with the withdrawal period. If you can get through that period, you're kind of well
on your way. The author of this book also cited like alcoholics anonymous as a really good program to hold yourself accountable and to have other people kind of hold you accountable or at least be there when you feel like you're going to cave into the craving, so that social support system can be invaluable in helping people shake some of their bad habits.
Yeah, you spoke before a little bit about I think you said about being open to a can't remember exactly, but open to learning new things. And I think one of the challenges too when you are a when you you know, scientist, non scientist, but when you have certain certain ideas or beliefs that you believe to be true, and you think, oh, this thing that I think that is the truth. So therefore anything that doesn't align with that is you know, problematic, or it's wrong or it's misinformed.
I think one of the challenges, like an example that I've given too many times on this show, but I've never given it to you, Doc, is when I grew up in the early eighties and I was working in gyms and working with athletes in the general public, and I would talk to people about the food pyramid because that's what I believe to be basically good science around food, and then over time I realized that probably isn't optimal.
And then, but what that meant for me was I had to acknowledge that I've been wrong, and not only had I been I was teaching people things that were wrong, and so being willing to go, oh, one, I got it wrong, being willing too to unlearn and then relearn. And then I think three for me, I want to
know your opinion on this. I think the hardest thing is when your identity is intertwined with a certain model, or a certain paradigm or a certain belief system, When you get your sense of identity from that, it makes you pretty much unteachable.
I couldn't agree more.
I've accumulated a little bit of wisdom in my old age as well. And when you're younger, you love to identify with things. You love to incorporate certain causes or behaviors you know or groups as a part of you. It's almost like you are proud of this, you're signaling it.
It's a real element of the self.
And I think that is that really backfires in a lot of ways, because, as you said, it closes you. You off automatically, and then the brain goes into like this automatic shutdown when it here's something different than what your group tells you to believe. And really, when you identify with something like that, who are you living for now?
It's like you've erected this your own prison. Okay, you really can't be an authentic self if you stop learning and you're so glued to a concept, ideal organization that you're impenetrable to new knowledge or evidence. And to me, you might as well be six feet underground because you're not really living anymore.
And also, I mean, now, now the person who you know in this instance, so you know, in some ways I would go, well, I'm a scientist, blah blah blah. But also, oh but now I'm being emotional and irrational. Now this is you know, it's like, because I don't want to be wrong, and therefore if you don't agree with me in inverted commas, then then you're the enemy.
And so then this and I think being able to you know, I know this sounds quite philosophical, but you know, it's a really interesting component of learning and growing, and you know, experimenting and unlearning and relearning is being able to deal with the fact that you're going to be right, wrong, probably more than you're going to be right and being okay with that, you know, whereas when we live in this echo chamber of confirmation bias, where everyone in the
world who doesn't agree with me on this is wrong. Like, like, even from a logical point of view, how dumb is that thought?
Right? Right? How dumb?
How is that?
Yeah, it's it's audacious and dangerous because when you think you know everything, you are closing yourself off to new knowledge, you know, and we're discovering new things all the time, So you can get into very serious trouble if you double down on, you know, beliefs that you.
Think are true.
We see this, unfortunately in politics all the time, and it is so maddening that, you know, their behavior is so ridiculous when they double down on something that is obviously wrong, it's demonstrably false, and yet they stick to their guns and end up shooting themselves in the foot with those guns. You know, it's just a and there's no way you can run a successful nation with leaders like that. It's just like you said, it's a formula for insanity. So we have this, and it goes back
to the issue we were talking about earlier, Craig. We have this capacity in our brain to crave comfort, security, predictability, and that's why we're so resistant to change. And there seems to be a window in our youth where we are kind of trained that this is the right religion, this is the right idea, this is the right behavior, and it's like solidifies after a certain age. It becomes very hard to start chipping away at that foundation, but
it certainly can be done. I mean, I work in the sciences and I run into scientists quite regularly who will double down on ideas that have been pretty convincingly proven false. Okay, but they're going to cling to that dogma that they're used to, you know, for reasons that
just defy logic at times. So even scientists and doctors are not immune to this very quirky thing about the human brain in that it just holds so tight it gives you know what, It's like we're bear hugging our beliefs when in fact we should just be holding that hand very very loosely and be willing to let it go. We have to get comfortable with uncertainty and the possibility that we could be wrong about things. Yes, let me tell you about this experiment. This is also a book.
It's a great concept that it was. It's the principle here. Do you ever hear of something called the knowledge illusion?
I don't think so, tell me.
Yeah.
So the knowledge illusion was this experiment that was done that got in a group of participants and they asked the group if they knew how a bicycle were. They asked them how confident they were, rate themselves on a scale of one to ten, how well they think they know how a bicycle works, And most people give themselves a ten. Sure, I know how a bicycle works. I've been riding them all my life. I built one some time ago.
Yeah.
And then the experimenters give them a piece of paper with a half drawn bicycle on it and tell them to complete the drawing, and most of them can't do it. You should google these images because they are some of the most you know, outlandishly non functional you'll ever see on paper. If like pedals and chains going all which way,
it clearly it wouldn't work. And then they have to reevaluate, they have to rescore themselves, okay, and most of them bring their score way down because they realize I thought I knew something and turns out I don't, and this just isn't With bicycles, they ask them all sorts of questions, you know, they ask them.
Like, how does a zipper work? Okay? How does a toilet flush?
And then in America we ask questions like how well do you know Obamacare?
Okay?
You ask them certain things that they that are political in nature, that they think they know so much about, and then you ask them just some very basic questions. Okay, so tell me how a zipper works, tell me what is Obamacare about?
You know, how does it work? And they can't answer this. This is the knowledge illusion. We think we have a lot more knowledge in our head. We think we have a much better understanding of the world world then we really do. So you got to put your money where your mouth is.
And if you claim to know something, you know, you have to be able to illustrate that you are an expert in the area. But I think what the knowledge illusion really illustrates for you know, most people, is that we have to accept the fact that we think we know a lot more than we do, and we have to get comfortable with that. That's not a ding against your personality. It doesn't mean you're flawed in any way.
It means you're human. And if you don't accept that as a basic fact, you're going to be closing yourself off from lifelong learning and possibly discovering some really interesting and fascinating things about yourself or about the world.
Yeah.
I love that. It's funny. When you said the knowledge illusion, I almost went, yeah, I know what that is. I would have been perfect because I.
Would have asked to Okay, how's it work exactly?
Fuck, I'm glad, I said no. But I've heard the term, but I don't know what it is.
But it's like, because you know, perfectly illegraated the kind of intellectual honesty and humility that you need, why are people so afraid to say, I don't know, I would like to learn.
To me, that's yeah, go on, well I think we do. You know, ego is self esteem all that bullshit. But but it's like you said, it's it's human. I mean I I yeah, I think it's you know, like we need to celebrate our humanity or at the very least, go yeah, I don't know, or I fucked that up. I got that right, I got that wrong. You know, like sometimes I'm in the middle of doing something or saying something, and I have this awareness, Oh, this is my ego right now, this is this is me trying
to make doctor Bill like me. In the moment, I'm like more of my fucking seven you know.
But you evolved from a social primate species that are very similar to chimpanzees, and we carry this evolutionary baggage around. We want social advancement, we want to be respected in the tribe. Because even worse than feeling seven Craig is not being able to have opportunities.
To attract a mate.
Okay, And in the olden days, when we were climbing down from the treaties, that was paramount. Reproduction was paramount, and you had a much higher probability of passing along your genes if you had a higher place in the hierarchy within the tribe. And all these silly little games that human beings continue to play today go all the way back to that evolutionary psychology. And when you frame the silly things we do in that way, you know, subconsciously,
my brain wants to attract a mate. So that's why I'm going to double down on this falsehood so that I can maintain face and some semblance of prey man, you really do look ridiculous. Yeah, but a lot of people can't see through that.
You know, a lot of the conversations that I have with different people from different spaces, background scientists or not, we end up talking about the human experience, and we kind of in a way come back to this underlying idea in psychology of you know, metacognition is thinking about how we think, like why do I think this way? Why do I tell myself? What's the origin story for
this thought? What's the origin story for this story? You know? Like, and then you know, the next layer up in the self awareness pyramid from that is theory of mind is me trying to understand how TIF thinks, Me trying to understand how you know, how you think, Bill, And then above that is my PhD, which is a meta perception and meta accuracy, is me trying to understand the creve
experience for you. But just in general terms, I don't think we actually think about how we think or why we think the way we think as much as we should. We just think and believe that we're right because well that's what I think.
Did you?
But rather go cool. I get it. I get it that you believe that and that you think that, And I'm not debating you. I'm just going why do you think that? And a lot of people go, fuck, I don't know, I just think that, right.
But that's that's a wonderful question to ask someone, especially if you have differing opinions on an issue. Rather than just get mad and go on to defensive, you know, to try to prove that you're right, why not get curious, okay, get curious about that person and try to understand, well, hey, I have a completely different view. What have you experienced in your life that has led you down a different
path to come up with a completely different conclusion. And you know, just because you understand how they arrived that their belief doesn't mean you agree with it or condone it. But to have that understanding makes for a much more productive conversation than two people just trying to convince each other that they're idiots and that they're wrong. You know that plays out in American politics and probably Australian politics
as well every single day. Rather than people trying to come together and learn why they believe the way they do, they would just rather fight and name call and throw a bunch of mud. And you can't have a productive society when everyone's acting that way now.
And you, I mean, you know, Stephen Covey and a bunch of others, you know, seek first to understand and then to be understood. But I think one of the one of the misconceptions is if I say something like I understand war, people think they're saying I can doone war. No. I fucking hate war, but I understand how it happens. I understand domestic violence, but I hate it. I understand drug addiction, but I don't can you know. It's like I can't overcome the thing I can't understand or won't understand.
And so whether or not I agree or disagree a line or don't a line, support or don't support whatever it is that person believes, thinks, I want to understand it, you know, because that's the stepping off point. Whereas you're exactly right in not just in politics, but in religion, in you know, in food. Cults Like to me, they're
all just cults of thinking. It's like this is how in our whether it's religious, political, nutrition, sociological, cultural, there are all these cults of thought, where this is how we think, this is how we see the world, this is what we believe. All of that's cognitive stuff, right, And in the middle of that is absolute intolerance for anything that doesn't sound or look or smell like me, you know, and just the willingness to go Look, Bill, I don't agree with you, but I'm really curious. Tell
me where that came from. And maybe maybe you'll turn me around. Maybe you won't. But even if we are diametrically opposed, that's still okay. I believe in God and creation. You believe you're an atheist and you believe in evolution. But we can still be mates because, of course, our friendship ain't dependent on or you know, yeah, it ain't reliant on total agreement.
Absolutely.
I always encourage people that when you encounter someone different than you, to view them as a mosaic piece of art, right, Yeah, you know, the mosaics are made up of these tiny little tiles, and if you're real close to the piece of work, you can't.
Tell what it is.
You need to say, step back in order to get the whole picture and see the complete portrait or the complete person. So, like you said, when we align in like a cult cult like fashion to group think and have to agree with everything that our group says, or else will become an outsider to that group. Okay, despite all of that, that's only one tile of their personality.
And believe me, on the book tours and when I go out and give scientific lectures to the general public, I encounter a lot of people who are very unlike me okay in certain respects. And we always try to approach that situation and saying, okay, my beliefs about X or just this one.
Tile in my entire mosaic.
I bet we can find other tiles that we have in common, and we more, we have a lot more in common then we do differences. So when we start talking about music, okay, or movies or you know, things that we like to do in nature, these are things that you can grab onto that are commonalities. And despite any sort of like political or philosophical difference, all of that suddenly seems to shrink. Those differences get smaller and the things that you do have in common get larger.
So we need to keep in mind when we encounter people different from us, that we're only looking at like a tip of the iceberg or we're only looking at like one tile in this very large mosaic. I have a formula that I write about recently called the three C's, and I think it really helps. It's easy to remember when you approach these, you know, difficult conversations, So you want to engage more with curiosity, okay, then to automatically start spewing out a whole bunch of things and reasons.
Why you're right. Okay.
In the old days, I used to like bury anti vaxxers in charts and graphs and data, and that approach failed miserably. That's not what they want to hear. So instead of trying to be persuasive, I get curious, and just like you said, Craig, I try to learn what experiences did they have that that has led them to this, you know, refusal or hesitancy about a vaccine of some kind. So that curiosity can spawn some very interesting information and usually provides you more about you know, their life and
values that you can find commonalities. And then when you start developing like a relationship a respectable you know, almost even a friendship with this person, they're more likely to entertain any sort of evidence or experience that you want to send their way. So that's the first the curiosity. The second one is compassion, and this is kind of related.
We have a tendency as human beings to get a little aggressive when we're trying to defend our own beliefs or when we're trying to prove someone wrong, and that usually comes at the expense of a compassionate conversation. So you really want to show the other party that you're genuinely interested in why they share these differences, okay, why they have these differences. And the third s is civility.
There's no reason why we can't have a conversation about differences without getting all angry and aggressive and resorting to name calling and whole bunch of horrible things. So keeping the conversation civil is also going to go a long way. Now, I engage in dialogues with a lot of people who might be opposed to evolution, might be opposed to vaccination, don't believe climate change is happening. That can be a very frustrating experience for me as a scientist because of
the experiences I've had. So I want to learn what is it about their life that has led them down a different path. I try to stay compassionate and understanding. And even though I'm not going to persuade them, at least not with just one encounter, I walk away from that discussion with the idea, with the comfort that they now know me not as like some kind of aggressive scientist who is just out to call them stupid, but as someone who genuinely cared about how they felt, why
they believe the way they do. I wasn't trying to ram stuff down their throat or convince them that I was correct. Just wanted to show respect, show some civility. So now when they think about scientists or doctors, their mind might not go to a negative place. They're going to say, hey, my conversation with Bill was really cool. He respected me, he was trying to understand my views. You know, maybe he's onto something. You know, who knows.
I think you're going to make more progress that way than if you're just having you know, horrible nan calling episodes.
I think it's great that you actually conceptualize that because it's true, and irrespective of who's right, wrong, what's true, what's not true, Like, there's a certain energy in conversations, and you know, even sometimes people that I agree with I don't like the way that they go about sharing their thoughts. It's like, I actually believe what you believe, but I don't like the aggression. I don't like the condescension.
I don't like the arrogance or the superiority. It's like, you know, that doesn't even if you're right, and who knows, but let's go, even if you're right, there's still a way to connect with people that's going to be more resonant or less resonant. And there's you know, so, and I'll be the.
First to say that scientists and doctors are horrible at that. I mean that there's not all of them, of course, but many of them take that condescending route or you know, I'm your doctor, just do as I say, and you know, next patient, please, So yeah, you know, they don't take the time and the energy to explain things.
And I get it.
I've been on the other side of the fence. It can be frustrating sometimes. And there's other people who are just really you know, they show that cult side and.
It can get very unnerving.
But you have to exercise those three c's, you know, curiosity, compassion, stability. It'll get us much further than if we try to continue on the same path that we're on now.
One hundred percent. I love chatting with you. You're in my top few. Love chatting with you. Appreciate you is place to make me. Is that your most recent book?
It is, it's actually the only book, but it is coming up when it's five year anniversary this August, So I can't believe the time flies, man, But it's great to know that.
It's still making waves.
It's still been translated into a dozen languages so far. So I'm just so grateful that people are reading it and absorbing that message in that book.
I want to know, did you do the audio version, the Mandarin audio version? Did you do that?
No?
I didn't do any of the audio any of those audio versions.
But yeah, a Mandarin one for me would have been very interesting.
Yeah, it would have been interesting for people who actually speak Mandarin as well. Hi, Doc will saygobof here. But once again, do you want to point anyone towards your socials or a website or anything do you want to direct now?
Thanks?
Thanks, thanks for reminding me. Author Bill Sullivan dot com. You'll find information about the book we've been alluding to but I have been writing a lot of articles, especially about the topics we've been discussing today, Craig, about these civil conversations and trying to understand people who are different than you. You can find those articles at author Bill Sullivan dot com.
Wow. We appreciate you, sir, love that you agree to be part of this. Every so often we'll say goodbye affair, but from the moment, thanks again, Doc.
Anytime, it's always a pleasure.