So I've just returned from the eudamonious summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, where I had the dubious pleasure of moderating a panel that was unofficially billed as maha versus anti-maha.

So on the stage with me, we're two brave souls that I know well and like very much, Dr. Will Cole and Dr. Jessica Nurek. Jessica has become a very prominent

articulate critic of the Maha movement, particularly on Instagram and TikTok. She's well

credentialed with a PhD in nutrition and has spent many, many years working in public health. Will

hails from Pittsburgh, where he runs a functional medicine telehealth

clinic. He's written a number of best-selling books. And while he's very much an independent

thinker, he's become closely associated with the Maha movement and many of its prominent figures.

So that was the setup. Two smart, thoughtful people who profoundly disagree on some very

consequential issues in public health, sitting on the stage together with me in the middle.

So my goals for this session were twofold.

The first was to model what a sane, constructive, respectful, hard

conversation looks like. And of course, this is sadly anomalous to our current media environment.

What passes for discourse on social media is primarily people screaming over each other from their respective echo chambers.

Content is engineered and algorithmically rewarded to tickle our human negativity bias, to keep us

scared, outrage, anchored in our biases, and addicted to a fire hose of sensationalism. Now,

outrage works famously for engagement, and this provides really perverse incentives for content

creators, especially in the health space where, ironically, we often talk about amygdala hijack

and the importance of emotional regulation.

We've built a virtual machine that rewards hyperbole and punishes nuance.

But it's really hard to spew vitriol up close.

When you put people together in actual four-dimensional space time, sharing oxygen and making eye

contact, tempers are often tempered. There's more room for curiosity. There's less appetite

...