This week we are going to dive deep into a topic that has been hot and heavy on a lot of people’s minds and see if we can’t shine a light in a few dark corners and maybe clarify a few things which previously have been murky and hard to understand. This episode isn’t the ultimate statement on this subject – there’s certainly plenty more to say after this – but my hope is that this will help anyone, liberal or conservative, blue or red, to better understand one of the most influential and powerful forces in our world today.

To what am I referring? The media. Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em. So what are we gonna do?

There’s a lot of talk about with the media lately. People have all sorts of opinions about what media’s proper role should be or could be, and how we get from here to there. As you know I like to do, I thought it would be a good idea to tackle this head on by going back and looking at where the whole idea of the media and a free press come from, how it developed over the centuries and how people answered these questions at different times and places. Knowing history isn’t worth very much if we don’t try to learn something from it and in this case, there are some amazing and even unbelievable facts about the media which you should know.

First off, what exactly is media? In simplest possible terms, media is a form of communication. It is important to understand that in some ways, media is the exact opposite of biologically evolved human communication. That may sound pretty strange, but stick with me on this.

The biologically evolved mode of human communication is speech, amplified and accentuated by tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. It emerged when humans lived in small collectives of hunter-gatherers. Exactly how small were those collectives? Archeological digs and studies of indigenous peoples suggest relatively small groups of less than a hundred, what most of us would think of as small tribes. Studies of great apes seem to concur. Common chimpanzees live in groups of anywhere between 15 to 150 individuals. Groups of bonobos (or what used to be called pygmy chimps) have been known to split after their headcount exceeded 100. So it’s a pretty good guess that early human tribes would max out at around 100 to 150 people. If you think about that many people trying to get along without a stable and well developed form of verbal communication, it makes even more sense.

So what kind of communication would evolve in this setting? Two things seem pertinent.

First, human communication is interactive. We routinely offer feedback, if only to acknowledge understanding or signal agreement. In fact, this is notably different from common chimps, who don’t watch each other’s facial expressions and actually interpret a direct stare as a form of aggression.

Second, human communication “in the wild” tends to happen on a one-to-one basis; sometimes, it’s one-to-few, but the few is still few enough to maintain a degree of interactivity. Now this is interesting because it suggests that early humans didn’t really have much use for communicating to very large groups of people at one time. There were no military generals assembling the troops, no political rallies or even religious sermons being given back then, much less large public speeches where one person would address hundreds or thousands of individuals in order to relay commands or instructions; there simply weren’t that many people in any one place at one time.

All of that changed with the advent of agriculture, polities, and writing.

Yes, I just said polities, which is not exactly the same thing as politics but it’s kind of related. This was a word that I’d never heard before I was working on this podcast and because I like to project,

There is a lot of hot debate around the subject of refugees coming to the US, lots of heated rhetoric and paranoia but very little factual information. It’s time to get some facts about this and debunk the paranoia. In this episode, I talk to Joe Sack, who has been working for many years on the front lines vetting and processing refugees from all over the world. We talk facts over fiction, what the vetting process really is like and what the real issues on refugees are.

Links from this episode:

Overview of US Refugee Law and Policy

Key Facts About Refugees to the US

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Recovery from a destructive cult or toxic relationship can be difficult. How do you know if the therapist or counselor you found is right for you? Are there questions you can ask or things you can do to make sure you have the right fit? This week, cult recovery counselor Rachel Bernstein and I discuss this in detail.

Music by Pale Blue.

 

Atheism is a contentious subject and as President of the American Atheists, David Silverman is an outspoken and proud advocate for atheism. In this episode, we talk about what hardcore atheism is and what it isn’t. While I know that I have a very controversial guest who I am positive is going to make some of you very angry, I hope you will give the full podcast a listen. Critical thinking involves looking and listening to alternative points of view. Politically, I think most of you know I lean left of center but everyday I watch Fox News as well as CNN and MSNBC and I pay close attention to my right-leaning friends on social media, the articles they post and what they have to say. I wouldn’t be much of a critical thinker if I just put my hands over my ears and cried everytime someone said something I didn’t like. Echo chambers aren’t great places to learn or grow so I always encourage listening to opposing points of view. Maybe the result is that you are more certain of your existing views or opinions but at least you don’t have to wonder what the other guys are saying.

Now as an atheist, I am not a believer in god or gods and I put myself very firmly in the atheist camp. However, I think of myself as a moderate because I advocate for a tolerance of belief. It’s not up to me to tell you how to think or what to think. I see my role as more of an educator and it’s up to you what you want to do with the information I give you. As an atheist, though, I very strongly believe in the separation of church and state. Frankly, I’ve been somewhat disappointed in the atheist community’s insularity on this, because they take on this issue as though they are the only ones who care about it and that’s not true. As crazy as this may sound to some atheists, I think that atheists can accomplish their goals faster and easier when it comes to separation of church and state by joining forces with like-minded religious groups. For those of you who don’t know, there are Christians and other religious groups who are very much in support of the legal separation of church and state and who advocate for it. I’d like to see more atheists work with those groups to move that ball down the road, but so far no atheists I’ve talked to seem at all interested in doing that. Believe it or not, we get more done together than apart and on this issue, we need all the help we can get, especially with the current political administration.

I like a lot of what Dave is doing and I agree with much of what he has to say but not everything. I wanted to bring him on my show because I wanted to see what the limits were on tolerance and understanding of belief from one of atheism’s most ardent advocates. When it comes to a total intolerance of religious belief, I cannot go there and I don’t think that it’s smart for atheists to either. However, I also understand that in any movement there are going to be people who have views that are about as absolute as you can get and for the atheists, Dave is that person. We discuss this during the interview amongst many other things.

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This week, my guest is Steve Hassan. He is a licensed mental health counselor who has written on the subject of cults and published three books through his Freedom of Mind Press. One of those books is Combatting Cult Mind Control, which is an excellent breakdown of how destructive cults work, what undue influence is, how to recover from a cult experience and what family and friends can do for their loved ones who may be stuck in a cult situation. I have recommended this book many times on my channel and really cannot give it enough praise.

Steve is a former cult member himself, having been involved with the Unification Church, i.e. the Moonies, for two years in the 1970s. He and I have known each other for a couple of years but it’s been a bit of a ships in the night situation trying to get him on my podcast. We first met at the Toronto Getting Clear conference and had a great time doing some presentations about Scientology and some of the mechanisms it uses to gain mental and emotional control of its members. In this interview, I wanted to talk to Steve about destructive cults in general and how the mind control mechanisms work. So without further ado, here’s Steve.

Steve’s website is here.

Questions covered during our talk:

(1) Just give some background on yourself and your experience with destructive cults for my listeners

(2) Can you talk about the cognitive biases or other mechanisms that prevent people in destructive cults from thinking rationally? They see themselves as being perfectly rational yet the facts say otherwise. How does that work?

(3) There’s a lot of discussion and concern about radicalized Islam and rightly so but it’s a nuanced conversation and not a black and white issue. Sam Harris said recently on Bill Maher’s show that this is a war of ideas and that banning all Muslims from the US, for example, is not the way to go because it keeps out moderate Muslims who would be our allies in the fight. From your experience, how do you see this and what do you think is an effective strategy for western countries to take in dealing with it?

(4) How do people find you and what can you do for them?

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I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately and there more to come. We have the best interviews here using the best words ever. Great words, great guests and of course, a great host. What more could you ask for?

But this week, we are going to do something different. Today we are going to plumb the depths of history, explore the limits of our incredulity and see if perhaps we might learn something about ourselves in the process. That sounds deep, huh?

Well, you know things are gonna get interesting when I start quoting the Bible. Specifically, according to Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” For those of you out there suffering from the mistaken notion that we in this generation, in this modern era, are the best and brightest who have ever lived, let me go ahead and just rob you of that illusion. Every generation gets this one wrong. You think back in Roman times, as they sat at the baths with one guy sitting on the pot next to another guy, butts out to the world, you think they didn’t tell each other that was the best of all possible worlds they were living in? Of course they did.

Our technology has evolved over the last century in extraordinary ways, and in some ways we have definitely advanced beyond our ancient forefathers, but unfortunately our ways of thinking have not really been keeping up and it’s a good idea for us to sort of keep that in mind from time to time. I don’t think a little humility ever hurt anyone. But yes, I am trying so hard right now to not make a political joke. Must. Resist.

Alright, now more to the point of this week’s show, I thought we might take a journey down memory lane but not just for the sake of gabbing about ancient history. I thought instead that we might begin what could be a long series of periodic episodes of the Sensibly Speaking Podcast where we do some in-depth exploration of where some of our thinking and ideas come from.

You know, I’ve said before that there is two-dimensional thinking and then there’s thinking in three dimensions. Now that’s just an analogy and I’m not talking about how your brain works, but it’s a pretty good analogy if I say so myself. You can have a surface level understanding of something where you learn a piece of information and you accept it or reject it based on whatever is in your head at that moment, but we know that’s not a full understanding. If you want to really grasp knowledge, or grok it as Heinlein used to say, then you need to drill down into the details. You need to go deep and get where things come from and get all the details of it. Then you can understand why people may think something is true and you can really play with that knowledge. Plus, when you understand something at that level, people are going to have a much harder time pulling one over on you.

Last December, in Episode 69, A Little Science Never Hurt Anyone, I spent some time discussing the layers of scientific knowledge: at the core there is the tested and true science which we generally accept and teach in schools and that kind of thing; the next layer is the actively investigated frontier which is something scientists of all kinds are working on advancing all the time; and then the last is the loosely formulated and hard-to-scrutinize fringe. And you may recall that in the fringe, we have these zombie ideas. That’s a proposition that has either been disproved or is not even testable, but like a zombie, it continues to live and feed out on the fringe of science even though there’s no real life in it. Zombie ideas usually shamble on because they appeal to our deeply held beliefs, so people choose to stick with them for emotional reasons and to hell with whatever the evidence says. Generally speaking, a lot of the pseudoscientific nonsense that still flies aroun...

This week I interview Steve Cannane, journalist for ABC and author of Fair Game, an amazing book about Scientology’s history in Australia. We discuss the research and writing of his book, how he got involved in covering Scientology as a journalist, how Scientology is like a microcosm for so many other things going on in the world and where this whole thing is going.

Please comment away and let me know your feedback or if you have any questions or comments you’d like me to address on air.

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This week I have another Skype conversation with an old Scientology friend and co-worker of mine, Nora Crest, about Scientology and all things related. We get together to discuss our time together in the Sea Organization back in the 1990s and 2000s, what life was like for us under its rigid system of rules and authority including being on the RPF and what it’s like working at Celebrity Centre International – Scientology’s mainline service organization for its celebrities.

Music by Pale Blue.

In this post-truth political era, can we bring rationality and sensible thought to politics? What is the Rationality Project and who is behind it? Why is it so hard for people to get along in the political arena and why do they have such different political philosophies anyway? This week we talk to Dr. Gleb Tsipursky from the University of Ohio about all of this and more.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky’s website is here.

His Rationality in Politics guide is here.

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This week I chat with former Sea Org member Aaron Smith-Levin, recently featured on Leah Remini’s A&E show, Scientology and the Aftermath. We discuss our mutual history at the PAC Base when Aaron was my junior (!), what it’s like to get a hate website from Scientology and what kind of reactions Aaron’s been hearing from under-the-radar Scientologists upon seeing him on TV.

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