This is the FCB Podcast Network. A Prada Masoda Day that we won't was sade and we won't to say all we got it? Does no one get take that away? Say it's gonna be okay? Masoda Day that we won't was saying and we wont was say all we got it? Does no one get take that away? Don't don't bade it is? Don't be okay? Hi, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Just Listen to Yourself with Kia Davis. I am your host, Kia Davis, and I have a confession to make. This isn't the episode you were supposed to get this week. I have another episode in the can talking about the difference between joy and happiness because that's something that's been on my heart and I and I've been working on it for like a month, just trying to form my thoughts on it. But something happen this week that really piqued my interest and it's been it was needling at me, gnawing at me all last night. So I got up this morning and decided to record a new podcast for y'all this week. While I have this fresh in my mind, I want to talk through this process it's just on my spirit. I can't let it go. I wrote a little bit about it at my sub stack. But it's in regards to the modern day philosopher and sort of a really a leader in the new atheist movement. And I don't mean a new movement of atheists. I mean the official we call this modern version of atheism is referred to as new atheism. So that's a designation. I just want to make that clear, like I'm not going this new fangled atheism, like it's actually a designation of this belief system like neo feminism or something. Anyways, he's a leader in the new atheist movement, and but he is a respected intellectual. He has traveled the world. He's gone on debate and discussion chores with Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein. They used to be good friends. I don't know if they are that good of friends anymore after the last few years, because Sam really fell off the deep end with the COVID stuff, like it really broke him. But I want to talk about that today because Sam's been making this noise for about a year or two now, about a year since we've since we've come out of the heat of COVID and everyone's started getting back to normal. Now we're starting to see the actual results of what we did during COVID. Everything was so hypothetical. But now we've had some time, We've had some time to analyze the test scores of kids who were denied the right to go to school, and we get to see the results of Zoom school and vaccines. You know, now we've got more data on what's happening to people with the vaccines. We're not happening to them. They have more data on COVID now because people are availing themselves of their constitutional rights and filing Freedom of Information Act requests, they're getting information back that shows how the government lied about certain information that we were all being clubbed over the head with as science. I believe the science. It turns out it wasn't science at all. It's actually the opposite of science. We're seeing all that, and it's becoming more clear for so many people that we just really we did everything wrong. That's actually the name of one of the episodes for this show. I just talked about all the things that we got wrong, and now we're starting to live out the consequences. So what I'm saying is all this stuff is coming at us. And for the last year or so, Sam Harris has decided instead of doing what he's been known for doing, which is started taking a set of facts, analyzing them then making a judgment based on logic and reason and discussion. Instead of doing that which he's been known for, he has just completely gone the opposite way. He's just like, oh, no, I was never wrong. I've been right this whole time, and I'm going to prove to you why I'm right. And by the way, nothing you say or show me will change my mind. And that is not the attitude of a professed I keep calling him an intellectual. That's just my description, so please don't like criticize him for that or whatever. I'm just talking about intellectual. When I use that term, I'm just saying, like, in terms of professionally speaking, Like there are people out there who are sure that you're a doctor or you're a nurse or but you're also a professional intellectual, Like people pay you to hear you analyze philosophy and social dilemmas and stuff like that. That's kind of what I mean. So I'm going to call Sam Harris an intell sellectual or you'll you'll hear me use that, But that's just what I mean. I'm only speaking in industry terms. I'm not saying he's smarter than you or me. He's probably smarter than me, but don't tell my sets up well, Like, his whole brand is based on being able to see across the spectrum, to see the full breadth of information and make at least an informed judgment on how he feels. You know, he doesn't come to the same conclusion as perhaps you or I would, And he even admits, you know that sometimes your politics inform that, and that's fine. But at least he was always open to the discussion, or so it seemed. Now one of the things that made Sam Harris and he just hasn't been able to like it started with Trump. It's this whole thing, but it started with Trump, right. Trump broke a lot of people. The idea of Trump broke a lot of people. I'm going to get into all this. I got to think through this, and I'm really sorry. Just come on this journey with me. I hope it won't be too agonizing or boring for you if you skip this. Let me just tell you now before you end this podcast, subscribe to my substat jess Kara Davis dot substack dot com, and don't forget to write us at jail Ty at ProtonMail dot com if you have questions or comments, and also please do subscribe and leave a rating and a review five stars please. Okay that being said, now, now I did the things I'm supposed to do. Now let me just talk through this issue because a lot of I think what I want to talk about today isn't Sam Harris's paradigm shifts and the realization I'm coming to of just how difficult those are for even the smartest of people to make. And Sam Harris is my way into this because this is the guy that I have seen talking about COVID is not the guy that I've been listening to an admiring in previous years. And this whole Trump thing, I'm calling it the Trump thing. It's not Trump. Even when you guys know, when he was president, I was doing this show, I kept saying, Trump, it's not the problem, He's the symptom. He's not the problem. And I'm not that's not an original thought. A lot of people have and do say that. But the Trump thing was so it was and I'll talk about this why why I think this is, but it was just so devastating to so many people. We joke about it, we say, oh, Trump broke this person, But the idea of Trump did break a lot of people like it broke them intellectually. It's there, literally was some kind of schism in their mind that happened because of it, And I have thoughts on that. But what it did was it set them up then for the COVID era. What I like to call now is the cult of COVID, right, the people who just believed everything that was coming out of the government's mouths and and wanted to follow every directive and didn't ask any questions or do any research of their own, and believed that it was the government's responsibility to force everyone to treat this virus the same and take the same measures. And so the Trump thing really set all those people up who were so put off by Trump, has set them up to diggin even more over COVID because all right, and there's an argument to be made. I've set it before, I'll say it again. There's an argument to be made that and it feels like unbelievable to say this, because it's almost arrogant to say it, like this is how important America is. But I truly believe this. I think if Donald Trump had not been the president, we wouldn't have seen a global lockdown. I do not think so. I think there was something about him being in office, and not just I know some of you out there are like, well, yeah, they were like the whole world conspired to get rid of him. Maybe maybe that's true. I'm not necessarily asserting that that all the global leaders were like, hey, hand, let's meet and find out how we can get rid of Trump doing this. I don't think that was the case, but I do think that once what was happening around the world started getting in to Trump's orbit, as soon as Trump took a stance on it, you've got to take the opposite, You've got to that's just the world. That the paradigm that was set up for us. So it's just set up. We were already set up to be enemies for COVID. It was just in the air, and Sam Harris fell into that hole hook line and sinker or however you want to mix your metaphors. And so he's been going around for the last year or two talking about how, yeah, sure it wasn't as bad as as we were treating it, but it could have been bad. It could have been bad, and if it had been bad, then I would be right. It's so weird. But let me start by for some of you might not be familiar with Sam Harris and why he is even being talked about, especially by people on the right, because he's a left winger that he doesn't try to pretend otherwise. He's a progressive, like I think. It's like typical East Coast liberal, I think, but he is famous for having like these very open minded discussions. One of the things that made and famous was he showed up on Bill Mars's show and when it was still on HBO, and he had a heated debate. Wasn't even a debate, it was just with Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck was just yelling at him because because Sam Harris expressed a logical and rational trepidation for comparing Islam to Christianity, and he's an atheist. But he was saying, I'm just looking objectively at the dangers that were looking at I think this is after one of the shootings that happened in the Europe because someone drew Muhammed Sam was trying to bring some reason into the conversation and you know, the seal clappers in the audience, we're going with Ben Affleck. But it did bring Harris some respect because for those of us on the right, particularly Christians who are tired of us being the only people of faith who are ever you know, you're only ever allowed to make fun of us, even though like, we're not gonna cut your head off if you make fun of us. But I guess that's why you can make fun of us. It was just nice to see a guy who's like an equal opportunity offender at the beginning. But he was like, yeah, Sam's on our side. I was like, okay, well, at least he can discuss these things rationally and openly without accusing someone of being a horrible racist, bigot, homopho, misogynist hashtag literally Hitler, let me play a little piece of this. It's what blew up his spot basically in a pop culture things and you're painting the whole group religion with no let's let's get down to who has the right answer here? A billion people? You say, all these billion people don't hold any of those five or something. Don't hold these pernicious beliefs. No, I wouldn't. Well, they don't. That's just not true, Ben, That's just not true. Can I can I down the idea? You haven't even the the you're you're trying to say that these few people, that's all the problem is these few bad apples, the idea that someone should be killed if they leave the horrible that's wait wait, wait, you're saying that the idea that someone should be killed if they leave the Islamic religion is just a few bad apples. The people who would actually believe in an act that you murder somebody if they is not the majority of Muslims at all. Okay, is it? Let me let me break this down. We have, as you say, we have one point five one point billion Muslims now like a biggest religion in the world a quarter. Well, Ben, let me let me unpack they may unpack this for you, please. Do we have just imagine some concentric circles here you have at the center you have jehadas. These are people who wake up in the morning wanting to kill apostates, wanting to die trying they believe in paradise, they and martyrdom. Outside of them, we have Islamists. These are These are people who are just as convinced of martyrdom and paradise and wanting to to voice their religion on the rest of humanity. But they want to work within the system. They're not going to blow themselves up on a bus. They want to change governments, they want to use democracy against itself. That those two circles arguably are twenty percent of the Muslim world. Okay, this is this is not the research a bunch of pull results that we can talk about. So did to give you one point of contact. Seventy eight percent of British Muslims think that the Danish cartoonists should have been prosecuted seventy eight percent. So I'm being conservative when I roll this back to twenty percent. But outside of that circle, you have conservative Muslims who can can write, can honestly look at Isis and say that that does not represent us, that we're horrified by that. But they hold views about human rights and about women, about homosexuals that are deeply troubling. So so these are not as Lamas. They're not you hottest, but they but they both those and they also keep women and homosexuals im miserrated in these cultures. And we have to empower the true reformers in the Muslim world to change it. And was lying about the length of my doctrine and behavior is not going to do that. The Great Divine all right, I'm not sure that the audience would agree, but Sam Harrison Bill mher eviscerated dumb old Benefleck. I don't know why how we well, I do know how we got here to this idea of like something everything a celebrity says about politics and social structures like, oh wow, we do this on the right too, So don't think you get off Scott free rights. We do this too. Most of these people haven't graduated high school. You don't need to, you know. I think you don't need to graduate high school to be intelligent, but they think you do. That's the side there on. And most of them haven't even graduated high school. So by their own standards, a lot of them are not equipped to be talking about these things. And yet we look to them as if they have some kind of knowledge because they read other people's words for a living. They know how to sound smart because they're acting it's acting. I have a friend here in Hollywood who's like, I don't date actors. She's an actress. She's like, I don't date actors. That is a hard and fast rule. I said why. She's like, because they're professional liars. We're professional liars, so we get good at it. Anyways, that's what made Sam Harris or the right kind of fall in love with Sam Harris, or at least welcome him as as somebody interesting to listen to. And he doesn't. You know, we didn't have some kind of revelation or wake up call. Still a left wing atheist, but I was willing to engage in debate. So it seems let's take a break. When we come back, let's fast forward to Sam's comments, and I'm gonna I'm gonna break them down and tell you what I think. And then I want to talk about what it means to have a paradigm shift and what I think is happening with Sam Harris. My very uninformed and amateur guests, All right, don't go anywhere. Hey, y'all, this is Ali Michelle. I'm a conservative social media influencer that has been censored by big tech, so I broke away from the restrictions and started a podcast called pillow Talk with Ally Michelle. My show is a space to have real conversations about the issues that impact our everyday lives without the fear of being canceled by the big tech tyrants. Subscribe to pillow Talk with Allie Michelle and ECB podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you getch podcasts. That's Ali a l I come check on my show. I'll see you there. All right, we're back. So Sam is on his post COVID justification for is that what I should call it. It's a tour. It's he's hitting every show talking about how everyone needs to calm down, specially conservatives. If you're thinking now that you're you know, now is the time for schaden freud. And I told you so, and now we realize, you know, don't be bragging about how you were right about COVID. You were actually wrong about COVID, even though all this new data and stuff is coming out and it wasn't as bad as a government said it was going to be. You were actually wrong, and you were wrong because sure it wasn't that bad, but it could have been bad. And if it had been bad. Then I would have been right. Literally his argument. Let me just play a clip off of one of the shows that he did recently. You know, but dial up the the deadliness of the pathogen. You know, give us something like, you know, airborne ebola that incubates for a month. You know, you don't know you have it, and you're what, you walk around spreading it and it's got you know, a seventy five percent fatality rate and it's mostly killing kids. No one gets to make that choice anymore. I mean, then literally, the cops come in and vaccinate you, and I would say that all of us would agree to that the moment again that you turn up the lethality on the pathogen, you turn up the effectiveness of the vaccine, you turn down the risk of the vaccine. Give me a truly safe vaccine where there's not even one documented case of vaccine injury, right, So that then you just have to be completely crazy to be worried about being vaccinated in that in that kind of environment, then it's just a no brainer. Then then we just don't tolerate a diversity of opinion because the stakes are too high. It's it's a full on emergency. Bodies of kids are being stacked up in parks, right, There's so many of them, we don't know what to do with them. We've got these mobile morgues, and we have a vaccine that actually works. And then we've got rfk Jr. Saying you know, maybe you don't want you know, maybe you don't want to get the jab on Rogan's podcast. Right. That's that. That's the world I've been worried about ever since COVID. I just I think this is why I was so in knots about this last night, Like I don't want to say in knots, like I don't sit up thinking about Sam Harris all night long, but something's getting my spirit right, and I can't let him go on just keep thinking about him. I think I think one of the things that shocks me about this clip. I would have expected that to come out of like Don Lemon's mouth, right, or Ben Affleck's mouth, like Jenue. Only stupid people. I don't know how to say it, like, or maybe it's not right because I don't know bad off Flag. He might not be stupid, but uninformed for people, right, people who who just haven't who who have a extream deep holes in their knowledge about world events and what's going on in the world. And I would have expected to hear that from them, but to hear Sam saying this out loud, not just not just because of the tyranny angle, like of course, as a conservatorian, like all of my like red flag like red flag, red flag like alert alert alert. Anybody who's excuse you can hear the dog back, they're sorry about that, anybody who is talking talking about Hey, but yeah, but for the greater good, if it's a real emergency, we're gonna need to make tough decisions. We're gonna need to have that power of the government. Obviously, that's somebody who I'm like, I'm dismissing you out of hand. I'm not listening to this any further. But this is somebody that I assume doesn't have a concept of the larger implications of such a thing. But I have heard Sam Harris speak, and I have heard him debate, and you even heard him right there in that clip with Ben Affleck, and I have heard him say, we need to think about the consequences of these choices that we're making, these social judgments that we're making. It sounds good for you to sit there and say one and a half billion Muslims are you know, it's ten people and one and a half billion people. That's the problem, and any other kind of discussion is racist or bigoted. It's one thing for you to say that it sounds good, but let's look at how this breaks down percentage wise, how the belief system breaks down, and where those people would be in these concentric circles. Like he's talking about ripples, he's talking about critical thinking, he's talking about Hey, this isn't just an issue of somebody being bigoted against a religion. This is a larger issue. If you're saying we're not allowed to tell the truth about this, then we can't have an open discussion about that. That's the Sam Harris I've been listening to for the last seven years or so. And now I will say this. There are plenty of people out there who will say and have told me, and I said to me, oh, he's always been a grifter. There have been people who have followed him, and he's not really an intellectual. He's kind of a pseudo intellectual. And so I don't know, I'll dig into that. I really don't know. I just know that he what I've seen, But this guy, to hear him say this, first of all, Hey, what he's saying, it makes no sense. I think that's what's like flabbergasting me. You go back and you listen to his debates on the origins of the universe with like Jordan Peterson and a guy's like Dave Rubin, and it's fascinating stuff and it's it's deep and it's detailed and it's thoughtful. And this guy, this is the same guy who is now sitting in a chair and some podcasters studio saying it's really too bad that COVID didn't kill more children because it made people think that COVID was really bad enough to justify government tyranny. If only COVID had been a totally different virus with totally different outcomes and totally different transmission paths and totally different mortality rates and totally different victims and totally different numbers, then I would be right. Therefore I'm right. What it blows my mind again, I would expect to hear that from Bed Affleck and not expect that the year to hear that from Sam Harris. But then if I'm going to apply some critical thinking to this statement, which is difficult. Then I have to say, well, seem you're a philosopher, you're a modern day philosopher. You know that you can't hold a concept like this and not pose it out. What the further results of that would be? Like, where's the intellectual curiosity of Sam argues things like what's the basis of morality? Right? He does this a lot, and they talk about why this is where a new atheism has to end up. But he talks a lot about the scientific that's a big part of the new atheist movement. Scientific evolutionary basis for morality argument he makes. I don't necessarily find it compelling, but he makes it very well. He knows what he's talking and he's very learned and studied in it. And part of the logicking or reasoning process a guy like Sem uses asked to include and always has included, the question who gets to decide what's right and wrong? Who gets to decide? So Sam always had this very a complicated and nuanced answer to that question, based on biology, evolution, survival of the species, all that stuff. Somehow, all of a sudden, Trump comes along, and then COVID comes along, and he breaks his brain, and all of a sudden, his intellectual argument is that goes out the window. None of that matters. Well, it was It's an emergency. And here's what I thought was right. And I'm the smartest person in the room. Everyone should have listened to me, and they would have listened to me if it had been different. And of course it wasn't different, Like the numbers weren't different. COVID didn't kill children. This is the whole thing we were saying the whole time, Sam, The whole time, we were saying, maybe this would be different effects kids, but it doesn't. So can we send our kids to school? Maybe this would be different if it was the black plague, but it's not. So can we just please take care of the sick and let the healthy do their business? Like That's all we were saying the whole time. And and now here's Sam, I going, wellfully, if only it were different, I would have been right, and that makes me right. I just this is gonna be a boring podcast because I'm so flabbergast and all I can do is like laugh and sit here with my mouth open and my eyes wide. But let's move on. Let's move out of this because I want to talk. I don't want to talk about Sam Harris so much as I do want to talk about a paradigm shift and what it means to have a paradise. Just what do I think is happening here? Was Sam? I'm gonna take another break. I'll be right back. Hey, y'all, this is Ali Michelle. I'm a conservative social media influence that has been censored by big tech. So I broke away from the restrictions and started a podcast called pillow Talk with Allie Michelle. My show is a space to have real conversations about the issues that I'm packed our everyday lives without the fear of being canceled by the big tech tyrants. Subscribe to pillow Talk with Allie Michelle and FCB podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you getch podcasts. That's Ali a l II come check on my show. I'll see you there. So I have some things to read. I had a friend of mine on Twitter, actually on X. I guess we'll all get used to calling it X at some point, but it's still Twitter to me right now. But he sent me a link to a blog that's kind of been following Sam Harris for a year or so. I'm vixon. I read that tonight. I'm really interested. I'm glad he sent it to me. So I can't speak to who's if Sam Harris is a total frodic. I can't speak to that. Can only address the Sam Harrison I have been watching in small fits and bursts for the last seven years. But as I'm watching him, and then I'm also watching posts come across my Twitter feed of you know, there's this one lady who was having a tantrum on Twitter because her five year old was having a tantrum because he didn't want to wear a mask to school anymore, because no one's mary wearing masks of school. I think he was seven. He must have been seven, because it seemed like he'd been in school for a while, so he must have been seven. Her seven year old throwing a tantrum he didn't want to wear a mask in school anymore because no one's wearing a mask in school. And she's like everybody, COVID is not over. I still wear my mask everywhere I order in my grow She's I wipe everything down before I use it. My son wears a mask to school. I don't allow plateates, I don't allow we don't go out in public very often. And I'm doing all this while you guys are out there living your lives and partying and going to concerts and COVID is not gone, and now I have it's agonizing for me. I'm paraphrasing. Obviously you can't get this many characters in on Twitter. But this is how I remember, right, we filter everything through our paradigms. So she says, I mean, now I have to sit here and agonize as I watch my child agonize, and he's so upset and he hates me right now, and all I'm trying to do is keep our family alive. How do I get my child to understand this? And of course I'm like, what, Oh my gosh, lady, this is child abused. Like, yes, he hates you because what you're doing is insane and completely unnecessary. But this is somebody, and she's representative of many people who are out there and who who once were the heroes for locking down and masking up and scolding all the rest of us for not following suit. They once were the heroes, right, She's probably she's boosted six times. She said, she's probably got a little tattoo or her booster shot. Way, you know, overnight, they now are the Now they're the fringe, and you and I were the fringe, and now they're the fringe. Because science, I realize, like most people cannot handle a paradigm shift. I realize that it's actually more rare than I think. And I like to think it's really common. Because I had a paradigm shift, I would say I had two, right, I had one when I became a Christian. Right, So a paradigm shift is a change in your method, systemology, model, or patterns, and patterns are very important to the human psyche and human development. And so I would say I have one paradigm shift, like where my entire worldview, right, my entire model changed becoming a Christian, like going from an atheist family to Christian. And then the second paradigm shift, I would say I had that going from liberal to conservative. And so to me, because because I did it, I assume it's common. You know, we do that. We make that mistake of like, well this is how I do it, So everybody does it, right, I wash my chicken before I cook. It doesn't everybody do it. I don't, by the way, that's just an example. But you think everybody does something and then you know, then you have another paradigm shift. You realize no, and I'm realizing now that paradigm shifts are really not that easy and actually not that many people accomplish it, which is another reason why we don't need to be getting heated over politics or most people you're never going to change their minds a paradi shift. The type of people you would argue with, Like there are people you could debate with and drop and have discussions with, but the type of people that you would argue with and have heated arguments with, like at your Thanksgiving table. At this point, I think, just back off. You're not going to change our paradigm. That's actually a really difficult thing to do, and most people aren't equipped to do it. I'm going to tell you why I think I was able to do it and the unique circumstances which led to it. And you know this isn't It's tough. It's tough for humans to change their patterns. So I started looking up paradigm shift and I was like, why is it so hard for people to shift their paradigm and what does it mean and what does this mean for this discussion about what Sam Harris has been thinking and doing? And I see now that the problem isn't that Sam Harris is an idiot. I'll read this stuff that people gave me that I don't think he's an idiot. And the problem is is that he's a typical person and he and the real problem is that he thinks he's not. He thinks he's atypical. Right. He takes himself far too seriously. Now, this is something that happens when men in particular achieve a great levels of popularity. So I think he's fallen victim to that, and he has no self awareness anymore. And that's something that comes with fame, I believe. But he's more like the people that he is trying to insult than the person he thinks he is. Does that make sense? And it's why Trump broke so many people, and then why COVID came in and finished off the job. So the Trump thing. Let me back up and let me talk to you about what I've been thinking. Again, Thank you for hanging in here. I'm just thinking through this as I go along. You think with me and let me know, write me jail t why at ProtonMail dot com. One of the thing reasons why the Trump era broke so many people is, I guess we could do a whole book, multiple books series on these things. I'm not the first person to say any of this, but the media had created a worldview, right, and so the worldview that was visible and popular and rewarded was the left wing, progressive worldview, which said which was a bubble, which was a worldview encased in a bubble. I call it the coastal bubbles, right affectionately, because I'm on a coast too, but I don't consider myself coastal, but that coastal intellectual bubble, you know, that elitist bubble, and those worldviews are shaped by the media and also for the media, by its customers, and so many people really had this worldview of Obama changed the world. We're never going back to the way it was, which was before Obama, America was awful, racist, bigoted, perverted, horrible country. After Obama, America is doing good. We're defeating all the rednecks. Like that was kind of the narrative that we were given with Obama, that he was gonna that he was going to bring us to this post racial nation. A lot of you conservatives like to be snarky about that, because the opposite happened, right, We got more racially divided, not less, with the first black president uniter. But that's not how the left sees it. The thing is is that you see unity as both sides coming together, and the left sees unity as one side just being erased. So for them, that was happening. So for them, they were living him during the Obama administration. They were living through post racial America. And then we were good. And then that's it. Republicans were done, Conservatives were done. Media is telling us this everywhere you look, TV shows, podcasts, radio shows, all your favorite musicians, all the most important people in the world are telling us we're done with that era. God is dead, the Republican Party is dead, Conservatism is dead, and we're going to have our first woman president going to be a Democrat. Her name's Hillary Clinton. That's the government we deserve. There was no competing message that was allowed to break into the bubble, so naturally, when Trump won, the bubble gets burst. And have you ever stepped out? I don't know if you live in a winter climate, or if you've been to one, you know this, on a very cold day, one of those days where it's like below freezing, too cold to snow. You're in a nice warm building and you step out and you get blasted by this blast of arctic air. It literally takes your breath away, literally, like you just all of a sudden, it's almost like the molecules are freezing. You can't get them into your lungs. Imagine now you're in your progressive elitist coastal bubble. You know the next president. You know it. You don't just think it. You know. This is your worldview that the next president is Hillary Clinton, and then you wake up the next morning and it's Donald Trump. Yeah, take your breath away. But there are two responses to having your intellectual breath taken away. One is to be introspective and let yourself absorb the impact of that cold air and either lean into it or be curious about it, right, like, pursue it a little more. Oh, this air is cold going into my lungs, But I don't know. If if I take a breath or two, I can kind of get used to it. And only it's actually nice out here. It's snowing and it's quiet, and you can do something like that or what you have what is more common. And I think this is just evolutionary. Actually, we have to dig in. It is self protection, It is a survival instinct. We cannot allow the paradigm to shift, because it's shifts the entire world. Our feet are then on quicksand and we don't know what's underneath us. We don't like that feeling. Have you ever been in an earthquake? Listen, I've been in some natural disasters before. I mean, I've been in like terrible tropical storms, I've been in a tornado, and I've been in an earthquake, and the earthquake is the most frightening thing to me. The tornado is most destructive in my mind, but the earthquake is the weirdest. I mean, you know how crazy it feels when you're on a bridge that's shaky, like if you're walking over a walking bridge, one of those rickey rickety walking bridges, or you're maybe you're at the carnival and you're in the House of Horrors and House of Mirrors or whatever and the ground's moving, like you know how crazy that feels. But when you're standing on solid ground, when you're standing on the earth, on the literal ground, and the ground moves, like, what do you ground yourself with? When when your floor starts moving, you reach for something right to steady yourself when the ground is moving? What do you steady yourself with? It is the most disorienting feeling. It really, it's like out of body. I swear it's out of body. It is. Everything's moving, everything's moving, and you're completely helpless. There's nothing to grab onto that isn't moving. You know, there, you're it's the weirdest feeling. That is a paradigm shift. It's scary. The whole ground is shifting underneath you and there's nothing solid to grab onto. And you can lean into that. And that's what you got to do with the earthquake. You can just got to write it out. You can lean into that, or you can like dig in, you know, just really put a shell around yourself and say, I'm I refuse, I can't let my world shift like this. And this is where Sam Harris was when Trump hit So until a guy like Trump, I think the reason that Sam Harris could be so intellectually curious or seemingly so and so open minded and so willing to engage in debate in the truth is because his paradigm, he felt was never going to be threatened, because he thought he was living in the right world and he thought the rest of us were gone. So it's okay for him to engage the little people because those little people are never going to be in power again. After Obama, we're going to have Hillary. The Republican era is dead. There will be no more conservatives. So yeah, I can be magnanimous to these people. I can like respect them as friends and have respectful conversations because at the end of the day, what they think doesn't really matter. So I can throw them a few bones and agree with them because this is what I think too. I am smart enough to reason through some of these issues, but I don't have to persuade or really debate, and I don't have to feel tense about it because these people are have already lost. So imagine waking up finding out that these people haven't lost quite the opposite, and now the whole the world you thought existed doesn't exist. Harris couldn't accept that, and so anything that came after that, if it was going to be associated with Trump or with the people who voted Trump into office. It just it can't be legitimate. It's illegitimate. It must be illegitimate. It's so hard to change your paradigm, your worldview. Even the smartest people have trouble with it. I don't think it has to deal with intelligence. I'll tell you this. Actually, let me just read some of the stuff. Let's get to that. Let me read some of the stuff that I came across. Why I was doing a lazy internet search about paradigm shifts. I found a lot of like personal coaching programs that involve paradigm shifts and the idea of like changing your mind and your past patterns. And while that wasn't necessarily the way like that I was using the term and the idea. I still read through some of these stuff and some of these things, and I think they there are some interesting things that I found. I found one psychologist slash life coach, which I've heard more than one theologian called life coaching a cult. If you go to one of my favorite YouTube accounts, body Language Ghost, she analyzes body language. It's awesome. I can't testify to the you know, veracity of her technique. I have no idea, but it's it's fascinating to watch you go over there. She actually she did a great body language analysis of the woman who is responsible for that disastrous but like campaign, Alissa Heiner Schneid I think is her name or Heinerschfeld, and she does she found an interview with her and she does this analysis of her body language and it speaks so much to why how that decision at bud Light got made. It's amazing. But one of the things that this Alissa Heiner Schneid person says is, oh, I was talking to my my life coach the other day and body language goes stops the tape and she says, there you go, folks, she's in a cult. There are a lot of people out there who think life coaches, that life coaching is a i'll say a cultish activity. I don't know how I feel about that. Life coach is sort of on one of my career bucket lists, just because I love telling people what to do. So it's still kind of up. There is something I think I want to do someday, But I know more than one professional in the area of you know, human resources and also therapy and psychology that have said coaching is a cult. I think Jordan Peterson even says that, regardless of this guy's a life coach talks about shifting your paradigm. I'm applying what he's saying in in terms of politics and worldview changes. And he has nine steps to how to shift your paradigm. And again this is used in the respect of life coaching. I don't know that most people are purposefully pursuing paradigm shifts, and if they are, they're not calling it a paradigm shift because I don't think anyone is like excited to change their worldview right like. I don't think that that's somebody goes like, you know what I want to do today, I want to change my entire worldview. Most of us think we have the right worldview and that there might be things we need to learn more about, but generally speaking, we're right about the big things. So a couple of these things points don't apply. It's got nine steps, A couple of them don't necessarily apply. Determine the paradigm I want to change. Write your goals down. But number three I like this one. Cultivate thoughts influencing the paradigm shift. So reading, journaling, surrounding yourself with people that incite progress, Okay, when you want to talk about how did I make my paradigm shift? Both on both occasions, I was surrounded by people who thought differently than me and said different things than me, So already I was cultivating different types of thoughts. Suddenly I wasn't in the bubble that I had been, So I wasn't in the atheist bubble that I had grown up with. Right, Suddenly I was around Christians, and Christians are talking about a paradigm shift. You want to talk about a paradigm shift going from the moral relativism of an atheist household to Christian that a worldview, it's yeah, you know. Then I went into the Christian bubble, and then I left the liberal bubble and was suddenly exposed to other people who thought differently than me, and other people who looked like me. This is one of the things I say all the time. My father in law was one of the first black men I ever met who called himself a Republican openly, and it shocked me. But here a suddenly, the people influencing my thoughts were different right, So that's one thing that leads to a paradigm shift, is being an environment where different thoughts are cultivated. This is why you have to be careful about colleges and universities. Some of your kids are experiencing paradigm shifts there. I have not been able to figure out a way to keep my kids out of the liberal education system when it comes to higher education, and so what I do is on this end, I try to loosen up the edges of their paradigms so they're not shocked, right, So I try to expose them to competing ideas and then we talk about it so that they're not yard and maybe sometimes dislodged from the foundation that they were growing up, which up with, which obviously I feel is the right one. Number four, he says, start doing the uncomfortable. This was another thing that I did, particularly when I have my political paradigm shift. I started doing things that made me uncomfortable. I started reading things that did not line up with my worldview. And my father in law would give me a challenge. You would give me something to read, point me to a newspaper article, or I would listen to someone on the radio that I had never would never listen to before like Russia Lambaugh, and those things made me uncomfortable by the way, like I had very uncomfortable discussions with conservatives, my father in law, other people. And I wasn't doing this on purpose. I didn't know I was engaging in a paradigm shift. I was just being curious. But now looking back, I see that's what I was doing. I was making myself uncomfortable, which opened me up for a paradigm shift. Number five, He says, practice who you want to become. Again, just to point out this is the life coach version of a paradigm shift, but I think it has some application as to why we have paradigm shifts, how they happen, and why mine, in particular happen. You practice who you want to become. Well, who I've always wanted to be. As a curious person, I have always had a sense of intellectual curiosity. I'm always wanting to learn. I have a huge bucket list of things I want to do. And I don't mean like bungee jumping, but like you know, museums to go to and bookstreating, languages to learn and philosophies to learn. And I want to become an expert in Sanskrit, and I want this ridiculous stuff. I just always want to be learning, and so that is the person that I have always been striving to be. Somebody who is learning more, somebody who knows more. So I think that also set me up for to be a receptive to a paradigm shift, or be able to withstand a paradigm shift, if that is Again, I don't want this to come off like I'm thinking I just had to shift because I'm so much smarter. I'm better than everybody. And this is not an intellectual I truly believe this is not related to your intellectual ability. There are certain factors that not everybody has the opportunity to cultivate. They can go into this. Hey, y'all, this is Ali Michelle. I'm a conservative social media influencer that has been censored by big tech. So I broke away from the restrictions and started a podcast called pillow Talk with Ally Michelle. My show is a space to have real conversations about the issues that I'm packed our everyday lives without the fear of being canceled by the big tech tyrants. Subscribe to pillow Talk with Allie Michelle and FCB podcast on book, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you getch podcasts. That's ali a l II. Come check on my show. I'll see you there. Number six was great balance your emotions right, and we're seeing how emotions sort of take over logic in this issue. Sam Harris is mad. This is why he has had this seemingly stark intellectual shift. He's mad. I mean, that's really what he's angry. He's angry that people didn't listen to him when he was absolutely convinced that he was right about COVID, and he really was convinced that his views would save the world. I genuinely believe that. And I think, just like that mom with the mask and the kid, like, there are people who you think they placed the burden of saving the world on themselves for whatever reason, they got daddy issues or a Superman complex or whatever. And that's a burden that no human, no one human being can live with. Only one did. It's Jesus for you atheists up there, but for him, it just it was so it's personal. That's why the Trump thing broke so many people, because they were very invested in the Obama to Hillary narrative, it was personal, like deeply personal. Now me, when I look at elections, I don't take them personally because I don't know any of these people personally. And I also have a life that's a lot bigger than each election cycle, which comes every two to four years, So I don't take I feel hurt, you know, I feel angry, I feel upset when they don't go the way I want them to go. But the idea that my entire world is shattered, no, that no, no, And Sam doesn't have that ability is internalized his worldview as literally life saving. He wanted to be right and he wasn't right, and now he's mad that he's wrong, so his emotions aren't imbalanced. So he's just not prepared for that paradigm paradigm shift. So I thought those were interesting things. And I think one of the reasons one of the circumstances that set me up because like I was on John Wood Junior's show this past week and I was telling him about a little bit about my journey into conservatism and he said, off air, oh, it's really that's really interesting, Kira, because that's a paradise. He used a term to you that's a paradigm shift. And in order for you to even be open to that, you would have to be a really intellectually curious person. He's like, you must be a very intelligent person. And again I go back to the idea, and I was trying to express this to him. I think this is another reason I'm doing this podcast today, because I didn't verbalized what I meant properly. I was trying to express to him that it wasn't I didn't believe like some kind of intelligence level, But it was more than that. It was the circumstances that I lived my life in. And one of the reasons why I think I was open is because I'm not from a stable home, right. I've had a very unstable, extremely unstable childhood, always living on shifting sands. I didn't even live in the same place most of the time, you know. I lived with my mom for a little bit, I lived with my grandparents. I lived in the country, I lived in the city, I lived with Later on in life, in my teenage years, I moved out from my mom's and moved into my stepgrandmother's place. I had a dad in the US that I lived with two and he moved around and got divorces, and that changed the landscape of my life. Like my life was always shifting and so and then being Canadian and being American at such a young age, the shifting ground underneath me didn't scare me as much, It's what I'm saying. So I did not feel the need to dig in when my worldview was challenged. I felt the need to know more. And that's where you know someone is capable of a paradigm shift. So I guess what I'm saying. Hearing Sam and realizing, gosh, this is who he's been all along, right, but probably a really smart guy. Again, I don't know much about who he is outside of what I've seen. Really smart guy, someone who's capable of great critical thinking. But he's always been a guy who's not capable of a paradigm shift. And if you're not even capable of it, if you're if you don't even have the skills set to open yourself up to that, then I don't think it's worth arguing with that person. And that's who that person is. This Sam Harris talking about dead kids, imaginary dead kids piling up that would prove his point. That's not a guy I want to debate or discuss with, he is unavailable for persuasion or even an interesting conversation at that point. The Sam Harris that went on tour with Jordan Peterson and had lots of interesting things to say, even though I don't believe them about evolution and the origins of the universe, that's a Sam Harris you could talk to and debate with. Right So, I think a lot of us are out here, and I get a lot of letters from people. How do I convince somebody or how do I come back to this? You know what? Everybody? I think we need to start exercising some discernment here. So while I am for thinking through our ideas and engaging in discussion, I love talking, you know I do. This podcast today in particular is proof I think we all need to get to a point where we can be discerning and understand that most people are not capable of shifting their worldview and so don't even try it. Ask questions if they want to be weird, just don't engage in those conversations. But if you find someone that you feel like it is a kindred spirit, someone who's intellectually curious and wants to know more. Then those are the people that you talk with and discuss and debate and even get heated with. Right, Like, you can even have arguments with those people. That's fine because you know what's going to happen with them is what happened with me, which is I didn't wake up one day I'd be like, what, Dad was right? Such an idiot for being a liberal all these years. Now I'm a conservative who wasn't like that at all. I knew he was wrong every time he talked to me, until I went home and started thinking about it, and then I would see something in the news and be like, oh, you know what, wait, Dad did mention that the other day. Let me look up more about this. That's how the real shifts come, right, They don't come while you're there to witness them. So don't think that you're going to be evangelizing to anybody and they're just gonna get saved into conservatism at that second paradigm shift is a really hard thing. Why. It's the ground underneath you, and it really truly is, and our brains are made to protect us from the ground underneath us moving. We need patterns, We need patterns and stability and consistency, like our brains have to know where the place things and things that our brains can't place in some kind of paradigm, it throws away like a virus, like something that is bad, anathema to the body and to the mind. So like, for instance, one time I was in therapy and I was asking my therapist why don't have any good memories of my stepfather. It was very cruel and cold and emotionally and otherwise abusive. And but my mom mom tells me, like when she and he first were started living together, I was five years old when they moved in together, that we were good friends. And there's a picture of me and him in the in my mom's bed. Clearly I had like crawled in with them in the morning and he was tickling me and we were giggling. By the way, I know this sounds where there's no sexual abuse in here in this story whatsoever. I don't want people to start making connections. This really wasn't innocent picture, and he never abused to me like that. But we're laughing. Well, he looks happy to be with me. And I've never known anything from this man except cruelty and insults and just horrid behavior, and I asked it there was why don't I remember this all I can? And she was like, because that's not who he was to you. That's was when you first met him. But whatever happened, And that's another thing. I eventually did find out what happened. But something, a thing did happen that changed the idea of his relationship to me. And then that is the only relationship that my brain processed for the next let's see how it's five. I left home when I was seventeen, so the next twelve years, that's the only category I had to put our relationship into, So the brain discarded anything else. So I happened. Even though those memories exist for somebody, they don't for me because they weren't worth it for my brain to categorize. So our brain literally protects us from new points of view coming in and shifting the ground underneath us. Once our brain acclimates to a pattern, it's really hard to see things outside that pattern. For instance, there is a very famous picture out there of it's a it's a shape, it's a figure, and it was used in some kind of research. But researchers put this picture next to small children like five and under, and then adults. The picture that the children see is I can't remember what I think, like an elephant or something. But the picture that the adults see are two people being intimate. And the reason why and it's, oh, in this first you know, the first thing you see? Well, the reason for that is that the kids don't have any patterns at that age to for the brain to fill in any other blanks. They've seen elephants, but hopefully at that age they haven't seen two adults being intimate, and so they don't have the information bank for the brain to interpret that image show. It interprets the images what it knows. And that's another thing that makes paradigm shifts so difficult. The brain can't really interpret this information through another lens. It doesn't know it. Again, how do you break through that? You just you have to have someone who's curious enough to want to hear to hear other information that doesn't make sense to them. And again, I just I think most people aren't like that. I think we're just lucky that a lot of a lot of us out there are like do think the right things? You know, But even for many of you out there, you would feel like it would be very difficult, right, it would be very difficult for me, Nay, impossible for me to shift out of the paradigm of Jesus Christ is alive and died for my sins. Like if some kind of proof, like they dug up the body of Jesus or something came along. I don't, I don't. I don't know that I can shift out of this paradigm. I really don't. I think I would, just I just I can't imagine it. So we're all prone to it in some respect or another. But it's really hard to change those patterns to get your brain to see something different. One of the things that that life coach had said was that you have to ensure repetition. Right, So a paradigm shift requires repetition, and it's not at one moment. This is another reason why I said, like, don't be like, oh, I'm gonna have this one interaction and then I'm going to change this person's mind. Like, it's a process, paradigm shift, take repetition. I had multiple discussions with people over years on politics and read multiple books and listened to multiple people. It was a process, was not one and done that was my journey into Christianity. It was a process. I went to youth group with my best friend who got saved away for the summer, and when it came back, she was like ah, I thought God. I was like, Ohm, where was he hiding? I thought she was a joke. But I used to spend so much time with her. I ended up going to her youth group with her. And you know, I went to the youth group for months, months and months and months before I started going to church. And then I went to church for months, and then I had a conversion. It was a process, but it took repetition. So how have I concluded this? How do I conclude this? Because this isn't the show I planned on. It obviously had no structure to it. I don't even know if I've accomplished anything for you the listener today, But I think for me, what I have come, what it has come down to, is when it comes to Sam Harris, I realize he's just like the rest of us. Guess what, all these people are just like the rest of us. I have a lot of respect for the people I talk about a lot on the show, like intellectuals. I read professors, I read Paul Titians. I enjoy like I have a lot of respect for those people, but I now realize it's just because I'm not as learned as some of these people doesn't mean they're better than me. Most of them aren't capable of doing what I did. Most people aren't capable of a paradigm shift, and I don't. I think I learned that during COVID. And by the way, if you have the right views, then don't be worried about that or ashamed of it. Stay right here. If you think like me, stay right here. You don't need to shift your paradigm on politics. I can't sort of, but I guess what I'm saying is that I realize now and COVID really showed me that many, many people are weak thinkers. Many are many more than I originally thought. And some people can sound good when they're talking. But when the moral landscape gets rocky and bumpy and it gets hard to live out your values, who's still standing? And I think most people want to be led, then that's normal. Even you know the word refers to all of us as cheap. I think we all want to be led by someone, and that can lead to us giving up our intellectual autonomy. We all want ease. That's what patterns are. That's what patterns do for us. They make things easier. We all want ease. And so to change how you think about something or what you believe that that's hard. That's hard. It takes work. And again, I think curiosity is the number one quality probably that leaves you open to a positive paradigm shifts. I think Sim Harris is mad a weak thinker because when something really big, like the big thing he's talking about, right, he's you heard him in that club and in they're going, oh, you know, if it were bigger, everyone would have understood it. If it were bigger or worse, if it were more, then we would have understood when I'm talking about he's the guy that's saying all of that. And I think that even if I think that for Sam, while he's asking everyone else to have this paradigm shift based on information that based on scenarios that didn't happen and never came true and as it turned out, weren't ever going to come true, then I think we can expect, or we should expect Sam Harris to be open to a paradigm shift over information that is true and has been proven true and we have seen the results of But because he can't even open himself up to the paradigm shift, to me, that tells me he's a weak thinker. And I think way more people than we believe are weak thinkers. I think we give too much credit. I think are people who are who are everybody's valuable and their opinion is valuable, and what they think about the world and their own families are valuable. But there are people who are not going to be leaders in thought, and so you shouldn't be listening to them. You shouldn't be considering give adding any more weight to their statements than anyone else. Sam Harris is that guy. When the real challenge to his intellectual curiosity came, he was absolutely incapable of embracing it. And that's sad, But I think it's a commonality. And so how do you know if you're a weak thinker of a strong or a strong thinker. I think I'll save that subject for later, but I think if you're listening to the show, obviously you're one of the good ones. You're a strong thinker if you're listening to the show, And I get I don't want to sound too like arrogant, but I do think it's this is a real concept. I think this is a real thing. Should you want to shift your paradigm. I don't think a paradigm shift when it comes to pology is something you should be seeking out. But I do think that you should at least be seeking information all the time, and so when a shift does come, you're in a better place to either analyze it and accept it, or analyze it and reject it. So I can accept that the ground underneath me is moving right now, and I can write it like a surfboard and just count the seconds which seemed like hours when you're in an earthquake. It's incredible how long. This is why I believe in, like the whole thing of bending, I believe in time travel. I believe we could find a way to do it, even if it's sending an object through time or something, because then you have physiology and all that. But the reason I believe it is because I do believe the time does slow down, it can slow down, and it can speed up. I really believe when you are in an earthquake that ten seconds it's a long time. It can feel like twenty minutes it's and legitimately feel like twenty minutes. Like I don't mean like, oh my gosh, it seemed like it was forever. I mean like you'll be shocked to know you weren't shaking for twenty minutes. It just a self. It's hard, such a weird feeling. You can lean into that and ride it out and wait till it stops. And then when it stops, you can go and survey the land and take a look at all the new changes that have been made, how different the landscape looks now that an earthquake is hit it. You can do that, or you can say, no, the earth isn't moving, I'm just standing wrong, and then just curl up into a fetal position and hope it stops moving at some point you have. These are your two choices when a paradigm shift comes along. Many of you might never experience the need for this, or experience a situation where this happens. And so I don't even I'm making no moral judgment on whether you need to or not. I really don't know. I'm just so interested in this phenomenon and what is happening to people that seem to be great thinkers. What about you? Have you ever had a paradigm shift? Have you ever experienced something that completely changed your worldview that just like shifted the ground underneath you and made you a totally different person, or at least put you on the path being that person. I'd love to hear your story. J L. T Y at ProtonMail dot com. J L. T Y at ProtonMail dot com. Please rate and review this show. Would you share this show with someone please? I appreciate your shares. That's how we get more listeners. If you have a favorite, if you have a guest or someone you would love for me to interview, send me that as well. Jilty at ProtonMail dot com. Sign up for my substack just Kara Davis dot substack dot com and buy my book Drawing Line. It's available on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Until we meet again, everybody, just remember, every once in a while, just stop and listen to yourself. Sam Harris, are you even listening to what you just said? What Brad my soda day that we won't spade and we won't to say all we got it? Does no one get tatto and bathe It's gonna be okay. Soda Day that we won't said, and we won't was said. All we got it, does no one get tatto and bade It's gonna be okay. This has been a presentation of the FCB podcast Network, where real talk lifts. Visit us online at FCB podcasts dot com.
