Beyond the Present Podcast

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

men, spend, male role models, young man, masculine, masculinity, father, crisis, women, problem, oftentimes, mom, world, means, lack, issue, people, modern, school teachers, male

SPEAKERS

Dan

Dan  00:11

Hello, welcome to yet another episode of beyond the present podcast, this solo edition. My name is Daniel Morgan, and welcome to this episode dedicated to the Father's Day and of course, the issue of masculinity in general. So first of all, I'd like to congratulate this wonderful day to all the fathers around the world, because obviously, it's you know, their day and I would like to somehow congratulate all of them, and to thank them for the effort that you make to raise the families and to contribute to their families. And today, of course, the major topic of our short discussion today is not so much so that, you know, the Father's Day itself, but the issue of masculinity and the fact that we are unfortunately, in a world right now where masculinity is under attack, and let me just explain that a little bit what that means. You see I have a lot of students friends, contacts, Basically, and staff members who come to me and asked for certain questions regarding how they could be a good man. I mean, this is a serious problem like imagine young people, man after man, they come and ask you listen, Dan, I got a problem. I don't know what it means to be a man anymore. And I don't even know should I do it right now? What's the manly thing here to do? And this clearly shows a certain crisis that we have entered into in the modern world. And that is the masculinity crisis. Now, let me explain what that means. You see, unlike the ancient times, where perhaps a young boy was born into a tribe, and then he would immediately have male role models everywhere, so he would go hunting, he would go fishing, he would go, I don't know, perhaps work with the blacksmiths and the men would oftentimes spend a lot of time with other men. And this way young men would have been learned how to be a man by simply learning from their male role models from their peers that essentially A lot of time with, unfortunately, in the modern world, things have changed a little bit. So most young men in their basically, critical, early years, they tend to spend most of their time with their mothers and not their fathers. Why? Because the father is out working, and making, you know, making money and trying to support the family. So oftentimes, in early years, especially into the first 12 to 15 years of a boy's life, he tends to spend a lot more time with his mother than his father. And this is, of course, one of the side effects of modernity, which unfortunately, has had a negative impact on most basically young man's sense of masculinity and manhood. And that is why we need to address this issue, of course, in this program, like to talk a little bit about, you know, this issue and how it will impact the young generation of men and what we could do about it to somehow resolve the issue. So first of all, when a young man spends most of his time Either at home, I don't know behind computer or playing video games and then physically encountering and you know, in talking with basically his mother, then he will simply not learn to think like a man, he will simply not learn to be a man because he does not have what we call a male role model. You see, oftentimes what I mean, if you look at like role models or mentoring, what it really means is to spend a lot of time interacting with asking questions and being in touch with a role model to ask questions to learn from them, and to emulate their behaviors. But unfortunately, model world that's not possible because these men, these young men tend to somehow spend very little time with their fathers. And you know, what they do instead is to just go to school and then oftentimes when they are young, most of their teachers are also women. If you look at like elementary school, the majority of elementary school teachers are women. So just imagine a seven year old and eight year old, a nine year old who is at home Most of the time, the father is outworking so he wakes up. Hi Mom, how are you and he's tends to spend a lot of time with his mother. Then he goes to school where he's been taught even more by other female teachers and no elementary school. And like he's, you know, at his prime like he's 789. This is this is a time when he is forming his personality, his basic behavior, and he's spending most of his time with other women. And this creates a certain problem and that is lack of male mentoring, lack of male, basically role model. so in this situation, what happens is, this gentleman will then grow up not knowing how to think like a man acquiring a lot of feminine characteristics. That's why a lot of unfortunately men these days, experienced tremendous issues psychologically, they said things like, I don't feel very confident or they call themselves super sensitive or they say things that if you heard from a guy, for example, 300 years ago, you would perhaps say like, what's wrong with this guy? Right? And the answer is very simple because this person has no other, you know, way. Any man, any young man who at the age of 789, spends most of his time interacting with a woman will lack, you know, the skill and the ability to think like a man because he has no ability. And then guess what, father comes home late at night, or maybe in the evening after nine or no, let's say 10. Eight, and then they start talking a little bit while watching TV. So yeah, there is a father here. I mean, we're not even talking about you know, single parents, basically, who, you know, single moms are raising their kids all by themselves. But like, if you look at the amount of time that this young man is going to spend with other women, that is primarily his mother and then his school, school teachers and elementary school. It's basically far more than the, you know, little time that he spent with his father. And this unfortunately, Tails this out. of balance. Because of this in the modern world, a lot of men are dealing with masculinity crisis. And this is the route people have asked like, so what is the source of masculinity crisis, the source is childhood. Now it is true that as these kids grow older, and become teenagers and go to school, eventually they will spend more time with other men. Again, unfortunate doesn't always happen. But it happens in many cases, but by then it's probably a little bit too late because these early primitive years that they've actually gone through, were spent mainly interacting with women. So they have acquired a lot of these traits on a subconscious level in their, you know, their personality, and now they lack a masculine attitude towards life, a masculine way of thinking. And because of this, we are now seeing this crisis happening. So, as we've discussed the source of this problem, basically, now it's time to find a solution. So yes, this is the reason why men in the modern age generally lack clear sense of masculinity. they acquire a lot of things feminine characteristics that are oftentimes not associated with men, and more apparently make most men miserable and unhappy. So next time you saw a young man who seemed to be extremely sensitive, or who seemed to care so much about what other people thought of him, or who seems not to have that level of confidence or assertiveness, or more importantly, if you saw a young man who was in a relationship with a woman that he's not happy with, where the woman just runs all over him, and just tells him to what this is what you do and all that stuff, I'm sure you know, such people around you the kind of men who are in relationships with women who basically are there second moms that they sleep with, which is just really, you know, unacceptable. In this situation, you are seeing the result of masculinity, basically, that is being rubbed off, erupt away from these people and are not unfortunately there. So because of this, we need to solve this issue by teaching these young men what it means to be a man and that requires many That requires them to actually spend time with other men. So, when a man is in a relationship, where he's basically controlled by his wife, let's say, what does that mean? But he's not a man. It's just very simple because our true man gets into a relationship that is winwin productive, where both sides make their voice heard, and where he plays a dominant male role. But in the modern age, when that man has grown up, and as in a society where he spends, perhaps spent most of his childhood with his mom, and then school teachers who are also female, is there any doubts that he grows up, he becomes 25 3035 gets married and then sees like, Oh, I'm so unhappy. My wife is controlling all the time, and I didn't know what to do. It's very simple. It goes back to your childhood. Now, this is of course a, you know, a serious issue. I know. And it's not just about your marriage, it about it's about almost everything else. As a man. It's about your sense of masculinity, your sense of dominance, your sense of self confidence. The kind of goals that you set for yourself, I mean, is your goal, you know, more masculine, for example, in terms of achieving things, getting results, and realizing your potentials or you have more feminine, basically goals of being approved and being light. And we're seeing a lot of these things happening these days in the modern world where people are trying, men especially are trying to act like girls. So instead of trying to be focused on their financial success, they're focused on how well they are basically liked by others. Instead of trying to focus on really developing their abilities and their skills and becoming something more they are concerned about whether people understand them or not. You see, these are all feminine qualities they've learned as a child, you know, as a child with their moms, because it is women who care a lot about being understood and appreciated. These are all feminine qualities, and men doesn't need to be understood. Amanda's needs to be appreciated, he needs to get results and that's what makes him happy. But unfortunately, a lot of men don't do that. So they are imitating the same behaviors they saw from their, you know, moms and from their, you know, Earth school children and are acting like whiskies. And that's exactly why we need to address this issue by helping these men to have male role models. And by letting them know what it means to be a man to be masculine, to have certain qualities that we consider to be masculine in nature, qualities such as goal orientation, persistence, self confidence, equality, such as independence, it's very important. Oh, I don't know. I think my, my, my best friends don't understand me, dude, please become a man. You don't need to be understood. In order to be approved. What you need is to get results. And trust me, once you get the results, you will also get the approval. But that's not what most men have been taught to do. Because there has been no man around to teach them these things. So that we know the source of this problem and this crisis, what remains to be done. Obviously, it's For us, to help these men to learn what it means to be a man. And that is why fortunately, we have nowadays a lot of mentors and a lot of programs designed exactly for this because a lot of men, they have to understand what it means to be a man. Now, Society of course, we just celebrated, you know, Father's Day, we would like to actually talk a little bit about this issue. And that is the first and most important thing that any man any young man can do is to strengthen their relationship with their father, and to learn what it means to be a man because unfortunately, most men in the modern world do not have a very close relationship with their father. In my seminars. In my workshops, I ask oftentimes, like the young man, so to which one are you closer? arguably, in most cases, most men say I am closer to my mom and my dad. This is a problem. You see, I'm very glad that you love your mother. And it's wonderful because I mean, I really believe that you know, a mother is the first love so I am Love My mother, and I'm sure that you do as well. But as a man, if you only love your mom and you spend less remember your mom, what happens? You become a mommy's boy. And that, unfortunately, is what's happened these days. So the first step that most young men could do in the modern world is to strengthen their relationship with their fathers, and to spend more time with their fathers. Now, you're saying, Well, what if I don't know my father passed away, or I have no axe to my father? No problem. The second best, basically, a way to do that is to start spending more time with other men, especially more masculine men, or mentors, who will then help you to think like a man to act like a man so spent, ask yourself, how much of my time do I spend with males and how much of my time to spend with females? If you're a guy just asked this question, how much of your time do you spend with men and how much do with women and if the number is not balanced, that is you do not spend at least as much time with men that you with women, then there is a problem. You're saying? Well, I spend most of my time with my girlfriend. But with my wife, well, I'm sorry. So you spend most of the time as a seven year old with your mom, as a 10 year old with your school teacher, and now as a 2030 year old with your wife, so you're spending most of your time with a woman. And you wonder why you lack masculinity? Well, what is what a difficult riddle to solve? It's very simple. It's the simple math dude. So what you got to do now is to spend more time with other men to balance this thing out. And to realize that, yes, I probably need to spend more time with men to learn from them. Now that again, maybe you don't have a lot of male friends right now because you've, you know, perhaps been a bit more introverted, or you have a lot of middle middle role models. Don't worry, there are a lot of great sources also available in forms of books, seminars, workshops, you can actually use to you know, learn more about these issues. If you just sit near search on Google will reveal lots and lots of resources for you actually to learn from and to study and To be able to somehow know what it means to be a man because ultimately, in the modern world, we're not taught most of us men, because this program, of course, is aimed at men. And of course, we love our ladies, I truly appreciate all of them. But this program is designed specifically just for men because of the Father's Day. And if you're a male listener, please understand that you are living amidst a crisis, which is called the masculinity crisis. A lot of your unhappiness and emotional instability is rooted not in your problems, but in the fact that you think not like a man but a woman. And guess what happens when a man thinks like a woman he will experience tremendous psychological pain and problem because he's thinking in a way that is not in alignment with his body, with his mind with his genetic code, and with his inherent instinctive desires as a man and of course, that leads to permanent. So if you are a man right now, and if you feel that you're one of the many Guys who have lacked a male role model since a young age. And don't worry, you're not alone. There are many such men out there. And what you got to do from now on, is to be able to balance this thing out, through mentorship, through studying and reading, and more importantly, by spending more time with other men, and learning from them, and imitating them, and understanding that, ultimately, a man should be a man and that's an issue that, unfortunately, has not been taught so much. Because in our totally correct world of feminism and modernity, which I am a fan of, by the way, we have then somehow gotten a little bit out of balance, and we don't understand anymore. Yes, it is true that men and women must be treated equally. They need equal rights, they have to have equal basically pay for their work. equality is what I stand for, and I support this is exactly what it is. But being equal, does not mean being the same. being equal does not mean that every man should live like a woman. And every woman should live like a man, no men should live, you know, live their lives according to certain masculine principles, which unfortunately, now our long forgotten model, especially in the Western world, because I travel a lot. Now, in certain countries, when I traveled when I work in, I see that still that, you know, male role models are still out there, and men tend to act more like men. But in the Western world, primarily, we're seeing this crisis right now. And of course, for all of those men, I'd say, start spending more time with men, get male and masculine mentors, start reading and studying and that will then allow you to hopefully get the most out of your experience. So this is all the time we have for today. Once again, I'd like to actually congratulate the you know, the Father's Day is really wonderful. And I really hope that this short talk will then inspire the men to not only spend more time with their fathers just spend more time with their numbers. One male role model that is their fathers, but to also take this issue seriously and start to invest in themselves and to know what it means to think like a real man. Thank you so much guys wish you all the best. If you have any questions, you can reach me on my website or on the social media and I'll be glad to answer all of your questions. Until then, have a good one.

One of the common divisions in our modern global societies is whether a community is resistant towards change and innovation or accepting of it. What do genetically modified food, children adopted by LGBT families, and abandoning coal mining for renewable energy have in common? They are all progressive plans that require a society that is open to new things; however, is accepting all things new necessarily the key to progress and life satisfaction? In this episode of Beyond the Present podcast Dan and Poujix discuss this issue in depth and explain why the optimum approach is the moderate one that is open to new things but is still rooted in the tried and true methods of the recent past.

Episode Transcript:

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

nations, world, conservative, approach, religious, tend, generally, terms, risk, wealth, impose, life, ideas, trump, people, europe, point, principle, precaution, traditions

SPEAKERS

Pouya LJ, Dan

Pouya LJ  00:09

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to yet another episode of beyond the present Podcast. I am as always joined here with Daniel Mulligan. How's it going down?

Dan  00:17

Edwin man, buddy, how are you going to be here with you for yet another great episode. And of course life is great. The world is gradually getting out of that crazy quarantine mood. And since you know, of course, we're now officially in summer.

00:31

So think

Dan  00:33

about the second way but for now we can actually breathe a little bit, go outside, go to the parks and even have business meetings and stuff while maintaining Of course, social distancing. So life seems a lot better now than it was like a month ago but for now we have to force remain hopeful and see what happens. The other Front Of course, we had a major protests following the death of George Floyd and the world is now expressing and condemning this action And I'm very happy about this matter of fact that this voice being heard, and all minorities around the world will now have their voice heard. So they can actually understand there's no place for racism in our modern world. And most recently, I heard that Joe Biden actually exceeded Trump in terms of his popularity. So now, as of now he's about 30%, popular, much higher than what Obama actually had a while back while Trump's dropped to 43. So basically, on the political front, on the business front, and on the social front, things seem a lot better, more positive, hopeful. And of course, it couldn't be any better right now, because now I'm feeling great. And of course, being here with you right now is just a great testament to that feeling and expression.

Pouya LJ  01:36

Appreciate that. Likewise, it's a it's a complimentary situation going on here. And yes, I think things are, again, if we don't jinx it right now, I'm not superstitious person, but you never know. So anywho. So, today's topic is not too distant from this conversation that we've been having until now. And that is about this thing called the precautionary principle. Which basically, I mean, in a nutshell, it means that if, you know you attack problems or or if you're unsure, you go with the most extreme precaution possible, and default to that status quo, essentially. And we're going to talk about the problems that can come up that actually there was a article motivating our conversation, which we're going to definitely put on the show notes people can read for themselves for their pleasure. However, we're gonna we're going to talk about that from our perspective. So what do you think about this, this principle and and what how do you look at this? Well,

Dan  02:43

I think before we actually express you know this to our audience, I think they should first know because you and I both we know what it means, but maybe our audience don't know. So right now, go ahead. First, tell our listeners a basic definition so they know what we're talking about here.

Pouya LJ  02:56

Of course, no, I definitely as I as I mentioned, so procrastinating is okay. I can actually I can bring a precise definition up here.

Dan  03:06

That's right, of course.

Pouya LJ  03:07

But in a nutshell, it means that you're, you're attacking problems from the point of view of being cautious. So okay, this is a this is the Google definition of it. The principal the distraction. Yes, the principle that the introduction of a new product or process could be also a legislature, whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown, should be resistant. It has mainly been used to prohibit the importation of genetically modified organism and food. Well, that's not just the thing we're talking about, but

Dan  03:40

just the GMOs as well. Yeah, absolutely. It's about being prepared, you know, having precautions for anything new and strange or not tested before try and but frankly, speaking, as you already you know, gave our listeners definition. As you probably know my attitude towards life, I believe in balance. So if you want to Create a lifestyle where you are resisting and you know, somehow going against the new, then there will be no progress. There'll be no development, there'll be no innovation. And I'm against that because the world needs to move forward. And if we're not moving forward, then automatically we go backwards and take a look right now the current world, you know, affairs right now, since we did not maintain our forward movement that was actually initiated. Now we are seeing in some parts of the world and gradually going back, they're going back to the values that we escaped from in the 20th century, and are now being repeated in the 21st. And this is, this goes back, I don't know two things like, you know, not caring about the environment. And making gold for example, I don't know coal mining a particular job again, despite the fact that there's history and and there now, there are nations around the world who have abandoned this completely, there are now two nations in the opinion that do not allow, for example, coal mining anymore right now, because of this, you know, forward momentum and these future orientation obviously, that we have obviously, we need to steps on new, B. Since at the same time, if you wonder, you know, animate everything and all the time, then there will be no sense of security, there'll be no sense of control over what's happening. And that's also chaotic. And as you probably know, I'm a fan of balance in all things. And, and, of course, as I mentioned, you really have to focus on, you know, creating that balanced approach in this situation. So am I against it, you know, trying to somehow prevent the new ideas to come in through? Of course, not because we need them without those, you know, there will be no moving forward. And if we don't move forward, we will automatically by default, go backwards, at the same time to allow everything right away. Probably not. There needs to be some, you know, research some testing before, you know, these things are actually gone mainstream. So as you probably already know, my preference, of course, there is a middle ground approach and a balanced one, basically.

Pouya LJ  05:55

Yes, exactly. And, well, of course, nobody expects to you know, I plan things and go go about them hey wire without any testing or anything but there's also a degree of risk taking that needs to be because ultimately there's nothing going to be absolute especially before trial and error you need some some degree of trial and error and some degree of it you can do in lab and you know make sure okay this is clearly crazy or this idea seems to be okay we don't know for sure we need to we need to go back and try and you know small scale and then see what happens. So, ultimately lots of things that we do are basically experiments and solve some of them are you know, scientific experiments on social experiments etc. And like, this whole democracy is a really a or or even or even Marcus ideas or communism, whatever all of these are. theories. Nobody tested them as lab and prove that they 100% word. At some point, we just accept that. Okay, let's give this thing a try. That's how, as you mentioned, progress comes about. So now, let's talk about. So I think the benefits are quite clear of tests of research or, you know, making sure everything works. Well. Now, let's talk about the downsides of doing it too much. What are you thinking? What are your points of view and when this thing is overdone, then the balance goes out the window, and we're overdoing it and real over concern? And what could go wrong? If we are?

Dan  07:29

Well? That's a great question. And, of course, if you you know, take a look at the world right now, we do have certain nations that are extremely on the side of, you know, innovation and trying new things and taking those kind of risks. A clear example of that, if you just take a look, you know, the COVID-19 crisis, you saw how, for example, Sweden, decided to actually go on the experiment of testing this, and they actually did not impose any of the restrictions that almost every other country was imposing on their citizens. They allowed everything to live allowed life to basically go on as usual, with some force levels of precaution, but not so as much as the other nations. And then we had, of course, nations that went on complete lockdown. Think of like China, for example, or a few other nations who impose very strict limitations on their citizens. And of course, you can see the results. In the end, if you take a look at it. Both extreme approaches, from my point of view, were not the most successful if you were unethical, like, you know, all the results that have come so far, in terms of the rate of fatality in terms of the actual life satisfaction and economic damage. Ironically, the best nation industry or one of the best nations who truly handle this well, was neither Sweden nor United States or China, it was actually Germany, Germany came as one of the top nations in terms of how well they handle it, how their medical system actually handle the situation, how much restrictions on their people how soon they got it out, actually, Germany was on First Nations in Europe that actually opened its theaters and opened basically its cultural centers long before all the nations rationally Gradually opening their businesses. So this showed a great, you know, balanced approach to this issue. And a while Sweden did not impose any restrictions on their people. And they wanted to stick to this, you know, new liberal, basically attitude towards life, they did a lot, you know, bottom line as of today, they did suffer a higher fatality rate. And then, of course, the other members of the European Union. And of course, the US story was not caring at all, seeing what Trump did now led to the US being the number one hazard in the world. So, because of this, I'm a fan of, you know, looking at the examples, because the best way to know which approach works, we call this modeling, you know, in NLP and various basically schools of thought modeling, not the career modeling. As you know, for example, a hot girl going for a catwalk but like modeling the behavior of someone who has achieved the kind of success that you have achieved is the foundation for true success that anybody can actually replicate. And just a simple Example, when it comes to just handling the, you know, the COVID-19 crisis shows that by looking at which countries got the best results, we can then somehow repeat that behavior to get the same results. This was of course about, you know, the COVID-19 crisis. How about other areas economically, again? Well, Germany perhaps is was one of the best nations in this regard was also the best in terms of state economy and entrepreneurship, probably not one of the best in Europe, for sure, but not globally. For that we have other nations who exceed this, us being a force, mainly one of them. So the point is this in all areas of life, we have an opportunity here we can look at patterns of excellence in terms of their decisions. And if you look at those your oftentime realize most of those nations or groups that are getting the best results are opting for that, you know, basically minded approach. Why is that because both extremes will have problems. So let's go to the fundamental issue here. Whether it is to be extremely conservative and reject all new ideas. I mean, we all probably know some of these people that are select Well, I got my bias That's the only book I ever need to read for the rest of my life. So these are like great examples of those who will fall behind, many of whom are probably are Trump voters. And this is a great example of going backwards, closing your mind and not paying any attention. On the other hand, I'm also not a fan of being extremely open to every new idea, we have to experiment things. And I think gradually we have to towards them. So right now we are seeing this as in a during the same period where Trump basically is trying to impose, you know, terrorists on international business and promoting, I don't know, coal mining in the US, we are seeing basically a lot of changes in all across Europe, which is right now, as of today, I find European Union to be you know, perhaps a leader in terms of futurism, which is why I actually made, you know, my company's headquarters for Maldon enterprises, basically in, you know, the European Union and is now forced to move to Berlin, Germany, because I wanted to be a part of that formula. Because I, you know, our podcasts called Beyond the present. So you and I both you're a physicist, and we care about the future. We want things to be better than the past. We want progress. And of course, that's why I feel like you're seeing that Europe. Now, I'm not saying that the European approach towards progress isn't sort of the best approach. And there are some tips for dealing with strain as we saw, you know, in this crisis that just happened to us. I believe that when you when you look at, you know, the issue of progress, you need to accept certain degrees of risk, and not all risks will necessarily pay off. But if you're not willing to take that risk, you will automatically reject change, you will reject progress, and that's not good. So, while you should not necessarily try everything new, because by doing so, perhaps you will have to lose a lot. At the same time. Being resistant towards any change just proves your close mindedness. At the same time, of course, we discussed earlier about this matter, which is why I'm a huge fan of embracing global Islam as a means of not only fighting racism, actually appreciating what it means to be more moderates what it means to be a bit more open minded, and to not resist every change the moment we're here to actually let the voice be heard and give it some positive consideration before we decide to say yes or no to that new pattern, basically.

Pouya LJ  13:21

Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. And Okay, so now. So I have two questions. I think their follow up, one is follow up with the other but so what makes what do you think makes a person inherently conservative or more risk risk risk taking? And if you are one or the other, and you want to hit the balance, what can you do to get there? How can you? Wow, I mean, it's really a hard hard thing to say. Because if you really have that mindset, the change is very hard for both cases, I suppose. Maybe that's rare for the risk taking kind of because he's already trying different ideas, but generally speaking, okay first, well what makes some person more risk averse or risk taker? And how can one change themselves about that?

Dan  14:11

Fantastic, great point. And the first question of course, what are the you know, the factors determining whether we are going to be more resistant towards it or more accepting of it, there are certain elements that tends to make us more conservative by default. First of course, being religion. So, if you are a religious person, therefore, you must adhere to your, to your religious principles. So, generally secular people are a lot more open minded to and they're open to new experiences, whether it is to try even like, no genetic modification than those who are religious or believer. So, religion by default, if you find nations, like the US, which is pretty religious, compared to most other, you know, developed nations, you see a higher degree of conservatism. So things like abortion, things like gay marriage seem like oh my gosh, way out at the same time where, for example, European nations are openly promoting, for example, gay couples having children. And we are seeing them in their sitcoms, where they because, of course, I tend to, you know, to improve my foreign languages, I tend to watch a lot of European shows, to practice my languages. And it seemed like in Europe, it's very common for them to demonstrate like, for example, lesbian couples where a son comes home and says, Hey, Mom, Hey, mom to two girls. And that's a family. But such a thing probably will cause a lot of taboos among the conservative Americans if that were to become a very major show, for example, right. So because of this, I believe that religion is one of those factors that tends to, you know, make a person more conservative. The other element, of course, is wealth, again, the use of also the wealthiest nation on Earth. And, unfortunately, it's not just about nations, it's about individuals as people become wealthier themselves as their net worth goes higher. I have seen among my own contacts I've seen in my own life as well as you basically as your net worth and your wealth increases over time, you generally tend to To be more conservative to because now all of a sudden, you don't want to lose your money. So you're gonna be a lot more careful to keep doing what has worked to generate more wealth. So generally among business, basically communities, those who tend to be focused on wealth, entrepreneurship, we see higher degrees of basically conservatism among those who are rather less capitalistic in nature, if you will, and more on the side of socialism. The third element, of course, is age, which is, of course, linked again to both wealth and religion. As we know, the higher the age, the likelihood that you will be wealthier or more religious. So as you get older, you tend to be a lot more conservative, because you've been around, you know, let's say a lot longer than a 19 year old or a five year old. So you tend to be a lot more grounded and rooted in your beliefs like I've seen the world and this is the way it is. So influencing somebody who is for example, I don't know 19 years old will be a lot different than somebody who was I don't know 75 right. And because of this, you need to understand that age itself. is a major factor. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the culture. certain cultures by nature, allow open mindedness and allow experimentation. Again, we see this mainly in Europe right now. Whereas some other cultures, or on the more traditional side, be it for example, China beat south, for example, East Asia, being the Middle East and Islamic nations, you see, of course, a lot more tendency towards, you know, accepting traditions and traditions and religions are not the same things, they tend to have a lot in common, but traditions could be quite separate could be very non religious, as we see it, for example, in China. So, these four elements of religion, wealth, age and tradition tend to make people more conservative and less open minded. Now, I'm not saying these are bad because they definitely are not examples are bound we can know that that there's nothing wrong inherently wrong with being wealthier or aging or having traditions or simply having a you know, a specific Basically religious belief, this, these are all fine and everybody's right to pursue their, you know, goals. But generally speaking, when you look at the opposite of you know the exact opposite. So, as we mentioned religion so those who are more secular, those who are generally more middle class, or upper middle class or lower class, and those who are generally on the side of basically, let's say modernity and modernism rather than tradition, of course, generally, they tend to have, let's say, higher level of openness towards new experiences and trying new things. And once you put it all together, you realize that it's best, of course, to opt for something in the middle, because nobody wants to certainly be go bankrupt, because they're trying new things all the time. And holding on to your millions and just rejecting the facts also, is not good, because in the long term, it'll actually harm the future generations. Think of those, you know, billionaires who are now denying global warming for example, they will definitely Maybe they will enjoy their you know, money but their grandchildren probably won't. And these are the facts that I think we have to consider and have to ask ourselves, where am I on this scale of religion, wealth, age? And basically, culture? Am I do I think of myself to be basically more religious or less religious? Do I think myself to be older or younger, within myself to be basically a middle class or more like the upper class? Or do I think I must be more traditional or more modern and this will then determine, of course, your initial position.

Pouya LJ  19:31

Absolutely makes a lot of sense. And so I think we're, we've covered a lot here and we're coming to the end of the show. So I want to give you the time at the end of the show to either you know, review things for for us or basically sum it up or if there's anything missing that you want to talk about, go ahead.

Dan  19:49

Very well, but before actually, I go for the, you know, the whole thing because I would like to, you know, summarize the point to yourself projects, to which guild if you will, do you belong or are you in the middle of Like, what is your own perspective here?

20:02

Yeah, I think I find myself a tad more on the risk taker side, but I am

Pouya LJ  20:10

true, we're very much towards the center. But, man, it's very

Dan  20:14

Yeah, and this exactly should be all of our goals. I mean, like right now, once you look at your goals right now, all of your goals should be mainly centered on basically this balance in the middle basically. And you of course, you have all the characteristics of being more on the right side. That is your, of course young, you tend to basically from my point of view, be more on the, let's say, open minded side more on the secondary side, you of course have that approach of, you know, embracing, embracing modernity. You're an immigrant yourself, you've moved, you've moved around the world. And obviously, you know, you are an academician and you're focused on your work and your studies. So this shows why you are a more balanced individual. And of course, the same applies to me as well because we obviously share the same beliefs here. But for those of our listeners who find themselves on the extremes of conservatism or basically open mindedness, as we just mentioned, I think the best approach is in the middle somewhere, whether you are religious or secular, whether you are older young, whether you are extremely wealthy, or just getting started, or whether you come from a, you know, very traditional background, or from a modern background, you want to find that middle because that's where the best stuff is basically. And that was exactly we talked about today projects, we talked about how we can actually understand the principles, this precautionary approach towards, you know, making decisions or embracing new things. And we discussed that there are two major approaches those who support it, those who are more on the conservative side, who tend to reject new ideas, or they are very skeptical of them. And then we have those who are embracing them all the time and without any problem. And we discussed their features. We mentioned four elements that determine whether or not you'll be on either side. And those four were of course, your age, your wealth, your basically Culture and background with traditional or modern? And of course, it comes down to your religious beliefs. Are you more religious? Or are you more secular? And once you put it all together, you realize it doesn't really matter where you come from, it doesn't matter if you go to church every Sunday, or if you perhaps, I don't know, spend most of your time, I don't know, just on the couch, enjoying a, let's say, the TV series on Netflix, and just having a good time and perhaps doing some pot every now and then what really matters is how can both sides bring themselves to that center, that sweet spot in the middle, where they do have certain beliefs that they hold to be true. But at the same time, they're always willing to reconsider their beliefs, should they prove false or wrong? And of course, that's what we are promoting here on our podcast. And, of course, our listeners will listen to that as well.

Pouya LJ  22:48

Excellent, no, that makes a lot of sense. And thank you for joining us today. As always,

Dan  22:53

my pleasure, buddy, and thank you for a great topic and great, all the great questions you asked, actually.

Pouya LJ  22:57

Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you all the time. And listeners for joining us for yet another episode. I hope you enjoyed this. Feel free to give your topics that you want us to hear us talk about or you want to, you know, as the research about because obviously not all of the topics that you might introduce, we might not be familiar with them, but we do all of our best to research and talk about them as best as we could. And until a later episode, good luck.

 Enough is enough! Those are the words shared by the masses not only in the United States but also all over the world following the unfair and unjust death of George Floyd that once again reminded us of the presence of racism in the modern world despite all the progress that we have made in all other areas of life. In this short talk Daniel will discuss why it is important to take a hard look at the issue of racism and he goes on to offer two major solutions to gradually reduce and eventually eliminate racism once and for all! 

Episode Transcript:

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

racism, minority, issue, world, education, people, empathy, friends, globalism, happen, indians, communities, mistreated, understand, black, awareness, ethnicity, traveling, violence, talk

SPEAKERS

Dan

Dan  00:12

Hello, and welcome to yet another solo. There's no beyond the present podcast. My name is Daniel Morgan, and welcome to this episode dedicated entirely to the issue of racism. You see, unfortunately, I don't have to remind you about the damage that has been caused not only you know communities all across America but all over the world after the death of George Floyd and we are all sorry and we just can't believe the harsh reality that we are currently now dealing with. So today I would like to talk about racism from a different angle. I'm talking about how we can actually eradicate it once and for all I'm not gonna dive you know, deep into why we have racism why we have this issue, right? And because we all know, the reasons go back to our history. We all know that this is not just the first time that we've seen member of African American community has been mistreated by the police officers. And I don't know how long will this continue. But this is simply has gone on for far too long. And we are now at a point where we have to say that enough is enough. And from my point of view, what really are is currently happening right now all across the world is a new level of awareness. We are seeing that people around the world are now waking up to the harsh reality and the consequences of racism. And the death of George Floyd hopefully will teach us to look at this issue a bit differently, and more importantly, to take it very, very seriously. So as of today, we have seen people all across the world stand up to this issue, and they're expressing their anger to the governments around the world, to authorities and of course, to anyone who harbors such racist beliefs. And I believe that they are doing the right thing and I'm totally with them in this regard. But for now, for today, I would like to basically talk about a solution. I believe that we should focus less than 10% of our attention on the problem. And about 90% on the solutions. And that's what I learned from my mentors. And I would like you guys to have the same perspective. Yes, we can talk for days, for weeks and months about how horrific what happened, George Floyd was. And that's so true. And we are all very sorry to have lost another black person just because of the mistreatment of the near the police, basically, and law enforcement, but talking about the problem, will not solve it. And I'm seeing this right now all across the media, people are talking so much about why it happened, how it happened. What was what were the details of that situation, exactly. And who was to be blamed here, and we need to find justice. These are all important. And I'm pretty sure that hopefully justice will be served and the officer or the officers in charge of this situation will be punished. But the real problem, the real underlying cause. That's what nobody's talking about. Because Racism needs to be eliminated in the modern world. There is no place for racism and it is my best, deepest wish and hope that at some point we actually stop somehow paying so much attention to details and instead focus on the real underlying cause. Why is it that the world of the 20th century, we had a major, major war, the war, the Second World War, of course, caused because of a racist person who thought that Jews are out there to you know, get the world we've already seen the damage done to the world. We've already seen what that does. We've already seen what fascism and racism does to the whole world and we aren't somehow you know, turning a blind eye to other issue. There's now happening with the black people and understand this. Today's racism is not just about the black community. It is also about anyone who comes from a specific ethnicity there's thought to be inferior in some way or some force some reason it could be, you know, easy to refer to certain Jewish backgrounds could be referred to certain Muslim backgrounds, people of certain nationalities, Indians, and many other types of people who are now being harshly judged purely, because they happen to be born in a family with that specific ethnicity. And that's just, you know, beyond me. So, the horrors of the 20th century, I believe, should act as a reminding lesson for us in the 21st to change the way we look at race, not only in America, but all over the world. And that requires us to actually understand what could be done about this issue. And I personally have two solutions. I believe that racism cannot be fought, especially using force. Now, we've seen certain demonstrators are now looting, for example, or using violence. Now, personally, I'm against that why I do that we should actually express our resentment towards the authorities who've allowed these things to take place in the US and all over the world for so long. But using force and violence will not solve the problem of racism, we need to actually address this issue fundamentally. And I believe that the best way to do so is through education and globalization. So why are these two very important because unless we, you know, improve the level of awareness of the majority, we simply cannot protect the minority. You see, I repeat one more time, unless we, you know, bring into awareness, the issue of racism for the majority, we simply cannot protect the minority. And that is why education is very important. Now, I'm very happy that now in the media, almost everybody talks about this issue and it must be talked about because the voice must be heard. We have seen this happening again, and again. And again. People have you know, color they have to actually worry about their well being just because they're going to you know, do their grocery shopping. What if us, you know, a cop stops by and asks, you know, for my, let's say ID and I'm trying to grab It and the guy thinks I got a gun and they start shooting. This is just horrific to be mistreated and mistrusted. Just because you happen to be black, or you happen to be Jewish or you happen to be, I don't know, Muslim or you happen to be Indian, or whatever it is, it just makes no sense. And because of this, I believe that education is the foundation for you know, solving this issue to help others realize what damage could be caused if we do not take the necessary steps required to actually resolve the issue and to make sure it never happens again. Other than that, of course, education is about being bringing to your awareness what it means to actually be a good citizen, what it means to make a contribution to your society and what it means to actually cause harm. So by understanding our past, and studying the history of humanity to see what racism and slavery have done, basically to our past, we will then understand the consequences of an action and then we'll have the motive Just start doing something. So you're single, then this is very important I get it, we need to educate ourselves about, you know, the issue of racism. So how are we going to do that? Exactly. Of course, now you're listening my podcast, that's just the first step. But that's not enough, this very short talk is not going to change anything unless you actually use this as a stepping stone to begin, you know, improving your level of awareness about the issue of racism. There are many great works right now, basically, and after this issue. Now, a lot of you know, great books about this subject are now bestsellers, again, which is, I think, something that I personally find fascinating, because that's really what we need right now to improve the level of awareness. And why is it that the issue of race is not taught directly by the white, you know, communities, and what we can do about this matter? That's education. And more importantly, we can also improve our knowledge about law about the legalities and the various political aspects of racism and why is that still as of today, we're seeing so much discrimination. Again, this is not just about race, we're seeing the exact same thing across many other issues we're seeing, you know, people who are being mistreated just because they happen to be LGBT, or they happen to be Muslims or they happen to be Jewish or they happen to be, I don't know Indians or even in case of sexism just because they happen to be a woman. So treating someone differently just because they happen to come from a different background, or different ethnicity or even different gender or sexual orientation. All of these things are the result of a closed mind and a, you know, way of thinking that belongs to the stone age's and not the modern age. and education of course, is the key to opening our eyes and becoming more open minded. But then again, becoming open minded itself isn't enough if you lack empathy and personal reference experience of dealing with the minorities because I've had the you know, the privilege of being around the world and having different types of friends and kids. context, I happen to, you know, be friends with those who come from certain backgrounds, African Americans, for example, Jews, Muslims, Indians, of course, I do have some, you know, friends who are from the LGBT community, and I've seen firsthand their struggles. And what we can, you know, you know, talk about here is what is the right way for us to be, you know, experienced what it means to be a member of an African man community. And for us, those of us white people who do not have this, you know, chance for him to have this first hand experience, then, obviously, we need to interact with those who are, which is why the second key is globalization. I really believe that without globalization, it becomes almost impossible to truly talk about racism to truly solve the problem because if you are living in your own country all the time, and if you're just you know, hanging out with those who belong to your background, from the same community, the same background, the same religion, the same color of skin But of course, it just makes no sense for you to go out of your way to resolve the issue of racism because you don't have any experience. And once you have no experience, you're lying. What? That's right stereotypes. So African Americans, well, be careful, they might be criminal. I don't know Jews, well, there have to take the world. Muslims out there all terrorists, women, oh, you cannot trust them. LGBT Oh, they are going to destroy the value of marriage, and so on and so forth. But once you open up, and once you actually try to have many of these so called minorities in your own life as colleagues, coworkers, students, friends, let's say, neighbors, only then you can begin to realize the truth. And the truth is very simple, that we are all people and that most of our assumptions about other people that you know stem from their background from their race from the color of their skin. They are all rooted in misinformation. Which is simply not at all true. And I believe that's why we need to look at this issue very seriously. You see, we need to start to open to people from different backgrounds, that itself will build our level of empathy for those who come from the, you know, certain minority groups. And more importantly, it'll allow us to truly feel what it means to be a stranger in your own land. Just imagine, just trying to practice some empathy. Just perceive of yourself as a black person walking down the streets of whatever state or city you're walking in. And then just think about it. Anytime you see a cop, you feel that sense of fear. Oh, my gosh, another cop. They're gonna start questioning god dammit, I'm late to work and I gotta, I gotta waste my meeting because of this guy. Because Because I'm black. Just imagine what it feels like to be rushing towards work. Just because you happen to be a black person, the moment you see the cops, you can no longer rely on your plan, oh my goodness, I could just be stuck right now. And I lose another 30 minutes of my time, just because I'm black. And this issue, of course, can be resolved once we practice empathy. Once we white people put ourselves in the shoes of these black individuals or other minority groups, only then we understand what it means to suffer and to feel the pain that they are feeling, you know, feeling this issue requires empathy, not violence, violence will not solve our problem. Empathy will, violence will not solve our problem, but education will, and more importantly, the ultimate solution. And the best way to, you know, somehow find a solution to resolve this issue is to actually know what it means to you know, be a member of, you know, minorities and one of the best ways to do so actually One of the perhaps the most educational way to feel like a minority is traveling, which is why I'm so much against that, you know, the current plan that we have in our society where like, we have to work very hard until the age of what 5560. And then you're gonna start traveling, it's too late. It is too late. Because when you're traveling age of 60, again, that's great. Once I am 60, I will definitely traveling as much as I'm traveling right now, perhaps even more, but that's a little bit too late because you are now missing on the education that comes with being a foreigner in a strange land and feeling like a minority only then you realize, oh, my goodness, that's how African Americans feel when they're actually walking on the streets of Chicago. The same way I feel when I'm walking, for example, as a white man in Tanzania, or I don't know in Paris, or whatever it is. So you you feel that you develop that sense of what it means to be a minority. And then you will develop empathy for those who are real minorities in your own system. It. More importantly, it expands your perspective about life. It makes you more open minded because as you're traveling, and you realize, well, not everybody in the world is like us. Not everybody in the world has American values. Maybe they are even against some of our values, but in reality, I can appreciate them. I can understand them, I can befriend them, I can work with them, or even I can marry them. These are all the things that you will then start developing as you begin traveling. So part of that, you know, education that you want to have for yourself is being able to travel, especially outside of your own country. That's called globalism, you need to you know, feel that there are many other ways to live your life and the way you're doing right now. And by embracing globalism, it becomes almost automatic to reject racism, dogmatism, patriotism, and all the other isms that unfortunately have poisoned our society today. Cuz we are not taking the time necessary to understand what it means to be a minority. And I believe that hopefully, this, you know, major movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, hopefully will bring into awareness, not just for us, but for the whole world. What it means to care about one another what it means to actually take this issue seriously because this is not just about black people, the same people who have a negative perspective towards black communities. They harbor the same beliefs towards other minorities, towards Mormons, towards Indians towards all the others. And we need to stop that, because I myself as a supporter of globalism, and liberalism, I believe that we need to instill these liberal ways of thinking, which is why then again, we need to put aside violence and embrace education, as well as globalism to understand what it means to actually grow resolve this issue and we're all disheartened by this issue right now, and the protests are currently continuing on across the US. And I've realized that some of the countries actually they're following up with this movement as well. And that's really wonderful. Because I would like this to be heard worldwide and for this issue to be resolved, globally, and not just in the US. But ultimately, I think that what we need right now the most is empathy, education, and embracing globalism. And that I think, is my wish for all of you listeners to figure out a way to do that, how could you practice more empathy towards those who might not necessarily have you know, the widest skins out there, or from those who might not, you know, share your beliefs and you're saying, well, Danna, I'm pretty okay with it. But can you actually do you find it easy to talk to someone, work with someone cooperate with someone who does not share your beliefs? If you are religious? Could you have a good dialogue, a constructive conversation with somebody who is an atheist If you aren't atheists, can you have a friend who is a firm believer? If you are straight? Can you actually tolerate having a friend who is part of the LGBT community? And vice versa? If you are American Can you tolerate or deal with those who are supposedly, you know, the political, basically rivals of your country? Could you make friends in China? How about Russia? How about the Middle East? So ultimately, you want to figure out a way. And the way is how can I start embracing the communities all over the world as a member of the same species, we are all humans, and it just makes no sense for us to create so much disparity, and to believe in certain stories and narratives that are not founded in reality, and it's my wish to you listeners, to start embracing this attitude to Expand your horizon, become open minded and understand that it is possible To have very good and productive relationships with members of all communities, ethnicities, races, religions, or non religious and because of this, you need to practice that open mindedness. And as I mentioned earlier, you cannot change your belief through education alone, you need reference experience. And that comes not just from traveling, but by embracing globalism. And it's my wish to all the listeners that this will happen. So thank you very much for this very short cop, you know, short talk that hopefully brought into your awareness to the importance of dealing with this issue. And it is my deepest of all wishes, that the death of George Floyd will not be forgotten as just another headline, and that his death will begin a new movement that will then try to eradicate racism once and for all, not using violence, or mere protests, but by changing who we are And the way we live and embracing education and globalism, as means of fighting this disease and to curing it from our species, once and for all. Thank you much, guys. I wish you guys the very best. If you're any question please feel free to contact me on the social media or directly on my website and we'll be glad to answer all of your questions. Have a good one and take care

The latest development in the research done regarding the coronavirus has proven that the virus was not as deadly as initially thought and in the world of politics new allegations against the government of China have been made. In this short episode we bring for you the latest update on the COVID19 pandemic and how it might change the world in ways the we could initially imagine. 

Image by Barbara A Lane from Pixabay 

In conversation with Deep & Govind entertaining thoughts on Fractals and the nature of reality. 

Deep is a quantum Computing and UFO researcher, avid participant of Reality and CEO of ReactiveQ, VP AI UAPx.

Govind has interests in computation models of cognition, using fractals to model dynamic systems, logic programming and fractals in number theory.

Projects he is working on:

1. SecureDLT

2. Rabbithole

3. Legal Hackers at UofT Law

This episode was recorded in March and all mentions of COVID-19 are quite irrelevant to today.

Episode Transcript and Show Notes:

Download Show Notes ----more----

Episode Transcript:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

fractals, mathematics, deep, reality, predict, mandelbrot set, emerges, measurement, physics, hilbert space, similar, model, universe, question, idea, talk, multiverse, super, stock market, measure

SPEAKERS

Pouya LJ, Govind, Deep

Pouya LJ  00:17

Okay, now we're live guys. How are you? Good. How are you? Pretty good. Pretty good. Thanks for asking. Going. Ah, we're going to go one by one. So how's it How's it going? How's life going with you? COVID

Govind  00:29

life's going good. I'm out in Washington, DC and it's been a while since we did some of these podcasts. So it's good to be back into this.

Pouya LJ  00:37

Yeah. Awesome. So yeah, it's been a long while and you have some exciting stuff later on. And in few months to that is going to be out of maybe even sooner. We'll see. Well, we'll just keep it at that. It's gonna be a secret for now. How about you day deep. How's it going?

Deep  00:52

I really good man. I'm enjoying the fact that the weather's getting better. I'm out in Toronto for the time being Yeah, I can just like the opportunity to reflect and stay indoors.

Pouya LJ  01:07

Awesome. Yeah. Well, so it's a good idea to probably stay indoors. Although it's a very nice weather. It's a little bit cold but it's very sunny here in Toronto. country I don't know. How's the weather in there? Govan in Washington?

Govind  01:21

Oh, well, it's it's better than Toronto to start, but it's also a warmer now and the trees are blooming again, because I used to thinking it's spring. So, you know, you know how weather is weather is fractal.

Pouya LJ  01:37

Now, why don't you tell us why you mentioned fractals right now.

Govind  01:41

Oh, well, because you told me Hey, let's talk about fractals in a podcast. No, I'm joking.

Pouya LJ  01:46

Well, that's actually literally why this

Govind  01:48

is what this is. But apart from that, well, weather itself is composed of many tiny micro processes that have an emergent macro phenomenon. Right, which is what weather is, the micro phenomenon is like how, how gases move with against each other. Like, like in the atmosphere and pressure differentials that happen due to various like micro conditions like, maybe something gets moved, you know, and then there's something that emerges out of it, which is which is what climate is. So that's kind of really the theme of what fractals are. fractals are something that have that are composed of many self similar pieces. So there's, there's like a large thing, like you're gonna think of it like a square like a square is self similar, because if you cut up a square into four tiny squares, you have each of those squares are just a quarter of the size of the actual square. But then you can you can extend that to something like a cube, which is like you can cut up a square a cube into like, four tinier cubes, each of which is an eighth of the size of the original cube, right? So you can also extend this to something like that. A weird funky curve, you know, like the coast of the coast of Britain, there is a factor by which you can reduce the, the size of the coast of England, and end up with some self similar replicas of the coast of England within the coast of England itself. And that's what's called the fractal dimension.

Pouya LJ  03:21

Wow. That's very interesting. And I always have been fascinated by fractals, which you basically give a broad definition of what they are and we're going to talk about them, not just them, but we'll get to a little bit depth and details of these things. Right, so so I'm going to ask deep so what deep Where was the Do you remember the first time you came across these fractals? fractals like as like, as general? Yeah. As a concept. Yes. So I would say I was in either grade eight or grade nine. Okay, you were early bloomer. I was. It was a little Whatever the leader later for me,

Deep  04:02

like, I understood the deepest mathematical aspects, but I knew what they were. I love them. So like a quick, like 10 second background, I was like a, I was a huge user of the internet, like from an early age. I'm sure both of you were to like, Haha, yeah. Yeah, that's what it seems like That's out of the question. So, um, so yeah, but I So, apart from playing a lot of runes game, I used to troll around on physics forums a lot like, around like grade seven, I got really obsessed with it. And through that, like these researches, just reading people's thoughts, eventually I came across fractals, so that was around grade eight, grade nine. It's amazing

Pouya LJ  04:43

now, for people who are like, well, what the fuck are these guys talking about? Why is it so beautiful or amazing or whatever? We're gonna just definitely put these in the show notes. Just go look at us on pictures, google it yourself, whatever is more accessible to you. But there is some beauty in these and the fact that we perceive them. As beautiful as it could actually be, has have some meaning behind it. I don't know. Have you have any of you thought about that? Why do we think of these things as kinda like beautiful or mesmerizing? Which I do and I know a lot of you do.

Govind  05:13

Well, I can start that one off because I think just the hyper fine structure and symmetries to fit is almost incomprehensible, right? There's like, no matter where you look in the in a fractal like a canonical fractal is the Mandelbrot set, which I'm sure we can include that in the show notes. If you look at it, and you stare into it, there's even some videos on YouTube of of like zooms into the Mandelbrot set. It's just no matter where you see there's just like these hyper structural patterns that are just so symmetric and so perfect that it's it's like hard to comprehend something like that can exist, right? I think I think that's what makes it seem so beautiful. In fact, well to answer your earlier question of where you encounter the fractals first and you ask the deep but I was raised as a Hindu. And my, my mom always used to draw these little pattern things out of flowers out of rice, flour, wheat flour, whatever. And this is like a big thing in Hindu culture. And I'm sure it is in other cultures too, right? Like, you just have fractals ingrained within us something that's beautiful. Yeah, you're

Pouya LJ  06:21

interesting. Actually, that's true. If you look at culturally, you can see these patterns emerging in a lot of cultures as an active components of, I don't know, symbology or whatever. Now let's get a little bit deeper. So about I don't I want to say about two years ago, or one and a half, or maybe one. Anyways, what somewhere between one or two years ago, you came to me with the notion of these fractals and you you were working on something specific and you mentioned that I'm doing this do you want to jump in we're well, deep is going to jump in as well. That's actually quite interesting. Do you want to Tell us a backstory of what that whole thing was and how you came to contact with it.

Govind  07:05

Yeah, for sure. That was the Mandelbrot set again, a little bit of foreshadowing here. And the project was to do machine learning on the on the Mandelbrot set and see if we could use something like saying you will network to learn the layers to learn the different resolutions of a Mandelbrot set and see if you can actually predict what a Mandelbrot set zoomed in is going to look like. Based on the training data. I thought that would be super fascinating just because we can that gives us more insight into something that's not really well understood in mathematics, which is fractals, right? Especially the Mandelbrot set. It's a class of functions known as iterative functions. And those produce very strange behavior. Because, well, for one, the Mandelbrot set is just composed of the root x squared plus C in the complex domain without wanting to get too technical and in the weeds, it's a pretty simple equation that generates something just so chaotic, which is a common theme in modern Mathematics and Computer Science or something very simple, like a very simple rule can create something so complex, like, infinitely complex even.

Pouya LJ  08:19

Yeah, no, that's, that's great. And then we jumped in, we started working on some aspects of this, this project, we were struggling with so many so much details that are redundant here. But for the for the, for the fun of it, we had trouble computing, large amount of basically large resolutions. So when you were trying to compute large subset of these numbers, it was becoming very time consuming. And we had a lot of those challenges which was, which was fun, very rigorous, and, and just just mentioning that as somebody who's not if you're listening and you're not familiar with these, there's like a lot of heartache and headache and never sweat goes into these things just for the appreciation part of it. But eventually, they, the beauty emerges. And that's where you're rewarded. And you're like, Ah, it's totally worth my time. And that's how I look at it at least now. Okay, so at the beginning, we, we started generating these so deep. So I'm going to go to the application a little bit. Each of you had some aspect of how you can apply us. So the question is, why do we even care, right? Why are they important? So each of you had an application in the real world for these for these patterns. Now, I'm going to start with you you had something I think in in fluid dynamics.

Deep  09:43

I yeah, that's right. So with fluid dynamics, there's actually different applications that we can use fractals for. My favorite one is more of like, it's more of a meta statement of how we can use practicals in physics in general. So not just fluid dynamics, but other times. Which is the idea of taking the very strict approach that if we're to study the universe and the physicality of the universe, then then the rules are the same no matter where you look. So it's just a matter of knowing where you are. And that fractal layer, right? The depth, that infinite recursion, knowing where you are in there is the question that we're trying to solve at any given time. So one example that will give to you is that consider the common problem of classical physics and quantum physics that are always brought up how the world when we zoom away, we aren't looking at each individual particle. It follows this classical rule, right? All these different subsets of classical physics instead. And but when you zoom in enough and you zoom into the universe's fractal real life fractal, you see that different rules apply quantum mechanics applies instead. So I like the idea When we take the fluid dynamics example of applying the fractal mentality to whatever object it is that we're modeling. So earlier, I brought up an example when we were discussing offline of the plane where different parts of the plane are experiencing different physics that we're interested in modeling at the surface layer at the boundary layer, which is the sub couple millimeters thin layer at the surface of the craft, and forms when you're at hypersonic speed. So five times the speed of sound when you're traveling at that layer or more, so it's a place where eventually air goes from very still in calm and fluids and the gases to extremely turbulent. And in doing so, you have all this chemistry that you want to predict, like how will the change in the temperature of the air here and the chemistry of the actual atmosphere affects that The let's say the paint or the heat of the craft at the surface layer. But then if you back up and you want to look at the physics of the shockwaves, which is around the craft instead, that's following slightly different physics. We're not interested in the chemistry anymore. Yet, when you take a step back further and look at the whole plane, it is just one system that we're that is just unique and unified that we're interested in. So it makes sense to apply fractal theory in that respect. Yeah.

Pouya LJ  12:32

Cool. And so Govan you have some application in cryptography, I believe.

Govind  12:40

Yeah, that's cryptography. But um, well, okay. So in the in cryptography, there's the idea of private and public key pairs. So there's the one idea that seems interesting to me, which I think has been explored in academic literature. albick not much is being able To use different uses of scale invariance properties of fractals to generate, generate a key pair where your scale for those of you that are familiar with private and public keys and encryption using those or rather unfamiliar, a public key is what is presented to the world. So you can lock up your, your data or your information that is secret or using your public key. That is your private key. And then that can be used against your public key to generate to regain that information. So think of it as like a lockbox where you lock it with one of the keys and the other key can open it again. So typically, this is done using using large prime numbers like RSA, RSA encryption, but using fractals The idea is that you can you can encode the like say one Part of the a fractal like if you're thinking of the Mandelbrot set, you can think of the big bowl of the Mandelbrot set. And you can encode information with that. And then you can transform your scale to find another one of the big bugs within the Mandelbrot set, which we know is possible, right? And then that the transformation that you used to get to that point would be your private key. Well, yeah, this is getting like pretty complicated. But now it's supposed to be easy, isn't it?

Pouya LJ  14:29

Exactly. I mean, I'm happy. First of all, I'm happy that complicated but no

Deep  14:34

easy stuff has been done. So

Pouya LJ  14:37

now, but it will also include some people who are just listening to this, we will include more details stuff in the show notes. So what Govind is basically explaining with some graphs or or explanation will make more sense to you. So continue, please.

Govind  14:52

Yeah, and I also wanted to talk about less complicated while still pretty complicated application. In which is the stock market? Well, the idea of using fat or the stock market is by no means new. In fact, Renoir Mandelbrot, the namesake of the Mandelbrot set that has been repeated ad nauseum in this podcast is, is famously, like one of the notable things he did was try to predict the fractal dimension of various indices in the stock market. This is a technique that's still used and widely studied in, in, in modern mathematical finance. Yes, that's, that's definitely a very, you know, out there application of fractals, right. You mentioned

Pouya LJ  15:39

before, briefly the fractal dimension, but can you reiterate what that is?

Govind  15:45

Yeah, for sure. So just how, if you're able to, if you take a square and you're able to cut it up into four pieces, and each of those four pieces is still a square, right? It's a square but like it's a scaled down version of a square, it's like magnified a little. It's like A quarter of the size, right? So if you, you can abstract that concept to a cube. But then you can also take that to like the jagad. Coast of the United Kingdom, right like this. This sounds like it's coming out of left field. But just Just think about it like the coast of the United Kingdom is like a bunch of squiggles, a lot of squiggles. So if you take that, and then you try to find some little tiny squiggle within that big squiggle that resembles the bigger squiggle a lot. It is basically a scaled down version of the bigger squiggle, right?

Pouya LJ  16:34

Like the smaller cubes and the bigger cube basically.

Govind  16:37

Yeah, exactly. That's the analogy, right? So we're in four squares, it's two dimensions, four cubes. It's like three dimensions. You can you can have like, weird like, like rational number dimensions, where you have like two thirds of a dimension like a 1.6 dimension. So that's the real intuition behind practice. To fully understand it is the fact that it's you're not working with like, dimensions that are easy anymore. You're working with dimensions that are just weird, completely weird, right? So how does

Pouya LJ  17:09

that non natural number perfect dimensions work like the 1.6.

Govind  17:16

So it's exactly what I what I explained earlier. So maybe in the show notes, we can include the definition of a fractal dimension, which is the number of self similar pieces within the within the curve or the object. So again, in a square, you can you can cut up a square into four pieces, and then the number of self similar pieces is four, and then you can divided by the magnification factor, which is which is a quarter.

Pouya LJ  17:41

So I see Okay, fair enough.

Govind  17:43

That's that's literally how you get it. But if you use a log, you have to use the log function. So it's log of the number of salsola pieces divided by the log of the magnification factor. If you're being precise.

Pouya LJ  17:56

Yeah, yeah, no, I got it. Okay. So so you remember So these are useful also in. So when you mentioned markets, so are you talking about predicting the markets?

Govind  18:08

Yes, exactly. To give you a little bit of an explanation of how this could work, if you see the stock market curve, maybe in the show notes, we can put the Bitcoin curve because it's, it's very easy to see these kind of self similar shapes. Okay. You can see how there's like a huge peak, and then it goes down, and then there's a huge peak again, and then it goes down. So intuitively, it is kind of self similar right there. There are these chunks where you like, again, if you think of it as a big squiggle, there's this tiny squiggle where it goes all the way up, and then it goes down. Right? It's like it's kind of like a sine wave. It's like, it's like a curve that goes in it reaches itself again. So it's kind of self similar in a sense.

Pouya LJ  18:51

Would you agree with that? No. Yeah,

Govind  18:53

yeah. So the idea is that you would use the point where it seems to match Like one of the ends of the curve, and then you can say, okay, based on my fractal model of the stock market, it looks like it's going to repeat at this point. And then you can, you know, make your investment based on that decision.

Pouya LJ  19:13

Right. And the rationale is that so, so I don't know if we discussed the model that our project is creating the machine learning model on the when we were online or offline, but did we mention it online?

Govind  19:28

I'm not quite sure actually. Okay, let's

Pouya LJ  19:30

reiterate. No, otherwise, let's go for it. Okay, so So what are we doing in our project basically.

Govind  19:38

So our project is to better understand the Mandelbrot set and how we can apply it for for use cases such as, I think the basic first step is to actually just see what happens can we actually predict layers of the Mandelbrot set right? Or is it gonna get hairy is something like is the best thing Yeah, that we have currently not able to learn the Mandelbrot set or like fractals in general.

Pouya LJ  20:06

You know, I think, what is it? Guess? If you had to take a guess Yes or no? Uh, you can you can explain why briefly by one yes or no.

Govind  20:16

My disclaimers? I'm not sure, of course. But I want to say no,

Pouya LJ  20:20

because I can't predict that's what you're saying.

Govind  20:23

Yeah, just because it's so computationally intensive. That I think there's something deeper mathematically hidden within these, these curves that simple statistics will not be able to help us get there.

Pouya LJ  20:40

Okay, what do you think the same question? Yeah,

Deep  20:43

I couldn't agree more. I think what we'll see if we're lucky is some kind of like Kwazii you know, like a five year old trying to recreate a drawing of a dinosaur like we might get something of that kind, but to truly capture the underlying mathematics or current regime of machine learning is just not there yet. Okay,

Pouya LJ  21:03

fair enough. Now,

Govind  21:05

I just want to see if I if I'm wrong. Hey, like, I think that'd be pretty cool. That in itself was a good discovery.

Pouya LJ  21:12

Yeah, no, I'm gonna be rooting for you to be wrong, honestly. So so don't worry about it. If your rock no but so as we're so basically as So, if we do train some AI that looks at these, these layers and tries to predict them and say they're successful now. Excuse me, how do we so it seems that if you're able to predict the the market, the economical market, you should be able to predict any anything else with any kind of self replication or self similarity. Would you agree with that?

Govind  21:54

Yeah, because, well, if we do predict the stock market successfully, well apart from being insane Rich, we also have predicted human behavior because that's kind of the underlying, you know, that's that's how the stock market works, right? Like, that's how economic models work.

Pouya LJ  22:10

And do you

Deep  22:13

need your to get a two for one deal? That's all I want to say. Haha.

Pouya LJ  22:17

No, actually, I was gonna ask you further. Do you have any other similar applications in your mind that is, like stop for you there or do you? I'm talking too deep actually. Okay. Do you think it has potential to go further in terms of what you can predict with these things? Do you have any examples?

Deep  22:34

Yeah, so one thing that and again, it's maybe less so about predictability, but we'll see is let's go back to quickly quantum mechanics and the fundamentals. So wait, let's so when we look at a system and we want to define the measurables of the system, what we're really saying is that this system has these kinds of measurements we can make and these are the five values that you can measure the system to be in. And that's all defined in the wave function, right? It's all encoded in there. And so you'll never, in theory, measure anything outside of that wave function. The wave function is supposed to contain everything about a system and the measurements you can make. So if you want to, but then if you dig a little bit deeper, you see that the actual definition of a measurable is that the value maps to the eigenvalue which maps to the eigenvector of the Hermitian operator, which is acting on a quantum state. So let's say that I have some sort of qubit, superposition or some sort of system, forget a qubit, any system physical system that's in a quantum superposition and I want to make a measurement on it. The way that I would define the state of that system is using Dirac notation. It would be a vector in a Hilbert space. Sometimes it's finite dimensional, sometimes infinite dimensional and there are different kinds of Can you super quickly explain what Hilbert spaces the Hilbert spaces, think of it as a generalized Euclidean space. So it's supposed to represent a more abstract vectors like complex vectors, while it also defining certain functions that the normal Euclidean space does not, I believe that includes the inner product. There's a specific kind that you can do quantum mechanics. So beyond that, the the whole idea though, is to keep that idea of conserve that concept of Euclidean spaces just at much higher dimensions, because keep in mind, we're representing quantum states in those dimensions where your, your actual vector is represented by a complex number, or it can be like your, the elements of your vector. So and so the more let's say entangled systems, you have the higher dimension, Hilbert space you're dealing with. So in the quantum computing regime, if you take, let's say, three cubits and you entangle them, then you're dealing with a Hilbert space, that's two to the three or eight dimensions large, and so on and so forth. So, so yeah. Does that make sense? So like the Hilbert space is really just a fancy Euclidean. Awesome. Great. So So and also, one thing about the Hilbert space is that it lets you using the vectors you can represent superpositions, which is insane, right? That's what we really care about. And so we so going back to the system that we haven't measured yet, it will be represented by this state function or this vector in the Hilbert space, right, let's say it's in a superposition. And the vector accurately reflects that. Then the measurements the possible values that we can measure in that system depends solely on the operator, the measurement operator that we're applying to that quantum state. So if we Apply, let's see your position operator where we want to measure the position, what it's going to do is it's going to apply that operator to the quantum state, and map all the possible states of that quantum state to the possible eigen states that consists of that operator that we just applied it to. So that's how you're able to kind of force these values, right? Of like measurement and, and all that stuff. And you know, you're constantly doing this mapping, like you either did a unitary action, which means you did disturber make a measurement to the system, or you did a measurement action. Now, why is that related to fractal theory? Like why am I rambling about the specifics because of the 10 Martini problem. And so the 10 Martini problem is looking at addressing quantum mechanics and operator logic and the spectrum of observables and all the mathematics that goes into that, right so now, rather than having a finite number of observable What happens in vivo continuous model? So what they deal with one thing that xR t looks at is the application of fractal theory applied to this, the problems that we come up with, and we find it in measurement, like quantum measurement and operator theory and operator logic.

Pouya LJ  27:19

Right. Right. And and for those who are not familiar with the martini problem, can you quickly give a gist of it?

Deep  27:27

So I'm gonna divert that to go, Vincent. All right. Yeah, he was the one who had sent it to me, but I have my own interpretation for what it's worth.

Pouya LJ  27:36

Okay, so go and give it give a brief on the paper description of what it is and then deep you can interpret all you want.

Govind  27:46

I have to confess I don't fully remember it.

Pouya LJ  27:52

So we'll put it in the show notes if you don't remember.

Deep  27:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can. So all I want To say about it was that is the fact that, like, for me, it was the spectrum of the matter you I can never pronounce his name but like Matthew operator, they found that it's a cantor set for all nonzero values, right for all these, the coupling of all irrational frequencies. That's like the formal definition. What they found, and I think it's like, that's why it diverted to go in because of the whole idea of the cantor set showing up. But um, yeah, I think what we should do is, it's almost worth talking about in a different podcast, but let's just go knows for now, yeah, no,

Pouya LJ  28:39

that's good. Yeah, I don't want to, like confuse people, like a, like, you know, like, we need to be super rigorous in what we're saying. So you know, okay, so we actually do have plans to do another in depth podcast so we can mention the details of the 10 Martini problem

Deep  28:57

would be the perfect place to do it because like we're we're learning really getting into the deepest parts of like, this stuff is not

Govind  29:03

easy to talk about. And then with quantum and well, there's of course, like the whole cliche Fineman quote of nobody in quantum really knows what they're doing what quantum is. They don't understand it.

Deep  29:13

Yeah, for good reason. Like I was actually what we were talking about with like the quantum theory with free join. We'll talk about that more after but yeah, well,

Govind  29:21

one fun fact about the 10 Martini problem is the guy who came up with it. He said he'll give he'll buy 10 martinis for someone who can solve the problem.

Deep  29:31

Oh, that's amazing.

Govind  29:33

Yeah. Another fun fact is the solution was given by a fields medalists from, I think like the middle of last decade. I think somewhere on 2015 or 2012. I turn Villa and he's the one who actually discovered the fractal implication for the the problem that was you know, didn't seem to relate to fractals at all, which shows how deeply embedded fractals are. Mathematics. Yes, again, I think this this, this scan should be covered in a separate podcast just because you know, like, we don't want too many icebergs floating around here. Yeah, no,

Pouya LJ  30:09

no, I agree. And they will do that. So for now, anybody who is wondering what, what the heck this thing is just look at the show notes. You'll get the idea but Okay, now, if any, if you don't have any specific like nooks and crannies details, Oh, actually, let's before that. Do you want to talk about where the project is going in the future that what are we try aspiring to essentially so right now we're basically developing the training these models to see whether we are we are able to train them and they are able to predict rather. So what's next?

Govind  30:45

Well, we have mind a an actual fuck ton of data. I'm not kidding. Nearly one terabyte of data. That's just sitting on a drive somewhere. The next step is to actually do the machine learning, which we've already kind of kicked off, we have our general model architecture that is derived by beak over here. And we need to actually do some batch machine learning over just tons of cross sections of data. Because we have such a huge data set. I live in safe if there's anyone listening who would like to join, you know, just shoot, shoot us a message, and we'd be happy to have you on that project.

Pouya LJ  31:23

Yeah, absolutely. It's a it's a completely open. So we're looking forward to hear from different people. Yeah,

Govind  31:28

it's open source. And it's a it's a really interesting problem for for machine learning in general. It's a very cool role.

Pouya LJ  31:35

Certainly. Now, if you don't if either of you don't have any specific thing to our project and these applications, I want to abstract out and talk about fractals a little bit broadly. You have anything to add at this point? I know I'm good. Okay. No. So what I asked you these before any steps into more philosophical realm a little bit, but again, as we talked in the fractals seem to be completely available, like existing in the background of the entire universe. If you zoom in, in any specific part, you can see them when you zoom out, you can keep seeing them, again, like galaxies that they're essentially these. So, in a sense fractals themselves. But then even even if you zoom out further, you can see super close super clusters or other clusters of galaxies that again, are self similar, fractal in a sense, so why does it why in Europeans does this fractal behavior exist? It seems inherent or maybe even fundamental in the universe, or maybe it's American that actually let's talk about that. Is that religion is a fundamental Yeah.

Govind  32:50

A few years ago, I remember there was a picture floating on the Internet of something like what you said like a cluster of galaxies, and also compared with a protein picture of a protein which which has, you know, like proteins look all squiggly and weird and stuff. Yeah. And most of my friends that I like and then there was I think inevitably it was some relation to how like intelligent design and all that stuff was there, which is not the focus of what I'm trying to say is this Mr as complete bullshit, but, you know, like, that's kind of what I'm trying to get at with the deep embedded nature of fractals and everything. I think well, since in mathematics, we generally deal with a lot of spaces right like I mean Hilbert spaces an example of one there are spaces of fractals themselves, right? spaces are fractals being in the complex plane, you can you can actually create, like use iterative functions on every single point of the of the complex plane and you end up with a unique fractal for each of those points. And those points are known as Julia sets. So each of those, those those fractals are called Julia sets. And what's really interesting is if you put those As a side note, if you arrange all those Giulia sets into different points, what emerges out of that is a Mandelbrot set. And that can we can add on the show notes. That's just that's just a really wacky, cool thing in mathematics. But I think it's, it goes to that, like, I mean, there is there's this debate in mathematics of whether mathematics model is just the best approximation of nature or on the on one side of the coin. And the other side of the coin is, well, mathematics is nature. And we're just trying to understand nature better by understanding mathematics better. So it's a I think it does come down to this, this, this two sided coin and this debate that's always going back and forth. But either way, I think nature is just really well approximated by fractals, I think it's the these like, Who's to say maybe we can even come up with some kind of super fine structure that we can use to approximate every single curve that we ever see. To an infinite degree, like now we can use calculus and we can get there to, to to a similar degree, but not quite there, which I'm sure we can explore at a later conversation. But I think I think fractals might actually help us get there.

Pouya LJ  35:16

Okay, and as to the question of whether in your I mean, I know it's purely an assumption, but do you think they seem to be more emergent or fundamental at this point?

Govind  35:28

I think it's a it's emergent like, because, again, most of these things have to do with I mean, it's always like, I mean, even the definition of a fractal dimension is is the number of self similar items that are there within an item and then their magnification factor, right. So like the, you start with the most basic unit and then the fractal emerges out of it, right? You have like you start with like this super tiny self similar, like seed, and then the, the rest of the fractal emerges out of the seat by the end and the way you operate it right, the way you magnify it. And the way you arrange it. And to make that clear, think of again a square and cutting up a square into 444 pieces. And then you see a bigger square emerge out of that, right? Your unit is a square. So it's kind of like that. But yeah, you don't know. Like, as with most of these emergent phenomena, you don't know where one ends and the other begins, right? Yeah, no,

Pouya LJ  36:19

that's fair. How about you? Did you have any thoughts on the matter?

Deep  36:24

Yeah. I mean, I agree with Govan, that it's fact matter is we're we're touching the deepest, one of the deepest questions about nature, which is, is math discovered or isn't invented, right. So like, so but that being said, like I've always, not always like recently concluded that. Going back to like the definition of superposition, I really like what it says about reality. Because when something's in a superposition of, let's say, two states, it's never saying that it's in either that state or the other state or both states or neither the states, it's saying it's in a superposition. Which is, which means that we can't physically say anything about its current state in any logical manner. That makes sense. But when you measure that superposition, you might get one or the other state, depending on the probability and what kind of superposition was so. So you'll get different answers, varying answers every time you make a measurement. And I feel like that's what happens with this. Of that is what's happening with this question of the dualistic sort of divide we take with ascertaining whether the universe is mathematical or whether we invented because it might not be either or it might just be a superposition of the two. So sometimes, factor like behavior we observe in the universe is truly just emergent. Sometimes it's the other way around. Maybe that's what I think.

Pouya LJ  37:51

Fair enough. Now, I want to throw out two other concepts that we're going to talk about in detail later, but I want your feedback like a short feedback. At this point and mentioning all of these mathematics being either developed or discovered or invented or discovered now, so I'm not sure if this was Lee Smolin, but I believe it was that was talking about possibly the laws of physics and the laws of the universe being being not constant, rather not fundamental right and evolving. And I again, I'm sorry if I'm misquoting him for somebody else, but so what are your thoughts on that?

Deep  38:38

So I love that because I love that. We're still thinking about that, because it's important for you to question right, but like, okay, I would like to know if the physics, you know, right outside of the Hubble bubble completely changes, right? That's important to know. So, that being said, so I believe the term is isotropic and anisotropic. Right. So like, So when something is added to tropic just for the listeners, what that means is that when you measure it from different, it likes physical angles or just different ways it has different properties. So the measurement, the type of measurement you make affects the outcome. And whereas with isotropic no matter where you measure it, or how you measure it, you will get the same result. So, physical example is, let's say like I take a sphere, and it's a perfectly like cut, you know, Diamond sphere. And if I wanted to measure, like, let's say the diffraction at a specific point on the sphere, it's going to be the same angle wherever I go, right? So that makes that property diffraction, in this case, an isotopic property of that diamond. Whereas with and so when you look at the universe, we're constantly asking you're likely Smolin and others is the universe isotropically When you look far enough, or is it anisotropic, where we have different physics when you measure it from a different place? And I think it's inevitably the latter. Even if it's not like, in our universe where we experience different laws of physics, it has to be the case. I think that there are other laws of physics out there. Because like, the fact that we exist means almost for sure that reality has existed before. And it does, like in other ways, but again, that's just another guess.

Pouya LJ  40:31

Right? Yeah. First, how about you? What are your thoughts on this? Oh, well, it's uh,

Govind  40:40

yeah, it's, I guess it's kind of this is regarding the invention versus discovery right of mathematics.

Pouya LJ  40:47

I think we I mean, so if we tend to accept that the laws of the universe are not fixed, evolving, or rather existing completely differently in a different unit. Reverse like now, will the same math explained both of them? Or rather, you have to modify it. So that maybe speaks to if you have to modify it, or there's a different math this might speak to, it's being invented to explain something rather than discovered. Or you can say, Well, that was different law. So it's mathematics. But they're the two different maps because they're two different laws. So in that sense, I want I'm thinking about it.

Govind  41:29

Well, I think, Well, for me, the core of mathematics has always been logic and logical inference. So if a different math had a different conception of logical inference, or maybe didn't even have logic at all, I think it would really be inconceivable for me, almost literally, I don't think I'd be able to conceive of a mathematics that's not I mean, maybe you can think of it as having different rules of Like rules of truth and assigning truth assignments to statements like or assumptions right, because most, most like I mean all models in mathematics are axiomatic you know, you have set theory, which has the set theory axioms, probability theory has the probability theory axioms and then you derive the theorems from all of them, right. That that is kind of the the heart of mathematics in my opinion, at least, if we if there is a different kind of mathematics, I'm not sure what would follow, but, that aside, I think, what the purpose of mathematics is, at least for the broad case of most humans who just want to you know, find out how the world works, and manipulate it according to what we want to do. I think, any form of mathematics would, would would serve that purpose, give some kind of objective script on causality objective as objective as possible. script on how we can reliably understand and abstractly understand and manipulate how the world works.

Pouya LJ  43:07

Okay? All right, that's fair now. So I'm going to throw a different question. Now if if the laws of physics, universe do in fact, differ in different either different times, or different realms or different universes, whatever you want to call them, would you think would you say either of you in throwing it out there? The same mathematics that we have can construct similar? I'm not like my details like what you said, actually, Matt. So maybe with a different set of axioms, well, essentially with the same logic constructor, we can come up or we can

Govind  43:39

not complete care.

Pouya LJ  43:41

Exactly. Can we can we describe those set of rules with but with the same basics of mathematics as we know it today? I know it's incomplete, but I'm just talking about philosophically speaking.

Deep  43:52

Hmm. So let's look at the idea of different infinites first, because

Govind  43:58

when we're done Good one.

Deep  44:01

So, so think about the multiverse for a second. And you know how there's different kinds of infinite, right? Like from zero to infinity, and just the whole numbers, and then all the integers and all the rationals. And all that stuff in the set keeps getting bigger and bigger, right? So think back to the multiverse. We don't know what kind of infinite it is. We don't know how large that set of infinite multiverses might be. And we don't know how large the number of people, or we also obviously don't know the anthropic principle, but we also don't know the number of inhabitants or life forms that exist out there in the multiverse. And that matters, because what if the Infinity for the multiverse is larger than the infinity of sentient beings out there in the multiverse? That means that you have leftover multiverses right that aren't inhabited, then in that case, if we're going to take physics as we approach it from the measurement, Problem approach, then we have no way of saying that there even is a physics in those multiverses where there is no one to make measurement. So my answer is that we would need a different kind of math and different kind of physics to address the physics of other multiverses that don't floor

Govind  45:23

Yeah, I mean, I think it's good that we are we're at least someone who's talking about these these these questions really, because it's, it's it just gets so hard to even talk about these because you you need to be at the highest level of abstraction at so many different fields. Stephen, this is kind of an emerging field like even true multiverses right.

Deep  45:44

Yeah, it totally is, like we, I feel that this century in this Millennium general will be a millennia of probing the multiverse and empirically proving it and just going farther and farther even trying to make like portals and ways to go, you know, travel until the multiverses I think we will do that at some point. Not in our lifetime for sure. But I eventually.

Govind  46:06

Yeah, I mean, let's hope it's in our lifetime. That'd be pretty cool.

Deep  46:09

Yeah. Make it happen. Yeah.

Govind  46:12

And I hope fractals will get us there.

Deep  46:16

Totally.

Pouya LJ  46:17

Now another thing that I want to throw at you, so two things. I mean, this is again, we're coming to the end of the show. So I want to basically make it very short, but we're going to talk about it in depth later on. But that is the I think I shared the book with you. I don't know if you have the author in front of you because I am blanking on his name. But the the book that he has is the case against reality of Donald Hoffman. Hoffman. So So once again, I I didn't read the entire book yet, but based on me hearing him talk in other people's talk about his work. Now his point of view, is that okay, reality as we come to define it, however you want to define it. It's not really Really, really the deepest of the realities that you can possibly think of. And it's the it's evolutionary, with. So this is what his saying it would be evolutionary, against our interest to actually understand reality as purity, because then we couldn't function in the world as we do. So for instance, he gives the analogy of computers and let's say you're moving objects than on your desktop to different folders to the recycle bin, whatever. And now, this is not literally what is happening at the low level of the computers. But it's a good approximation for us to understand and and us to do our things in the computer. Now, what are your thoughts on that? either of you can go first, maybe?

Deep  47:47

Sure. So, first of all, like I really like the idea that he's taking the evolutionary approach of like, okay, maybe it's not even worth knowing the true nature of reality because maybe That's why we don't have like natural intuition for quantum mechanics. Right? It doesn't make sense to us. It's literally literally not logical, the way that it behaves and simplifications for sometimes. So, I wonder, though, like, and is it? It depends, but I wonder if we can like, train the next generation of, let's say, children to have a different intuition. Right. And to have a better deeper understanding of reality. Would Hoffman consider that as going against? What is in our evolutionary benefit? Right.

Pouya LJ  48:34

Yeah. Right. So based on what I understand of him, I don't want to butcher his point of view, obviously, but this is just my interpretation of what he's saying. And that is, well, maybe not in one generation. And it doesn't mean that we cannot develop tools that help us understand the nature but that's not so that's not really natural to us, but so we have to put a lot of work to actually duck deep so he's not imposing that it's always like it, like, absolutely impossible. And there's no way we ever can do this. That's not what he's saying. But he's saying maybe maybe that's the case. But I'm more optimistic. And I think we can like develop tools like we have to both science to further understand the reality like at least closer realities of the universe rather than some further approximation of them and get keep getting closer and perhaps getting to the, to the, to the thing, whatever that is, but, but I don't think he's just going to accept the training of a next generation as enough of a step. Awesome.

Deep  49:39

Yeah, that's good.

Pouya LJ  49:40

Yeah, you go and what do you what do you think about this whole

Govind  49:44

thing denying of reality, okay. So

Pouya LJ  49:48

so his book is called the case against reality in that okay, like, actually, I don't know why he names that book. As it as he did again, because I didn't read the entire book. I've mostly heard him talk about that. The book. So it's not a fair assessment, but essentially so. So do you think there is a complete like, again, going back to the analogy of the computer, so when you're moving icons on the folder, two folders and from the folders, that's way far from what is actually happening, and there's a bunch of electrons moving around, and there's nothing, you have no understanding of those electrons when you're moving into computers. So do you think we're stopped Far from it? absolute reality, if you will?

Govind  50:28

Well, I mean, this is this is a question of philosophy has been trying to address this specifically metaphysics for like, hundreds, thousands of years, right? Where we started out with, like all our ancient, like rationalist philosophy from Aristotle. And then we end up with empiricism. And then we have Khan who's like, hey, why not both, you know, I don't want to go too deep in that in that rabbit hole. But, um, well, the fact of the matter I think, a good philosopher to use for this discussion is Charles Sanders. appears you know, if you take if you take, you know, the blind spot in your right, right? Yep, like we got a spot where I think the optic nerve passes through. So it seems like there's like I mean, when you put something there just doesn't show what that what that is you can directly look at anything that's in there. Well, what happens is that your your eye kind of fills up the gap with something else like I mean, the experiment that Charles Sanders fear said is like you take a little Penny, and then you You look really you put it on a piece of paper, and you look really close at the penny until it goes into your blind spot. Your I won't even look at process depending it'll just it'll fill up the gap with the paper that's around it. So I mean, a lot of reality is just our cognition being projected onto it. But that isn't to say that we are we're, you know, we're tripping on some you know, acid reality. Completely. I think most of what our body does is to just enhance our experience and make sure that we're always alive and aware of what's going on. I'm making an evolutionary argument, I guess, in this case, yeah. But to say that we're separated to such an extreme degree from the actual objective reality seems a bit of a stretch to me.

Pouya LJ  52:24

Mm hmm. Okay, cool. We discussed this definitely further. Because again, it's a whole topic on its own. We can separate these. I just wanted to throw them out there because they're quite related in this in this realm. What we're talking about all of them can come together, essentially. Yeah. So thanks, guys. This was awesome. We are going to definitely deep dig deep in all of these subjects that we talked about 10 Martini problem and what do you got these two that I recently introduced and basically bring everything together at some point. If you have any final words, go for it. Otherwise, I think we can adjourn here.

Govind  53:00

Well, I'll say that I'm, I'm very excited for the fractal project, and to see what kind of models we can come up with, and we'll be sure to keep you guys posted on what we make of it.

Pouya LJ  53:13

Awesome, YouTube.

Deep  53:15

I just want to make one final comment. And also Yeah, I echo Goldman's thoughts. I think this project is going to be super cool. It's going to reveal a lot of things about reality that we all care about. But speaking of reality, my final thought was that we definitely need to get better with and we'll talk about it more next time. But, um, so one of the best philosophers of all time and especially of the 20th century, who's also logician his name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He had a bunch of he made a couple of breakthroughs in philosophy and logic, and one of the ones that he did in philosophy, like the general idea, came down to him showing debunking the use of language and how we don't use it properly. And even when we do, it still isn't good enough in the way that we use it for what we are trying to approach and accomplish and tackle. So he like really emphasized the use of language. And when it comes to the idea of reality and objective reality and how far we are, we definitely need to agree on definitions better and have super precise, rigorous, you know, wide varying definitions of reality and just super nuanced looks on what we mean when we say that.

Pouya LJ  54:32

I couldn't agree more. That was actually well said and awesome. Alright guys, thank you

Deep  54:37

for the awesome chat, by the way, very engaging.

Pouya LJ  54:39

Thank you. Yeah, definitely. I always enjoy having a chat with you too. It's amazing, either online or offline doesn't matter. I hope our listeners will enjoy again we picked this up later with more depth and until later episode, have a good day.

Your behavior in a personal or professional relationship ought not to always remain the same and implementing a reward and punishment mechanism is the basis of relationship management at home and at work. In this episode of Beyond the Present podcast Dan and Poujix discuss this aspect of relationship management and describe in detail the three stages of polite confrontation, warning, and punishment in a relationship and offer all the options that should be exhausted before one has to end a personal or professional relationship. If you want to know when to reward and when to punish your staff, business partner, or significant other then this program is right up your alley! 

From Napoleon Hill to Robert Greene many mentors have recommended opting for focused pursuit of our skills in one or few areas that we are excellent at by calling them specialized knowledge and mastery respectively. Yet, taking the path of mastery seems quite old fashioned in the modern age when google can do almost anything for us. However, this could not be any further from the truth! Winning the future in any career or profession requires competing not only with other human players in that field but also with artificial intelligence and robotics that are being rapidly developed to put the majority of average performers in almost all fields out of job, from business and finance to medicine and healthcare and even in arts and humanities! However, committing to developing mastery level skills in your chosen field makes you immune against being outperformed by others or replaced by technologies. In this short talk Daniel will tell you why it is important to commit to excellence, how you can become a master in your field, and how you can make changes to your social circle so that mastery can be maintained and developed.

There is no denying the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic and any single one of the deaths caused by this incident is one too many. However, just like the lives lost on September 11th 2001 led to the operation Iraqi Freedom and the formation of a new world order, Covid19 has been used by world leaders in a manner that has undermined liberalism, human rights, and privacy of people all over the world. In this episode of Beyond the Present podcast Daniel and Pouya discuss how world leaders have gained an upper edge over the people they are elected to serve by being given the right to lock down entire cities, enrich their facial recognition databases to recognize people even while wearing masks, monitor the movements of citizens, use smartphones to openly track their movements 24/7, and above all show complete disregard for free enterprise and entrepreneurship. Suddenly an overly exaggerated virus has made it seem normal or even legitimate for modern governments in the developed world to undermine liberty, a value that the entire modern civilized world is founded upon. Make sure not to miss out on this episode to find out how the pandemic could have been managed differently!  

Steve Joordens is a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and chief science officer at Cogneeto Inc. and the instructor of the free Coursera course titled "Mind Control: Managing Your Mental Health During COVID-19". His research interest includes but not limited to Consciousness, memory, attention.

In this episode of BTP we bring to you our conversation with Professor Steve Joordens regarding mental health during COVID-19 pandemic, its implications as well as ways to manage it. This conversation does not, by any means, exhaust the material in the course and you are encouraged to take part in this free course on Coursera.

Coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/manage-health-covid-19

Website: https://stevejoordens.ca/

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/stevejoordens

Show Notes

00:21:00 - Leon Festinger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Festinger

Steve Joordens is a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and chief science officer at Cogneeto Inc. and the instructor of the free Coursera course titled "Mind Control: Managing Your Mental Health During COVID-19". His research interest includes but not limited to Consciousness, memory, attention.

In this episode of BTP we bring to you our conversation with Professor Steve Joordens regarding mental health during COVID-19 pandemic, its implications as well as ways to manage it. This conversation does not, by any means, exhaust the material in the course and you are encouraged to take part in this free course on Coursera.

Coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/manage-health-covid-19

Website: https://stevejoordens.ca/

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/stevejoordens

Show Notes

00:21:00 - Leon Festinger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Festinger

Episode Transcript:

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, anxiety, learn, feel, extreme, fight, body, talk, virus, pandemic, day, mind, isolation, control, flee, understand, strategies, world, person, anxious

SPEAKERS

Pouya LJ, Prof. Joordens

Pouya LJ  00:17

Hello, Professor Jordans. How are you?

Prof. Joordens  00:19

Good, good. Nice to be with you.

Pouya LJ  00:20

Thank you. You too. Thank you for taking your time and joining us here today.

Prof. Joordens  00:24

Yeah, no, it's fun. I look forward to it.

Pouya LJ  00:26

This will be good. Awesome. Now this whole COVID-19 is grand, taking everybody away from different aspects. Now obviously a lot of people are concerning about the physical aspect of the health. You know, getting dividers not getting the virus is quite definitely quite lethal for a lot of people, which is unfortunate. But I've been always quiet for a long time I've been thinking about this from the aspect of mental also health as well, which you're an expert here and yeah, I mean, it I this is my perspective, this is me thinking out loud, basically. But I always feel like, as unfortunate as this whole thing is, eventually we'll for a matter of months, whatever, eventually it will find its own equilibrium, whatever that is. But I'm worried that the mental aspect of this will outlast the pandemic itself. And, yeah, I can transcend that time. And also, you will have a potentially individual, obviously, but potentially societal, and, you know, maybe world impact, and later on how we are going to think about things.

Prof. Joordens  01:32

Let me stick a hint of optimism in there. So So, you know, yes, I think that these are extremely challenging times. Psychologically, the the optimism, I'm all about silver linings these days where the optimism is, you know, if you're not anxious right now, you're not paying attention really. So mental health is no longer or mental unease, let's say is no longer just something certain people experience we are all very anxious. So the potential silver lining is that We actually take the time now we have the time to learn what this anxiety response is, and to learn some relatively simple coping strategies for dealing with it so that, you know, maybe that lingering effect is a bunch of people who have now a better ability to kind of take control of their mind and, and be driving their psychology a little bit. So that, you know, that's the hopeful side of that opportunity.

Pouya LJ  02:26

Yeah, well, so the lines are great. I think they're great. We need the switch is we do. Alright, so let's get started with Okay, so why do you think from your perspective, that this COVID-19 has has been more disruptive than previous pandemics in our recent history?

Prof. Joordens  02:43

Yeah, I mean, it really is amazing. And it honestly took me a while to kind of understand why so many leaders were willing to take such extreme steps at a time when it was, you know, admittedly a little ambiguous what the right thing to do was and so totally shut down. The economy seemed really extreme. However, you know, once we kind of understood at some point that this pandemic, unlike others had the ability to completely overwhelm healthcare services. And as many people say, that would have taken down the economy anyway. So if we had just sort of allowed it to go, but the funny thing is, psychologically, it's not funny. The odd thing is the the prescription that we all are being asked to take, you know, the isolation really goes against our primary coping strategy, which is, you know, when we suffer anxiety or stress or grief or anything like that we reach out to other human beings and emotionally connect with them. You know, the, the strongest version of that would be a hug, reaching out to hug someone. My dog is upset by some animal.

03:52

Welcome to the new world. So, you know, oh, it's a squirrel. Yes.

Prof. Joordens  03:59

She's loving So yeah, that I'm completely confused now what was?

Pouya LJ  04:06

Actually I lost the two. I think you were talking? Yeah, yeah. I think you were talking about the economy after that. Oh, yeah.

Prof. Joordens  04:18

So So, yeah, I mean, I take issue with the term social distancing, because that's not what we need. Right now. We need physical distancing. It's the disease travels through space, not through our social networks. And so, in fact, we need to come socially together. But I think that is what's made this such a difficult thing for us is, you know, we're saying people are saying, here's what you have to do. And by the way, what you have to do will deprive you of your primary way of coping with what we're telling you to do. And so I think we all now have to And literally, I'm pretty heavy on this where we have to learn how to control our anxiety, because if we allow it to continue for too long, there's a lot of great work by Hon. So years ago, for chronic stress or chronic activation of this fight or flight system, which is what it is, it eventually wears down our immune system. So if we allow the anxiety to just rule, we will eventually become compromised and our immune system and and therefore wide open to catching the virus ourselves. So, so you know, we really have to take the time now. And the good news is, it's not that complex a system, and it's not that hard to learn to control it. And there's certainly no, you know, Freudian Voodoo involved, what we're talking about is physiology, it really comes down to our basic physiology and being able to control it much like, you know, a guru, although they're, they're more extreme, but we hear the stories of a guru who could slow their heart rate down to the point where they're almost seemed like they're, they're dead, you know, using the mind to control the physiology of the body. That's an extreme case, they spend years learning how to do that, but a much less extreme case can be learned much more quickly.

Pouya LJ  05:58

Okay, and so What do you think is the primary reason for this whole psychological toll we're experiencing?

Prof. Joordens  06:05

Yeah, well, let let me give you just a taste of the the, what the system is supposed to do. And then we'll talk about why this is so nasty. So it's really meant, you know, most of the time our bodies are in this what we call parasympathetic mode, which, which is when the body focuses on things like digestion, getting nutrients out of food, separating the waste delivering the nutrients to the body, kind of like maintenance on our on our body. But let's say a predator, suddenly, you know, jumps out of a bush, our bodies can go into the sympathetic mode, and when it goes into the sympathetic mode, digestion stops, and the body is prepared to either fight or flee. So we breathe faster, our heart beats faster, that's getting blood all through our body, it's delivering oxygen to our muscles, it's making us very strong, but it's also giving us that sort of energy. And the idea is we're supposed to use that energy to either fight this predator or get the heck away from it. Either way. Whatever happens is usually over in like 10 minutes. And when it's over, then the system can relax again. The problem is the predator nowadays is COVID. We don't even really understand what it is we know it's very dangerous. We don't know how long it's going to be around, and it ain't going nowhere. And so we can't flee. It seems impossible to flee. It's unclear how to fight it. But I think we are part of my advices we have to realize that some of the things we're doing is fighting it, we have to tell our body because this fight or flee system kind of comes up with this imperative do something. It's like we're driven, we have to do something. And so one of the parts of the psychological well being is is convincing yourself you are doing some things that certain things like staying home is actually a very powerful way to have an effect here. But yeah, that's the feeling. So that's what we all have is this chronically engaged fight or flee system and it's expensive. bad because of all the ambiguity, you know, we'll hear it's going to be over and if the worst is two weeks from now, and then a little while later you hear well, we could be doing this till you know 2022 so this is ambiguous stuff that our brain does not like, our brain likes to predict the future and it can't right now.

Pouya LJ  08:20

Like Yeah, and the fact that the active fight thing that that we can do is to remain passive kind of Yeah, yes, kind of paradox that we don't appreciate, I guess.

Prof. Joordens  08:29

It is and I actually highlight when it when I talk about you know, how family should talk to children. I think it's very important to you know, not say the following do not say, you know, we're hiding it at home because there's this evil virus and we don't want to catch it. It sounds sort of like a hiding away thing. Instead, it's much better to say to children, you know, you are not at risk, probably heartland at all. And even we, the parents are probably not at that much risk. But there's all these other people in the community that are and there are these healthcare workers that are on the front lines that are working really hard. And so what we're doing here by staying home is is sort of actively doing our part to keep the viruses small, kind of like we're all fighting to keep the sucker as small as we can keep it. And people do have to play that mental trick because this as you said, it feels passive. But you have to convince students this is active, the more active you can make it, the better. By the way, I also suggest things like, if you have a young family, and if you know somebody who's older, who maybe alone, and maybe isn't very tech savvy, if you could adopt a person or two, and just commit to calling them every day, and tell your kids you know, we're doing this for these people, they need some social support, they need to know we care. So we're going to do this that feels more active. And you can tell the kid you know, this is part of how we are fighting the virus as well. So yeah, if you can come up with active things that feel like you're doing something because that's what your body is screaming, do something. If you feel like some way to do that, then that's very powerful. Hmm,

Pouya LJ  10:00

interesting. Good to know. And now there's the all of this raises the question, is there any direct, indirect, some sort of link between how deadly this pandemic is? And how, how much panic people get? And like? Yeah, so nearly otherwise? Yeah, I'm sorry.

Prof. Joordens  10:17

Yeah, no, absolutely. So one interesting, I'm going to pick on a word you said, because I think it's an interesting word. That's something I'm thinking about quite a bit, which is panic. We actually haven't seen you know, it's, we can talk about how horrible this isn't. It is horrible. From a psychologists point of view. I'm amazed at how compliant people are and have been, you know, we see these people who aren't physically distancing and they annoy us and they should, but they're actually a minority. The vast majority of people have have agreed to this, you know, extreme extreme change in their whole life, lack of finances, in some cases, you know, losing their their money. And so by and large, the lack of panic is impressive. Other than toilet paper, and We haven't seen a whole lot happening. But it's something we have to keep our eyes on again. And you know, when I look at the whole world, I heard a story, I can't remember where it was, there was some place where there was a riot in response to the government telling people to stay home. And I think it only happened a little bit, and it fizzled out. But yeah, so so we're not seeing that. But, you know, I think with respect to the, the chance of death, I worry about older people in that regard, that that people who are younger and relatively healthy, don't feel a fear that they are personally going to be impacted. But if you're 70, or 80, right now, I mean, it's another level, it's a whole, like know that. Most of us will say, we don't want to catch it, because we'd hate to give it to somebody else or something like that. We're not so worried about ourselves, but if you're 70 or 80, and you catch it, that could be it. And so for them, the the threat is far more real, far more of a mortal threat. And so there's is a chance that that could really psychologically be, you know, a harder stone to carry for a lot of older folks, and they may be the hardest ones to reach through social connections and other things, too. So, I am concerned about about a lot of older folks for that reason.

Pouya LJ  12:17

And do you so specifically to those people? Do you have anything specific that you are otherwise to, like you mentioned that younger people can call them that's good. But specifically, if you're just talking to that group of people, is there anything you wouldn't want to say to them,

Prof. Joordens  12:31

I mean, I would say don't be shy on your side to call other people. You know, if you have a little if you're like most older people, you probably got a bunch of numbers written in a in some sort of flip thing or whatever. Go through the numbers at different days, pick two or three people and and maybe old friends and maybe people your age who may be in your situation. If you can get a sort of buddy group going where you just agree. You know, you're going to touch base with each other now and then through the day that can Really kind of give some of these people something to think about something to look forward to. And it can make them feel less alone while they're alone. So those social connections are great. The other thing I would say for these people and I say this, in the course I have about managing anxiety, I talked about strategies. And one of the things I claim is you have to get away from the anxiety you can't, you can't just have running away all the time. And there are easy ways to get away you can distract your mind. And for an older group like that, especially if you have somebody in your family maybe that's like that, find the music that was, you know, popular when they were in their 20s you know, somewhere from 16 to 26 or something, if you can figure out what music you might not have heard of any of this stuff, but you play that music for them, create a little playlist do what you can to get that music into their environment. It will transform them, it will make them smile, it will make them sing, and those are all positive. They release things into the body. endorphins that are that are fighting the anxiety response. And so those people need a break from the anxiety and music is just all powerful in that regard. And if you can find the right music, the music they know and that they haven't heard for years, that will light them up. And so that's just one little strategy, I would toss it there.

Pouya LJ  14:17

Okay, that's actually great. I never would have thought of it. Now, you mentioned that sometimes we need to get away from it and distract ourselves. Now that brings me to my next question, actually. Is news helping us like is it making it worse? And if so, should we stop or limit? I mean, I guess to a degree, you can't stop because you have to know what you should comply with and not. But should we limit our exposure to news media and others? Yeah,

Prof. Joordens  14:41

absolutely. So that's exactly when we talk about the simple strategies. What ends up in your mind gets there two ways, either internal thoughts, something internal pushes something into your mind or the world, you know, bring something to us. And so we can use the world to change our mind, so to speak, so So yeah, if we look at, I guess, the negative side, so the news I would put on the negative side, and it's a fascinating thing at a time like this, because there's so much uncertainty, we become information addicts. And I mean that in the in the same way you're addicted to your smartphone, if something delivers you rewards on a sort of random basis. And so you know, somebody just shared your post, which makes you feel good. And so that's great, you put the phone down, but somebody might share it immediately right after you put the phone down. So maybe you better check to make sure somebody hasn't just shared it again. And if you never know when that's going to come you keep checking in Yeah. And so now we have, we want information, we want to know what's going on. And the news delivers us that information. And so we will have this natural tendency to want to keep checking and keep checking and keep checking like our phones. But every time you look at the news, your brain is getting this message you are under threat. There is this nasty thing out there. And so it's feeding the anxiety and is getting you anxious. So but as you say you want that information, so what do you do you budget. What I claim is, you know, maybe a couple times a day, you actually budget times in your day where you say, Okay, I'm going to consume the news at that time. But do things like if you have any news apps on your phone, turn off those notifications, like don't let the news control you and get you, you know, control your mind, you say, Okay, I am going to allow you into my mind for a while. I then claim once you're done watching the news, you should use what I'm now calling a sort of cognitive palate cleanser, kind of like when you eat some food, and then you will eat something neutral to kind of get that taste out of your mouth. After you watch the news plan to watch something else that will engage your mind and that'll be different for all of us. But But if there's something that you watch on TV or something that you know, playing a video game or whatever, if it pulls your mind away from anxiety, learn what those things are, you know, pay attention to those that whole when I was like, for me, it's Garage Band and playing with, you know, musical stuff in the basement. When I'm doing that everything else goes away. And so if you learn those things, those things become powerful leavers. For you watch the news, do one of those so that you know, you let your head go there, but then you pull your head back away from that. So that kind of thing can be how, you know, when I talked about living in isolation, that's the sort of trick is that's budget your day, schedule your day, and and put in good stuff along with the anxiety stuff because we're not going to get rid of the anxiety when the goal is to manage it, not to lose it, you'll

Pouya LJ  17:27

never lose it. Okay, fair enough. Now, we mentioned the old people like, age groups aside, are there any types of people that are more susceptible to being more struggling with this?

Prof. Joordens  17:38

Yeah, so I get asked this question a lot. And I mean, the truth, the absolutely 100% truth is, we've not done any psychology experiment, anything like this. You know, when when we look at isolation, we look at things like solitary confinement in prison, which is very different than what we're all dealing with. We'll also look at social isolation, so people who have trouble you know, being played heard of any group and we know what that does. But this kind of isolation is something brand new. And so I get asked by reporters if people are already anxious or depressed, or if they have, you know, issues, are they going to be double hit? And I don't know, I've, I've asked some people that I know. And there are some surprising anecdotes the other way where, you know, one of the things I was told by somebody is I'm not alone anymore. I felt like I was the only one suffering for this anxiety thing. And now I have all these friends who understand how I feel. So from one perspective, that was good, and I heard from another person that, you know, they are they had already learned some of these coping strategies as part of managing their own mental health. And so now they felt like they were kind of equipped and that there's all these other sort of naive people who suddenly are discovering what anxiety feels like and don't know how to manage it. So it's possible that some of them are better equipped and that it's not hitting them, you know, double hard as we might think. But we're not seeing you know, nobody's collecting a lot of good data right now, which is probably a shame. Probably would be good be collecting some good data. So I don't know if we know, we know things like abuse is up, you know, a lot of that kind of, so there's stresses that come with being stuck in a place with a person that may exacerbate any anxiety or depression, but I don't know if the isolation itself. Yeah, we just don't know.

Pouya LJ  19:25

Okay, fair enough. Now, that's good. That's good. Actually, I admire that. And that's one of the things I admire in science. We don't know we just say we don't know. We don't know figure it out soon, hopefully. But yeah, I do the hand as you mentioned, there, bunch of people like group maybe minority that really don't take this seriously. And another question arises, why is that and is it just because they don't believe in danger? Or do you think they're immune? And is it as bad as before?

Prof. Joordens  19:50

So there's, there's some psychology we can bring to bear on that which is, which is kind of interesting. And the first thing I want to I want to sort of throw out there is I think for some for some People it is sort of a macho thing and I can't wrap my head around that to be honest. Like I think of our hurricanes bearing down and you see those people who are out in the beach even though hurricanes coming down. That's kind of okay, I guess because it's you're risking your own life. And if you want to be an idiot and risk your own life, that's that's one thing. But the problem here is, you know, I really think of this virus as a monster that's, that's growing, that the healthcare community is trying to fight but if it grows too big, they're not going to be able to fight it. And so most of us are doing our best to try to keep the monster small, where these people are feeding the monster and they're feeding the monster themselves, their families, their friends, families, and I almost think they need an image like this. I'm a big fan of you know, rational argument doesn't work sometimes with people but just depicting them as the person feeding the virus and making it bigger while the healthcare people are getting you know, attacked by it. That's how they should should think of it. So why you know, don't they get there, there's a there's a really funny set of a Psychology experiments that were started by someone called Leon Festinger, and it's come to be known as cognitive dissonance. But the first the story of his first study is a good one. I like it. He was doing his daily thing. I think it was in New York. And there was somebody who was gaining some prominence who claim that the world was ending. She knew this because she was in contact with aliens, she would go into a trance, and the aliens would speak to her and she would write with her non dominant hand stuff and whatever she wrote that that came from the aliens. And so the aliens basically said the world was coming to an end, they gave an exact date. But of course, they were going to bring a spaceship down and save a few people who followed her. And so a bunch of people did this is what Leon Festinger was kind of interested in a bunch of people sold all their stuff, and you know, went to hang out with her and waited for this date. And Leon, being a good psychologist said, wonder what they're gonna think about the day after. I want to talk so he figured out who these people were and he made a point They after the world ended to go seek them out. And the question was, would they all say, Oh, I was an idiot. So let's imagine, you know, the people who said, Oh, it's not going to be that bad, this pandemic isn't gonna be that bad. You're all overreacting. What you found when you talk to these people is that they after they did not think they were idiots, they in fact, felt like something had gone wrong. Of course, the person was now in touch with aliens and aliens had postponed the date or something wouldn't have. But they were very willing to believe all of this stuff. They were very unwilling to accept that their original position was a stupid one. Humans don't like telling ourselves we're stupid and will twist the facts and will twist all sorts of things to do that. And so I think for a lot of people, you know, back when we were talking about how extreme that that choice was to shut down the economy. There's a lot of people that were obviously very personally affected by that. And who probably felt that was just too extreme that it was too extreme. For the For the actual danger. Now, of course, since then we've seen like New York healthcare system, basically almost on its knees. And so the vast majority of us who had any doubt about that are now on the side that I guess it wasn't too extreme. I guess it wasn't necessary. But if you were loud and vocal early in the days, if you were someone who said, you guys are all idiots, this is too extreme, blah, blah, blah. Humans have a hard time walking away from that, once they take a position. They have a hard time flipping it. So I think some of these people are, are still kind of hanging on to that notion that no, it's not really that bad. And you are still all being too dramatic about this. But I don't know. I mean, as they do that they're feeding the monster. So So to me, it's almost that's why rational thought like trying to speak to these people, rationally. Sometimes it's hard because they'll they'll listen to what they want confirmation bias and they'll hold on to the things that fit. And that's where I think a good image can go a long way. A good little graphic or cartoon that kind of says, You This new this slimy guy in the head. You want to be up to you your goal,

Pouya LJ  24:06

maybe maybe knocks them out? Who knows? Yeah. Now I had a friend of mine actually heard about this conversation that I'm going to have with you and asked this question that I want to ask on his behalf? And is there such thing such a thing as types of anxiety? And if so, is it important in this scenario? Or is it just anxiety?

Prof. Joordens  24:22

Well, I mean, there's that basic anxiety response that I talked about, which is basically just the fight or flight reaction. There are people. So right now this is being triggered by a real threat. So So in fact, this is a very natural reaction. For us all to have. It's just not good when it's extended, as I talked about, in the pre COVID world, other you know, people who suffered from anxiety issues, there would be triggers and the triggers could be very different. For a lot of people, for example, what we can all relate this on the small scale, if you've ever had the network, there's there's what we call social anxiety. Right? You know, if You ever had to go and talk to a bunch of people you don't know and try to represent yourself? Well, in a networking kind of event, any of us find that stressful, we all find that anxiety, anxiety provoking, we can learn strategies, and we can figure out how to do it, we can see the value in doing it. You know, for some people that can happen when it's one other person they have to talk to, and not a roomful of strangers, so it can be any there, they can start to think. I'm going to say something stupid, I'm gonna make a fool of myself, this person isn't gonna like me. And so they can start worrying, you know, before they even open their mouth before they even have a conversation, they can start having these negative thoughts about consequences that can happen and that could make them literally fearful and invoke that so depending on who you are different things. It's the same basic response, but but it can sort of play out in very different contexts. Here's another funny example. I'll throw just to, you know, give the sense of the importance of thinking as we go. So UT Scarborough, we're, you know, our home. One of the things they do At the exam time, that I find kind of humorous, knowing how multicultural UT Scarborough is they have a room full of puppies. And there, the idea is, while you're all stressed out for exams, you know, this would be a great go hang out with the dogs and puppies, and this will make you feel better. And I think Well, yeah, for some students, that's the most terrifying idea in the world to go walk into a room full of dogs and puppies. So you know, it's not the dogs or puppies. It's the way you think about them and the thoughts they put. So if you think they're all cute, and that's putting you into one state, if you think they're potentially dangerous, and you know, and could bite you at any moment that's putting you into the other state. So it's really about the sort of thoughts that come along with these activities. And if those thoughts trigger, our amygdala, which is like our spider senses, the thing that centers senses potential danger, then we go into that fight or flee response. In an extreme case, by the way, let's mention this one other situation. There's They call the panic attack. And a panic attack is sort of a different kind of anxiety in the sense of, it's kind of that amygdala, that spider sense going off for no reason. So some people, it's just a little too sensitive. And so it's like your brain senses danger. And it's telling you, you're in danger. And you're looking around and you don't see the source of the danger. You're not sure why your your body is readying you to fight or flee. That can be double terrifying, because now you don't know where to run away from you don't know where the danger is. And so some people in those situations really it can, it can sort of cycle and they can get really, really, really scared. And, you know, imagine you're on a subway train, so to speak, and this starts happening. When those train doors open, somebody with a panic attack, which is both out of the train, both out of the train station go out in the road somewhere and we just be sort of running to get away from something. And that's a very sort of extreme version. Those those people feel like they're going to die. They literally have this sense that I'm about to die. And I don't know why. So that's that's kind of a special form. It's still the same basic mechanism. But when you can't find the danger, it's almost worse.

Pouya LJ  28:12

Now, have you do do you think it will relate to the situation? In a sense that okay, we know what it is, but I don't know. Like, you know, yeah, I can't see it. Yeah. Is that is that something that might happen to people? I've heard

Prof. Joordens  28:24

of all of this uncertainty, yes, that you can't see it. And by the way, there's a really weird almost getting back to your psychological impacts thing where we're starting to we're starting to have a disgust reaction towards other human beings,

Pouya LJ  28:38

which is yes.

Prof. Joordens  28:40

That's all you know, I'll be walking my dog. And if someone and the paths are only so wide, and and if somebody I just see somebody coming, just the fact that somebody is coming my way, makes me know. It's like, it's like suddenly humans are being, you know, this source of distrust and disgust and potentially dirty, maybe carrying the Maybe not. And I don't know how that will play out, like how we're how we're going to carry on with that afterwards. Yeah, it's a weird, fascinating world.

Pouya LJ  29:12

I heard different things about this actually. So like in terms of predictions, yeah. Not from experts, but random people and hypothesizing and some people were like, yeah, this is gonna be devastating. People are gonna hate people for a long time. And then other people are like, no, people are gonna be wanting to hug people. This is

Prof. Joordens  29:29

I'm on both sides of that too. I said to my wife last night that one of the things that I thought might be fun for some people to start doing is planning what i what i call Liberty day, you know, when the day when we're all free of all these restrictions, and you can imagine a big celebration of some sort, you know, think Raptors parade but but bigger. At some level. We're all free. But that is the interesting question. So if you had let's say, we took Toronto Island and we made it into this Party Central. Would people come with the idea of being shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of people, you know, even on a ferry or wherever, yeah. Are we mentally able to do that? Right? How long will it take for that? to come back? I've heard some people talk about the economy. And I wonder if it's similar where they say, you know, you're not just going to turn flip a switch and the economy is going to be back what it was that businesses will have died, there will be a period of time when it will probably come back, but that period of time is probably yours. I wonder, you know, if we defeat the virus, if it hasn't become a seasonal thing or something, if it suddenly we're gone, let's say tomorrow or next month, I think human interactions would similarly take a while to come back. I think if the threat was really gone, they would come back. I don't know but a hand shaking. You know, I don't certainly not hugging strangers like we used to at some point in time. But, but I think it will come back we'll be slowing. It would be funny to see if people are willing to just suddenly like do we feel like we need them. To be together, because that's a very psychologically normal feeling to, but we've had all that disgust on top of it, and you know, steering away from crowds, and it's becoming habit. Right. And once it becomes habit, then then it's pretty ingrained in our body and it takes a while to undo.

Pouya LJ  31:16

Yeah, for sure. No, it's definitely I initially, I didn't tend to do that. But I feel like if I don't do it, it seems like something's wrong with me because everybody's doing it, I guess. Anyways, so I think it's as good a time as any so for those people who don't know you have a course that is free on Coursera called mind control managing your mental health during COVID-19. Now, do you want to? Why don't you like just tell us a little bit about what's show? I mean, I guess people have a good idea what this course is about, but yeah, coming from you.

Prof. Joordens  31:44

So the mind control part. I always like these weird twists or words and I have some sort of Jedi references all through and you know, I have this image in my mind of this may be going back for for some people but, but Luke when he's finally been all trained, and then he's going to Jabba the Hutt. To rescue Han Solo, but it's this period where he's actually confident and competent. And he's learned all these these mental skills, these mind tricks, and then he can just waltz in and he's kind of the Jedi warrior. Well, you know that that's sort of in my mind is you we need to learn that sort of ability to control our own minds. And it really isn't that tough. So the big idea of the course is to empower people with knowledge to make them, you know, really understand what the anxiety response is. And then when and then to give them some tips about managing it tips that will make sense once they understand it. So I think, you know, I've told reporters, here's a tip, here's what happened, and they get those little tips and that's fine. But when you really kind of get it, oh, yeah, that's why that works. It's important because sometimes the tip isn't exactly perfect for you. But if you understand why it works, you can find one that is, oh, you know, he talked about singing karaoke, I wouldn't do that. But I would do this and it's the same idea. So the course is essentially It's called three weeks, although people are binge watching it, so whatever but but it's broken down to three weeks, each week has about maybe an hour of videos, three or four short videos. The first week is really about understanding where anxiety comes from, and why it's so important that we learn to control it. And I end that week by telling them about guided relaxation. So basically, you can't be both anxious and relaxed at the same time. It's sort of two different modes our body can be in. So if you want to stop being anxious, the best way to do it is to learn how to be relaxed. And if you can invoke some kind of summon relaxation, that will get rid of the anxiety and it's something you can learn to do but it is a skill. It is you know, mental mind tricks so to speak. And so you begin by I give them a little audio tape that just kind of what they just lay down and it walks them through the process and just to demystify it just so your listeners understand. It's just something Like we start at your feet, and we say clench your feet as hard as you can, like it's a fist, like clench that foot as hard as you can make that muscle hurt, and keep clenching. And make it really, really, really, really hurt. And we say that for a little while, and then at some point, that critical point, we say, Okay, now release that tension. And while you release that tension, feel what it feels like when the tension sort of bleeds away, when it's just sort of, you know, drains out of your body, like it's going down the drain, and then feel that relaxation that's left in your feet after that, and then we go up, and we do it with your calves and we do with your thighs, and we work all the way up through your body. And the idea is just it's kind of is my sci fi references again, it's like the teleporter and Star Trek where you want to go from one place to another. It's kind of like you can do that pretty well with your mind. If your mind knows that location you want to go to and has to be very familiar with that location. And if it is, it can transport you there. And so doing the relaxation you become familiar with. That's what relaxation feels like. That's what it feels like the drain stress. And at some point, it can become a Jedi mind trick where you can literally, you know, someone says you're a jerk, and you're about ready to come back at them with some nasty words, but you can just go No, let me pull them back. And let me be rational and and that is I call the psychology of being cool in my class that's that's learning how to kind of be in control of your motion. So that's a very sort of direct way. In the next week, though, I talk like we've been talking about a little bit more about how you can use distractions. So I talked about the news and why it sort of like we did like it's, it's not not necessarily good for our state, but it's something we kind of need now. But how you can now change the channels on your mind, through the activities you engage in, that certain things will be good distractions for you. Other things will actually be like aerobic activity. We've never understood this in psychology, or aerobic activity makes people more positive emotionally. You don't know why. We just know that's been shown over and over again. So if you can factor some of that into your day, That will help your mental health. So I give a bunch of strategies like that in the second part, we talked about the importance of social connections, things like that. And then finally, in the third week, we focus really on isolation, this new like living in isolation and what that does to a person. What we know from the psychological literature, what we don't know yet, as we've talked about, there's a lot we don't know about this situation. But then I then I give some advice about sort of configuring your life in isolation and how to kind of, you know, have the use in there. But as we've talked about a little budgeted bits and use, you know, follow them with some sort of palate cleanser, cognitive palate cleanser, have other ones throughout the day, have social interactions as part of what you do find ways to have control. One of the things I talked about, by the way in, in that third section is if you can accomplish something, if you can be spending this time, and maybe bettering yourself, so maybe taking courses online, if there are certain skills you always wished you had or whatnot, you can Get some certificates or you can just learn about something you always wanted to learn about. If you wake up in the morning with something to do, and you go bed at night, having accomplished something that makes you feel a lot better too, and it's less that you're just kind of hanging out. So I'm talking about things like that little things you can do that will literally answer your body's call of do something, and, and also kind of give you escapes from the anxiety at times, give you things that work against the anxiety. And the whole hope is that these become things that people just have in their back pocket. So I love the idea. I don't know if this is happening, but I love the idea of a family going through this. And literally, you know, involving kids at a very early age in terms of hey, here's how you can kind of control your mental states as well. And then maybe you know, six months from now that kids being bullied or something and and maybe they feel a little bit more in control of the situation and control of their emotions and maybe that allows them to, you know, come up with some strategies they might not have thought about. This is another thing. By the way, it's an interesting thing about this fighter Felice system. It's all about activating the body to respond. And it actually drains blood from the frontal lobes. It's kind of like your your body is saying, This isn't the time to be thinking it's a time to be doing something, just do something. Which makes sense if it's a bear in front of you, right? But, but otherwise, it's very hard. So if somebody was being bullied, for example, kids being bullied, usually they're going to have an emotional reaction. And it's very hard for them to think strategically about what what are the options? What's the best way to respond? Well, what could I do? Instead, they just let their emotions take control. But if they can push back that emotion, and get cool, and kind of think their way through, they may actually, you know, have a tool that they can use all their life. And so that's that silver lining I told you about before. I think we all have to learn these tricks now. But I think they will serve us well in our life going forward, too. So so it's an opportunity in a sense,

Pouya LJ  38:57

fair enough. Now why is this a perfect time? Well, Right time rather well, I think

Prof. Joordens  39:02

it's the right time. I think one of the great things but this is so strange these words that but as we all are all are feeling the same thing. You know, I literally tell people, if you're not anxious, you're not paying attention right now like, you know if you're clued in at all to what's going on. So it's no debate and it's not a mystical thing. So let me say it this way there, there are still a lot of pockets in the world where mental health is not spoken about where it's seen, as you know, if someone's having a struggle, that's something you want to hide, that's something that shameful, that's something they shouldn't be able to control themselves. So we'll say to somebody, like stop being anxious or stop being depressed, but we don't tell them how to do that. And we just don't naturally know how to do that. And so when we're talking about mental health, we're talking about going public even if you feel that way, like this person should be able to do something about their depression. Well, okay, but at least let them learn what they can do, but their depression, like don't just deny them the opportunity to actually figure out how to do that. And so I think we're in a case now where we're all feeling it and so it's not awesome them, it's us. And it's absolutely critical again, actually, for two reasons. One, the one I told you about that if the if the fight or flee system stays engaged too long, we become immunocompromised and that's not good for the virus. The other thing though, is and it worries me. Anxiety is better than depression, which sounds kind of odd, but anxiety is your body screaming at you do something. Depression is your body's screaming at you don't bother, it won't make a difference. Nothing does. It's not worth the effort. So depression is a real, you know, bad state that leads to suicide and leads to a lot of other very dangerous things. And if we don't learn to manage our anxiety, we may end up feel feeling at some point like nothing we're doing as much as helping, there's nothing we can do this is just going to ruin everything. And that's sort of the path that is something called learned helplessness, we can start to feel like, we can't control the situation. And that can lead to depression. And so that that worries me more than anxiety. It's an anxiety is uncomfortable, but it's an activating kind of state and so activate people to learn how to manage their mental states and to learn that it's not Voodoo. You know, I think Freud kind of did a disservice to psychology years ago, he's fascinating to read, but he you know, gives this impression of little demons in your head doing various kinds of weird stuff. And that's not modern psychology. modern psychology is much more about habits. And you can have habits of mind just like habits of body and and sometimes biases and the way you think about things the way you weigh things. And all of these things make sense when you hear them and their their approaches to, you know, sort of rebalancing the system and now As Voodoo, none of it should be seen as weakness. Any more than, you know, somebody jogging, we don't think someone's weak because they're jogging. We think they're actually taking the time to, you know, take care of their body. And you know, that's what I kind of hope people will start to see here that this mental health stuff, it's not about fixing a problem. It's about being fit, being ready for challenge, being able to take things on and not having them crush you. And so yeah, I think we may have the opportunity where enough people are motivated to learn about that, to actually kind of see what mental health is really about.

Pouya LJ  42:35

Alright, fair enough. Now, you mentioned the structure of the course being separated week by week. Yeah, actually, I did not. I started a course by I didn't finish it. One of the reasons was because I wanted to ask you this. Yeah. Is there do you recommend to go through that week by week or bingeing is okay, too?

Prof. Joordens  42:51

Yeah. I mean, obviously, I recommend you go through an order because I do build on some things later on. But, I mean, generally so let me Let me put on my geeky cognitive psychology hat. If you really want to remember it, there is what's what we call spaced learning leads to the best memory. So to learn little chunks and think about those and then wait to learn the next chunk, etc. So generally bingeing or cramming, that can get you the information for now, but it doesn't hang on is long. So generally speaking, anytime you're learning, it's better to distribute then to binge. However, you know, in this case, I've had a lot of people do the binge eating thing, and they say they've learned lots of great tips. And that's exactly what they wanted to get out of it. The good news about this, I mean, as an educator, the good news about this course is it's it's relevant. You know, students are taking this because they want to know these strategies, and they want to understand and so they're it's a very motivated, engaged student group. And in that case, all you really need to do is give them what they need to learn. And you know, if you wanted to binge it, it would probably be fine as well. Yeah, but the one the one thing I would mention, though, Then I want to highlight is that learning to relax, I highlight the suit, of course, but I can never highly enough it's like learning to play guitar, you know, you don't just pick it up and do it, you literally have to. So I recommend things like, like twice a day you do that guided relaxation thing, it takes 10 minutes. But you know, revisit that place called relaxation a couple times a day, and then keep doing this for a week or two weeks. You know, it takes a while before you can just mentally put yourself there. And so there are parts of the course like that, that if you if somebody just listens to it once and gets the concept. Well, that's great. They have the concept, they're not going to have the skill, skills only develop with practice. So everything people learn. It's less about how you learn and more about do you take what you learned and use it? Do you start using it in your life, and if you're using it in your life, it's going to stick and so that's what that would be my big recommendation to people is literally leave the thing saying, Oh, I know three ways I can do that and then do that.

Pouya LJ  44:57

Now that's fair. I think that anybody who's done Any kind of learning, especially with instruments or whatever it can, yeah, I can relate to that. Definitely. It's it makes a lot of sense. Now we're coming to the end of the, the episode here and I want to see if there's anything we missed that you want to talk about any final advice for the audience?

Prof. Joordens  45:16

Wow. I mean, there's there's so many angles on this I have reporters called me and asked me all sorts of questions and so many things. So there's, there's probably things we haven't discussed. But I think we got the, the main gist of and I think the things you know, I would really like the listeners to, to kind of grasp on is, is, this is a relatively quick experience. I can go through that. No, if you think of it in that Jedi way, you know, how long did he spend in a swamp with some great little green guy learning to do stuff. There's a whole lot less time that you'll spend and I really think it will be valuable. I really think there are tips in here that will make you feel better and that's why I'm trying so hard to kind of get it out there. So yeah, I just People listen to it, use what they listen to. And I really, really hope that it gives them a little bit of peace of mind a little bit more control over their mind. That's what it's all about.

Pouya LJ  46:09

Yeah. And I, from going back to the silver lining that you mentioned, I think, actually, and as I keep telling myself, I was like, I always thought to myself, there's so much books I want to read or whatever that never get a chance to. And now, this is a perfect chance, but like, I have a friend who was telling me that now that I have the chance, I'm just like, No, I was like, was that just an excuse?

Prof. Joordens  46:33

So I think Yeah, in a sense, it's a great opportunity for those of us who are staying healthy. I mean, obviously there are those who are impacted very badly, but it's an opportunity for other people other that are not so impacted. That too, yeah, pick up on those and these skills, specifically this that you mentioned, and that and that will make you feel a lot better in and of itself. Just Just because i mean it's it's a anti victim kind of, it's not like you're a victim of the situation. It's like you're someone that's like okay, this The situation how can I use this to my advantage and that's a very different place to be psychologically and a much more healthy place to be psychologically. So, you know, sometimes the way we frame things to ourselves makes a big difference. And I think that's a good example.

Pouya LJ  47:13

All right, thank you. Thank you for your time and agreeing to come come up here.

Prof. Joordens  47:16

Yeah, no problem. Thank you for the invite. We and yeah, this has been a lot of fun.

Pouya LJ  47:20

Yeah, remember? Yeah, me too. Me too. It was awesome. And hopefully, we're gonna hope that this thing goes away quickly, but I'm assuming it doesn't. I hope we can count on your expertise. Further.

Prof. Joordens  47:30

No worries.

Pouya LJ  47:32

Cheers. Thank you. Thank you for your hard work.