Episode 30 - What Does It Mean To Be A Man?

Darron and Jeff grapple with the idea of masculinity and what it means to live as a man in 2023. First they briefly touch on how masculinity is frequently discussed in the context of “toxic masculinity” and then begin to examine how they have come to understand what it means to be a man. This leads to a discussion of their relationships and experiences with their own fathers, how concepts such as masculinity might exist on a spectrum that changes over time, and how we might move forward and build a more positive and affirmative vision of masculinity. Although this conversation is very much an attempt to make meaning for themselves, it is by no means an end to their thinking on this subject, and is in fact quite the opposite - an initial conversation about a complex topic they plan on delving into more deeply in the future.

Notes:

• 4:48 - See “What Went Wrong at Woodstock '99? 'Perfect Cocktail of Unfortunate Events'” (Newsweek, 2022)

• 5:40 - See the toxic masculinity Wikipedia entry

• 6:04 - Listen to the August 7, 2023 episode of The Gray Area podcast, “The New Crisis of Masculinity,” and the May 12, 2023 of The Bulwark podcast, “Richard Reeves: The Trouble with Boys and Men”

• 6:05 - Read “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.” (Washington Post, 2023) and “In Praise of Heroic Masculinity” (The Atlantic, 2023)

• 6:08 - See The Art of Manliness website and podcast

• 8:46 - See “The Enduring Grip of the Gender Wage Gap” (Pew Research Center, 2023) and “The Women’s Leadership Gap” (American Progress, 2018), and for much more detail on a global scale see the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Report 2023”

• 9:33 - See the Marlboro Man Wikipedia entry

• 9:38 - According to Wikipedia the Marlboro Man was used in tobacco advertising campaigns for Marlboro cigarettes in the US from 1954 to 1999. First conceived in 1954. the images initially featured rugged men portrayed in a variety of roles but later primarily featured a rugged cowboy or cowboys in picturesque wild terrain. Interestingly the ads were originally conceived as a way to popularize filtered cigarettes, which at the time were considered feminine. The campaign is said to be one of the most brilliant advertisement campaigns of all time which transformed a feminine campaign, with the slogan "Mild as May", into one that was masculine, in a matter of months.

• 19:40 - See “What’s the Difference Between Sex and Gender?” (WebMD, 2023)

• 39:36 - See “Annual Sheehan-Lyman Hall powder puff game continues to draw attention in its 50th year” (Hartford Courant, 2021)

• 49:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 22 - What is Life? from March 2022

Episode 27 - A Gluten-Free Beautiful Illusion

Darron and Jeff discuss Darron's recent diagnosis and early experience with Celiac disease. They talk about what led to the diagnosis, how it impacts his identity as a bread baker both personally and socially, and how he views his personal medical needs in relation to others and the rest of the world at large. They use the example of quitting drinking as an analogue to explore the social reality of these types of life changes, whether we choose them or have them thrust upon us. Finally they talk about how amazing modern science is, the role of learning and the importance of love of learning when we suddenly find ourselves in new contexts, and how we might instill this love in young learners.

Notes:

• 2:05 - See “What is Celiac Disease?” and “What is Gluten?” (Celiac Disease Foundation)

• 9:24 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021

• 17:45 - See “Confirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence” (Farnam Street Blog)

• 21:42 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self from January 2022

• 21:46 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2021, where we discuss The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef

• 29:58 - See “Celiac Disease vs. Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity vs. Food Allergy” (Cleveland Clinic)

• 31:22 - The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms

• 33:45 - See “Fred Rogers on Education and Teaching” (YouTube) - “The best teacher in the world is someone who loves what he or she does and just loves it in front of you.”

Episode 25 - Living the Dream

Jeff and Darron debut a new episode format for the show, which is something they hope will be more manageable while still maintaining the spirit in which they began this endeavor 3 years ago. Starting with this episode many of the new releases will feature shorter, relatively unplanned conversations that build on some of the ideas they've explored in their first 24 episodes, as opposed to the typical longer format. Rather than doing a lot of prior research and working off extensive quote-laden outlines, they will discuss whatever might be rattling around in one or both of their minds in the days leading up to recording. Today they riff on the phrase “living the dream” as they try to figure out what this statement might mean in our modern context.

Notes:

• 7:28 - See “Negativity Bias” (The Decision Lab) and the abstract of “Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development” (Psychological Bulletin, 2008)

• 8:52 - For the 2021-2022 school year the average teacher salary in Connecticut was just over $79,000, which was the 5th highest in the nation. The average starting salary for a Connecticut teacher is $47,447 and the average top salary is $95,823. For comparison, the 2021 median household income in the United States was just under $71,000. On a related note, an oft-cited 2010 study by noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman et. al found that while emotional well-being does appear to rise with income this effect peaks at around $75,000, which is actually under the average teacher salary in Connecticut. Although this has been somewhat disputed by a more recent study by Wharton School of Business Senior Fellow Matthew Killingsworth, who was actually trying to confirm the 2010 Kahneman study, and found that increasing income above $75,000 continues to increase experienced well-being - that higher earners are happier in part due to an increased sense of control over life, as more money manifests itself as more choices over how to live life. Notably though, according to Killingsworth, he found that while increasing income does appear to increase happiness, even beyond $75,000, overall income is still only a modest determinant of happiness. For more see “Teacher Salary Benchmarks” (National Education Association), “Ranking all 50 states on highest teacher pay shows the pinch of inflation” (District Administration, 2022), “Connecticut Teacher Income” (Teach Connecticut), “Income in the United States: 2021” (United States Census Bureau), “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010), “Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021), and “Money matters to happiness—perhaps more than previously thought” (Penn Today, 2021)

• 21:00 - See “Positive attitude toward math predicts math achievement in kids” (Stanford Medicine, 2018)

• 21:24 - See “A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain” (Scientific American, 2011) and the “Embodied cognition” Wikipedia entry

• 22:20 - See “What is the FISH! Philosophy?” 

• 27:20 - See “The Bright and Dark Side of Gossip for Cooperation in Groups” (Frontiers in Psychology, 2019)

• 28:05 - See “How to Respond to Negativity” (Harvard Business Review, 2012)

• 28:19 - Toxic positivity (Wikipedia)

Episode 18 - Making Progress Better

Jeff and Darron continue to discuss ideas related to and inspired by last month’s Book Club episode, in which they discussed The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong. Jeff presents his idea for a long term Beautiful Illusions book project, and they begin exploring the nature of progress. What is it? What’s wrong with the way we talk about it, and how might we improve our conversations about progress? They discuss the difficulties associated with notions such as defining a minimum level of comfort for 7+ billion humans, and the seemingly impossible task of presenting information in a way that speaks to people from varied and diverse backgrounds, beliefs, and cultures without shutting down necessary dialogue.

Notes:

• 2:12 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 17 - BI Book Club 1: The Reality Bubble from July 2021, where we discuss Ziya Tong’s 2019 book The Reality Bubble

• 4:07 - Published in 1739, book 3 of philosopher David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, “Of Morals”, articulates what has come to be known as the “is-ought problem” which arises when someone makes claims about what ought to be that are based solely on statements about what is. Hume found that there seems to be a significant difference between positive statements (about what is) and prescriptive normative statements (about what ought to be), and that it is not obvious how one can coherently move from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. While Hume was dealing with moral philosophy, a related epistemological concept derived from Hume’s thought is the fact-value distinction, in which statements of fact based upon reason and physical observation, and which are examined via the empirical method, are separate from statements of value, which encompass ethics and aesthetics. This barrier between 'fact' and 'value' implies it is impossible to derive ethical claims from factual arguments, or to defend the former using the latter. 

• 5:44 - James Madison lays out his views on a large diverse republic in Federalist No. 10, see the Wikipedia entry as well

• 10:33 - See the great “Cognitive bias cheat sheet” and “What Can We Do About Our Bias?” by Buster Benson writing for Better Humans

• 12:49 - Listen to Season 2, Episode 18 of Conversations With Coleman: The Myth of Climate Apocalypse with Michael Shellenberger (YouTube), more on Coleman Hughes and Michael Shellenberger

• 13:27 - From the Season 2, Episode 22 show notes of Conversations With Coleman (YouTube): My second announcement today is about my interview with Michael Shellenberger from a few weeks back. It seems that Michael made some very misleading or outright false claims about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Specifically, he said that climate change did not contribute to the intensity of wildfires in California and Australia. It was a surprising claim to me at the time, but I didn't push back in the moment. Although in retrospect, I should have because it turns out this is not the consensus of the climate science community. Some of his other claims, including that we're not in a sixth mass extinction are at the very least far more controversial than he indicated. So to rectify this, I'm going to get a mainstream climate scientist on the show very soon, and cover all of these topics in detail.

• 13:34 - Factfulness by Hans Rosling

• 19:31 - See the social reality Wikipedia entry and “Why Chimpanzees Don’t Hold Elections: The Power of Social Reality” (Undark, 2021) excerpted from Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• 22:04 - In his 2018 book Stubborn Attachments economist Tyler Cowen argues that “[t]he lives of humans born decades from now might be difficult for us to imagine, or to treat as of equal worth to our own. But our own lives were once similarly distant from those taking their turn on Earth; the future, when it comes, will feel as real to those living in it as the present does to us. Economists should treat threats to future lives as just as morally reprehensible as present threats to our own.”

• 23:11 - See “The Brain Isn’t Supposed to Change This Much” (The Atlantic, 2021)

• 25:25 - Watch “Louis CK Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy” (YouTube)

• 27:53 - See “How much plastic actually gets recycled?” (Live Science, 2020), “Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not” (New York Times, 2018),and “Is This The End of Recycling?” (The Atlantic, 2019)

• 28:12 - See “Biden’s fake burger ban and the rising culture war over meat” (Vox, 2021), and “Eating meat has ‘dire’ consequences for the planet, says report” (National Geographic, 2019)

• 29:24 - In Factfulness, author Hans Rosling lays out 10 “dramatic instincts” that often lead us astray, the first three of which he refers to as “mega misconceptions.” The first of these is what he calls “The Gap Instinct” or the mega misconception that the world is divided into two, to paraphrase Rosling he says we have a tendency to “divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups with an imagined gap...in between...the gap instinct makes us imagine a division where there is just a smooth range, difference where there is convergence, and conflict where there is agreement...in most cases there is no clear separation of two groups...the majority is to be found in the middle, and it tells a very different story.” To combat this instinct Rosling suggests recognizing when a story is about a gap and realizing that reality is often not polarized at all, and furthermore to beware of extremes, that although the difference between extremes is dramatic, the majority is usually in the middle where the gap is supposed to be.” For more useful information on the gap instinct and the other 9 dramatic instincts, see Factfulness at Gapminder

• 31:02 - Straw man

• 31:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020, and see Difficult Conversations by by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen

• 31:57 - Cognitive dissonance

• 32:04 - See “This Article Won’t Change Your Mind” (The Atlantic, 2017) - “People see evidence that disagrees with them as weaker, because ultimately, they’re asking themselves fundamentally different questions when evaluating that evidence, depending on whether they want to believe what it suggests or not, according to psychologist Tom Gilovich. “For desired conclusions,” he writes, “it is as if we ask ourselves ‘Can I believe this?’, but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, ‘Must I believe this?’” People come to some information seeking permission to believe, and to other information looking for escape routes.”

• 32:24 - In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett states this explicitly with the half lesson that opens the book titled “Your Brain is Not For Thinking” which lays the foundation for the subsequent 7 lessons, - In a New York Times op-ed piece of the same title published in November 2020, after drawing a brief sketch of the evolution of the animal brain, she writes “This story of how brains evolved, while admittedly just a sketch, draws attention to a key insight about human beings that is too often overlooked. Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize...Your brain runs your body using something like a budget...This view of the brain has many implications for understanding human beings. So often, for example, we conceive of ourselves in mental terms, separate from the physical...In body-budgeting terms, however, this distinction between mental and physical is not meaningful...Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting.”

• 34:18 - See Super Duper Food Trucks Catering, the spin off of Super Duper Weenie

• 42:28 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

• 44:38 - As well meaning as we might be, it goes without saying that Jeff and I are hardly the first humans to engage in this kind of exercise, in fact, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948, as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It was drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, and was it set out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected, and is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels. The Declaration comprises 30 individual articles, the first of which states “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” and the 25th of which states “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” For the other 28 Articles see the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (United Nations)

• 46:20 - Farm Aid

• 46:22 - Live Aid

• 46:31 - Watch the benefit song “U.S.A. For Africa - We Are the World (Official Video)” (YouTube) and read the Wikipedia entry, Bob Dylan appears at 3:46

• 46:38 - See “We Already Grow Enough Food For 10 Billion People -- and Still Can't End Hunger” (Journal of Sustainable Agriculture, 2012) and “Can we feed the world and ensure no one goes hungry?” (United Nations, 2019)

• 50:28 - See “Building New Renewables Is Cheaper Than Burning Fossil Fuels” (Bloomberg Green, 2021), “Majority of New Renewables Undercut Cheapest Fossil Fuel on Cost” (International Renewable Energy Agency, 2021), and “Solar power got cheap. So why aren’t we using it more?” (Popular Science, 2021)

• 52:14 - See Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, “Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago” (Scientific American, 2015) and “How the oil industry made us doubt climate change” (BBC, 2020) 

• 53:30 - Former Vice President Al Gore released his climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006

• 55:22 - See “Why you think you’re right, even when you’re wrong” (TED Ideas, 2017)

• 58:18 - The Progress Network

• 1:00:24 - In his 1971 book Theory of Justice, philosopher John Rawls presents the thought experiment of the Veil of Ignorance, which allows us to test ideas for fairness when thinking about setting up a just society. For more see “The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness” (Farnam Street Blog) 

• 1:00:43 - See “The Ship Breakers” (The Atlantic, 2014), “Inside the Shady, Dangerous Business of Shipbreaking” (Atlas Obscura, 2016), watch “Where Ships Go to Die, Workers Risk Everything” (National Geographic YouTube Channel), and see the Wikipedia entry on ship breaking

• 1:02:35 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021

Episode 17 - BI Book Club 1: The Reality Bubble

In this first Book Club episode Jeff and Darron discuss The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong. Subtitled “How Science Reveals the Hidden Truths that Shape Our World” the book explores the various ways in which our perception of the world is very different from what’s actually there, and how this is true because of our biology, the workings of our modern economic and political world, and the intergenerational, evolving nature of culturally inherited concepts. Jeff offers a critique of Tong’s presentation which leads to a discussion about the difficulties of presenting information that can be perceived as negative or anti-progress, and the importance of seeing reality as it is, grappling with hard truths, and trying our best to find a balanced perspective.

Notes:

• 2:23 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 133: Ziya Tong on Realities We Don’t See for an overview and discussion of ideas Tong presents in her 2019 book The Reality Bubble

• 4:36 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 2020

• 6:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 01 - Why It’s Pointless to Start a Podcast In a Pandemic from September 2020

• 6:16 - See Jean Baudrillard , Hyperreality, and Simulacra and Simulation

• 7:52 - Factfulness by Hans Rosling

• 8:00 - Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

• 9:39 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021

• 9:56 - Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

• 10:35 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2021

• 10:44 - See the Wikipedia entry of the “Echo Chamber” effect

• 16:40 - See “Chickens have gotten ridiculously large since the 1950’s” (Vox, 2014)

• 18:50 - See the Wikipedia entry on the “environmental impact of meat production” and “Meat’s Sustainability Problem” (The Good Food Institute, 2018)

• 19:48 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett - “An organization called Seeds of Peace tries to change predictions by bringing together young people from cultures that are in serious conflict, like Palestinians and Israelis, and Indians and Pakistanis. The teens participate in activities like soccer, canoeing, and leadership training, and they can talk about the animosity between their cultures in a supportive environment. By creating new experiences, these teens are changing their future predictions in the hopes of building bridges between the cultures and, ultimately, creating a more peaceful world.”

• 26:06 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 2021

• 30:22 - The 2008 documentary Food, Inc. is an “unflattering look inside America's corporate controlled food industry.”

• 30:27 - For more on Chinese surveillance see the “Mass surveillance in China” Wikipedia entry, “Facial Recognition And Beyond: Journalist Ventures Inside China's 'Surveillance State'” (NPR, 2021), “China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone” (The Atlantic, 2018), and “The Panopticon Is Already Here” (The Atlantic, 2020)

• 30:30 - The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma “[e]xplores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.”

• 31:33 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 08 - System 2, Superman, & Simulacra: Jeff's Amateur Philosophy from December 2020

• 31:03 - See “Can Prairie Dogs Talk?” (New York Times Magazine, 2017) and “The Linguistic Genius of Prairie Dogs” (Animal Cognition) which discuss the work of animal biologist Con Slobodchikoff, who among other things claims that many animals have language and can talk

• 33:08 - See the “Pain in animals” Wikipedia entry and “Animals can feel pain. A biologist explains how we know.” (Vox, 2017)

• 35:22 - The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson

• 35:54 - See the “Biophilia hypothesis” Wikipedia entry

• 40:17 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich

• 40:42 - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari 

• 41:31 - Watch “Meet the Chimps” on Disney Plus

• 42:15 - See The Secret of Our Success website

• 43:09 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021

• 46:35 - Jack Kerouac

• 48:44 - 1491 by Charles C. Mann

• 51:44 - Slight correction - the evolution of fish began about 530 million years ago, see the “Evolution of fish” Wikipedia entry for more

• 54:20 - Watch a hilarious compilation from legendary comedian Mitch Hedberg and see “21 of the Funniest and Most Unforgettable Mitch Hedberg Jokes” (Vulture, 2020)

• 1:01:33 - Jonathan Locke, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Adam Smith

• 1:02:30 - Candide by Voltaire

• 1:03:15 - James Stockdale was a candidate for Vice President of the United States in the 1992 presidential election, on Ross Perot's independent ticket.

• 1:03:35 - Jim Collins discusses what he calls The Stockdale Paradox, which is based on the experience of James Stockdale who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War for over seven years, in his 2001 business classic Good to Great

• 1:03:58 - In his 2018 book Stubborn Attachments economist Tyler Cowen argues that “if we want to flourish, do what’s best for the maximum amount of people and create a more pluralistic society. One of the most important building blocks of such a society is to have a stubborn attachment to economic growth (in its Cowen variety of Wealth Plus).Cowen defines Wealth Plus as “the total amount of value produced over a certain time period. This includes the traditional measures of economic value found in GDP statistics, but also includes measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth.”” See “The Clear and Comprehensive Case for Growth” (Archbridge Notes, 2018)

Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza

Jeff and Darron explore the nature of conservatism and progressivism by looking at pizza and other food preferences. They talk about the nature of category designations, what it means to call something by a specific name, and why this can sometimes feel so important to us. They look at their own preferences and inclinations towards conservative or progressive thinking, examine where they might come from, and how they are often dependent on context. They touch on the benefits of honing an existing process versus trying new techniques and methods, the importance and drawbacks of categories and categorization, and finally how we might use an examination of our personal preferences about food to better understand the larger sociopolitical and cultural context in which we find ourselves.

Notes:

• 2:12 - The “Big Mac” pizza is one of of many “Gourmet Pizzas” served at Illiano’s Pizza & Italian Cuisine in Middletown, CT

• 3:45 - See “The Definitive Guide to New Haven Pizza”, the “New Haven-style pizza” Wikipedia entry, and the website for Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria Napoletana

• 4:05 - I’m currently using Andrew Janigan’s updated version for NYC Thin-Crust Pizza Dough, which is terrific, and for more detail about the process check out his three part series on dough and baking pizzas

• 5:21 - See “The History of Pizza” (CNN Travel, 2021)

• 5:29 - - According to the 2021 CNN Travel article “How Italians Made Tomatoes Their Essential Ingredient”, tomatoes were first “Brought to Europe by the Spanish when they colonized the Americas -- it's an Aztec plant, as we can tell by its original name, "tomatl" -- by the mid-1500s, it had made its way to Italy. Nobody quite knows how -- some think the Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain in 1492, could have brought it with them. Or maybe it made its way over with Eleanor of Toledo, who came to Florence when she married the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de' Medici, in 1539. Either way, by 1548, the tomato was to be found in Cosimo's botanical gardens in Pisa. But it wasn't yet on tables...The earliest recipe for tomato sauce was published in 1694, by Neapolitan chef Antonio Latini in his book "Lo Scalco alla Moderna" -- "The Modern Steward." "It mentions that if you mix onions, tomatoes and some herbs you get a very interesting sauce that can be used in all sorts of things on meat, especially boiled meat -- and things that aren't so tasty become more interesting with the acidity of the tomato," See “How Italians Made Tomatoes Their Essential Ingredient” (CNN Travel, 2021) 

• 6:48 - See the “Neopolitan pizza” Wikipedia entry and the website of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, an association set up in 1984 to preserve the Neapolitan pizza tradition

• 8:04 - Plato’s Theory of Forms (Wikipedia) - “...the physical world is not as real or true as timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas. According to this theory, ideas in this sense, often capitalized and translated as "Ideas" or "Forms", are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations.”

• 8:15 - For more on pizza styles see “Do You Know These Regional Pizza Styles?” (Serious Eats, 2018)

• 8:40 - See Adam Kuban’s current site, Famous Original Slice, and this profile from Serious Eats where he mentions, among other things, his pizza cognition theory

• 9:20 - Sergio’s Pizza and Restaurant in Hamden, CT

• 10:00 - See “Chefs Weigh In: Is Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Really Pizza?” (Eater, 2014), “Why Deep Dish Can't Be Considered Pizza in a Court of Law” (Thrillist, 2016), and the Wikipedia entry on Chicago-Style Pizza

• 11:50 - I now bake pizza on a baking steel that sits on top of a fibrament baking stone - the stone absorbs and retains a ton of heat and the steel is highly conductive so it transfers that heat into the bottom of the crust very efficiently making for a nicely crisp and browned bottom crust

• 12:10 - See “What Is a Controlled Experiment?” (ThoughtCo, 2019)

• 17:19 - Released in 1998, the dramatic war film The Thin Red Line is an adaptation of James Jones' autobiographical 1962 novel, focusing on the conflict at Guadalcanal during the second World War

• 17:53 - The Yale repertory Theatre

• 18:10 - Guinness Beer

• 18:50 - Daniel Kahneman

• 18:54 - See “How the Difference Between Your Experiencing Self and Your Remembering Self Shapes Your Happiness” (Brainpickings, 2011) and watch “Daniel Kahneman: The Riddle of Experience Vs. Memory” (TED, 2010)

• 19:02 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 14 - Talkin' Baseball Stories & Beautiful Illusions from May 2021

• 23:22 - See “Why do fatty foods taste so good?” (EarthSky, 2017) and “Human Perceptions and Preferences for Fat-Rich Foods” (Chapter 11 of Fat Detection, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2010)

• 23:54 - See the Jimi Hendrix Wikipedia entry, bio from JimiHendrix.com, “Jimi Hendrix’ use of distortion to extend the performance vocabulary of the electric guitar” (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1998), “100 Greatest Guitarist lists” from Rolling Stone (Hendrix comes in at #1) and Guitar World (Hendrix comes in at #2), and watch his legendary Woodstock performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” (YouTube)

• 25:21 - Watch Jimi Hendrix play acoustically and listen to an acoustic jam session from 1968

• 25:42 - See “Why You Shouldn't Use Effects When You Practice” (Guitar World, 2018)

• 25:53 - See the “Learning curve” Wikipedia entry

• 26:33 - Jimi Hendrix spent a number of years honing his skills as a professional musician backing up a number of US acts on the Chitlin Circuit during the early 60’s, but he eventually chafed at having to play the same sets every night and the many other musical restrictions associated with being a sideman. By 1966 he had moved into New York’s vibrant Greenwich Village music scene, however he did not have much initial success attempting to go his own way, and did not see any real recognition until arriving in London in the back half of 1966. Notably it was another guitarist, Keith Richards, who saw his early brilliance and eventually connected him with the London scene. Once there it was notables such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Pete Townshend, many of whom were guitar masters themselves, that were among the first to truly recognize the nature of Hendrix’s innovations on the guitar, how he blended virtuosic playing with diverse styles and experimental tones, and they almost immediately recognized the impact it would have on themselves and the burgeoning rock scene of the mid to late sixties.

• 28:42 - Molecular gastronomy

• 28:53 - See “French Cooking: How and Why French Cooking Came to Rule the World” (Escoffier, 2021) and the “French Cuisine” Wikipedia entry

• 29:05 - See “Modern Art: History and Concepts” (The Art Story) and the “Modern Art” Wikipedia entry

• 29:40 - See “Pumpkin Spice Is Overrated and We Need to Talk About It” (Eating Well, 2019) and the “Pumpkin Pie Spice” Wikipedia entry

• 29:58 - See “Why do so many people find pineapple on pizza offensive?” (GoodFood, 2019) and the “Hawaiian Pizza” Wikipedia entry

• 32:29 - J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (official site) and bio from Serious Eats

• 33:06 - See “Hydration” (CraftyBaking) and “Pizza Dough Hydration Explained” (NA-Pizza)

• 36:50 - See “The Happiness Benefits of Trying New Things” (The Atlantic, 2021)

• 36:58 - See “Neophilia vs Neophobia - What's the difference?” (WikiDiff)

• 37:43 - See “Emotion Theory and Research: Highlights, Unanswered Questions, and Emerging Issues” (Annual Review of Psychology, 2009) by Caroll Izzard 

• 38:40 - The Big Five Personality Traits

• 40:37 - The Epic of Gilgamesh

• 40:48 - For more on the long history of bread see “14,000-Year-Old Piece Of Bread Rewrites The History Of Baking And Farming” (NPR, 2018), “Who Invented Bread?” (LiveScience, 2018), the “History of Bread” Wikipedia entry, “Why San Francisco does sourdough best” (BBC Travel, 2020), and “What Makes San Francisco Sourdough Unique?” (KQED, 2017)

• 42:50 - See “What is Challah?” (My Jewish Learning) and the “Rye Bread” Wikipedia entry

• 43:00 - Mastery Learning

• 43:09 - Zen

• 43:16 - Watch Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s TED Talk “Flow, The Secret To Happiness”

• 46:18 - See “Stream Jimmy Montague’s horn-fueled, ’70s-inspired new album ‘Casual Use’” (Brooklyn Vegan, 2021) and visit the album’s Bandcamp page

• 47:50 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 02 - Our Back Pages from September 2020 where Jeff and Darron discuss their long-standing obsession with Bob Dylan

• 48:10 - See the “Electric Dylan Controversy” Wikipedia entry, “The Night Bob Dylan Went Electric” (History), “Dylan goes electric at The Newport Folk Festival” (History), “July 25, 1965: Dylan Goes Electric at The Newport Folk Festival” (Smithsonian), and “Revisit Bob Dylan’s electric performance at Newport Folk Festival 50 years later” (Consequence of Sound)

• 51:50 - See “Category Learning in the Brain” (Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2010) and “How the brain forms categories” (ScienceDaily, 2012)

• 52:35 - Postmodernism

• 54:25 - See the “Food and Drink Prohibitions” Wikipedia entry

• 54:35 - The new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009 and “our version” of Yankee Stadium was actually the renovated version of the original stadium built in 1923

• 55:09 - There are a few different designations for Italian food products, but the most stringent is the Denominazinone d’Origine Protetta, translated to Protected Designation of Origin, and abbreviated DOP. According to the Eataly website, “this designation guarantees that your favorite cheese, prosciutto, olive oil, etc., is produced, processed, and packaged in a specific geographical zone and according to tradition. Each step, from production to packaging, is regulated”, and this matters simply because “beyond saving ancient traditions, the product actually tastes better. It's true. There is a reason why Prosciutto Toscano DOP is made with pigs raised in the hills of a set zone and grazed on local grasses, then cured at precise temperatures with a secret recipe of local herbs: the prosciutto tastes delicious. It tasted delicious centuries ago, when the methods were defined and perfected, it tastes delicious today, and it is guaranteed to taste delicious in centuries to come.” And furthermore that “The need for guaranteed authentic products began in the mid-1900s, when Italy's food and wine producers found themselves in trouble. As "Italian cuisine" gained popularity in the U.S. and abroad, the market was flooded with low-quality, knock-off olive oil, cheese, prosciutto, and wine, all sold under the guise of the high-quality products they mimicked. To protect its culinary reputation, Italy worked with the European Union to create legal certifications that encourage food and wine producers to focus on quality, tradition, and reliability. To earn the labels, producers must adhere to a strict set of guidelines, overseen by the government.” For more see “A Guide to Italian Certifications” (Eataly) and “DOP Foods of Italy: What They Are, and How to Find Them” (Walks of Italy)

• 56:55 - See the “Neopolitan pizza” Wikipedia entry and the website of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, an association set up in 1984 to preserve the Neapolitan pizza tradition and their 14-page document outlining the requirements for certification

• 59:38 - See the “Carbonara” Wikipedia entry, “Watch Michelin-Starred Chefs Cook Carbonara” (Fine Dining Lovers, 2017), “Smoky Tomato Carbonara” (New York Times, 2021), “'Stop this madness': NYT angers Italians with 'smoky tomato carbonara' recipe” (The Guardian, 2021), “New York Times’ Tomato Carbonara Recipe (Rightly) Causes International Incident” (The Daily Beast, 2021), and predating the more recent controversy “Italian Icons: Carbonara, a Squabble Recipe” (Find Dining Lovers, 2015) and “Carbonara Purists Can’t Stop the Pasta Revolution” (The New Yorker, 2016)

• 1:01:09 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020 and Beautiful Illusions Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2021

• 1:01:15 - James Madison: A Biography by Ralph Ketcham

• 1:01:48 - See the “David Hume” Wikipedia entry and “Hume and Madison on Faction” (The William and Mary Quarterly, 2002)

• 1:02:10 - Madison lays out his views on a large diverse republic in Federalist No. 10, see the Wikipedia entry as well 

• 1:03:00 - See “Aristotle’s Ethics: The Doctrine of the Mean” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

• 1:05:15 - Loss aversion

• 1:07:45 - See “The Jefferson Dinner” (JeffersonDinner.org)

• 1:07:50 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain byLisa Feldman Barrett

Episode 14 - Talkin' Baseball Stories & Beautiful Illusions

Jeff and Darron have a casual conversation about the beautiful illusion of baseball. They talk about their own experiences centered around the narrative of baseball as something passed from father to son, delve a bit into the myth and magic on offer through baseball history, discuss the dissonance they both experience at times being Yankee fans, and tell a lot of personal stories about going to games. Jeff describes how his engagement with the narrative of baseball has changed over time, and Darron talks about how through the years he somehow still manages to buy into the naive magical view of the National Pastime. It’s a relatively loose, fun conversation that leaves a lot on the table for future exploration.

Notes:

• 2:19 - The Yankees beat the Indians 1-0 in Game 3 of the 2017 American League Division Series, see “2017 American League Division Series (ALDS) Game 3, Indians at Yankees” (Baseball Reference) and 2017 ALDS Game 3 Highlights

• 2:38 - Gleyber Torres 

• 2:56 - StubHub

• 3:25 - Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, August 2, 2019

• 3:34 - Yankee Stadium

• 3:36 - We always park at the Harlem River North Lot, exit 6 off of I-87S (The Major Deegan Expressway)

• 3:55 - It was Adam Ottavino 

• 4:18 - James Paxton

• 4:52 - Watch Gleyber Torres' Grand Slam vs Red Sox | August 2, 2019

• 5:28 - Torres' grand slam leads Yankees to a 4-2 win | Red Sox-Yankees Game Highlights 8/2/19 (YouTube)

• 8:50 - Written in 1908, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is the baseball anthem traditionally sung during the 7th inning stretch -  listen to a 1908 recording and watch legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray famously lead the singing at Wrigley Field

• 9:18 - See “New York Yankees Team History & Encyclopedia” from Baseball Reference, the “History of the New York Yankees” Wikipedia entry, or the “New York Yankees” entry from Baseball Almanac

• 9:26 - See “Yankees in the ‘70s” from baseball writer and historian Marty Appel

• 9:33 - Mickey Rivers, Graig Nettles, Ron Guidry, and Thurman Munson

• 9:45 - Thurman Munson, an avid amateur pilot, died on August 2, 1979 attempting to land his personal plane and crashing short of the runway - see “8/02/1979 - Thurman Munson dies in crash” (SBNation, 2010), “40 years on, Thurman Munson's death remains one of sports' most stunning moments” (Yahoo! Sports, 2019), and “Remembering the Great Thurman Munson 40 Years After His Tragic Death” (How They Play, 2020)

• 9:48 - Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson

• 10:05 - Watch Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson almost come to blows in the dugout at Fenway Park after Martin pulled Jackson from the game, which the Red Sox won 10-4, see “June 18, 1977: When Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin clashed at Fenway” (Sporting News, 2019) and “New York Yankees at Boston Red Sox Box Score, June 18, 1977” (Baseball Reference)

• 10:52 - Dunkin’ Donuts Park in Hartford, CT, home of the Yard Goats

• 11:11 - See “Three Movements in New Retro Ballpark Construction” (Ballpark Ratings)

• 11:22 - Thimble Island Brewing Company

• 14:44 - The Red Sox beat the Yankees 11-0 on Saturday September 6, 2003 at Yankee Stadium, see “Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, September 6, 2003” (Baseball Reference)

• 16:05 - The Yankees didn’t trade for Jason Giambi, they signed him to a seven-year, $120 million dollar free agent contract in December of 2001, see “Giambi tops Yankees' arsenal of new additions” (ESPN, 2001)

• 16:18 - The Yankees traded Alfonso Soriano for Alex Rodriguez in February of 2004, see “Trades Of The Decade: A-Rod For Soriano” (MLB Trade Rumors, 2009) and “The great A-Rod trade robbery” (Bronx Pinstripes, 2020)

• 16:34 - Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992 and was innovative and influential for being the first of the “retro” style ballparks that , see “Three Movements in New Retro Ballpark Construction” (Ballpark Ratings)

• 16:40 - Eutaw Street

• 16:50 - Watch Ken Griffey Jr. hit the B&O Warehouse in the 1993 MLB All-Star Homerun Derby and see “Home Run Derby hero Ken Griffey Jr. is still the only player to ever homer off the Camden Yards warehouse” (as of 2018, at according to MLB.com)

• 16:59 - Legendary Oriole first basemen Boog Powell’s Boog’s BBQ has been an iconic food venue at Camden Yards since it opened in 1992, see “Boog’s BBQ: 25 Years and Still Cookin’ - The beloved first baseman’s BBQ stand has been a hit since the first Opening Day at Camden Yards in 1992.” (Baltimore Magazine, 2017)

• 18:05 - See the “Bleacher Creatures” Wikipedia entry

• 20:06 - Of the 30 Major League ballparks in use today, Boston’s Fenway Park is the oldest. It opened the same week the Titanic sunk in 1912, and Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, opened two years later in 1914. For reference, the next oldest currently operating park is Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962, and 25 of the 30 current MLB parks have been built since 1989. For more info see Wikipedia’s list of current Major League Baseball stadiums and the slightly out of date article “MLB Ballparks, From Oldest to Newest” (Ballpark Digest, 2017)

• 20:46 - See “The Steroids Era” (ESPN, 2012) and the Wikipedia entry on “doping in baseball”, also check out what is shaping up to be an excellent podcast summation of the era, Crushed from Religion of Sports

• 20:47 - Mark McGwire

• 20:53 - Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 breaking Babe Ruth’s record of 60 set in 1927, watch the 61st homer with call by the former Yankee shortstop and legendary broadcaster Phil Rizzuto , and see “Roger Maris Breaks the Home Run Record” (History) or “61 Home Runs by Roger Maris” (Baseball Almanac)

• 21:07 - See the “1998 Major League Baseball home run record chase” Wikipedia entry and “The McGwire-Sosa home run chase helped make 1998 one of MLB's wildest seasons ever” (ESPN, 2020)

• 21:10 - The Yankees beat the Red Sox 3-2 at Fenway Park on September 8, 1998, see “New York Yankees at Boston Red Sox Box Score, September 8, 1998” (Baseball Reference)

• 21:44 - Watch Mark McGwire’s 62nd homer of 1998

• 22:53 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 09 - Lying About Santa: Naughty or Nice? from December 2020

• 23:32 - The funny thing about this story is that despite Jeff remembering it this way and actually having the story triggered in his memory by my previous story, I was not in fact with Sal at this game, nor was Sal there at all with anyone. I was with my dad, one of my brothers, and a different friend, and Sal was watching at home. I actually spent a bunch of time texting various people one morning to confirm this was indeed the case and didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole when we were recording this live, but when I did eventually tell Jeff a few days later, even though he didn’t doubt it he had a hard time incorporating the new information into his version of events, which is in and of itself an interesting example of how memory is a construction and not a snapshot, and is highly susceptible to unconscious alteration as we remember things again and again over the years. We have no real way to identify when our brain has done this, and we often feel the memories we have are completely accurate. 

• 24:35 - Derek Jeter

• 24:38 - The Yankees beat the Red Sox 5-4 in 13 innings at Yankee Stadium on Thursday July 1, 2004, this game is notable for being the famous “Jeter In The Stands” game, and is undoubtedly one of the best Yankees vs Red Sox regular season games of all time, see “July 1, 2004: Best regular season win” (Bronx Pinstripes), “Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, July 1, 2004” (Baseball Reference), and watch the Yankees rally and win in the bottom of the 13th

• 28:02 - Hideki Matsui

• 28:08 - The 2003 Yankees home opener vs the Minnesota Twins scheduled to be played on Monday April 7, was postponed due to snow and played on Tuesday April 8, the temperature was a balmy 35° at first pitch, the Yankees won 7-3, and Hideki Matsui hit a memorable grand slam in his first game at Yankee Stadium, see “Minnesota Twins at New York Yankees Box Score, April 8, 2003” (Baseball Reference)

• 28:30 - Watch the Yankees rally and win in the bottom of the 13th vs the Red Sox on July 1, 2004

• 28:38 - Manny Ramirez

• 28:45 - Ruben Sierra

• 28:50 - John Flaherty

• 29:17 - See image at bottom of post which was indeed created using Microsoft Paint

• 29:37 - Chase Field in Phoenix, AZ, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks

• 31:27 - The Diamondbacks came back in the bottom of the 9th to beat the Yankees 3-2 in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, see the winning hit by Luis Gonzalez off of future Hall of Famer, greatest closer of all time, and absolute Yankee legend Mariano Rivera

• 31:57 -Watch “...the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat…”

• 32:08 - See “Baseball History, American History and You” (National Baseball Hall of Fame) and “The National Pastime” (Our Game MLB Blog)

• 32:20 - Field of Dreams (1989)

• 33:05 - Watch James Earl Jones in his role as Terence Mann reciting one of the most famous monologues in movie history from 1989’s Field of Dreams, and while you’re at it watch Ray have a catch with his dad, just because...

• 33:22 - Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams

• 33:28 - Shoeless Joe Jackson and the “Black Sox” Scandal

• 33:31 - Jackie Robinson and the breaking of the color barrier (History)

• 33:35 - See “Baseball in World War II” (Baseball in Wartime)

• 34:06 - See “Why are Sportswriters Whitewashing Baseball’s Dark Secrets?” (The Daily Beast, 2018)

• 34:16 - Mickey Mantle

• 34:33 - See “The Legend of Mickey Mantle” (American Heritage, 2019), and with an extreme grain of salt see “Mickey Mantle’s 10 Longest Home Runs” (TheMick.com)

• 34:40 - See “Time in a Bottle” by Mickey Mantle recounting his struggles with alcoholism from the April 1994 issue of Sports Illustrated

• 36:39 - It’s no accident that today we view Ruth and the early legends of baseball as more gods than men. Aside from being far removed in time, the role of sports journalism and the relationship of sportswriters to players has evolved over time as well. In the first half of the 20th century writers often traveled with the team and ran in the same social circles, in an era before television and easy access to sports through mass media, these men were incentivized to create a mythical greatness around the sport and its heroes, and that’s exactly what they did. In a 2010 article in Sports Illustrated adapted from her Mickey Mantle biography The Last Boy, baseball writer and journalist Jane Leavy writes “The sportswriters’ unstated code of honor was to look the other way. The writers traveled, ate and drank with the team. Their tab was often paid by the team. “You couldn’t write one word of it, the debauchery,” said Jack Lang, the longtime executive secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America. “It wasn’t just liquor. It was the women.” She goes on to recount a tale from writer John Drebinger, who wrote the lead story for the New York Times for every World Series game from 1929 to 1963, as told to legendary boxing writer Bert Sugar - “Drebby, as his colleagues called him, regaled Sugar with a tale from an overnight train trip with Babe Ruth’s Yankees. “The writers had their own car, and dinner had been served,” Sugar recounted. “They’d cleared the tables, and they’d just dealt out a hand of bridge when the door to the back of the car flew open, and Babe Ruth ran down the aisle naked. And about 10 feet behind him a woman, equally naked, with a knife in her hand, comes running out! And Drebby says one of the guys looks up from the table and says, ‘Well, that’s another story we won’t cover!'”” This began to change throughout the 50’s and by the 70’s reporting on sports and it’s biggest stars, warts and all, by a slowly diversifying set of voices was becoming the norm that continues through today. Long gone are the days of writers and players enjoying easy access to one another’s personal lives, similar incentives, and mutual reasons to construct myths at the expense of hard truths, and the evolution of mass media and communication technology has made this type of construction a near impossibility regardless. For today’s superstar athletes, the fall is merely one Tweet away, and everyone is always watching. Writing about Mantle in the 50’s Leavy says he was “the Last Boy in the last decade ruled by boys, when it was O.K. to laugh at them for being themselves, and O.K. not to know and O.K. to forgive what you did know.” Although Ruth and Mantle had similar skeletons in their closet, Ruth was long gone by the time this change took hold, allowing him to escape relatively unscathed, but Mantle played the end of his career and lived his entire life after in a very different media world. 

• 41:52 - Bob Gibson

• 42:14 - After the 1968 season, which is now referred to as the “Year of the Pitcher,” baseball lowered the pitcher’s mound from a maximum of 15 inches to 10 inches, decreased the size of the strike zone, and became more vigilant about pitcher’s doctoring balls. Gibson gets a lot of the press here, and deservedly so, for his amazing 1.12 ERA over 34 starts, still the lowest in modern baseball history, he was actually one of 7 starters with a sub 2 ERA that season, the majors set a record for lowest league batting average (.237) and on-base percentage (.299), and entire teams struggled to hit and score runs. The changes were largely seen as correction to an imbalance that was causing offenses to sputter and exasperating fans and were largely effective, as the average runs scored per game increased from 6.84 in ‘68 to 8.14 in ‘69, so while it may be a myth that the mound was lowered because of Bob Gibson alone, he certainly played an outsized role in a unique baseball year. See “After 1968’s ‘Year of the Pitcher,’ MLB lowered the mound. Now, the league could do it again.” (Washington Post, 2019) and “Four stats that showed why baseball had to lower the mound after 1968” (Cut4, MLB.com)

• 43:27 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich

• 43:32 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 128 - Joe Henrich on the Weirdness of the West from January 2021

• 44:05 - See “The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012), “A cultural species: How culture drove human evolution” (American Psychological Association, 2011), and “How Culture Drove Human Evolution” (Edge, 2012)

• 44:08 - See “One Thing Humans Are Better Than Other Species At: Throwing” (Smithsonian Magazine, 2014)

• 44:42 - Watch “Why chimps don’t play baseball” (Nature YouTube Channel)

• 48:00 - The New York Giants

• 48:11 - UConn basketball

• 48:49 - Baseball Reference

• 49:00 - Tony Gwynn

• 50:09 - See “Stats to Avoid: Batting Average” (FanGraphs) and “Stat to the Future: Why it's time to stop relying on batting average” (Sporting News)

• 50:16 - See “State of Analytics: How the Movement Has Forever Changed Baseball – For Better or Worse” (Stats Perform) and “Statistics ruined baseball by perfecting it” (The Conversation, 2019)

• 54:02 - The new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009

• 55:40 - “My version” of Yankee Stadium was actually the renovated version of the original stadium built in 1923

• 56:53 - Lou Gherig

• 59:43 - Hamilton (the movie version)

• 1:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020 and Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2020

• 1:00:30 - Little League Baseball

• 1:00:45 - The Little League World Series

• 1:01:05 - Watch Trumbull, CT win the 1989 Little League World Series by beating Taiwan, 5-2

• 1:03:58 - Gary Sanchez

Made with love using Windows Paint…

Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts

Jeff and Darron continue their conversation about the difficulties of having political conversations. They discuss how we determine what’s true and how our conscious perceptions might not reflect reality to the extent that we believe, how well-meaning people looking at the same evidence can come to different conclusions based on their prior life experiences, how our lived reality is socially constructed to a degree of which we are generally unaware, and how all of these factors interact in the context of our current information environment to make political discussions particularly fraught and ripe for disagreement over even our most basic assumptions about reality. Finally they discuss what we might do as individuals to try and make our own conversations less acrimonious and more productive.

Jeff and Darron continue their conversation about the difficulties of having political conversations.

Notes:

• 2:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - “What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics”

• 3:07 - See “U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided” (Pew Research Center, 2020)

• 3:45 - See “American News Pathways Project,” “How Americans Navigated the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review,” and “Misinformation and competing views of reality abounded throughout 2020” (Pew Research Center, 2021)

• 4:45 - See “The COVID Confidence Conundrum” (Gallup, 2020), “How misinformation is distorting COVID policies and behaviors” (Brookings, 2020), and “Covid’s Partisan Errors” (New York Times, 2021)

• 10:11 - Watch “How We Figured Out That Earth Goes Around the Sun” from the SciShow Space YouTube channel

• 10:45 - See the “Copernican Revolution” entry from Britannica  

• 14:17 - The Atlantic

• 14:45 - Epistemology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

• 15:40 - Listen to You Are Not So Smart Episode 200 - “Socks and Crocs”

• 16:02 - See “The inside story of the ‘white dress, blue dress’ drama that divided a planet” (Washington Post, 2015)

• 17:00 - See “‘The dress’, 5 years on” (Pascal’s Pensees, 2020), and “Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw “The Dress” Differently” (Pascal Wallisch writing for Slate, 2017), and “Illumination assumptions account for individual differences in the perceptual interpretation of a profoundly ambiguous stimulus in the color domain: ‘The dress’” (Journal of Vision, 2017)

• 18:40 - See “Disambiguation of ambiguous figures in the brain” (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2013)

• 19:15 - The Brain Science podcast

• 19:45 - See “Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures” (The Atlantic, 2019)

• 20:00 - Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson

• 22:35 - Laplace’s demon

• 26:36 - See “Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred” (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1996) by Elizabeth Loftus Et al. 

• 27:40 - See “Three kinds of propaganda, and what to do about them” by Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing, 2017)

• 30:06 - Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway

• 30:30 - See “Merchants Of Doubt: How The Tobacco Strategy Obscures the Realities of Global Warming” (Farnam Street, 2016)

• 32:48 - For more on the concept of “negative partisanship” and it’s role in our politics see “‘Negative Partisanship’ Explains Everything” (Politico Magazine, 2017), the research the article is based on, “The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century” (Electoral Studies, 2015), and “How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics” (FiveThirtyEight, 2020)

• 34:59 - See “Confirmation bias”, and the “Cognitive bias cheat sheet” and “What Can We Do About Our Bias?” by Buster Benson writing for Better Humans

• 35:14 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - “A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism”

• 35:40 - See “You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You?” (or watch the video) by Danah Boyd (Data & Society, 2018)

• 37:13 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• 38:38 - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

• 38:48 - “Phrenology” and “Scientific racism”

• 40:09 - Social reality

• 40:30 - See “Trust and Distrust in America” and “Key findings about Americans’ declining trust in government and each other”, and “Trust and Mistrust in Americans’ Views of Scientific Experts” (Pew Research Center, 2019)

• 40:05 - See “Why Chimpanzees Don’t Hold Elections: The Power of Social Reality” (Undark, 2021) excerpted from Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• 43:12 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions and leads to further action and self justification

• 45:10 - See “Our Consensus Reality Has Shattered” (The Atlantic, 2020)

• 46:19 - Anthony Giddens

• 49:32 - Tyler Cowen 

• 50:07 - Listen to Episode 116 of the Mindscape Podcast - “Teresa Bejan on Free Speech, Civility, and Toleration”) - an interview with Teresa Bejan, political scientist and author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration

• 51:09 - Naive realism

• 53:14 - See “Truth Decay” - a 2018 report from the RAND Corporation

• 57:35 - See “Bad science in the headlines. Who takes responsibility when science is distorted in the mass media?” (EMBO Reports, 2006), “Opinion: The media is ruining science” (Washington Post, 2016), “How the media warp science: the case of the sensationalised satnav” (The Guardian, 2017), “Fake science: Who's to blame when the media gets research wrong?” (National Post, 2018), or “Hyped-up science erodes trust. Here’s how researchers can fight back.” (Vox, 2019)

• 58:38 - See “Op-Ed: I called Arizona for Biden on Fox News. Here's what I learned” by Chris Stirewalt

• 1:00:43 - As Jeff will note in a minute, this is false, for more see “Shattering the infertility myth: What we know about Covid-19 vaccines and pregnancy” by reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist, Dr. Eve Feinberg, who is also an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. For an extremely reasonable and respectful take on vaccine hesitancy and talking with people who may be expressing reservations about vaccination, I recommend listening to a recent episode of The Dispatch Podcast from March 26 which features an excellent interview with former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden

• 1:01:17 - Listen to “Coronavirus, Variants, and Vaccination” (The Dispatch Podcast, 2021)

• 1:03:19 - Another thing to be aware of when conducting online information searches is the potentially pernicious filter bubble effect, which was first identified by activist Eli Pariser and described in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. According to Wikipedia, a filter bubble is the result from personalized searches when a website algorithm (like Google’s, YouTube’s, or Facebook’s, for example) selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history. One outcome of this effect is that how we search and what we click affects what we see in future searches, so that unless we are actively trying to counter the effect through various technological and personal search habit countermeasures, we see a flood of articles, posts, and videos that support our current opinions and perspectives to ensure that we enjoy what we see, which captures our attention and keeps us clicking. Eventually, due to the human tendency to believe that what we see is all there is, combined with a general lack of awareness that what we are seeing online is being filtered, we end up in personally tailored echo chambers, where we might begin to believe that everyone thinks like us, and we forget that other perspectives exist. In this example, a person who has previously searched for, or clicked on, information about why vaccines are bad will see very different results from someone who has previously searched for or clicked on information of why vaccines are safe and efficacious. 

• 1:04:54 - Watch Eli Pariser’s 2011 TED Talk “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles’”, and see “How Filter Bubbles Distort Reality: Everything You Need to Know” (Farnam Street, 2017)

• 1:05:48 - See “Facebook Built the Perfect Platform for Covid Vaccine Conspiracies” (Bloomberg Businessweek, 2021)

• 1:07:14 - Difficult Conversations by by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen

• 1:10:48 - See “Social media and the challenge of managing disagreement positively” (Pascal’s Pensees, 2017) - click here for diagram image

• 1:13:23 - See the “How To Understand Your Enemy” episode of The Good Fight podcast, which features an interview with political science professor Dr. John Hibbing

• 1:13:37 - Austin Bradford Hill