Episode 180: Chekhov's Schrödinger's Dagger (Kurosawa's "Rashomon")

Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say.

And knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes they say to fucking smog is the fucking reason you have such beautiful fucking sunsets.

The greatest has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man. I'm a very good man. Good man. They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to very Bad wizards. I'm Tamela Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, this is our first episode of 2020 I'll ask you the same question I always ask you in our first episodes of the year. What's your New Year's resolution?

God, this year I always say that I think New Year's resolutions are stupid and they don't work. And that's true. That's true. But this year, I found myself kind of wanting one. I want to participate. I wanted to be part of, uh, this big cultural event. So I thought, and I thought and I thought, and I can't. For the life of me, I don't need.

The ideal form of Dave Bizarro.

Yeah, I'm as polished as a turd can get.

Um, I don't know. I feel like resolutions are treated with more skepticism lately.

Yeah, I think that it's just that you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Uh, and it's this little brief glimpse of optimism, maybe fueled by, uh, the hangoverness of January 1, trying to start a new leaf, to turn over a new leaf. But I don't know why. Every year you'd think that we would realize that we don't really do.

I did. There are years where I've kept my New Year's rEsolutions. Someone suggested doing it every month rather than for a whole year, so it would work through, like, April, which is still better than not working at all. But, yeah, even I am, um, like, a sucker for these kind of cultish self improvement things. I meditate.

That's why you defend religion sometimes, because you secretly just want to be in some sort of group that will tell you exactly what silly thing to do next.

I crave ritual, or at least I crave it in theory. When I actually am presented with the possibility of being involved in some sort of community like that, I always Bach at it. I just say, no, fuck it. But, uh, I know that there is a part of me that craves ritual.

And there is a psychology. Maybe at some point we'll talk about it. There is a psychology of how to successfully change your habits. There's work out there on that, and you need to make it specific enough. It can't just be like, be a better person, right? It has to be like, I'm going to do. And then you get really specific, and then you deal with all of the barriers that are stopped. It's there.

I think habits are like magic. It's incredible. It's like you take something that you don't want to do, and it takes a big force of will to do it. And then you make it a habit. And then this is what biking to work has become for me now. It takes, uh, a supreme act of will for me not to bike to work. Whereas before, I would be looking for every excuse to not bike. Oh, it looks like it might rain now. It's really hard for me psychologically to not bike to work. That's also true with meditating. It's also true, like, you take something that starts out being hard, and then once it's a habit, it's just the opposite. It's what you want to do. I think habits are the most underemphasized thing in the world. That's all we should be thinking about.

Is habits pretty much is just like non consciously performing things.

Well, I mean, it's your kantianism that resists it. It's like everything has to be this autonomous choice, but that's just not how we're Wired.

Well, the one habit that I keep trying to build, and I've actually been good since about September, um, of exercising routinely, not every day. But I think one of the big things for me is you're going to fail, right? So at some point, you're going to fail to meet whatever goal you had for yourself. And it's those moments of failure that can really derail me. So right now, I was in California for two weeks, and I didn't have the chance to exercise as much. So now I'm back in my regular life, and now that extreme force of will kicks in again because I'm out of the habit, right? It doesn't take long, so I can't get down on myself for not having exercise for two weeks. I have to just say, exercising today is better than not having exercise today.

And it's really hard. It's like someone used the analogy of, it's like you gather a ball of yarn and it takes a long time to gather a ball of yarn into a ball, but then when you drop it, it's all gone. And the psychological barrier, when you've had a habit, this is like swimming with me when you lose it, and then you have to go back to an earlier point, like, really, I'm just going to do like 16 laps and that's going to be hard for me.

Yeah, exactly. Um, well, yours like biking to work, that's tying an exercise to something that you have to do anyway. And I think that's a really good way to do it rather than having to do a whole brand new thing. This is in the service of meeting a goal. That's why, honestly, one of the reasons I got a dog because I know I'm going to have to walk it. So it's good to have an excuse to exercise.

Yeah. Be outside, meet people. Dogs are so good for just getting you to be more active. So this is the new very bad wizards, everybody. We are a self help podcast now, uh, Tim M. Ferriss, like, has to watch his audience because we're going to take it. We're going to take it from all the Stoic podcasts we are right now all about self improvement on very bad wizards.

That's right. You know what? Let's take a break because I'm going to do some push ups.

All right, so what are we talking about today? We are talking about just an incredible movie in the second segment by Akira Kuroshawa called Rashaman. Um, but first, something not quite as quite as great.

Yeah, so you showed this to me because you got it from neurosceptic. Once again, thank you, neurosceptic, for improving your tweeting habits to better fit our show. Um, this is something, and I can't believe we haven't talked about this broad topic before, but this is an article that, uh, should, uh, annoy anybody who knows anything about psychology. But it's in Forbes, which I don't understand, but it's called when your lizard brain burns you out and short circuits your career, your inbox slog overwhelms you. The colleague who fails to meet as part of the team's deadline infuriates you. A coworker talks over you in a meeting and you seethe with anger, your computer crashes and you slam your fist. So a bunch of examples. But turns out, Tamler, that this is all because, uh, you have a lizard brain deep inside of you that is, uh, an evolutionary remnant of when we were all lizards, apparently. And this is what's causing all of the bad things to happen in your life.

Well, it's what's causing your reaction to all the bad things, uh, overreaction to.

All the which themselves can lead to further bad things. And this is an idea that actually came from a psychologist or neuroscientist back in the day. The idea, um, that evolution worked by building layers on top of each other of, uh, brain areas such that our earliest evolutionary ancestors had this part of our brain that deals solely with sort of reflexive responses to danger. Um, it's vigilant, it's attuned to negativity, and it is emotional and it causes, um, immediate, quick reactions to stimuli in our environment. We still have that even though thousands, millions of years of evolution have layered on a smarter part of our brain, like the mammalian brain, the prefrontal cortex that we have that can reason and think about stuff. That old evolutionary part, your lizard brain, still kicks in every once in a while.