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Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind, the show that focuses on the overlap of psychology and religion and spirituality. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and psychology of religion researcher. But when I say researcher, you say bullshit because on the other line is Dr. James W. Pennebaker, professor emeritus of psychology at University of Austin. And if I say I'm a researcher, then I don't know what that makes you, Jamie.
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B
So let me University of Texas at Austin.
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A
Oh, okay. Okay. What did I say?
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B
University of Austin.
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A
I know it's UT Austin. I, I know that your, I know that your football field holds as many people as live within the city limits. I know a lot about ut. I can't believe I messed that up. Wow, I must be nervous. I'm shivering with my, with my one public, my one or two publications up against your, I don't know, what is it, 300 peer reviewed articles or something? Your, your CV, your CV is longer than if Costco had an inventory list of every item they carried in the warehouse. It is overwhelming. It's well into the double digits of pages, very small single space type. But your work has focused on a bunch of stuff that I find interesting and aligns with kind of the current direction of this show. So we'll be talking about language, the way that people use language and what your research over the years has shown about that. You were also early into talking about AI and large language models. And when those really started coming online, you were well positioned to talk about them from a psychological angle. So I definitely want to talk with you about that. And that will lead us into sort of like religion, both AI and religion, religion and spirituality, what language that is sort of synthetically created might be able to do around that stuff as well as anything else you're interested in sort of in that world. And I know you've also done a lot about language and prayer, processing events through writing. And so that also has a heavy overlap with religion and spirituality. So that's a little bit of the menu here. But we're going to go wherever the conversation takes us. I wanted to start here. Longtime listeners know that the book that sort of helped turn me towards psychology and to the extent that I had to choose away from theology and philosophy was Jonathan Haidt's the Righteous Mind, which I read in 2016amidst intense polarization in the electorate and the upcoming election of Trump. I read it before he was elected and trying to understand left and right and sort of moral psychology. But there's more in that book. That book actually has a lot of sort of accrued psychological wisdom and research in it. Not all of it is Haidt's own, but he talks about. One of the things that has stuck with me forever from reading that book is the way that oftentimes we think that our personal language, the words that I choose to use to explain something or explain myself, that that's, I am accurately naming the real reason, so to speak, that I did X or Y. And he gives an example of like, you know, my wife comes home and she's like, hey, did you feed the cat and do the dishes? Because I had said to her, hey, I'll feed the cat and do the dishes while you're gone. And then I don't. And she comes home. Now, I'm not gonna say, yeah, you know, honey, I'm the kind of person who doesn't do what he says. I'm not gonna say that. Although that would be probably the more accurate thing to say. I'll say, oh yeah, you know, our kids did this and I got distracted and this thing came up. And in that sense, my language is a post hoc justification or an after the fact explanation of what happened in a way that coheres with my sense of self is the way that I would sort of summarize that. So I'll, I won't say, oh yeah, I guess I sometimes fuck up. I will say instead, oh, this thing got in the way. But I'm not the kind of person who does that. I mean, it was circumstances and that, that, that's a simple example, but that goes much, much more deep throughout all kinds of ways. So let's start here. Do you agree with that basic version of, you know, Jonathan Haidt refracted through me? How does that cohere with your work on the way that language might work in a sort of a post hoc justification or explanatory kind of a way?
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B
And Jonathan is exactly right about this. The fact is, in psychology, we know humans are not rational. We're rationalizing that. The reality is we don't know much of anything, but we've got this incredible computer in our head, our brain, that is helping us to understand. So if you look at a chimpanzee or a dog or a rat for that matter, they are able to do absolutely incredible things. They're able to think rationally and so forth. They don't have language and the level of their understanding is probably minimal. But if you could put a human brain on top of it, the human brain would immediately start looking around and trying to understand, you know, why am I searching for this kind of food versus that kind of food? And our, and our new rat brain would start to come up with theories and ideas and ways of explaining it. That's not to say that our brains are wrong. Our brains evolved to try to figure out the world, to be able to predict it as well as we possibly can. And that's what the brain is for. Which means we are able to think much further ahead. And even more important, we're able to think further ahead and communicate it with others. Which now all of a sudden makes our social life much richer than say, a chimpanzee social life or a rat social life. Because I can learn from this person's experiences when they've been out there on their own and can explain and the two of us can come up with richer explanations. And this is really kind of the beginning of what culture is, the ability to all of a sudden identify who I am, who we are, who this group is, and that group that's over in the other field, five miles away. A lot of people have talked about this. The book Nexus is really interesting when it lays out essentially how communication has evolved. From the very first humanoids started to come up with a fairly rudimentary language, first just labeling things. And then as it evolves, being able to tell stories and stories now allow us to. So my tribe will have a somewhat different story than your tribe. But now we start to integrate these and all of a sudden you see from small cultures to broader cultures, et cetera. And then from there we get the iPhone.
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A
A few, a few short skips away, we get to the iPhone.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Okay. This is extremely early in a conversation for me to try and land a plane of this size, so to speak, but I'm going to try because you've got me thinking about something here. One thing that's been very helpful for me as I have come out of more conservative religion into a more sort of open handed faith and spiritual experience. Which by the way, Jamie, and I'm calling you Jamie because that's what you put in your riverside name, by the way, I'm not. Listeners don't, I don't want. That's a good enough signal for me to call you what you write on your own thing. So you know, that for me is Sort of a liberal Protestant type type Christianity, a Paul Tlic type Christianity. And one thing that's been helpful for me in making that transition is to think of Christianity and other religions as well as wisdom traditions. Kind of more often than I think of it as like perfectly divinely revealed, you know, truth that has been unspoiled through supernatural means, which I don't really buy anymore. But wisdom tradition is interesting because it's kind of in the middle view there. And I'm wondering if it might, if, if you might be helping me find language for how I'm thinking that that works. So if I take what you just said about a single individual person or maybe just a few people, two or three people in relationship with each other, well, okay. As my brain tries to do at least two things at once, many more, but for our purposes, two things at once. Number one, figure out true things about the world, while number two, protecting my fragile sense of self and my social standing amongst my group. So it's gonna lie. It's. I'm lie to myself, I'm gonna lie to other people. I'm gonna massage the truth. I'm gonna do all these things so I look good both inwardly and externally. That's producing a conflict there. So I am trying to find out truth, but I'm also trying to save my own ass all the time. And everyone's doing that all the time. And more mature people maybe do it slightly less, but everybody does it. What a wisdom tradition does is it. It takes, let's say it starts with a thousand claims from a thousand different people within a group. Well, over the years and then generations and then centuries and then millennia, it's got away in the aggregate of figuring out which of those formulations that are always dancing between saving face and finding truth or which of them found the most truth, which we would find out through usefulness and help. You know, it's useful for understanding. It has explanatory power. It has predictive power like you're talking about earlier. So someone who says, hey, you're feeling happy now, but just wait till that honeymoon phase is over. That is a wisdom tradition type of a predictive claim about how relationships go based on past experience. So you're kind of giving me language for maybe how that might work. Despite the limitations of language, that nonetheless a wisdom tradition, which is ensconced in ritual and language, doctrine, scripture, yada, yada, could nonetheless do that helpful work of giving us a container that's like pretty good, pretty accurate without us having to learn it all from scratch. And how. Okay, what do you think?
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B
How do I do that? Sounds reasonable. The question I come to is, well, is there truth? And what's the relationship between wisdom and truth? And this idea of the first humans are trying to figure out the world and they come up with, after a few generations, you know, they have an understanding of why the sun comes up and why this constellations seem to change over time. And they come up with these theories and this large group of people all agree on it. And then they come up with an idea of a. They put it into some kind of religion organization. And everybody agrees to it and there's variations in it. And the question is, is. And then they, then they have writing. So they write it down and then it's. Then they make that holy. So they are saying that that is truth. But the reality is, is it is still a human made organization and structure that may work just great as long as the world always works on those principles. So the real truth is what's happening in terms of all of this random information. But we have to remember that our truth is a structure that our brain is trying to see. And if all of a sudden the world changes radically, all of a sudden the rain stops for 100 years where I live. Or if all of a sudden there's a, you know, a massive tsunami that wipes out the entire population, or we could go on and on with different types of disasters. All of a sudden we start to realize, you know, maybe we'll have to come up with a new. A new truth, a new sets, sets of rules and wisdom and so forth. And there is the thing that I find so intriguing. Humans are great at coming up with hypotheses and beliefs and then they start to believe them that they are true. And my personal view is, I'm happy to say something's true for the time being until there's persuasive evidence that maybe the world does not work that way. And we get into this issue that I'm sure that you've talked about in great detail, which is, you know, gravitate to people who are seeking truth. Run away from those people who have found it.
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A
Oh, that's a good form. Where's that one from? That's a great formulation.
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B
I saw it on a bumper sticker on a car several years ago.
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A
Well, the bumper sticker industry could be conceived of as its own micro wisdom tradition, but maybe with a slightly worse track record.
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B
That's right.
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A
I totally agree with everything you're saying. I think like, let's Take ancient Judaism as an example here. So there's all kinds of little sort of nuggets that, that contain in them basically propositional claims that we could extract out, you know, the sort of cognitive meaning of the thing. So there's a, it's a real mixed bag. In the Hebrew Bible you've got a bunch of claims about the fact that blood is required for gods to be satiated in their wrath. Okay, including BAAL and the sort of small G gods, but also Yahweh, like also the God of the Old Testament. Right. So that's a claim that psychologically the story of Jesus and Paul's idea that Jesus sort of ends the sacrificial system by being the one sacrificial lamb. Whether or not that is a true statement about what happened to Jesus, about what it means for God, it gave people coming into a new era of sort of human culture and consciousness an out because that kind of idea was not really going to stick around. And Jews today don't really believe that. And, and like it's kind of it that one's found its way out. But take a bunch of the stuff in the psalms and the proverbs, you know, sort of like the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Fear being probably better understood as awe and like awe, gratitude. Wow, this is a big, this huge force that I don't understand. Well, I think that's done a hell of a lot better than gods require blood for sin. You know what I mean? Like, like some idea that like there's a kind of humility before awesome power that is necessary for real human wisdom. For a human, like in Daryl Van Tungren's words, for a human to be humble, to be right sized for their. Who they are, well, that one does a lot better. So I would just. That was like. My first thought is that wisdom traditions then contain a stratification, you might say, of claims that we could kind of sort by how permanent they are. Or like, like for instance, the, the honeymoon phase, one that I used earlier, which is a more of a contemporary wisdom thing that's getting at something true psychologically that I don't think 100 years from now people are going to go, we were totally wrong about the honeymoon phase. No, like there's a period of increased dopamine and serotonin and increased oxytocin that papers over differences, you know, like we find we could, I could talk about it through neurotransmitters and hormones and relational patterns, or I could just call it the honeymoon phase that One probably is pretty secure because it seems to really get at something repeatable through time. Is that making sense?
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B
Let's not lose sight of the fact that's kind of going on a model of monogamy and kind of going on a model of, you know, a certain kind of living system and so forth, as opposed to a system that humans sometimes have gotten into, where you're in a group of people and you go through a period of wild sexual passion with one other person, knowing full well that this is just, you know, this is a fabulous period for the next few weeks. In other words, even that is premised on a certain kind of stable environment that humans sometimes don't have, where they are part of a group of 100 or 200 people who are going along and it's essentially, look at how bonobo colonies work. And sure, they go through that period, but they wouldn't call it a honeymoon period. It would just be, you know, this is party time and we're both really into each other today and probably for probably days.
- [19:00]
A
Yeah, well, so that makes sense. I just think that the honeymoon framing of that, sure, that's sort of assuming this particular background, but you could still describe. Even you could chart out a wave of hormone and neurotransmitter levels over a certain number of days, and bonobos would have a slightly different graph than humans and. And whatever. But, like, it's still getting at something real in the way that I think, you know, fear, gratitude, before awesome massive realities gets at something real like that gets at something of like, oh, if you don't think that the world is big and you think that you can easily understand it, you're fucking wrong. I mean, like, you're just. You're wrong. Now, there's different ways we could kind of tease that out or whatever, but, like, those people, people who make those claims, those aren't going to last because people will try them and then either they'll find out they don't work or they'll die and they won't pass them on, or something like that.
- [19:58]
B
Right. You know, it's interesting, many of these issues that you're talking about in the religious world are also true in the science world, because in science there's been this long debate about kind of the deductive kind of science that you have a theory and then you test it, and then you tested again and again, and then the theory is truth. And then there's this other group of scientists who are more inductive, which is, I don't know how the world works. I'm, you know, I'm doing this and I all of a sudden see, well, look at this. You do it this way and it works, but this way it doesn't work, and so forth. And then I think most scientists are a mixture of deductive and inductive. But the important thing to always remember is go on the assumption that all theories are problematic and all theories fall down under some circumstances. You know, you look at our greatest theories, you know, Einstein's E equals MC squared, or we could go on and on the nature of gravity and so forth, and we're finding, you know, all of these theories are problematic. And so to me, that is a really important issue. And it brings us back to the humility issue. Don't believe any theory is absolutely true. Don't believe any religion is absolutely true. Don't believe that your conceptions of life after death are absolutely true. These are all, they are working models that people have come up with doing the best they can to understand the world. But as you're pointing out, we always have to have humility.
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A
I've thought twice now as I've listened to you talk about human language, about this concept. If people have read anything about AI, if you've read any news articles or sort of followed any of the rollout of these large language models, probably the number one complaint about them, and it's always being addressed and bugs are being fixed, but. But it has remained, is that they hallucinate. That's the term that's caught on. And the way I would describe that for people who haven't read about this is the large language model. It has a prejudice, it has a default aim that is, I guess it's probably encoded by the developers because of the company's interests and incentives. But basically the way that these all work is like, they want to like, complete the paragraph, they want to have something to say whether or not the thing that they say is true. They really want things to be true. Obviously, like OpenAI wants that, Metta wants that. They want them to be accurate. But more than that, slightly more important is they need to have fucking something to say. They're not going to say nothing. They, they're not gonna sort of run out of words. And of course they don't need to, because no physical person is having to keep up the energy to talk like, you and I have to have, like, you got coffee before and I've got my coffee here. We have to be able to like, you know, we're using finite calories to do that. Of Course, these data centers are using other forms of energy, but the idea is they will say something and sometimes they will say the wrong thing. That sounds like kind enough, kind of close enough to write. Or maybe the kind of thing that somebody who is bullshitting about a topic might say. They will make up quotes from people that in the context of the answer sound like they would be something the person said. But very often, if you ask them for a page number or a book or whatever, they can't find it because it's not real. And I just keep thinking twice now, like, gosh, that's kind of how we use language.
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B
That sounds just like me. It sounds like everybody. It sounds like how you talk to your wife about why you didn't do your chores.
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A
Right. So I'm able to make that surface level connection there. But can you take us a couple levels deeper? So how do you see that kind of language? Hallucination, maybe first in a human being. So you said that's how we are. Maybe get a bit more technical with how you think that works.
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B
Well, think about how it happens with us when we are being complete. We think we're being completely honest. And I know my wife gives me shit about this. My close friends do as well. Someone will ask me something and I know pretty much about the topic. But, you know, of course, not everything.
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A
I have no idea what you're talking about. Now, this, I don't relate to this at all.
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B
And so I'll give an answer and somebody will ask a question and, you know, I'll say, well, 60% of the time, such and such and such, I'm pulling that out of my ass. I have no idea if it's true. And then all the time, and then, you know, someone will talk to me and they'll be really interested. Wow. 60% of the time. Do you have some evidence for that? And you know, and of course, well, this book might be helpful figuring. I don't. I haven't read the book, but it seemed like.
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A
But you have heard somebody mention the book in this context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is so true.
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B
Yeah. If you ask me, am I lying? No, no, no, I'm lying. You know, I was just making some educated guesses. And you know, my wife, even now, she says, you know, you told me such and such, and I believed you. And I know I shouldn't believe you, but you speak with such confidence. And she said, just like most men, she points out. I don't know where she gets that.
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A
But of course, yeah, there could be a whole little subfield of analysis where it's just like, was it all dudes who made the large language models?
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B
Yeah. And of course, it mostly was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's another fascinating thing. This is one thing I do study is humans are sucked in by people who speak with confidence. And if you look at the history of US Presidents, I do a lot of text analysis work. And what we found is since 1900, there's been a linear increase in terms of the degree to which presidents speak with confidence. You know, and Trump's the highest, but Obama was the second highest, and George W. Bush and Clinton and Reagan, et cetera. It was linear. We've been going up in terms of speaking with confidence. And at the same time, the fact is, is that we are being less internally logical over time. So here people are speaking in a less logical way, but in a more confident way.
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A
Are you saying presidential candidates have done that or you're saying precedents that human beings speak? Okay, yeah. So you're saying in the same textual analysis, you're finding both increased confidence and decreased factfulness, basically accuracy.
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B
That's right.
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A
Okay.
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B
And what I'm pointing out is those are the people we elect. We are suckers for. These are the Cheetos of leaders. So these are, you know, they are giving us what we want. We want somebody who speaks simply and with confidence. Well, that's a, you know, that's a pretty horrible combination. And I mean, it's ironic that Biden, but Obama and Trump have more in common than you would think in terms of this, how they are talking and conveying and why so many people have been so enamored with them. And I'm not, I mean, now ignoring what they're saying, this is just speaking styles.
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A
Well, I believe you about Trump and Obama, but when it comes to Biden, Jamie, that's malarkey. Okay.
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B
When he ran for president the first time, he was also speaking simply and with confidence as well. And this is 20th century politics, and this is true in other countries as well, that when there's two candidates, we generally go for the one that's simpler and the one who is more confident.
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A
Let me ask you a question about that. I've got a couple follow ups just to put pins in them, and partly so I don't forget, I want to talk about a spiritual abuse angle here, because there's one that I did not see coming. And then we want to get back to applying this to large language models. But before we do, like, do you think that that is essentially, basically, I could Think of two hypotheses for why that's changed over time and why you would see a linear progression from 1900 to 2025. I'm sure there are more. The two that come to mind for me are, number one, there has been an actual change in at least human public language that would be maybe best understood through the lens of media studies. I'm thinking of Neil Postman amusing ourselves to Death or Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. These, these ideas that like understanding the form of media and how that restricts communication. That's the way to understand it. Alternately, I could see a hypothesis that, that makes the opposite claim. Nothing has changed, but really what's going on is that the type of people who study this thing, basically the type of people that candidates hire to help them get elected, have like other sort of scientists just gotten better at this? Maybe closer to like marketing executives. They have uncovered the laws of human persuasion with greater and greater accuracy and tools as technology has allowed them to do that. And, and that's why you see it worldwide and not only in a particular Western culture, for instance, where, I don't know, you could make a postman argument that television is global, Twitter and X are global, that this stuff is. I guess you could make the data fit either of those in some superficial way. Do you think both of those are operant? Do you think there's a bigger one that I'm not naming?
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B
We have data that, to address those issues. So for example, we can look at how in the congressional records, all the debates and so forth over the last hundred years, and what we find is that the language has not changed that much. We can look at the history of newspapers, the language has not changed that much. And what happens is this started to, to change these, these trends started to occur in the United States starting about, starting about 1910, something like that. And they, they went up quite a bit.
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A
Now, isn't that the age of radio?
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B
Basically, that's, that's where I'm going with this. I'm sorry, that's exactly where I'm going with this. And you start looking at other countries, Australia, Canada, England, that this increase started probably 10 or 15 years later. So mass media became important. And early on you see it with fdr, you see it with others, that all of a sudden these leaders realize, damn, I need to be thinking about how I'm coming across as much as what I'm saying. And up to that time people were concerned about what they were saying. And so all of a sudden the rules change. So, by and large, I think the way that we're talking with our friends, our colleagues, et cetera, is pretty similar. But what's happening is it's essentially the growth of junk food that we discovered. People buy a lot more garbage food if it tastes good, even though it's not nutritious, because that's what humans like.
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A
Yeah, okay. Yeah. If you give people the option at roughly the same cost, even they will choose the junkier thing in most circumstances, unless they're, like, on a cleanse or, like, you know, whatever. Yeah.
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B
And I would bet that you could do an analysis of the popularity of churches and religions in terms of some similar issues, because big churches are paying a huge amount of attention to how they're selling. What are people clicking? And that's just. And by the way, religions are just like toothpaste. And, you know, you see some of this even in popular science as well. So this issue, this is we're dealing with human weaknesses, which is we like certainty and simplicity.
- [33:27]
A
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B
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A
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C
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- [34:46]
A
So the spiritual abuse angle is that there's a meaningful difference, I think, between a presidential candidate saying, I'm your best bet for solving immigration, economy issues, national defense. Pick your topic, right? And a pastor saying, the Lord is saying to you today, there is a real difference there. So where I see the sort of straight line to spiritual abuse is the politician could be lying or over inflating his or her competence or making bold predictions that some people are Gonna believe the true believers. Other people will be skeptical or cynical, okay, whatever. But when we take that angle of what you're saying of we are drawn to the straightforward simp confident person speaking big claims of truth. That is a kind of a human weakness around religion that is particularly worrisome because there's sort of more room for harm because people let their pastors much deeper into themselves so to speak than they let their favorite politician. With a few exceptions of basically political activists or volunteers who are very close to this candidate or something. It's a small group. The average voter does not give nearly the amount of authority to their state's governor as they do their spiritual leader or mentor, anybody in their life for whom they give that sort of authority to. So that's kind of where my mind went. I'd love to hear what you think about that.
- [36:36]
B
So a powerful charismatic political leader is able to say all. Everything we know shows that immigration leads to the breakdown of society. You can see it over here and coming up with total, total deceptive, false information. And that person is going to have a huge impact. And especially if that person ironically is an independent of some kind who can draw from both sides. You know, the spiritual leader, I think it's really the same kind of thing. So you could say, well the spiritual person is particularly dangerous because they are wrapping, they're claiming it's not their beliefs but it's God's beliefs and God's will and so forth. And that's going to have a big impact among the people who are into that particular religious religion or religious leader. So if this person is the head of the Republicans or head of the Democrats it will be a particularly powerful for them an independent is make has.
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A
Greater, greater potential reach. Right? Yeah, that's right.
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B
And you know, the religious side, I find it fascinating because there's. There's been a long history of religious leaders essentially being demagogues. Who is Father McLaughlin in the 1930s and others. And I believe he was Catholic and had a huge messianic following doing just the same thing that you're talking about. I do think that that is a bastardization of politics, but it's certainly not new. How dangerous is it? Well, it's. Of course it's dangerous from a political perspective. The other issue that I see is it's really damning for the religion itself. One reason people are able to do this more now is there's so many kind of non aligned religions. So you create your own, your own church and then people. Now the question I would Ask is what's the draw for people to go into that church? Is it actually the religious fundamentalism and simplicity that is drawing them, that makes the world much simpler? Is this the abuse of a religion? I mean, it's a. Let's think of it as a product. People are buying the product just to.
- [39:19]
A
Make, to make sure I'm not claiming something that I'm not claiming and make sure it's clear. I'm not saying that the outline, the scenario I outlined is necessarily spiritually abusive. What I'm saying is it makes individual spiritual abuse more likely and perhaps more powerful to the extent that a pastor sort of shares these qualities that help people, politicians in our, our day and age, that. That's what I'm saying. And so it will not have the same reach as a politician would in almost any case. Like, there's, there are very few religious leaders of any kind that are as influential or reach as many people as successful politicians do just numerically. I mean, the Pope. Right. I guess. But like the Pope is constrained by a lot of, you know, if, if the Pope starts kind of going rogue, like the.
- [40:11]
B
There are, let's be honest, there's some real historical example of Popes going rogue.
- [40:18]
A
Oh, it's happened. Yeah. Yeah. Although I actually think that we could put this a little bit in conversation with the earlier wisdom tradition stuff though. It's interesting how you're mentioning. Yeah, like you can sort of splinter off and do your own kind of religion now and you could, if you're social media savvy, you could maybe amass a few hundred thousand followers pretty easily. If you're good looking, speak with confidence and have a good video editor, you could get to 2 or 300,000 followers and probably get yourself on a few big podcasts within a couple years if you put your mind to it. But I think that you can contrast that with just the very bare facts of the ministry and life of Jesus of Nazareth. For instance, I know Christianity best because that's my tradition. But you could, I'm sure you could do a similar analysis with Islam or Buddhism or whatever.
- [41:10]
B
Right.
- [41:11]
A
But with Christianity, it's like at the end of the day, over time, you're going to have your big blustery, you know, demagogue type pastors and leaders, or you're going to have politicians who sort of twist the words of Christ. I mean, I think you see it right now with JD Vance and others, but in the long term analysis, Jesus fucking gave up his life. Like whether or not he raised from the dead as Far as we can tell, he willingly submitted to being crucified rather than fighting back. And that choice alone, you can interpret it 50 different ways, but none of them get you to Trump. None of them get you to power for power's sake. None of them get you to, well, just tell everybody a really powerful story and get their money. Like, he let them kill him, right? He just died. So there is something in that, that. You know what I mean? Like, it will always be critiquing these other approaches, like, from its just basic factness of it, you know what I mean?
- [42:18]
B
I think you are thinking that us humans are. That are logical, human.
- [42:27]
A
Oh, no, no, no. I'm not making that mistake.
- [42:30]
B
I think you have to understand that humans are really good at justifying their worldview and a worldview, by the way, that they believe. They believe all this. The story of Jesus. Absolutely. And this is why Trump is the perfect person, because he's a person who has really had a troubled, difficult childhood. He's a person who is an instrument of God. This is exactly what Jesus would want, is somebody like Trump to be leading us. I can't believe that you are even questioning the holiness of this man who, you know, I saw him show the Bible in front of that church. This is just who we are. And by the way, liberals are no different. Liberals, Nazis, everybody, if they have a very strong belief in a leader, they will make that leader conform with their other fundamental beliefs about what's morally right and wrong. And this goes back to the remarkable ability of the human brain. Just like GPT, it's able to put together all of these facts, many of which are. Don't fit, but the human brain is able to find some connections.
- [44:06]
A
I mean, I think you're totally right. I guess what I'm saying. What I'm saying is if I'm making an argument, it's a chronologically zoomed out argument. I'm saying if we stay zoomed in on the moment, 100%, there will be, whatever, 30 million Americans or something like that who will go to their deathbeds thinking with utmost confidence that God used Trump in a very straightforward, godlike way, the kind of way that God does things. And those people are like, they're just. They're almost definitely wrong. There's 30 million of them, but they're probably wrong. And they're gonna go to their deathbeds. But that's like 10 to 15% of American adults will go to. Will go to their deathbed with that belief. And the people with the exact same let's just posit 10 million other non Americans with the same. Let's just, let's just say they have the same personality structure, they have the same big five scores, the same rural urban splits, whatever. Give yourself a representative 10 million others. If they're not Americans, 1% of them are gonna believe that maybe 3%, 5%. And the only ones who will believe it are ones who consume a ton of American media content. So there is a sense already in which the global church, even just in this short time span, if we just ask them, if we ask conservative Christian leaders around the world what they think about a claim like that, nine out of 10 of them will say, we don't agree with that. You would only believe that if you are constantly watching Newsmax and OAN and Fox News all the time and maybe certain other Christian publishing and stuff like that. I think my argument gets even stronger at a longer timescale. So I think 100 years from now, when people look back and they no longer have particular skin in the game with the particular hopes and dreams and resentments and pain and whatever that Trump seems to be giving voice to right now, with hindsight, it will be even clearer how far that, how far Trump is from like any, any remotely plausible reading of the person and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, whether you take the Jesus seminar lefty version or the faithful, this is all perfectly exactly accurate version. He doesn't line up with any of those versions. But so basically I'm saying I agree with you. In the current moment, that is what we are like. But that's sort of the value of the wisdom tradition is that it necessarily continues on after the current moment and we can look back to hundreds or thousands of years of previous moments that were then current. Does that make sense?
- [46:53]
B
Yes and no. Yes in the sense of. It's very interesting because you are assuming that the Judeo Christian approach in the broadest sense is real and true as opposed to.
- [47:10]
A
Oh, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not assuming that. To be clear.
- [47:13]
B
Okay.
- [47:14]
A
I'm an old school liberal Protestant. I'm like, maybe it's all metaphor. I don't know what. I guess what I am. I will say what I'm assuming is true. What I am assuming is true is that there was a Jewish leader named Jesus of Nazareth that roughly lived and had ministry and was crucified under the Roman Empire and opted not to lead a jubilee like rebellion like happened 40 years later or whatever. When is that Jubilees? No, whatever. The later one is where they destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70. So 70 BCE like, so I'm just saying just those basic facts. I'm not adding any confessionalism here or anything. I'm just saying there was this religious leader who's like, nah, I'm not gonna write anything down, and I'm not gonna lead a revolt. I'm gonna allow myself to be killed. At minimum, I'm not going to lead a resistance movement to stop myself from being killed. That's really all I'm. That's all I'm assuming as factual.
- [48:17]
B
So I'd like to imagine we look now at another society. Like, it could be ancient Peruvian period, it could be Egyptian, it could be almost anything that was going on long, long before Christ. And societies that have a very rich philosophical religious tradition. And the fact of the matter is, a strong, charismatic person steps up and says, I want to change everything. And there's a lot of people out there who are unhappy with the way the system is. And that person who's trying to change all of this is going to wrap him or herself around the current belief structures of people at the time, because otherwise they're not going to buy into it and is going to be able to subvert all of that. And then you're saying, well, don't they see that this person is doing that? Not really. Because they want a lot of these changes that they think would be best for me, for my family, for my community, et cetera. And is it inconsistent with the current belief systems? No, not at all. Because belief systems are. They are malleable. And is it written specifically in the Bible? Come on. There's all sorts of written in the Bible. And so I think, even though Trump is not behaving the way that most people interpret the life of Jesus as is written in the Bible and doesn't behave in the way that I think most people in a civil society would like someone to behave. You know, a large percentage of people, and by the way, good people, honest people, people who care about their families in their community and their country, they are able to, you know, give. Give a pass on this because this person is trying to do something that they think is good. And then there's a whole other group of people who are looking at this and they are appalled by what he's trying to do and trying to make a logical argument that it doesn't fit in with religious scripture. Well, that's kind of a. That's, that's missing the point.
- [50:41]
A
Yeah. Okay, so I, I do think I agree with you. And I'm agreeing that a lot of the current era analysis that sort of, there's a naivety to saying, well, let's just, let's just hold this up against the facts of our religious tradition. And can't we all see that he's, I agree with you in the moment, that's not effective. It's not the way that most people are persuaded. It's not like if what you want is to change, let's say votes, like a particular upcoming, this worldly outcome, do not engage in the type of theological and philosophical reflection that I'm talking about. That's not gonna work. That's not going to get you votes to pass the thing.
- [51:29]
B
That's right. And, and it also raises some really interesting questions. So getting out of religion, I think most of us think that being honest is a good idea. I think most of us actually believe that you should treat other people the way you would want to be treated. That most, most people, you know, do believe that it is wrong to bully people and extort money from them for your own good, especially as a leader. And you don't even have to have religion to believe in those things. Virtually every religion on earth would say those are things that humans in societies should do. So we got somebody who doesn't really endorse those views. I view that as a problem. And it doesn't even have to have anything to do with religion. It's being a human being in a civilized society. And maybe the argument is, well, we're not in a civilized society, so all's fair in love and war.
- [52:37]
A
Well, I'd like to get your explanation of what you think is going on there, because I do think that's a really good, it's a good problem to try and sink our teeth into that. Trump presents sort of a more straightforward example of this. I do think that the basic line that people will come back with, which is like all politicians have various levels of corruption and whatever, obviously true, but he's really flaunting it. He, in his own words, admits to 10 times what any previous president has admitted to, most of which they've tried to distance themselves from, even that one tenth of it or whatever. And so there's maybe less of a difference in terms of what the presidents and their administrations actually do. That gets filtered through our media. And we, we all probably depending on our own sources of media, think there's a bigger discrepancy than there is. And the discrepancy goes opposite directions depending on our media. But in terms of owning it from a Messaging standpoint, Trump is genuinely new in the American experience. And that. And that opens up very interesting questions like you're talking about, okay, so a Biden or Obama or George W. Or George HW Or Clinton supporter, do they sometimes have to contort themselves to say that their guy is good? Because even though he did have this kind of corruption or Monica Lewinsky, well, maybe it's private sex versus maybe that's not okay. We're all getting a little uncomfortable. And here's Trump. He's just like, yeah, give me a jet. Just give me. I am going to order my own Justice Department to award me $230 million in a way that no president has ever done before with no real outside oversight. And that presents a different core question to be solved. So how. What is going on psychologically when it is so in your face like that? How do you conceive of that for the individual American? I think, especially the supporter, right, the person for whom they are finding a way. Because for me, I just go, oh, yeah, he's a piece of shit. That's easy. I call him President Corleone. That's my way out. I resolve it very quickly. I don't have any dissonance about it at all, but some people in my life, I think, should have dissonance. How would you describe what's going on for them?
- [55:09]
B
I wish I could answer this in a straightforward way. The people I know, and I don't know many, you know, true believer Trump supporters, they are able to wall themselves off from any information that they don't want to hear. And, you know, humans are really good at that. They do want to see change in the United States. And a lot of them are so disgusted with. With the. The political landscape, they just want to blow it all up. Not appreciating that blowing things up has some serious downsides. And I think a large percentage of the people in the United States right now feel, you know, really kind of psychologically removed from our culture. And I think this is true worldwide. Why? Well, we could, you know, social media certainly plays into it. The whole, you know, our being distanced from work and. And our communities. It's a. You know, and it goes back to Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, which came out, you know, in the 1980s, basically pointing out, you know, people were no longer joining clubs, they were no longer joining bowling leagues, and, you know, that there was this kind of fragmentation. And I've watched this at the university for the last 20 years. Fewer and fewer faculty members spend their days at the university and it's safe and students spend less time at school and people have been going to their churches as much. It's been really interesting kind of this, what's happening worldwide. And our question is, is, does there need to be just a big bloodletting? Is that, is that what, what we're all essentially asking for or drifting towards? I don't know. I find it profoundly disturbing and I see this as a side note. I've become president of a large association in psychology, the association of Psychological Science. And I've been watching this for the last 10 years. Membership has been dropping and people are not, they're just not as committed. They're doing research, they're doing really good work, but there's just less social connections everywhere.
- [57:39]
A
So two of the things you said, I see a connection between them. So the way that media and technology along the Putnam line have sort of fragmented us, isolated us really, is that it's gone only one direction, which is greater isolation from other people that that enables. The first thing you said, which is to wall ourselves off from information. And I would add in the other thing that makes that possible is that creating news and, and current events media has gotten so inexpensive that you don't need big consensus building corporations because they're the only ones who can finance paying the salaries of everybody and having the studios and cameras and all that stuff, which used to be prohibitively expensive. And now any sort of well spoken, good looking person with an iPhone can become a celebrity over about a year if they want and sort of build their own brand and everything. So that enables this walling of ourselves off from information at a sort of technological level. I'd like you to speak though to the psychological reality of that. So you say we've always wanted to do this. So human beings, this is not a new tendency to want to close off information that doesn't cohere with our worldview or doesn't help us in whatever way we think it might help us or make us feel a certain way. Can you talk about how do you know that that is a more enduring trait that sort of predates the technological and media changes?
- [59:21]
B
I actually wouldn't say that we naturally want to wall ourselves off. I don't think that's true.
- [59:27]
A
Okay.
- [59:28]
B
I think humans are social. I mean, that's why we've been so successful in terms of survival. We actively seek out others. We like the fellowship of others. We want people in our. We don't like conflict, but we still want, we still want to be part of a group. And ideally, this group's better if we all agree on things. And if somebody is a troublemaker and a constant troublemaker maker, well, we just kill them, we put them in prison, or we banish them. But, you know, it's interesting if you look at kind of the history of towns, towns that are close to the trade network, so ports, you know, if you're at crossroads, those are the people who know people. Those are the people who really want to. They're open to experience. They know that ideas don't. Aren't coherent. And they are the people. So big cities like New York or Houston or these other places, they are always. They're always in the modern parliament, liberal simply because they know that there's perspective from the small towns, from other countries, et cetera, because they have to deal with them and their businesses require this. But they're also very social. They talk to one another, et cetera. The groups that end up being quite different historically, they would be in farming communities or ranching communities or other kind of communities where outsiders often are trouble. You know, if you're. If you're living in Nebraska in the mid-1800s, you know, you've got Indians who are coming every now and then, or you have other settlers who are coming in who might try to take your land. And so it's a totally different kind of siege mentality. So you have to look at the group. Humans, by their very nature are sociable and they seek out others. I'm saying the same thing over and over again.
- [61:47]
A
Well, no, so it's great. And it brings up something. So a lot of people who have left evangelicalism, which is maybe over time, been the bulk of listeners to this podcast that's expanding now as I just bring psychology in and broaden things out. But certainly historically, I was primarily speaking as a former evangelical to people who were in the process of leaving or rethinking their evangelical faith or some similar version of Christianity. And in trying to do. And in all of that, the political reality has been reason number one, that people have begun to feel that splintering within themselves or between themselves and their communities, their families, their churches. It's not the only reason. There's people who are doctrinally minded, people who have gay friends or go through periods of suffering or something like that. But politics is maybe the number one reason. And especially Trump has sort of kicked into overdrive a process that I think began in the late 80s and 90s around the moral Majority and the mainstreaming of that sort of in the post Reagan years. But Trump really, as we've been talking about, presents this very stark example. And one of the first concepts that I found so helpful in understanding how my former community had gone 81% for him was the way that evangelical American Christianity, for the most part, to a lesser extent Catholicism and other forms of Christianity since the Jesus movement of the 70s, which, which is really the people who became evangelicals created their own parallel institutions as again, it's media studies. It got cheaper to print books, cheaper to put on radio shows, cheaper to run your like Trinity Broadcasting Network, the Christian television station. It got affordable enough that you could do that kind of regionally and it would build and Christian record labels. It got cheap enough to make records and you didn't have to spend $200,000 to make a good sounding record. You could spend $40,000 to make a good sounding record. Now all of a sudden DC talk can compete with Nirvana, right? Think of it that way and that, that trained evangelicals over a long period to sort of just trust their own stuff. If you wanted to, you could live in an entirely Christian parallel institution bubble for your life. And what it strikes me though, hearing you describe this sort of inherent socialness that we have these different kind of approaches. I think there actually are sort of two approaches of evangelicalism that I witnessed growing up, broadly speaking. You could, I'm sure you could further nuance this, but there's the sort of, there are the crossroads types. And as a, as a Californian with a dad who was a licensed therapist, these were more the evangelical adults that I came into contact with, these were people who were like, we're engaging the broader culture. Yes, we're, we are non denominational Christians. Yes, we have a personal relationship with Jesus. However they would have said it. But like we work regular jobs, we wear flip flops and Hawaiian shirts and we are out at our local restaurants and we know our neighbors, we're not afraid. But then there is the more kind of siege mentality like the Castle Garters, that's a more fundamentalist leaning and more like doctrinal certainty and more like, well, we don't drink, we don't smoke, we don't play cards, we don't go dancing. We're sort of like, we're not, we're not of the world, we are separate from the world. And those types I think are more the ones who have kind of taken this trumpy turn and made the kind of information wall off decisions that we have been talking about, whereas the crossroads types have either had to rethink or have left evangelicalism, they've rebranded themselves, they distance themselves from all that stuff. And that's roughly been my experience. I wonder what you think about sort of that application in this particular context.
- [65:56]
B
You know, I think that, you know, I don't know the evangelical culture very well, but the way you're describing makes a lot of sense. And it's also interesting as I think, you know, what I see in other countries in terms of the growth of kind of fundamentalist Islam as well, where you see societies such as Egypt or Morocco or many other countries that have gone through a period of being much more open and so forth. And then when things get ugly and the war start happening, then you get these very powerful fundamentalist religious groups that are closed minded who are also not engaging in the world. Those are really scary times from a worldwide perspective. You know it. And of course somebody like me who's fairly secular, this, you know, it makes me very nervous. And you know, people like people who are secular, who are not particularly believers, but believe deeply in the things that Jesus taught that other important religious figures taught. This is a time that I certainly look at the world with some degree of anxiety and just curious how we move forward and how we can get, you know, it's interesting hearing you. How can you from your side of the evangelical fence engage with people on the other side of the evangelical fence? Because in many ways both sides of that fence, you don't want to talk to the other side.
- [67:51]
A
Well, they don't want to talk to me, that's for sure. And also I don't really want to talk to them.
- [67:56]
B
Yes, no, you're right, that's the point. You both have to talk to the other side. And that's, I feel, by the way, I feel the same pressure. I need to be talking more to Trumpians and Trumpians need to be talking more to me. Because this is a famous thing. The reality is you share, probably 90% of your beliefs are the same. That's what we forget as humans. And me as someone who's, who's not even in the club, I share 90% of my values with you.
- [68:33]
A
It's interesting though. I am so much more open to talking to like a secular conservative. I think you could say it's kind of trauma trigger type language might work. I don't think I have active religious trauma. And I say that as someone who regularly treats religious trauma in my clients. I don't think I have it, but I do have a discomfort with it. I have a real lack of interest. I have A real boredom with certain topics that I've been over a thousand times, and there's a certain exhaustion with feeling judged that I recognize as well.
- [69:06]
B
But, yeah, let's not kid yourself. You're judging them, of course, and you've told them the same thing over again that they don't listen to. I think the issue is to try to remove those things and realize that these people are really decent people. They are. Most of them are really good parents. Most of them, you know, really have or want a good job. They're hard workers. That most of their life is dealing with the same shit that you're dealing with in your life. And I think we all need to be coming back to that fundamental principle that, you know, most revolutions are between people who are virtually identical. I mean, Jesus, look at Israel and Gaza. You know, those people, they eat the same foods, the weather's the same. I mean, it's just amazing. And they hate each other's guts. And they have for centuries, or at least decades.
- [70:09]
A
Yeah, it's the old Swedes and Norwegians or Seattleites and Portlanders. Exactly. You guys are the fucking same.
- [70:18]
B
That's exactly right. And I think that's. That's such an important thing we all have to remember.
- [70:25]
A
Well, yeah, I. And I do. You know, one of the things I do on this show is I bring on people who are to my right, who more, you know, and try and engage in meaningful conversation with them. So I'm a little bit leaning into the. The disgust and exhaustion there for comedic effect. Last sort of last topic to bring back in the large language model AI stuff here. And I think I can connect it to what we've been talking about. So you're saying, and rightfully so, that actually we share a ton of things with the other side at like a percentage level. Not if you just phrase it all in politics, of course, that's where we differ. But if you ask other questions just about the human experience or you just get to know somebody, you end up sharing a bunch. One thing that I've been kind of optimistic about with AI and with LLMs is the answers that ChatGPT gives me when I ask it. Questions that might have a sort of tribal or political or something valence to them. In my experience, it tends to do a pretty good job of telling me the truth. And the truth is usually something kind of more like what you're saying, well, here are the differences and here are the similarities. Or just, I guess there's a question of, like, do you think that that's True. Relatedly, do you think that the way that LLMs are structured that they on average will do a better job of presenting an accurate range in that sense, drawing those connections? Is that something that we actually have to pressure the companies to make sure is included? Because as we know with social media, telling people what they want to hear is way more profitable than telling them the truth. But LLMs have a certain they are claiming to tell you the truth in a way that your TikTok algorithm is not necessarily. You go to TikTok or Instagram for entertainment, maybe connection, maybe laughter. You go to ChatGPT for the truth. And if you're going to ask it a question, you got to think it's telling you the truth. Same thing with Google. So do you think that that's good, or are there worries there or what?
- [72:33]
B
Okay, first of all, let's stop for just a second and go back. There's not necessarily one truth. In fact, there's probably never one truth. So if you're looking for absolute truth, give up. But what I like about GPT is I use it a lot, but I always am asking it. I was just trying to figure out what kind of new phones should I get. But then I say, the one thing I've learned with GPT is you have to give it information so it knows where you're coming from. And you also ask, ask. I always ask it, what am I? What other questions would you like to know before you answer this? And then I always say, what would be the counter argument to this? Is there a good reason I should go this way? In other words, I think the art form in using GPT is it's a great place to get ideas and to look at things from a different perspective. So, for example, I often will ask, I've asked you this and this and this. What am I missing? In other words, really experiment really broadly. Because keep in mind that GPT is trying to answer it as best as it knows you, but that's not always what you want it to be doing. You also want it to look at it. How would a person from the other side view what I'm saying? In other words, don't ever believe that GPT is correct. Assume it's probably better than your average friend, but it's not 100% correct. And approach it with. I always approach it with playfulness, which is going back and forth, asking questions from using different language, different, just different perspective. And I also will bounce between GPT and Gemini and some other systems as well.
- [74:49]
A
So that all sounds right. To me and the best experiences I've had using these models is when I approach it the way that you're describing the bummer about that is that you have to choose to do that. And if I ask myself what percentage of people who are using this product in the middle of their busy lives are going to use it that way, I think what, 3% or something? I mean it's not going to be very many people. Most people will not do that. Does it? Is it still helpful that it's better than the average friend? Is it still helpful that it's better than maybe a Google search would be because you're only going to get one thing or you know, I don't know, you're crazy.
- [75:30]
B
Don't just do one search. Do.
- [75:31]
A
Sure.
- [75:32]
B
Do Google, do. Do GPT. Just the more you use GPT, the more you come up with shortcuts to figure out to get a straight answer. You know, GPT is amazing at getting really personalized information and that. So for me, I find that really, really valuable.
- [75:55]
A
Well, I do too. I guess I'm asking at a societal level, like I'll frame it this way. Is Greater use of LLMs likelier to produce greater polarization or to be on the side of reducing polarization? Because it is so easy if you want to get it to like present in a way that you can understand because it kind of knows you a little bit like how the other side might like. It's so good at that. But somebody has to ask at that point. And so that's kind of what I'm wondering. Is it more likely in the aggregate to lead to good outcomes or bad outcomes vis a vis something like polarization?
- [76:36]
B
My gut sense is it'll be as good or better than a system where you are looking for a specific answer to validate your worldviews. I think GPT, it could do that, but it often, in my experience, it often will bring up alternative views as well.
- [77:01]
A
Yeah, and it'll, it'll, it'll suggest follow up questions too, which I find to be quite helpful. It's like you kind of have to ignore that if you just want it to tell you what you want to hear. Because it'll be like, would you like me to bring up alternative viewpoints? And then you basically have. I like that. That's like forcing you to say no. And then you have to look at that.
- [77:21]
B
Maybe that's right. And that's the other issue. I would really urge people who are getting into GPT approach it as a smart friend who is not judging you, who can give you truly honest answers. And by honest, it thinks it's honest. Keep in mind there is no truth, but there is an approximation of truth.
- [77:50]
A
Yeah. Closer. It gets you closer to truth.
- [77:53]
B
And it's going to make stuff up sometimes and you have to be the judge. It's not GPT who's going to be the ultimate judge.
- [78:01]
A
Yeah. That ultimately feels to me like probably a good thing. If I think about the development of the individual person and maturity over time, I think like a person learning to use. You know, I think about my boys. So my boys are 5 and 1 and they are gonna grow up in a world where LLMs and whatever comes after LLMs are ubiquitous and available to them. And if I think, well, do I want them to grow up to just rely on it as an oracle? No, that would be, you know, I mean, I know that there are some sort of techno optimists who, who envision a world where there is a kind of like as perfectly rational as possible oracle that like runs society and algorithms, figure out resource distribution and stuff. And I, you know, who knows? That seems unlikely to me. Would I rather it be like, oh, this they grow up with a new set of tools that I didn't have that are better but that still require them to, you know, think critically, you know, use their own agency. They're sort of learning to ask questions honestly. That's what a fucking philosophy bachelor's does for people at a more condensed, concentrated scale. But like, that's also kind of what DBT and CBT do for people. Speaking from a therapeutic lens, like building agency. You know, one of the lines in CBT is we're training our clients to become their own CBT therapists. Like, you really do like cbt. Properly and fully done cognitive therapy of any kind, properly and fully done will leave a client with a greater ability to do their own cognitive appraisal and reappraisal such that they can use those skills for the rest of their fucking lives. Like, that's what I'm hoping for with my clients. So that I guess that is hopeful that like it.
- [79:54]
B
I'm.
- [79:54]
A
I guess I'm glad, like the paternalist liberal in me wants ChatGPT to solve the world's problems for us. And I think that's kind of what Democrats have been, how we've been airing way too much paternalism. And so I guess I am heartened that like my boys, like, it's a thing I can teach them how to use that will help them learn to think and adjudicate and all of that. Does that, I mean, does that sound right to you?
- [80:20]
B
Yeah, no, I think, I think it is. And you know, we're in for a, a serious bumpy ride over the next five or 10 years. And this goes way beyond Trump. And I think that the whole AI world is, I find it both absolutely thrilling and terrifying. So, you know, it's going to be a fascinating time ahead.
- [80:47]
A
Well, thrilling and terrifying is a good place to end because that's real, that's realistic. Dr. Pennebaker, what a fantastic and wide ranging conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
- [80:58]
B
This has been fun. Thanks so much.
- [81:00]
A
So fun. All right, well, we'll have a link to your faculty page which has your CV and all your publications and everything like that if people want to read more deeply.
- [81:10]
B
Sounds great.
- [81:11]
A
Thank you.
- [81:11]
B
Okay, bye. Bye. Sam.