[Music] Hey fellow Guners, those of us like our spirituality with a twist. Daniel was giving me this grid and trying to see if he could [...] my [...] up. No, you're good. You do it every week. Um, all right. So, um, we're in the midst of like our next subject matter, which is really talking about cults. And it seems to be to a very timely and really important conversation to our to our eyes, to our minds. I can say honestly, I'm not especially interested in cults overall. And I know we talked about last week, Daniel, but when I was like kind of prepping my side of this, I didn't remember. Do you find that interesting at all or That's why we're doing it. Well, no, but like the David Cares and the Jonestowns, do you find that subject matter interesting? Yeah, from a psychological perspective, for sure. Okay. They vaguely interesting. Okay. I'm like semi-interested in that, but that's actually not, you know, our main thing. It's more because seems like now in the world we're living in this kind of deadly web of cults. Yeah. Controlling everything and it's pretty dangerous times in the sense that it's really dominated by cults. So, we wanted to explore that. Um, but before we do, speaking of dangerous webs, oh, I'll ask you to do the thing that everyone asks at the beginning of every video, which is to like, subscribe, do the things. So, uh, we can you can help our little G&T podcast get out of the dangerous webs of the evil arachnoid like algorithm that wants to entrap all of us when its webs find us. So, if you can do that, that would be great. always helps out every every podcast that you ever watch in your life. They ask you to do it because it'll help with the algorithm and we all need to liberate oursel from the evil spiderlike webs of the algorithm. But to our episode then um so I mean I was just going to like we did the other episode but just like I thought context for it. It seems then important to look at sort of the psychology behind cult mentality or something like that. Yeah. Yep. and especially what makes people vulnerable to that kind of thinking because people seem to be vulnerable to this, right? And then maybe in the end as we go along each episode or however it plays itself out, but we'll also talk about the spirituality of this. Yeah. And then hopefully how spirituality with a twist can help break us out of this. I do see like we're It's weird. When I was doing the psychology of this, I was like, "Yeah, we really are trying to do something about this in our own little small way." Sure. Making a contribution, but how spirituality can break us out of all this individually and then maybe hopefully ultimately collectively too. All right. So, I was kind of putting together stuff on the psychology of this. Daniel and I talked about it and um I did look at like kind of textbooks on sociology, textbooks on social psychology. It's interesting because I looked in the index of these things. Like I had these sources and there really isn't that much form, as we said last time, there's not really formal definitions of cults or like official formal positions about cults that you find very easily. It just it isn't like a formalized thing. What I've seen with this, someone else has any more information about that, but I'm not finding it. So, it's not a formal definition thing, but I went to sources that were social psychology things and sociology things. I wanted to give a specific credit to one of the people I used for this though, which is the Dr. AJ Marsden for her approach to this because I thought it was simple and straightforward. She really kind of highlights three big ideas behind like the psychology of cults. I thought, well, that's really kind of direct and to the point, but on the other hand, it's like what she does is also very kind of deep in the psych literature. So, it's not like oversimplified either. and she's really tapping into ideas that you kind of can recognize if you know the psych stuff of what she's saying. Sure. So, anyways, want to give a shout out to her. Yeah. She was on this place called Beacon University, which I never heard of, or Beacon College, maybe. And it was interesting because it's directed to students with learning disabilities and ADHD, and she's giving a lecture in a way that's kind of designed for that audience, but when I was listening to it, I was like, "No, she's really going for this." And she went for some pretty deep psychology in it. So anyways, just to get props out, you know, to someone that I sourced around this. So anyways, yeah, our idea is like I'll throw the I'll throw the ideas out to you, Daniel. I'm interested in your opinions and we'll kind of like take it apart as we go. Yeah. Right. Um Okay. So the perspective on this in this way of thinking about it boils it down to three main ideas. And I think maybe in this conversation we'll just end up focusing on the first one because there's a lot to say about each of these and they're deep subjects but she has like kind of three ideas and I thought well this is great you know so the first she lists is this idea of the problem of conformity. Now, these sounds like these are just normal everyday English words, but actually they're being used in kind of like technical ways because there's a kind of a social psychology of conformity and what that means from like a social psych sense. So, we all know the word, but they're using it more like a psych concept. So the psych the psychological concept of conformity and research around it with that to me as far as a cult goes. I think that gets to the idea of conformity and like a shared ideology too. Yeah. Which is something we talked about last week, right? When we were kind of introducing the whole idea of what we're trying to be up to here. Yeah. And then she talked about this thing called social cohesion, which almost sounds like it would be saying the same thing, conformity and social cohesion, but it's not because it's being used in kind of a technical way. So, this is going to be kind of deep stuff. We're going to go for it, too. We probably won't talk about these other two in this episode, but we'll get to them whether we do this over like two episodes or three episodes or something. But you know the social cohesion thing is a little bit like a sociology concept and it has to do with how you build you know again like solidarity within a community a little bit different even than conformity and some different theory around that. So we'll throw it out for people to think about and then the last of this gets this idea and she said it interesting. She said charismatic or divine power. Meaning it could be a charismatic leader or it might be just sort of like a charismatic oligarchy of people at the top or a charismatic sort of hierarchy or something with also the idea of like charismatic power behind it or divine power where you're sort of saying that there's something bigger going on. So it could be in a leader, it could be in a movement. One of the people I was listening to was talking about the Jehovah Witnesses and she was debating like whether or not that's a cult or not. She definitely thought it was. This is a Dr. Alexandria Stain. She spells it Stein but pronounces it Stain. So, well, we're going to have on somebody uh a friend of mine in a few weeks who left the Jehovah's Witness. And actually, you know, Todd, who's been on a couple times with us, grew up as a Jehovah's Witness. I can get a hold of him and they would agree it's definitely a cult, you know. Okay. So, you've heard that from people who are participants. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because, you know, I think one one thing and I mean we're going to go over this for sure, but one of the things about a cult, you have to break from it. Yeah. Like, and that's it's what you know, I don't know if that's I don't I didn't I didn't see it in the notes that you had here, but like the leaving up a little bit in the end or something how you start to make space to get out of it. Yeah. It's like from the question of conformity, we can look at it from other points of view too, but right. Yeah. Like in in a in a socially, you know, like social conformity, you know, you have to kind of follow the rules, but there's there's wiggle room within the rules. You could still be, you know, like in high school, you have emo people, people dressed in all black and dark, what, you know, like there's still they're they're in their own kind of mini thing within the within the culture still. Um, but they don't have to break from culture. you know, you could just stop listening to like death metal, you know, and and move over to like grunge, you know what I'm saying? Like it's a last thing. Whereas, but like you can't be in the cult like a little bit. You're either in it or you're not in it. There's Well, this is the part that really interests me because I'm like, we both have our own perspectives on this, but I'm very interested in like the the the layers of difference between like cult Jehovah's Witness and then other aspects of conformity. Like I'm really kind of fascinated by Sure. Yeah. But it's obviously like if you're in a real small little subculturally cult like that cult you might say, right? Yeah. Technical cult. That's its own thing, right? Yeah. How you right. Well, and that's part of that's part of it too, right? It's the isolation, you know? So, you can't be like uh you know, you can't be like a part-time Menanite. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And work like that. like you can't be a Scientologist on the weekend, you know, like Yeah. Well, yeah, the Scientology one. We'll play with it, right? Yeah. You know, we both have these things. I don't know like from that point of view, sort of interested in cults from that more narrow point of view. And I'm interested in hearing people's experiences for sure. Yeah. Right. But I'm like I'm also kind of fascinated. Well, we'll do the psychology conformity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And we'll see what we think. Yeah. Anyway, she put this idea of conformity, social cohesion, and then this sense of like a charismatic leader or divine power. Oh, you know, the reason she was talking about Jehovah's Witnesses, and I guess we'll hear from the people that know it in this way, right, that participate in it, was that there probably was a charismatic leader in the beginning, but it's not the case now, right? But the energy of that sense like continues on or something, right? It's like a kingdom to be the leader isn't gone or something. Yeah. It's like a kingdom in a sense, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Mhm. And they um what is it? I mean, it it hasn't really held up so well, but you know, the one of the social uh so sociologists of of fame of of lore uh from the Middle East, Iben Khalun, if you're a sociologist, he's a you know, famous kind of a guy in there. Um four generations is what he says, right? the first generation that rises and then their progeny their progeny their progeny is the last one after that it is it is something different you know oh so when you get a group like that eventually it it like just spreads and it like it won't carry through the generations eventually it starts to become yes yes but you know the difference is that like at that time resources were money were resources all of which had to be continually ually uh acquired. Mhm. Whereas money is now a little bit more static. You can increase money with generations as opposed to decrease it. And so I think it's a it maybe you know I don't know if it works as well, but I'm not I'm not completely wellversed in his. I've only I've had uh one course on sociology and he was kind of like the main focus of it. So but I digress. That's cool. Well, you know, the thing that struck me about this was that you can have a leader and then, you know, that could be the charismatic power and that or within a movement. So, we were kind of talking about that last episode and I don't mind saying this and Daniel can take whatever attitude with this that he feels right with, but I don't mind talking about the Elon cult. I think that's totally fine. I think it's fine to say that that's a cult. That's a cult for sure. Yeah, that's a cult. And so, you know, you have this divine leader, you have like that kind of thing or like, and I don't mind saying it too, like the Trump culture. Yeah. Right. And it was interesting as I was doing some of the research around this, I went to listen to some of the Christians who sort of pulled away from that, you know, Christian circles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I only got to I only got to two of the three. I got one more listen. Okay. Got one more to go. All right. That's cool. Yeah. Uh, one of the guys was David French, who I guess he's a known person. And I can't remember the other guy. I kind of like him like to the extent that he's very honest, you know. Um, and he was part of the Southern Baptist Council or something. I get the dude's name later. But anyways, that it was interesting because this idea of charismatic or divine power like in our Elon episode, there was all this like over overarching transcendent. I'm going to save humanity, preserve the species, preserve the consciousness, get us out in the solar system and every [...] Star Trek thing you can think of, you know? So, there was that side of it. And then within the Trump cult, it was interesting listening to them because they're like there's this whole subculture of like prophecies now. Yeah. Around him and then this weird logic of almost like he's so unlikely that isn't that what God would do? He's such a paradoxical figure. He's such an unlikely savior figure that it must be true. Maybe unlikable is is a better described shooting match. Yeah. Yeah. So the like the more he's an [...] Mhm. The more unlikely he is, the more the prophecies flow. Oh. Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't like put the term in here from the psych literature, but there's this thing called cognitive dissonance. Hey, where like once you're in, you tend to rationalize things. Yes, you do. And so this idea that like okay well these prophecies are things that are built around you know this cognitive dissonance thing psychologically it's required actually Eric. Yeah but it's interesting because you know they they were just talking about like okay now we're in this circle of people who we thought were our fellow Christians and we were in the same space and now realize oh no we're not. And they're kind of going, I think, from their own perspectives, they're going, "Oh, cult." And they're trying to back away from it. And a lot of pressure. I'll kind of maybe reference some stuff as we go, but a lot of weird pressure. Sure. Right. So, just to like kind of make to make it clear, and I don't know how you feel about this, Daniel, but just to make it clear that we're not just being like lefty people. No. By saying this, I don't I think it's just objective. I think we're just trying to be objective. And it's fair to say that there are left and right-wing cults. It doesn't have to be all on one side of a political spectrum. Yeah, it's totally fine, right? Yeah. Uh even that uh Dr. Alexandria Stain I was talking about earlier, she has a whole thing where she talks about her experiences being in kind of a left-wing political cult where it was built around like political action and you know elements of social justice which could be good things but it was sort of culty, right? and she got kind of stuck in it and yeah know like her life got more and more kind of taken over by that. So she was kind of an interesting tale to tell. Maybe we'll share more about that later but it it wasn't just about like just to criticize people on one side or other of the aisle and I was remembering back because there was sort of a little line that people would talk about like Obama bots back in the day. people who were so interested in Obama, President Obama, which can respect, first black president and you know, he was an important person, you know, history of the country and and you know, certainly from my perspective broke years of like again really culty stuff going on. Sure. But you know, like it wasn't like everything he did was good, right? And no, for us we could say, you know, there's problems. He didn't handle the financial crisis in the right way. It was a weird thing where and we don't do a lot of political stuff, but you know, he didn't he didn't put people in jail who probably should have been put in jail. It never Correct. Right. And there's other problems with that. So, you know, it's not to be blind on one side or the other with this, you know, while still acknowledging that like the Elon and Trump things are cults. I just want to do the disclaimer. Anything more you think we need to say about that or that's all good? No, I think that's good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I mean I think it's fair to just be objective about it to say, "Hey, this is cult [...] We gota just you got to call it out for what it is." Yeah. I mean I think at any point if you are my my guess is most of our audience is probably a little bit more liberalleleaning just in general. That'd be my guess. Um, but even if even if not, regardless of where you sit on the spectrum, if you know, free thinking and criticism of the same side of the aisle that you're on is not allowed or is uh shamed, you know, you're shamed for it, then you're probably too far in. What whatever whatever it is, it doesn't it doesn't really matter, right? You're too far in. If Elon is uh you know too special to be criticized, you're too far in. Yeah. And simultaneously if you know whatever whoever whatever I there is no there's no figure on the left at this point that is you know important enough to even talk about. Yeah. Exactly. You know but what pick your favorite you know pick your favorite person I guess. you know, if they're too uh too much, too too big or too sensitive or whatever to be criticized and you find that, you know, people who you normally would share views with are antithetical to even hearing that kind of criticism, then you're too far that you're you're too far down that road either. So the the goal is to free is to highlight some of these things to free one's thinking because for me you know and the motivation in bringing this in doing this is that I see this and and we we both agree with this we see this as a problem as a large problem in society one that is like we can call it like maybe a social epidemic if you will and you know in Buddhist practice they they talk about like the suffering uffing of change, the suffering of conditioning and then the kind of the suffering of like the body aspects, body emotions, you know. But the the second one, the suffering of conditioning is is twofold is the the conditioning of the ego, right? That you're an isolated being outside of other other humans and other sentient beings is one one aspect. But then the the sort of meta aspect, it's the conditioning of your family. It's the conditioning of your gender. It's the conditioning of society. And they mention this and it is, you know, as I do my practice every day and I know Eric does his practice, you know, every day. This is part of the acknowledgement when you practice is that you are intentionally softening the hardness that comes through with conditioning. Conditioning that is placed upon you. And so in this aspect, I feel like this is part of our work as practitioners um of these kinds of philosophies is to bring this forth, you know, to the people who are are, you know, working with us or listening to us, consuming what it is that we're, you know, presenting to do this consciously. And at this particular point, we are sort of counterculture to the narrative that is being presented by the vast majority of the media and the sort of center right. Now we can argue that point, but the center right leanings of the politics of this country at this time and even center right is kind of, you know, that's being polite about it. I am being polite about it because at some point we're going to start dunking on people and so I got to start center and then slowly work my work work my way over. But we're doing this not from the um place of being like specifically political because there's enough of that that's out there but being specifically spiritually minded in approaching society as an external representation of our practice. So yes, it's important to have um you know an ideology philosophy that you're working with or whatever, but we also have to realize we're not isolated beings, you know, as this is one of the rec the areas of recognition for us. We're not isolated beings and we live in society. So at some point something has to be done. What what what should be done? What is that point? That is not for you know us to necessarily say but our goal and I could or I can see speak for myself. goal is to, you know, work with Eric and and and whoever else is going to be presenting these materials with us to provide the the sort of uh different perspectives from the inside out and then from the outside in to help people see what is going on, see what is happening and then maybe change some minds. I don't care if I change your vote in particular, but I want to change your mind. I care more about that. A vote is something that you do on one particular day at one particular time. But your mind is malleable and I believe that to be the case for everybody more or less for some folks based on age and circumstance and conditioning, right? But overall, I think the people who are listening to this are are are pretty open-minded. And I'm hoping that the conversations that we have, you know, from here for the next however long it takes us to kind of get through all this is is sharable. You know, sharable in a way that we're not I'm not selling anybody anything. I don't give a [...] to be totally honest on who you voted for. I'm looking to the future and trying to like get people to think a little bit differently to understand what it is that you're stepping in when you say yes. You know, when you put on a blue hat or you put on a white hat, Charlemagne the God one time a few years ago said, "Independent thinkers don't wear hats." And I was like, I like that and I'm going to take that and I'm going to put that right here. There's kind of an irony in that both of us have these hats, but but these hats are black, so you know, black hats matter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um Yeah. There's like multiple sides to it, right? So there's like the individual side of cracking yourself out of this, right? I think that's a point of individual liberation. And then there's a kind of like a social danger that no matter who we are and what where we're at, like if there's really like a this explosion of this cult mentality, just dangerous, right? you know, and well, we'll get we'll get as we go, but yeah, it's been a little bit disappointing with some of it. I used to I know we'll drop the politics thing in one second, but I used to watch this show called Breaking Points where it was sort of like a one person who was talking from sort of a right perspective, the other person talking from a left perspective. Sure. And one of the things about it was the people who were on the left perspective would be pretty critical of like things on the left. Sure. But now that the right side is in power in the United States, these people on the right ain't saying [...] And I was like, I can't watch this anymore. And it did have to do with the things we're going to talk about, like kind of a conformity. Yeah. They can't speak out. Yeah. You know, and you know, anyways, we we'll drop the politics of it and we'll get to the psychology of it. But that part I think is like then you could see there's a problem like what you're talking about earlier. Yeah. All right. And a lot of the views a lot of the views that you know we have that we hold on things are counterculture regardless even even if the other side is quote unquote in power. You know what I'm saying? Like it's the the yogis don't live in society. They live in the ch, you know, traditionally have lived in the in the burial grounds, right? And they cover themselves in ash to say like I live in the dirtiest part of places and I carry that dirt with me everywhere and I'm naked and I don't give a [...] You you know what I'm saying? Like yeah, that's the statement if you go like the fullon like you know. Yeah. It's like I we know it's like we we piss on austerity you know like that kind of the the conformity like no no no no no no no that is not it. Tantric practitioners are not shamed not shamed. Transform transform the things that other people tell you you shouldn't do. we transform that and you say now this is how it looks like when you make lead into gold you know. Yeah. Yeah. Totally agreed and that's why I was so tickled when I was listening to this Dr. Marsden because the first thing she led with was the psychology and problem of conformity and I was like oh man we talk about this like all the time. Yeah. Because it's such a core spiritual idea. So I was like, "Okay, totally in my wheelhouse." And and it is the social psychology thing to talk about if you're going to talk about cult cult psychology or cult mentality or whatever you want to call it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess I'll do psychology of conformity, right? So, um All right. So, in social psych, they got these three big ideas. We'll figure out how we want to talk about them as we go forward, but they're all part of potentially like cult psychology. Yeah. We'll do the conformity one today depending on time. Maybe we finish, maybe we don't. It's interesting [...] to talk about. Sure. You know, it's probably like the core idea of this because in any cult, strict cult, Jehovah's Witness or Jonestown or whatever, conformity is a obviously key point. That's Dr. Marsden's point. If we stretch this out again, then this can become the problem of this web of cults that seem to be taking over the world, right? In so many ways. And then, you know, all the different levels. Oh, we have to work individually like you were talking about and everything, right? So, yeah, the conformity thing is big. Then they have other related psych terms and I'll probably do like little mini things on them because I think they're interesting to hear the psychology of it and you know, I think people appreciate that from the episodes that we do when we present the psychology behind the things that we're talking about. So, they have another word they use compliance which would seem like conformity again, but this is just more how sort of you push people to get to do what you want. So this is how do you elicit compliance from people, right? And the ways that you push. And so we'll do a little mini thing on that because that's kind of interesting to look at, right? Like how do you like request and push people to do things, right? Um and then the last one is this idea of obedience, which has a lot more to do with like power and authority and intimidation, you know? So it ends up being conformity, compliance, and obedience. And there's sort of famous psych stuff around us that we can kind of look at as we go. So, um, all right. But, you know, so, and like I think from this position, these are all part of what you might call potential cult psychology. Got it. All right. So, starting with the conformity thing, right, the psych definition of this is how do you change people's perceptions, opinions, and behaviors to group norms? So, you know, what's involved in that? And there's a number of kind of famous psych studies that we can talk about with this. Again, when you get people talking about these issues, these are the studies that usually pop up. So, I'll lay a couple of these out to you, Daniel, and you can tell me what you think. And and so, the first of these is this one that's associated with this psychologist named Solomon Ash. These are sort of the Ash studies. And it's it's interesting. So what he did was he would have people looking at like a sample line and then you'd give like three other lines and it was obvious two of the lines were identical. So you'd have one line that would be like the one they would show you. Then they'd show you these set of three lines and they would ask you which of these lines is the same length as the one that you looked at over here and one would be like the same and the others would be like obviously different. Mhm. And then they're like, you know, they have the subjects in the experiment and it was a setup. So the person who was there as the actual subject would be presumably in a perception test or something. They would be told, right? But all the other people that were participating would be, you know, like in in on the study, right? They were actually like part of the experiment and they would give like wrong answers to this to put pressure on that person to see whether or not they would conform. and agree like even though it's obvious that you know it's line C is the same as the one that's the sample whether you could pressure people to say line B or line A when they were obviously wrong. So that's the Ash study right and um it's one of the ones that's sort of mainly talked about with conformity and makes sense. So it was interesting when you get to like kind of think how many people do you think would conform and I guess it depends on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist but you can get people to do it. So when are people are put under that social pressure to say the wrong comparison line the numbers are interesting. There's like from the studies 25% of people just won't do it. They won't conform. Those two lines those are the ones and no matter how much pressure you put on they won't do it. But shout outs to those people. Yeah. Yeah. Tip of the hat to the old Solomon experiment people. Um 50% will conform at least h more half or more of the time. So just pressuring they kind of crack. Betas. [Laughter] Well, you could say sigas and betas, right? The alphas are the one pressuring people. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, those are the ones running the experiment. And then 25% will do it more occasionally. So, it's a weird thing when people start the stats because they say 37% when you look at the whole thing, but to me that kind of almost misses the point of it. If you get 50% of the people willing to do it at least half the time, you know, it's not so great. So, really 75% of the people are willing to like, okay, fine. uh okay cave to this pressure in some way or another. So that's the famous ash experiment and I to me some people will say well okay it's only 30 30% 7% of the times but that kind of misses the numbers it's it's 75% of the people are willing to do it well that's part of the problem. Okay. So, so but but that number 37, we'll just let's just call it a third. Okay. So, in uh sociology, in the the study of human behavior, there is something no or I guess I could I could call it like even the study of I know the magic the most hated term now in American politics, diversity, inclusion and uh equity or whatever diversity, equity, inclusion, right? So DEI in the study of DEI, they have a a thing called the magic third. And I don't know if you're familiar with this or not. No, I haven't heard that phrase. Yeah. Okay. So So Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book, The Tipping Point, and then he wrote a follow-up to the called the the Revenge of the Tipping Point, which I'm which I'm reading now in preparation, you know, kind of for this. And so I heard this. So it's an interesting thing. So why this is important. So let's say you have a boardroom. Okay, the boardroom you usually have nine members. If you have, so it started, you know, like whatever in the 50s and 60s, they might or maybe probably in the 70s really or 80s, they would have like a woman on there, your token woman, you know. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. So they have one on there, but then when they started to do research on if she, you know, the impact that she had, it was very low. And many women actually reported that like during meetings the men would just walk completely ignore them, like walk by them. They would acknowledge there's a woman in the room, but they wouldn't acknowledge that the woman had actual like autonomy to make her own decisions and be part of the decision-making process. But there was a certain percentage of women on these boards that were able to make a difference. Of course, I already said it, it's the third. And they call this the magic third. So it was three women on a board of nine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. There's also some social experiments. Uh one was done in Palo Alto in the 80s. No, sorry. like the 60s when you had kind of like a great migration of like African-Americans sort of moving all around the country and a lot of you know despite what people think there was something called the white flight where when black people would move into the neighborhood white people would either a harass them or harm them or b move out like this was a huge thing especially in large cities. Um but so Palo Alto kind of running out of room purchased some land and and built like 24 24 or 30 uh homes and they allowed people to move in but they kept a very strict ratio and they never allowed so they had whites, Asians and blacks essentially that lived in these in this neighborhood. All right. So you had 24 homes or 30 but no more than 33%. Yeah. Okay. Somebody wanted their uh their cousin to move in. I think it was one of the black members of the neighborhood and they said, "Please, they're having a very hard time. They're a school teacher. They work really hard or whatever." The community, which had been in in in existence already for several years and had good harmony as you know, sort of other areas were watching this sort of ex social experiment voted no. Uh they would. So then that house sat empty for like 10 years. Oh, okay. Because they didn't want to go over that magic third because when you have 33% of something, then you can get a movement going outside of that. So, as you're talking about these numbers, that's the number to think about. And and I just want to plant that. You want to pivot something too, right? This is almost the opposite thing. Yes. It's interesting because if it's 25% of the people won't conform, you don't get to the magic third. Correct. You have to get that extra 8% in there or something, right? To move forward. Yeah. Right. And then we think about the uh approval rating of our uh favorite uh you know commander and chief tends to be right around 334. It hovers. Yeah. Just at that magic line. Yeah. Just at that magic line. And there's a reason for that, right? The reason for that is that seems to be the number when you're studying sociology that things change that things start to tip. That's the that what they have found to be the tipping point is about 33 30 33%. So anyways, I wanted to bring that up because it seemed to fit well there and I've had it loaded in my mind for about a week or so. So it does fit and it's interesting because it fits into the 25% thing. If you can't get that more then [...] gets stuck, right? So you have to get that thing up. That's why I think the 37% looks a little misleading in the sense that you need to have people who are like no and we'll come back to this issue later on. Yeah. Yeah. Because there has to be whether we do it this week or not, we probably won't have time to do it. But it's a deep subject matter. So I'm glad we're doing this stuff. I think this is important. Right. So to my mind like some people will say like I think I think it misses the point because there's a high degree of conformity and then when you get to further of it it's only a [...] line that you're talking about, right? Sure. Yeah. So there's nothing at stake even in this which on some level makes it more like interesting, right? But um there's another part of the research around this that just shows that when there's more ambiguity, you don't even make it so obvious. Okay, this is obviously the right line, right? When you start like putting more ambiguity, then people crack even more. So I mean that's kind of interesting to the subject matter too of how do you break out of these things because the situations are even when they're very clear only 25% of the people will draw a solid line and stick with what's obvious right and then you get to the point where if you put it even less obvious well then you even start to lose that a little bit. Mhm. So, there was another one that like I thought was interesting around this which is sort of like like a a thing based on like how people identify colors. Yes. And I'll come back to it later on. It's interesting, but I'll do it real quick uh just to start off with. So, it has a lot to do with what we'll get to later on, which is whether or not you're allowed to be exposed to dissent. But they kind of did this weird thing where they had people and they weren't ever exposed to like a dissenting opinion. Like they would ask people, they would flash them something that would be obviously red and the person would have and uh and people people would say it was orange and they put the pressure on the person. Are they going to go along and agree that it's orange, right? I have the stats later on in these notes, but like when they did it on their own, it was like less than 1%. People would always identify the colors, right? You know, but once you started putting social pressure on them to do this, especially if there was no dissenting opinions involved or if there was no previous experience of dissenting opinions, which is interesting, too. And we'll talk more about the details of that later. But again, when you look at it, if you had a unanimous group pressing a person, 70% of the people would just go along and misidentify the colors. So, you know, it does give you some idea of like the pressure of this on some level. Yeah. Okay. So, that's the stuff around the the ash experiment around this, right? And so, you get a feeling of what these results are and we all can think about that for ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. The other one that comes up is and I thought this was interesting. It's Mustafa Shariff and he did these studies around the autokinetic effect. I have to like just kind of like talk about this a little bit just because it was interesting to me. It was sort of like I use a standard social psychology kind of text around this, right? Dug it off the shelf and uh it's just interesting like you were talking about the other sociologists you were bringing up earlier. This is a Turkish social psychologist. And I thought, well, that's interesting, right? You don't always get those perspectives from those different parts of the world, right? Grew up in Turkey. He went to University of Istanbul, eventually got to the United States. But yeah, interesting. You know what's what's the autokinetic effect, Eric? Yeah, I'll get to it. Yeah, sorry. It has to do with this idea. It he uses it in the experiment. It's a pretty old experiment, but if you have a dark room and you put like just a little spot of light up just because I guess how the eye tracks, it'll start to move that around. So, it it's called the autokinetic effect. I never heard of it outside of this study. Okay. It's sort of a weird visual thing. It won't. The dot is still, but the person will start to perceive it as moving. Interesting. Sounds Sounds like something you do when you're high. It's It's something that you would probably appreciate when you're high. Yeah. You're like, "Oh, dude. Well, bro, sick." Then you'd have synthesia and you'd hear all these waves as it moved Um or like you're on some shrooms and it Yeah, exactly. has some trails behind it or something. Um anyways it's this motionless dot with this illusionment of moving. Okay. So what was interesting in this one and he was again curious about like conformity in groups right so when people were allowed to do it independently they would report kind of their own experience of the amounts of movement and different people would I guess experience this as moving a lot or a little depending on like you know their individual differences or how this appeared to them. So then what he did is he changed it up and he put them in groups. And once the people are in the groups, a weird thing happens. No matter where they were individually, they start to collapse to a standard. So you know, I would have seen it moving 12 in or something. By the end, you're saying it's only moving four or something. Someone else saw it moving two inches. Eventually they agree. So this starts to build this conformity. In the end, everyone agrees on what it is. So for this you know uh Dr. Sharief he was like oh yeah that's the that's the st now now we're establishing like a norm it's a very generic thing to do right but the point is it's how human beings get to norms somehow right you put a group of people together the conformity starts to build within that group and in the end you say okay now we've come up with a norm weird thing is even when you take that person out of the group they still see it that way so damage whatever yeah whatever their first perception was is gone. And they start to say that they're seeing it like the way the group was seeing it. And the next trippy thing, what's that? That's interesting. When when was this done? It's it's an old one. It's done like in the 30s and the 40s, but up over time. That's because it's the next level genius. That's why. Yeah. Yeah. Get in on the ground floor and do the genius work. Yeah. Yeah. So, but the weird part is too when you would have the people come back a year later, they would do it with the norm again. So, so the so the changes were were kind of permanent. Yeah. It's stuck. So, it's one of the studies that cited around this idea of like how you get people to start to like in that more norm conforming situation to start to like curtail their individual experience to hit a norm. Interesting. Yeah, this stuff is deep. Yeah. Well, Eric, I think that's I think that's a good place to pause for now. I know it's like a Oh, you want Okay, good. Cliffhanger for our audience, but on a high note. Mhm. Yeah. Well, the and and the next pieces that are coming intriguing note, I guess you'd say, right? Yeah. Because the next pieces that are coming are far more uh not technical, but they they kind of go they start to work deeper into it, and I want to leave that I want to I want to have the episode begin there. So, that'll be the uh the teaser for next time. So, you know, uh if if you guys like the what we're bringing, what we're doing here, then uh there's more more of this to come. Uh and if you don't, then uh you know, avoid us for the next couple months. So, you know, whatever. Just kidding. Don't do that. No, no, no, don't do that. It's going to be good. It's going to be good, y'all. Yeah. No, no, this is good. By the end, we're going to see all these dots in our own ways, and we'll be a [...] you with the lines. I'm calling the lines how I see them. I'm calling how I see it. The lines are moving, the dots are orange, and and I don't give a [...] about what anybody else says, you know. Um Yeah. Yeah. But it's all good. Eric, thank you so much for uh for for doing, you know. Audience, thank you for tuning in. As always, uh subscribe. Leave a comment if uh you feel like that's something that you want to do. Uh hit us up at jynantragmail.com. We have an Instagram uh the Jin and Tantra podcast. You can uh slide into our DMs up in there. check out the little clips that we post. Uh, you know, and if you find our work to be useful, please go ahead and share that. Uh, we definitely appreciate everybody tuning in, especially to the end. If you are still here, uh, you are in the top like 5% of attention spans of the universe apparently at this point. Tik Tok has infiltrated everybody's last bits of attention and and dwindled it down now to mere milliseconds. So, uh, so we appreciate, uh, y'all tuning in. We didn't even have the time to see the dot move. No, they're like what dot? Anyways, uh but thanks for thanks for tuning in and we'll we'll uh we'll hope to see you guys here uh when we do this again. For Eric, this is Daniel. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Peace.