We understand my free the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a
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question everything, and start thinking. This is the Thinking Atheist podcast hosted
by Said Andrews. It is rare that I have a gassed back of the
show within a few months of that guest appearing beforehand. You know, I
want to give everybody some breathing room. But I've been having conversations about conversations.
I've been going through some stuff in my own circle, and I've been
watching this big Joe Rogan dust up with RFK Junior and doctor Peter Hotez and
this sort of demand for debates, you know, abate for debate, debate
me or else kind of thing, and so I want to talk about discussions.
The first person I thought of was the guest I had had on earlier
this year. It's Melanie Trici King, who is an educator and she is
the founder of Thinking is power dot com. Melanie, so glad you came.
Thank you so much for having me on. It's really an honor.
Okay, first, I'm want to start off with this whole ghost thing,
and this is unrelated, but I love I would love to stay in a
haunted house. I don't necessarily believe in ghost in spirits and apparition and phantoms,
but I don't care. I've been watching your social media feed. You
have stayed or have been staying in a haunted house or houses plural. What's
that about? So that was such a fun opportunity. I have a good
friend Kenny Biddle, who is the world's only full time paranormal investigator at the
Center for Inquiry, and he actually used to be a pardon the air quotes,
but a ghost hunter, like the TV kind that you would see.
And wanted to go stay with him, and he mentioned staying in a haunted
house, and I said, you know, I want to see what a
ghost hunt looks like. No, I want to see what a paranormal investigation
looks like and how that's different than a ghost hunt. And so there's a
supposed haunted house out there. It's called the Hinsdale House in rural western New
York. And we runted the house for the evening and my husband and Kenny
and I spent the night in the house and had a nice tour of it,
heard the ghost stories from the person who was letting us in the Actually
the forest was supposedly haunted too, so we went up into the forest to
check things out. The story goes in the nineteenth century, early nineteenth century,
there was a pair of brothers that again this is according to Lare,
but they were on the stagecount coach route and they robbed and murdered on nearly
ninety people and buried them on the grounds. And in the seventies there was
a family that lived there and they reported all kinds of paranormal experiences and even
had a priest come in and give an exorcism of the house. And since
then no one's lived there, but it's been a place where people have gone
to experience paranormal sightings. Okay, well, I'd be forgive the digression,
but I love ghosts. I would love to stay the night in one of
the I hate the word murder house, but that's kind of what a few
of them are. Maybe it's tacky, you know, where someone some horrible
thing happened and now they you know, they hang a shingle out front and
stay for only four unit box you can sleep over. I mean, maybe
that's tacky, but I would I would kind of do that, Okay,
I wouldn't talked a little bit about it. I want to start here before
we get into rogue and everybody else. I think you posted something on thinking
aspower dot com, or on the web page or on the Facebook page rather
about the world being gray. Yeah. My graduate professor used to always say
that the world wasn't black or white, it was shades of gray. And
that's really struck me and stayed with me. So, um, binary thinking
is simple, it's easy, it's seductive. It's clear this or that.
You can be confident in certain in what you think that you know. Reality
doesn't work that way. There's lots of shades of gray. And so one
of the first things with critical thinking is to get students to and I say
this all because I'm an educator, but to get students to understand that knowledge
isn't black or white. It's not like you know something or you don't know
something. I mean, certainly some things are more certain than others. But
literally put on a spectrum, start with this is what I think is true
zero two hundred percent? How sure am I that that is true? And
then get them to understand that those extremes are probably something that we want to
avoid, so scoochy in and then with new evidence be able to move how
certain we think that that conclusion is. And a lot of extremists tend to
see the world in these black or white terms, and then they add in
tribalism us in them good bad, black or white. Where if we want
to solve problems, it behooves us to understand them, and to understand them,
we have to realize that it's not that simple. Right the other team,
the other side, might be right about something, we might be partly
wrong about something. It is almost certainly true that you're not absolutely right about
everything. So the question is what is it? And it starts with not
being so confident in what you think you know. Yeah, but isn't there's
something that we can be confident about? Right now? There are people hammering
out the angry email. Right, I am confident that Nazis are bad and
that what they represent is evil or awful or horrible. So I mean,
are there times when you do draw the line and say, you know I
am right, that I can say that with confidence? I mean, yeah,
the joke that I give my students in class is always what we could
be living in the matrix. Right, So it is true that there are
some things that I are much more confident in others. Look, Nazis bad,
Yes, I'm confident about that, but most situations not that. Oftentimes,
and again not always, but oftentimes that's used to shut down a conversation
by associating someone with Nazis or Hitler. It's an easy way to not have
to make a coaching argument, and so it's mostly a cop out. There
are times where it would absolutely apply, but I think that if you have
to get to that point, then it's probably not a conversation worth continuing anyway.
Well, you know, we do it because we need the other to
be the worst. And here's an example. We had a massive storm with
one hundred mile an hour winds blowing through at midnight one night. It knocked
out power in two hundred thousand homes. We had one hundred million dollars worth
of damage. We had buildings destroyed, trees ripped down from the roots,
and it was just crazy. And I had some damage at our home.
We had this privacy fence and it blew the fence over a big portion of
the fence. Well, my name is over here. He is a maga
conservative Republican, I mean, just right out of the book, right off
of Fox News, right. But he saw that my fence was down.
He said, you know, I can't work today. I got the whole
day. You know, I'm doing nothing else. Looks like you could use
a hand. Let me grab some tools and let me come over and we'll
fix your fence today. And that guy spent all day in ninety three degrees
side by side with me to solve my problem. And it wasn't about politics.
We didn't speak about our philosophies about the world. He was just demonstrating
goodness. Now, if I had seen him on paper right right, weighing
evangelical, maga conservative, I might have written him off wholesale. Yeah,
so there's a lot in there. I'm reminded of the Burnee Brown quote.
I don't know if you're familiar with Burnee Brown, but she says something to
the effective people are hard to hate up close, So move in and online
there's there's a separation, right, there's a distance. You're almost anonymous,
you know, behind a keyboard, and so people display behaviors that they wouldn't
in real life. But actually I'm reminded of I don't know if you're familiar
with Henri taj Fail's work from the mid twentieth century on group dynamics, and
he was a product of the Holocaust, and he saw how horrible the Germans
had treated the Nazis had treated the Jews, and so he set up some
experiments to try to figure out it was clearly in us versus them, but
how how different do groups have to be before one group will start to discriminate
against the other group. So he had people in and he randomly gave them
a series of dots on a screen and asked them to estimate how many dots
were on the screen. And then he grouped the into either overestimators or underestimators.
And his goal was to figure out, if I established this minimal group
paradigm, how many more layers will I have to go before I get to
a point where they will start to discriminate against the other group. And the
twist and the experiment was that he randomly assigned the groups to over underestimators.
So even as something is venal as how many dots are on a screen,
they were still randomly assigned to this group or that group. And he found
that even at that condition, the groups would discriminate against each other. They
would actually take less for their group if it meant the difference between the two
groups was greater. So it is now called the minimal group paradigm. And
to me, what this says, and what I see in your story is
that we have our tribes based on our identities. We have our groups based
on shared characteristics that we think are important. But as soon as those groups
change, as soon as we establish shared identity, then we can connect there
and be on the same team. I'm working on a speech about identity beliefs,
something I'm probably going to take on the road in the winter time or
maybe a first part of next year. But it gets into you know,
whether it's flat earth societies or the anti vax communities, or even religious beliefs,
denominations or faith expressions and how you know there is a sense of social
bonding that might actually trump the ideas themselves. Right. The ideas may be
important, but it's in many ways more important to belong. When you get
paid, you get that feeling of family, you get support and security,
they've got your backs, you feel superior as you do battle against the other.
I'm interested in the social aspects of identity beliefs. You want to that
in more depth for just second. Yeah, so you mentioned like the flat
Earthers in particular. It's really fascinating too. I don't know if he's seen
the documentary Behind the Curve, Okay, wonderful. The main character in that
story, who is like the big guy in the flat Earth community. You
kind of see him throughout, and by the end it's clear that he gets
so much social reward from being not only in that group, but a member
of that group that is able to articulate the best arguments for their position,
that he gets rewarded for it, and that's really hard to give up.
I personally have noticed that it is harder to disagree with my tribe on issues
than it is to disagree with the other tribe. And I kind of I
kind of feel like a coward when it comes to some of it, because
there are things that I think my tribe aren't quite right on that I would
like to speak out on, but I am scared, so I don't do
it. That said, when you've got someone like flat earthers, I mean,
that's really easy to mock. But the more someone is mocked for a
belief, the more they're going to dig in and actually the part of their
brain. Brain scans show that the part of the brain that is activated when
there's a physical threat is actually activated when it's a personal belief, A close
identity belief is attached, is attacked in some way. When I cover this
with my students, I play this fun game and I'll say, okay,
how many species of elephants are there? Right? And you see, I
don't know. Most students have never thought about that, right, And they'll
come up with an answer. I'm like, well, how sure are you
right? So proportionate? Again, how would you feel if you were wrong?
I don't know, So I tell them there's, well, there's three
species of elephants, right, There's a two species of African elephant now,
and there's an Asian species of elephant. Okay, how do you feel that
you're wrong? Nobody came years and imagine feeling that same way about any of
these identity beliefs, these beliefs that hold our social groups together. Imagine being
told that one of those really foundational beliefs is wrong and caring just as much
as you care about not knowing how many species of elephent there are. We
would be able to change our minds, we'd be able to grow and align
our beliefs with what's true. But instead, what we do is we attach
our self esteem and our group membership, and our tribe self esteem to those
beliefs, and so we literally tribe Trump's truth. We care more about our
social standing than we do about the truth. It's interesting to me I read
an article a couple of years ago that was talking about our online interactions because
I can get my snark on, especially with the high profile players. You
know, I like going I think there is merit in going after the franchise
players of awfulness, the people taking themselves way too seriously, doing a tremendous
amount of damage. I like the idea of trying to knock them down a
few pegs to let them know that many of us don't take them seriously.
I handle the one on ones with the every day interlocket much much differently.
Maybe that's me rationalizing. I don't know, but I saw somebody and they
were saying, you know, especially online, all you have to do to
feel like a good person these days is to broadcast a good opinion. Right,
All I have to do is go on Twitter and say some noble thing,
and now I'm a good person. It seems like kind of a cheap
way to achieve personal nobility. I might be an awful person in my regular
life the way I treat people, but if I'm not broadcasting my nobility,
if i give you the correct opinion, that makes me a good person.
And the Internet is really really fed into that model. You want to speak
to that at all. Yeah, we certainly portray ourselves differently online, or
many of us do, than we are in real life. I will the
snark thing is funny because I try really really hard not to be snarky,
but every once in a while it gets the best of me. But more
often, like there's I have a filter, and I know how tired I
am because it's how far down is that filter? Like it's sort of creaking,
like like there's a would they call that the ID? I don't know.
There's something deep down that wants to crawl out and literally crawl into the
culture. But you have to repress it, right, You have to prepare,
You have to civilize yourself, Melanie, right too. And I try
really hard, um, and I notice myself when when I'm like, you
know what, I can't hold this back anymore, and I'm about ready to
hit send and I'll say something. I'll know enough to say something to my
husband, and you know what, why don't you wait till the morning to
do that? Okay, that's will be fair, because I know the snark
makes me feel good, and I know there are times where the person that
I'm giving the snark too, I think objectively deserves the snark. However,
there's a whole mass of people who are watching, and they are going to
fall somewhere along the spectrum. And if they are more closely to the person
that I might snark against, if that grammar was correct, if they're more
closely tied to that, they're gonna see that more's attack on them and I
might lose them. So my goal is to hit the people in the middle
that are probably just watching, they're they're spectators in this, and they're influenced
by the behaviors and the arguments of the people. At least this is the
optimist in me thinks this. And so by holding back the snark and by
by doing what I think is probably the more say, grown up Melanie way
of dealing with it, hopefully I do more. I've been working on myself.
This is a little bit of a setup because I wanted to tell this
story. But I've gotten weary, you know. I I've gotten weary because
so little seems to come of it, especially when it comes to just regular
people. Oh I disagree with you. No you're wrong, No you're doubly
wrong. Oh yeah, Well all my people say that they agree with me.
Oh yeah, my people disagree and they agree with me. Well,
now I'm going to insult you more, and I'm gonna block you, and
I'm gonna screenshot the block, and I'm gonna screenshot the block of the block,
and I'm going to write a blog response blog video response video. It's
just insane. Only escalation, right, only escalation. Nothing gets resolved.
So I'd said something on my own social media page about something, and a
public figure that I really admire jumped in and said something kind of snarky.
He disagreed, and he came in and kind of nuked me from orbit,
you know, and not too bad a way, but he was definitely snarking.
And I had that moment where I thought, I just want to go
in and engage, right. I want to go in. I want to
be snarky back. I want to be clever. I want people to tell
me I'm clever. I want to get that payoff. But I did the
same thing, like, I just took a breath and I said, all
right, And because I've been working on myself, I'm in the middle of
a journey and a process as to how I might improve some of how I
operate, I decided I'm going to try something else. And I said,
thanks for jumping in here. Please know my intent was not that. My
intent actually is this because I have legitimate concern. I love your work,
by the way, and I appreciate you very much. You are smart and
funny, and I will continue to be a fan. And I might be
wrong on this. It won't be the first time I've been wrong, but
just no, this is my intent. This is where I came from.
And when he finally reappeared, he didn't come back to up the auntie,
he didn't double down. Everything a de escalated and we began an exchange which
was productive and thoughtful and filled with goodwill. Right, And I'll tell you
the payoff for that was a hell of a lot more intense than it was
for me throwing out some zinger or shooting a meme his way instead. I
mean, I really felt the rush. I still feel it now. It
felt good to try to build that bridge, and then I thought it is
possible, and other people saw that it was possible. So I just wanted
to tell that story. Maybe it's selfish to take up the airtime to provide
that case study melody, but that's where I'm at anyway. No, that's
brilliant. And back to when I know that my filter has worn down and
I really shouldn't press reply ors and in the morning I always feel better that
I didn't. And when I have mustered the courage to be humble in public
like that and demonstrate kindness in the face of someone who might have been a
bit snarky at me, it always pays off in the end, and not
just for myself, but I see it in other commenters as well. Okay,
I'm not saying I'm perfect on this because I do like to get in
there and stir the pot. High profile types. I mean, Superintendent of
Public Education Ryan Walters in Oaklahomy is just on my list. Marjorie Taylor Green,
It's on my list, damn it. Okay, Finally, after twenty
minutes of talking about other things, I'm going to get into this RFK Joe
Rogan, doctor Peter Hotez thing, the big dust up on Twitter that's making
worldwide headlines. We'll talk about it with my special guests next. I'm talking
here with Melody Tree, he said king. She is an educator and the
founder of Thinking is Power dot com. Joe Rogan the most popular podcaster on
Spotify. It's got like eleven million listeners for every freaking episode he does,
has RFK Junior on RFK Junior running for presidents, and is just a conspiracy
nutbark, I mean just whacky whacky. Believes he thinks that anti depressants are
responsible for mass shootings. He thinks that the CIA was behind the assassination of
JFK, and he's a big anti vaccer and he's got crazy, crazy ideas.
And so doctor Peter Hotez, who was an actual vaccine scientist, comes
forward and says, beware misinformation. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking
about. Joe Rogan says, oh, yeah, I will donate one hundred
thousand dollars to the charity of your choice if you will come on my show
to debate RFK Junior. No time limit, you know, mono imano.
Let's have it out right here, and doctor Hotez said, heil, no,
this is not the forum. If you want to talk personally, Joe,
I'll give you my cell. I think he actually said that, I'll
give you my number. We can have a conversation, but I'm not going
to go and be a part of a circus. And people have come after
doctor Hotez calling him a coward. All right, you're afraid to debate.
What are you afraid of? Why not present the information? So the reason
I bring all this up is that you and I align on this. We
don't think doctor Hotez should step into that ring. Would you agree with that
totally? And why? Because that would not be a science debate. And
let's be clear about this. So the word debate means different things to different
people. Scientists are trained to debate scientists. The process of science is a
collection and evaluation of evidence. As a community, you have to submit your
findings to other researchers who have to try and check you, and they're all
trying to prove each other wrong. It is cutthroat. Scientists do not like
to agree. That's one of the main misconception I think of science I see
is that people think that science is like a democracy, a group think,
and nothing could be further from the truth. The way you make a name
for yourself in science is to say all of this evidence we have is wrong,
and I know that because here's the evidence. Now. That is a
science debate. What Rogan is after is one of those Internet type debates where
it's a no holds barred and it's who can who can defeat somebody else and
beat them into submission. And that's not how science works. This issue has
been and debated in the scientific community, and Hotez is on the side of
science. Rogan and Kennedy just want a platform to air conspiratorial and unsupported beliefs
to a public who doesn't understand the difference. And this is one of my
soapboxes. So if you just want to shut me up at some point,
tell me to shut up. So people don't understand how science works, and
part of it, to my mind, comes from how we teach it.
We teach science like, here's a scientific method, and it's a series of
steps, and at the end you did a science and then you prove something
to be true. And then here's all these facts that we've learned from science.
And certainly there are interesting things that we've come we've learned from the process
of science. The scientific method does not work like that. There is no
single scientific method, and so to present it that way is misleading at best.
But also science isn't a body of facts. We learn things from the
process of science. But fact can change. I mean, when I was
in college, Pluto was a planet. There was no such thing as epigenetics.
There was five kingdoms instead of three domains, and a series of community
kingdoms under them. Facts change. There's nothing set in stone about facts.
Some of them are more supportive than others and are much less likely to change.
But the point of that is that all of that is a process of
how we learned those things. That is the process of science and the process
of scientists debating. So when the community comes out at the other end and
says, here's what we know, here's my problem, here's what we know.
Is great, but we've now trained the public to think that what they
know is set in stone. It's a series of facts and over the pandemic
in particular, we all saw the process of science play out in real time.
We had a new virus, we had a new vaccine, we had
a set of shifting recommendations based on that science. Right, science is what
do we know? And then what should we do with it? That's policy,
and good policy should be based on science. But all of that was
shifting as we learned, and none of us are perfect. Right, what
we're trying to do is get to a better outcome in the end. But
then people felt like science was always changing their mind. They which is a
good thing, and of course they do. They'll say, well they're not
sure. Well, you know what, we're never really confident about everything.
But the public didn't understand any of that. And worse, I think because
they didn't understand the process of science, and the pandemic got politicized so early
that people went back to their tribes. They went back to the group that
they trusted the most. And unfortunately, once it becomes politicized, then your
identity becomes attached to it. It's much less a harder to change your mind,
like we just talked about. So, if we're talking about having a
debate, I personally would love to see scientists do a better job of communicating
to the public what science is. As science educators, I think we could
do a better job of helping our students understand how the process of science works.
But the whole point is epistemology. It is how do we know what
we know? And what I would like to see? Even if Gosh,
I don't think this would be appropriate for Kennedy and for our hotels. But
the better question is how do the different How does science know what it knows
about vaccines? That I think is a much better conversation to have. Then
here's all the evidence, because what you have is people finding sites based on
who they trust, and unfortunately, some people have put their trust in places
that do not deserve it. Well. I think one of the big concerns
that I have and many have, is that that kind of theater often lends
itself the style over substance. I mean, doctor Hotez goes in and gets
into the minute right of how vaccines work, blah blah blah, and he
starts to go down the tier of layers into the history of vaccines and how
everything's peer reviewed and tested and blah blah blah, and people are just gonna
wink out, right. I mean, they're not tuning into Joe Rogan because
they're ready for a deep science lecture. They want theater, right, they
want to see an MMA match in some ways. And so then OURFK Junior
is able to just smooth talk and sell and do his thing, and if
you look at it only at the surface level, he might come off like
he won. And I just don't know if that's a serious. Plus,
I hate the whole bating thing. You know, to debate me or else.
Here's some money, I'll put it up for grabs. Are you a
coward? What are you afraid of? That kind of thing? Really?
I see it on my channel. I'll get theists to drop me a line
and say, debate me coward. I'm like, is this how someone approaches
someone else in good faith to have a conversation about the things matter. I
just don't buy it, you know, I don't think that Rogan is the
forum for this kind of discussion. Yeah, I mean, in the process
of science, scientists are taught to argue. So a good argument for a
scientist is going to be different than something that you probably hear on Rogan.
And that gets back to the nature of debate. A debate, in Rogan's
terms, is a shouting match where you know, no holds barred. There's
ad hominems and strawman and red herrings and you know, fallacies galore, Whereas
in Hotez's world, those kinds of things aren't tolerated. They're not valid responses
to an argument, and so it's not even that that's not even debating.
And so scientists are taught to do that as opposed to um as opposed to
doing what Rogan is doing. One more thing there, which is that scientists
are taught to be dispassionate and the you don't want to attach your identity to
your beliefs because you're you're trying to prove yourself right. You have to subject
your findings to other people. It is not fun, but it gets to
a better outcome. Ironically, I see a lot of and I'm stereotyping here,
but the logic bros who are always calling for these kinds of debates and
so on, like to talk about how well facts don't care about your feelings
and you just need to be more logical about this, when in reality,
the emotional side, and this is Rogan side, it is not Hotez's side.
And in a debate, in a debate between these two, that's why
somebody like Kennedy might win is playing two emotions. You may not realize it.
And the more you are in denial about the role of your emotions in
your thought processes, the more susceptible you are to them. That's how Kennedy
is going to win as opposed to Hotez's side. Well, it's also talk
about an example of personal Now we've got everybody online who's gone after this good
man who's committed decades of his life to science. It's very Fauci asked,
you know, the way they've gone after him, vilified him. Now they're
making accusations that he's just a you know, he's making chillionaire bucks for big
Pharma, all right, he's worth a ton of money, and therefore he's
not credible. You've addressed those on the thinking as power pages, have you
not? Yeah? I have, And you know, I half joked with
my husband recently, like, hey, kids, go in science, Look
how well you'll be treating When I think about it, you know, a
seven figure, eight figure incomes. Science is normally not the first field that
comes to mind. Oh my god. And the scientists that I know are
like driving hondas and they're paying off student loans. Right, there's there's a
few scientists that have made some money, to be sure, but yeah,
so um a few. About a week ago, what came out was that
Hotez was worth thirty five million dollars. And it's from a site that I
still I've been waiting for it to be fact checked and I haven't seen it.
It's only the claim has only come from one site that doesn't to be
a reliable site. But even if we say that's true, so are we
saying that because somebody is worth thirty five million dollars, they're not trustworthy?
Okay, Well I checked, and Kennedy is worth at least fifty million,
and Rogan is worth like one hundred and twenty million so are they not credible
because they are worth more money? So the standards don't seem to apply equally
to all sides in this debate. Here, well, we've also got people
showing up a poor doctor Houtz's run door. People are just showing up at
his house, and I don't get it, Like, when did this become
such a personal thing. I would feel threatened if somebody was on my property
after being called out in front of the world by arguably the planet's most popular
podcaster. I mean, it all seems like it's a powder kig that could
blow up at any moment. Yeah, it's really heartbreaking and quite frankly,
I mean this is anecdotal, but I don't know if there's any studies to
document this. I know a lot of scientists and they have folders of hate
mail and death threats. I mean, this is obviously what's happening to Hotez
is an extreme version, as was what happened to Fauji, but it's not
uncommon. I saw recently. Actually there's a weatherman in a meteorologist in Iowa
that just resigned because he was getting death threats and it was giving him,
you know, PTSD. Why would a meteorologist be getting death threats because he
talked about climate change. I see, let me play Devil's advocate. Why
not go on one of the biggest forums in the world, and you know
you've practiced, You've got cute cards, you've formatted the information for the general
public. Why not go and at least present the case? I mean,
is there a scenario situation where you think somebody who was a science communicator and
a vaccine proponent could go on just in every platform like that and be effective.
Honestly, I don't see how. So part of that is it would
require a moderator that absolutely it sticks people, makes people adhere to the rules
involved, and so far that seems like it would be Rogan. And I
don't think Rogan has the wherewithal to be able to do that, especially since
he certainly has a side in this debate, and so there would need to
be rules and a moderator. But who has has gone on line? It's
not how he hasn't been public right, He's gone on podcast, He's been
interviewed by news programs. He is trying to get the science based message out
to the public, So it's not like he's being secretive. He's just not
willing to play in the mud. I'm reminded of that, like, don't
play chess with a pigeon because they're going to shed all over the blood when
they want, so you wouldn't do it. I mean, come on,
somebody right now, Melody from Thinking his power. I'm calling you out.
I want you on my shell, and we're going to debate whatever you and
I disagree with. You would always say no, Well, I certainly don't
feel like I have the expertise debate vaccines. So I suppose it might depend
on what area it is that we're talking about. And I don't know is
my checking the mail because I never shows up. I hear it is like,
I'm I don't know where you fall religiously, I'm not here for that,
but like I'm an ex evangelical and so one of the things, one
of the many tactics that people use to try to discredit the witness when it
comes to me, is he does this for a living or he's sold book
he has, he's selling books that he has authored. Therefore, if he
receives revenue, his interests are completely self serving. Therefore he is not credible.
And I stare blankly at these people like they love their pastors, even
the maga pastors, the Joel Osteen types who are worth the squillion dollars,
or this idea that if you can find a way to make a living doing
what you love, you are automatically a shill. Like you know, do
they say professional athletes are fake or professional musicians are fake, or professional poets,
authors, dramatists, actors, they don't love what they do, they're
not true believers. I mean, I don't know what if you do thinking
is power full time or if you're a teacher part time or what. But
I mean if you could, if you could be about thinkingspower dot com twenty
four to seven, would that discredit you as someone who wants rational thinking in
a more reasonable world. I don't think so, Melanie. I just don't.
Yeah. I think it's a really easy way to make yourself feel like
you've won an argument. And I the reason I bring up the net worth
of like Brogan and Kennedy is because, like you mentioned with the pastor,
the that kind of argument always tends to be one sided, like it applies
to you, but it doesn't apply to me. And scientists have decades of
schooling and experience, and we expect professionals to get paid for what you do.
I mean, if you're a plumber, do you expect to not get
paid when you go to a house call? Right? Does that mean that
you're like some sort of biased for plumbing. This only seems to apply two
issues where scientific findings, which we all know are inherently reliable. We understand
that science is reliable, which is why so many people try to justify their
opinions with science. But when science conflicts with a core belief, something that's
really important to us, then that gets our defensiveness up, and we need
to find a way to make ourselves feel justified for rejecting those scientific findings.
I'm sorry for giving me Melanie. Go ahead, it go ahead now.
I was just thinking about a comedian and I don't I don't believe this,
but the joke made me laugh out loud. He said, you know,
if I actually do make twenty million dollars, you're going to know because I'll
be in Palm Springs with my new friends right due that you and I are
cashing in. It's just it's obviously they're trying to discredit the witness rather than
deal with the points are that are being presented and disagreed with. I worry
that we live in a world where disagreement is it's a respectful disagreement is considered
weakness. I don't want to live in the same world as those people.
I'm not going to give quarter to those people. But I don't think that's
how we change the world. I don't think, hey, you're an idiot,
Hey you're a moron, Hey at fuck you or whatever that. I
don't think that's how we change the world. But I see a lot out
of it because I think people write other people off completely. You are unreachable.
Now, I want to tell you another personal anecdote. This is dirty
laundry, but I'm just gonna this is where I am, Melanie. I'm
like an abused partner when it comes to my religious mother, and every couple
of years I unblock and we have a casual relationship that then escalates into judgment
and shame, and then I have enough and I blocked. You know.
Sorry, I don't know why I keep going back going This time it'll be
different, right, I'm sure there's good in there somewhere, and so it
has happened again. I look at my evangelical lady, four year old zealot
of a parent and think I've written her off, like I think she is
unreachable. So I'm guilty of that. Do you think there are some people
in this world where and there's no hope? That why bother? You know,
do you ever get there? Well? Yeah, I think those are
two separate questions. Thank you for sharing that story. That's really hard.
It's kind of self serving, I guess. I mean, I don't know
what people want to know what goes on in my life, but it's as
a host. I just you know, it's a personal struggle that may relate
to other people going through familial stuff and emotional blackmail and boundary violations, and
so I really share it in that way because I know many people can relate,
and not just when it comes to religion, but when it comes to
life choices and identity and everything else. But I mean, sometimes you and
I have to look at people and go no hope next. And I'm guilty
of that, right Yeah. So I think that I would like to think
that no person is unreachable. However, I think there are people who aren't
reachable by what I have the ability, or what I am wanting to give,
And that line falls in different places for different people. So if you
know me, my husband is black, and when we got married, I
lost family members and it was a battle that we tried to fight. And
for some people, it was just not worth keeping them in our lives,
and you have to make that decision. For at least this is why I
tell myself it wasn't worth the effort to keep them in my life. For
a random stranger, when I see somebody online posting antibax conspiracy theories, they're
not worth my time at all. So it depends on the situation and the
relationship. I would like to think, though, that those people still are
reachable. I'm just not willing to do it. Maybe I can call your
family and then I'll give you my mom's cell number. Maybe we can like,
you know, swap. Maybe that's it. We just come from different,
different perspectives, different contexts. But you're right, I mean I think
I may not be able to reach someone. That's maybe someone else could,
you know, maybe it's someone from a different perspective who is less threatening and
there's less baggage. I'm by that, you know, that's that seems intuitive.
Any final thoughts about thinking is power for our audience here that you know,
I just love your stuff. It's it sounds. I'm not trying to
minimize it, but it's fun to look at and it's easily digestible, and
it's really taps into the humanity the why we believe what we believe, and
it doesn't it doesn't lead with disdain for the sheeple, but instead says,
we're all people were navigating our way. Let's find a way to I don't
know, get opportunities, create opportunities for changing minds, even our own that
I just sell your site for you after I ask you what it was,
Melanie, I mean, I don't know. That's what I do. I
don't know. I don't think I could do any better than that. You
can. What is thinking as power? And what resources do you have?
As we punctuate the conversation here, well, thinking as power came from my
work as an educator. I teach a science at a community college and non
major science importantly, so these are people who don't want to be scientists when
they grow up, and I was teaching them science the old way, like
biology. And here's all the things you need to memorize, and I finally
realized that was not a good use of their time, and so I created
a course instead to teach these skills and teach them how to think. And
in the process, what I found was, again, how we think and
how we know what we know and why science is reliable is more important than
the findings of science, because implicit in that process, if you understand how
biased we are and how irrational we are and emotional and so on, then
the logic of the process of science falls in place, like we can't understand
why we need science until we understand how biased we are. But the other
thing is there's a lot of misinformation that science classes hopefully would address, you
know, things like climate change denial or evolution denile, or the safety of
GMOs or the safety of vaccines, and those issues, like we've talked about,
tend to be important identity issues. There are things that are emotional that
maybe your tribal for my students, and if I come in with one of
those issues, then they're going to get defensive. So what I realized is
I need to start with something that's not triggering, and so I teach them
first like we baby step into the water, right, we wade into this
shallow and where we do like witches and ghosts and UFOs and astrology and that
kind of thing, and we move on to the more important things as we
go. But I'm teaching them the process of how to think, what good
evidence looks like, what a logical argument looks like, and so that when
they get to those issues, they've had the practice to do so. And
then when I put it online, I just kind of thought, well,
maybe people would be interested. And since then I've realized that reaching people is
fun. And please if you follow me, I really appreciate you. But
I really think a way to help us address our issue is to improve how
we teach science, and so I'm doing more work with educators. Like if
you get one educator, you get all of their students and so on and
so on. So I'm trying to do more of my work moving forward with
educators as well. You know, we'd like to think we're all immune from
bias. Those other people they're deluded. Our thinking is pure. There was
a great comic or political cartoon that you posted this is a few days ago,
where you see a husband and wife sitting on the couch. I think
they're watching the news, and the man says, it's interesting how it's the
people who disagree with me who are all victims of bias or something like that.
We don't like to think that we can be biased or wrong, but
it's a great reminder that we were all human for better and for us hopefully
usually for better. But it's always good to realize that we might be wrong,
and it's good to know if we're wrong, even if it stings.
Melanie King, you are amazing and I appreciate you chatting with me again.
I'll link to thinkingspower dot com in the description box and let's talk again soon.
Okay, awesome, Thank you so much. Follow The Thinking Atheist on
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