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Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: In a reading from StressHacked: The Mind, you recount your chapter “Public Speaking and Social Exposure: Conquering Fear Through Controlled Stress.” In it, you describe being gripped by unexpected anxiety during your first podcast appearances discussing molecular hydrogen, as well when defending the science to doctors and scientists sitting across from you in meetings. One anecdote I liked from this chapter is when you showed up to The Skinny Confidential hungover, yet you still persevered and gave an impassioned defense of the science of molecular hydrogen (the podcast was held in Austin, Texas, and I get the energy of wanting to have a good time in Austin—as I shared with you previously).
I could relate to your chapter on social anxiety perhaps more than any other in StressHacked, personally. I, too, dealt with an ability to speak publicly, almost to the point of paralysis. I, also, engaged myself in increasing exposure to speaking opportunities so I could recreate my ‘self-concept’ (as you put in that chapter) of someone who can indeed speak in public. I think the crucial point you make in this chapter is that you have to intentionally choose social exposure that builds your capacity, but also have to get through it once you make that decision. “Ain’t no half-steppin’,” to put it in the words of Big Daddy Kane.
I recall once in college giving a presentation to my class. I was stuttering, sweating, out of breath, and could barely speak. My professor asked me if I wanted to stop and I said “no.” I still finished the presentation, to the best of my ability (and I got quite the props from the class if I recall correctly). Me stating “no” made all the difference. I do not go on the same kind of speaking engagements as you. However, I have made presentations to dozens if not a hundred or more people with no problems. So long as I am prepared, I, too, can navigate most audiences provided they want to hear from me.
Your advice in this chapter is to be steady and deliberate in your social exposure, and I believe my transformation was like that. However (and perhaps you can relate to this from your own experiences), my social anxiety considerably diminished when my physical pain increased. For reasons I shared with you privately, I induced physical pain in myself and the phenomenology, if you will, of living with pain makes the intensity of anxiety diminish, at least for me. You’re more concerned about how you feel rather than what people think of you. I stopped caring so much (at least unnecessarily) about what people thought of me when I am reminded of how finite and sorrowful, also if you will, life is.
In instances where I did fail at public speaking, and there are a few (due to a language barrier or poor preparation) I cringe at them, but they have taught me a lot. What advice do you have to people who are just starting out with public speaking? Is it, as I intuit above, to say ‘yes’ to every reasonable opportunity and to say ‘no’ to giving up during that opportunity if it is in fact going poorly?
AT: I would respond that there are two aspects to consider: your memory and projection of the pain you felt, which is tied to potential embarrassment, and the generalized reality of what others remember about your internalized failures.
First, most project their current fear of pain onto the situation, and avoid it. This strategy will never lead to more capacity; the avoidance will, if anything, reduce capacity. Opportunities will be lost, and the individual who avoids this pain is resigning themselves to defeat, labeling themselves as something they hold a negative view of (someone incapable of presenting their ideas). If they didn’t consider this a negative, they would not feel the pain and fear visualizing how the moment will go.
Second, as I detailed in StressHacked (or perhaps section 1 of The Stone Wall, I cannot quite recall), our perception of what others remember about us is distorted by our own emotional amplification of our own actions. In reality, very few other people will clearly recall the events that we attribute as our greatest embarrassments. Especially when the embarrassments are, for all intents and purposes, mild and mundane. Often, we amplify our internalized embarrassment because our external actions or performance do not align with our internal assessment of who we want to, or ought to be. We are faced with the reminder of who we currently are, which is painful. This is critical to realize, as others are almost certainly preoccupied with their own internal/external struggle on who they want to be, and who they actually are. Because of this, our “great embarrassments” are typically never even noticed by others, the majority of others preoccupied in the moment with their own anguish over their external/internal mismatch.
Knowing this, the logical decision is to push forward towards becoming who we aspire to be. If we value the ability to speak in public, we must endeavor to speak in public as often as we can. If we stumble, stutter, and embarrass ourselves, that is ok. Typically, this will not be remembered, or used to diminish us, until a time comes when we have risen to something more than, something great that others, usually driven by their own fears and insecurities, wish to tear down. The good news is, if you reach this peak, you will be inoculated against these future attacks. Embracing who you are, carefully monitoring who you are becoming, and eventually ascending to who you wish to be, the journey will leave you inspired, not embarrassed. If others use your past failures to attack your future self, the future self will be able to, instead of retreating in embarrassment, highlight the difference and say loudly, and proudly: “I am truly amazed at who I have become, knowing where I began. Thank you for the reminder, it has inspired me to continue my journey, while also giving me the humility to have more patience with others just starting theirs.” In this inversion, what we view today as a weakness which holds power over us, in the future becomes a potential amplifier of the success we earned, step by step, publicly orated word by word. Our weakness becomes our strength.
VG: You are correct most people don’t notice our embarrassing moments. There is empirical research showing this, with participants in studies failing to notice even obvious incongruencies in their interlocutors. People really are that self-absorbed, that they don’t notice. Beyond this, people aren’t even “that” great (or another way to look at it is that only some people are very good). This is what I was getting at with my description of physical pain earlier: the immediacy of physical suffering negates the desire to be seen positively by others, especially if these people suck. As Morrissey puts it, “Oh, why do I give valuable time / To people who don’t care / If I live or die?”
I think of this idea of others pulling people down due to their insecurities often. I think it happens because other people are mirrors to us, in the sense that we’ll only learn about ourselves through our interactions with others, and so other people remind us of what we can be if we worked a little harder, or something like this. This is a mindset that’s difficult for me to relate to, because, while there are many people who are better than me at all things, I admire what’s good in me and what’s good in them. Tearing people down out of insecurity is a desire to see everyone be as bad as you because you don’t like other people being better is insane to me, although it’s the modus operandi of what Edward Dutton colorfully calls “spiteful mutants,” that is people who seem to operate on the idea that weaponized resentment (ressentiment) is the way to regulate society such that everyone can be as bad as they are.
It’s possible this phenomenon of pulling people down out of insecurity goes deeper than even ressentiment, though. Totalitarian societies despise the display of thought-crime, even if it is innocuous. They don’t like people to see there’s another path, even another ‘self-concept’ of oneself. In the past we had public speakers in the town squares, called griots in the African tradition, and today we have social media. Look at how that turned out. What we have today is managed, algorithmic thought control and what Martin Heidegger calls authentic action, wherein one stands out of the community that forms them, is increasingly difficult. If we do an authentic act, like if we butcher public speaking, we have spiteful mutants coming down and telling us everything we’ve ever done has always been wrong. The social regulation continues.
This social regulation is also about being “too good” at what we are expected or even trained to do. Police departments filter out persons with a too-high IQ test from working as officers (though they are recommended to other agencies, and so on). Similarly, in the video game Deus Ex, you play as JC Denton, an augmented supersoldier who works for a corporate government. Yet, when the augmentations, related to strength but also cognitive ability, allow Denton to uncover corruption and conspiracy within the government itself, the government naturally turns on him and declares him an enemy. The tools for one’s discernment are granted to you, including by the government (in the real world; not just in video games), but if you use them to their natural conclusion you’re worse than dumb, you’re evil. This is a highly “unautistic” social arrangement, and I mean this in the worst way.
I digress. We are talking about public speaking and social anxiety. Do you agree with me that a failure to perform public speaking, so long as we tried and persevered through it, is an authentic act, and we should pursue more of such acts? And do you agree—I believe you do since you write about it in The Final Thought War—that authentic acts, even public speaking to an audience that is “ready” to hear it, are getting rarer and rarer? I think to how people record concerts on their phones now, watching it through the phone sometimes. Speaking to someone now is like speaking to infrastructure.
AT: These spiteful mutants are almost exclusively low testosterone men. Women, when they are this way, become undone with moderate pushback, they simply cannot take having themselves revealed for what they have become. These weak men though—the men that are something less than worthless, as I put it in The Stone Wall—demand that the strong descend to their level, if only briefly. To show them, and everyone else, who and what they really are. We must plunge our hands into their filth in order to drown them in it, before pulling them out, exposed, vulnerable, and defeated. If we do not, they become emboldened, multiply, and work to tear others down. These weak, ressentiment-filled men are where my empathy ends. Of course, the second they break, if they ever do, and ask for help—the strong must immediately stop our onslaught and help lift them up, inspire them to be better.
To me, this descent into the filth—just like the failed speaking engagement—is an authentic act. It is one we must hope we never have to do, or that perhaps one day can toss to the side as a relic, yet realize that today, as things stand, this authenticity is needed more than ever. So, for all willing and able to fail publicly, to show themselves as vulnerable in the pursuit of gaining strength and capacity, remember this: your vulnerability will be attacked, and it is your duty to fight back, provided you have the strength. Know that if you don’t, these wretched intellectual and spiritual invalids will turn to the next, breaking them down like they worked to break you down. They are a cancer, parasites draining the life force of civilization, and they cannot be tolerated.
