I'm joined this week by Alex Boklin to explore the topic of magical thinking especially in the context of Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret", and the similarities it bears to The Global Consciousness Project (GCP). The GCP puts forward the hypothesis that random number generators elicit statistically significant changes as a result of major world events.
Data Skeptic
The Secret and the Global Consciousness Project with Alex Boklin
(upbeat music) - The Data Skeptic Podcast is a weekly show featuring conversations about skepticism, critical thinking, and data science. - So welcome back to another episode of the Data Skeptic Podcast. I'm here this week with my guest, Alex Boklin. How are you doing, Alex? - I'm good, thanks for having me here. - I first learned about you by reading your great article in a recent issue of Skeptic Magazine titled "The Miracle of Large Numbers." So for anyone who hasn't read it, could you give us a brief synopsis? - Yeah, why not? Although it's been quite a while since I worked on that piece of text. So the basic idea was to show the interplay between small numbers and large numbers in different areas and how we can both see the beauty of the interactions between those and use this as an explanatory mechanism to debunk stuff like intelligent design, the Bible code, let's say, and see how various cognitive biases occur. - Yeah, we can save a lot of the punchlines 'cause I'll encourage readers to go check that out. Volume 19, number two, I definitely encourage everyone to go pick it up if they haven't. I think it was a great read and a lot to learn from it. - Thank you, thank you. - So tell me a little bit about your background and area of study. - By my education, I'm a sociologist, and until recently I was a PhD student at George Mason in Virginia, and unfortunately I had to stop my education due to various reasons, but while I was working on my PhD dissertation, I was interested in studying the phenomenon of magical thinking, most notably illustrated by the popularity of his secret, which we are going to discuss. So basically, my interest was to get into why people are so attracted by the idea that you can change material world by simply thinking about different things. I think it's a very fascinating thing, and it's quite an old story, actually, this whole magical thinking thing. - Yeah, how far does that go back? - Well, classical anthropologist of the 19th century actually wrote quite a lot about magical thinking, and they delineated two cognitive processes involved in this thing. The first was the law of contagion, basically the idea that two entities that get in touch with each other stay in contact, even if separated by time and space. This is why, for example, witches and witches use nails and hairs to cast their spells. So this is one part of magical thinking. And the second part, which I guess is more interesting, and that's exactly what we are going to discuss tonight, is the law of similarity. It's the idea that light produces light, that the cause is similar to the effect. In case of the secret, it's the idea that positive thoughts can materialize positive things, whereas negative thoughts can materialize negative things. And that's quite an old idea. As I said, classical anthropologist and classical psychologist like Zigmund Freud, they thought that such models of thinking was peculiar to primitive people, not to educate Western adults. Sometimes Freud and his older colleagues thought that magical thinking was actually symptom of schizophrenia even. So they connect magical thinking with mental disorders. But more recently, psychologists came to recognize that not only does magical thinking play lots of very positive functions. It also, we are all magicians in the sense that even Western educated adults, even skeptics sometimes, are prone to magical thinking to a different extent. It may be suppressed to a certain degree, but in different situations, we all think in this way. - Would you say that maybe even the brain is a little bit wired up to try and perceive things that way? - I'm not a neuroscientist, but I think, yeah, I think there is some neurobases for that. The fact that we are prone to finding meaningful patterns everywhere, like the peridolia phenomenon. - Yeah, the classic example I always hear people giving is, I think of an early homo sapien living somewhere, and one of them hears of rustling and looks over in the darkness and they think they see a tiger, someone else doesn't see the tiger, the person that saw it, whether it was there or not, decided to run. So whenever it does happen to be there, they're more likely to survive. So I'm not a neurologist or evolutionary biologist, but at least to me is a plausible claim that maybe there's a reason we see things or have a tendency to see things that aren't quite there. - Yeah, that's exactly, that's really nice thingy. You are bringing up because that's actually what I wanted to say. The modern psychologists emphasize the evolutionary, the adaptive value of magical thinking. It may not work this way in modern world. I mean, we do not live a montage or snakes primarily at least, but for our ancestors, it was a very efficient way of, and sometimes a lifesaver even when you said. So I also find this to be a very plausible and really interesting claim. - So would you make a distinction between positive thinking? You know, like maybe I wake up in the morning, I tell myself that I'm good enough, smart enough, and dog gone at people like me versus I wake up and I think that today I will win the lottery and expect that to happen. I guess I'm asking from like a more psychology perspective that if I heard there was a peer reviewed research paper saying that people who in the morning recite a positive mantra maybe had some small mental health benefit. I would want to see evidence for that, but there's a plausibility to it. But it's harder to believe that, you know, I can think a brand new car into existence. Do you see a distinction between positive and magical thinking or is it a blurry line? - It's a blurry line, but in case of the secret, for example, it's quite distinct I would say because when you think about yourself positively and when you try to see relationships with other people in a positive way and yourself included, I would call this positive thinking, right? And this is, you know, some kind of a self help to me. There is nothing magical, so to speak about it. Nothing mysterious, and you know, whereas when we speak about trying to materialize stuff like a new sexual partner, like a new house or a new car via thoughts, that's magical thinking, definitely. And this is quite different. Although some researchers like Barbara Erin Reich, I guess she uses the terms, you know, similarly without distinguishing them from each other, whereas some psychologist would claim that these are different phenomenon. And we should be very distinct as to what we mean by saying this and that. But to me, it's does the difference. - So we've touched on the secret commit. We maybe give a more formal definition of what was her name, Rhonda Byrne, the claim she made in her book in the accompanying film. - It's quite popular, at least it used to be a really popular book and the movie. And she actually published another one called The Power. I haven't read this one, I'll be honest, but I suspect the contents are quite the same. So the basic idea of the secret was that there is a law of nature called the law of attraction, which to me is like the law of similarity, which I mentioned to you when we were discussing the works of classical anthropologists. So this law of attraction is a law of nature, which works in the following way. When you think about persistently, we can think about positive things. When you visualize them, when you express and feel positive emotions about some object, this object is more likely to be materialized in your life. And vice versa, if you think about something negative, if you anticipate that something bad will happen to you, this bad thing will materialize. And the main, so to speak, actor in this story is what she calls the universe. It's the overwhelming environment in which we all live. And the universe somehow recognizes the frequencies of these bad and good thoughts. And it fulfills our wishes, as if it was some kind of a huge cosmic mole and you by thinking positively or negatively send your orders, so to speak. - We'd have to kind of be like our own broadcast transmitters that are sending out thoughts and somehow the universe is a big antenna receiving them and then acting on them, I guess. - Yeah, exactly, that's the idea. So does Burnoff really empirical data to support the claims? - I'm afraid she doesn't. The way she presents your claim is she simply states that the law of attraction is the law of nature. You can believe it or not, but it works all the same, just like the law of gravity would. And the universe is there and it can feel your vibrations and it interacts with you whether you realize this or not. And the way she tries to substantiate her claim is that she relies on testimonies provided by different gurus like doctors, physicists, philosophers. The official secret website also contains an immense amount of successful stories. Basically people go there and describe how the secret helped them to get something, to materialize some stuff. And there are thousands of stories up to date. So I encourage our listeners to go online if they're interested and go through some of those stories. - It's an interesting selection bias, I guess, in that if I practice this and had a great result, I might go share a testimony, but I doubt if there's the secret failed me.com where I talk about how I didn't get the new car or the new job or anything. - So do you think that the claim of the law of attraction can be tested? Is there an empirical basis by which we could evaluate whether it's a provable hypothesis or not? - The way Byrne presents her claim, it's totally unfalsifiable. It can only be verified by, if you succeeded means that you were doing everything in the right fashion. If you did not succeed, it's your fault. The law still works, it's just the problem is with you because you do not do something that is required. It's actually interesting because, again, classical anthropologist like Bernice Lomelenowski, the Polish-British famous anthropologist who studied magic, he pointed out that magic is exactly characterized by a strictness of the ritual. If you did something wrong in a very slight way, everything will go wrong and it's your fault, that the ritual was not successful. Oh, there is some counter magic that, you know, we're gonna use one. So it's exactly the same logic here, but speaking about how we could possibly come up with some rigorous empirical design, I think the only way we could possibly do so is by hooking experimental subjects to, let's say, fMRI machines and try to see what happens there. But again, it would be very difficult to, we will need to control for the time span. I mean, what is the time gap between your mental order and the result? It may be very different from person to person. How do you control for that? So yeah, it would be hard to blind it too, I think. Yeah, it's very baffling when it comes to thinking about how we could possibly justify such claims empirically in the laboratory. The only thing that comes to my mind, some companies these days, they produce special headbands that can recognize your brain waves and they can display your brain waves on the monitor, let's say, of your laptop or your smartphone and rather, you know, specifically designed smartphone apps where you can, let's say, move virtual objects by concentrating well enough on something. But that's, again, it's not that pure magical thinking where you simply think about something, here you have facilitated with technology. It's quite different. But in this way, I don't know, that looks to me like some at least plausible piece of empirical design. It's very difficult for me to come up with something. It's a very tricky topic and that's why I think, among many other things, you're so successful because it's very hard to falsify such claims. Yeah, if you can always say, well, you didn't do it right, then it's an unfalsifiable argument. Yeah, absolutely. I can't imagine we could talk about the secret without at least mentioning Oprah's support of it, which I think we touched on earlier. How much do you think that can perpetuate an idea of magical thinking? In other words, if a person like me makes a YouTube channel and starts talking about it, I might be looked at like a crank, but someone who has a national, very popular TV show has some semblance of authority. Does that contribute to it kind of spreading and becoming part of what people in the general populace will think? I think it's a rhetorical question. I mean, it's obvious that at least to a certain degree, it really helps facilitate such claims. If she's an authority, if she's popular, I mean, Oprah in this case, that's a huge boost to the overall popularity. And there is quite a number of similar books to the secret, which also talk about the law of attraction, but the secret is the most popular one. It goes back, I found stuff that Napoleon Hill was writing in the '30s even, and Norman Vincent Pearl in the '50s. Pretty much the same thing as what she said. But what do you think uniquely made her become such a phenomenon, or at least a number of years ago, she was compared to their limited success? Well, it might be some circumstantial thing. I mean, a number of things happened in the very, that was a happenstance for her, that exactly her book was not noticed by Oprah, and it all just came out successfully. I think the fact that Napoleon's heel, I think a girl rich is still very popular. It's a nice illustration of the fact that these ideas are still around, and they have been around for a while, and she just re-expressed the same idea once again. I'm not sure about why she exactly was the most mainstream author and the most popular one, but I think it's a combination of the fact that she combines this nice picture of the universe helping you out. She also invited lots of gurus, like I said, she had the support from Oprah, which was, again, a really nice feature for her. So, all these things combined, I guess, it led to her success. And I'm sure they will emerge similar kinds of books some years from now. I think it's quite inevitable. Yeah, it's almost like some of these things are cyclical. I don't think the secret's as popular now as it was five to 10 years ago, but there'll be something like the secret, maybe another 15. Do you see that? Is that a trend in magical thinking that we go through sort of a periodic up and down with what people will be popular amongst general people's thinking? I wouldn't say it's up and down. I would rather say that it's not maybe an archetype that would be the wrong term to use, but it's an expression of the mode of thinking that we all share as humans. It's a sort of rationalization of evil or novelization, I don't know, of these ideas. And we also have our local Russian analogs of the secret, not as popular as the secret because they are written not in English but in Russian, which limits your audience significantly, but still. It's a nice illustration of the fact that books and movies like that, they appear on a regular basis. And like I said, it's just an expression of how we feel about the world around us humans. So I think we are really wired in some sense to think that those can produce material outcomes. - Do you think it varies by culture? How much people are susceptible to thinking this? You know, when we look at other skeptical topics, US has sort of a problem with people not believing in vaccines, even though there's strong supporting evidence that they're effective. And in Canada, I don't think it's a big of a problem, but they have a big community of people saying that Wi-Fi is damaging to the health. And you almost never hear that in the United States. Is the secret more global? Or do you think some cultures are more in favor of it? - Well, the secret itself is really global. It was translated in terms of languages. It was successful worldwide. But I think just like religion, it differs from country to country. With, for example, not that, you know, let's say this kind of an even country that's much less religious than the United States, for instance. I think it also depends not only on the particular culture, but also on what social class a person belongs to. Even though some psychologists would suggest that such things only influence the degree of suppression of these beliefs. And being humans, we all share this, the promise to magical thinking. Even if you reach and educate it, and you realize that it's basically bullshit that doesn't work this way. I mean, changing material world with the power of your thoughts. Still, sometimes, at least sometimes, you will try to do that deliberately on that yourself. - Yeah, for, there was a time when I thought, oh, this must be something that's going to appeal to people in the lowest stature in life. You know, the down and out on their luck, because it would be a quick and easy way to jump up a few rings. But at the same time, I thought, well, it could just as well be that a successful person thinks that this is the secret to their success, that there has to be this, there's like a desire people have to give an explanation for something that might just be random. - It also depends a lot on the particular circumstances a person finds themselves in. I think it's not a coincidence that the majority of works that study magical thinking and superstitions for that matter are concentrated on athletes. Because athletes deal with big debris of uncertainty, so they try to use these lucky superstitions just in case without even sometimes believing in the fact that you might change something actually. You just do it because it might work knows. - That leads into an interesting aside. If I'm an athlete, let's say, and someone says, hey, where this bracelet, maybe it will help, maybe it won't, what's the harm? Do you see a potential harm in people believing in the secret? - Well, when we speak about situations like you should wear this lucky bracelet, the potential harm, I guess, is minimal. But things might be different when we talk about the secret and the likes. And the biggest harm that I see potentially was actually described by Barbara Ehrenwerk, who was diagnosed with breast cancer at one point. And that's exactly how she got into the secret subculture. She revolved around people who thought that cancer was a gift from the universe, who thought that you should think positively about this whole situation, about your illness. And in this way, you will be able to overcome this. And this might be very dangerous, actually. If you supplant real actions, real treatment with your positive thinking, it might be very dangerous. So I think it's the biggest possible harm. Or sometimes, financial losses might be involved. I don't know. - Absolutely. - Like if you're a gambler and you try to rely on this law of nature called the law of attraction, instead of trying to be at least a little bit more rational about your real chances to win. It might cost you some real sums of money. And it's also quite dangerous. So these two possibly would be the biggest threats of the positive thinking, or magical thinking, if you will. But there are also lots of positive functions. We should recognize those as well. So it's not the one-sided phenomenon. - True, true. You've mentioned Barbara Ehrenwerk a couple of times. Can you share with the listeners the book you recommended to me via email? - It's called the bright-sided how a positive thinking fooled America in the world, I believe. I'm not mistaken. And it describes, she gives a nice overview of the movement of positive thinking, starting with Napoleon Hill and Protestant ethic in previous centuries. She also describes how this whole industry works quite neatly because she visit lots of conferences. She conducted interviews and she studied secondary literature. And like I said, she was directly involved in this subculture because at one point of her life, she was forced by the circumstances to get into that. And it has a really personal take. But I think she is too critical about positive thinking. I wouldn't be that harsh, but she has the motive. And it's definitely worthy reading. So I would definitely recommend this one. It's very skeptical and it's very intellectually repression. - I've ordered a copy, but I haven't had a chance to get into it yet. I'm looking forward to it. So I appreciated the recommendation. - Yeah, it's a nice book. And unfortunately, it's one of the few books on the topic. It's not, for some reason, it's not a widely studied topic. - It's too bad. Her book doesn't sell one to one with copies of the secret. That would be a nice balance. - It never will result on this scale. It doesn't work this way. - So there's an interesting claim, sort of in parallel to the secret that kind of makes it relevant to a lot of the data stuff I typically talk about on the podcast, specifically this thing called the Global Consciousness Project. Have you had a chance to look into that at all? - Yeah, and I would first like to thank you for pointing to me. I've never heard about this before. Yeah, and I've tried to read stuff about it. And I think it's, yes, it's very relevant to our discussion in many ways. - Yeah, would you mind sharing a summary for anyone who's not familiar with it? - Yeah, sure, but I must warn your readers that not being a cool statistician, I will just describe the general logic of the whole project, if you don't mind. - Not at all, that's the best description one can give. - Okay, so as follows from the title of it, it's a global collaboration, which was started at Princeton University, I believe more than 15 years ago now. And the general hypothesis they rely upon is that global catastrophes or global events like terroristic attacks, natural disasters or famous people's deaths, or to the country positive events, like the World War Cup. They induce positive, positive or negative emotions and a large amount of people. And this, so to speak, global consciousness can interact some subtly with the machines. In this case, they work with random number generators. And they assume that these generalized and aggregated mental energy, so to speak, can distort the random patterns of the lack of pattern if it's random in these machines. So they have quite a number of these random member generators all across the globe. These machines are constantly generated tons of data, which is aggregated at the server at Princeton and analyzed statistically. And the major finding is that there is a slight deviation from the expectation. So they collect the data, they calculate z-scores and they create the cumulative z-score graph. And in their view, it deviates significantly from chance. And they think that this speaks to the fact that there is a subtle correlation between thoughts or emotions and how machines work. - Yeah, I've been struggling since I've been reading about it, just in understanding the mechanism there. I hate to say the secret is more plausible, but at least there's some sense like, if there were a way that we were broadcasting thoughts and the universe could be a receptor, then perhaps there could be a lot of similarity and a lot of attraction. But I'm sort of baffled by what mechanism would cause thoughts to go into random number generators and push them one way or the other. Is there anything there or have I kind of hit the bottom of the logic? I'm afraid you hit the bottom. And my personal thought about this whole project is that ironically or not, it's main problem is not with statistics, it's not with the mathematical apparatus, the employee. Well, I have one, do not understand it to the end, but I see major logical flaws with the project just like with this secret. And it's not about statistics to me, it's about logical gaps and they are serious. Like you said, for example, would you like me to go into that? - Yeah, please. - Well, for one, for example, the main logical gap that this project shares with the secret is that, well, okay, let's assume that collectively or individually thoughts can shape material reality. Let's take this for granted and agree with that. But this will inevitably mean that all the bad things that happen on the global scale, such as, you know, the Holocaust, touristic attacks, natural disasters, wars, and things like that are caused by collective mental efforts where the people are aware of that or not. It was actually one of the major, major criticism shared by many authors towards the secret, that the secret basically blames victims. If a woman got raped, for example, it means that it was due to her bad thinking, bad expectations. Dave Chappelle, I'm not sure. Do you know this stand-up comedian? - Sure do, yeah. - He had a very small piece of one of his shows about positive thinking and run the burn. He actually imagined how he would approach a starving African boy who would ask him for a sandwich. And he would reply to him, boy, you need to visualize that sandwich. Don't you understand that it's all about your positive attitude. So it's the same with the secret. And I think that quite the same gap we can see with regards to this global consciousness project, in a way that the others state in many places that there is a correlation between collective consciousness or collective emotions, for that matter, and changes in the behavior of material systems. But can that possibly mean that, again, just like with the secret, this collective consciousness can change things in the very bad ways. Because one of their major examples was the 9/11 tragedy. And they pointed out that the registered deviations, not only during the event itself, but also before the event, which is very interesting. Can that possibly mean that collective consciousness somehow predicted or stimulated that tragedy? So that's a huge problem, they need to grapple with it. And they do not do so, I'm afraid. - Yeah, I was having trouble finding what their process is for trying to select which events they want to investigate and what we should expect to find and what we shouldn't. So for example, if a major world leader, let's say the president of the United States was assassinated, that's pretty major world event, we'd expect it to be fine there. If the vice president of a local library in rural Canada is assassinated, probably not a world event, I couldn't seem to find any criteria by which they would measure where we should expect things. So we could actually falsify this. Did you find anything there, or are they just kind of cherry-picking this data? - Cherry-picking was exactly the work I was gonna use to answer your phrase about it. - Yeah, I'm afraid that's what they do. And like I said, my personal take on this is that the problem is not with statistics, it's about the logic of the whole research. It's about how they select events, how they justify their claim. Let's once again agree with their basic assumption that random number generators produce no meaningful patterns because they generate randomness, right? And that collective thoughts or collective emotions can disturb this lack of pattern and bring some patterns into that. In other words, collective consciousness can create order in randomness. That's exactly what they're saying. But why do they think that collective consciousness should bring order into randomness? Why shouldn't it be vice versa? Why shouldn't it be some kind of disorder instead? How can they know, I a priori, that this should be the exact result of the workings of collective consciousness? That's a very bold assumption and it's not justified, it's just taken for granted. And that's a very, it's very bold. And I don't find any justification for that. It's like they really enjoy this idea. - Yeah, yeah, I agree very much with you that it's really not about the statistics. I mean, I could maybe pick apart some of it and talk about controlling from multiple comparisons but it really comes down to the logical flaws. So do you think that there's sort of maybe a feedback loop involved in the people who are researching it? So once you come to believe this idea, if you look for something and you find it, it's confirmation. If you look for something and don't find it, you can keep looking. It would be, I guess it might be hard for someone who starts believing to stop believing because the absence of evidence isn't as dramatic as the presence of evidence. - Do you think there's a sort of a sociological feedback loop involved there? - Well, not maybe sociological, but definitely psychological. And you're absolutely right. And I would agree with you that any hit will seem to you more impressive than any miss, especially if you're interested in some particular topic. It's totally about selection bias in this way. And as a person who I actually was preoccupied with positive thinking for some time and with different kinds of esoterics before I became professional sociologists and a skeptic later. So I really understand people, I understand why people find this all very attractive. And again, if you are studying something or if you think about the justification issues, if you are, let's say, a simple magical thinking user, not a statistician from Princeton. And let's say at a particular point of time, magical thinking works. Let's say you wanted to find a new job and you found it. It's very attractive to think that it was due to this, to the hub of the universe. Would you agree with me? And the same with random numbers, the same with any fringe science claims, especially if you are emotionally and intellectually involved with that topic. It's very difficult to keep distance. And like I said, any hits, any pieces of proof, they are really intellectually rewarding. And it's very easy to ignore. - Do these sort of fringe claims, ultimately like one person has to start believing them and then convince the second and so on and so forth? Do these things sort of evolve like viruses or are they their own thing? - I actually like the idea of mental virus. And I think at least as a metaphor. And again, I'm not a neuroscience, I'm not a position to discuss the particular cognitive mechanisms involved or neural mechanisms even. But I really think it spreads softly. And the interesting thing, I haven't tested this hypothesis empirically unfortunately. But if you go through all those successful stories posted at the official secret website, which I mentioned earlier, you will quite easily notice that the goals that people set to themselves, in most cases, quite realistic. Let's say we talk about health issues. Most of the people will not wish for overcoming, let's say brain tumors or curing cancer. Most of them will wish for losing weight, let's say becoming healthier, a healthier person who makes more exercises, things like that. The same with financial issues. People will not wish for becoming millionaires tomorrow morning. Because I think implicitly they realize that such things are not realistic and deliberately are not people themselves support, self-perpetuate this idea. And also, the social aspect of this, of how this intellectual virus spreads is that many people spread lots of time online. They can see these stories, especially if they are propagated by famous characters like Oprah. They go to bookstores, let's say, and they see that bookshelves are filled with such literature. And it's all very attractive covers, very impressive claims like, you can do everything with your life, just think the right way. Yeah, it spreads really quickly. And again, it also relies on the fact that every human is prone to thinking this way. Evolutionary, or cognitively, as a human being, we all share this thrownness. So when these two things are combined, it's a nice mixture for authors like Rhonda Byrne. Yeah, I noticed in a lot of these things, certainly in the Global Consciousness Project, there's technical language that's there, that not every reader will understand. But even in the secret, and especially a lot of the surrounding gurus, words like quantum and these physics words that are often used incorrectly are present there. But it also makes a lay person who doesn't know the technical details of that field, perhaps get intimidated by it. Do you think the language contributes to the success of people believing in things? Yes, both language and appeal to authority. That's exactly what you mentioned. I just remember that Byrne appeals to famous people of the past like Albert Einstein, saying that you know what people, Albert Einstein actually recognized the same idea a long time ago. Leonardo Da Vinci knew that, and he also wrote about it. In addition to this, she employs some technical jargon like quantum waves, frequencies and stuff. These two things I think really perse to it, lots of people, because unfortunately, I think most of the readers are not very critical. Yeah. And they are really susceptible to such kind of language. And the appeal to authority once again. It's a very powerful trigger for the majority of the audience. Yeah. So I think we had a pretty good exploration of the topic. Is there anything we missed that you think we should cover? I just remember that I can't help by telling this anecdote about illustrate, that illustrates how positive thinking works. And it's an anecdote about, I actually thought it was purely a Russian story, but it proved to be an international one. I just easily found this on Google a couple of hours ago. The story is about, again, let's say it's John, who is in financial difficulty. So he walks in the church and starts to pray to God, saying, listen God, I wasn't the best person lately, but I'm in the real financial trouble, and I need to win the lottery. I simply don't have the money. I know here ubiquitous, you can hear me. So just, could you please help me with that? So he leaves the church a week, goes by, nothing happens. He comes to the synagogue, and again, prays to God, saying, please God, I know you can help me with this lottery thing. I just really need some money to pay the bills. My wife is sick, and I really need to do something about it. So I'm counting on you. He leaves the synagogue, the week passes by, nothing happens. Finally, he comes to the mosque and says the same prayer, and says, you know God, I pray, I pray, nothing happens. Now I'm really disappointed with how you work and how you treat people. You're really starting to disappoint me God. And at this particular moment, the clouds open up. There is, you know, immense light all around, and a booming voice says John, at least by yourself, of fucking lottery tickets. (laughing) That's great. I think it's the best illustration of all the logical flaws involved and how it works, so. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Leslie, I like to wind up by asking all my guests to give two recommendations. They can, you know, be anything, a book, a paper, whatever. First is the benevolent recommendation, something you have no connection to, but think people would appreciate and get benefit from. And the second, your self-serving recommendation, something that hopefully you get direct benefit from your appearance on the show. As benevolent recommendation, I will be quite trivial. That's going to be a book. It's one of the, my recent favorites. It's called "Slides of Mind," what the neuroscience of magic reveals about our everyday deceptions. It was written by Stephen Macknick, Susanna Martinez-Conte, and Sandra Blake-Sley. So this is just to give a short description. It's written by neuroscientists, but it's written in a very popular, easy-to-access language. And it deals with parallels between how stage magicians fool us and what particular cognitive mechanisms they employ in order to do so. And it provides very neat illustrations of stage magic tricks, and it explains a lot. It's full of wonderful illustrations. And once again, it's really clear-cut and engaging. I truly enjoy that reading. So I think that everyone who gets this one will enjoy it very cool, like I did. So it's a really cool book. It's quite a recent one. It was published, I guess, three years ago. As for the second one, since I'm not very fruitful writer yet, I would just recommend my skeptical, and hope that people will find interesting things. I believe that this topic of large numbers and how understanding the logic of large and small numbers, deserves to be the topic for full-fledged book, but maybe this could be some future task for me. But for now, I just hope that this reading will, again, cause some enjoyment for somebody. - Absolutely, I highly recommend it. And a great start to a future book, I hope to see. - Yeah, I hope so, I hope so. - Sounds great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show today. I really appreciate it, and I think we've had a great conversation. Thanks, I really enjoyed that. And I hope that our readers will enjoy this as well. It was very intriguing and fruitful, I hope. - Definitely. [MUSIC]