What Nature Reveals About Living Longer & Why Smart People Believe Irrational Things-SYSK Choice

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Today on something you should know, the top 10 Halloween candies this year.

Then what science is learning from animals to help humans live longer because some animals live a very long time.

What's the longest?

It's a clam called the ocean cohog.

They live at least 507 years because we know of one that lived that long.

It was born in 1499 and died in 2006.

Also, why you shouldn't throw away your empty prescription bottles and the terrible consequences of misbelief, believing things that just aren't true.

My guest Dan Ariely is a victim of it.

Because people were very much convinced that I conspired to bring about COVID.

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something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carruthers

hi welcome to something you should know

One list that doesn't change much year to year is the list of the most popular Halloween candies.

Now it does vary from region to region and state to state and well and person to person for that matter, but candystore.com has compiled a list of the top 10 Halloween candies in the U.S.

according to their data that they put together over the last 16 years.

At number 10 is Snickers.

Which surprises me a little bit because it's my number one or maybe number two.

So number 10 is Snickers.

Number 9 is Hershey's Mini Bars.

Number 8, Candy Corn.

Never been a big fan of candy corn, but it is one of the only candies that you see only at Halloween.

Number seven is Hershey's Kisses.

Starburst comes in at number six.

Sour Patch Kids at number five.

The fourth most popular Halloween candy is Skittles.

At number three, Hot Tamales.

Number two is MM's.

And the number one Halloween candy, can you guess?

Reese's peanut butter cups.

Hard to argue with that one.

And that is something you should know.

Human beings live to be somewhere around 80 years old, on average.

And that's a lot longer than it used to be.

And of course, you occasionally hear of people living well over 100.

But that's pretty rare.

Clearly, age or aging is a killer.

Still, there are other species that live a lot longer than we do.

So what if we could learn from or even extract from those animals whatever the magic is to keep us alive a lot longer?

Or what if we could somehow use the whatever it is that say keeps birds healthy because birds tend to stay healthy right up until when they die and they don't get those long slow illnesses that often painfully kill people.

It may sound a little science fictiony, but there's actually some serious research going on to see if we can live longer the way other species do.

And it starts by understanding what it is and how it is that these animals live for decades longer and sometimes literally centuries longer than we do.

Right in the middle of this research is Stephen Austad.

Stephen is a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of a couple of books.

His latest is Methuselah's Zoo, What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives.

Hi, Stephen.

Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thanks.

It's nice to be here.

So this idea, this whole notion of looking at other animals that live longer and somehow tying it to human longevity and improving human longevity, how does this all work?

How does this research explain all this?

Well, our fundamental biology is very similar between animals and humans.

And in fact, some people study aging in single-celled animals even.

But the thing is that we're quite successful at aging.

So life itself is a damaging process and gradually it kills organisms.

But some animals are very good at resisting that damage and some are not so good.

Humans happen to be quite good.

We're the longest lived of any of the terrestrial mammals.

But there are animals that combat the destructive processes of aging better than we do.

And I think that we can learn something from their biology that could turn into, let's say, pharmaceuticals that address some of our key vulnerabilities inside our bodies.

Well, I've often wondered, you hear about animals like turtles, you know, tortoises that live, you know, I don't know, they live forever.

And you wonder, well, you know, we hear that our body parts, our organs and things wear out at a certain point.

Why don't theirs wear out too?

What's the difference?

Well, turtles are an interesting case because one of the reasons that they probably wear out more slowly is that they live much more slowly than we do.

They have a heart rate that's seven or eight beats a minute, you know, a tenth of ours.

And pretty much everything they do is in in slow motion.

They even, of course, move in slow motion, as everyone knows.

And it turns out that a major contributor to what goes on with our aging is the damage due to our metabolism.

And they have a very slow metabolism.

So even though they're long-lived, and they live somewhere between 150 and 200 years,

we're certain about that range, but we're not certain about the specifics of that.

If you calculate, let's say, how many times their heart beats in a lifetime, it's actually only about a third of the number of heartbeats that we get in a lifetime.

So it's interesting that part of their longevity is because they're slow and that they don't move a lot.

And yet we're told, and our experience is that for humans to live a long time, you need to move, that movement is essential to good health and longevity.

That's exactly right.

And,

you you know, for the turtles, whether they're moving or not, it's kind of hard to tell the difference.

It doesn't change that much.

Charles Darwin, when he first discovered these giant tortoises on the Galapagos Island, actually walked along them and timed how fast that they walked.

And

a turtle that's going top speed can cover about four miles in a 24-hour time period.

Now, that wouldn't be much for us.

But surprisingly enough, this link between metabolism and longevity is so strong if you look across animal species that one of the early aging researchers even wrote an article called Why Lazy People Live the Longest, making the case that really exercise is bad for you.

Now we know now that he was very, very wrong, but he lived and died by his words.

He died at 62 of a massive heart attack.

And one of the reasons that we think that

activity is good for us is that, you know, our muscles are very, very important to our health.

Our muscles are even important to our brain health as we're learning now.

So metabolism plays a role in how long we live and how healthily we live, but

it's not the whole story.

Exercise is clearly one of the miracle drugs for staying healthy longer.

So what is the longest living animal on earth, either on average or the longest living animal that we actually know lived?

The longest living animal that we would perceive as an animal.

I actually have spent some time studying.

It's a clam called the ocean cohog,

and they live at least 507 years.

And I can say at least 507 years because we know of one that lived that long, and it was killed by a scientist, actually, by a researcher, who had no idea how long-alived it was when he killed it.

We found that out later.

He must have felt terrible.

Well, it was actually a daughter and his daughter was helping him with the research and he was just collecting all these clams and he was interested in the shells because he was using the shells to try to understand ancient climates.

And his daughter was just scooping the insides out of these shells and throwing it over the side of the boat.

So that's what happened to what we call Ming the Mollusk.

Oh, man.

Whoops.

And I'm sure he was horrified when he discovered this because we don't even know what sex it was.

So it could have been a male, could have been a female.

We do know, though, that it was born in 1499 and died in 2006 when this young girl scooped it out of its shell.

How could you possibly know that a clam was born in 1499?

Because they have growth rings in their shells that if you know what you're doing, you can section this.

You have to section the shell.

You have to polish it.

You have to etch it.

But if you do all this and then you study it very carefully under a microscope, you can count the growth rings.

So that's how we know precisely how long ago it was born.

That's incredible.

And I would imagine that a clam, too, like the tortoise, lives a very slow existence.

That is true.

But clams, most people don't realize this, but clams have a beating heart.

And this clam's heart beats about as fast as the tortoise's heart.

But what that means is that there is somewhere out there, there's hearts that have been beating over for over 500 years, which I find pretty remarkable.

In fact, I used to have cardiology residents come by my lab and I'd say, here, hold this clam here.

I said, you're holding an older heart than you will ever hold in your lifetime again.

So I know birds, or some birds, like the parrot family of birds, that live a long time, right?

And birds are a long-lived animal.

I mean, I have a parrot that may be the longest-lived parrot of its species.

If I can believe, and this is always a problem with these longevity records, is that there tends to be exaggeration, particularly in the lack of knowledge.

But if I can believe the people who gave me this parrot some 40 years ago, this This parrot's now 73 years old.

But there are really good records of parrots living into their 80s and less good records of them living longer than that.

The longest live bird in the wild, these are all pets, but the longest live bird in the wild that we know of is actually an albatross that's at least 72 years old and just had a baby last year.

The other thing that makes it remarkable, and this is one of the things about that makes birds remarkable, is they seem to maintain their physical fitness right up to the very end.

I mean, albatrosses have to fly thousands of miles to feed their chicks when they're raising them.

And to be able to do that when they're, you know, in their 70s, it's really quite remarkable.

And even veterinarians say about pet birds, you know, they're fine, they're fine, they're fine, they're dead,

which is kind of like what we'd like humans to do.

Of course, we'd like that to happen as late as possible.

But if we could stay healthy right up till the end of our lives, that's kind of a goal of the kind of research that I do.

We're talking about how many other animals live a long, long time.

And what can we learn from that to help humans live a long, long time?

My guest is Stephen Austad.

He is a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

And his book is Methuselah's Zoo, What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives.

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So Stephen, as fascinating as this is about how other animals live a long, long time, how does this intersect with human longevity?

We're working very actively on this and we haven't got anything that's quite ready for humans yet, but we've just recently there was a paper where they took a gene out of a very long-lived animal called a naked mole rat.

And naked mole rat is roughly the size of a mouse, and a mouse will live two or three years, and a naked mole rat will live up to 40 years.

And so they took a gene that they thought was responsible for some of this naked mole rat's longevity and they put it into the mouse genome and the mouse lived a bit longer and stayed healthy substantially longer.

So this is the first example of taking a gene from a long-lived animal, putting it in a short-lived animal, keeping it healthy longer.

And I think that's probably the first of a slew of these kinds of things that we're going to come up with.

Now, we're not going to take the genes from long-lived animals and put them into people, probably.

People are not going to go for that.

But we might put it into some parts of people.

We might take a gene, for instance, that

keeps proteins from clumping in your brain, and we might inject it into your brain in a virus and that might keep people from getting Alzheimer's disease which is caused by clumps of protein in the brain well that'd be pretty cool yeah it's one of the things that we discovered about the really long-lived clams is they seem to have something in their bodies that keeps proteins from clumping together and it would be very nice to know even the protein that causes Alzheimer's disease is a beta protein it prevents it from clumping.

So if we can figure out what that is, that's a good example of how we might use knowledge that we get from long-lived animals to keep people healthy longer.

But generally, when you look at animals in the wild that live a long time, do they eventually start to suffer the same things that people who live a long time,

you know, aches and pains and arthritis and things like that?

Does that happen?

Yeah, the things that degrade the quality of later life.

Yeah, you can see that.

And I mean, I've spent, you know, unlike most of the researchers in this field that came up through medical laboratories I came through field biology and I have spent years and years watching animals of various ages in the wild and yes you can see them with cataracts you can see them with arthritis you can see them with many of the same maladies that they get they don't tend to live very long once they get those maladies because if your vision is compromised and you're living in the wild uh it's something something bad is going to happen to you quickly.

You have this, you tell the story of the, was it the vampire bat?

And I think you used the phrase that it's constantly teetering on the edge of starvation.

Explain that and why that's part of this conversation.

Yeah, so vampire bats exclusively live on blood.

And blood, they don't have the ability to store a lot of energy as fat.

Blood is pretty much all protein.

So they're on a protein-only diet and their bodies do not store energy very well.

So they're always a couple of days away from starving.

And that's why they have this unique system where they actually share blood.

So in these colonies that they live in, if one individual has not been successful at

finding anything anything to bite and drink its blood in a day or so, they'll actually share blood.

The ones that are successful will share it with the ones that are unsuccessful.

Now,

they're pretty unique in that their window to starvation is so short.

But one of the things that we know from a lot of other animals is if you reduce the amount that they want to eat, you give them less than they prefer to eat, actually increases their health quite substantially.

So what's another example of an animal that lives a ridiculously long time and what we learn from that?

Sure.

One of the animals that I'm most fascinated by,

well, a group of animals, are the bats.

And in particular, there's one species of bat called Brandt's bat, which is very similar.

It's an old world bat.

It lives in Europe and Asia, but it's very similar to bats that we have here.

And it weighs about as much as a quarter and a nickel put together.

So it's very, very tiny.

They live up to 40 years in the wild.

And if you think of all the dangers that something that small faces, dangers of predators, dangers of diseases, because they live in dense colonies and you know, that's why they, you know, that's why they have so many viruses that sometimes spread to humans.

But the remarkable thing about them is not just that they live so long, but the fact that they maintain their health so long.

So for instance, bats that eat insects

hear hear their prey.

They don't see their prey.

They yell and they listen for the echo and that's how they track down their prey.

And they yell in these very high-pitched screams, basically.

Well, one of the first things to go in humans is our high-frequency hearing.

So these bats live decade after decade and maintain their high-frequency hearing.

Otherwise,

they wouldn't survive.

The other thing is

if we are forced to undergo bed rest for a period of time say we had some surgery or something else our muscles shrink and after really just a couple of weeks people have a tough time even getting out of bed and walking around well bats can hibernate for six or eight or nine months and wake up and fly off now how do they do that how do they maintain their hearing The other thing is they have this incredible memory for space and

geography.

One of the first things to go in our is our

spatial memory, as they call it.

These bats will fly 50 to 100 miles a night in the dark, and then they'll go back and they'll find the cave that they were living in and they'll find their pup that might be there among a million other bats in that cave.

And

if we could transfer any of these capabilities to humans, it would be quite remarkable.

Is there a creature that people probably have not heard of that really just is off the charts on longevity and health and all that you've studied that we just we haven't we don't know anything about?

Yeah, well, it's interesting.

So some animals you'd never think of are pretty amazing.

There's a very small animal called a hydra that lives in fresh water, and basically it looks like a little tube with a bunch of tentacles around its top, and that's its mouth.

So far as we can tell, that animal does not age at all.

At least in the laboratory, it doesn't age.

That is, as long as anybody has had the patience to follow them, they don't die.

Their death rate doesn't increase the older they get, and their reproductive rate doesn't decrease.

Now, this is no doubt not true in the wild because they live in a very seasonal environment, but at least in the laboratory, we know they don't age.

So, we might learn something critical about aging for them.

The other group of animals that's pretty interesting in this regard are the mole rats.

I mentioned the naked mole rat before, and that lives underground in colonies.

They virtually never come above ground.

They live on the equator in East Africa, and about the only thing you ever see of them is them kicking dirt out of their underground tunnels.

So you'll see these little things that look like volcanoes, little mounds of dirt with dirt coming out of it.

That's as close as you've come.

And like I say, in the laboratory, at least, they live 10 times as as long as a mouse, which is the same size.

So they live up to about 40 years.

Now, the interesting thing is there's a number of other rodents that live their entire lives underground, and those also tend to be long-lived.

And we're not really sure why that is.

I think it may have to do with their ability to exist on

very low levels of oxygen and very high levels of carbon dioxide.

Because if you're in a tunnel that doesn't have good ventilation and you're breathing a lot, you're going to reduce the oxygen that's in the atmosphere there, and you're also going to be increasing the carbon dioxide.

And there really is this remarkable relationship between animals that can get by on very little oxygen, but yet live a long time.

Whales live a long time, right?

They live like, what, hundreds of years?

That's a very interesting story because the bowhead whale, which is the one that lives over 200 years, lives in the Arctic.

And unlike cold-blooded animals, whose metabolic rate is really determined by the temperature that they're in, mammals like whales have to maintain a high body temperature.

You know, we have a body temperature of 98.6, and whales have a body temperature that's roughly the same.

Well, they've got to do that in the face of the fact that they're living in water that's only a couple of degrees above freezing.

And one way to do that is to make your metabolism faster, not slower.

So these whales are really interesting because they're living that fast.

I mean, they have a metabolism that's that fast, but despite that, they're living quite a long time.

And they're also extremely resistant to cancer.

And here's another thing, just a thought experiment about the world.

So

about cancer susceptibility.

So virtually every animal that we know of gets cancer, cancer,

although some of them get it very rarely and some of it get it quite commonly.

But if you think of the fact that any cell in your body has the potential to

have out-of-control growth and then potentially kill you, well, then animals with a lot of cells should be very susceptible to cancer because there's more chances for any single cell.

to undergo this kind of transformation.

But yet, animals like like elephants and animals like whales that have thousands, you know, hundreds of thousands of times the number of cells that mice do or birds do or humans do, somehow can survive for decade after decade or century after century without getting cancer.

And that's, again, that's something we'd like very much.

to be able to understand and find some way to mimic with pharmaceuticals or with diets or somehow.

Well, it seems so amazing that there's like these secrets of longevity locked into these animals.

And wouldn't it be great if we could unlock those secrets and apply them to humans?

I mean, that's so exciting.

I've been speaking with Stephen Austad.

He is a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

the author of several books.

And his latest book is called Methuselah's Zoo, What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Living Longer, Healthier Lives.

And there's a link to that book in the show notes.

Thank you, Stephen.

This was really, really interesting.

Thanks, Mark.

It's been a lot of fun talking to you.

I've enjoyed it, and I hope we can do it again sometime.

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So, this is a segment, a discussion, about misbelief, which you'll understand better in just a moment, but essentially, misbelief is believing something that is not true, or generally accepted to be not true.

And we are about to have this discussion about misbelief with Dan Ariely, who was, and maybe still is, the subject of misbelief.

It's kind of a weird and interesting story that's about to unfold here.

So meet Dan Arielli.

He's been here before, and Dan is a well-regarded professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University.

He's co-founder of several companies and author of several best-selling books.

His latest is titled Misbelief, What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things.

Hi, Dan.

Thanks for coming back on.

Wonderful to be back.

So let's start with an example.

Give me an example of misbelief.

Think about the question of diets.

People have all kinds of beliefs in diets, and some of them are actually harmful.

People have all kinds of beliefs about cancer treatment.

People have beliefs about end of life.

Almost everything we have beliefs on, and many of those are wrong.

I'm not saying that your beliefs specifically are misbeliefs, but I'm saying that if you think about something incredibly basic, like educating our kids, the reality is that we have very strong beliefs about what is the best way to raise our kids, but we haven't really tested those.

We haven't looked really at the data.

And many people do things that are actually not in the best interest of their kids.

According to who?

According to science.

But many times, science is proven to be wrong.

That's right.

That's right.

What's the difference between misbelief and being wrong?

The idea is that if we have the consensus scientific notion pointing to one direction, and then we have a few people who are holding

that are not just wrong and they're not ignorant, they're not unaware of what the establishment is saying, but they're saying the establishment is wrong and we have it right.

That in the current context is defined for me as a misbelief.

All right, I get that.

I believe that.

Yeah, that certainly seems correct.

in the face of a lot of evidence and convention and what most people believe, you believe something else, that's probably a misbelief.

Yeah, and not just in a way that you're unaware of it, because then it could be just a mistake, right?

But it's something that you believe in is strong, in a strong way.

But there's another part to this you talk about, that misbelief is not just believing something that is proven to be not true.

It's believing something that you think or that you know is right when there isn't any evidence at all, one way or the other.

So, give me an example of that.

I have a notion, for example, of what's the

right way to give allowances to kids.

But it's just my opinion.

There's almost no research on this topic.

The few papers that there are are not that good.

And I'm realizing I'm basing it in a very lot of confidence, but very little actual data.

So, that, of course, opens the door for misbeliefs.

If you don't have people who misbelieve, it seems like you would never make progress on anything because if somebody doesn't say

the conventional wisdom is wrong,

nothing ever changes.

So there's a difference between being convinced that it's wrong and

willingness to ask the question.

So I think one of the nice things about science is that people are able to hold multiple hypotheses at the same time.

It is to say, everybody's saying that X is correct,

but nobody has really shown that that's correct.

And maybe B is correct.

And I don't have to be convinced that B is correct.

I can just create an idea of how B might be correct, what would be the mechanism by which B would be correct, and then I would test it.

But I don't think for progress, we necessarily need the conviction that everybody is wrong.

We just need to have the open-mindedness and actually this open-mindedness is incredibly important.

Sometimes it's called intellectual humility.

This ability to hold multiple hypotheses at the same time, not to be overly convinced in any one of them and basically saying, okay, I'm looking for evidence.

And not only am I looking for evidence, I'm going to enjoy the process.

of looking for evidence until I can find out what is correct and what is wrong.

This seems like a really interesting academic exercise, but it seems that in most things in life, this doesn't really matter.

When you say this, you mean what?

This whole idea of what's a misbelief versus what's a belief.

It seems, I mean, there are, I'm sure, big things that this is important to, but if I spent my whole day trying to decide is this a misbelief or is this the truth or about allowances or everything, it would be exhausting.

Yes,

that's right.

But other misbeliefs can have more dire consequences.

For example, let's just take the question of health.

Imagine that some people decide that they don't believe in conventional medicine and they don't believe in cancer treatment, and therefore they're going to go for alternative medications.

I saw some institution not too long ago that basically

takes people's urine and gives it back to them.

These people end up, you know, first of all, it doesn't seem like it's working.

They end up spending lots of money.

There's a lot of wasted hope.

And also they eventually cost a lot of money to the healthcare system.

We did an interview not long ago.

We were talking about

kind of great breakthrough moments in history.

And one of the discussions that we had was talking about how there was a time when somebody, I don't remember the details, suggested that germs could be causing a lot of problems because up until that point,

doctors, surgeons didn't clean things, they didn't wash their hands,

and when this person came out and said, no, these things are creating problems because it's causing infections,

the conventional wisdom is you can't see it, it's not true.

They poo-pooed it,

they ostracized this guy because convention was, if you can't see it it's not a problem and they convention was dead wrong and now we don't believe that anymore that's right so so there are two ways to think about your statement one is to say that misbeliefs are not 100 bad that there are occasions in which they are useful maybe even incredibly useful

And another way to think about it is that maybe

this

was not a misbelief as I define it, but that really depends on the person.

If the person in question, right, this was in England a long time ago, but if they, and I don't remember the name of the person who discovered that, but

if that person basically said,

I

reject everybody's notion and I'm 100% correct, and that's it, that I would have called it misbelief, and it would fall into the category of, yes, sometimes misbeliefs are correct.

But if it falls into the category of that person saying, you know what, everybody believes that, I'm not so sure that that's true, I have another alternative, and let me see whether my alternative is a better explanation to reality.

That for me would not be a misbelief.

That would just mean that the person has what we call, again, high intellectual humility and they're basically open to the possibility that there are other alternatives.

And that's always good.

And instead of saying, I know it for sure, they say, let me look for data to support it.

I mean, one of the things with misbeliefs is that people are not looking for that much data, that they are quite confident in what they have, and they're not even looking for a lot of evidence.

So, we've been talking about how misbeliefs happen, but

talk about why they happen and the purpose they serve, because

they must serve a purpose.

I also

say that these misbeliefs that people have

are actually a reasonable response to some real need.

They don't just happen.

The story is that people basically start with a stressful situation.

And I don't mean the stress of being too much at work or having too much to do.

It's the stress of feeling that I'm kind of hard done by.

The world has done something bad to me.

I don't understand the world.

I don't understand why I'm not successful.

I don't understand why I got sick, why I lost my job, something like that.

And now I have a need for an explanation.

And that need for an explanation is a need to fulfill something.

And what do I want?

I want to understand the world.

I want to find a villain

that would, I could blame them, it would not be my fault.

And I want an explanation that would make me feel in control, that I'm smart and I know more things and so on.

So the way that misbeliefs end up being shaped is into

stories about why

I'm not doing so well and why it's somebody else's fault, a villain.

And the story has to give the person telling the story to themselves that they are actually knowledgeable and smart and know something that I when you think of just think about all the conspiracy theories that people have,

there's always a villain.

It's the government, it's Russia, it's, you know, there's, we need a villain.

It serves a purpose, doesn't it, to have a villain?

Because then they're wrong and we're right.

So my story with the misbeliever started with a video.

Yeah, and this is what I wanted to get to because you, being a fairly high-profile guy, were the subject of a big misbelief that started with this video.

So yeah, go ahead with the story.

So there was one video that showed how because of my injury, because I got badly burned, I started hating healthy people.

And that was the reason for me to join Bill Gates and the Illuminati in trying to kill as many healthy people as possible.

I don't know if you know

some of those theories, but there's theories about the cabal of people who are trying to reduce the world's population.

You were accused of trying to kill as many people as possible.

As many healthy people as possible.

Presumably out of resentment to people who were not badly injured.

Well, that, I mean, I can't really get my head around that.

That people would actually believe that someone like you,

that anybody, would be out to kill as many healthy people as possible.

It seems absurd.

So, you know, I don't think it's, well, you know, I wish it didn't happen.

It was very painful.

I also got lots of death threats in the first few years of COVID.

But, you know, in the beginning...

why were you getting death threats?

Because people were very much convinced that

I conspired to bring about COVID.

They thought that I was part of the COVID plot, I was part of the vaccination plot.

So we can say, oh, you know, this is just a shame and this is crazy and this is sick and so on.

But for me, I want to understand that psychology and I want to understand what were the causes that got people to go down that path.

And then also what can we do next time to hopefully fix it or reduce it or improve on it?

Why do you think,

I mean, this is so fascinating to me.

Why?

Because you were right in the eye of the storm.

Why you?

Why would people

attach on you that you started COVID and that you wanted to kill healthy people?

Why you?

So I think that kind of two reasons, two main reasons.

One is that I did try to help lots of governments early in COVID.

There were questions about giving fines and not giving fines.

There were questions about reducing domestic violence, distant education.

There were lots of questions in the beginning.

about all kinds of things and I try to help as much as I can.

But this

second thing is, I don't know if you've seen how I look in the last few years.

Yes.

But I have this very strange half-a-beard

because of my injury, right?

I don't have hair on the right side of my face and I don't shave, so I have something that looks like it is, it is a half-a-beard, it's almost symmetrical.

And,

you know, there are lots of comments about

devil,

devilish look,

not in a good way.

So I think the combination of looking strange, seeming odd basically created that.

And once it's created, I became a social currency.

And people kind of made up more facts about me, more information, and attacked me.

By the way, one of the there was at some point there was a post about me that described kind of my crimes against humanity.

And the guy wondered whether I should get life in prison or public hanging when they do the Nuremberg 2.0 trials for all the people who've did crimes against humanity during COVID.

And there were about a thousand comments to his post.

And

if you didn't read his post, you would just see love and support for this guy.

People told him what a clever writer he is and how insightful and so on.

And if you just looked at the comments, you you would think, oh, what a kind, wonderful group of people.

But of course, they were not.

But they did give each other tremendous support, right?

And they needed that support.

Again, the psychological perspective here

is to look at that behavior and to try and understand what is fulfilling.

And those people were basically

you know, ostracized from society.

I'm sure their friends and family didn't understand them anymore, probably wouldn't talk to them.

And they found a great group of people who supported each other and helped each other.

And that was incredibly important.

Some at my expense,

but incredibly important for them to manage these complex times.

So you were the villain.

I was the villain, yeah, yeah.

Can I ask you, I mean, I don't want to get too personal here, but what is that when you when you're in bed at night and you think about about all that, what does that feel like?

That there's like this

hatred for you when you know in your heart that it's not deserved?

Yeah, so so you know, when it started,

I thought that I could just explain to them that they were wrong.

I thought, okay, this must be a simple matter of misunderstanding, understanding.

Let me just fix it.

And I called some of them, I joined some online discussion group, I joined some

podcasts with them, and

I only did myself damage.

I couldn't convince them of anything.

They were not there to be convinced.

They were not there after data.

Going back to how we talked about misbelief, they were not there to find out the truth.

They've decided what the truth was, and

nothing changed.

So I spent a few weeks trying to persuade them and

failed miserably, maybe even a month.

And during that time,

during the day,

I was kind of okay.

But then at night, I would have terrible nightmares.

It's terrible to feel so hated.

I know that, and I find this remarkable, that you actually spoke to some of these people who hate you, who want you dead.

who attacked you.

And I'd like to get your comment on what that was like.

And also, if it changed their thinking about you, seeing you as a person as opposed to a monster.

I know there were a couple of people, but that one woman that you talked to, what was that experience like?

As I was describing it, you know, it was the combination of the emotional state from being attacked plus the emotion of

reminding myself about those very, very tough days on being on the ventilator.

And I just started crying, just started crying uncontrollably.

And that influenced her.

I met her for beer at some point.

What?

But yeah, yeah, I met her for, you know, I, you know, as I told you, like my coping strategy is to try and understand.

I did meet her for beer at some point, but she made sure that she was always

with her back towards the other people so nobody could take a picture of her meeting me.

So her reputation would not be hurt.

Just because you've mentioned it, can you just quickly in 30 seconds explain

if you wish to, your burns, how you got them?

So when I was in my late teens, I was next to a magnesium flare, one of these things that the military sends to the sky to light up a battlefield.

And one of those things got burned, exploded next to me.

And I was burning about 70% of my body.

And I stayed for almost three years in hospital.

And that, that, you know, life in hospital is very tough and life with burns after it is very complex.

It's certainly the biggest event of my life.

It gives me perspective on everything else and lots of lessons, but

very, very tough.

Still, still very, very tough.

Well, it's certainly a shame that you went through all you went through and being hated the way you were, but it certainly gives you this unique perspective from being right

at the as the target of it

to understand this whole idea of misbelief.

I've been talking to Dan Arielli.

He is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University.

He's the author of several best-selling books.

The latest is called Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things.

And there's a link to that book in the show notes.

Thank you, Dan.

Thank you.

It's an honor to talk to you.

Thanks.

Thank you very much.

You probably, when you're done with a prescription pill bottle, you probably just throw the bottle in the trash.

What harm could that do?

Well, it could put you at risk.

You see, there's a lot of important information on the label, and it really needs to be removed before you toss out the bottle.

Your name, prescription number, pharmacy, and doctor are all usually listed.

That could give some unauthorized access to any number of people, family members, friends, someone working in your house, to the person recycling or sifting through your trash.

So what could they do with that sensitive information?

Well, for starters, there's a chance they could use the pharmacy's automated refill line or find a drive-through pharmacy that doesn't require ID.

Not only could they end up with your medication, you could have a big problem with your next refill.

And that is something you should know.

If you enjoyed this episode of something you Should Know, I hope you'll spread the word and tell someone you know about it and suggest they give a listen.

I'm Mike Herbers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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