Speaker 1: M This is Mesters in Business with Very Results on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, I have an
Speaker 1: extra special and fascinating guests. His name is David McCraney
Speaker 1: and he is a science journalist and author. I first
Speaker 1: came to know David's work through his blog and book
Speaker 1: You Are Not So Smart, which was a fun review
Speaker 1: of all of the cognitive foibles and behavioral errors we
Speaker 1: all make. But it turns out that David was looking
Speaker 1: at how people change their minds, how you persuade people,
Speaker 1: and he thought the answer was found in all of
Speaker 1: these cognitive errors. And if you could only alert people
Speaker 1: to the mistakes they were making, whether it be fact
Speaker 1: checks or just showing them their biases uh and the
Speaker 1: heuristics they use and the rules of thumb they use
Speaker 1: that we're wrong, hey would come around and see the light.
Speaker 1: And as it turns out, that approach is all wrong,
Speaker 1: and his mia culpa is essentially this book How Minds Change.
Speaker 1: It turns out that persuading people about their fundamental beliefs
Speaker 1: involves a very very specific set of steps, starting with
Speaker 1: they have to want to change. They have to be
Speaker 1: willing to change, which only occurs when people come to
Speaker 1: the realization that they believe something for perhaps reasons that
Speaker 1: aren't very good, and it's a process, it's an exploration.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating the people he's met with and discussed, whether
Speaker 1: it's deep canvassing or street epistemology, or some of the
Speaker 1: other methodologies that are used to persuade people that some
Speaker 1: of their really controversial political beliefs are wrong. He's met
Speaker 1: with various people from all everything from flat Arthur's to
Speaker 1: antivactors to the folks who have left the Westboro Baptist Church,
Speaker 1: a pretty notorious and controversial institution. I found this conversation
Speaker 1: really to be tremendous and fascinating, and I think you
Speaker 1: will also. With no further ado, my interview with David McRaney. Well,
Speaker 1: I've been a fan of your work and I thought
Speaker 1: when this book came out it was a great opportunity
Speaker 1: to sit down and have a conversation with you. Before
Speaker 1: we get to the book, let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about your background. You started as a reporter covering everything
Speaker 1: from Hurricane Katrina, test rockets for NASA, Halfway Home for
Speaker 1: homeless people with HIV. What led you to becoming focused
Speaker 1: on behavior in psychology. Well, I thought that's what I
Speaker 1: was gonna do for a living. I was. I went
Speaker 1: to school to university to study psychology. I thought it
Speaker 1: would be a therapist, got that degree. But then as
Speaker 1: I was doing that, uh, there was a sign up
Speaker 1: on campus that said opinionated in big helvetica font and
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, I am that would mean that
Speaker 1: seems what is that? And said, you know, come down
Speaker 1: to the offices of the student newspaper. I went down
Speaker 1: there and said, how does this work? They said, just
Speaker 1: email us stuff. You have an opinions piece you want
Speaker 1: to do. I'm like m and I I wrote a
Speaker 1: really like uh sophomore thing about Starbucks on campus because
Speaker 1: it was just about to come into campus. And I
Speaker 1: wrote that and wrote a couple of things. And then
Speaker 1: there was a study that had just recently come out,
Speaker 1: and who knows if it's replicated or stood the test
Speaker 1: of time, but it was when your favorite sports team loses,
Speaker 1: men's sperm counts go down. And I thought, our team
Speaker 1: at our school had lost every single game that year
Speaker 1: so far? What does that mean for the future progeny alumni?
Speaker 1: That's right? And I thought it would be a great
Speaker 1: headline that would be funny. And the headline I wrote was,
Speaker 1: you know, evidence suggests the sperm counts reach record lows
Speaker 1: on campus. And uh one of my professors laughed about
Speaker 1: it and asked the whole class that they had read it,
Speaker 1: but they didn't know that I was in the class.
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh, way, this could be fun
Speaker 1: So I switched to journalism, and you know, went all
Speaker 1: the way through the student paper and then went into
Speaker 1: print journalism and TV journalist. But I once I've reached
Speaker 1: a certain point in that world, I wasn't able to
Speaker 1: write anymore. I was doing editing and helping other people,
Speaker 1: and I just really wanted to write something. And it
Speaker 1: just happened blogs were becoming very popular that time. Uh
Speaker 1: my dad says, and uh others that were like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's way later. I'm thinking back to uh Yahoo's geo
Speaker 1: cities and ye world. I mean, I'm I'm the o
Speaker 1: G when it comes to blogging, go way way back.
Speaker 1: I just happened to be there when they blew up
Speaker 1: on the point of like they got book deals and
Speaker 1: I started a blog called you Were Not So Smart
Speaker 1: about all the cognitive biases and fallacies and heroistics that
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed, and I wrote a piece about brand
Speaker 1: loyalty that went viral and the rest is history. That
Speaker 1: was asked to write a book about it, and then
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, I will continue playing in this world.
Speaker 1: But I started. I started the podcast to promote the
Speaker 1: second book because the first book did so well. They said,
Speaker 1: and do another really quickly, and I did, you are
Speaker 1: less dumb now? You are now less dumb yet? And
Speaker 1: I just so happened to start a podcast right when
Speaker 1: podcasts were becoming a thing. I sent an email to
Speaker 1: Mark Mayren because he had the number one podcast. I said,
Speaker 1: how do you do this? And he actually sent me
Speaker 1: an email with a a point really h like each
Speaker 1: with links to Amazon items and no kidding, and he
Speaker 1: was very nice. And I got all this stuff and
Speaker 1: started it up, and that has now becomes from the centerpiece,
Speaker 1: because that's uh, I was there when I got going.
Speaker 1: My My pitch for this podcast was WTF meets Charlie Rose,
Speaker 1: and nobody knew what w TF was. I mean, they
Speaker 1: didn't know the acronym, nor did they know the podcast.
Speaker 1: Because you know, you have to be a little bit
Speaker 1: of a comedy junkie to have found that in the
Speaker 1: early days. Later on it was ubiquitous. So sticking with
Speaker 1: journalism when you were still writing, you seem to have
Speaker 1: covered some really unusual and interesting stories. Tell us about
Speaker 1: one of the more surprising things that you covered. I
Speaker 1: always wanted to do feature pieces. That was the world
Speaker 1: that I loved, and that was always in journalism school
Speaker 1: and you know, uh, Frank Sinatra has a cold, electricoli
Speaker 1: ascid test. I just wanted to write features. I wanted
Speaker 1: to be there in person and and like tell you
Speaker 1: explore humanity from the inside out my way and I
Speaker 1: the Halfway Home for HIV positive men for homeless people
Speaker 1: in the Deep South. That was a real turning point
Speaker 1: for me because there's uh. I had to spend about
Speaker 1: three weeks on that story, and I visited all the
Speaker 1: different people, went to all the different meetings, and the
Speaker 1: homelessness is very invisible in the Deep South. They often live,
Speaker 1: uh in the woods. You know, they're looking for us
Speaker 1: and they there's a lot of people in the Deep South.
Speaker 1: I don't think there is a homeless problem. And that
Speaker 1: was a really interesting way to break that story into
Speaker 1: the public. You know, consciousness of no, no, there's a
Speaker 1: problem here. It's just hidden from you in a very
Speaker 1: particular way, and a lot of people aren't even wear
Speaker 1: their organizations that dealt with that, and that really show
Speaker 1: me this is the world I want to be and
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff I want to do. So I'm
Speaker 1: picking up a theme in both your writing columns and books,
Speaker 1: which is there's a problem you don't know about it.
Speaker 1: It's hidden, and here it is. That's the whole thing,
Speaker 1: Like hidden worlds are it for me? Like I grew
Speaker 1: up in a trailer in the woods in the Deep South,
Speaker 1: and as an only child, I was always searching for
Speaker 1: the others. I didn't know how I was going to
Speaker 1: get there, and once I got at a hand was
Speaker 1: extended into this stage. It's all I want to do.
Speaker 1: Like I call him taramissoum moments because I remember the
Speaker 1: first time you had tarremsa I was I went to.
Speaker 1: It was when I was still in the working for
Speaker 1: a TV station. We had a little conference where people
Speaker 1: in my position went and we went there and we
Speaker 1: got tarmiseu as a dessert and I remember took a
Speaker 1: bite of it and I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is so damn good. What what is this, and
Speaker 1: everyone there was like, uh, it's Tarmissus, And I was like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, termisous loved the stuff and and but
Speaker 1: that's it. That's what I'm pursuing now. I want more
Speaker 1: of those things. I didn't know. I didn't know. You know,
Speaker 1: that's really quite interesting. So I guess it's kind of
Speaker 1: natural that you evolve towards behavior and cognitive issues. I
Speaker 1: was going to ask you what led to it, but
Speaker 1: it seems like that's something you've been driving for your
Speaker 1: whole career. Yeah, it's a unity through humility. It's it's
Speaker 1: we're all absolutely stumbling and fumbling in the dark and
Speaker 1: pretending like we're we know we're up to even here
Speaker 1: in these fantastic, you know, bloomberg offices, like uh. The
Speaker 1: thing I want to avoid is the sense that I've
Speaker 1: got it all figured out. And there are massive domains
Speaker 1: in psychology, neuroscience, and other social sciences that just start
Speaker 1: from that place and then investigate it. And I find
Speaker 1: that when I discover these things that we all share
Speaker 1: that should give us a pause, should cause us to
Speaker 1: feel humility. I feel like I'm in the right spot,
Speaker 1: and I want to like dig deeper into those places
Speaker 1: and reveal them so we can all be on the
Speaker 1: same page that way. So blind spots, unknown unknowns, things
Speaker 1: that we are just clearly clueless about, and the biases
Speaker 1: that they're When I started out, things like confirmation bias,
Speaker 1: wasn't you know there wasn't as just the tip of
Speaker 1: the tongue as it is now and survivorship bias, things
Speaker 1: like that. So I noticed in this book nothing written
Speaker 1: about Dunning Krueger, nothing about Chaldoni's persuasion. Is that a
Speaker 1: different approach to decision making and psychology? Like or because
Speaker 1: I always assume there would be a little bit of
Speaker 1: an overlap there, I didn't want to retread anything there.
Speaker 1: There's some foundational stuff that I do talk about in
Speaker 1: the book that feel like you can never not talk about,
Speaker 1: some which go back a century and like the introspection
Speaker 1: illusion has to always be uh talked about. We don't
Speaker 1: know the antecedence to our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, but we
Speaker 1: are very good at creating narratives to explain ourselves to ourselves.
Speaker 1: And if you always have to mention that in any
Speaker 1: book about this topic, as far as concern and so
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of that. But like Dunning, Krueger
Speaker 1: and uh all the other big heavy hitters, I definitely
Speaker 1: did not want to write How to Win Friends and
Speaker 1: Influence People, Part Two because I wanted to come from
Speaker 1: a very different perspective on all this, and I didn't
Speaker 1: want it to be a book specifically about persuasion, because
Speaker 1: I don't even start talking about actual persuasion techniques still
Speaker 1: about page two hundred, Like, I show you people who
Speaker 1: are doing things that could be labeled as persuasion techniques,
Speaker 1: but I don't get into the like the science of
Speaker 1: it till later. Other you mentioned Dunning Krueger. I I
Speaker 1: just recently spent some time with Old Dunning, Professor David
Speaker 1: Dunning he um a former guest on the show. I
Speaker 1: don't think he's that old. I think, yeah, I say
Speaker 1: old in the chow me pat you on the back
Speaker 1: cut of right he Uh. I keep asking to come
Speaker 1: back on the show, but he's working on a new
Speaker 1: project and he's a new book on Dunning Crew. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you know that a lot of people has been
Speaker 1: all these people who want to knock it down and
Speaker 1: and he's there have been attempts, but none have really
Speaker 1: landed a blow. So we helped him out, or he
Speaker 1: helped us out. My good friend Johansson has a YouTube
Speaker 1: channel and uh it does explore different science Stuff's called
Speaker 1: be Smart, and we were talking about that recently. There
Speaker 1: was a story about someone who, uh, the pilot you
Speaker 1: went unconscious and they've landed the airplane but they got
Speaker 1: help from the tower. And we were talking about that
Speaker 1: and I was like, I feel like I could land
Speaker 1: an airplane based off all my video game experience, and
Speaker 1: Joe said he thought he could too, and I said,
Speaker 1: this has got to be done in Kruger, right, And
Speaker 1: I said it would be cool if you did a
Speaker 1: video where you got into like one of those commercial
Speaker 1: commercial flight simulator and they just said, yeah, I try,
Speaker 1: go ahead, land knock yourself. And so he got I
Speaker 1: get I got him in touch with Dunning, and Dunning
Speaker 1: was like, I can't wait to be part of this project.
Speaker 1: So he both interviews back and forth with Dunning before
Speaker 1: and after, and of course he gets in the simulator
Speaker 1: and they hand him the controls and they say, okay, landed,
Speaker 1: and of course he crashed. And you crashed it three times.
Speaker 1: That's impressive, you know. Even David Dunning tells a wonderful
Speaker 1: story about they never expected the research paper Dunning Krueger
Speaker 1: on metacognition to explode. And he goes, I never thought
Speaker 1: about trademarking it. He goes, go on, go on Amazon.
Speaker 1: You'll see Dunning Krueger University shirts, key chains, all sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff. He goes, there's a million dollars there. I
Speaker 1: just had no experience in that, and I got a
Speaker 1: little Dunning crugerd did not did not think about the
Speaker 1: commercial side of it. So there's a quote I want
Speaker 1: to share because it sets up everything. Uh, and I'm
Speaker 1: I'm sort of cheating. It's from towards the end of
Speaker 1: the book. We do this because we are social primates
Speaker 1: who gather information in a bias manner for the purpose
Speaker 1: of arguing for our individual perspectives in a pooled information
Speaker 1: environment within a group that deliberates on shared plans of
Speaker 1: actions towards a collective goal. Kind of sums up everything
Speaker 1: we do in a US. That was a lot of work,
Speaker 1: with years of work within that little little that A
Speaker 1: lot of that comes from something that's called the interactions model. Uh.
Speaker 1: They're sort of a peanut butter and chocolate have come
Speaker 1: up and in this book because I've spent years talking
Speaker 1: to people through you are not so smart, and I
Speaker 1: would argue that we're flawed and irrational, right, And that
Speaker 1: was there was a big pop psychology movement for that
Speaker 1: about a decade ago, things like predictably Irrational and uh,
Speaker 1: even the work of Knomen Diversky, like a lot of
Speaker 1: the like interpretation of that was like, oh, look how
Speaker 1: dumb we are, right, and look how easily fooled we're
Speaker 1: Look how bad we were probabilities. And one of the
Speaker 1: incepting moments of this book was I did a lecture
Speaker 1: and somebody came up to me afterwards. Her father was
Speaker 1: had slipped into a conspiracy theory, and she asked, what
Speaker 1: do I do about that? And I told her nothing
Speaker 1: like but I felt gross saying it. I felt like
Speaker 1: I was locking my keys in my car. I felt like,
Speaker 1: I think I know enough to tell you that, but
Speaker 1: I know I don't. And also I don't want to
Speaker 1: be that that pessimistic and centicle. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: the attitudes and norms on same sex marriage the United
Speaker 1: States had flipped like very rapidly, We're that. So those
Speaker 1: two things together I was like, I would I want
Speaker 1: to understand this better. So I invited on my podcast
Speaker 1: Hugo mercy A and he teamed up with Dan Sperber
Speaker 1: and they created something called the interactions model, which is
Speaker 1: a model that I only want to talk to them about,
Speaker 1: you know, changing minds, arguing, and it opened up this
Speaker 1: whole world and through them, I also met with Tom Stafford,
Speaker 1: and there's the interactionist model, and there's the truth wind scenario,
Speaker 1: and those are sort of a peanut butter and chocolate
Speaker 1: my come up. And it's because instead of looking at
Speaker 1: people as being flawed in irrational, alsa is just as
Speaker 1: biased and lazy, which is different. And what you're just
Speaker 1: talking about what that paragraph is about the interactionist model,
Speaker 1: which is uh, A lot of the research that went
Speaker 1: into all those books from about a decade ago. They
Speaker 1: were pulling from studies that were done on individuals and isolation.
Speaker 1: And then when you pool all of their conclusions together
Speaker 1: and you treat people as a group of people based
Speaker 1: off that research, we do look kind of flawed, right,
Speaker 1: we do look very irrational. But if you take that
Speaker 1: exact same research and you allow people to do liberating groups,
Speaker 1: you get much different reactions, much different responses, and that's
Speaker 1: been furthered by the work of Tom Stafford. He's been
Speaker 1: taking some of the old stuff from those old studies
Speaker 1: and putting them to groups and even creating um social
Speaker 1: media similarcrooms that work like Twitter and Facebook and stuff,
Speaker 1: but have a totally different context, allows people to deliberate
Speaker 1: and argue in different ways and you get much different results.
Speaker 1: You get better results were much. A good example of
Speaker 1: that is like, uh, you take something from the common
Speaker 1: reflection task or something like a I'll make it real
Speaker 1: simple so we don't have to like do any weird
Speaker 1: math in their heads. Like you're running a race and
Speaker 1: you pass the person in second place, what place you in?
Speaker 1: And you know the intuitive answer You're start trying to
Speaker 1: work it out in your head. But the answer one
Speaker 1: if you like lean back, is well I replaced second place.
Speaker 1: I'm in second place. But if you ask people individually
Speaker 1: you get a pretty high response fade where they get
Speaker 1: the wrong answer. But if you take that exact same
Speaker 1: question and you pose it to a group of people
Speaker 1: and I do some lectures now and you say, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask this question, keep the answer to yourself. Now,
Speaker 1: does anyone to have the right answer. You know you
Speaker 1: have the right answer. Raise your hand. Somebody raised their hand.
Speaker 1: I say, okay, what's the answer. They give you the answer.
Speaker 1: Then you say, explain your reasoning, and then they explain
Speaker 1: the reasoning. When they give their answer, there will be
Speaker 1: a grumble on the crowd. When they explain the reasoning
Speaker 1: behind it, the crowd goes, Okay. Now, if you took
Speaker 1: everyone's individual answer and pulled it together, you'd be like, wow,
Speaker 1: this group got their wrong answer. But if you allow
Speaker 1: that deliberation moment to take place where I explain how
Speaker 1: reasoning to you, you get a group of people who
Speaker 1: would go from eight percent in correct correct. And we
Speaker 1: really set up for that. And the interactionist model is
Speaker 1: all about this the work of Humorocity and Dan Spur
Speaker 1: really have a great book about this, called The Enigma
Speaker 1: of Reason. It's a it's not a light read, it's
Speaker 1: really sort of you know, academic, but it's great because
Speaker 1: they found, looking through the old research and their own
Speaker 1: new research, that we have two cognitive systems, one for
Speaker 1: producing arguments, one for evaluating arguments, and the one that
Speaker 1: produces arguments does it very lazily and very in a
Speaker 1: very biased manner. You can think of it like you
Speaker 1: ask where do you want to go eat? And you know,
Speaker 1: I have three or four people after a movie like
Speaker 1: hanging out in the lobby like I wanna I want
Speaker 1: to go here, I want to go here, I want
Speaker 1: to go here, and UH they have biased reasons for that.
Speaker 1: One person's says, hey, let's go get sushi, and the
Speaker 1: somebody's like, we're over here and on my ex work there,
Speaker 1: or or I someone to say I had sushi yesterday,
Speaker 1: or I don't like sushi. That you can't predict what
Speaker 1: are going to be the counter argument, so you to
Speaker 1: present your most biased and lazy argument up front, and
Speaker 1: you let the deliberation take place in the pooled UH
Speaker 1: evaluation process. You all flow the cognitive labor to that
Speaker 1: we're all familiar with doing that. Everyone has their ideas,
Speaker 1: You trade back and forth, and we decide on the
Speaker 1: group goal on the plan, which is what this evolved
Speaker 1: to do. But we are also very familiar with the
Speaker 1: way that plays out on the internet, which is not
Speaker 1: good for an AUC is removed and you don't get
Speaker 1: the same social cues coming right, So you get like,
Speaker 1: let's say, my good friend Alistair Croll, who runs conferences.
Speaker 1: He put it to me like this. He's like, on
Speaker 1: the Internet, when you say, uh, I want a grilled
Speaker 1: cheese sandwich, Uh, it's not an argument for for who
Speaker 1: wants grilled cheese sandwiches? Should we get grilled cheese sandwiches
Speaker 1: anywhere else? Agree with me? On the Internet, on most
Speaker 1: of the platforms we use today, it's saying I want
Speaker 1: grilled cheese sandwiches. Who wants to go with me to
Speaker 1: the grilled cheese sandwich room? And so everyone who agrees
Speaker 1: with that position and is already like, yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I want to they get pulled off into a community
Speaker 1: of people who want this and then a whole new
Speaker 1: set of psychological act that was going to play, which
Speaker 1: is all about being a social primate and being a community.
Speaker 1: So there's no iteration, there's no debate, there's no consensus
Speaker 1: forming as to what the best solution to that problem is.
Speaker 1: You just have some salient issue and people form of
Speaker 1: what looks like madness or what looks like some sort
Speaker 1: of nefarious thing going down. One of the things that
Speaker 1: the Internet gives us is the ability to group up
Speaker 1: very quickly, and we are social prime rates. If we
Speaker 1: go into a group, we start being worried about motivations
Speaker 1: like I want to be a good member of my group,
Speaker 1: I want to be to be considered a trustworthy member
Speaker 1: of my group, and so on, and you get a
Speaker 1: lot of weird stuff we see today that that falls
Speaker 1: into the domain of being polarized or being in a
Speaker 1: system where everyone is. If you have in a group
Speaker 1: people who agree with you in your current position, it's
Speaker 1: very difficult to argue out of it because I can
Speaker 1: always fall back to them from back and so that
Speaker 1: that's some of the stuff that goes into that paragraph,
Speaker 1: and it gets more complicated from there. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: that was very illuminating to me, and a lot of
Speaker 1: the new material in this book relates back to it.
Speaker 1: Not that the earlier books were wrong or incorrect in anyway,
Speaker 1: but I kind of took this as a little bit
Speaker 1: of a mia Kalpa in terms of, hey, I was
Speaker 1: focusing on one area, but really we need to focus
Speaker 1: on a broader area in terms of not just why
Speaker 1: we make these cognitive eras, but how you can change
Speaker 1: somebody's mind who's trapped in some heuristic or other cognitive
Speaker 1: problem that is leading them the wrong life. I did
Speaker 1: not intend for this to be like some sort of
Speaker 1: marketing phrase or trick, but it's the truth. But I
Speaker 1: in writing a book of how Minds Change, I changed
Speaker 1: my mind on a lot of stuff that I was
Speaker 1: like depending on for like my career, and I'm happy
Speaker 1: to do that. It feels really great to be on
Speaker 1: the other side of some of these things and see
Speaker 1: it more clearly and more, you know, more dimensionality to it.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about the blog that
Speaker 1: led to the books that really put you on the map.
Speaker 1: You are not so smart? Um. I love the title
Speaker 1: of this Why you have too many friends on Facebook?
Speaker 1: Why your memory is mostly fiction? And forty six other
Speaker 1: ways you're deluding yourself? Was there were there forty six chapters?
Speaker 1: Was that just a random No? That was that was
Speaker 1: exactly how many things are exploring in the book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's great. So we already discussed what led you
Speaker 1: to this area of research. Why did you decide to
Speaker 1: go from blogging, which is easy in short form, to
Speaker 1: writing a book, which anyone who has done it will
Speaker 1: tell you it can be a bit of a slog
Speaker 1: It was. Here's how that happened. I was just blogging
Speaker 1: away back in the early days, and maybe you had
Speaker 1: a thousand people reading my stuff. And that was back
Speaker 1: way before medium and Twitter and any other way to
Speaker 1: get your stuff out there. And when did you launch?
Speaker 1: You are not so smart. I got into an argument
Speaker 1: two of my friends about what was better the PlayStation
Speaker 1: three of the Xbox three six. We got so mad
Speaker 1: at each other that it was like I might not
Speaker 1: be able to like hang out with them. And this
Speaker 1: isn't a political Trump versus Biden debate. This is yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's just the same psychology. And I couldn't get over, like,
Speaker 1: why would I get mad about this? It's just a
Speaker 1: box of wires and uh. And I, since I had
Speaker 1: a background in psychology, I went and I had access
Speaker 1: to the university library. I was I just was like,
Speaker 1: there's got to be some material about this. And I
Speaker 1: found a bunch of material and brand loyalty and identification
Speaker 1: and group identity, and I wrote a little blog about it,
Speaker 1: but I framed it as Apple versus PC. That we
Speaker 1: mean those commercials were oute right there. And at that
Speaker 1: time the blog Gizmoto had stolen the iPhone prototype. I
Speaker 1: recall that, and like Steve Jobs, and they didn't steal it.
Speaker 1: They found it in a bar. Found they found it
Speaker 1: in a bar, and uh, Steve Jobs sent them emails says,
Speaker 1: give me back my iPhone and they just they just
Speaker 1: went for the hits and they super viral. And I
Speaker 1: just assumed they had like a Google alert for stuff
Speaker 1: written about Apple stuff. And I got an email said
Speaker 1: can we reblog your blog post on this? And I
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, sure, And I went from a thousand
Speaker 1: to two hundred and fifty thousand people, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I should write a bunch of stuff on And so
Speaker 1: that week I just started going like things in that
Speaker 1: sort of area, and I wrote a lot more things
Speaker 1: about like I learned helplessness and other issues, and I
Speaker 1: had an audience and it and it was maybe four
Speaker 1: months later. An agent reached out who had worked on
Speaker 1: pre economics and said, I think this could be a book.
Speaker 1: And she still my age. I actually met with her
Speaker 1: two days. If I'm in town, I want to always
Speaker 1: try to meet with because she changed my life. Alan
Speaker 1: Bar amazing human being. And uh we turned it into
Speaker 1: a book, and about half of it was already in
Speaker 1: blog form. I wrote the rest of it for the
Speaker 1: book and that book just really took off, like it's
Speaker 1: still even today. It's like in nineteen different languages. It's
Speaker 1: something every once in a while to beating number one
Speaker 1: in a different country. It was recently number one in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Well that's how I went from blog to book world.
Speaker 1: But then they were like, hey, could you write another book?
Speaker 1: And I said, I sure can, and uh, I wanted
Speaker 1: to promote it. And at that time, podcasting had just
Speaker 1: become a thing. I was listening to Radio Lab and
Speaker 1: This American Life, and uh, I was like you, I
Speaker 1: was listening to WTF and I said, I can. I
Speaker 1: want to do something like that, and I just started
Speaker 1: up the podcast to promote it. And it just turned
Speaker 1: out that the podcast was really where I could actually
Speaker 1: explore this stuff, and I jumped into it. So so
Speaker 1: there is a quote. I think this might be from
Speaker 1: the back of the book. So I don't know if
Speaker 1: this is your words or a Blurbu'm stealing, but quote.
Speaker 1: There's a growing body of work coming out of psychology
Speaker 1: and cognitive science that says you have no clue why
Speaker 1: you act the way you do, choose the things you choose,
Speaker 1: or think the thoughts you think that's got the introspecting illusion,
Speaker 1: and it's been a real centerpiece of my work for
Speaker 1: a long time. We don't have access to the antecedents
Speaker 1: of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but we do have thoughts,
Speaker 1: feelings of behaviors that requires some kind of explanation, and
Speaker 1: we are very good at coming up with these post
Speaker 1: hoc ad hawk rationalizations and justifications for what we're doing,
Speaker 1: and those eventually become a narrative that we live by.
Speaker 1: It becomes sort of the character we portray, and we
Speaker 1: end up being an unreliable narrator in the story of
Speaker 1: our own lives. And so the two it's like a
Speaker 1: one two punch of you're unaware of how unaware you are,
Speaker 1: and that leads you to being the unreliable narrator in
Speaker 1: the story of your life. And that's fine, Like this
Speaker 1: is something that is adaptive in most situations. But there's
Speaker 1: when we get into some complex stuff like you know, politics,
Speaker 1: running a business, designing an airplane. You should know about
Speaker 1: some of these things because they'll get you into some
Speaker 1: trouble that we never got into, you know, a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. So a lot of this is evolutionary
Speaker 1: baggage that we carry forward. But you touched on two
Speaker 1: of my favorite biases. One is the narrative fallacy that
Speaker 1: we create these stories to explain what we're doing, as
Speaker 1: well as hindsight bias, where after something happens, of course
Speaker 1: we that was going to happen, We saw it coming.
Speaker 1: Tell us about those two dies, well, they're the fallacy.
Speaker 1: I love this. My good friend Will Store, who writes, um,
Speaker 1: it's a question I have for you love enemies of science.
Speaker 1: I love Will so much. And he has a book
Speaker 1: not too long ago he came up with the science
Speaker 1: of storytelling, and uh, I love that domain all the
Speaker 1: whole hero's journey, the Camp of Campbell. Right. The science
Speaker 1: side of that is, most storytelling takes place exactly along
Speaker 1: the same lines as retrospection. So your retrospection, looking back,
Speaker 1: prospection looking forward. We tend to look back on our
Speaker 1: own lives. As you know, we're the hero, were the protagonist,
Speaker 1: and whatever we're looking at specifically, it's like, Okay, we
Speaker 1: started out in this space, and then we went on
Speaker 1: a exploratory journey, and then we eventually came back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: eventually we came back around with that new knowledge and
Speaker 1: applied it. Yeah, yeah, you know that we have the
Speaker 1: the synthesis and the anti thesis and all those things
Speaker 1: are how we kind of see ourselves. Is how we
Speaker 1: make sense of our past because we couldn't remember everything
Speaker 1: that would be horrible we had, so we edit it
Speaker 1: to be useful in that way. That's when when you're
Speaker 1: watching a movie or reading a book and it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to be work for you, it's because it's not
Speaker 1: really playing nice with that retrospective system. But it's also
Speaker 1: our personal narratives seemed to be very nice and tidy
Speaker 1: in that way, and although they never are. If you've
Speaker 1: ever told a story about something with someone who was
Speaker 1: also there and they're like, it didn't happen that. My
Speaker 1: wife says that all the time, I don't know what
Speaker 1: what experience he had, but I was there, None of
Speaker 1: that happened. That's right, And you, uh, if without people
Speaker 1: to check you, what does that say? It says that
Speaker 1: a whole lot of you, what you believe is the
Speaker 1: story of your life is one of those things that
Speaker 1: if we had a perfect diary of it or a
Speaker 1: recording of it, or someone who was there who could
Speaker 1: challenge you, it wasn't exactly the way you think it was.
Speaker 1: Who was the professor after was it nine eleven or
Speaker 1: some big events had everybody right down their notes as
Speaker 1: to what they saw, what they felt, what they were experiencing.
Speaker 1: And then I guess these were freshmen and then by
Speaker 1: the time they become seniors they circle back and asked them,
Speaker 1: now it's three years later, and not only do they
Speaker 1: misremember it, but when showing their own notes, they disagree
Speaker 1: with themselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's been repeated a few times.
Speaker 1: I'll talk about it and how mind changed. Robert Burton
Speaker 1: did this experiment after the Challenger incident. That was that
Speaker 1: was the big one, right, But the one that in
Speaker 1: that study was when it's signaling above the noise. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the most amazing part of it. You they have
Speaker 1: you to write down whatever happened, at what you thought happened.
Speaker 1: They also do a prospection wise, I think they've done
Speaker 1: they've done it where you tell me what you think
Speaker 1: is going to happen, and you put into a Manila envelope,
Speaker 1: and then the thing happened, you know, whatever event takes place,
Speaker 1: and then you ask people, what did you what did
Speaker 1: you predict? Was going to happen, and they tell you,
Speaker 1: I predicted exactly what happened. You take it out of
Speaker 1: the minial envelope and it's not that and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: come on, there's no way. But even though that's my handwriting,
Speaker 1: I never would have written. And that's the weirdest thing
Speaker 1: in the in the Challenger study, uh, when he showed
Speaker 1: people that their memory was absolutely not what they thought
Speaker 1: it was, their first reaction was to say, you're tricking me, like,
Speaker 1: like this is you wrote this, like somebody else wrote this.
Speaker 1: And that seems so similar to something called anasignosia. And
Speaker 1: anasignosia is the denial of disorder. And you can have
Speaker 1: like a lesion or a brain injury that it calls
Speaker 1: some something that's wrong in your body. But then on
Speaker 1: top of that, you have this other thing, which is
Speaker 1: denial of the thing that's wrong your body. So I've
Speaker 1: seen cases where people have an arm that doesn't function properly,
Speaker 1: and they'll ask, like, why can't you lift your arm?
Speaker 1: Why can't you pick up this pencil? And they'll and
Speaker 1: they'll say, oh, what do you do? And I can
Speaker 1: pick that up? But what's going on with this arm?
Speaker 1: Like that's my mom's arm. She's playing a joke on
Speaker 1: me right now. Like the split brain patients where they
Speaker 1: don't understand what they're seeing when they come up with
Speaker 1: This is the greatest example we've been discussing is if
Speaker 1: you if you have someone who has a they called
Speaker 1: split brain patient, the corpus colos and that connects the
Speaker 1: two hemispheres. They corpus colosomy is often performed when a
Speaker 1: person has a certain kind of they have seizures that
Speaker 1: they don't want a cascade. Um, you end up with
Speaker 1: basically two brains, and you can use a divider so
Speaker 1: that one I is going to one hemisphere wives going
Speaker 1: the other. You can show a person in image. Let's
Speaker 1: say you show them a terrible carrec mangled bodies, and
Speaker 1: they feel very sick. But the portion of and you're
Speaker 1: showing that too, is not the portion that delivers language.
Speaker 1: So then you ask the person who is feeling sick,
Speaker 1: why you feel sick right now? What's going on? They say, Oh,
Speaker 1: I had something bad at lunch. You have we we
Speaker 1: will very quickly come up with a narrative and our
Speaker 1: explanation for what we're experiencing, and we do so believing
Speaker 1: that narrative, even if that narrative is way far away
Speaker 1: from what's actually taking place. So let's quickly run through
Speaker 1: some of our favorite cognitive bias is going to be tested.
Speaker 1: I hope I remember this. Let's go, um. Well, we'll
Speaker 1: start with an easy one. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias. When
Speaker 1: people write about confirmation bias, they usually get it pretty wrong. Uh,
Speaker 1: here's the way it confirms. It's a great way to
Speaker 1: put it. The least sexy term in psychology is that
Speaker 1: makes sense stopping rule. You think they come up with
Speaker 1: a better phrase, and that that just means when I
Speaker 1: go looking for an explanation of something, when when it finally,
Speaker 1: when it makes sense, I'll stop looking for information. Confirmation
Speaker 1: bias is what happens. Here's the way I prefer to
Speaker 1: frame it. Let's say you're at a tent in the woods.
Speaker 1: You hear a weird sound and you think, oh, that
Speaker 1: might be a bear. I should go look. So what
Speaker 1: you have a negative effect in your body, you have
Speaker 1: an anxiety. You go out looking for confirmation that that
Speaker 1: anxiety is just or reasonable because as a social aspect
Speaker 1: to it at all times, because we can't escape our
Speaker 1: social selves, and so you're looking and maybe you don't
Speaker 1: find it, you know, maybe you don't find evidence that
Speaker 1: points in that direction. Eventually you you modify your behavior
Speaker 1: based off what you see with your flash lie. If
Speaker 1: you do that online though an environment that's an information
Speaker 1: rich environment. You have some sort of anxiety and you're
Speaker 1: looking for justification that that anxiety is uh is reasonable.
Speaker 1: You'll find it. You'll find something right, and that will
Speaker 1: confirm that you that your search was was good and
Speaker 1: justified and reasonable to other human beings. So confirmation bo
Speaker 1: is very simply is just something happens that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1: You want to disambiguate it. It's uncertain. You want to
Speaker 1: reach some level of certainty. So you look for information
Speaker 1: that based off your hunch, your hypothesis, and then when
Speaker 1: you find information that seems to it's like confirm your hunch.
Speaker 1: You stop looking as if you like, did some something wrong,
Speaker 1: as if you solved it. Why don't we as a species, look,
Speaker 1: we're disconfirming information just to validate in most situations is
Speaker 1: not adaptive, like confirmation bias is actually the right move
Speaker 1: in most situations, Like if you're looking for your keys,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, you don't go looking for your keys
Speaker 1: on Mars. You go looking for them in your kitchen, right,
Speaker 1: and like it's the faster solution, and most of our
Speaker 1: most of these biases go back to the adaptive thing
Speaker 1: is the thing that costs the least calories and and
Speaker 1: gets you to this solution as quickly as possible, so
Speaker 1: you can go back to trying to find food not
Speaker 1: getting eaten. And in this case, most of the time,
Speaker 1: most of the time confirmation bias serves as well. It's
Speaker 1: in those instances where it really doesn't serve as well
Speaker 1: that we end up with things like you know, climate
Speaker 1: change or what have you. What about ego depletion, Oh, man,
Speaker 1: ego depletion is one of the things that boy that
Speaker 1: it goes back and forth. Uh. The original scientists are
Speaker 1: still like hardcore into it. I love it. Uh. Whether
Speaker 1: or not ego depletion is properly like defined or categorized,
Speaker 1: the phenomenon does exist. The actual mechanisms of it aren't
Speaker 1: well understood. But when you have been faced with a
Speaker 1: lot of cognitive tasks, uh, you start to have a
Speaker 1: hard time completing more cognitive task and in general, hum
Speaker 1: as well as issues that require willpower and discipline. Right,
Speaker 1: So the more you the more you use willpower, the
Speaker 1: less willpower you have to use. It's finite, not not unended.
Speaker 1: And this is not well understood a lot of the like,
Speaker 1: here's why this is happening, Like haven't I failed to replicate?
Speaker 1: So we have this phenomenon, but we still don't quite
Speaker 1: understand what is the mechanism under allowing it. Well, let
Speaker 1: me do one last one. The Benjamin Franklin And that's
Speaker 1: my favorite Benjamin Franklin effect goes back to you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of my new book is is as in
Speaker 1: this domain of justification and rationalization. Um, Benjamin Franklin had
Speaker 1: someone who was opposing him at every turn. I call
Speaker 1: him a hater in the in the previous book, back
Speaker 1: when that was a term. Yeah, and uh, he just
Speaker 1: had this political opponent that he, uh, he knew was
Speaker 1: going to cause him real problems for the next thing
Speaker 1: he was going up for. And uh, he also knew
Speaker 1: that this guy had a really nice book collection. And
Speaker 1: everybody also knew that Benjamin Franklin had a nice book collection,
Speaker 1: and so he sent them a letter and said, there's
Speaker 1: a book that I've always wanted to read. But I
Speaker 1: can never find I hear you've got a copy of it. No,
Speaker 1: the who knows it seems from reading the literature that
Speaker 1: been Refrancla totally had this book. And uh, but the
Speaker 1: guy gave him the book as a favor, and he
Speaker 1: was like very honored that been re Franklin asked for it.
Speaker 1: I like to think of Benjamin Franklin just like put
Speaker 1: it on a shelf and then wait, wait, waited a month,
Speaker 1: and then took it back to him. Um, but he said,
Speaker 1: thank you, I'm forever in your debt. You're the best.
Speaker 1: And from that point forward, that guy never said another
Speaker 1: negative thing about Benjamin Franklin. So what that comes down
Speaker 1: to is I just observed my own behavior. I did
Speaker 1: something that produced cognitive dissonance. I have a negative attitude
Speaker 1: toward ben or Franklin, but I did something that a
Speaker 1: person with a positive attitude would do. So I must
Speaker 1: either think a strange thing about who I am and
Speaker 1: what I'm doing, or I could just take the easy
Speaker 1: rout out and go I like Benjamin Franklin. And that's
Speaker 1: that I think called that the Benjamin Franklin effect. I
Speaker 1: find that really just fascinating that there are two phrases
Speaker 1: that I'm in a note of in one of the
Speaker 1: books that I have to ask about extinction burst, and
Speaker 1: I have to ask what is wrong with Catharsis. Catharsis
Speaker 1: the stincionburst is a real thing that I love. Uh.
Speaker 1: I see that everywhere I see. I see that all
Speaker 1: in society right now in many different ways. That extinction
Speaker 1: bursts is u when you have a behavior that has
Speaker 1: been enforced many many times, and you it's your body
Speaker 1: even expects that you're going to perform this behavior, and
Speaker 1: you start doing something like say dieting, or you're trying
Speaker 1: to keep smoking, or you're trying to do you're trying
Speaker 1: to just extinguish the behavior. Right at the moment before
Speaker 1: it fully extinguishes, you will have a little hissy fit.
Speaker 1: You'll have a as they say back home, um, you'll
Speaker 1: have a toddler outburst sort of thing where you're all
Speaker 1: of your systems, cognitive systems are saying, why don't we
Speaker 1: really really try to do that thing again, because we're
Speaker 1: about to lose it? And the they call this an
Speaker 1: extinction bursts. That moment of like if you're watching it
Speaker 1: on a slope, it's sloping down down, down, down, and
Speaker 1: there's a huge spike. And that could either be the
Speaker 1: moment you go back to smoking or relapse, or the fish.
Speaker 1: It could be the death rottle. Depends on how you
Speaker 1: how you deal with your extinction burst. I thought that
Speaker 1: was fascinating, And then of Tharsis comes up. Why is
Speaker 1: the concept of that cathartic surrender or finish the things problematic?
Speaker 1: It's related to the extverse. There's a for a while
Speaker 1: there this, especially in like nineteen fifties psychology, the idea
Speaker 1: that like just get it out, you know, like like
Speaker 1: if you're angry, go beat up a punching bag or
Speaker 1: yell at people from the safety of your car. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There used to be a thing in like the eighties
Speaker 1: scream therapy. Yeah, I recall the unfortunately primal scream. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately or fortunately. Uh, the evidence, the evidence suggests that
Speaker 1: what this does is reward you for the behavior, and uh,
Speaker 1: you maintain that level of anger and anxiety and frustrations.
Speaker 1: It's self rewarding, yea. And so it's uh, there are
Speaker 1: ways to have cathartic experiences, but the ones where you
Speaker 1: reward yourself for being angry tend to keep you angry
Speaker 1: that that makes a lot of sense. And last question
Speaker 1: on you are not so smart? Do we ever really
Speaker 1: know things or do we just have a feeling of knowing?
Speaker 1: Is an unanswerable question, thankfully, Uh from from you? No, No,
Speaker 1: I feel like I feel like I know. That's uh.
Speaker 1: Here's what's important to know about the Certainty is an emotion.
Speaker 1: This is something that gets me in trouble. I think
Speaker 1: in like rationalists and uh, you know, circles. But I
Speaker 1: won't get you in trouble here. Well, thank you, because
Speaker 1: like the the ideas like facts not feelings or your
Speaker 1: you know, let's not get emotional, let's not make emotional appeals. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's no dividing emotion from cognition. Emotion is cognition, and
Speaker 1: certainty is one of those things that lets you bridge
Speaker 1: the two because certainty is the emergent property of networks
Speaker 1: waiting something in one direction or another, and you feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, if you want to do percentage wise, it's
Speaker 1: is you can feel it. I ask you percentage wise,
Speaker 1: like if I ask you did you have eggs last
Speaker 1: week on Tuesday? And you're like, I think I did,
Speaker 1: and like, well, like on a scale from one to ten,
Speaker 1: like on a percentage wise on Saturday morning, I went
Speaker 1: to the dinner, I had eggs. So that feeling that
Speaker 1: you're getting, there's something generating that deepeealing, right, So the
Speaker 1: feeling of knowing is something that's separate from knowing, but
Speaker 1: as far as subjectively, it's the exact same thing. We
Speaker 1: only get to see this objectively in some way, especially
Speaker 1: in those like open up the middle envelope, let's see
Speaker 1: what you actually said. So this is a pet peeve
Speaker 1: of mind because here in finance there is this, for
Speaker 1: lack of a better phrase, meme that the markets hate uncertainty,
Speaker 1: and whenever people are talking about what's going to happen
Speaker 1: in the future, well, it's very uncertain, to which I say, well,
Speaker 1: the future is always inherently uncertain. When things are going
Speaker 1: along fine and the market's going up, we feel okay
Speaker 1: with our uncertainty, so we can lie to ourselves about
Speaker 1: it very very easily, exactly. But when everything is terrible,
Speaker 1: the markets are down, the Feds raising rates, inflation, Oh,
Speaker 1: the market hates uncertainty. Now at the uncertainty level, you
Speaker 1: didn't know the future before, you don't know the future now,
Speaker 1: but you can no longer lie to yourself and you
Speaker 1: have a sense of of what's going on. This is,
Speaker 1: by the way, a very out liar view, because everybody
Speaker 1: loves the uncertain. So well, I'm happy to sit here,
Speaker 1: I despise. I'm happy to sit here and surrounded about
Speaker 1: all these people and take the position of, uh, you're
Speaker 1: very wrong. Uh, the they are less smart. There is
Speaker 1: no such thing as certainty. This is, you know, from
Speaker 1: the scientific or psychological even philosophical domain. Everything is probabilistic
Speaker 1: and we can like hedge our bets, but the concept
Speaker 1: of certainty is way outside the domain of any of
Speaker 1: these topics. Yeah, and and well, we'll talk about bertrand
Speaker 1: Russell later. But it's a quote from your book that
Speaker 1: always makes me think, well, let's let's talk about it now,
Speaker 1: because it's such an interesting observation quote. The observer when
Speaker 1: he seems to himself be observing a stone is really,
Speaker 1: if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of
Speaker 1: the stone upon himself. Right, Isn't that awesome? That is
Speaker 1: right from this book How Minds Change by Day Man Here,
Speaker 1: it's a good book. The U I got that from
Speaker 1: interviewing the Lately Ross who created the term naive realism.
Speaker 1: It's another phrase I love, and this this is a
Speaker 1: way to kind of get into naive realism. N I
Speaker 1: realism is the assumption that you're getting a sort of
Speaker 1: a video camera view of the world through your eyeballs,
Speaker 1: and that you're storing your memories and some sort of
Speaker 1: database like a hard drive and uh, and that when
Speaker 1: I ask your opinion on say, uh, immigration or gun control,
Speaker 1: that whatever you tell me came from you went down
Speaker 1: to the bowels of your castle to your scrolls and
Speaker 1: pulled out the scrolls by candle light and read them all.
Speaker 1: And then one day came up from that and emerged
Speaker 1: from the staircase and raised your finger and said, ha,
Speaker 1: this is what I think about gun control. And it
Speaker 1: minded what what's invisible in the process or what becomes
Speaker 1: invisible when we're at we're tasked with explaining ourselves. Is
Speaker 1: that uh, all the rationalization and justification and all the
Speaker 1: interpretation that you've done, and all the elaboration, these all
Speaker 1: these psychological terms, and that you Uh. This concept of
Speaker 1: nairealism is that you see reality for what it is
Speaker 1: and other people are mistaken when you get into moments
Speaker 1: of conflict and the The thing that bergand Russell said
Speaker 1: is so nice because he is alluding to the fact
Speaker 1: that all reality's virtual reality, that the subjective experiences is
Speaker 1: very limited, with the German psychologists called an un velt
Speaker 1: the thing related to naive realism that was so surprising
Speaker 1: in the book. And we keep alluding to evolution in
Speaker 1: various things. I did not realize that the optic nerve
Speaker 1: does not perceive the world in three D. It's only
Speaker 1: two dimensional. And okay, so we have two eyes, so
Speaker 1: we were able to create an illusion of depth of
Speaker 1: a third dimension, but the human eye does not see
Speaker 1: the world in full three Yeah. I just while while
Speaker 1: I'm in visiting New York, I spent time with Pascal
Speaker 1: who's in the book, and he's the one who like
Speaker 1: ram me through all this. That's amazing, isn't it. It's uh,
Speaker 1: the retina. I mean, you know, obviously at microscopic levels
Speaker 1: it's three dimensional, but for the purpose of the vision,
Speaker 1: it's a two dimensional sheet. And so we create within
Speaker 1: consciousness the third dimension. But it's an illusion, just like
Speaker 1: every color is an elite. It's a very realistic illusion,
Speaker 1: but it's an illusion, right, And and that's why paintings
Speaker 1: can look nice because you play with the rules of
Speaker 1: illusions that to create depth. And even people who who
Speaker 1: gained vision late in life, the understanding depth and three
Speaker 1: dimensionality is something that takes a lot of experience. You
Speaker 1: have to learn how to do it. And they oftentimes
Speaker 1: they'll in experiments with people who just gained vision late
Speaker 1: in life, they'll like put a telephone and run like
Speaker 1: far away from them, and they'll they'll try to reach
Speaker 1: out to it. It's like thirty ft away because you
Speaker 1: have to learn depth. That's something that we learned over time.
Speaker 1: We you know, we did as children. Who don't you remember,
Speaker 1: you don't really think about it. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: how minds change. And I want to start by asking
Speaker 1: how did a flat earther inspire this book? They actually
Speaker 1: came in a little later in the process. I was
Speaker 1: there was a documentary on Netflix. You may have seen it,
Speaker 1: Behind the Curve, uh, and the producers of that were
Speaker 1: ends of my podcast, and then they grabbed a couple
Speaker 1: of my guests for the show and everything, and I
Speaker 1: thought it would be you know, I would love to
Speaker 1: help promote something. I didn't know this, but someone told
Speaker 1: me I was in the credits and I looked in
Speaker 1: the credits it was like, you know David, thanks to
Speaker 1: David McRaney, And I was like, oh wow. So I
Speaker 1: emailed them and said, hey, you want to come on
Speaker 1: my podcast, we'll talk about your documentary. Because if I
Speaker 1: had gotten a chance to make a Netflix show, it
Speaker 1: had have been very similar because that's it seems like
Speaker 1: it's about flat Earth, but it's actually about motivated reasoning
Speaker 1: and identity and community and things like that, and community
Speaker 1: community is a huge part of it. Group identity, and
Speaker 1: um that after that episode, Uh, they a group in
Speaker 1: Sweden do they put on something like south By Southwest
Speaker 1: called the gather Festival. They asked, Hey, we got this
Speaker 1: crazy idea. What if you go to Sweden and we'll
Speaker 1: get h Mark Sargent, who was sort of the spokesperson
Speaker 1: for the flat Earth community, and we'll put you on stage.
Speaker 1: And I know you're writing a book about how minds change,
Speaker 1: you can try to try out some of those techniques
Speaker 1: on them. And I was like, oh, that sounds awesome,
Speaker 1: So um I did. I went and I met Mark,
Speaker 1: and uh, I found it very nice, very lovely man.
Speaker 1: And I did try something at the point where where
Speaker 1: I met him. I was about halfway through and that
Speaker 1: wasn't great at the techniques, but I did an okay job.
Speaker 1: That's that's towards the end of the book where you
Speaker 1: actually describe um. He said it was one of the
Speaker 1: best conversations he ever had. You don't call him an idiot,
Speaker 1: you know challenges views. You're really asking how did you
Speaker 1: come to these sorts of perspectives to get him to
Speaker 1: focus on his own process. That's the whole idea of
Speaker 1: the techniques I learned about in the book. Uh, we're
Speaker 1: writing this book. I met many different organizations. Deeve Campels
Speaker 1: are street epistemology, people who work in motivational interviewing and
Speaker 1: therapeutic practices, UH, professional negotiation and conflict resolution. UH people
Speaker 1: work in those spaces. And what really astounded me was
Speaker 1: when I would bring the stuff that I was witnessing
Speaker 1: to scientists or experts. They there was this underlying literature
Speaker 1: that made sense. But none of these groups had ever
Speaker 1: heard of this literature for the most part, and they
Speaker 1: definitely hadn't heard of each other. But they did a
Speaker 1: lot of a b testing thousands of conversations throw away.
Speaker 1: I didn't work keeping what did and they would arrive
Speaker 1: at this is how you ought to do this, and
Speaker 1: then would also be similar they had it was in steps,
Speaker 1: the steps would be in the same order. And I
Speaker 1: sorted think of it like, you know, if you wanted
Speaker 1: to build an airplane, the first airplane ever built, no
Speaker 1: matter where it was builder who did it, it's gonna
Speaker 1: look kind of like an airplane. It's gonna have wings,
Speaker 1: and it's going to be lighter than because you're dealing
Speaker 1: with the physics that you have to contend with when
Speaker 1: it comes to the kind of conversation dynamics that actually
Speaker 1: persuade people or move people or illuminate them. They have
Speaker 1: to work with the way brains makes sins of the
Speaker 1: world and all of the evolutionary path that pressures all
Speaker 1: of that. And so these independent groups discovered all that
Speaker 1: independent of each other and of the science that supports them.
Speaker 1: And Mark Sargeant, like when I first met him, I
Speaker 1: shook his hand and said, look, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: like make fun of you or anything. Goes Oh, that's fine,
Speaker 1: make fun of me all you want. And he he
Speaker 1: took out his phone and showed me the commercially've done
Speaker 1: for LifeLock, whereas like, if I can do it, anybody
Speaker 1: can do it, and he's totally okay with it. But
Speaker 1: that's not what I did. And then when I sat
Speaker 1: down with him, one of the essences, I know we'll
Speaker 1: get to it, but it's like, you don't want to
Speaker 1: face off and I need to win, you need to lose.
Speaker 1: I'm trying. I'm not even to aiding you. What I
Speaker 1: want to do is get shoulder to shoulder with you
Speaker 1: and say, isn't interesting that we disagree? I wonder why
Speaker 1: you want to pardner up with me and trying to
Speaker 1: investigate that mystery together. And in so doing I opened
Speaker 1: up a space to let him meta cognate and run
Speaker 1: through how did I arrive at this? And that's what
Speaker 1: I did with him on stage, and you know, we
Speaker 1: learned all sorts of things, like he he used to
Speaker 1: be a ringer for a video game company, so that
Speaker 1: so that's where his conspiratorial stuff first came from. Oh
Speaker 1: so of course he wasn't just a guy showing these
Speaker 1: contests weren't fair. They and it's always a name, they
Speaker 1: had somebody skewing the outcome. Going through his whole history,
Speaker 1: it was really clear how he got motivated into this.
Speaker 1: But the thing that really kicked in was, you know,
Speaker 1: flat Earth is a pretty big group of people. They
Speaker 1: have conventions, they have dating apps, and once he became
Speaker 1: a spokesperson for it, and he's traveling around the world,
Speaker 1: is going to Sweden, Like now he's not traveling around
Speaker 1: the world, he's traveling up across surface. That's right. He
Speaker 1: is traversing the geography Cartesian plane of planet, that's right.
Speaker 1: And so that that was a really the sun flat also,
Speaker 1: that's always my question. If the Earth is flat, is
Speaker 1: the Sun of sphere, why would some celestial bodies be
Speaker 1: There are schisms within the flat earth community. There are
Speaker 1: many different models of flat Earth. The one that Mark
Speaker 1: Sergeant is part of. They see the Earth that's sort
Speaker 1: of it's almost like a snow globe. It's flat, but
Speaker 1: there's a dome, there's a there's makes perfect sense to
Speaker 1: and perfectly the Sun and the Moon are are are
Speaker 1: celestial objects that are orbs. And when you ask my
Speaker 1: good question was like, okay, well then it seems manufactured.
Speaker 1: Who made it? God's or aliens? And he goes and
Speaker 1: I remember leaning in and saying it doesn't matter. Isn't
Speaker 1: it the same thing? Well, you know, the Greeks figured
Speaker 1: out five thousand years ago that the Earth was round
Speaker 1: by just looking at the shadow of the sun cast
Speaker 1: at the same time in different cities of different latitudes.
Speaker 1: But five thousand years of progress, just hold a side. Look,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't you would believe that the number of ways
Speaker 1: that that has been explained away in you know, flat
Speaker 1: earth world, there's a plenty of explanations for why that's,
Speaker 1: you know, part of the big conspiracy. My favorite part
Speaker 1: of the flat earth community was flat Earth Meets done
Speaker 1: in Krueger with the guy who built a rocket to
Speaker 1: go up in order to prove that the Earth was flat.
Speaker 1: We don't know what he saw because he crashed and died.
Speaker 1: Do you recall this was like remember three summers ago,
Speaker 1: I can tell I can I know exactly how the
Speaker 1: response would like see see he took him out and
Speaker 1: they took him out. So you mentioned several different groups,
Speaker 1: The Street Epistemology and the deep canvassers were really fascinating
Speaker 1: my book. Right, So a quick background, A well funded
Speaker 1: group in California. We're trying to convince people to support
Speaker 1: the Marriage Equality Act, which ultimately ends up failing in
Speaker 1: California by three or four percent, and they had done
Speaker 1: thousands of home visits, knocked on the door, Hey, we
Speaker 1: want to talk to you about about this act and
Speaker 1: why we think you should support it. And the failure
Speaker 1: of that was a real moment of clarity, and they said,
Speaker 1: we have to rejigger everything we doing because this is
Speaker 1: totally ineffective. And the methodology they came up with that
Speaker 1: standing shoulders shoulder and let's figure out why we think.
Speaker 1: Let's explore why we think so differently. You know, in
Speaker 1: politics and single issues, if you can move somebody a
Speaker 1: tenth of a percent, it's huge. Their impact is a
Speaker 1: hundred times that it's ten. It's astonishing. Tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about what this group does that's so effective
Speaker 1: when they're supporting a specific issue. Yeah, the background you
Speaker 1: gave exactly what happened. They wanted to understand how they lost,
Speaker 1: and they went door to door asking They came up
Speaker 1: with this idea. This Dave Fleischer, who runs the Leadership
Speaker 1: Lab U c l A or USC and the LGBT
Speaker 1: Center of Los Angeles, and they're extremely well funded, millions
Speaker 1: of millions of dollars and the biggest LGBT organization of
Speaker 1: its kind in the world, and the Leadership Lab was
Speaker 1: their political action wing. And as they were doing this
Speaker 1: cavasing thing and they lost in Prop eight, he wanted
Speaker 1: to know, how could that be because this seems to
Speaker 1: be an area where we would definitely wouldn't lose this,
Speaker 1: And so he said, what if we just wouldn't ask people?
Speaker 1: And so they did the exact same thing again. So
Speaker 1: this time they knock on doors and say they went
Speaker 1: to areas they knew that they law that they had
Speaker 1: lost in help us understand, and if that somebody had
Speaker 1: voted against it, they asked, why did you vote against it?
Speaker 1: And they had these listening brigades about fifty seventy five
Speaker 1: people would go out and knocked or the door, and
Speaker 1: to their astonishment, people wanted to talk. When they started asking, like,
Speaker 1: this is a non adversarial thing, it's just hear them out.
Speaker 1: And when they did that, these conversations we go to
Speaker 1: forty minutes and they started thinking, well, we need to
Speaker 1: record these, and they started recording them, and somewhere along
Speaker 1: the way, about three or four times people talk themselves
Speaker 1: out of their position when you just stood there and listened,
Speaker 1: don't You're not You're not nudging them, and you're not
Speaker 1: challenging them, You're just letting them be heard. And so
Speaker 1: they wanted to know what did we do there, what
Speaker 1: happened in that conversation that led to that? So they
Speaker 1: started reviewing that those specific conversations and taking bits and
Speaker 1: pieces and testing out was that this wasn't that, was that,
Speaker 1: this wasn't that. And they eventually when I met them,
Speaker 1: they had done seventeen thousand of these conversations and recorded
Speaker 1: on the video and they had a b tested their
Speaker 1: way to a technique that was so powerful that while
Speaker 1: I went there several times and went door to door
Speaker 1: with them everything, but every time I went there would
Speaker 1: be scientists there, there'd be activists from around the world
Speaker 1: there because they were like, what have you done? What
Speaker 1: have you discovered? And it's very powerful. And over the
Speaker 1: course of writing the book, the research was done a
Speaker 1: couple different times on them, and they found the numbers.
Speaker 1: You're talking about twelve ten or twelve percent success, right,
Speaker 1: And the method is very similar. You only really know
Speaker 1: two of the steps, but you know it's about ten steps.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to do it the full thing The
Speaker 1: most important aspect of this is non judgmental listening and
Speaker 1: non judgmental listening and holding. You're gonna hold space to
Speaker 1: let the other person explore how they arrived at their
Speaker 1: current position. In other words, you're going to help them
Speaker 1: be very self reflective and figure out their thought problems.
Speaker 1: It's probably good to give you a foundation of what motivational,
Speaker 1: what motivated reasoning is right here. So you know, when
Speaker 1: somebody's falling in love with someone and you ask them
Speaker 1: like why do you like them? Like why you why
Speaker 1: are you going to date this person? And they'll say
Speaker 1: something like the way they talked, the way they walked,
Speaker 1: where they cut their food, the uh, the music they're
Speaker 1: introducing me to. When that same person is breaking up
Speaker 1: with that same person, you ask why you're breaking up
Speaker 1: with them, they'll say things like, well, the way they talk,
Speaker 1: the way they walked, where they cut their food, the
Speaker 1: dumb music they made me listen to. It. So reasons
Speaker 1: for what will come, reasons against when the motivation to
Speaker 1: search for reasons that will I rationalize and justify your
Speaker 1: position change. As you've said all throughout our conversation, we're
Speaker 1: often are very unaware of that and if someone comes
Speaker 1: along and gives you an opportunity to self reflecting a
Speaker 1: way where you will go through your reasoning process, you
Speaker 1: will often start to feel moments of dissonance and question yourself.
Speaker 1: And as long as the other party isn't is allowing
Speaker 1: you to save face. And it's just non judgment and listening.
Speaker 1: That's a big component of this and their technique. They'll
Speaker 1: open up and say, okay, we're talking about that that
Speaker 1: same sex marriage or transgender bathroom laws or something. They're
Speaker 1: very political organizations, so the sort of the topics they cover,
Speaker 1: they'll ask a person this is this is the biggest
Speaker 1: part of everything, and this I urge every you wanted
Speaker 1: to try this out on yourself and other people. You
Speaker 1: can just do it on a movie like the last
Speaker 1: movie that you watch. Let's what's last movie you watched?
Speaker 1: The Adam Project? Okay, the Adam Project. Did you like it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Ryan Reynolds boom. It's so easy to say I liked it. Okay.
Speaker 1: Now I ask on a scale from zero to ten,
Speaker 1: like if you're a movie review or what would you
Speaker 1: give it? Six? Seven? Okay? Why why does six feel
Speaker 1: like the right number? Um, it's not a great movie.
Speaker 1: It's not The Godfather, but it was entertaining and silly
Speaker 1: and fun. You like The Godfather, you know that's a ten. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what what do you think is the Godfather
Speaker 1: has that this movie doesn't. It's much more sophisticated. It
Speaker 1: tells a much more interesting tell. It's the characters are
Speaker 1: much more fleshed out. They're more interesting. Um, the violence
Speaker 1: is is gripping, whereas the violence and this is sort
Speaker 1: of cartoony. So we're gonna step out of that conversation
Speaker 1: when we come back to it. But now what this
Speaker 1: is what I'm doing. I'm listening to you. I'm not
Speaker 1: judging you, and I'm giving you a chance to actually
Speaker 1: explore the reasoning and at and and your values are
Speaker 1: starting to come up and things that are unique to
Speaker 1: you and things you like about the world are a
Speaker 1: lot of times this is the first time a person
Speaker 1: has ever even experienced that. And this is a moment
Speaker 1: for you to start to understand yourself in a certain way.
Speaker 1: And a conversation about a political issue you might start
Speaker 1: pulling in things about where this actually, you know, the
Speaker 1: first time you ever heard about this thing, and then
Speaker 1: will become you see it superceived wisdom or you're being
Speaker 1: influenced by others, and then all that comes into it's
Speaker 1: very easy for you to extract that emotion and tell
Speaker 1: me what you felt. I liked it, I didn't like it.
Speaker 1: When I ask you to rationalize and justify it for
Speaker 1: me and come up and go through your own personal
Speaker 1: reasoning process, not my reasoning process. This is a unique
Speaker 1: experience for a lot of people. And then the other
Speaker 1: thing I can do is say you give it a six?
Speaker 1: How come not say a four? You know, under five
Speaker 1: I would think is something I didn't especially like. You know,
Speaker 1: I smiled and laughed throughout it, and it get me
Speaker 1: up detained for ninety minutes. That's and my nephews, that's
Speaker 1: all I'm looking at, you see. And so we're getting deeper,
Speaker 1: more and deeper deeper into the things that you you
Speaker 1: look for entertainment, but we're talking about a political issue.
Speaker 1: This something comes out of motivation interviewing, and they weren't
Speaker 1: even aware of this. The deep camps, people therapists who
Speaker 1: had dealt with people would come in for say alcoholism
Speaker 1: or drug addiction, and you know, they already are at
Speaker 1: a state of ambivalence. They want to do it, and
Speaker 1: they all and they don't want to do it. That's
Speaker 1: why they've come for help. But a psychologist would often
Speaker 1: engage in something called the writing reflect They say, okay,
Speaker 1: well there's here's what you're doing wrong. Is what you
Speaker 1: need to do. Here's what you and you you will
Speaker 1: feel something called reactants, which is that unhand me, you fools,
Speaker 1: feeling that I'm telling you what to think, I'm shaming you.
Speaker 1: And when you push away from it, you will start
Speaker 1: creating arguments to keep pursuing the thing. And they this
Speaker 1: was such a debacle that they developed something come motivational interviewing,
Speaker 1: where I would start, I would start trying to evoke
Speaker 1: from you counter arguments. And I can do that very
Speaker 1: simply with the scale, because when I ask you why
Speaker 1: not a four, the only thing you can really produce
Speaker 1: for me your reasons why you wouldn't go away from
Speaker 1: the six, which is also kind of going towards a seven.
Speaker 1: And in a political discussion, that's how they'll open it up.
Speaker 1: They'll say, we're talking about transitor bathroom law. Here's the
Speaker 1: position that I'm talking about is coming up for a vote.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering where you're at on that like a scale
Speaker 1: one was eer to ten. They'll tell them, and then
Speaker 1: they'll say why that, And this is a moment. We
Speaker 1: may stay there for twenty minutes, we go through how
Speaker 1: you arrived at this number. And then in that the
Speaker 1: deep campras to do something different from the other groups.
Speaker 1: They asked the personal if they've had a personal experience
Speaker 1: with this issue. And on the LGBT same sex marriage issue,
Speaker 1: what seemed to have come up time and again was hey,
Speaker 1: is there anybody gain your family? Do you want them
Speaker 1: to have find love? Do you want them to find happiness?
Speaker 1: And suddenly when it becomes personal, the political issue gets inverted.
Speaker 1: That's right. You start really realizing how much of this
Speaker 1: is abstraction, how much of this has received wisdom, how
Speaker 1: much of this is political signaling our group I inter singly,
Speaker 1: and not every time, but many times people who will
Speaker 1: have a personal experience related to the issue, and that
Speaker 1: personal experience really issue will create massive amounts of cognitive
Speaker 1: dissonance on the position I just gave you. There's a
Speaker 1: phrase which I was going to mention later, but I
Speaker 1: have to share it. Excruciating disequal a brim is that
Speaker 1: how you ultimately get to a point where either somebody
Speaker 1: changes their perspective or or something breaks. This is how
Speaker 1: we change our minds on everything, Like we're always changing
Speaker 1: your minds at all times, like the everything is provisional
Speaker 1: until yeah, and we don't we're not always We're totally
Speaker 1: not aware of it most of the time. But this
Speaker 1: comes to the work of a lot of psychologists. But
Speaker 1: I focus in on p J because there's two mechanisms,
Speaker 1: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is uh when something's ambiguous or
Speaker 1: uncertain you when you interpret in a way that says basically,
Speaker 1: everything I thought and felt and believed before now I
Speaker 1: still think, feeling, believe it. This is just a modified
Speaker 1: a little bit with you assimilated into your current model reality. Accommodation,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, is when there's so many anomalies
Speaker 1: build up or this is so counterattitudinal or counterfactual what
Speaker 1: you currently have in your model reality are they they
Speaker 1: had called it a schema, you must accommodate us. You
Speaker 1: can think of it like a child sees a dog
Speaker 1: for the first time and they're like, what is that?
Speaker 1: You say, it's a dog in their minds? Something categorical,
Speaker 1: something like it's got four legs, walks on four legs,
Speaker 1: it's not wearing any clothes, as it's furry as a tail,
Speaker 1: it's non human dog. And then if they see like
Speaker 1: a a orange dog or a you know, a speckled dog,
Speaker 1: they can just say they can assimilate that and different
Speaker 1: versions of the thing. I already understand. When they see
Speaker 1: a horse, they might point at it and go big dog,
Speaker 1: and they're really is an attempt to assimilate, Like I'm
Speaker 1: interpreting it and look, it's got four legs, it walks
Speaker 1: on four legs, it's non human, it's not wearing clothes.
Speaker 1: What's going on here? And he said, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: that's not a dog, that's a horse. This requires an
Speaker 1: accommodation moment because you need to create a category that
Speaker 1: both horses and dogs can fit with it an overarching category.
Speaker 1: And we're doing that all the time. Like there are
Speaker 1: moments where we I think of things like that have happened. Uh, politically,
Speaker 1: I don't know how politically you want to give a
Speaker 1: let's like think about the insurrection right the For a
Speaker 1: lot of people, I have positive attitudes toward a certain
Speaker 1: political persuasion, and people within that positive attitude space did
Speaker 1: something I don't like. So I have these two feelings.
Speaker 1: I'm I feel negatively and I feel positively about what
Speaker 1: has happened. You could accommodate and say, well, it looks
Speaker 1: like people who share my political views sometimes do bad
Speaker 1: things and I need to like have a more complex
Speaker 1: view of things. Or you could assimilate, which is often
Speaker 1: how we get into conspiratorial thinking, and say, well, I'm
Speaker 1: looking at this. What if they didn't do that at all?
Speaker 1: What if those were actors? What if those were people
Speaker 1: who are pretending to be people that agree with me?
Speaker 1: So how do you explain from that? Here's the fascinating thing.
Speaker 1: There was widespread disapproval, especially from Republican leadership, and then
Speaker 1: very quickly, within a sixty days, maybe even less thirty days,
Speaker 1: that faded and then it was just a bunch of
Speaker 1: tourists passing through UH through Congress. So was it just
Speaker 1: strictly that sort of tribal thing that we needed to
Speaker 1: to everybody to manage people just reverted back to their
Speaker 1: tribalism because there was some consensus for a brief period
Speaker 1: and then it went straight back to partisan politics. Was
Speaker 1: that there's a there was a long stretch, and there
Speaker 1: always is where you're you're being pulled in every direction. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to make a blanket statement.
Speaker 1: Most people are pretty rational about what happened there. But
Speaker 1: there's a certain ports and the population that went very
Speaker 1: conspiratorial with it, and there is a deep crisis of
Speaker 1: how to make sense of the world and where should
Speaker 1: I put my allegiances and where my values expressed. And
Speaker 1: what we would rather do is assimilate if we can
Speaker 1: get away with it, because that allows us to maintain
Speaker 1: our current model and move forward. And if we can
Speaker 1: find an elite who says, no, it's okay to think
Speaker 1: what you think. In fact, I agree with you. If
Speaker 1: I can find peers who will who will support me
Speaker 1: in that, if I can find groups having conversations on
Speaker 1: the Internet who let me do this, I'll assimilate and
Speaker 1: I'll stay within it, and as they say in psychology,
Speaker 1: my social network will reassert its influence. So one of
Speaker 1: the interesting things about the shift in UH same sex
Speaker 1: marriage opinion the US is how sudden it was, and
Speaker 1: when we compare it to things like abortion rights, Vietnam,
Speaker 1: race voting, even marijuana, all those things seem to have
Speaker 1: taken much longer or why is that? That was actually
Speaker 1: the first question I had. I thought that that's what
Speaker 1: the book was going to be about. There's a dozen
Speaker 1: different answers of that question. That was sort of a
Speaker 1: confluence of psychological mechanisms. The most influential part of his contact, right.
Speaker 1: There's an idea in psychology called pluralistic ignorance, where you know,
Speaker 1: you ask a lot of people have will have a
Speaker 1: certain feeling inside of them, attitude or value, and they'll
Speaker 1: feel like that the only person within their community who
Speaker 1: has that feeling, and unless you surface the norm in
Speaker 1: some way, they are not They won't be aware that
Speaker 1: there are so many other people who feel the same
Speaker 1: way they feel. Surface the norm, surface the norm, as
Speaker 1: they put it. When I was asking political scientists about
Speaker 1: um the shift and attitudes about same sex marriage, they
Speaker 1: kept telling me this was the fastest recording shifts in
Speaker 1: public opinion since we've been recording this since the twenties
Speaker 1: and since then. There was an attitude shift on COVID nineteam,
Speaker 1: which I put in the book that was a little
Speaker 1: bit faster, but in this case in which direction towards vaccination.
Speaker 1: Vaccination yet which is kind of interesting because there was
Speaker 1: an anti vaxor movement pre COVID that was really kind fringe,
Speaker 1: and I went to one of the conventions for the
Speaker 1: book best not in the book. It was part of
Speaker 1: the cut material, the Lancet article on what is an
Speaker 1: m R M or R m R and remember which
Speaker 1: the Musles rebella MOMPS vaccine, which was substantly completely debunked.
Speaker 1: But what ended up happening is that group seems to
Speaker 1: gain a little bit of momentum, the anti vaxers, and
Speaker 1: yet even around the world most countries are vaccinated, most
Speaker 1: wealthy developed countries that with access to the vaccine, the
Speaker 1: US is a laggered um, less vaccinations, less boosts, and
Speaker 1: the most per capita deaths of any advanced economy, which
Speaker 1: kind of raises the question how much of an impact
Speaker 1: did the anti vaxers have, even though a lot of
Speaker 1: people eventually came around and got the vaccine. The reason
Speaker 1: I like to talk about flat earthers so much is
Speaker 1: because the same psychological mechanisms are at play and everything
Speaker 1: else that we like to talk about. But most most
Speaker 1: people assume they would never be a flat right, But
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily get that uniformity when it comes to
Speaker 1: things like same sex matters or or any or any
Speaker 1: political issue, that anything becomes charged politically. And I use
Speaker 1: flat earthers so much because they're pretty much neutral and
Speaker 1: people can feel like they have some distance from it,
Speaker 1: and the mechanisms. You can see those mechanisms at play,
Speaker 1: and then I can say, and that's also in this
Speaker 1: and you can see how it works the with same
Speaker 1: sex marriage. That it's almost impossible to believe this as
Speaker 1: a person talking to a microphone right now, in this
Speaker 1: modern moment, like it wasn't very long ago. The people
Speaker 1: argued about this as vehemently as they argue about like
Speaker 1: immigration and gun control and everything else that's that's a
Speaker 1: wedge issue today. And there were articles that would be
Speaker 1: that would come out, but like this is something we'll
Speaker 1: never get over. You should and you shouldn't talk about
Speaker 1: this and Thanksgiving kind of things, right, And then the
Speaker 1: course of about twelve years, but very rapidly, of course,
Speaker 1: with three or four years, we went from more than
Speaker 1: sixty percent of the country opposed to six in the
Speaker 1: country in favor and around two thousand twelve ish, and
Speaker 1: the it seemed like, how could this possibly have happened
Speaker 1: where it come from. And I want to understand that too,
Speaker 1: because I thought if I could take most of the
Speaker 1: of the country and put them on a time machine
Speaker 1: and send them back a decade, would they argue with
Speaker 1: themselves and what happened in between these two moments, and
Speaker 1: if they were going to change their mind about this,
Speaker 1: what was preventing them from changing their mind the whole time.
Speaker 1: One answer to that is that a lot of things
Speaker 1: that have changed when it comes to like social issues,
Speaker 1: people were separate from one another in social contexts, whereas
Speaker 1: with same sex marriage and other LGBTQ issues, coming out
Speaker 1: was a very huge part of that. Any movement that
Speaker 1: urged people to reveal their identities and to live openly
Speaker 1: allow people the opportunity to go, well, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I have a family member like this. I have a
Speaker 1: person who I care about who's being affected by this issue.
Speaker 1: I have people who my plumber, my my hairdresser, my
Speaker 1: brother and my brother, all this whole world, and then
Speaker 1: that contact was part of that, right, I think that
Speaker 1: is the key to this being so stealthy. Why nobody
Speaker 1: saw it Because you go from I know a guy
Speaker 1: who's gay, or I know a woman who's gay too.
Speaker 1: I know lots of people who are gay, and over
Speaker 1: that ensuing decade and the decade before, at least from
Speaker 1: my perspective, it felt like lots of people both private
Speaker 1: and public personas were coming out as getting and you know,
Speaker 1: you had Ellen come out, which was a big deal,
Speaker 1: and you had Will and Grace on TV. It seemed
Speaker 1: like it was just, you know, the momentum was building
Speaker 1: and it was an exchange like that. And you talked
Speaker 1: about in the book where where it's the cascade is
Speaker 1: waiting for the network to be ready. That's EXAs where
Speaker 1: I'm headed up. Thanks for kicking me over to The
Speaker 1: culture is being influenced by the social change, and then
Speaker 1: the social change in reflection influence of the culture, and
Speaker 1: this back and forth is what creates a staggered acceleration
Speaker 1: of the social change. Right, But what's deep within that
Speaker 1: is understood a network science as cascades. And the best
Speaker 1: way I could like quickly explain what a cascade is is, Uh,
Speaker 1: have you ever been to a party and everything seems
Speaker 1: to be going up k and then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden everybody leaves and you're like, what happened? Especially if
Speaker 1: with the host, or have you ever like waited to
Speaker 1: get into a restaurant, or if you remember back in
Speaker 1: a university setting, you're waiting to get into a classroom
Speaker 1: and uh, there's just a big line of people, and
Speaker 1: then the door opens up and you could have gone
Speaker 1: in at any time. These are examples of cascades, up
Speaker 1: cascades and down castkades. So in a school setting or
Speaker 1: a restaurant setting, you're waiting a line. The first person
Speaker 1: that shows up, they have an internal signal because they
Speaker 1: have no information the doors closed. So maybe in the
Speaker 1: past they tried to go to a classroom and they
Speaker 1: open the door and everybody turned and looked at them,
Speaker 1: and they felt real weird about it. Maybe they just
Speaker 1: have a certain kind of social anxiety. There are all
Speaker 1: sorts of nature nurture things to give them an internal
Speaker 1: signal that says I should wait and see what's going on.
Speaker 1: So they take out their phone, they're playing with it.
Speaker 1: The second person that shows up, they don't just have
Speaker 1: an internal signal. They have one human being who seems
Speaker 1: to be waiting and maybe they know something I don't,
Speaker 1: So whatever internal signal they have is magnified by that.
Speaker 1: They start to wait. Once you show up at a
Speaker 1: door and there are two people waiting and you don't,
Speaker 1: you're you're pretty sure you're gonna wait too. Once there
Speaker 1: are three people waiting at a door, it's almost inevitable
Speaker 1: you're gonna get a line of people waiting because they
Speaker 1: assume they're part of something, and everybody knows something they don't,
Speaker 1: and you're not with a cascade. The only thing that
Speaker 1: will break the cascade is new information out of the system.
Speaker 1: The door opens up and like the professor's like, why
Speaker 1: are you waiting? Or somebody who looks at their watch
Speaker 1: and it's like, I figure we should have been in
Speaker 1: here by now. Or you could have a real rabble rouse,
Speaker 1: or you could have a subversive element. Somebody who's a punk.
Speaker 1: They have a low threshold for conformity, you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're like, I don't care what people think of me.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna open the door, and that person will lead
Speaker 1: everybody in. So what you end up here with our
Speaker 1: thresholds of conformity. Uh. Some people need only a few
Speaker 1: people around them to do something before they do it.
Speaker 1: Some people need a lot. And any population is going
Speaker 1: to have a large mix of people who have different
Speaker 1: thresholds of conformity. If you think of it like an
Speaker 1: old chemistry molecule with like balls and sticks connect to it,
Speaker 1: each person is a node and each node has a
Speaker 1: different threshold of conformity, and that threshold conformity is influenced
Speaker 1: by how many people they know, so how many sticks
Speaker 1: are connected to balls around them, and you end up
Speaker 1: with clumps and claw sters of people who have different
Speaker 1: thresholds as a cluster. Let's say you're at a party
Speaker 1: and they want to go because you know they're they're
Speaker 1: tired of being there, they have work in the morning
Speaker 1: or whatever. But there are other people in the group
Speaker 1: who are like I would like to go, but like,
Speaker 1: I can't just be the first person that leaves. So
Speaker 1: the person who has a reason to leave, or they
Speaker 1: just don't care what other people think they leave the party.
Speaker 1: That that encourages the next group of people who needed
Speaker 1: one more person to back them up to leave. Now
Speaker 1: there are people who actually did. They wanted to stay
Speaker 1: at the party, but hey, if everybody else is leaving
Speaker 1: but they're threshold conform you just got me out there,
Speaker 1: like I should probably go. And then now you have
Speaker 1: the people who are really we're gonna stay all night,
Speaker 1: and like I guess in the last person here and
Speaker 1: either they spend the night on your couch or they
Speaker 1: leave and you're like, oh my god, what happened to
Speaker 1: my party? This is cascades. This is a It's a
Speaker 1: very fascinating part of human psychology because we're talking about
Speaker 1: massive groups of people, and you have a nation of people,
Speaker 1: you'll have massive clusters of people that will have different thresholds,
Speaker 1: and we often will have one in that group, many
Speaker 1: of them called a percolating local cluster. Anyone listening, who's
Speaker 1: in this world? I hope you're happy that I found
Speaker 1: your stuff. This stuff was totally unfamiliar to me. The
Speaker 1: stuff goes into like diffusion science and people studying how
Speaker 1: rocks sink and floating local climate. So here's the here's
Speaker 1: the best thing, uh, I've ever seen about to explain this,
Speaker 1: you're driving down this is Duncan Watts. Yes, Duncan Watts,
Speaker 1: the great sociologist. Everything is he is. He gave this
Speaker 1: example to me and thank him forever for it. You
Speaker 1: can imagine a road that people are driving down in
Speaker 1: the middle of a forest. There's uh, someone who smokes
Speaker 1: a cigarette on the way to wherever they're going, and
Speaker 1: they throw a cigarette out pretty much every time at
Speaker 1: a certain spot in the forest. And they've been doing
Speaker 1: this for years and nothing ever happens, and then one day, uh,
Speaker 1: they tossed that cigarette out and it causes a seven
Speaker 1: county fire. Now, if you look at this from a
Speaker 1: sort of a great Man theory of history, or you're
Speaker 1: looking for people who are innovators, if you look at
Speaker 1: the whole old tipping point models and things like that,
Speaker 1: you're looking for the mavens and the connectors and everything. Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out the science doesn't really support that very well.
Speaker 1: Has nothing to do with any individual being more connect
Speaker 1: that are more powerful or more savvy than anybody else.
Speaker 1: What it has to do with is the susceptibility of
Speaker 1: the system to anybody throwing out a cigarette, meaning how
Speaker 1: dry or droughts stricken, something happened in that system. What's
Speaker 1: going on with dry leaves, with just the vulnerability of
Speaker 1: that the vulnerable that's exactly how they that they're phrasing
Speaker 1: the youth. The vulnerability of that particular aspect of the
Speaker 1: network at that particular moment was quite vulnerable to any nudge,
Speaker 1: any impact any strike. And the thing that really struck
Speaker 1: me about his example was it could have been a
Speaker 1: cigarette he tossed out, it could have been a lightning bolt,
Speaker 1: it could have been a nuclear bomb. It didn't matter
Speaker 1: how powerful it was, and it didn't matter how connected
Speaker 1: the person was. You don't think of it any connection. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the science of that connectivity everything, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: that the cluster was vulnerable at that point. And any
Speaker 1: complex system is going to be like the surface of
Speaker 1: the ocean. There are is constantly moving around. So if
Speaker 1: you think of that molecule model of human connectivity, it's
Speaker 1: constantly morphing and changing as people their relationships change and
Speaker 1: they move from one group to another. So the point
Speaker 1: that's vulnerable is all is moving. So how do you
Speaker 1: affect great change like same sex marriage or any other
Speaker 1: social issue that we've seen in the past. You have
Speaker 1: to strike at the system relentlessly, and if you're an individual,
Speaker 1: you need to get as many people on your your
Speaker 1: group to strike together, and because eventually you're going to
Speaker 1: be the lip match in the dry forest. That's the idea,
Speaker 1: and you have to let luck be a big part
Speaker 1: of it, because you're trying to find the percolating local
Speaker 1: cluster that will create the cascade that will cascade all
Speaker 1: along the network because you're different, thresholds of conformity are
Speaker 1: moving in and out of the networks that you're affecting.
Speaker 1: If you look through any of the history of people
Speaker 1: who who have affected great social change, especially history of
Speaker 1: the United States, UH, they had figured out some system
Speaker 1: by which to get a lot of people together to
Speaker 1: strike at the system relentlessly, and they were indefatigable. And
Speaker 1: that was the most important aspect of the whole thing.
Speaker 1: And there are all sorts of other ways to nudge
Speaker 1: and move around, but that seems to be the essence
Speaker 1: of it. And that example from COVID nineteen, that's what
Speaker 1: the fastest social change now ever recorded. They use this.
Speaker 1: What they did is they it was people who were
Speaker 1: very hesitant to get vaccinated because it was in the UK.
Speaker 1: People in certain religious communities were very hesitant because of
Speaker 1: their past with the you know, the government of the UK,
Speaker 1: and they didn't want to necessarily allow these government entities
Speaker 1: they didn't understand very well to take a needle and
Speaker 1: put something they didn't understand very well in their bodies.
Speaker 1: So organizations got together with mosques and said here's the
Speaker 1: sites where we'll have the vaccinations. And they they got
Speaker 1: the the elites within that religious community too, to be
Speaker 1: the first to vaccinate. And so what you end up
Speaker 1: with is you have this wave effect of the least
Speaker 1: hesitant among the most hesitants. So these are people with
Speaker 1: the threshold, the threshold of performity where they will go, well,
Speaker 1: all I need is one person I trust to do this,
Speaker 1: they get vaccinated. Well, that's a new wave of people
Speaker 1: who are vaccinated. So that next level of hesitancy says, well,
Speaker 1: this number of people that I trust have been vaccinated,
Speaker 1: I'll get vaccinated. So now you have that next level
Speaker 1: of hesitancy that they've been they've been saying, told two friends.
Speaker 1: And you eventually wave your way through the cascades so
Speaker 1: that when you get to that middle hump that's very
Speaker 1: hard to get over, you have so many people vaccinated
Speaker 1: around you, it seems kind of weird that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: be And it's okay. You only some of the holdouts
Speaker 1: may take forever, the last people to buy the facts
Speaker 1: machine or whatever, but they're in a world. But you
Speaker 1: people that have already, and that's what we're aiming for
Speaker 1: and so there are ways to UH to catalyze the
Speaker 1: cascade effects, but you have to you have to think
Speaker 1: of it in terms of the diffusion model. In this
Speaker 1: regard is not that old fashioned, the early adopter holdout model.
Speaker 1: It's it's waves of conformity via the thresholds cafformity, where
Speaker 1: you want to build up by saying this group influences
Speaker 1: this group together, they become a new unit, and so
Speaker 1: on and so on. Quite quite intriguing. So let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about this evolutionary baggage that we have.
Speaker 1: It seems that so much of our decision making UH
Speaker 1: is affected by mechanisms and processes which worked great on
Speaker 1: the savannah, but in a modern world don't really seem
Speaker 1: to help us and sometimes hurt us. Yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: I mean, that's been a big part of all of
Speaker 1: my work of the all these things are adaptive, as
Speaker 1: that's the phrase you want to use, like, in all
Speaker 1: things being equal, this is probably the best thing to do.
Speaker 1: But we get in certain situations where that are unique
Speaker 1: to modern life, and it turns out that he can
Speaker 1: get us in trouble. So that's the the baggage you're
Speaker 1: talking about. Is one of those things where most of
Speaker 1: the time it serves as well, but in very specific
Speaker 1: situations it goes the other way. Huh. Really intriguing there.
Speaker 1: There's there is some specific evolutionary or adaptive issues that
Speaker 1: come up. Why do humans argue? And why is that
Speaker 1: really a social dynamic that we all do when we
Speaker 1: all evolved to do? I? You know, this is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite things that that change the way I
Speaker 1: see the world. In researching the book The Um, a
Speaker 1: lot of this also goes back to the interactions model.
Speaker 1: With that Mercy and Sperber helped put together, UM, why
Speaker 1: would we argue? Well, the human beings have this nice, uh,
Speaker 1: complex and dense communication system that eventually became language, and
Speaker 1: we depend very much on the signals from other units
Speaker 1: in our social network to help us understand what's going on,
Speaker 1: to make plans, to settle on goals, shared goals, to
Speaker 1: decide to just do stuff, and so we do a
Speaker 1: lot of deliberating and arguing that space. The problem is, uh,
Speaker 1: imagine it like, UM, there are three people, three proto
Speaker 1: humans are on a hill and they're all looking in
Speaker 1: different directions, and the none of us can see what
Speaker 1: the other two can see, so you would benefit from
Speaker 1: some sort of worldview that is the combination of all
Speaker 1: three perspectives. So if I do trust these people, I
Speaker 1: know them pretty well, and we're talking about going to
Speaker 1: a certain place in the in the forest together or something.
Speaker 1: One persons for it, one persons against it, I'll know
Speaker 1: that the person who's for it is young. It's the
Speaker 1: first time out. They don't know much about the world.
Speaker 1: They're eager to show what they can do. That's that's
Speaker 1: that's why they like that. The other news hesitant. They
Speaker 1: were in a bear attack two years ago, and they're
Speaker 1: I don't know if they really are there, maybe a
Speaker 1: little over scared. This is also I have a pretty
Speaker 1: good idea of what how to modulate my trust about
Speaker 1: when it comes into the deliberation process. The more people
Speaker 1: involved in that process, the more complex against the more
Speaker 1: I have to worry about. People could be misleading me.
Speaker 1: They could be wrong just about about no fault of
Speaker 1: their own, or they could be purposely misleading me because
Speaker 1: they want to get an advantage over me. So um
Speaker 1: they use the phrase we have a built in epistemic
Speaker 1: vigilance for when people might be misleading us. The and
Speaker 1: that serves as well too. The only problem is that
Speaker 1: can lead to something they call a trust bottleneck. And
Speaker 1: a trust bottleneck is when someone does actually in our
Speaker 1: group come up with a very innovative idea. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: a some sort of invention. They've created some sort of
Speaker 1: new way of doing something. They have an idea about
Speaker 1: going to a new territory where they're there's good things
Speaker 1: for us to go do there. But it's there's a
Speaker 1: risk and reward in it and this, but this person
Speaker 1: really is right. If we get into an argumentation prod
Speaker 1: yus that's too epistemically vigilant, then we will end up
Speaker 1: not doing the thing that could benefit the group, And
Speaker 1: so we have this trust bottleneck that could prevent the
Speaker 1: calls groups to stagnate. So we developed another evolutionary mechanism
Speaker 1: to get past trust bottlenecks, and that is arguing itself.
Speaker 1: The argumentation process is how we get through the trust
Speaker 1: bottleneck created by epistemic vigilance and go ahead. Ye, So
Speaker 1: I was gonna ask, why are we so good at
Speaker 1: picking other people's arguments apart and so terrible at objectively
Speaker 1: evaluating all loves so much? There's a uh this it
Speaker 1: reminds me something the psychology called the Solomon paradox. I
Speaker 1: think it's in business too, with the we're really good
Speaker 1: at giving out advice, it's very hard for us to
Speaker 1: actually employ in our own lives. Like you, when somebody
Speaker 1: has a problem, they tell you and you're like, here's
Speaker 1: what you ought to do, But then when you have
Speaker 1: that exact same problem, you don't do that thing. Um.
Speaker 1: There's some really cool research recently where they have people
Speaker 1: put on VR headsets and they walk into a room
Speaker 1: in virtuality and see uh Freud sitting there and uh
Speaker 1: Freud says, tell me about your problems, and they sit
Speaker 1: down and they explained the problem they're they're having, and
Speaker 1: then they run the second time, but the second time,
Speaker 1: you are Freud and uh you see yourself walk in.
Speaker 1: It's all been recorded. They even have an avatar with
Speaker 1: your face and you hear the audio of yourself telling
Speaker 1: your telling you as Freud what your problems are. And
Speaker 1: they have around a sixty eight percent success rate of
Speaker 1: the person having a breakthrough, Oh I see what I
Speaker 1: ought to do now that they couldn't do on their own.
Speaker 1: They need to get into this dynamic that we're talking
Speaker 1: about meaning looking at it from with through a different
Speaker 1: path they need to be they had to get that
Speaker 1: evaluation phase. So um, we have two cognitive mechanisms to
Speaker 1: really simplify this. One for the production of arguments, for
Speaker 1: the production of justifications and rationalizations, reasons why we are
Speaker 1: doing something. It's important that in psychology reason is not
Speaker 1: the big our reason of philosophy with propositional logic and
Speaker 1: all that. It's just coming up for with reasons for
Speaker 1: what you think totally rationalization, rationalization and justification and in
Speaker 1: some cases just explanation and why why do we do this? Well,
Speaker 1: the the interaccess model is because we're always imagined the
Speaker 1: audience that's going to be receiving the information. That's why
Speaker 1: you in your shower you're thinking of how you're gonna
Speaker 1: really stick it to that person on Reddit that you've
Speaker 1: been arguing with all day? Right? Why? Because that's the
Speaker 1: that's how that's how we produce reasons. But we also
Speaker 1: do it alone. Like if I'm imagining I want to
Speaker 1: buy something on Amazon or I want to take a
Speaker 1: trip somewhere, You'll start rationalizing and justifying it to yourself.
Speaker 1: And when you when you want a piece of cake,
Speaker 1: you will come up with with a justification. We're getting
Speaker 1: the cake right, like I didn't need anything to day,
Speaker 1: or I did or exercise yesterday, or whatever it is
Speaker 1: you need to do. You want to do it, but
Speaker 1: you need a justification for it. There's a humongous body
Speaker 1: of evidence that we don't even make the decisions that
Speaker 1: are best. We only make the decision that's easiest to justify.
Speaker 1: And um, huge mercy and spurn all these great experiments
Speaker 1: where they have people um and one of them, they
Speaker 1: had people they solve these word problems, and then they
Speaker 1: would mix the answers up and have people evaluate other
Speaker 1: people who have been looking at the word problem. But
Speaker 1: of course the trick is when one of the answers
Speaker 1: is their own, and they would find that when people
Speaker 1: were thinking that they were evaluating other people's arguments, they'd
Speaker 1: find the holes in their own like thinking and their
Speaker 1: own reasoning, But if they thought they were looking at
Speaker 1: their own arguments, they'd usually miss it. So it's an
Speaker 1: effective trick. Maybe trick is the wrong word, but it's
Speaker 1: an effective technique to get people to objectively self analyzes,
Speaker 1: to make them believe they're criticizing someone else's argus right,
Speaker 1: So the there and what it seems to be the
Speaker 1: function here. Why this is so adaptive is that under
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure or doesn't even it doesn't even
Speaker 1: need to be a group selection process. It's just simply
Speaker 1: how the math works out. If you have a lot
Speaker 1: of different people with a lot of different experiences, and
Speaker 1: they have a lot of different value sets, and they
Speaker 1: have a lot of different skill sets, and you're facing
Speaker 1: a problem, you're trying to come up with a solution
Speaker 1: to it, or you have a goal you want to
Speaker 1: reach it, you will be much more effective as a
Speaker 1: group if everybody presents their biased individual perspective and they
Speaker 1: don't put a lot of cognitive effort into the production
Speaker 1: of it, make it easy, cheap, and bias. Then you
Speaker 1: offload the cognitive labor to that evaluation process that twelve
Speaker 1: angry men experience where everyone looks at each other arguments
Speaker 1: and goes, okay, this that, this, that, this that, and
Speaker 1: over time that's developed these two mechanisms we have this. Uh.
Speaker 1: That's why as individuals, and that's not one of the
Speaker 1: biggest problems on the Internet is that we we do
Speaker 1: a lot of our deliberating these days and context that
Speaker 1: incentivize the production of arguments, but don't really give us
Speaker 1: much opportunity to go through that evaluation together. There's a
Speaker 1: phrase you had in the book that that caught my eye.
Speaker 1: Debate leads those who are wrong to change their minds,
Speaker 1: and as a group, you want to get to the
Speaker 1: best decision, the best outcome. On the Internet, it's not
Speaker 1: as much a real collaborative discussion argument debate as it
Speaker 1: is just people yelling past each other. Yeah, but it
Speaker 1: feels like, you know, it looks like a real debate,
Speaker 1: but it's not. Yeah, I feel like I'm doing that,
Speaker 1: you know, I feel like I'm participating in some sort
Speaker 1: of marketplace of ideas. It seems like I'm doing that.
Speaker 1: But the way the platforms are currently set up, for
Speaker 1: the most part, it's just people yelling people like writing
Speaker 1: on a piece of paper what they think, feeling believe in,
Speaker 1: dumping it onto a big pie, and then other people
Speaker 1: running through the pile and guard like there's it's not
Speaker 1: like a twelve angry man. We're not actually sitting in
Speaker 1: a circle and and or you know, it's not like
Speaker 1: a dinner party where we're I'm sure you've had dinner
Speaker 1: parties or had guests over who have really wildly different
Speaker 1: political views in you and you didn't like get into
Speaker 1: twitter mind with them. You talked it out in some way.
Speaker 1: That is that that aspect is something we've yet to
Speaker 1: tweak the system to allow us in certain contexts. There
Speaker 1: was a very amusing cartoon. I don't remember who who's
Speaker 1: it was, but the line was, what did you do
Speaker 1: when the United States was overthrown in the early twenty
Speaker 1: one century? Oh? I tweeted my disapproval for and it
Speaker 1: just you know what, what is a hundred forty characters?
Speaker 1: It's just it scrolls by instantly. It's not really that
Speaker 1: sort of engaged discussion. I don't mean to be like,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't mean to to poople on social media.
Speaker 1: It's it's great for what it is. It's just that
Speaker 1: it is. But it also is what it is like,
Speaker 1: it's been a It's a great tool for giving voice
Speaker 1: to people who haven't been part of the conversation in
Speaker 1: a long time. It's a great way to gauge what
Speaker 1: are people thinking and feeling. But if we want to
Speaker 1: do the deliberation thing, the argumentation thing that moves things around,
Speaker 1: it's not so great at that yet and the question
Speaker 1: is will will it ever be? Um? So, so you
Speaker 1: mentioned twelve angry men. This is a this is a
Speaker 1: great line in your book. All culture is twelve angry
Speaker 1: men at scale. Yeah, go into some detail about you know,
Speaker 1: as plays right off what we were just discussing, like
Speaker 1: the the everything we've ever achieved as species of note
Speaker 1: as came out of a lot of people disagreeing and
Speaker 1: then like sorting it out and there are um we've
Speaker 1: been great at creating some some institutions that do this
Speaker 1: on purpose, like science when it's done well is a
Speaker 1: group of people debating and argument with the other and
Speaker 1: trying to tear each other's ideas. But there's a good
Speaker 1: faith in signs and elsewhere that you may not get
Speaker 1: on on Reddit or Twitter. It's so crucial to create
Speaker 1: creating the rules of the game, and we all play
Speaker 1: by it. And you I've that you if I meet
Speaker 1: you on the street or I meet you on the internet,
Speaker 1: like we may not be in a good faith environment,
Speaker 1: we're going to play by those rules that that That's
Speaker 1: why it was so nice to create these systems of
Speaker 1: argumentation like law and UH medicine and academia, the and
Speaker 1: most of the people that we I'm very against the
Speaker 1: great Man theory of things that where you imagine single
Speaker 1: inventors coming up with amazing insights like no one ever
Speaker 1: does anything in isolation like that. The and a lot
Speaker 1: of the even the people we've lauded throughout history, they
Speaker 1: had either someone that they bounced ideas with across and against,
Speaker 1: or they collaborated with, or they were absolutely assaulted over
Speaker 1: and over again by people who disagreed with them, and
Speaker 1: they had to refine their arguments in the presence of
Speaker 1: all of that. And that's why I talk about culture
Speaker 1: being twelve agrement scale like once any like society five
Speaker 1: figures out a way to institutionalize those things. That's when
Speaker 1: you get those massive leaps, and both in the social
Speaker 1: domain and the political domain and the scientific and technological domains.
Speaker 1: So so, given all of these things we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: from tribalism to identity, how do we get people to
Speaker 1: actually change their mind? What are the three key things
Speaker 1: people need to have happened to them in order to
Speaker 1: get a major shift in their position. We know it
Speaker 1: would be difficult, I think, to pick just three things,
Speaker 1: but I can think of a couple of things that
Speaker 1: we fit in here. I think one thing I want
Speaker 1: people to understand is all persuasion and self persuasion, uh
Speaker 1: most mostly when it comes to change people's minds, what
Speaker 1: you're trying to do is alert them the fact that
Speaker 1: they could change their mind. So a little bit of
Speaker 1: socratic process is you you're guiding them to something and
Speaker 1: if they're not willing, then they're never going to change them.
Speaker 1: And it's you know, we all we talk a lot
Speaker 1: about how facts don't seem to work so well. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's only because the usually when you start arguing somebody
Speaker 1: over an issue you want to present them, you'll say like, hey,
Speaker 1: read this book, Hey watch this YouTube video, Hey go
Speaker 1: to this website, and you're like, that should do it.
Speaker 1: But how's that? Has that ever happened to you? Like,
Speaker 1: never has anyone sent me a YouTube video? And I've
Speaker 1: been like, oh, okay, I never know it though, change
Speaker 1: my mind, said nobody. And that's the idea of that
Speaker 1: is you there's a reasoning. There's a chain of processing
Speaker 1: involved in reasoning where you are probably unaware that you
Speaker 1: went through all this and it landed on a particular
Speaker 1: conclusion because it made sense to you had matched your
Speaker 1: values and your attitudes and your beliefs on the matter,
Speaker 1: and you have to afford the other person the opportunity
Speaker 1: to go through that same process. You can't meet them
Speaker 1: at the level of the conclusion, because what ends up
Speaker 1: happening you just start tossing these these facts that support
Speaker 1: your position at each other instead of having a conversation
Speaker 1: in which we're looking at the issue together. Right. So
Speaker 1: that's one thing, is like you can't copy and paste
Speaker 1: your reasoning into another person. And when you're trying to
Speaker 1: argue just based off facts and links and stuff, that's
Speaker 1: really what you're suggesting they ought to do. So all
Speaker 1: persuasion self persuasion. I have to open up a space
Speaker 1: for you to explore your own reasoning, and I have
Speaker 1: to open up a space for you to to entertain
Speaker 1: different perspectives and to think about where your stuff comes from.
Speaker 1: Was what we did earlier in the conversation. Secondly, you
Speaker 1: have to recognize that we're social creatures, so people are
Speaker 1: influenced by the signaling and the expectations of the people
Speaker 1: around them. If you say anything to that person that
Speaker 1: could be interpreted as you ought to be ashamed for
Speaker 1: what you think, feeling, believe, conversations over. At that point,
Speaker 1: no one was willing to be ostracized. The great sociologist
Speaker 1: Brooke Harrington told me that there was an Eagles mc
Speaker 1: Square of social science. It would be social death. The
Speaker 1: fear of social death is greater than the fear of
Speaker 1: physical death. Literally a quote I have written down because
Speaker 1: I thought it was so so, and she ran me
Speaker 1: through a hundred examples where this is the true, from
Speaker 1: war to excommunication, to go down the list. It is social.
Speaker 1: Social death is actual death in most of history. And
Speaker 1: I don't care who you are, what kind of profession
Speaker 1: you're in. You're worried about other people around you, and
Speaker 1: that profession think about you, and you're modulating your behavior
Speaker 1: to go with and your modulating your beliefs, attitudes and values.
Speaker 1: And when it comes down to it, if the situation
Speaker 1: requires it, you'll put your reputation on the lifeboat and
Speaker 1: you will let your body sink to the bottom of
Speaker 1: the ocean if that's the situation you're put in. And
Speaker 1: Dueling and all those things we do, I'll talk all
Speaker 1: about the book Dueling Last a long time was really peculiar,
Speaker 1: but it was just this system out of ann troll.
Speaker 1: And if I'm trying to discuss an issue with you
Speaker 1: and I've put you in that state of mind, you
Speaker 1: there's no what you're what you're gonna do is react.
Speaker 1: You're gonna push back against me. Then I'm going to
Speaker 1: get feel that feeling. I'm going to push back against you,
Speaker 1: and then you push back harder, I push back harder,
Speaker 1: and we end up in that stupid phrase of well,
Speaker 1: let's agree to disagree. Well, we already agree to disagree.
Speaker 1: That's how we sat down here, right. We're really saying
Speaker 1: is stopped talking to me, And that's what that is,
Speaker 1: is a nice we're agreeing to stop arguing with the data.
Speaker 1: We're agreeing to to never actually advance this issue and
Speaker 1: never talk to each other again. So never open up
Speaker 1: the conversation with anything that could be interpreted as you
Speaker 1: ought to be ashamed, even if they should be ashamed
Speaker 1: of what they're feeling and thinking. If you're hoping to
Speaker 1: persuade them, you have to not do that. And then
Speaker 1: the so be aware that they're a social primate. You're
Speaker 1: a social primate. Never try to copy and paste your
Speaker 1: reading and the other person and the most important part
Speaker 1: is that you have to get out of debate frame.
Speaker 1: Don't don't create a dynamic work. I want to win,
Speaker 1: I want you to lose. I want to show that
Speaker 1: I'm right and you're wrong. This is this is the
Speaker 1: most crucial thing. If you take nothing else away from it,
Speaker 1: take this, think of it. We're like hum, I find
Speaker 1: you a reasonable, rational, interesting human being, and it's ad
Speaker 1: that I disagree with you on this. I wonder why
Speaker 1: I disagree with you? Our disagreement is a mystery. What
Speaker 1: if we teamed up to solve a mystery together why
Speaker 1: we disagree? And now we're taking all these things that
Speaker 1: are adaptive and usually in a way that could actually
Speaker 1: get us further along and settle. And what might actually
Speaker 1: happen is we both realized we're both wrong. What we
Speaker 1: we get to vin diagram ourselves. So you go from
Speaker 1: face off to shoulder shoulder and this if There are
Speaker 1: many different ways to go about it, but once you
Speaker 1: get in that dynamic, you're much more likely to persuade
Speaker 1: each other of something and move the attitude the room
Speaker 1: quite fascinating. So let's jump to our speed round. I'm
Speaker 1: going to ask all these questions thirty seconds or less.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do my best. These are These are what
Speaker 1: we ask all of our guests, starting with what are
Speaker 1: you streaming or listening? To? Tell us what what Netflix,
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime podcasts kept you entertained the past couple of years?
Speaker 1: Cool very quickly. My favorite podcast has always been are
Speaker 1: still is Decoder Ring? I recommended to everybody. I love it.
Speaker 1: Will A Paskin is amazing best show US stream and
Speaker 1: recently it's definitely Severance. Everybody should have seen Severance by now.
Speaker 1: Also the rehearsal. You can see the kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that I like watch. Someone just recommended the rehearsal and
Speaker 1: said it reminded them of Severance and how out there?
Speaker 1: Ye watch that? And then like, I'm among those people
Speaker 1: that please video games the highest form of art. You
Speaker 1: definitely play Death Stranding And I replayed BioShock recently because
Speaker 1: I interviewed Douglas rush Kof and we were talking about
Speaker 1: BioShock and it still holds up. Who are some of
Speaker 1: your mentors who helped you develop your your view of
Speaker 1: psychology and cognitive issues? And you know, persuasion Gene Edwards
Speaker 1: my first, like the first psychology professor that took me
Speaker 1: inside aside and said let's be friends and really talking
Speaker 1: about it. I owe a lot to her, you know
Speaker 1: people who I've met in real life. Whoever. James Burke
Speaker 1: is the most influential person in my life. I loved
Speaker 1: his show years ago. I think it was BBC How
Speaker 1: the Universe Change, How the Universe change? And can actions?
Speaker 1: And I can Connections only for people listening to this.
Speaker 1: I worked with Johnson and UH, James Burke all over
Speaker 1: all throughout COVID to develop a new Connection series really
Speaker 1: and I can't say anything else about it, but it
Speaker 1: will be coming out with in the next year. Very exciting.
Speaker 1: I love his stuff. What are some of your favorite books?
Speaker 1: And what are you reading right now? Let me say,
Speaker 1: as far as authors, I love UH, John Jeremiah Sullivan, UM,
Speaker 1: Charlie Laduff, Michael Perry, Larry Brown, all these there are
Speaker 1: either people who are in Southern Gothic literature or or
Speaker 1: the Southern Gothic literature version of journalism. I can't get
Speaker 1: enough of that stuff. Our last two questions, what sort
Speaker 1: of advice would you give to a recent college grad
Speaker 1: who was interested in a career of either journalism or
Speaker 1: psychology or anything related to to your field. I'll give you.
Speaker 1: I'll give you two solid pieces of advice that aren't
Speaker 1: just high minded like that sounds nice, and they can
Speaker 1: put it on postcard things. This is what you gotta do.
Speaker 1: Number one, Email the people that you admire or the
Speaker 1: people you'd like to interview. I have about a seventy
Speaker 1: percent success rate of when I was good starting out
Speaker 1: of people. They will at least email you back and
Speaker 1: say I can't talk, but you'd be surprised how many
Speaker 1: people are willing to talk to you. Just do that,
Speaker 1: and then on this on the back end, make content
Speaker 1: out of that and give it away for free until
Speaker 1: you build up an audience. We now live in an
Speaker 1: environment we've been living in it for about twenty years
Speaker 1: now where the people who are going to offer their
Speaker 1: hand to get you on stage, they care about whether
Speaker 1: or not you have an audience. Yet you can build
Speaker 1: that audience without anybody's permission right now, and you can
Speaker 1: do that by making content on TikTok YouTube, putting it
Speaker 1: out on a medium wherever you put your stuff. So
Speaker 1: do those two things back to back. Email the people
Speaker 1: you want, and they make content out of those emails
Speaker 1: and give it away for free into you have an audience,
Speaker 1: develop your voice. Love that idea. Final question, what do
Speaker 1: you know about the world of psychology, changing minds and
Speaker 1: persuasion today that you wish you knew twenty or so
Speaker 1: years ago when you were first getting started. No one's unreachable,
Speaker 1: No one's unpersuadable. There's no such thing. And I think
Speaker 1: of it more like if you try to reach the
Speaker 1: moon with a ladder, you'll fail, and if you assume
Speaker 1: from that that the moon is unreachable, then you really
Speaker 1: learn nothing right. And that's what I actually had thought
Speaker 1: for a long time. And it turns out the frustration
Speaker 1: I was feeling to where other people should have been
Speaker 1: directed to myself for not trying to understand, well, why
Speaker 1: is this not working the way I thought it should work.
Speaker 1: The assumption that they're stupid or they're misled, are there
Speaker 1: nefarious in some way? That was a real misconception on
Speaker 1: my part, the misconception that people are just absolutely unreachable
Speaker 1: and unpersuadable. I have, through the work of this book
Speaker 1: changed my mind. Thank you, David for being so generous
Speaker 1: with your time. We have been speaking with David McRaney,
Speaker 1: the award winning science journalist and author of the book
Speaker 1: How Minds Change The Surprising science of belief, opinion, and Persuasion.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out
Speaker 1: any of our four hundred previous discussions over the past
Speaker 1: eight years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,
Speaker 1: wherever you feed your podcast fix. You can sign up
Speaker 1: from my daily reading list at rittle dot com. Follow
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Ridholts. I would be remiss if
Speaker 1: I did not thank the crack team that helps put
Speaker 1: these conversations together each week. Justin Milner was my audio engineer.
Speaker 1: Atico val Bron is my project manager. Paris Wald is
Speaker 1: my producer. Sean Russo is my head of research. I'm
Speaker 1: Barry Ridholts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg RADIOA