Category: Comet/Courier Articles

Like most millennials, I remember the early 2000s when Joe Rogan was just that drill sergeant who hosted “Fear Factor,” but it turns out he’s actually a pretty cool and well-rounded dude. Was he just playing a character back then, or was he actually that guy that we loved to hate?

His reputation is different now. He’s a man’s man, a talented TV and UFC presenter and a former national champion martial artist himself. He enjoys hunting wild game and running through the Hollywood Hills with his insta-famous dog. He likes cars, music and unfiltered conversations about everything from science to sex. He has an open, refreshing sense of humor and is one of the most popular comedians of our day. If I were pressed to choose one individual as our Renaissance man, I’d look no further. The fact that Joe has accomplished so much is impressive, but there is another purpose he serves which might top it all: his podcast called the “Joe Rogan Experience.”

Podcasting is kind of a new thing. Just as emojis and memes allow us to express thoughts and emotions more simply than through text alone, podcasting is a platform for learning that is less limiting than reading a book or sitting through a lecture. The latter two involve someone “talking at” you, leaving you with the feeling that you must agree or disagree with the whole message or with the person.

Although podcasting is new, it is ancient in essence. Podcasts, in the form that Joe’s takes, are closely in line with forum-style discussion used by philosophers in ancient Greece. The long format has no time limit, and the goal of each conversation is to understand as many sides of the topic as possible and to make clear the terms with which that is being done, all with a healthy dose of humor. Joe converses from near-universal appeal given the broad spectrum of his interests, not in a manner that is too intellectual or pretentious. He stops his guests and plays devil’s advocate when he senses that the audience might be getting lost. His curiosity is sincere and child-like. He asks “why,” is a good rhetorician and doesn’t shy away from debate when his guest seems rigid or incomplete in a position. But because he is so open and versatile, it rarely comes to debate.

This is precisely what education was all about in Greek times, and which we’ve strode far from in recent centuries: thinking, discussing, arguing, structuring, understanding and learning from ideological conflict. That has been lost, however, and now the academy is saturated by pretentious book-readers who stay locked in their ivory towers, closed off from all but those who share their path and their unchallenged, institutionally dogmatic opinions. Readership of academic journals is confined to those who are actively participating in the research. It has no popular appeal and little impact on the world. The university, from a humanities standpoint, is worthless.

In Greece, philosophy and critical thinking were the core of learning, and things anyone could participate in. Joe is a player in the resurgence of that ancient game. He has had guests such as fellow comedians, physicists, academics, journalists, celebrities, nutritionists and provocateurs of all sorts. He has produced more than 1,200 episodes. If there aren’t a few that you find interesting, then it’s likely you have no interests.

Having begun 10 years ago as a comedy show from his living room, Joe’s is by far the most listened-to in the world. His subscriber base and monthly downloads are in the tens of millions and are growing. But why? The episodes typically range from one to four hours. Who has time for that? The answer is: anyone. First of all, it’s easy. You don’t have to physically be anywhere. You can listen on your own time while you perform mundane tasks. Having a good podcast can even motivate you to get those dreaded things done. Podcasts essentially sell time, but there is something much bigger going on that Joe does best. It is the search for truth, in the philosophical sense, and it is essential.

We live in the best time to live, in the most liberated country that has every been dreamed of. Quality of life for my great grandparents would be considered poverty today in almost every way. We now have access to luxuries beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams. Yet we are ungrateful. We are divided by opinion and seek confirmation of our beliefs by filtering our Twitter and Instagram feeds to see only those things that offer us expedient pleasure, without having to challenge ourselves in the ruthlessly competitive jungle formerly known as the real world. But, challenge ourselves we should, to question confirmations of what we think we already know. Challenge ourselves to expand our knowledge while we go for a jog or do the dishes. Learning is a form of growing, and one cannot grow without shedding layers of stubborn deadwood from our ripe, malleable cores. Challenge ourselves by seeking truth, through podcasting, as philosophers do – philosophers like Joe Rogan.

Posted Apr 5, 2019 at 7:14 AM, Houma Courier & Thibodaux Daily Comet

Empathy is more straightforward. We ca define it as the ability to understand someone’s experience by sharing their feelings. One can have an empathetic understanding of parental love of a child only by having a child and loving it. Others can only sympathize with that feeling – to understand that parental love is somehow deeper and more unconditional than other types of love, for example, by relating it what one feels for one’s dog (which is not a child, by the way). Apart from life-changing experiences such as having a child, however, there isn’t much one can do to learn to empathize – to feel what another is feeling. It seems to be an ability that one has to a fixed degree from birth. Many psychologists agree.

Since the 1980s, psychologists have used the Big 5 model to measure and understand personality traits in a consistent way. The acronym for the traits is OCEAN (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism). Once measured, the results are understood in percentiles, and the distribution among the data pool is represented by a bell curve where most people center around the average. These traits show that everyone’s personality is unique. They explain the ways in which my biological brother and I are so different despite our having been born less than two years apart with identical upbringings. They strongly indicate that one’s personality is more nature than nurture, it is thought, by about an 80-20 ratio.

The trait relevant to these purposes is agreeableness. This is the maternal aspect of personality that measures rates of aggression on the low percentile end and empathy on the high end. The average woman is over 20 percent higher than the average man in agreeableness. This trait difference explains why women are more likely to choose people-based professions such as health care and social work, why they are more suited (apart from obvious biological reasons) to care for infants and why there are 10 times fewer of them in prison. Men tend to be more thing- and system-oriented, dominating fields like engineering, economics and serial killing. In short, agreeableness measures one’s innate propensity to empathize, and that is a people-oriented matter. This trait cannot be changed throughout life – only managed. If we assume that compassion is a moral virtue, and if empathy and compassion are the same, then there is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that women are better people than men are. Of course, this is absurd.

If compassion is a virtue, as I think it is, we cannot equate it with empathy. No one is a better or worse person than anyone else simply because one is born with a particular temperament. A woman hears an infant crying and thinks, “What can I do to care for and nurture it?” A man in the same situation thinks, “How do I stop the crying?” Though the woman acts from empathy and the male more systematically, they can achieve the same positive result of giving the child what it needs.

Politically, to be more empathetic is to say that one sees the victimized and underprivileged as exploited infants. The resurgence of coddling, socialist political ideals in the west have been described as a “feminine philosophy” that is somehow preferable to the competitive, masculine capitalism that has brought the entire western world out of crippling poverty. Even masculinity itself has been described by supporters of this neo-socialism as “toxic.” It is assumed that maternal empathy is more virtuous than masculine rationale despite all of the 20th century history of communism and current socialist disasters such as in Venezuela. They mask these ideals as compassionate, but that is fake. Compassion, as I define it, must involve the feminine and the masculine.

Empathy is founded mostly in one’s biology, so it indicates how one reacts. It must, therefore, be tempered. Compassion is exemplified by how one willfully acts, so it must be cultivated. Men often have to work hard to act with care and gentleness. Having a daughter is one way a man can be forced into to achieving this. Imagine if Donald Trump did not have a daughter; he might have become an actual tyrant. Women have to learn to recognize contexts where empathy is not appropriate, so they can hold back from acting on it – such as in not sheltering their children into dependency and resisting the urge to vote Democrat. Cultivating compassion must come from both ends. There is a time and place for both maternal and paternal interference in society as well as in the family. Too much or too little of either can be fatal. Real compassion is the ability to find the right balance between the two.

Posted Mar 26, 2019 at 7:00 AM, Houma Courier & Thibodaux Daily Comet

Teaching logic has shown me that everyone is born with some capacity for critical thinking, but most people lose the skill over time. Children, specifically those aged 3-5, happen to be the best at it. This can be proven by a single, dreaded word: “Why?”

When someone asks a why question, they are asking a question of reason, which is to say they are thinking critically to some degree. Children do this much more openly than adults, which is why most adults think children are simply being pests when they do. They’re not. The root of their questioning is different. It is not aimed toward a predetermined goal. It is not funneled through other knowledge accumulated over time. It is genuine curiosity, it is philosophical. Children challenge assumptions, premises and claims more openly than anyone, and they demand reasons to back up new knowledge. Their brains are not computers that simply accept input data. They are inclined to put effort into developing beliefs, and they should. Unfortunately, many parents and teachers are not ready to cater to such relentless curiosity, nor do they want to. Who can blame them? Thinking is calorie-intensive and requires effort. This neglect, I think, is a critical mistake. Parents and teachers have a tremendous job to do.

A child’s tendency to ask why will persist for some time, but his or her continuance to do so will depend greatly on how open and able his or her parents and teachers are to dealing with it. In a perfect world, adults would take this as an opportunity to think critically about those questions themselves when they likely had not done so before. Instead, they get frustrated or annoyed, react with an answer such as “because I said so,” and send their kid straight to bed or wherever to keep them out from under the their skin. This is an uninspired and resistant approach to educating. The child’s curiosity is repressed, and they gradually stop asking questions and start submitting more and more to whichever ideology they find immediately pleasing to their temperament. The more conscientious children by nature (who are no smarter, despite what convention might suggest) give in more quickly to the rules set before them. Others become rebellious. Either way, their guardians’ attitudes have lasting, negative effects on how they think.

I do not have any children of my own. On that basis, one might think that I have an incredible opinion on the matter. I would like to think that the contrary is true for two main reasons. First, I am a good planner. I am fully aware of the challenges of raising a child and thus take the necessary precautions to prevent having one before I’m ready. Secondly, experience isn’t everything. I can observe the effects of bad parenting because my thoughts about the matter are not distorted by the shifting perspective caused by having a child – a perspective that centers one’s concerns around the child, inhibiting one’s ability to reason outside of the scope of the child’s perceived well-being.

Having said that, this is my quick and dirty “philosophy of learning” that is critical for parents and educators, though often painfully difficult to implement.

There is a modern saying that goes, “grade school teaches one what to think whereas college teaches one how to think.”

Unfortunately, by the time we get to college age, we have already developed a foundation for our system of beliefs. It is almost too late to teach one how to think. What’s more, universities since 2014 – humanities and social sciences in particular – have become politically correct indoctrination machines designed specifically to prevent critical thinking. Critical thinking should start much sooner, well before one considers entering that battleground. Small children ask the most critical questions. Parents should help them improve that ability at that point. The obstacle here is that the parents have previously adopted certain beliefs and have largely surrendered their own ability to think well, much less will they be able to teach that skill to someone else. Leading by example is vital, though, as kids learn largely by copying. If they learn to suppress their intellect – their interest in ideas – at a young age, there is a good chance that you won’t like how they turn out. There’s nothing worse than that (so I’ve heard).

How can someone be ready to raise or teach a child in this manner?

This seems like a personal question that everyone has a unique answer to. That is true to an extent, but there is also an ideal that all should embrace. What readiness should mean here, in my view, is that one is willing to accept the intellectual challenge of teaching a little person how to think, and this involves letting go of certain beliefs of your own. Don’t shrug or shirk every time your child asks “why,” but ask it for yourself, and develop genuine interest for your child’s questions and ideas, no matter how absurd they may seem. Do a quick Internet search of the facts, reason through the answer together, and you’ll both learn something about the topic, about each other and most crucially about yourselves. The best part? It’s free!

Posted Jan 31, 2019 at 1:00 AM, Houma Courier & Thibodaux Daily Comet

Hi there. My name is Generation Y. I was born between 1980-94. If you are of the traditionalist or baby-boomer generations, I expect that you are a bit worried about my place in the world today. I like alternative rock music, thrift stores and video games. I’m on anti-depressants, and I am still in debt from being unable to monetize my liberal arts degree that I earned almost a decade ago. I rent a room in a three bedroom apartment and have virtually no chance of purchasing a home in the foreseeable future as two salaries are required for that, while my salary – due to the inflation that you caused – barely qualifies as one.

It’s fair to say that I’m a bit of a mess. I like to think, however, that I am an organized mess.

Why am I such a mess? This is largely a matter of perception, for we have different values. You value hard work while I value passion. You value family while I value personal freedom. You value tradition while I value new ideas. We couldn’t seem more different on the surface, and therefore, as the moment creeps nearer, you are extremely hesitant to hand down the torch of society to me. All of your feelings are completely justified, and even I can admit that much of what you do works. You’re right about a lot. I am here to convince you that things will work out just fine despite out differences. I may have led you to believe otherwise because I’ve asked of your values “why?” Hence my name, but that very question is what will keep society afloat for the next few decades. Allow me to explain.

First, I’m trying my best to live a life that is meaningful and unique, and, without discrediting your values, I question whether your path should become mine. I see the world as a place of possibilities rather than inevitabilities, and the difference in our values not as “mine-not-yours” but rather as “mine-then-yours.” Don’t worry, you’ll get your grandchildren – just fewer of them and later than you’d like. I want it all, and I think I can have it. I’m a dreamer, but I am also aware of the utility and importance of your values. It is taking me a while, however, to find balance between them. This balance is necessary, as the next point will show.

Secondly, the world is changing quickly, and my logic suits it. Technology is evolving at a much faster rate than our brains can, and however unfortunate, this is having a harder impact on my future everyday. I often praise it, for it allows me to entertain myself and work freelance from home in my pajamas while I order food to be delivered right to my door. You see that as a threat to the value of hard work, and that is often correct, but what constitutes work in the first place is changing. I’m doing my best to adapt to this shift to an extent that you don’t need to.

Thirdly, my conditioning, due in part to your well-intentioned attempt to protect me, has led me into the forest without a flashlight. As a child, I was often rewarded for participating incompetently. I left a box in your attic full of green ribbons to prove it. You knew that wasn’t true, so you reassured me that in the case that I could not make things work on my own, you would pick up the slack. I’m grateful for that, sincerely, as it has given me short-term security, but you have overcompensated for my delayed success; I still have to take responsibility for my long-term ends. I am having to cut myself off since you didn’t have the heart to do it when I was 22. I’m sorting through the mess, finally, and I’m even teaching myself to cook out of necessity just to save money – a skill I could have learned from you.

We’re different, yes, but we’re also the same. I didn’t grow up like my little cousins in Generation Z are doing right now, having had an iPhone from age 12 and forming personal identities through others’ verification on social media. I’m only minimally influenced by it. Gen-Z, however, is a lost cause in that regard. They are lazy, have no practical skills, use GPS on their phones to get to the vape shop and will gladly pay $9 for avocado toast at the Internet cafe on the corner. They have no sympathy for tradition nor understanding of the depth of your values. They’re too far removed from them. Who is parenting them anyway? Oh yeah, Generation X. Let’s not mention them.

Unfortunately, Gen-Z isn’t simply going away, and that means I have a job to do: serve as the mediator between your generation and theirs. I understand and can get through to both sides. As long as I take over the world before they do, perhaps even through negotiating with them, then I can guarantee that it won’t come to an end just yet. Just sit back and relax, for your job is done. Trust me like the greatest generation trusted you (for better or for worse), and let me organize my own mess. You have no other choice.

Posted Jan 18, 2019 at 2:56 PM Updated Jan 18, 2019 at 2:56 PM, Houma Courier & Thibodaux Daily Comet