Okay, Dr.

Wilburn, welcome back to the show. How are you?

I'm very well. Thank you so much for inviting me back.

I'm, I'm honored it. Thank you.

It's great to have you back. It's a new year.

It's our first episode of 2022, so, um, we're excited

to kick off the new year with some interesting topics

that are relevant to

what most people are experiencing around the world.

And I thought today, you know, we had a chat last week about

what we could talk about, and I made so many notes.

It was ridiculous. I was writing on every little bit

of scrap paper I could, but I, I found myself coming back

to towards the word trust in this,

in the last couple of years.

I thought trust is a very, very interesting word.

It's an interesting concept,

and I think it's changed for a lot of people,

and especially in a world of, you know,

conflicting information and a lot of deceit perhaps.

So I just thought before we kick off, for those people

who are unfamiliar with you, would you be kind enough

to tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Oh, gracious. Yeah. Um, I'm gonna try and keep this short.

I've had a multi strand career. Yeah.

So, um, I trained as a psychotherapist.

I've worked as a psychotherapist, sometimes

almost full-time right now.

I have just picked up two or three clients.

Um, uh, I'm also a qualitative researcher, so

that's commercial research, uh, looking at, uh, um,

strategies, for example, or brands

or, uh, new product development

or policies, stuff like that.

Working for either big corporations

or charities or governments.

Um, trying to find out what people think about things.

Uh, I'm a philosopher, a storyteller,

an author and a teacher.

I'm just about to start teaching at a university here.

I'm currently living in Vietnam. I'm British.

I lived most of my life in the uk, but traveled a fair bit.

Um, and I've got a, a wife

and a couple of small boys, which kind

of focuses the mind a bit as well.

Wonderful. So, with small children in your life

and partners and different businesses

and different colleagues, employees, employers, et cetera,

trust is without question a huge part of any relationship,

be it with your 2-year-old child or a boss.

So when you actually hear the words trust,

where does your mind kind of immediately take you?

It takes me back away, actually.

Um, so, uh, one

of the things I did a,

a long time ago was I wrote some script

for some videos, by which I mean videotapes,

this was back in the day of videotapes, not CDs,

not downloads, whatever.

This is that long ago. Okay.

Um, so it was a series of, of, uh, videotapes.

I was the author, and, um,

the guy who was basically putting up the money

for the whole thing, uh, had a, he was brave

to put the money up, but turned out he had a,

a fairly sketchy reputation.

Um, and, uh,

various things had come up.

People were a little bit worried about.

Anyway, the day

before I was due to deliver the first set of scripts,

I get a phone call from him, from this guy,

and he says to me, Hugh, Hugh mate, um, uh,

having cash flow problems, you know,

if you can just deliver the scripts, you know, later,

we can, uh, you know, we can sort out the

payment later on, you know?

And, um, the alarm bells were ringing all over my, uh, beds

and my head and everything.

So, um, I said, well, no, uh, Mr.

X, I think, um, I think I'd rather

actually get the money on delivery.

You know, that's the kind of deal.

And he said, ah, come on, come on, come on.

We gotta have a, you gotta have a bit

of trust in your relationships.

And I said, yes, Mr. X, you're absolutely right.

We do have to have trust,

and I trust the contract that we signed.

So the next day, literally that I had,

I handed over the scripts with one hand

and collected the check with the other hand.

And, um, I was actually, exactly, yeah.

And I was actually the only person who came out ahead in

that particular deal, the talent

and all the other people, uh,

they got screwed, really. So, um,

So those are people. So some that,

those are the people that got,

who got screwed over how, like where was their trust?

Like you, you, you had trust in the contract

and you had trust in yourself to, you know, kind of stick

by your guns because, you know,

you had some alarm bells were ringing,

ringing there a little bit.

So your trust moved from this individual

to the contract you had and your own confidence, I suppose.

But these other people who kind of missed out, they,

were they, were they foolish with their trust?

Did they give it away? Were they,

you know, what, what do you think?

I, I'm not really,

I can't remember enough about that situation.

I can remember, I can remember two things.

One was, uh,

the guy was the only per prepared finance this set

of, uh, videos.

So that he was a bit of a, he was willing to risk money.

It's just he also, uh, wasn't particularly well organized.

And, um, his accounting never seemed

to generate the profit that was expected

to generate the revenue for everybody else.

Um, so let's say, uh,

they learned from the experience,

okay, let's put it that way,

Because then this individual maybe had a little bit too

much trust with his own project or his own potential,

or his own ability to pull these things together.

Yeah, I think, I think he, he had a little,

he was definitely overconfident in, in his other areas

of, of, of work.

And, uh, sadly things didn't go too well, uh,

in the long term for him.

Um, so there's a good, there's a, there's a couple of,

if you like, negatives about trust.

Like trusting yourself without enough basis,

without enough experience,

without enough competence can be a problem.

And particularly trusting other people who say,

you've got to trust me.

That's always an alarm bell for me.

I think, well, if I trust you,

I don't even have to talk about it.

Right? I don't, um, for example, Simon,

I trust you right now.

We've never had a conversation. Do we trust each other?

Right? It's, it's never been explicit, you know, um,

are you going to do something terrible with this interview?

I don't think you will. Actually,

I don't think you're gonna edit in weird stuff

that I didn't say.

I just trust you. Now, I, I trust you, um,

because I know you now a little bit.

I mean, actually we've never met, um, we've only met, uh,

uh, through Zoom and conversations and so forth.

But, um, my feeling is I trust you.

Now, I may be wrong, but I suspect I won't be okay. Right?

And, and so talking about trust, funnily enough can be, um,

the source of distrust.

So I'll turn it on its head. Let's look at it like this.

How, how do you start doing trust?

What's the beginning of trust? Okay.

And the, the answer is it trust must start

inside each individual.

So the trust

that I have in anybody

or anything else must start in trusting me.

I have to trust me first,

and on that basis, I can trust other people.

I mean, just see what happens if you try it differently.

Let's say, um, I don't know, you own a new school, you dunno

what to do, or a new group, or a new gang or a new company.

And, uh, you turn to someone who looks friendly

and you say, who are the good people around here?

Who should I trust? And they say, oh, you should trust,

you know, Tom and Jerry and Bill and Ben

and uh, Frida Carlo, and, um, you,

and you say, oh, great, thank you.

That's really helpful, right?

And you trust them for a while, and then life happens.

And one day you wake up and you think, well,

but why do I trust the person who told me to trust them?

Why should I trust that person? How do I know? Right?

The answer is, you've got,

unless you trust yourself,

you're gonna have an endless string of people telling you

to trust somebody else, and you'll never know why you trust

them, right?

You'll always be a little bit adrift, right?

A little bit like, why should I trust this person?

If you trust yourself, then

you can then judge, well, I'm gonna trust this guy.

I'm gonna trust that person. I'm gonna trust that woman.

Right? And

after a while, you'll discover,

you make a few mistakes, you got it wrong, okay?

But each one, each time you get it wrong,

you learn something about it.

If, if you are willing to learn

and you get better at trusting, I mean, it's, it's,

it's just like a, a, a, a,

a motor skill, if you like, like juggling.

How do you learn to juggle, right?

You try, you literally, somebody will tell you what to do,

but you've gotta try and do it, right?

I can explain to you what to do.

Uh, that's not gonna help you juggle.

You actually have to do it yourself several times

until you've taught your arms

and your eyes to coordinate properly.

And while you are learning, you are busy failing a lot.

You are busy dropping the balls over and over

and over again until you catch them properly.

So trust is the emotional equivalent of that.

You know, you have to get it wrong a few times

until you get better at it,

and you're never gonna be perfect.

Even the greatest jugglers in the world occasionally

drop a ball, right?

So that's, that's what trust is. It's a process.

It's a, a sequence of decisions,

and you get better at it

provided you are willing to know you get it wrong

and to learn when you do get it wrong.

Absolutely. I think that the idea of trust being

a skill, and when we are making these

judgements on whether we trust

or not, you know, we're, we're, we're pulling from inside

of us, lots of different experiences.

We're using our, like reptilian brain as well

as our analytical brain.

There's so many things that, um, actually play a part

to actually, you know, do we, do we trust this individual?

Do we trust this transaction?

Do we trust this piece of information?

I think that a lot of people lose

that trust from a certain situation,

and then they just, like, they just don't trust anything.

And there's obviously a big difference between, between,

you know, being, let's say, being skeptical about something

or being skeptical about somebody,

and then being completely distrusting of

that individual right from the back.

So I feel like with being skeptic, there is trust there.

Like you've got the potential for being trustful,

but you're not there to commit it yet.

But when it comes to, if I'm just gonna distrust this,

this person and what they're talking about right from the

get go, I don't think I've got the ability to really listen

to what's being said,

and I'm never gonna be in a position to be able

to trust that person going forward.

And the reason I kind of bring up

that point is I'm talking about like information,

especially wrapped around covid, you know, like

where people grab the go, get their information,

people rarely shift from those sources,

and that's usually the one place that they go to

because they, for some reason, whether one reason

or another, they trust that source of information

and they distrust other sources

and have a lack of skepticism, which, you know, it's, it

that's an interesting, an interesting place to be.

And it's an interesting balance to have.

Uh, yeah, that's a lot

of topics in, uh, one little moment there.

Um, Simon, thanks.

Um,

I mean that, so like, do I trust somebody?

Um, that's like, that sounds like a question, right?

Do I, do I trust them? Yes. No, no, I don't.

But actually, uh, in real life it's,

it's way more complicated than that.

It's like what I, what am I asking them to do?

What do I trust them to do? Yeah.

So, um, a taxi driver, do I trust him to drive me

where I go, where I want to go?

Yeah. Um, well, nine times out of 10

or more than that, you know,

99 times outta a hundred, uh, yes I do.

Yeah. Very occasionally I think he's a bad

driver or he's lost.

But mostly I trust him

and I'll find out pretty quickly within the first, like

whatever it is, a few hundred meters, you know,

can he drive properly?

Is he drunk? Does he know anywhere

about the city that we're in?

Right? And yeah, I'm gonna trust him to

nearly always, I trust him to drive me

where I want him to.

Do. I trust him to look after my finances, uh,

or to feed my children.

No. That like, no, absolutely not. Yeah.

So I, I can trust somebody in one area

and not in another area.

And that's totally sensible.

That's a very good attitude to have. Yeah.

You don't trust complete people completely about everything

unless you know them very well.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's a great, that's a very good point. Yeah.

In regards to, people have their, you know,

usually when you, you're engaging with somebody, there's,

there's a clear defined role there.

Whether you're talking with a friend

or you're talking with somebody

who's providing you a service.

There's clearly like a relationship there that just from,

just from society has dictated how

that interaction kind of would go.

And yeah, there would be different levels of,

of trust within that, with, within that engagement.

And obviously, yeah, you wouldn't,

you wouldn't allow this taxi driver stranger to,

you wouldn't trust him to feed your kid, your kids,

but you've probably got the cap.

He's probably got the capability to do so.

But that, that, that trust of that, that's a, that's,

that's leaving yourself to all types of vulnerability

and so many parameters of, of you know what's gonna happen.

That's when, you know,

you can't give too much trust to that, to that individual.

That gets to a bit of a scary spot.

Yeah. And, and, and there's context.

I mean, you know, I'm much more likely to get him strangely.

I'm more likely trust him to feed my children.

I would to trust him to look after my bank account.

Um, so again, that, you know,

there's all sorts of wrinkles.

So what's that pointing to two things.

Um, one context, context is super important, right?

It's, it's a, a kind of mad idea

to trust somebody about everything everywhere, all the time.

That's just a little bit, I mean,

the only person really you should trust under those

circumstances is yourself.

And you should also know you are probably gonna get it wrong

as well and learn from it.

So we should avoid absolutism just

because we can define what we mean by trust.

It doesn't mean that we should go

for the con complete version of it all the time.

Um, you mentioned earlier a little bit about, uh, covid,

you know, what do we, where people get their information,

who should they trust and so on.

And, um, I mean, oh,

that's a definitely a hot topic at the moment.

Um, one of the

things I observed a very long time ago, actually, when,

so remember, I'm a psychotherapist and a market researcher.

So in both cases, I get

to meet a whole load of different people.

And as a qualitative market researcher, I literally met a,

a, a properly structured

and stratified cross-section of society through the uk

and less broadly,

but to some extent in, in other parts of the world.

But I really did meet a proper statistically sound

cross-section of society.

And, and what I've found is that the vast majority

of people, um, are really helpful.

They're really nice, they're kind,

they want to get on with life.

They're, they're nice. They, they wanna help me

and you and everybody else.

Um, and they,

they really only have two common problems that are

very, very common all over the UK and certain more,

and also over the world.

And that is that in spite of the fact

that they're relatively astute

and they know pretty well how to run their own lives,

they are dis disempowered

and misinformed.

And they're particularly, I mean, they're,

I'll tell you a bit more about the misinformation.

A lot of people are innumerate,

they're not very good at assessing risk.

They, they, they just don't, they, they don't really know,

for example, that, um, you know, flying by an airplane is,

you know, by a factor of thousands safer than

driving a car and so forth.

They're not good at risk assessment.

They're not good at, at maths.

But, and that's a sort of subsection of being informed.

Where, where does that come from?

Probably didn't pay enough attention at school.

If we don't have, if we don't

Have These, most of us,

Yeah. If, if we, sorry. Yeah,

if we just,

and that's a really, really important point.

'cause I think that if we don't have,

if we don't have a significant amount of risk in our lives,

which relatively speaking today, most people really don't.

Mm-Hmm. Um, you know, I'm talking about like wars

and, you know, significant, significant, um,

risky situations where there's so much out of your hands,

you dunno what's going on.

You know, like I just take World War II for an example,

you know, I think that you would come out of

that whole scenario

and situation depending on where you were located with

being able to scale what's, what's that,

what's risky and what's not risky.

And you'd have, you know, you'd be able

to judge that a little bit better.

But now we have very, very comfortable lives.

And as you say, like,

unless that you're a sta a statistician, a sta statistician,

you wouldn't know that flying flying in an airplane is a lot

safer than, you know, driving in your car.

I don't think you would know that information,

but we just don't, I, I think so many people now don't have

experiences in their lives

or the education in school to, you know,

discuss past experiences.

If we don't have those, then our assessment

of the assessment of risk is, is kind

of all over the place and not realistic.

We can shoot to fear way too quickly.

Um, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, another way of putting that is that for an,

a good number of people, they've never really been in a very

physically risky situation.

Physically Risky. Yeah.

Or they've never been in an economically risky situation.

So if you, if you have a, you know, a safe job, for example,

you know, you have the, and the same amount

of money coming in every month

and gradually more whatever,

you don't really know much about economic risk.

If you've not started a business

or lost money, you don't know much about it.

And it would be a quite a frightening thought, you know,

if if you're used to having so much money per month,

not having it is like a big deal.

Yeah. Um, I, I mean, I noticed as an aside that,

um, a lot of the people I I was talking to around Covid

who were, um, not particularly frightened around it and,

and were somewhat skeptical about the numbers,

were there, had two things in common.

One was they rode motorcycles,

and, uh, the other was they didn't have a television.

And, um, and that, that also describes me.

I, I ride a motor, I've ridden a motor bike for years,

and I've never earned a television.

So, as well as being largely risk enumerate,

an awful lot of people are disempowered and misinformed.

Now, that's kind of an arrogant thing of me to say,

who are you to say they're disempowered and misinformed?

Well, I'm observing it as a researcher.

I mean, I would hear people say very intelligent,

sensible things, and then they would say,

oh, but you know, who am I?

You know, I've got, you know, I'm just Joe blogs, you know,

uh, and I'd think, well, you are you.

That's great that you are you, you know,

your opinion is splendid.

I want to hear it. It's just as good

as anybody else's opinion.

But a lot of people would say, no, no, no,

that's not really, nah.

I mean, I'm just, you know,

it's not like I'm on the telly or anything, right?

The television disempowers people, all those people

who watch it and never appear on telly,

they think there's something special about

the people who are on the telly.

Like they're, somehow they're better.

Well, they've gotta be, aren't they? They're,

they're on the telly, they've succeeded.

Right? Mostly it means they're kind of very strange

and rather narcissistic and incredibly ambitious.

Right? That's if you, why is that person on the television?

Because they're narcissistic.

They're a bit weird, and they're very,

very ambitious, right?

Um, they're also, um, everybody else, the rest

of us are also misinformed, right?

And how, why you might ask, you know, how,

who the hell are you Hugh, to tell us we are misinformed?

Right? Okay. Like, here's a little thought experiment.

Um, I would like you to think

of a subject which is your specialty,

which you really know a lot about, right?

It might be a hobby. It might be to do

with your life experiences.

It might be something that you've been obsessed about

since you were 10 years old.

Whatever it is. Think of a, if you like a specialty subject,

which you know a great deal about you, it's your thing,

you've really studied it, you love it, okay?

Right? Whatever it is.

Pigeons, car mechanics, doesn't matter. Right?

Now, remember a time

when you either saw a TV program, saw a bit of the news,

or read an article about

that specialty subject, okay?

About the stuff that you know a lot about.

And I'm gonna tell you, the journalism,

the journalism was inaccurate.

It left something out

and they clearly, clearly didn't understand it properly.

Is that not correct?

That's very correct. Mine is, mine is, um, like digestion

and microbiome and gut health, and right, there you go.

Yeah. Every diet magazine, every health section

of any newspaper, and then again, yeah, on the TV as well.

Yeah, spot on.

Now it's, I mean, this isn't deliberate by the way.

It's a function of the medium.

In other words, they don't have much time.

And what their, their main issue is to keep your attention

and to, to entertain you, right?

So they don't really care about the topic.

Their, the, the job of the TV is to keep you interested,

keep you watching, and to keep you entertained and watching.

And, and, uh, if you like, hypnotized, keep you watching.

That's the key thing. That's what they're trying to do.

They tell you they're trying to educate you,

but that's, you know, so much fluff.

Really. Yeah. That's not the job of the television.

But the consequence of this, right?

If you think about it now,

I just asked you about your specialty subject.

Now, let's imagine there are

a thousand, a hundred, a thousand.

Let's say there are 10,000 people listening

to this podcast, right?

You are all specialists in different areas, right?

You all know something that I don't,

that Simon doesn't, right?

And probably nobody else watching

or listening to this knows about it.

But you do. You really do.

And you happen to notice every time it gets written about,

they get it a little bit wrong.

Even when they're trying hard, they're just not accurate.

They miss out the key issues

or they misunderstand the key issues.

Right? Now that's true of every single listener.

It's actually true of, let us say 99.9%

of journalism right now, journalism.

Let's put it, there's two bits.

There's fact bits and opinion bits.

Well, an opinion's an opinion, that's fine.

You can't, that's just, that's not about right and wrong.

It's like, I think it's good or bad, right?

But the fact bit, that's the bit

that they consistently get wrong.

'cause it's too short, it's edited

and it's the biases towards entertainment.

So that's why so many of us are misinformed about,

uh, everything we get from the television

and by extension, YouTube, uh, the internet and so on.

But hang on a moment, you might say to me, hang on, COVID,

that wasn't about entertaining us.

That was terrifying.

You know, that was, they were scaring the pants off us. Why?

That's, they're not trying to terrify us.

Well, actually, fear is a fan fantastic way

to keep you watching the television, right?

It's just brilliant.

If you are, if you are frightened

and you dunno what the government's gonna do next,

or maybe, you know, COVID is gonna bang on your door

and infect you and your granny, you know, you, you are,

that's, that's gonna scare the hell out of you, isn't it?

So you wanna know all the latest about Covid,

so you keep watching whatever nut nutty stuff

they tell you on their telly.

And the more you watch it, the more likely you are to think,

well, if they're saying it that much.

And that often, surely it's a kind of true, isn't it?

No, that's, that's great.

I mean, I think that the fact that

you look at Hollywood, you look at Netflix, you look at all

of these entertainment sources, you know,

it all, it's all about emotion.

You know, it's about fear.

It's about, uh, fighting

and, you know, all, all these most popular shows that do,

people that do keep people locked in, watching hours

after hours after hours late into the late into the night

when they know it's not good for them,

literally binging, binging on these things.

People are yeah, absolutely fascinated with

the aspect of fear.

And I don't think we're very conscious about, about that,

about the, the emotional

connectivity to something like that.

But without question,

you can just look at the last two years of these, you know,

you can just, you know, 24 hour news

channels is relatively a new thing, you know, like

I remember when you would get the 10 o'clock news

and it would be 10 minutes

or something, you know, like it'd be a, it'd be a, you know,

they, they've round up the most important,

the most important stories.

Talk about them. That was difficult enough, most likely

to get the really good stories to keep people entertained.

But now they've gotta keep this going 24 hours a day.

It's just, there's just gonna be so much error

and so much misinformation

and so much just made up stuff to fill that time

to provide this high level of like, emotional entertainment

for people to keep them locked in.

And Covid was a, you know,

it's a great op was certainly a great opportunity for that.

If you're able to say words like virus and infection

and, you know, have the number tally going up and up and up

and bar charts and all these things.

Um, yeah, I, I'm not sure

what these media outfits are gonna do when it,

when it finishes up, but,

but it's, um, it was a highly interest just as myself

as an observer, just observing

and making my own opinions about these things.

First of all, I know kind of like

how media works and what they're there to do.

They're there to get eyes on the telly to make money.

And I know that they're not gonna necessarily tell,

give me the factual information

and provide me the references and provide me the journals

and the studies where I can actually look them up

and make up my own opinion about these things.

It's like, this is how it is, here we go.

Like, it's, it's super kind of just like one sided.

And I also know the fact that where do these stations,

whether these news channels get their money from,

because whoever's funding them is going to have an agenda

and an, and an idea about, you know,

how they want these things presented.

You know, you just have to look at America

and how they're, you know, every three minutes you see a,

an ad for a pharmaceutical company,

I'll be like, oh, that's really interesting.

Like, it's interesting you don't see carrots and apples

and organic foods being, being splashed around there.

'cause that, you know, that might be quite healthy to do.

But yeah,

it's just interesting the perception of individuals.

Do they have the backstory

and their knowledge about kind of like, how does media work

and what they're there to do?

Or are they just sat there listening and just absorbing this

and having this psychological, um, emotional biochemical

experience happening to them?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's also the case that the,

the tv,

um, really they want a nice, clear emotional story.

And, uh, I mean, I dunno what happened in Canada,

but in, in, in, uh, Europe, there was a big

deal at the beginning of the, what they call the pandemic,

where, uh, a lot

of o older people in Italy were sick all at the same time.

And were in the hospitals in the,

was these very scary pictures.

Well, again, if you know anything about how TV works

or you've ever worked with the TV crew,

you'll realize those are the pictures

they're gonna pick, right?

If they go filming for like an hour,

and they're mostly walking down empty corridors,

so they go into a ward where it looks like every other ward,

uh, the,

and they're being looked after of footage

to illustrate a story, you're gonna pick

the scariest footage, of course, right?

Because it's the best story, right?

And once this lot have got the scariest footage out,

then everybody else will, oh, well,

we've gotta have even scarier footage.

Like, like there's a com, there's a, a news

competition to have even

better scary footage.

Uh, certainly in around LA there are helicopters that go up

to, to film police chasers.

They listen on the police radio,

and then they'll film the police chasers.

And they really love it if they can get one with, you know,

lots of crashes and maybe a fatality or two, you know,

because they get more viewers.

It's like weird and sick,

but they're looking for that kind of drama.

That's what, that's what drives TV viewer numbers.

Now, the reality of, I dunno for just consider the issues

of, um, uh, well the most topical one, right?

Is it a good thing if you've had two vaccinations

to have a third vaccination?

Or if you're in Israel, a fourth vaccination, right?

Um, and, and how many people are in hospital who've had two

vaccines or three vaccines,

and more importantly, as a proportion of the people

who have no vaccines, one vaccine, two vaccine,

three vaccines, which cohort

generates the largest number of people in hospital?

I mean, already, that's a complicated question, right?

Already just that question.

Well, hang on, what do you mean

by cohort and what's this a bit about?

Percentage isn't absolute numbers enough now to, to cash

that out and to make it clear

and see where the highest risk is,

particularly when in this entire scenario,

all the risks are very low, right?

So the risks from Covid for everybody under the age

of 70 is incredibly low.

It's something like 0.03% of people who have it, um,

really have it, not just test it,

but really have it, uh, succumb

to the disease if you're under 70.

And you almost certainly have other factors going on.

So already I've got complicated just trying

to explain one tiny little bit, okay?

And we haven't got that yet,

but the complications of looking at how, for example,

vaccine efficacy fades, you know, which cohort you're in,

what your age, it's complicated.

If you want to go into detail, if you want to zoom back

and you go, hang on a moment, covid iss not that risky.

The vaccines that everybody's worrying about,

they're not that risky either.

I mean, they are risky for sure,

but they're still not that risky.

You know, we don't have people falling over in the street.

Like, we like that you had those pictures from Wuhan,

which were faked, right?

I mean, it's certainly risky

and it looks like if you are a young athletic person,

you shouldn't have a second vaccine.

If you're a young man, particularly, you're,

you've got a higher risk of myocarditis from the vaccine

than you have from Covid.

But it's still a very small risk.

I mean, there are literally millions

of young men who've been vaccinated

who are absolutely fine, right?

So the whole problem is

being ridiculously magnified.

That's not to say you shouldn't make up your own mind on the

basis of your own research

and do it your own way, make,

you know, trust yourself first.

I would definitely say that. But, um, you need a sense

of proportion for the whole thing, right?

The, the, the, the so-called Covid pandemic was, was a,

a panic, right?

You didn't need the end up bit in the middle.

You just, it was just P-A-N-I-C. That's really what it was.

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I, I always come back to the,

coming back to the word trust again and trusting yourself.

And I think that it's very, very difficult to trust

when we've got so much going on in the external world.

You know, we live in a world where our biology just has not

caught up with the amount of external stimulation

that we ha have going on.

Like, there's no way that we can process all of

that information in a, in a normal way.

So I feel like if you did have good,

let's say instinctual trust

or just good instincts in general, whether to where

to give your trust and where to not to, I think the fact

that there's so much stuff coming at people

that it's actually almost impossible to engage

that trust element within you to make any kind of

proper judgment.

And I think that confuses people.

I think that it really stops people from

being able to look within themselves, taking a breath

and saying, okay, this is what I feel

and this is what I want to do.

And I just, yeah, I'd love to talk about maybe some ways

that people can start to trust themselves a little bit more.

Because I think over the last couple of years, a lot

of people have put their trust in wrong, in the wrong place,

and that's outside of them.

And I think the place to reset that has to come from, has

to come from a place of inside.

You're not gonna find that on a YouTube channel

or on a blog or on the tv.

You're not gonna find your kind of trust reset button

in any of those sources.

So what, what do,

do you have any tool tools for something like that? Tips?

Yeah, I've got a few tips really.

Um, because actually this,

this problem is not uncommon, okay?

So it's a problem you come across in psychotherapy, uh,

where people, I mean, it's interesting.

People would come in and they would say things like,

you know, I, I know I shouldn't do this.

I shouldn't be listening to my mother so much.

And I, I kind of know what I want, but I dunno what to do.

And I'd think, well, actually, you do know what to do.

You just told me what to do.

You just said, I must stop listening to my mother

and do what I want to do, right?

So they will tell you the answer over and over again.

And then, but, oh, I can't do that. Right?

And, well, that's interesting.

So my job is simply to help people trust themselves, right?

Not, not 'cause they're right about everything,

because it's a process of learning how

to get more and more, right?

So let's get, let's get very specific about this.

Um, accept that you are going

to get embarrassed from time to time about being wrong.

Now, I've been wrong so many times,

I've kind of over it, you know?

Now, I mean, I, you could prove me wrong now.

Like, oh no, again, nightmare.

But honestly, it won't be the first time in my life.

You know, I've screwed up a lot.

And, um, actually, to be honest,

I don't think I've met anybody who hasn't screwed up.

And I've met some very successful

and very, very wealthy people and very happy people,

and they've all screwed up too.

It turns out that accepting that you screwed up

is pretty vital.

That's a really vital part of the learning process.

But let's try and get it right all the same.

So, first of all, do it small.

You know, trust yourself to bake a

cake if you've never baked a cake before,

or cook a shepherd's pie or something.

Like, super simple, right? Just push yourself a little bit.

And I love this one. Find some people

with whom you disagree and talk to them.

Don't insult them, don't scare them.

Don't try to change their minds.

Just talk to them and find out what they think. Be curious.

And if they ask you about what you think,

well tell them what you think.

But don't, don't tell 'em you are right and they're wrong.

Just say, well, the way I see it is this.

Yeah, just try it out. Because two things happen.

One is you meet somebody

and if you're not trying to bully them

or tell 'em they're wrong, you will learn something about

someone else's point of view.

And you will also discover that neither of you

bursts into flames or vanishes in a puff of smoke.

You can tolerate disagreeing with people, right?

And secondly, perhaps this is more important,

it will help you to clarify your own thinking.

When I have to explain myself, it forces me

to think more clearly.

What do I really believe? What do I really want to say?

I mean, one of the reasons I enjoy doing podcasts is, and,

and any con conversations actually, is

because I find out a bit more about what I myself,

think it's interesting to me.

So do that. And if you do use the internet

or watch the telly or whatever, try and read

or watch a little bit of the stuff

that you naturally disagree with.

So log onto the Daily Telegraph

or The Guardian, ideally both, right?

So if you naturally would go to The Guardian,

look at the Telegraph, if you would naturally go

to The Telegraph, look at The Guardian, right?

Just, and keep in touch just a little bit with the people

who think completely differently from you.

And the advantage is you discover, you know,

actually there's, I don't know how many thousand people,

hundreds of thousands of people perhaps read

those two newspapers.

And you are gonna read an article

and you think, well, that's disgraceful, that's rubish.

I totally disagree. You know, bloody telegraph, right?

Uh, or guardian. It doesn't matter, right?

And, um, you just get used to the fact

that you probably do disagree with a lot of other people

on the basis of your point of view.

So next step, once you've got used to disagreeing

with people and learning from it, and you,

and you think, okay, now I, now I've, oh heck, I've got

to trust somebody or not right?

Now I've gotta make a decision, right?

Do I do this podcast, right?

Is it gonna ruin my reputation or not? Right?

Well, so I ask myself a question and I ask it in three ways.

I ask my head, I ask my heart, and I ask my hips.

In other words, I ask my, my intellect, I ask my emotions

and I ask my physicality, right?

So my intellect says, oh, that's a really clever idea.

I think that's a really good view. You're

have a really fun time.

And then my heart says, stop gibbering. Right?

Nobody wants that many ideas, right?

What really matters is, do we connect with each other,

even if it's only over a silly little story?

Those things matter far more than me having a bunch

of ideas about stuff, right?

If I can make a nice connection, fantastic,

and I ask my hips, that's my body.

You know, I use the word hips

'cause it's got that, you know, it's that area

around the, the sexuality.

And it's an important point.

You know, we're all people with sexuality,

and so we have to kind of pay attention to that.

But it's also part of our animal instinct.

The animal instinct, which we probably can't put into words,

but it's worth paying attention to that, you know,

does my animal trust your animal?

Okay? Do I trust my own animal to make this right decision?

So that's a, a useful, if you're,

if you're really lost, you dunno what to do.

Um, actually I've got a, a little preparatory one,

which is feel your feet get into your body so that you,

you are here not lost in fear and ideas

and crazy and this, that and the other.

All that, you know, all that excessive information.

Get into your body, ask your head, your heart and your hips,

and, uh, and listen.

And they'll tell you whether you should

trust somebody or something.

Let me just, I, I'm just four more things, Simon.

'cause I, you mentioned this before,

and I want to just put a little bit out there, which is that

there's so much information that one

of the skills we need in, in the modern era is discernment.

The ability to separate out the trash

from the valuable stuff.

And that's really hard. Yeah.

But trying to pay attention to it all

or learn it all is a fool's game

that you're just gonna fail.

Let me tell you straight away, you already know

that there's no way you can know everything about a single

topic, let alone all

of the stuff you have to deal with in your life.

So you have to get better and better

at finding quality sources.

Or what are the things that indicate to you

that this is worthwhile or meaningful or intelligent?

Yeah, we could do another whole podcast on discernment.

Secondly, what are your principles?

They will help you make a decision, right?

If you think to yourself, I kind of want to do, I want,

if I do a deal, I want both sides of the deal

to be happy to have agreed it.

Yeah. That means I'm not gonna slide in a,

a cheeky little clause that allows me

to pull back the money in a way

that you didn't notice, right?

I mean, maybe I could do it. I'm a clever, you know,

when I was a kid, I used to win arguments all the time.

Not because I was right, but

because I was good at winning arguments.

Yeah. It got me nowhere. I mean, everybody hated me.

You, I, I eventually hated myself. I thought, just stop it.

Just stop being such a clever toss pot, you know,

just shut up, right?

And, and like for about three

or four years, I would literally win ridiculous arguments

and people would be staggering.

Like, well, how did he do? That's, I know it's wrong.

I said, no, it's wrong. I go, yeah, prove it. Haha.

You know, I was a jerk, I have to tell you.

And I had to give up, right?

Winning the argument is not the point.

The question is what's worth doing? What's valuable, right?

So keep your principles, you know,

you may discover you're talented at things

that you shouldn't be good at.

So give it up. Um, keep a sense of proportion.

The whole of the covid thing,

the biggest single error is a lack of proportion, right?

Yes, COVID exists. Yes, some people died. Same.

You know, pneumonia exists, influenza exists.

People die of these things.

Nothing like the numbers of people who die of heart disease,

cancer and diabetes, but people did die of, of covid, right?

And, and a few people will continue to die of covid,

very old people and people with comorbidities, right?

But let's get in, in proportion.

More people die of all other things,

all the bloody time, right?

And we don't need to spend that much money on covid.

And the same is true with vaccines.

They're mostly harmless,

but they are a bit dangerous for certain groups of people.

But you don't God need one.

You the, the, it's like getting, I dunno, a vaccine that,

uh, with a one in a thousand chance

of killing you against the common cold,

just get a bloody cold, right?

So you need a sense of proportion

and then it blows all the other trash out.

You need to pay attention to it. Keep a sense of proportion.

And finally, if we're talking about trust,

trust yourself to trust some people.

Occasionally you'll get it wrong,

but when you find people that you do trust

and you can trust, then you can learn from them.

Because there's nobody in the whole world

who thinks exactly like you.

So they're going to disagree with you, these people.

And if you trust them, you're gonna learn from them a bit.

Let them talk to you. Let them educate you.

Let them tell you stuff that you don't know.

So do trust people,

but learn to be very, very skeptical of theories.

People learn things, people change, and people have hearts.

Theories don't change. They didn't learn anything.

They're inanimate and they don't have hearts.

And almost all of them eventually turn out to be wrong.

Yeah, I think the, I think the biggest,

the biggest point you made there for me

that really resonated with me was the, you know, connecting

and listening to other people

who might have opposing opinions.

And I think the big, the best, the best reason to do that is

because you will humanize the opposition.

'cause at this, at this point, it is, it's one side

or another side, whatever topic it may be.

You will have your opinion and you will have your, your gang

who also agree with you.

But then there's this other gang, you know, the jets who

Think, Who think differently, you know?

And I think that without sitting

and chatting with those individuals

and listening to them, you know, without trying

to speak over them,

or just thinking about what you are gonna say next,

sitting there and listening to them

and being present with those individuals completely

humanizes the other point of view.

And I think that it, it allows people to realize, okay,

this person, at the end of the day, this group of people,

the jets, they're just a bunch of human beings

just trying to make it through life.

Who just might think differently than me.

And I think that is a really big aspect of dealing

with your own immersion emotion,

emotional turmoil about the other side.

And the other part of the conversation, I think to do, to,

to, to give yourself a little bit more stability

and to, you know, no one wants to live in the stress

of stressful emotions too long.

You know, it's just not healthy to be able to help yourself.

Having those individual conversations with people

and humanizing it is very, very important.

And the second point, which I really love as well, is,

without question, I mean, nobody does it when they're young,

especially as a young adult or a teenager.

But being wrong is totally okay.

We have a awful problem in a whole society of having a fear

of being wrong or misspeaking or looking like an idiot.

Um, I, myself as well, I have been wrong a billion times

and I've looked myself look like a

idiot even more than that.

And it's turned me into a much more, um,

courageous individual just to know that I,

I'm completely open to being wrong at

all times with anything.

Therefore, I feel like I can walk through world

and walk through the world

and have conversations with people and being open

and being skeptical to things a lot easier

because I'm not, I'm not bound to this,

to these opinions that I might formulate

just from the information that I get and my own experiences.

I think that that's a dangerous place to be.

I think being away, one, two,

being opinionated on one side is never helpful.

It's also just gonna push people away.

And you are just going to be connected with those people

who think the same as you.

And that's boring. How boring is that?

Just to, you know, have a group of individuals

that say the same thing as you

and think the same thing as you.

And I, I don't think that's a healthy place to be in.

So yeah, I really appreciate those recommendations, Hugh.

Thank you.

Not at all. It's kind of easier for me, you know,

because I've, I've, I've,

I've only ever had one job in my life.

I've, otherwise I've worked for myself

and I'm completely used to disagreeing with people.

I, I, I've, I've never, or I have a lot of friends

and I always disagree with 'em about something.

I just, that's what I do.

I, I, I'm naturally,

I see things differently from other people,

and I kind of got used to it.

And yeah, sometimes just like you,

sometimes it was catastrophically wrong, but, um,

but you survive and, uh,

and, uh, if you're lucky, you learn.

But it can take a long time.

I must say now I can make a mistake

and not realize what I really should

do until 10 years later. But hey,

Certainly I, you go That,

I think, I think, I think trust and fear

and being incorrect, I think all these things develop

with age without question.

Um, you know, I think we're all very different people than

we were five years ago, 10 years ago, 15, 20, 30 years ago.

And we evolve and we develop

and it's, it's definitely, it's certainly a part of life,

but when something quite emotional comes up, like,

like Covid, I think it's important to take a step back,

realize that we're all human,

we're all trying to get in the same place.

And, um, what can, what can we do to start reconnecting

with people and start building those relationships again,

regardless of opinions?

Because, you know, I know people

who have lost family members

and lost friend, really good friends over opinions

and beliefs over covid.

And it's, it's a massive shame

because it's one

of the truly remarkable things about being human is to

connect and listen and share stories, and, and laugh

and cry, and do all these things that, you know,

make us the incredible thing that we are

Indeed.

Wonderful. We're gonna wrap that up here.

I really appreciate your time today.

Where can people connect with you?

So, um, I have a, I have a podcast actually, uh,

with my colleague Leah Berg.

And, uh, we have a website, which is, uh,

powerhouse class.com.

I have my own blog@hughwilborn.com.

So that's, maybe you can put this in the blurb for me,

Simon, but I'll spell it for people.

Um,

H-U-G-H-W-I-L-L-B-O-U-R n.com.

So I have a blog and there are links there to the podcast

and to trainings and goodness knows what else.

Um, but like, actually, my name is pretty unusual,

so you could just Google me.

You know, I'm pretty much the only person in the world

called Hugh Wilborn.

H-U-G-H-W-I-L-L-B-O-U-R-N.

There you go.

Amazing. And I will make sure

that those links are in the show notes so people can connect

with you and connect with your blog and your podcast.

Congratulations on launching that, by the way.

It's not an easy thing to do.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

And, um, uh, thank you once again for inviting me

and, um, hunt around guys.

Listen to this guy's, uh, other epi episodes.

There's some, there's some great stuff there.

Appreciate that here.

Well, thank you very much for listening, everybody.

Uh, any information that you require, any links

that we spoke about in the show, we,

we'll be in the show notes.

Um, don't forget to subscribe yet if you haven't.

But thank you so much for listening.

This is True Hope Podcast, the

official podcast of True Hope Canada. We'll see

You next week.

All right.