Website Mark Changizi
Twitter/X Mark Changizi X X
Website Loof Wired
Youtube Mark Changizi

Ahmad (00:00.887)
There are still two hospitals that I can work out of. So I did two operations this morning and operating is really good fun. And it’s just my quiet time and I can relax. People think operating is stressful, but it’s not. It’s just Zen, Zen-like. But Mark, wasn’t your dad an MD as well?

Mark Changizi (00:24.862)
Yeah, my dad, that’s my Iranian side. My dad was a doctor. He passed away 25 years ago, but 30 years ago, 25. And yeah, he was a doctor, so I was a MD kid, so to speak. My mom was a nurse, American. They met, typical doctor nurse, marriage situation from the 60s.

Ahmad (00:43.999)
Dude, that must have been quite young. You must have been quite young when he passed away. I’m sorry to hear that.

Mark Changizi (00:52.678)
Oh, I was 20, late 20s, sort of upper end of 20s when he passed away.

Ahmad (00:58.387)
That’s still young. That’s still young. I was, um…

Mark Changizi (01:01.47)
He died young. For some reason he got cancer. He never smoked but just got lung cancer and passed away at 60. Which was… which just sucks.

Ahmad (01:09.279)
Dude, that’s the same as me. So my dad was 72 and he died in 2018 and he had lung cancer and he didn’t smoke. But now actually having interviewed a lot of very smart, intelligent people like Thomas Seyfried and Isabella Cooper and Travis Christofferson, I realized cancer is a metabolic disease. My dad was type two diabetic, he was overweight and it’s all about mitochondrial dysfunction.

Mark Changizi (01:35.307)
Hmm.

Ahmad (01:38.431)
and that’s what leads to the cancer. So yeah, my dad sadly died of lung cancer too. I miss him desperately so many. I thought he passed away when I was young. I was in my early 40s, 44, 45. But yeah, I miss my dad. They leave a big imprint on you, good or bad, but he left a good imprint on me. So you are a scientist. You’re talking off air about how you’re a theoretical kind of scientist.

Mark Changizi (01:39.736)
Yeah.

Mark Changizi (01:47.34)
Yeah.

Mark Changizi (01:52.45)
Yeah.

Mark Changizi (02:02.102)
Oh yeah.

Ahmad (02:06.907)
and you look at, you’ve written, you’re a very prolific writer, you’ve written six books already, you’re on your seventh, or you’re about to publish your seventh, I can’t remember what you were saying. But yeah, tell me.

Mark Changizi (02:17.526)
Oh, no, I mean, if there’s going to be a seventh, it’ll be maybe on this mass hysteria stuff, COVID was not only one of the most dystopian, frightening experiences for many of us, but it was also one of the most scientifically interesting. And so I feel a lot of the kinds of stuff that I’ve been talking about on trying to explain these kinds of mass hysteria phenomena and the movements of politics in some sense are really the… So that can lead to another book and at the Free Expression Institute,

is this research institute I started in 2021, that the hope is all of these combined to be book number seven. But I won’t know until it all shapes together as a nice, beautiful, unifying theory, and it may never. That’s just the nature of this stuff.

Ahmad (03:03.043)
So tell me about your thoughts about mass hysteria is it along the similar kind of vein to Matthias Desmet and the mass dissonance and.

Mark Changizi (03:13.738)
Yeah, I mean…

Mark Changizi (03:17.462)
Well, I mean, there are some differences that the I don’t know much about the way that they approach or I didn’t know anything about that community per se. I come out of as a more of a physics mathematician type and also from as a cognitive scientist thinking about the nature of all kinds of large scale complex systems which undergo both selection forces that is selection processes sort of that lead to them evolving in certain kinds of ways depending on how they select for things.

And immersion process, certain things just bubble up and happen for free by virtue of the nature of the whole and how it works together. These are what you have to understand if you want to understand how brains work or how any kind of complex phenomenon biology, for example, works or how swarms work and these sorts of things. This is bread and butter stuff for us, but it’s all super counterintuitive for regular folks. So most…

regular folks find natural regular. I just mean they haven’t been steeped for dozens of years in evolutionary biology. Natural selection is a paradigm example of this. You get brilliant design like our eyeballs and our bodies and all these brilliant engineering design. It’s certainly incredibly more plausible to imagine somebody did this, somebody designed it because they end up with all this design and then walking and say, and then nobody did, nobody designed it. It is mind boggling.

So one of the most counterintuitive and amazing theories that’s ever been, you know, posed is Darwin’s natural selection But it’s deeply counterintuitive, but those same kinds of complex deeply counterintuitive processes also are what shape much of what goes on in society much of these sociopolitical movements really have their explanations and similar kind of things not by virtue of the linear billiard ball Explanations that we find in everyday life that we’re really comfortable

And so I’ve been trying to focus, I came at sort of mass hysteria from those kinds of angles, whereas the Desmond crew comes, these are more, and I am a psychologist, a cognitive sort of scientist, but they come almost from like, from my point of view, it’s a very, I don’t know, it’s a continental psychologist or almost like clinical psychological perspective where they’re looking at the states of the minds, they have to be a certain, the minds within the community have to be.

Mark Changizi (05:36.322)
have certain kinds of trauma beforehand, four different kinds, and then it’s susceptible for these various, they’re not thinking of it in the way that a physicist would at all. And so I think some of the way that they’re thinking about isn’t really predictive. But generally, we’re still attacking a similar sort of problem. And a lot of folks wanna say, hey, if you’re trying to say that mass hysteria did this, you’re telling me that there are no culpable individuals. And that’s just silly.

This is the difference between levels of explanation. So in biology, there’s neuroscientists who are interested in let’s say synapse level Very small vesicles and things with inside neurons, you know They’re studying the brain but trying to understand in terms of these really micro Chemicals and things like this others are looking at the neuron levels Well, they’ve got a trillion neurons that they’re having to figure out how some ensembles of them work But then some might look at the brain as a group of areas made as a hundred areas coordinating with one another and some

look at it even at a higher level, kind of looking at just the functional computations that they have evolved to do. These are all studying the brain, and for someone like me who’s typically at these higher levels and I say, look, the brain evolved to do this kind of thing, and here’s this functional capabilities and you can derive, blah, blah. Someone might say, are you saying neurons aren’t involved? Are you saying that neurons aren’t responsible for the, well of course, neurons are undergirding all of these things that the brain is doing.

But the level of, to really understand what these neurons are all doing, you have to understand at these higher computational levels. But really, they’re all part of these parts, they’ve been selected, and they end up doing these sorts of large-scale computations for these sorts of reasons. And to understand the whole, you have to understand it at this holistic level. You can’t just think about it as a trillion neurons doing stuff. You’re never going to understand it. So, same thing for societies. Societies are massive mobs that are…

end ups often being selected or emerge certain kinds of things happen for large scale reasons that have nothing to do per se with what one of these individuals is saying. You know, people say, oh, Doug over there, evil Doug said this and then these things happen. So they want to say, okay, Doug said this, these things happen that caused Judy to say this and then there was war over there. Like they’re looking for very linear explanations, which makes sense for like you and your social group in town when you know, there’s these small scale things, but they’re typically not causally predictive or explanatory.

Mark Changizi (07:56.091)
at these kinds of societal level scales.

Ahmad (07:59.975)
I’m really struggling to keep up. I’m so simple, it’s unbelievable. The reason why I became a North African surgeon is things are either broken or they’re not and you fix them or you don’t. So what did you find out then? What did you, like explain the whole COVID thing then. You’re not saying that there aren’t some culpable bad people. Why did the world go to shit?

Mark Changizi (08:04.775)
Hahaha

Mark Changizi (08:13.975)
Right.

Mark Changizi (08:26.11)
Yeah, so I mean, one of the… Yeah, so why are they world-gun shit? So, I mean, what mass hysteria is sort of like a mob on crack. And I think folks do have an understanding for a mob. The mob gets riled up because of something, and then they just keep riling themselves up, and then suddenly the whole mob goes, they go and burn down some particular houses. And afterwards, to understand what happened, you really have to say, well, it was a mob.

And that’s part of the explanation. It was a mob. But it doesn’t mean that lots of the individuals within the mob, or all the individuals within the mob, don’t share culpability, right? They’re just different kinds of things. And so mass hysteria is a much deeper and more complicated object than a mob. Because when the groups of individuals over time, and this is what I studied in this most recent book, is expressly human, is about how social networks work and how…

memes travel through these things and create narratives over time. You know, mobs don’t have much time to create a narrative. You know, Doug might just say, yeah, we should burn Judy the witch. And they go, oh, we should. And they’re like, OK, the narrative is like Judy’s a witch and we should burn her. It’s pretty short. But whole communities over time start to build narratives and create membership signals, which start to say, well, look, we’re part of this righteous community that takes COVID super seriously. And

then in order to do that, you should do these kinds of things and say these kinds of things and wear these kinds of things. And they’ll end up with certain kinds of characteristic dynamics. So for example, one characteristic dynamic of all of these sorts of things is that they’ll end up with membership signals, which are unusual. Because if they weren’t unusual membership signals, then people that aren’t in the community would wear them. They have to be at least sort of bizarre things, things that show membership. So for example, wearing a mask.

in March and April of 2020, almost nobody wore masks. In fact, we were advised not to wear masks. But there were folks that were wearing masks here and there. These were the folks that were super zero COVID, even before zero COVID was a word. So by May, it was a clear, even in April, it was a clear membership signal that I care more than you, right? I am super serious about this. And if you’re not, and then that developed more and more into a membership signal.

Ahmad (10:40.488)
Hmm.

Mark Changizi (10:46.27)
and more and more people started to wear that to show support for this righteous new righteous cult of COVID cult. But it never stops that it’s just a membership signal. What ends up being selected for in these communities, when someone comes up with a reason, well, it’s not just a good membership signal, it’s actually good to wear these because, and if they come up with a really good argument, it doesn’t mean it’s actually true, but kind of a pretty good argument that will tend to get selected for and spread across that you should wear these not only as membership because they themselves are just good. They’re good for you. And then,

that will then more in those people’s reputations will rise because they came up with a good argument. The way that these social networks work is such that they’ll select for justifications for why those membership signals are also virtuous. This is the rise of virtue signals. Virtue signals are basically membership signals which evolved over time without anybody deciding that they will be very good, but it ends up evolving over. So within two months, there were 80 papers or whatever, observational studies, crappy observational studies.

saying masks worked and they are virtuous. Right? None of this is, no one was lying in the sense that they were trying to do this on purpose, but these communities evolve these things on their own. And it happened at small scales all the time. You know, people in certain cities, like women’s magazines will say, you should wear Lululemons in our community. We wear like these Lululemons, it’s comfortable. And that signals membership in their sort of fancy upper class sort of white neighborhood. But it’s not just a membership signal because

Soon the magazines will say, it’s actually good for your legs to do this. And it’s great because they come up with family related things or health related things. Whereas the other, some other community of let’s say, Persians who don’t go to just walk around the level that they actually dress up, Persians will have a different kind of, their membership, signal membership amongst the Persian community or African-American community, which typically dresses up, will say, no, you shouldn’t go out and loot the lambs. It’s actually better to actually just respect yourself and look beautiful and blah, blah. They come up with other.

things that justify, ethically justify their membership signals and they become virtue signals. These are minor ones no one really notices or thinks about but they happen at all scales. But when they happen at these largest scales like in COVID, you can end up with, in the whole world is beating as one, it becomes something that is sick. And so this is just the beginnings of the kinds of things they select, but they also select for treating outgroups invariably as infectious.

Mark Changizi (13:08.974)
having cooties. This happens with the Jews, this happened. Jews were treated as infectious. In fact, all of these propaganda, and again, propaganda doesn’t mean they consciously thought, oh, let’s call them infectious because that will cause the masses. No, they started to really think about them as infectious. And there might’ve been some infection within one community of some poor area. So there’s some kernel of truth. And so then it suddenly spreads, oh, they’re disproportionately likely to be infectious, and that will spread. And treatments of out-groups always are treated as infectious.

and women who are not wearing their hijab correctly are treated as infectious because these are the memes that tend to spread through human minds and they work as further augmenting the notion of who are the unclean outgroups. In our case, our case being COVID, of course, the unvaccinated, there is a real virus going around. So there is some kind of kernel of truth about infectiousness. It’s not just a metaphor, but ultimately it’s the same thing.

these metaphors of infectiousness were prone to these metaphors of infectiousness, were prone to having disgust for these things. And so people in the outgroup, namely the unvaccinated, who, of course, were just as likely or even less likely to potentially get COVID, because they already had COVID by then, were treated as unclean and infectious. And people hated them for those sorts of reasons, because the metaphors of an unclean outgroup had spread through the community and had become part of the narrative.

So trying to understand these narratives and these dynamics that lead to these narratives is what I’m studying. And there’s actually connections which I don’t need to go into here. With blockchain, blockchain is all about, which I’ll just briefly, blockchain is all about having no centralized records of who gave Bitcoin to who. It’s all decentralized, right? No one is in control. It’s decentralized. Well, that’s the way that gossip and reputation works.

Ahmad (14:57.77)
Mm.

Mark Changizi (15:05.062)
and free expression works because all of these people are talking and debating and discussing and some people rise in reputation, some people lower in reputation because they say bullshit, right? Some people rise because they typically say true things. And so there’s all these reputations out there. People don’t all have the same reputation. It is not kept in some centralized bank of reputation. It’s kept in the minds across the community in a decentralized way. So

if I lose reputation to you in some argument and other people watch, they go, yeah, Mark was really being really douchebag, he was really confident and disdainful, and yet he was wrong, so he lost a lot of reputation. That gossip spreads through, it gets added to the, instead of it being added to the blockchain, it’s added to this narrative of what happened last week in terms of the rises and falls of various people, including Mark being a douchebag and losing reputation. And so, and these narratives are all part of keeping track.

of some sense of these reputation changes over time. And it’s very hard to change that history, that narrative for many of the same mathematical reasons that blockchains are hard to fuck with. They’re hard to mess with on purpose because you don’t want people messing with the blockchain. Otherwise people suddenly say, no, I got all the Bitcoin. I know you didn’t get, no, it’s kept decentralized in a way that’s hard to sort of cryptographically break. It turns out for the same mathematical reasons, analogies are the same. These narratives, once they’re formed,

Are almost impossible to displace. So once a new narrative forms and it’s completely false sometimes It’s never gonna go away. It just stays forever and you can explain why that’s the case Which is again the kinds of things that I’m saying so a lot to understand all these things You need to understand these things at these higher computational evolutionary physics kinds of levels. You can’t understand it by saying Klaus Schwab Decided in 2005 with Bill Gates to create a virus

and do it to us. These are ridiculous hypotheses that often people want to summarize what happened to us in terms of just a few cabal of a few bad guys. That’s not what happened. There’s a lot more bad guys. And yeah, they’re bad guys. I’m not saying they’re not. But the number of bad guys is extremely, it goes well beyond that. And the dynamics that occurs, that’s ultimately our human downfall and happens over and over in all the great genocides and democides.

Mark Changizi (17:17.798)
is due to these dynamics with different icing every time.

Ahmad (17:23.943)
There’s, take a breath, take a breath. So can I just ask, oh God, there’s so many things you said there and I’m trying to keep up to date. So virtue signaling, I think of it as the laziest form of doing good and it’s funny, I don’t really remember that as a term four or five years ago, certainly not a decade ago. Is virtue signaling a new thing or has it always been there and we’re just aware of it now?

Mark Changizi (17:54.274)
Oh, it’s always been there. It’s just a basic, yeah, but no, it wasn’t the term necessarily. I mean, I’ve heard about it, I don’t know. 30 years at least, I’ve known the term, I presume. But the idea of a virtue signal, and the way that I’m describing it is maybe not the way that everybody else. People, when they typically describe virtue signal, they’re gonna describe it in the way that there was this famous Seinfeld, the TV show episode, where there was a rainbow gay rights,

parade and whatever his name across the hall from Seinfeld, the crazy guy with the hair, he didn’t wanna wear the ribbon. He was totally behind it. He wanted to go out and show support, but he just didn’t like the idea of having to wear ribbons. And so the people that were organizing the event said, wear the ribbon. And they became really Nazi about it. It’s like, you gotta wear the ribbon. They’re chasing them all over to wear the ribbon. Wearing the ribbon in a conscious, hey, let’s go virtue signal now, isn’t really a virtue signal. That’s a…

overly conscious, intentful notion of a virtue suit. Virtue signals as they really appear in life are end up evolving to be signals that people, unusual things that people wear or sometimes harmful, slightly self harmful because that ensures that your opposition would never put them on. If they’re actually useful, truly useful, everybody’s gonna start wearing them and they’re not gonna serve as a membership signal anymore. So they end up as a result of these sorts of selection sort of processes that end up

being justified as something people should do within that community. And so they just end up being truly believed by the community as something that people should do or wear or behave, certain kinds of behaviors or activities. They’re not consciously virtue signals at all.

Ahmad (19:38.075)
Okay, okay. So next, you said, Clow, Schwab, and Bill Gates are bad guys, but there’s many other bad guys. Why do you think they are bad guys?

Mark Changizi (19:51.382)
Well, I mean, generally speaking, you were a… The more that you agitated for civil liberties violating interventions, the more that you… And not doing cost benefit analyses and so forth. And the more that you were agitating for that, and the more that you were, let’s say, a public intellectual with a big voice, and the more that you were… And most of all, if you were an elected… You had…

actual responsibilities in terms of you’re a politician, an elected leader, the more you’re culpable for having pushed these civil liberties, violating harmful policies. And what I often complain about is folks that suddenly want to say, well, it’s just this cabal of people who tricked our leaders. Our leaders are innocent. Defenders of Trump will often do this.

Oh, well, Trump, you know, he was he was just misguided by this cabal of leaders. I people, you know, the New Zealand lady, what’s her name? She was I know her in person. One of these guys has a big following. I know in person she’s a good lady. She was just tricked by this cabal. We know the most the most culpable people of all were the leaders. You know, they’re more culpable than Gates and Klaus Schwab is a clown.

It’s our leaders that ultimately made the decision to enact these civil liberties violating and harmful interventions. So the number of people that are culpable, of course, goes way beyond that. Your neighbors were culpable for screaming at you, for having too many guests in your house, for calling the police for you jogging without a mask, for all the enforcers and snitchers on the street.

And so unfortunately, when there are these kinds of mass hysterias, and it’s a totalitarianism, what we experienced was totalitarianism, it was not just top down done by our governments. It was definitely not done top down by this cabal controlling the government. No, it was as much bottom up as it was top down. You have places like in the UK, Boris Johnson, you can just watch him in mid-March. He’s saying, everybody, you need to calm down. It’s not a big deal, blah, blah. But…

Mark Changizi (22:10.418)
uh… in city the ccp in the beginning was telling the people to calm down population doesn’t trust ccp and they got whipped up and they demanded action so what do leaders do when the populace as well as media and public you know policy public intellectuals start saying you have to do something well leaders then pretend to lead they get out in front of it and i know we are totally leading like you guys want me to the whole time so there’s a tons of bottom-up driven

And another way to see that is that everywhere in March and April and May and beyond of 2020, folks on the street were going well beyond whatever the interventions were saying. Folks were driving by with masks. There was no rule that you had to be masked up in your car. Whole cities I visited in January of 2021, Washington, D.C., there was no outdoor mask mandate. But every last person, except for a couple of homeless people, had masks on.

outdoors walking around. They were out there rowing in their boats on the river with masks on, you know. They went beyond the mandate.

Ahmad (23:10.079)
Okay.

Ahmad (23:19.461)
So I am in agreement and then I might not be in agreement on some part. So I say that we can’t blame a few people at the top. We have to blame all of ourselves because we are the ones that let this happen. If we didn’t play along, if we didn’t do what we did, you know, none of this would have happened. So, you know, the doctors are the ones who forgot their medical ethics.

They put that aside, they put that aside. If they had just simply said, hey, this is ridiculous, we’re not doing lockdowns and mandates and telling people to stay at home and using experimental shots, you know, none of this would have been able to happen. But the population are equally to blame. So that’s one aspect, so I think we’re kind of in agreement there. Where I might disagree with you is I could say, yes, you’re saying top-down, but bottom-up to the people who acted

irrationally, maybe the people at the top were manipulating and using, for example, in the UK, spy B, behavioral science units, weaponized, military grade, PsyOps, 77th Brigade, they were manipulating the population. They knew what triggers and levers to pull and what buttons to press. They instilled fear. And when you have a population that is fearful, confused, then they’re malleable.

And then what you saw when even now I see some people in the car driving on their own with a mask, these people are traumatized. These people are mentally damaged now. That’s what’s happening. So what do you think of that kind of argument that it’s not just bottom up? The population was subjected to trauma, Psiops.

Mark Changizi (25:08.066)
They certainly were, but to say that, no one is saying that it’s just bottom up. So for example, it’s top down and bottom up. When you have an avalanche, like a regular old avalanche on a hillside, there may be some little rock at the top that bumps into two little rocks, which bumps into a bunch of rocks, which suddenly can hit one big rock. And so that would be bottom up, because a bunch of little rocks ended up displacing a big rock.

Or you might have one big rock on the top of it that gets to somehow displace and hits a million little rocks. But of course, as it continues, those little rocks are gonna hit big rocks and displace big rocks, which will hit little rocks, which will hit more big rocks. There’s gonna be top down and bottom up forces in this sense, big things, centralized big things sitting. It’ll happen over and over again in many different ways. And if you go try to figure out what the first one was, say, oh, but yeah, but who started all of this? Yeah, you don’t really.

know whether it was one big rock, a slightly bigger, it’s usually not a gigantic rock at the top, I mean it can sometimes happen, it finally slips out. Usually it happens because the whole mountainside is ready to go and anything at the top, any little marshmallow hitting it, some very small thing is gonna be the thing that triggers the whole thing. But that small thing that triggered is kind of irrelevant. That small thing that triggered would have been something else small that triggered it tomorrow or the next day. That first little pebble that moved at the top of the avalanche,

is not the cause, who’s the culpable individuals are all the individuals that slid instead of holding on. Now we’re talking about humans. And of course, it’s more complicated than this in real life because an avalanche is just down and these kinds of avalanches are sideways. So public policy folks are exaggerating things that gets the population fearful, which makes media more likely to then cover it, which makes politicians fearful. These things go in loops.

Ahmad (27:05.163)
Thank you.

Mark Changizi (27:06.122)
Right? And that doesn’t mean there’s no one culpable. The culpable rocks are anybody that choose to not hold on tight and then thereby slid and hit more people and have got them excited. But they’re more culpable the bigger that they were or the longer that they slid. And there’s so many people that are culpable. I mean, everybody’s a little bit culpable, but the culpability gets more like epsilon amongst the regular folks on the street who basically didn’t have a voice and didn’t have any responsibility, formal responsibility.

So, for example, in the case of the PSYOPs that they were doing, yeah, but this both caused further and they’re culpable for it because they made things much worse. But they were not the first cause. They themselves, the reason that they did this was because by then, by the time they were doing it, it was already late March or April, by the way. The mass hysteria was well enforced before these even PSYOPs got up and running. But of course, they made it worse.

they were also a consequence of the mass hysteria as much as they were a further cause of it. So to understand these things, you don’t have to say that they’re not culpable. Of course they’re culpable, they’re deeply culpable. But to be culpable, you don’t have to say, it doesn’t require you to say that they’re the first cause to show culpability because that’s a kind of mistaken aim.

Ahmad (28:21.695)
So.

Ahmad (28:26.331)
No, I think this is where we part ways. I think they instigate. So I think they lobbed the dynamite to start the avalanche. I like a little avalanche analogy, but I think there would have been no avalanche if no one threw that block of dynamite and kicked it off. I mean, sometimes an avalanche can happen for sure, but the reality is we see problems. We see these constant problems.

and there’s always a reaction and they’re offered solutions. And you’ve got these global crises that require global solutions and you just need to look at the timelines. The timelines just don’t make sense. You’ve got all these pandemic preparedness meetings going on, event 201, all this kind of stuff. They were practicing everything, the way the patents were put out for Moderna and the drugs.

the way the speed of onset of the drug development just doesn’t make sense. I mean, things were being prepared years in advance and it’s there, it’s all documented.

Mark Changizi (29:32.374)
Right, but those are the… That’s not the behavior of someone who is planning as a cabal to create a plandemic, a fake pandemic, to enslave the population with chips or, you know, whatever the kinds of things that people are doing an economic reset. They don’t do things out and they open and let everybody in the event 201 still… In fact, event 201, bullet number three conclusion was do not do lockdowns. In 2019.

do not do lockdowns, right? What those are, to understand how those had an effect, these are springs that were set to activate if there was a pandemic. And there’s tons of springs set to activate. There’s all over the military industrial complex are constantly inviting academics like me, like when I was in academia, to show up and come up with a whole bunch of well-meaning, authoritarian bullshit plans to do if blah, blah were to happen.

And invariably, you go listen to the Event 201 people, like we should do all these sensorial, we gotta control misinformation, we gotta do this, all of these authoritarian, as if we’re SimCity simulations. All this authoritarian stuff that we should do to help. And there’s that Event 201-like things, and hundreds of these sorts of things, as little springs ready to just activate and explode and cause much harm once people start getting afraid, hey, I think there’s a pandemic, or I think there’s blah, blah.

All these things are set to explode and make things much worse, right? This is not evidence of pre-planning a plandemic. This is pre-planned, helpful, authoritarian bullshit that has been set for us, right? All of those things are part of the story about why things were so bad. That it was all of these things to help us, we’re ready to activate and make things much worse. Media is always ready to activate and make things much worse and since whatever people are afraid about, they’re gonna talk about more and they’re gonna ramp it up. So many of these, and politicians are,

preset activate to do look like they’re doing something so they don’t look like pussies and so they get reelected all of these things are In the sense of in one sense pre-planned but that doesn’t mean that the entire Pandemic was set as by a cabal to do this to us. No, it’s just a bunch of well-meaning Pretentious assholes in some sense set up all of these stupid ideas with no civil liberties Can you know no respect for civil liberties and no understanding of how economies work?

Mark Changizi (31:56.358)
and believing how smart they are, having the hubris to believe that they can control society and that people won’t become scared during a emergency, start violating civil liberties and seeking out groups and dividing socially up society. They had no wisdom about what they were doing. All of these things are what caused this was like having…

Ahmad (32:16.849)
So I’ve had…

I’ve heard this argument before. I can see why some people think like this. I don’t subscribe to it. So, and the reason why is there was a lot of money made by this. A lot of people enrich themselves. And when, and that wasn’t just by chance. The, you know, the super, super wealthy.

Mark Changizi (32:40.338)
Anytime anytime there’s mass hysteria If every anytime there’s mass hysteria and there’s governments that come in there and create Massive shifts like this there are tremendous Vacuums vacuums that are going to always be filled by somebody many people lost tremendous amounts of money even rich people lost tremendous amounts of money and many different groups use the opportunity like Amazon said well screw it They’re gonna if they are and then they help them if they’re gonna start You know

shutting down all these small business, what do you expect Amazon to do? They go fill in the gaps, right? This doesn’t mean that Amazon was part of a 20 year plan to do it, but they’re culpable for it.

Ahmad (33:13.799)
So, I know, but if this was all just noble, I know, but if this was all good noble people and they’re trying their best, I don’t think we would have seen the degree of draconian censorship, punishment, vilification. It was quite harsh. It was quite, it was awful. Anyone who dissented, you know, it wasn’t like, oh, we’ll accept them a dissenting voice.

proper totalitarian, you know, we’re going to decapitate this person. That these were not the actions of nice people.

Mark Changizi (33:52.514)
No, well, they’re not nice people, and they’re not noble people. But, and I have a movie called, Societal Level Evil, that I did. It’s about an hour and a half, sort of curated from my science moments here. Societal level evil, and all of the crimes against humanity that we’re familiar with, the democides and the genocides, are done by people who believe they are doing good. This has been the great moral of all the great genocides, the banality of evil. They believe they are doing good, and when only,

Ahmad (34:03.636)
Mm.

Ahmad (34:07.927)
Mm.

Mark Changizi (34:21.166)
People who believe they are doing good have the stomach to crush the number of skulls that they crush in these crimes against humanity. Mustache twiddling criminals just trying to bilk in power and money don’t have the stomach for that. In fact, many of these crimes against humanity and democides and genocides, the leaders that are doing it are often spiraling downhill. Economically, they’re losing. They do these things because they’ve come falsely to believe that they’re evil. These are evil people. True societal level evil.

are people who believe they’re doing the righteous good, but they have no respect for civil liberties or cost benefit analysis, and they’ve gotten swept up. And that’s what evil is at the societal level. If you believe that you, just because you have good intent, can’t do evil, then you yourself are right for evil. Everybody, except for normal criminals in everyday life, everybody at the societal level, all of these sides believe that they’re right. They believe that they’re good.

And this doesn’t make them good. It’s just a tautology. Of course they think they’re good. Who walks around going, aha, I’m gonna do this to those, to the world and that’s going to enrich me and that’s my go, you know, they have, they don’t just have justifications in the way that some kid justified why he stole a cookie. Their justifications come backed by the whole social community, which has evolved over time better and better justifications for their evil. That’s why it’s so deep.

It’s not just simply you coming up with bullshit justifications where you eventually, maybe you’re caught and you say, oh, I’m so sorry, I was just bullshitting. I realize now I’m wrong. No, it’s not like that. It’s completely backed by everybody that you know in the community, all these high reputation people that have created very powerful justifications for why you should do those sorts of things and why the people in the unclean out group deserve what they get, right? That’s in some sense one of the principal morals that I’ve been arguing for three years.

Ahmad (36:11.679)
So I spoke to…

Ahmad (36:17.067)
So I spoke to Ed Griffin and he said, part of the problem is you’ve got this 1% at the top who are just psychopaths and surrounded by sociopaths. And they’re the ones who’ve accumulated vast amounts of wealth and they’re the ones that control then the media and the levers of power. Do you think we’ve got a psychopath problem or you’d still think it’s the masses that are the problem?

Mark Changizi (36:43.274)
No, I mean, this is, again, this is people trying to think about sickness at the societal level and explaining it by virtue of sickness at the level of individuals. The whole point of mass hysteria and the whole point of mobs is that everybody in the mob, nobody in the mob is sick mentally. They’re all like perfectly well. The sickness is by virtue of the mob and the way that it gets whipped up.

then perfectly mentally well people do evil things and they’ve let themselves do evil things because they shouldn’t have let themselves get whipped up. They should have conformed to civil liberties. They shouldn’t have burned Judy just because everybody thought it was a good idea to burn Judy. They’re culpable. These are linear explanations. Let’s explain this dystopian craziness and the sickness that we see in society because of some sickness over here and the sickness spreads. This is not how it happens. Those people, you don’t need sickness of individuals.

They’re sick in some other sense. They’ve come to do sick things, and they’ve become sick by virtue of the whole network now believing in something sick, and they’re culpable for it. They don’t find their way into power. Psychopaths are everywhere. They’re uniformly distributed here and there, but they don’t drive these events. Psychopaths, in fact, are less likely to make it to these things. Psychopaths have lots of mental problems that make them unable disproportionately

Ahmad (37:45.727)
But you know there’s psychopaths- psychopaths do exist.

Ahmad (37:57.385)
Haven’t you looked at-

Mark Changizi (38:05.242)
unable to find themselves to those heights of powers.

Ahmad (38:07.967)
Wasn’t there a study that showed like there’s a disproportionate number of psychopaths and the boards of big companies, the higher up you go, the more.

Mark Changizi (38:21.114)
It sounds like utter bullshit. I mean, that’s one of these bullshit studies. The moral that we saw in Nazi Germany was these great, powerful Nazi leaders and generals that were involved. When you actually talk, they were regular, banal, normal, boring, non-mustache twiddling, smart, non-psychopath people that had come to do the greatest evils of all. And that’s the moral that we have to keep learning every generation.

If you want to understand the evils that people are doing, you have to get into their heads. They believe they’re doing good. It doesn’t mean they are good. And just because, oh, you’re saying they’re well-intentioned and so they’re good, no. I’m telling you, some people say, well, I think that evil people have horns in their head, which it just doesn’t make an exaggeration. I say, no, evil in the real world don’t have horns on their head. Oh, why are you defending evil people? No, I’m not defending you. I’m trying to tell you the math and the psychology of where evil is at the societal level.

It’s not people who believe that they’re doing evil and understand that they’re doing evil. They don’t understand. The people that understand they’re doing evil are mafia. They get it. You know, we’re in the criminal world. We get that. Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed whatever, 60 men, he knew he was doing evil. In fact, he kind of wanted to stop. He apparently says, but I just can’t. I have a compulsion to do it. This is not a model of societal level evil. It is much worse in societal level evil.

Ahmad (39:40.532)
Mmm.

Ahmad (39:44.693)
Mmm.

Mark Changizi (39:46.934)
because they feel justified to do it and they will keep on doing it and keep crushing skulls way beyond what any kind of rationality in terms of self-engrandizement would ever justify.

Ahmad (39:58.619)
All right, well Mark, now we need some solutions. So how do we prevent this from happening again? How do we fix this societal problem?

Mark Changizi (40:07.422)
Yeah, so this is the kind of things that I’m working on, trying to work on, free of stuff. I’m trying to think about are there structures to social networks, ways of structuring social networks is ultimately one of the problems that occurred this time was that it’s the same kinds of psychosocial forces that have, you know, harmed humanity and have always harmed humanity. And they typically happened in this little part of the world and lots of people would get killed, righteously get killed because of some stupid idea. And

More recently, it’s happened, of course, in Germany, in communist China and Iran, and often people in the West would just say, well, the Germans are a little stiff and rigid, and we make jokes about it, and we come up with some reason why it couldn’t happen here, but it happened to the Germans. And certainly the Iranians are, you know, the Persians, it’s totally different than us, and communist revolution, it couldn’t happen here, because, well, they’re Chinese, they’re really far away. No, it can happen to anybody, and it has happened to everybody, to anybody over time. What was different was that now we’re all connected by social media.

And so they don’t just stop in the village or the borders, they can spread worldwide. And so if you end up with this kind of sickness traveling through, it really can devastate the world, not just over there, right? So are there ways of structuring social networks so that it’s still consistent civil liberties or not like having the governments come and do something, but where you can have them so that they can prevent or more likely inhibit the spread of these sorts of sick, sick group thinking kinds of things when they.

if they were to occur. And so those are some of the things that I’m working with. More down to earth though, are a couple of things. One is being aloof. And I talked about this before. I think often the reason that people who got swept up in COVID hysteria, the reason they got swept up was where they sat within the network. I have always tried to be aloof as a scientist because I’m always trying to move to some new field as a theorist, I won’t stay in one field. I need to move to different fields to hope to have a new idea where I can make some kind of grand.

you know, difference. And so I’ve always tried to remain aloof. I left academia to be aloof and started my own company so that I could have my intellectual freedom to be aloof. And it also gave me political aloofness, which I didn’t really plan on. And I think that certainly helped me be independent during COVID. But if I had been sitting in academia amongst all of the typical leftist, 97, you know, 99% leftist, and hadn’t always been trying to be aloof, I might’ve been the biggest Karen of them all. I’m not sure. I hope I wouldn’t have been.

Mark Changizi (42:30.326)
But we all believe what we believe because of the network around us, right? I’m a scientist, I’ve got a couple dozen things that I’ve discovered, so I’ve got like maybe 24 things that I know because I know them. All the other 99 million things that I believe, it’s because somebody in my network told me so and I believe them because I trust them. Same for all of us. So if I’d been sitting in that network where they all told me the COVID was disproportionately dangerous and altogether novel and we have to do all of these interventions, which are totally, are obviously common sense.

Well, who am I to say now that I wouldn’t have believed them? It’s too easy just to say, no, I’m totally, no, I would have believed them because I sat in the wrong part of the network. So being aloof, always trying to remain not part of these socio-political communities and trying to recognize that these socio-political communities look like they’re getting kind of group thinking and to say, I don’t wanna be part of that. Everybody, you should not wanna be part of anybody’s club, is the general rule. But the most important rule is,

civil liberties and that emergencies do not justify civil liberties violations. Civil liberties are not one of the variables that we optimize when we’re doing utilitarian calculations. We don’t say when you have a backyard, for example, and you haven’t done anything to your new backyard of your house, you have to do utilitarian calculation in terms of how much of it you wanted to devote to a deck and to a…

pool into a frisbee space into a garden. And you know, the more of one leads to less of the other. What you don’t do is say, I’d like to push my fence a little bit into Doug the neighbor’s yard, right? No, that’s an inviolable constraint. You’re constrained, you’re not allowed to violate the civil liberties or the property rights of your neighbors. That’s a constraint. Civil liberties is not something that is thrown into the mix when we’re trying to optimize how much.

welfare to have, how much transport, how good our transportation or our Medicaid, Medicare should be and all the different kinds of things, how much military spending. No, it is an inviolable constraint and we have to treat it as such. And as soon as people think there’s an emergency, the first thing that they do is say, oh, well, now’s the time when we get rid of civil liberties because there’s an emergency. No, civil liberties are for the emergencies. The only reason we have civil liberties, the only, just like free expression, the only reason we have free expression is for.

Mark Changizi (44:52.45)
the statements of people who we disagree with, greatly disagree, that we should despise. I don’t need to have a notion of free expression for me to want to protect the views of all the folks that are saying stuff I agree with. The whole point is when people are saying things that I despise and I think hurts the world, I think they’re genuinely hurting the world, it’s then that free speech, the principles of free speech rise. Someone say, no, you’re not allowed to do that. The whole point of free speech is that, is that situation. The whole point of civil liberties is that when suddenly people are afraid there’s a perceived emergency,

and they want to say, Doug, you can’t do this or go there anymore. And Judy, we got to control all… No, look, that’s when civil liberties matter because no one’s trying to take their civil liberties away when they’re not afraid. Civil liberties is all about the emergencies. It’s especially for the emergencies. And in fact, the greatest emergency there has ever been and will ever be is when populations want to remove civil liberties because of emergencies. That’s the path towards the great genocides, democides and crimes against humanity.

Ahmad (45:51.935)
We’re back on track. I agree with all of that, 100%. And it’s like freedom of speech. I don’t think freedom of speech is being allowed to say something that the majority likes or the minority likes. It’s about you being allowed to say whatever you want regardless. No one should be able to shackle you and hold you down, just like your civil liberties. It can’t be for the greater good. And I think there’s a lot of greater good business going on.

including, for example, like the climate thing agenda we’re seeing, it’s all about the greater good. And it’s very similar, I think, the parallels with COVID. You know, the virtue signaling, oh, look, I’m a good person, I subscribe to this. I am trying to save the planet. I’m not even trying to save you or granny, I’m actually trying to save the planet. I mean, what is more noble than saving the planet? But there seems to be a lot of these crises and virtue signaling and how…

Seriously, Mark, how do we fix this? How do we fix this so that people don’t get run away by the mob? You know, the mob baying for blood and their righteous indignation. How do we get humanity out of this so that we can transcend to a better place?

Mark Changizi (47:10.822)
Yeah, so I mean, I suppose I don’t think we will ever remove those, the psychology underlying that and because we’re always in groups, we’re social animals, those things are always going to pop up. Having in addition to having a degree of aloofness that should hopefully somewhat insulate one from falling into that and having an appreciation for civil liberties and having it embedded more in the heads of people in society because if people don’t really believe in civil liberties, it doesn’t matter.

how many formal structural things we put in government. If the population really doesn’t believe it, those things will all break and it’ll just pass right through it and the civil liberties will be violated. So having a true belief that it’s taboo, like not wearing pants, like going under pantless to a restaurant, that it’s a taboo to break civil liberties is something that needs to be in everybody’s heads, but it really has to be in everybody’s heads. It’s not enough to be…

an abstract thing that a few people in government or professors understand.

Ahmad (48:14.355)
No, I like that, I like that. So where do you stand when it comes to government? So I don’t like the idea of a government. I don’t want to be governed. I believe in a state and a republic, if you wanna have that. But I’m essentially very libertarian at heart. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do. As long as I’m not harming anyone, I should. All right.

Mark Changizi (48:35.07)
Yeah, so I’m a libertarian. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, libertarians, little-l libertarians like me are happy to use the word government for the minimal state that most of us do think there still needs to be a minimal state because, and they’re happy to call whatever that is government. But yeah, I’m a little-l libertarian. Definitely.

Ahmad (48:57.003)
Yeah, off air we were talking about how people who speak out against the prevailing narrative get censored or punished. So you mentioned a little bit, I think it’s worth talking about this. So what has your experience been speaking out against the masks? You did a video I think and you talked about mask mandates. You’ve talked about a lot of things infringing on people’s civil liberties. I mean this all sounds like really good stuff, but what’s the response been like amongst your peers and your profession?

Mark Changizi (49:29.27)
Uh, you know, I mean, uh, certainly, uh, a lot of my former peers don’t like the fact that I stood up. They, they, from the beginning, they, they reached out and just would attack me and saying, how dare I do this? I’m a MAGA for this is of course, when Trump was pro lockdown, Trump was pro mass, Trump was pro vaccine. So I’m not really sure in what sense I’m pro MAGA. Um, but no, I certainly became, uh, quickly an outcast of not just to academia, but to friends and family. Right? I mean.

literally almost everybody except for a small group thought I was crazy people would reach out and say Mark are you okay what’s wrong with you that you’re actually you know so they believed despite me being the only scientist they often knew because not everybody knows inside it means nothing because from their point of view they had heard all the experts and so another scientific opinion was meaningless. So

Uh, yeah, so I’m not sure what the question was now, but yeah, I’ve certainly been on about free expression and masks, yeah, for three and a half years.

Ahmad (50:34.076)
What?

Ahmad (50:38.771)
Basically, have you paid the price? Have you paid the price for your views? I mean, I wanted to tell you about… No, no, carry on, carry on.

Mark Changizi (50:43.962)
Oh yeah. Yeah, I… Yeah.

Mark Changizi (50:51.63)
No, I say, yeah, and we had briefly talked about this off air and I presume your audience knows your story. And my story, I’ll mention it. I mean, given how many people lost their jobs and their proper businesses, I don’t really, my case is comparatively small. But, and it helped that I was out of academia because I was out of, for 12 years I left academia, started my own research institute, started my own vein finder company so that I could be aloof, so that I could have my intellectual freedom, which again helped me be.

independently free once sort of this kind of stuff happened. But when COVID hit within the first few months, all the science journalists that I relied on for my books, you know, they promote them. They had quickly said, we don’t want to cover Mark anymore. In fact, they had a tweet floating around saying that it would be great if we could create like an app that blacklists people like Mark’s that we showed up at the bookstore or whatever. It would say, oh, don’t buy Mark’s book. Right. And so.

science journalists which are, you know, had basically blacklisted me. And then when my sixth book, which my last book is Expressly Human and the Origins of Emotional Expressions, sort of answering Darwood’s question about why do we have emotional expressions, what are they for, this sort of tells, it’s a grand explanation for why and how they serve, why we have them and how they serve as our real language before we ever had language. This was 10 years in the making, but by 2022 when it came out, not only was I blacklisted among science journalists,

Um, but the Biden administration had already been censoring me for two years. I was, uh, suspended six times, permanently suspended once, and then under, uh, sensitive content. So I was treated as a porn star. You know, you could, you could go in there and you could see where they clicked it into sensitive content mode. And I couldn’t unclick. You can’t unclick. So for two years, my, um, you know, my impressions went up and then it just crashed almost nothing for two years. So when the government.

This is my lawsuit, Chang’ezi versus the Biden administration. I was the first lawsuit, first amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration. And we just got, we appealed and they rejected our appeal saying that we didn’t have standing. It wasn’t even on the basis of the, the Missouri case came out after us three or four months. There was much more documents by then available for them when we went to court first. They look like they’re going to Supreme court soon. So that’d be great. We ourselves are, are contesting this. There’s more to our story.

Mark Changizi (53:15.35)
But so when the federal government censors you, when science journalists censor you, they effectively have censored your book. They have effectively done a book censoring because if you can’t promote your book, you effectively have a censored book.

Ahmad (53:31.291)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s different ways of censoring. You can put physical gag on you. You can lock you away, or they can deprive you of your ability to promote your work and your book. They can deprive your ability to go on social media. They can deprive you of your income. And if you’ve got no income and you can’t do your job, well, they’ve censored you, haven’t they? I mean, there’s lots of different ways to censor. So my wife is a junior doctor, and she was at work today. And one of the consultants told her,

You need to keep your husband out of trouble.

Ahmad (54:07.535)
What do you think of that? I don’t think I’m actually doing anything that’s troubling. All I’m doing is speaking to people like yourself, and I’ve got views that are not the same as the government. It’s funny, if you agree with the government, you’re never called a conspiracy theorist. If you agree with the government, you’re never censored. Isn’t that funny? It’s only if you disagree with them that you get these problems.

Mark Changizi (54:10.908)
What?

Ahmad (54:35.935)
The idea that the government is always right is just ridiculous. The idea that the government is noble and paternal, is theirs, never makes mistakes, and is your best friend and has your interest at heart is a very naive and stupid one.

Mark Changizi (54:49.778)
And even if it was, and if for some reason God was protecting it and made sure that they were always trying their best, which of course you shouldn’t believe, even so, this is the path to falsehood, to preventing, I mean, you don’t find the truth by ensuring that there’s no misinformation. Most published journal articles are false.

and it’s only a matter of time before we realize they’re false. There’s in fact a half-life people study. How many years does it take for this, you know, for the average paper to be realized to be false? But it’s on the rungs of false journal articles that science progresses and gets towards the truth. It’s on the rungs of misinformation that we move our way towards the truth. You can’t just ban misinformation. This is part of the conversation. Every debate has two folks arguing and very often.

Ahmad (55:25.33)
Yeah

Mark Changizi (55:43.978)
at most one side can be correct. That doesn’t mean you don’t debate, right? This is what it’s all about.

Ahmad (55:48.795)
And if we, you know, what kind of society are we creating if we’re not allowed to have mistakes and we’re not allowed to make mistakes? I mean, I tell my kids, you learn from your mistakes. I mean, I’d be a really bad dad if I said, no mistakes, no mistakes. They’re like, what dad? No, you have to ban all mistakes. It’s like, you learn most of your life, well, most of my life is mistakes. I shouldn’t say that on air, but.

I’ve made so many mistakes in my life, but I don’t look back and go, oh, I wish I could take them all away. I’m really glad I made those mistakes because I learned from them and I am where I am today because of them. So yeah, I think we do need to kind of reevaluate science and the way we’re talking about because they seem to be popping up everywhere like little mushrooms, you know, these misinformation, disinformation units, what you are allowed to say, the online safety bill. I don’t know if you heard in the UK, we’ve had an online safety bill to prevent misinformation.

And it’s like, who’s misinformation? What might be true to me might not be true to you. You know, it’s just like, it’s a bit crazy. I think it’s just getting ridiculous.

Mark Changizi (56:53.074)
But it’s important to recognize that though that, again, like natural selection and some of these kinds of emergent processes I’m describing, the intuition that we should censor misinformation is highly intuitive. Most people, to understand how free markets work, requires centralized control of markets is actually kind of intuitive. You’re like, how the heck are we going to create?

companies and stuff that creates all of this cool stuff around me, including iPhones that I’m watching this on, which are literally like masterful devices that you can’t even believe. How is it possible that a bunch of just people out there can distribute all of these goods and can make them all across society and the prices are gonna find, right? It’s mind boggling. Same thing for free expression. How is it that all these people, this chaotic mess of arguments going on across billions of people and trillions of pairwise conversations can lead towards the truth? There’s just no way to.

build designed things, namely truthy things or well-designed functional things that feed people and make people, you know, their lives richer, surely you need a designer that does this. So, it’s super counterintuitive and which is why it has to be explained in every generation how these decentralized market-like forces, whether it’s natural selection or free markets or the free market of ideas, how they are really able to do amazing things.

design in this case, finding the truth. But you have to remember when you’re doing that, that it’s super counterintuitive. And so you have to re-educate every generation about this because it isn’t intuitive. It is not intuitive that you can find the truth without centralized folks just figuring it out. Shouldn’t it just be a bunch of really smart scientists that just figure out the truth and tell everybody? We can laugh at it, but we have to remember it is actually the most obvious idea, right? It is super…

weird that that’s not the way to go, right? So try to remember that and then always, I’m trying to come up with new ways of trying to different angles to say, here’s why that could never work and here’s why this other thing in fact works. And it’s super, you know, what you think is super intuitive is very often in fact false and always trying to find, but it’s not simple, right? And to pretend that free expression.

Mark Changizi (59:10.71)
is super obviously going to lead to the truth, where essentializing isn’t so simple. I mean, it’s true, but it is super counter-truth.

Ahmad (59:20.207)
Mark, can I ask you something? Do you believe in God?

Mark Changizi (59:23.722)
Yeah. I do not. I’m an atheist. I’ve been, I’m a defender of religion for many years. I’ve done science moments where, unlike my colleagues, so like, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe there’s a God. I think that it’s clearly either false or not even false, depending on how you want to think about these things. I think that, so one of the things I’ve studied is cultural evolution.

Ahmad (59:25.044)
You do.

Okay… Uh, okay…

Mark Changizi (59:53.174)
The reason that we have, that we can speak at all, we didn’t evolve to speak. We speak because cultural evolution shaped the sounds of speech to sound like things that our auditory system is already brilliant at hearing. Namely, it’s like solid object events. We’re good at hearing hits and slides and rings and the grammar of sounds of solid object. The reason that we can read and write is because cultural evolution is a masterful designer and it created writing systems, hundreds of writing systems. When you look across hundreds of writing systems like I’ve done in my old research,

Writing systems have come to look like nature. The contour conglomerations that you find in writing look like the contour conglomerations that happen in natural scenes, thereby harnessing your visual system, which is for recognizing objects, and turning it into a modern reading brain, which it never evolved to be. Tons of what we take to be human, our human selves, aren’t biologically human selves. I call them human 2.0s that we are today. We do all of these things we never evolved to do, not because we’re really plastic and we do these new weird things. No, it’s because cultural evolution

shaped new things that it wants us to do, artifacts made them fit our unchanging brains and transformed our brain to be tricked into thinking it’s doing old things, but it’s actually doing new things. Religion is just another one of these things. Now, religion is too complicated for me to study. I can, as a theorist, I’m good at handling, let’s say, letters with three contours. I can begin to make sense of that and look at, but man, religion is a gazillion times more complicated.

But the moral that you get from doing these sorts of studies is that these things that humans have created, whether it’s writing systems or language or music, music has culturally evolved to sound like a human moving in your midst, so there’s another whole book on that. These cultural artifacts have culturally evolved over time to be designed to fit human brains to do things for us that have been selected for. It is not just some, it’s whether religion is good or bad or useful, it’s not about whether the propositions that they’re stating are

you know, literally true. That’s kind of just ridiculous. No, there are complex evolved structures which are, have all of this design in terms of how they interact with human brains and societies and trying to fully understand what they’re for in this deeper sense is super difficult. I can’t claim to even begin to try to address these things, but I treat religions more in this way as things people need to revere and not just presume that they’re bullshit. They’re not, they’re deeply evolved entities.

Mark Changizi (01:02:20.13)
which interact with us and they should be studied in their own right. Now that they may not always be for good, they could sometimes really maybe screw everybody up. But they should be treated as a complex animal and deserving of respect in the way that a lion might eat you also and deserves respect for its biology at a minimum.

Ahmad (01:02:37.163)
Thanks for watching!

The reason why I’m asking is the last question I ask relates to death and meeting your maker. And I kind of sense that you’re an atheist and I got it right. So I’m gonna change the question for you. I don’t subscribe to any religion by the way, but for some reason I do believe in a God and a creator. I just have to. And I’ve got no evidence, I’ve got no proof.

But it’s just, yeah, I just, I believe that there’s a creator. Anyway, so the question is, imagine Mark Chingazi. I don’t know, actually, do you have any children either? Do you have any children?

Mark Changizi (01:03:20.63)
You have two kids, young adults.

Ahmad (01:03:22.151)
Okay, wonderful. So imagine you’re now 139 and you’re on your deathbed. Now, this is where I’m not gonna say you’re gonna meet your maker, because you’re an atheist. But you’re about to pass away and you’re very comfortable in your deathbed. You’ve had a great long life and your family’s around you, your great grandchildren, the whole shebang. Now, before you pass away, what words of advice and wisdom, health or otherwise, would you give them?

Mark Changizi (01:03:53.614)
Put on a mask. Yeah, that would be, I mean, it would be funny if people knew my background, they’d just get a good laugh. Yeah, that’s a good question. In terms of a very short tweet as the final thing that you want to say. Yeah, I guess, you know, one of the…

Ahmad (01:03:59.565)
Ha!

Ahmad (01:04:07.253)
Put on a mask, I love it.

Mark Changizi (01:04:21.298)
setting aside all of these political things and ethical things and I suppose, you know, my aim in life since I was young, I was a Carl Sagan kid I think one of the you know, my aim in life was to answer the questions of the universe ever since I’ve been ten and watched Carl Sagan’s cosmos and I think sometimes I myself forget those romantic roots. My career’s all been romantically about trying to figure out why there’s the life universe and everything, you know, that kind of thing and I think it’s

I think it’s helpful to just jaw people’s memories about it is amazingly wonderful that there is a life and there’s universe and everything and why is that the case so that they can really just try to occasionally focus on these really deep questions about why we’re all here and if there’s meaning to any of it at all and just so I think that would probably be the kind of thing that I’d like to poke some folks to sometimes get out of their normal

group, even if we’re not in a group think, we’re all in a group think in the sense that we sometimes forget about the life, the universe and everything. And occasionally you think about all that and what it all means.

Ahmad (01:05:32.007)
100%, you know what, get out there in the dark in the middle of the night and look up at the stars. Just think how small and insignificant we are. Mark, it’s been lovely chatting to you. It’s been really nice. Thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate it’s very early where you are. Thank you for accommodating me. God bless you. Thank you everyone, bye bye.

Mark Changizi (01:05:47.534)
It’s been great to meet you.