The Importance of Changing Your Mind w/Stephen Dubner | Joe Rogan

So that's the tricky part. I mean, that's why I like economists because economists are ruthless, bloodless. They almost don't know what humans are, but they're very good at measuring costs and benefits. And that's what I feel that our kind of political, social media discourse is missing. People are all, for the most part, advocates or activists, they pick up lane and they stay in it and they want to pave over the rest of everybody's lanes and make it theirs. Yes. And it's not a good way to be. No, it's not. You know, that's another episode that I was listening to of yours recently about how hard it is to get people to change their mind on things. And I forget who the expert was who was talking, but it was a really interesting point that he had about the mind. Like people say, change your mind. You don't really have a mind. You have the mind of the community. And if you step outside the beliefs of the community, it can be very bad for you in terms of like your personal connections with people. And I really enjoyed that episode. It's funny. Thanks. It's a paradox though. Because the way you just said it, like if you are in your tribe, then even though it can be healthier for you and for presumably many other people for you to change your mind or at least think differently about things, right? You risk losing credibility or whatever. Yeah. Well, I mean, some religions, I mean, that's how they keep you, right? You get ostracized. There's religions that we know of where if you decide to leave, you don't just get ostracized. You're literally, you have a death sentence. Like now you've escaped our group. You're an outsider now. My father, both my parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism before they met each other. Whoa. Yeah. It was very unusual. How did that happen? It's a long story. I'll tell you if you really want to know, but anyway, I'll do the short, what I'm getting to. And this was during the Second World War. They were both in New York, both first generation American Jews. That makes sense. They converted for different reasons from each other. And then they met. My father's family was Orthodox. And his father, a guy named Shepsil Dubner, who'd come here when he was in his maybe late twenties from Poland. He still lived his every day in Brooklyn, as if he were still in Poland. He didn't change at all. When my father converted and his father found out, my father was in the war. He was overseas. He was home on leave. And his father was cleaning up. And from my father's pants that he'd left over a chair, Rosary Beads slipped out and fell on the floor. That's how his Jewish father, Shepsil Dubner, found out that his son had become a Catholic. So what he did is he proceeded to sit shiva for him. The Jewish morning ritual were for seven days. You mourn the dead. He declared that he would never again speak to his son. And he forbade everyone in his family from speaking to his son. So by the time I was born, I was the youngest of eight kids in this family because they'd become very Catholic. I didn't know this whole family of my father's was unknown to me entirely. So they did exactly what you're saying now. Holy shit. Yeah. Yeah. That was what I thought too when I... Holy shit. And my mother's did the same thing, but it was less dramatic because her family was less religious. So they still didn't like it all that she had converted. But yeah. Do you have any children? Yeah, I got a couple. I'm Jewish again, though. It's a long... My first... The first book I wrote, long before Freakonomics, was called Turbulent Souls, although it got then republished under a different title called Choosing My Religion. And it tells this story of my two parents and then me. I would love to hear that, but I just want to put in your head that what I was going to ask you is could you imagine a scenario where you would be capable of doing that to your children? So, no chance. No chance. No chance. But here's... It's so scary. Yeah, it's scary. It is. But on the other hand, I mean, this is what Freakonomics is... What I try to learn through doing Freakonomics is to measure the what and try to figure out the why, but then not be the judge who says, that was terrible, this is wonderful because different people have... Look, if Shepsil Dubner were here, we could ask him, what's your side of the story? He could tell us a story that might convince us that, you know what, this son of his did a terrible thing to the family. He did a terrible thing. He would say, how could it be that we Jews existed for generations and generations and generations when everywhere we were lived, there was always someone trying to get rid of us? And then we finally come to America, the land of freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom. And here, after generations and generations of forefathers fought to stay Jewish, here, my son decides to become Catholic. What are you thinking? So, you know, everybody's got a perspective. Everybody's got an emotional experience. So I try to respect that, but no, I would not do that to my children. I understand the outrage. I understand being upset, but I can't understand choosing that over your son and over the relationship you have with your son. It's ridiculous. The saddest end of the story is then when that grandfather, my grandfather, who I never met, this was a long time ago, my father's father. My father died when I was very young, so I didn't know the story either. That was why I wrote this first book, was to try to figure out this, all the stuff I'm telling you now, none of this I knew until I was in my like 20s when I was writing this book. But when Shepsil Dubner was dying of cancer in the maybe late 50s or so, a nephew of his who my father used to be very close with and who looked a lot like my dad, and this guy was maybe in his early 20s, late teens by now, he walked into the hospital room and Shepsil, you know, on his deathbed really, thought that that was my father, his son. My dad's name was Solomon. He called him Schleuma, and he was calling out to him, Schleuma, Schleuma, as if he was, you know, happy to see him. It wasn't him though. And my father didn't go visit his own father dying in the hospital because he'd been forbidden to go anywhere near. Yeah, so is terrible. So, look, this is why religion, I've been long fascinated by religion. And I think that, again, if you think about it the way that economists think about things, there are costs and there are benefits and it's complicated. I think you're 100% right. And they think that's hard for people to handle. And, you know, people are hardcore atheists where they don't see any value in it whatsoever, even though people are, they're getting some sort of ethical value, moral value. And the way I always put it is like it's like a scaffolding to live your life by. You can live within these confines and it really kind of makes sense if you follow it loosely that we're doing to try it for the benefit of community. And it's also like a real community sense that comes from meeting in Sunday with all those other, or whatever day it is with your religion. You meet in a group of other people that are also in the community and you all basically are saying together that we should do good things and be good to people and treat each other the way God would want us to. All that has undeniable benefits. And anybody that says differently is like you're deluding yourself. Like your points, the atheists who are hardcore, who make points about the preposterous nature of a lot of religious texts, they're on the money. But it doesn't mean, doesn't mean that it doesn't give people a benefit and that I couldn't even disagree with them continuing it. Because there's a lot of people that benefit greatly from religion. Someone wrote to us after that loneliness episode came out and said, how did you fail to write about this supposed epidemic of loneliness without addressing the huge decline in organized religion in America, which I thought was a very good piece of criticism. That would have been a good, because you're right, it's a community. One other thing I would add to the list that you provided of what it can give is humility, right? Because if you have an image of some superior being, God, deity, whatever you want to call it, you kind of understand that one mortal is, the world does not revolve around me. The other thing I would say, and look, it's hard for me to scientifically, logically embrace a lot of the arguments that a lot of religions make, especially about things like the afterlife, right? That said, even to an atheist, I would suggest one way to think about it is if someone does believe in those rewards or in economic terms, we're talking about them as incentives, even if it's a placebo effect. In other words, if I'm encouraged to treat other people well on the chance that if I do so, I have a reward, an eternal reward, hey, that's not a bad reason to incentivize people to do well. Sounds like a nice justification for one of them psychic houses. You drive by and they get the neon sign. They're helping people. They're giving people a sense what the future's going to be like. How do you know they're not? Hope. It might be. Imagine if that's where the real psychics are, those neon signs.