June 24, 2025 • 23 mins
Explore the heart of why we believe and how it shapes who we are. This episode dives into the importance of belief for young people—not what to believe, but how to believe.
A huge shoutout to our sponsor, Conviction Co.! Grab 10% off their gear with code WAXONWAXOFF at https://convictionco.com/solomon29.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey everyone, welcome back. I'm really happy to be back with
you guys and I have something really special today.
It's from the bottom of my heart.
I've been thinking about it a lot.
I've been working on this episode a lot and thinking
deeply about what I want to talkabout within this topic.
And the topic that we're going to be talking about is belief.
(00:22):
And when I do these solo episodes, I want it to be pure.
And the way that I think it willbe pure is if we go about
picking a topic or answering a question and diving really deep
into that. Also, if you want to have a
(00:44):
question that you have answered,and I probably don't know the
answer, but if I can help in anyway, throw your questions in the
comments below and we'll do an episode on that 'cause I really
want to be getting to the root problem of what it is that you
are struggling with or what it is that you're questioning or
what it is that you're wonderingabout or talking to the guests
(01:05):
that you want to hear from. So yeah, feel free to always
reach out and ask your questions.
And if I can be of help in any way.
And I'm just a normal guy who just sits in front of a mic and
a camera and tries my best to make sense of this crazy world
we live in. So today I do, like I said, I
(01:27):
want to talk about belief. And I think that this is really
important to kind of any big problem that we have because
belief is at the core of every single person.
And we all believe. We all believe in something.
And I'm not referring to belief as belief in God, but it could
be that or belief in your political ideology, or belief in
(01:51):
what is healthy and what is not,or belief in anything that it
believe in Bigfoot. Like it doesn't matter.
We all believe in something and I think we all know that we
believe, but we don't know why we believe.
We judge other people for not believing the same things that
we do. But why?
My goal today is to try and get to the root of that issue and
(02:15):
figure out why it is that we believe.
And I think that we will find that the solution to a lot of
the problems that we have in politics and in religion and in
the world stem from belief. John Mayer has this song called
(02:43):
Belief, and what he talks about in that song is extremely
prevalent to this conversation. In this song, John Mayer talks
about a bunch of different things stemming around belief.
(03:05):
He says everyone believes in whothey ought to be.
We can't believe in ourselves, but we can believe that we need
to be something else than we already are in the future, he
says. We're never going to win the
world. We're never going to stop the
war. We're never going to beat this.
If belief is what we're fightingfor and if we're fighting for
(03:28):
belief for our belief for for our group's belief, all that
does, and this is what he says is puts 100,000 children in the
sand. What puts the folded flag inside
the mother's hand? Belief can.
And I think that if we don't have our view around belief
(03:53):
right, the world and the way that we act in the world is
going to be wrong. This song kind of perfectly
describes what happens when we let our beliefs, but more
importantly the conflict of our beliefs, surpass our desire for
peace with our fellow man. There is no belief that is of
(04:16):
more priority than loving your neighbor.
I I also want to kind of touch on when he says we believe
everyone believes in who they ought to be.
We give up our ability to believe ourselves, believe in
(04:38):
ourselves in the here and now, and we're always focusing on the
future or on the past. I did this in the past.
I did I can't believe I did this.
I need to be better in the future.
I can't believe I did this now or I'm like this now.
So I need to be better in the future.
And I do this all the time in mylife.
(05:00):
I I get stuff wrong and I beat myself up about it.
I, I mean, I'll do things that Ihave fun doing.
I'll go play video games with myfriends for a couple hours and
then I'll get done with that andI'll be like, I can't believe.
I can't believe that you wasted all that time.
You could have been working out,you could have been running, you
(05:22):
could have been going in the sauna doing the cold plunge,
whatever. The thing is, you could have
been doing better. I believe that I could be
better, and that's a good thing.It's good to have a self
improvement mindset, but it's not good when it ruins the
present moment. If you believe the wrong thing,
(05:48):
you're going to have the wrong outcome.
And I don't necessarily mean that it's the content of what is
in our belief, but it is the waythat we believe.
As a disclaimer for this episode, the goal is not to
(06:08):
change what you believe. It's not to change if you are.
If you're a Christian, I'm not trying to change your belief and
make you into an atheist or a Buddhist or a Muslim.
I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to get to the root
cause and maybe change the way that you view your beliefs and
(06:30):
the way that you go about talking about things You
believe. We all believe and we all should
believe, but I don't think that we're going about it the right
way. And I think that there are some
factors that we subconsciously are taking ingesting into
ourselves. And it's it, it is putting out
(06:54):
something that is, is not beneficial for anyone, including
ourselves. So First off, what is a belief?
I think a belief is a, a core value and a conclusion that we
have come to based on what we perceive as logical thinking.
And the problem is, is we're alldifferent.
(07:16):
We all think differently. We all had different
upbringings. We all ingest different forms of
media. We all think about things
differently out the gate. And I think if you, this sounds
kind of, and I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but
this sounds kind of stupid. But if you thought the same way
(07:42):
I did and you had the opportunity to listen to the
same things that I listen to, you would come to the same
conclusion as me. And the same goes for me with
you. If I listen to the podcast you
listen to, if I watch the news that you watch, if I did the
(08:06):
things that you did and I and I processed information the same
way that you did, I would come to the same conclusion as you.
And that's to me, that's an interesting thing to think about
because it kind of shows us thatwe are a result of our
environment in a way and that webelieve what is placed in front
(08:30):
of us by ingesting mentally certain things over time.
And I think something that's important, if we're kind of
going along this analogy of ingesting food or eating, an
(08:52):
important part of that process is digesting.
And I don't think a lot of us dothat.
And what is digesting? Look, in this analogy, it means
sitting and breaking down what it is that you have just
consumed. So if I listen to a podcast, I'm
(09:13):
not going to listen to it and just trust that everything I
heard was the truth. I'm going to sit with it.
I'm going to look at the things that I've believed in the past,
and I'm going to put that against the things that I just
heard and kind of have like a mini conversation, battle
(09:33):
whatever of these two beliefs and see if this stands up to
what it is that I already know to be true.
And when we do this with our self, it's very important, but
it's even more important when wedo it with others.
And I think we go about the way of doing that.
We we do that the wrong way. We when we when me and someone
(09:57):
that I know have a conversation about beliefs and our beliefs
clash and we exchange our beliefs, we go about it the
wrong way. Hey everyone, I want to take a
quick moment to shout out my friends at Conviction Co.
If you know me, you know I love my hats and my friends at
(10:21):
Conviction Co have not only madean amazing hat, but hats that
stand for something amazing. I'm obsessed with these and you
will be too. Seriously, they're such great
quality and I love them so much.So head over right now to
convictionco.com to grab your own hat and stand with me and
standing for something you believe in and looking and
feeling good while doing it. Use code wax on, wax off at
(10:43):
checkout for 10% off. That's wax on, wax off for 10%
off at checkout. Trust me, you'll love these hats
as much as I do. Use the link below.
Let's get back into the episode and I think the reason that we
go about it the wrong way for the most part, when I have
conversations with people I disagree with, and I think an
(11:07):
important thing to understand isthat if you are going to have a
conversation with someone that you disagree with, do not go
into it trying to change their mind.
It's futile, it's pointless, andyou're going to leave
disappointed. If you're trying to change
someone's beliefs, that's not going to work.
Instead, you should shift your intention to trying to believe
(11:36):
what it is that they believe. And if you can't do that, then
that's why you should be having this conversation in the 1st
place, and you should be sittingwith them and trying to
understand deeply what it is that they believe, with no wrong
intention, with no evil intention.
It's like the sorcerer's stone. You're not going to pull the
(11:57):
sword out of the rock if your intentions are bad and it's
important to exchange police. We can't avoid it.
It's not a conflict. It's not this thing that we need
to avoid that that causes pain and discord.
Now it does. It causes discord today and in
in our day and age, it causes discord.
Back when the founding fathers were around, they disagreed.
They would slam on tables, they would freak out, but they, they
(12:21):
were doing it with a purpose andthey could have these intense,
sometimes intense, sometimes civil conversations and go out
after it and go get lunch, go get dinner, go hang out.
And that's important because if I go sit down, I go to, I mean,
I guess I might as well just saythis.
(12:42):
I go to an extremely liberal college.
I have, I'm a very I'm a centrist and I agree with most
of the things that Bobby Kennedyagrees with.
For the most part. I have contradictory views to
these people. I believe something different
than they do. When I go and I try and have a
(13:05):
conversation exchange and believe, they blow up, they
freak out, they shut down and they attack me personally.
Why do they do that? The reason that they do that is
because they do something that people, everyone, everybody does
(13:30):
this. And if, if you're not careful,
you're going to do it. It's just something that
everyone does. And if you, you have to be
intentional about what you're doing when you talk about
beliefs, the reason that they attacked me personally and the
reason that people attack peoplepersonally when they talk about
(13:53):
beliefs is this reason you identify as your belief.
And you should not do that because you are not your
beliefs. You are the, some people say in
philosophy that you are a thinking thing.
I don't think we're a thinking thing.
I think we are a thing that witnesses the thinking thing.
(14:14):
You are not the thought that youhave.
The thought is your belief. You think about this.
I believe this. OK, this is me.
You're not that. And it's easy to believe in
something if it's integrated within yourself because it's a
more tangible thing. But you shouldn't do that
(14:37):
because then when someone tries to have a conversation with you
and they're like, well, what do you believe?
And they're trying take your belief.
If it's an object, we're going to view it as an object and they
try and move it around and look at it and poke it and see how
does your belief behave in comparison to my belief.
That's what we're doing when we have have a conversation about
(15:01):
belief and about conflicting ideas.
If you identify as that, then you're going to feel like
they're pushing you around and moving you around and poking you
and prodding you and making you feel bad.
And then you're going to feel personally attacked.
And then what are you going to do?
You're going to go and you're going to try and personally
attack them back because they just tried to personally attack
(15:22):
you by having this conversation with you.
That's not what they're trying to do.
And I fall prey to this all the time.
I, I, I, this is a problem that I have and I have to constantly
take myself hostage and look at myself and say, what am I doing?
(15:43):
Am I believing something or am Iidentifying as my belief?
If you're identifying as your belief, you you lose and you
can't have civil conversations and you're always going to be
this person that people look at like a puffer fish, like
something that's going to easilybe inflamed and automatically
become defensive. You need to disassociate
(16:04):
yourself from your beliefs and hold them separate from yourself
constantly. I feel like an aspect of this
also is people think that they know the thing, they know the
answer. They have the answer that they
have arrived at the truth, but nobody has arrived at the truth.
And that's why we seek after truth.
(16:26):
That's why you have these conversations is because I know
that my belief is not fully formed.
I know that what I have right now is true, but it's not at its
full potential. And I'm probably going to end up
running to into people that teach me something and make me
learn something and then I adaptit and I change it.
(16:47):
And it's not a bad thing. You never fully arrive.
No matter what you believe, you're never fully right.
I heard this person the other day say this.
They're like, I'm right wing, which also happens, which is
awesome because that also happens to be the right thing.
And I was like stupid. You don't know everything.
(17:09):
You don't the same way that someone on the left doesn't know
everything. That's why there are sides is so
that we can learn from each other.
You are not. And if if someone is going to
act like they know everything orthat they have arrived at the
truth, I don't. I just don't trust those people.
(17:32):
I, I honestly don't. Socrates, one of the most
brilliant philosophical minds ever, said.
I know that I am intelligent because I know that I know
nothing. The more you know, the more you
know that you know nothing. And true wisdom is recognizing
the fact that you know nothing. I'm not trying to change what
(17:52):
you believe. I'm trying to give you some
tools that I have learned, that I have found helpful and that
have helped me in having civil, honest, good conversations with
people that teach me more. I'm not.
I've gone into conversations trying to change people's mind
and what happens? We get into a civil or uncivil
(18:16):
argument of some kind. There's circular argument.
We just have a circular argumentgoing over different points that
contradict each other and we find no common ground.
It's an important part of a conversation.
It's finding common ground and going into it with a pure heart.
And and you're on a quest, you have a question.
You're trying to understand something about the other
(18:39):
person's beliefs and something about the other and something
about your beliefs and seeing how those things match up.
It's a quest that you're on and you don't go.
If you're going on an evil questand your intention is bad and
your question is bad, then people are going to behave
badly. Sometimes you can have the right
question and the what right intention, but people are still
(19:01):
going to behave badly because they don't have the right tools
in their toolbox and I don't have it all figured out.
I don't understand the answer toeverything.
I don't know, but I know that these things are are helpful for
people. They've helped me and they've
helped others friends in my life.
So I guess I'm going to wrap it up here.
(19:22):
I don't really know what else tosay.
My goal behind this conversationis I see people fighting other
people, not with fists or weapons, but with words, and it
makes me sad. I don't want to be a failure and
(19:45):
I don't want my generation to fail.
And I'm going to do everything that I can to try and make the
people that I get to interact with just a little bit better.
And I don't. It's pointless to have these
arguments with people and to just like you don't have a
(20:06):
problem with the person. Let me pick someone super
controversial, Charlie Kirk. If you disagree with him, right,
you don't like what he says. First of all, you probably don't
even know what he says. You probably haven't even
listened to what it is that he has to say.
And you've seen four or five TikTok clips that your algorithm
(20:29):
has sent you because they know that you don't like people like
him. So if they send you these clips
that are out of context, you're going to hate him even more and
you're going to hate or dislike other people that like him,
causing more division in the world.
You don't even know what it is that he's saying.
(20:51):
You see four clips, That's not him.
I don't know him. I've watched a couple of his
clips. I've watched videos of his not
because I agree with him, just to trying to understand him and
he makes some valid points and other points he makes are
freaking crazy. But that doesn't make him a bad
person. That doesn't make people who
(21:13):
like him bad people. That just means that he's human
and humans make mistakes and humans don't have everything
figured out. And if you have a problem with
him, the only one that that's hurting is you.
You shouldn't have a problem with him.
You should just say this is thisis truly what it is.
(21:36):
If you think you know what is right and you have the answer
and you think that you are more correct than he is, then you
have the truth. The truth is not threatened by
anything. No one.
I if someone goes up to me or upto a scientist that discovered
colors and they said the grass is green and then someone goes
up to them and they say actuallythe grass is blue, that
(22:00):
scientist is not going to be threatened by you saying
something that's imbecilic and stupid.
Only people that don't have the truth and that are insecure are
going to be people that are going to lash out.
So you probably don't have the truth anyway if you're so
unstable and insecure and what it is that you believe.
(22:24):
And I just don't want I I just want, I don't want people to all
believe the same thing. That's not the point.
You're supposed to disagree, butyou're supposed to disagree the
right way. There is a right way to
disagree. Disagreeing is not bad.
Asking questions is not bad. But it's going about it the
(22:48):
right way with pure intentions, not trying to change someone
else's view on things and tryingto understand what it is that
they believe. More.
So that way you can use the information that they have given
you, put it up against what it is that you believe in private
or in a conversation, and propose different ideas civilly
(23:11):
so that way you can have good conversations with people.
I don't know if this episode is helpful.
I hope it is. It's helped me.
And if you want to see more stuff like this, let me know.
I'm really happy to be here withyou guys.
Yeah. So let's keep doing this thing.
(23:33):
I'm grateful. And yeah, I love you guys.
Bye everybody.
Hey everyone, welcome back. I'm really happy to be back with
you guys and I have something really special today.
It's from the bottom of my heart.
I've been thinking about it a lot.
I've been working on this episode a lot and thinking
deeply about what I want to talkabout within this topic.
And the topic that we're going to be talking about is belief.
(00:22):
And when I do these solo episodes, I want it to be pure.
And the way that I think it willbe pure is if we go about
picking a topic or answering a question and diving really deep
into that. Also, if you want to have a
(00:44):
question that you have answered,and I probably don't know the
answer, but if I can help in anyway, throw your questions in the
comments below and we'll do an episode on that 'cause I really
want to be getting to the root problem of what it is that you
are struggling with or what it is that you're questioning or
what it is that you're wonderingabout or talking to the guests
(01:05):
that you want to hear from. So yeah, feel free to always
reach out and ask your questions.
And if I can be of help in any way.
And I'm just a normal guy who just sits in front of a mic and
a camera and tries my best to make sense of this crazy world
we live in. So today I do, like I said, I
(01:27):
want to talk about belief. And I think that this is really
important to kind of any big problem that we have because
belief is at the core of every single person.
And we all believe. We all believe in something.
And I'm not referring to belief as belief in God, but it could
be that or belief in your political ideology, or belief in
(01:51):
what is healthy and what is not,or belief in anything that it
believe in Bigfoot. Like it doesn't matter.
We all believe in something and I think we all know that we
believe, but we don't know why we believe.
We judge other people for not believing the same things that
we do. But why?
My goal today is to try and get to the root of that issue and
(02:15):
figure out why it is that we believe.
And I think that we will find that the solution to a lot of
the problems that we have in politics and in religion and in
the world stem from belief. John Mayer has this song called
(02:43):
Belief, and what he talks about in that song is extremely
prevalent to this conversation. In this song, John Mayer talks
about a bunch of different things stemming around belief.
(03:05):
He says everyone believes in whothey ought to be.
We can't believe in ourselves, but we can believe that we need
to be something else than we already are in the future, he
says. We're never going to win the
world. We're never going to stop the
war. We're never going to beat this.
If belief is what we're fightingfor and if we're fighting for
(03:28):
belief for our belief for for our group's belief, all that
does, and this is what he says is puts 100,000 children in the
sand. What puts the folded flag inside
the mother's hand? Belief can.
And I think that if we don't have our view around belief
(03:53):
right, the world and the way that we act in the world is
going to be wrong. This song kind of perfectly
describes what happens when we let our beliefs, but more
importantly the conflict of our beliefs, surpass our desire for
peace with our fellow man. There is no belief that is of
(04:16):
more priority than loving your neighbor.
I I also want to kind of touch on when he says we believe
everyone believes in who they ought to be.
We give up our ability to believe ourselves, believe in
(04:38):
ourselves in the here and now, and we're always focusing on the
future or on the past. I did this in the past.
I did I can't believe I did this.
I need to be better in the future.
I can't believe I did this now or I'm like this now.
So I need to be better in the future.
And I do this all the time in mylife.
(05:00):
I I get stuff wrong and I beat myself up about it.
I, I mean, I'll do things that Ihave fun doing.
I'll go play video games with myfriends for a couple hours and
then I'll get done with that andI'll be like, I can't believe.
I can't believe that you wasted all that time.
You could have been working out,you could have been running, you
(05:22):
could have been going in the sauna doing the cold plunge,
whatever. The thing is, you could have
been doing better. I believe that I could be
better, and that's a good thing.It's good to have a self
improvement mindset, but it's not good when it ruins the
present moment. If you believe the wrong thing,
(05:48):
you're going to have the wrong outcome.
And I don't necessarily mean that it's the content of what is
in our belief, but it is the waythat we believe.
As a disclaimer for this episode, the goal is not to
(06:08):
change what you believe. It's not to change if you are.
If you're a Christian, I'm not trying to change your belief and
make you into an atheist or a Buddhist or a Muslim.
I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to get to the root
cause and maybe change the way that you view your beliefs and
(06:30):
the way that you go about talking about things You
believe. We all believe and we all should
believe, but I don't think that we're going about it the right
way. And I think that there are some
factors that we subconsciously are taking ingesting into
ourselves. And it's it, it is putting out
(06:54):
something that is, is not beneficial for anyone, including
ourselves. So First off, what is a belief?
I think a belief is a, a core value and a conclusion that we
have come to based on what we perceive as logical thinking.
And the problem is, is we're alldifferent.
(07:16):
We all think differently. We all had different
upbringings. We all ingest different forms of
media. We all think about things
differently out the gate. And I think if you, this sounds
kind of, and I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but
this sounds kind of stupid. But if you thought the same way
(07:42):
I did and you had the opportunity to listen to the
same things that I listen to, you would come to the same
conclusion as me. And the same goes for me with
you. If I listen to the podcast you
listen to, if I watch the news that you watch, if I did the
(08:06):
things that you did and I and I processed information the same
way that you did, I would come to the same conclusion as you.
And that's to me, that's an interesting thing to think about
because it kind of shows us thatwe are a result of our
environment in a way and that webelieve what is placed in front
(08:30):
of us by ingesting mentally certain things over time.
And I think something that's important, if we're kind of
going along this analogy of ingesting food or eating, an
(08:52):
important part of that process is digesting.
And I don't think a lot of us dothat.
And what is digesting? Look, in this analogy, it means
sitting and breaking down what it is that you have just
consumed. So if I listen to a podcast, I'm
(09:13):
not going to listen to it and just trust that everything I
heard was the truth. I'm going to sit with it.
I'm going to look at the things that I've believed in the past,
and I'm going to put that against the things that I just
heard and kind of have like a mini conversation, battle
(09:33):
whatever of these two beliefs and see if this stands up to
what it is that I already know to be true.
And when we do this with our self, it's very important, but
it's even more important when wedo it with others.
And I think we go about the way of doing that.
We we do that the wrong way. We when we when me and someone
(09:57):
that I know have a conversation about beliefs and our beliefs
clash and we exchange our beliefs, we go about it the
wrong way. Hey everyone, I want to take a
quick moment to shout out my friends at Conviction Co.
If you know me, you know I love my hats and my friends at
(10:21):
Conviction Co have not only madean amazing hat, but hats that
stand for something amazing. I'm obsessed with these and you
will be too. Seriously, they're such great
quality and I love them so much.So head over right now to
convictionco.com to grab your own hat and stand with me and
standing for something you believe in and looking and
feeling good while doing it. Use code wax on, wax off at
(10:43):
checkout for 10% off. That's wax on, wax off for 10%
off at checkout. Trust me, you'll love these hats
as much as I do. Use the link below.
Let's get back into the episode and I think the reason that we
go about it the wrong way for the most part, when I have
conversations with people I disagree with, and I think an
(11:07):
important thing to understand isthat if you are going to have a
conversation with someone that you disagree with, do not go
into it trying to change their mind.
It's futile, it's pointless, andyou're going to leave
disappointed. If you're trying to change
someone's beliefs, that's not going to work.
Instead, you should shift your intention to trying to believe
(11:36):
what it is that they believe. And if you can't do that, then
that's why you should be having this conversation in the 1st
place, and you should be sittingwith them and trying to
understand deeply what it is that they believe, with no wrong
intention, with no evil intention.
It's like the sorcerer's stone. You're not going to pull the
(11:57):
sword out of the rock if your intentions are bad and it's
important to exchange police. We can't avoid it.
It's not a conflict. It's not this thing that we need
to avoid that that causes pain and discord.
Now it does. It causes discord today and in
in our day and age, it causes discord.
Back when the founding fathers were around, they disagreed.
They would slam on tables, they would freak out, but they, they
(12:21):
were doing it with a purpose andthey could have these intense,
sometimes intense, sometimes civil conversations and go out
after it and go get lunch, go get dinner, go hang out.
And that's important because if I go sit down, I go to, I mean,
I guess I might as well just saythis.
(12:42):
I go to an extremely liberal college.
I have, I'm a very I'm a centrist and I agree with most
of the things that Bobby Kennedyagrees with.
For the most part. I have contradictory views to
these people. I believe something different
than they do. When I go and I try and have a
(13:05):
conversation exchange and believe, they blow up, they
freak out, they shut down and they attack me personally.
Why do they do that? The reason that they do that is
because they do something that people, everyone, everybody does
(13:30):
this. And if, if you're not careful,
you're going to do it. It's just something that
everyone does. And if you, you have to be
intentional about what you're doing when you talk about
beliefs, the reason that they attacked me personally and the
reason that people attack peoplepersonally when they talk about
(13:53):
beliefs is this reason you identify as your belief.
And you should not do that because you are not your
beliefs. You are the, some people say in
philosophy that you are a thinking thing.
I don't think we're a thinking thing.
I think we are a thing that witnesses the thinking thing.
(14:14):
You are not the thought that youhave.
The thought is your belief. You think about this.
I believe this. OK, this is me.
You're not that. And it's easy to believe in
something if it's integrated within yourself because it's a
more tangible thing. But you shouldn't do that
(14:37):
because then when someone tries to have a conversation with you
and they're like, well, what do you believe?
And they're trying take your belief.
If it's an object, we're going to view it as an object and they
try and move it around and look at it and poke it and see how
does your belief behave in comparison to my belief.
That's what we're doing when we have have a conversation about
(15:01):
belief and about conflicting ideas.
If you identify as that, then you're going to feel like
they're pushing you around and moving you around and poking you
and prodding you and making you feel bad.
And then you're going to feel personally attacked.
And then what are you going to do?
You're going to go and you're going to try and personally
attack them back because they just tried to personally attack
(15:22):
you by having this conversation with you.
That's not what they're trying to do.
And I fall prey to this all the time.
I, I, I, this is a problem that I have and I have to constantly
take myself hostage and look at myself and say, what am I doing?
(15:43):
Am I believing something or am Iidentifying as my belief?
If you're identifying as your belief, you you lose and you
can't have civil conversations and you're always going to be
this person that people look at like a puffer fish, like
something that's going to easilybe inflamed and automatically
become defensive. You need to disassociate
(16:04):
yourself from your beliefs and hold them separate from yourself
constantly. I feel like an aspect of this
also is people think that they know the thing, they know the
answer. They have the answer that they
have arrived at the truth, but nobody has arrived at the truth.
And that's why we seek after truth.
(16:26):
That's why you have these conversations is because I know
that my belief is not fully formed.
I know that what I have right now is true, but it's not at its
full potential. And I'm probably going to end up
running to into people that teach me something and make me
learn something and then I adaptit and I change it.
(16:47):
And it's not a bad thing. You never fully arrive.
No matter what you believe, you're never fully right.
I heard this person the other day say this.
They're like, I'm right wing, which also happens, which is
awesome because that also happens to be the right thing.
And I was like stupid. You don't know everything.
(17:09):
You don't the same way that someone on the left doesn't know
everything. That's why there are sides is so
that we can learn from each other.
You are not. And if if someone is going to
act like they know everything orthat they have arrived at the
truth, I don't. I just don't trust those people.
(17:32):
I, I honestly don't. Socrates, one of the most
brilliant philosophical minds ever, said.
I know that I am intelligent because I know that I know
nothing. The more you know, the more you
know that you know nothing. And true wisdom is recognizing
the fact that you know nothing. I'm not trying to change what
(17:52):
you believe. I'm trying to give you some
tools that I have learned, that I have found helpful and that
have helped me in having civil, honest, good conversations with
people that teach me more. I'm not.
I've gone into conversations trying to change people's mind
and what happens? We get into a civil or uncivil
(18:16):
argument of some kind. There's circular argument.
We just have a circular argumentgoing over different points that
contradict each other and we find no common ground.
It's an important part of a conversation.
It's finding common ground and going into it with a pure heart.
And and you're on a quest, you have a question.
You're trying to understand something about the other
(18:39):
person's beliefs and something about the other and something
about your beliefs and seeing how those things match up.
It's a quest that you're on and you don't go.
If you're going on an evil questand your intention is bad and
your question is bad, then people are going to behave
badly. Sometimes you can have the right
question and the what right intention, but people are still
(19:01):
going to behave badly because they don't have the right tools
in their toolbox and I don't have it all figured out.
I don't understand the answer toeverything.
I don't know, but I know that these things are are helpful for
people. They've helped me and they've
helped others friends in my life.
So I guess I'm going to wrap it up here.
(19:22):
I don't really know what else tosay.
My goal behind this conversationis I see people fighting other
people, not with fists or weapons, but with words, and it
makes me sad. I don't want to be a failure and
(19:45):
I don't want my generation to fail.
And I'm going to do everything that I can to try and make the
people that I get to interact with just a little bit better.
And I don't. It's pointless to have these
arguments with people and to just like you don't have a
(20:06):
problem with the person. Let me pick someone super
controversial, Charlie Kirk. If you disagree with him, right,
you don't like what he says. First of all, you probably don't
even know what he says. You probably haven't even
listened to what it is that he has to say.
And you've seen four or five TikTok clips that your algorithm
(20:29):
has sent you because they know that you don't like people like
him. So if they send you these clips
that are out of context, you're going to hate him even more and
you're going to hate or dislike other people that like him,
causing more division in the world.
You don't even know what it is that he's saying.
(20:51):
You see four clips, That's not him.
I don't know him. I've watched a couple of his
clips. I've watched videos of his not
because I agree with him, just to trying to understand him and
he makes some valid points and other points he makes are
freaking crazy. But that doesn't make him a bad
person. That doesn't make people who
(21:13):
like him bad people. That just means that he's human
and humans make mistakes and humans don't have everything
figured out. And if you have a problem with
him, the only one that that's hurting is you.
You shouldn't have a problem with him.
You should just say this is thisis truly what it is.
(21:36):
If you think you know what is right and you have the answer
and you think that you are more correct than he is, then you
have the truth. The truth is not threatened by
anything. No one.
I if someone goes up to me or upto a scientist that discovered
colors and they said the grass is green and then someone goes
up to them and they say actuallythe grass is blue, that
(22:00):
scientist is not going to be threatened by you saying
something that's imbecilic and stupid.
Only people that don't have the truth and that are insecure are
going to be people that are going to lash out.
So you probably don't have the truth anyway if you're so
unstable and insecure and what it is that you believe.
(22:24):
And I just don't want I I just want, I don't want people to all
believe the same thing. That's not the point.
You're supposed to disagree, butyou're supposed to disagree the
right way. There is a right way to
disagree. Disagreeing is not bad.
Asking questions is not bad. But it's going about it the
(22:48):
right way with pure intentions, not trying to change someone
else's view on things and tryingto understand what it is that
they believe. More.
So that way you can use the information that they have given
you, put it up against what it is that you believe in private
or in a conversation, and propose different ideas civilly
(23:11):
so that way you can have good conversations with people.
I don't know if this episode is helpful.
I hope it is. It's helped me.
And if you want to see more stuff like this, let me know.
I'm really happy to be here withyou guys.
Yeah. So let's keep doing this thing.
(23:33):
I'm grateful. And yeah, I love you guys.
Bye everybody.
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