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David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion · Masters in Business

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  Speaker 1: M This is Mesters in Business with Very Results on
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  Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, I have an
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  Speaker 1: extra special and fascinating guests. His name is David McCraney
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  Speaker 1: and he is a science journalist and author. I first
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  Speaker 1: came to know David's work through his blog and book
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  Speaker 1: You Are Not So Smart, which was a fun review
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  Speaker 1: of all of the cognitive foibles and behavioral errors we
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  Speaker 1: all make. But it turns out that David was looking
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  Speaker 1: at how people change their minds, how you persuade people,
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  Speaker 1: and he thought the answer was found in all of
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  Speaker 1: these cognitive errors. And if you could only alert people
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  Speaker 1: to the mistakes they were making, whether it be fact
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  Speaker 1: checks or just showing them their biases uh and the
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  Speaker 1: heuristics they use and the rules of thumb they use
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  Speaker 1: that we're wrong, hey would come around and see the light.
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  Speaker 1: And as it turns out, that approach is all wrong,
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  Speaker 1: and his mia culpa is essentially this book How Minds Change.
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  Speaker 1: It turns out that persuading people about their fundamental beliefs
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  Speaker 1: involves a very very specific set of steps, starting with
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  Speaker 1: they have to want to change. They have to be
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  Speaker 1: willing to change, which only occurs when people come to
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  Speaker 1: the realization that they believe something for perhaps reasons that
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  Speaker 1: aren't very good, and it's a process, it's an exploration.
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  Speaker 1: It's fascinating the people he's met with and discussed, whether
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  Speaker 1: it's deep canvassing or street epistemology, or some of the
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  Speaker 1: other methodologies that are used to persuade people that some
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  Speaker 1: of their really controversial political beliefs are wrong. He's met
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  Speaker 1: with various people from all everything from flat Arthur's to
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  Speaker 1: antivactors to the folks who have left the Westboro Baptist Church,
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  Speaker 1: a pretty notorious and controversial institution. I found this conversation
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  Speaker 1: really to be tremendous and fascinating, and I think you
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  Speaker 1: will also. With no further ado, my interview with David McRaney. Well,
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  Speaker 1: I've been a fan of your work and I thought
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  Speaker 1: when this book came out it was a great opportunity
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  Speaker 1: to sit down and have a conversation with you. Before
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  Speaker 1: we get to the book, let's talk a little bit
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  Speaker 1: about your background. You started as a reporter covering everything
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  Speaker 1: from Hurricane Katrina, test rockets for NASA, Halfway Home for
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  Speaker 1: homeless people with HIV. What led you to becoming focused
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  Speaker 1: on behavior in psychology. Well, I thought that's what I
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  Speaker 1: was gonna do for a living. I was. I went
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  Speaker 1: to school to university to study psychology. I thought it
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  Speaker 1: would be a therapist, got that degree. But then as
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  Speaker 1: I was doing that, uh, there was a sign up
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  Speaker 1: on campus that said opinionated in big helvetica font and
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  Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, I am that would mean that
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  Speaker 1: seems what is that? And said, you know, come down
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: to the offices of the student newspaper. I went down
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: there and said, how does this work? They said, just
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  Speaker 1: email us stuff. You have an opinions piece you want
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  Speaker 1: to do. I'm like m and I I wrote a
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: really like uh sophomore thing about Starbucks on campus because
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: it was just about to come into campus. And I
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  Speaker 1: wrote that and wrote a couple of things. And then
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  Speaker 1: there was a study that had just recently come out,
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  Speaker 1: and who knows if it's replicated or stood the test
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  Speaker 1: of time, but it was when your favorite sports team loses,
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  Speaker 1: men's sperm counts go down. And I thought, our team
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  Speaker 1: at our school had lost every single game that year
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  Speaker 1: so far? What does that mean for the future progeny alumni?
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  Speaker 1: That's right? And I thought it would be a great
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  Speaker 1: headline that would be funny. And the headline I wrote was,
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  Speaker 1: you know, evidence suggests the sperm counts reach record lows
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  Speaker 1: on campus. And uh one of my professors laughed about
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  Speaker 1: it and asked the whole class that they had read it,
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  Speaker 1: but they didn't know that I was in the class.
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  Speaker 1: And I was like, oh, way, this could be fun
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  Speaker 1: So I switched to journalism, and you know, went all
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  Speaker 1: the way through the student paper and then went into
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  Speaker 1: print journalism and TV journalist. But I once I've reached
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  Speaker 1: a certain point in that world, I wasn't able to
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  Speaker 1: write anymore. I was doing editing and helping other people,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: and I just really wanted to write something. And it
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  Speaker 1: just happened blogs were becoming very popular that time. Uh
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  Speaker 1: my dad says, and uh others that were like, oh,
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  Speaker 1: that's way later. I'm thinking back to uh Yahoo's geo
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  Speaker 1: cities and ye world. I mean, I'm I'm the o
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  Speaker 1: G when it comes to blogging, go way way back.
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  Speaker 1: I just happened to be there when they blew up
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  Speaker 1: on the point of like they got book deals and
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  Speaker 1: I started a blog called you Were Not So Smart
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  Speaker 1: about all the cognitive biases and fallacies and heroistics that
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  Speaker 1: I really enjoyed, and I wrote a piece about brand
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  Speaker 1: loyalty that went viral and the rest is history. That
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  Speaker 1: was asked to write a book about it, and then
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  Speaker 1: I was like, oh, I will continue playing in this world.
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  Speaker 1: But I started. I started the podcast to promote the
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  Speaker 1: second book because the first book did so well. They said,
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  Speaker 1: and do another really quickly, and I did, you are
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  Speaker 1: less dumb now? You are now less dumb yet? And
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: I just so happened to start a podcast right when
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: podcasts were becoming a thing. I sent an email to
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  Speaker 1: Mark Mayren because he had the number one podcast. I said,
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  Speaker 1: how do you do this? And he actually sent me
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  Speaker 1: an email with a a point really h like each
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  Speaker 1: with links to Amazon items and no kidding, and he
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  Speaker 1: was very nice. And I got all this stuff and
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  Speaker 1: started it up, and that has now becomes from the centerpiece,
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: because that's uh, I was there when I got going.
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  Speaker 1: My My pitch for this podcast was WTF meets Charlie Rose,
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: and nobody knew what w TF was. I mean, they
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  Speaker 1: didn't know the acronym, nor did they know the podcast.
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  Speaker 1: Because you know, you have to be a little bit
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: of a comedy junkie to have found that in the
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: early days. Later on it was ubiquitous. So sticking with
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: journalism when you were still writing, you seem to have
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: covered some really unusual and interesting stories. Tell us about
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: one of the more surprising things that you covered. I
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: always wanted to do feature pieces. That was the world
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  Speaker 1: that I loved, and that was always in journalism school
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  Speaker 1: and you know, uh, Frank Sinatra has a cold, electricoli
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  Speaker 1: ascid test. I just wanted to write features. I wanted
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  Speaker 1: to be there in person and and like tell you
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  Speaker 1: explore humanity from the inside out my way and I
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  Speaker 1: the Halfway Home for HIV positive men for homeless people
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  Speaker 1: in the Deep South. That was a real turning point
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  Speaker 1: for me because there's uh. I had to spend about
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  Speaker 1: three weeks on that story, and I visited all the
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  Speaker 1: different people, went to all the different meetings, and the
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  Speaker 1: homelessness is very invisible in the Deep South. They often live,
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  Speaker 1: uh in the woods. You know, they're looking for us
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  Speaker 1: and they there's a lot of people in the Deep South.
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  Speaker 1: I don't think there is a homeless problem. And that
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  Speaker 1: was a really interesting way to break that story into
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  Speaker 1: the public. You know, consciousness of no, no, there's a
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  Speaker 1: problem here. It's just hidden from you in a very
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  Speaker 1: particular way, and a lot of people aren't even wear
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  Speaker 1: their organizations that dealt with that, and that really show
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  Speaker 1: me this is the world I want to be and
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  Speaker 1: this kind of stuff I want to do. So I'm
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  Speaker 1: picking up a theme in both your writing columns and books,
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  Speaker 1: which is there's a problem you don't know about it.
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  Speaker 1: It's hidden, and here it is. That's the whole thing,
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  Speaker 1: Like hidden worlds are it for me? Like I grew
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  Speaker 1: up in a trailer in the woods in the Deep South,
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  Speaker 1: and as an only child, I was always searching for
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  Speaker 1: the others. I didn't know how I was going to
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  Speaker 1: get there, and once I got at a hand was
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  Speaker 1: extended into this stage. It's all I want to do.
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  Speaker 1: Like I call him taramissoum moments because I remember the
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  Speaker 1: first time you had tarremsa I was I went to.
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  Speaker 1: It was when I was still in the working for
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  Speaker 1: a TV station. We had a little conference where people
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  Speaker 1: in my position went and we went there and we
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  Speaker 1: got tarmiseu as a dessert and I remember took a
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  Speaker 1: bite of it and I was like, oh my god,
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  Speaker 1: this is so damn good. What what is this, and
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: everyone there was like, uh, it's Tarmissus, And I was like,
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  Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, termisous loved the stuff and and but
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  Speaker 1: that's it. That's what I'm pursuing now. I want more
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  Speaker 1: of those things. I didn't know. I didn't know. You know,
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  Speaker 1: that's really quite interesting. So I guess it's kind of
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  Speaker 1: natural that you evolve towards behavior and cognitive issues. I
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  Speaker 1: was going to ask you what led to it, but
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  Speaker 1: it seems like that's something you've been driving for your
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  Speaker 1: whole career. Yeah, it's a unity through humility. It's it's
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  Speaker 1: we're all absolutely stumbling and fumbling in the dark and
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  Speaker 1: pretending like we're we know we're up to even here
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  Speaker 1: in these fantastic, you know, bloomberg offices, like uh. The
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  Speaker 1: thing I want to avoid is the sense that I've
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  Speaker 1: got it all figured out. And there are massive domains
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  Speaker 1: in psychology, neuroscience, and other social sciences that just start
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  Speaker 1: from that place and then investigate it. And I find
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  Speaker 1: that when I discover these things that we all share
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  Speaker 1: that should give us a pause, should cause us to
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  Speaker 1: feel humility. I feel like I'm in the right spot,
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  Speaker 1: and I want to like dig deeper into those places
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  Speaker 1: and reveal them so we can all be on the
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  Speaker 1: same page that way. So blind spots, unknown unknowns, things
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  Speaker 1: that we are just clearly clueless about, and the biases
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  Speaker 1: that they're When I started out, things like confirmation bias,
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  Speaker 1: wasn't you know there wasn't as just the tip of
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  Speaker 1: the tongue as it is now and survivorship bias, things
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  Speaker 1: like that. So I noticed in this book nothing written
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  Speaker 1: about Dunning Krueger, nothing about Chaldoni's persuasion. Is that a
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  Speaker 1: different approach to decision making and psychology? Like or because
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  Speaker 1: I always assume there would be a little bit of
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  Speaker 1: an overlap there, I didn't want to retread anything there.
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  Speaker 1: There's some foundational stuff that I do talk about in
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  Speaker 1: the book that feel like you can never not talk about,
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  Speaker 1: some which go back a century and like the introspection
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  Speaker 1: illusion has to always be uh talked about. We don't
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  Speaker 1: know the antecedence to our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, but we
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  Speaker 1: are very good at creating narratives to explain ourselves to ourselves.
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  Speaker 1: And if you always have to mention that in any
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  Speaker 1: book about this topic, as far as concern and so
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  Speaker 1: there's a little bit of that. But like Dunning, Krueger
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  Speaker 1: and uh all the other big heavy hitters, I definitely
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: did not want to write How to Win Friends and
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  Speaker 1: Influence People, Part Two because I wanted to come from
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  Speaker 1: a very different perspective on all this, and I didn't
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  Speaker 1: want it to be a book specifically about persuasion, because
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  Speaker 1: I don't even start talking about actual persuasion techniques still
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  Speaker 1: about page two hundred, Like, I show you people who
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  Speaker 1: are doing things that could be labeled as persuasion techniques,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: but I don't get into the like the science of
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  Speaker 1: it till later. Other you mentioned Dunning Krueger. I I
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  Speaker 1: just recently spent some time with Old Dunning, Professor David
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  Speaker 1: Dunning he um a former guest on the show. I
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: don't think he's that old. I think, yeah, I say
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: old in the chow me pat you on the back
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  Speaker 1: cut of right he Uh. I keep asking to come
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: back on the show, but he's working on a new
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  Speaker 1: project and he's a new book on Dunning Crew. Yeah. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: because you know that a lot of people has been
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  Speaker 1: all these people who want to knock it down and
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  Speaker 1: and he's there have been attempts, but none have really
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  Speaker 1: landed a blow. So we helped him out, or he
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: helped us out. My good friend Johansson has a YouTube
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: channel and uh it does explore different science Stuff's called
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: be Smart, and we were talking about that recently. There
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: was a story about someone who, uh, the pilot you
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: went unconscious and they've landed the airplane but they got
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: help from the tower. And we were talking about that
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  Speaker 1: and I was like, I feel like I could land
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: an airplane based off all my video game experience, and
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Joe said he thought he could too, and I said,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: this has got to be done in Kruger, right, And
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: I said it would be cool if you did a
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: video where you got into like one of those commercial
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: commercial flight simulator and they just said, yeah, I try,
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: go ahead, land knock yourself. And so he got I
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: get I got him in touch with Dunning, and Dunning
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: was like, I can't wait to be part of this project.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: So he both interviews back and forth with Dunning before
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: and after, and of course he gets in the simulator
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: and they hand him the controls and they say, okay, landed,
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  Speaker 1: and of course he crashed. And you crashed it three times.
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  Speaker 1: That's impressive, you know. Even David Dunning tells a wonderful
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  Speaker 1: story about they never expected the research paper Dunning Krueger
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: on metacognition to explode. And he goes, I never thought
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: about trademarking it. He goes, go on, go on Amazon.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: You'll see Dunning Krueger University shirts, key chains, all sorts
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: of stuff. He goes, there's a million dollars there. I
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  Speaker 1: just had no experience in that, and I got a
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: little Dunning crugerd did not did not think about the
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  Speaker 1: commercial side of it. So there's a quote I want
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  Speaker 1: to share because it sets up everything. Uh, and I'm
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: I'm sort of cheating. It's from towards the end of
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  Speaker 1: the book. We do this because we are social primates
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  Speaker 1: who gather information in a bias manner for the purpose
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  Speaker 1: of arguing for our individual perspectives in a pooled information
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: environment within a group that deliberates on shared plans of
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: actions towards a collective goal. Kind of sums up everything
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: we do in a US. That was a lot of work,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: with years of work within that little little that A
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: lot of that comes from something that's called the interactions model. Uh.
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  Speaker 1: They're sort of a peanut butter and chocolate have come
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  Speaker 1: up and in this book because I've spent years talking
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  Speaker 1: to people through you are not so smart, and I
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: would argue that we're flawed and irrational, right, And that
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: was there was a big pop psychology movement for that
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: about a decade ago, things like predictably Irrational and uh,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: even the work of Knomen Diversky, like a lot of
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: the like interpretation of that was like, oh, look how
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: dumb we are, right, and look how easily fooled we're
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Look how bad we were probabilities. And one of the
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: incepting moments of this book was I did a lecture
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: and somebody came up to me afterwards. Her father was
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: had slipped into a conspiracy theory, and she asked, what
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: do I do about that? And I told her nothing
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: like but I felt gross saying it. I felt like
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: I was locking my keys in my car. I felt like,
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: I think I know enough to tell you that, but
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: I know I don't. And also I don't want to
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: be that that pessimistic and centicle. And at the same time,
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: the attitudes and norms on same sex marriage the United
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: States had flipped like very rapidly, We're that. So those
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: two things together I was like, I would I want
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: to understand this better. So I invited on my podcast
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Hugo mercy A and he teamed up with Dan Sperber
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: and they created something called the interactions model, which is
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: a model that I only want to talk to them about,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: you know, changing minds, arguing, and it opened up this
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: whole world and through them, I also met with Tom Stafford,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: and there's the interactionist model, and there's the truth wind scenario,
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: and those are sort of a peanut butter and chocolate
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: my come up. And it's because instead of looking at
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: people as being flawed in irrational, alsa is just as
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: biased and lazy, which is different. And what you're just
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: talking about what that paragraph is about the interactionist model,
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: which is uh, A lot of the research that went
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: into all those books from about a decade ago. They
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: were pulling from studies that were done on individuals and isolation.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: And then when you pool all of their conclusions together
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  Speaker 1: and you treat people as a group of people based
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: off that research, we do look kind of flawed, right,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: we do look very irrational. But if you take that
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: exact same research and you allow people to do liberating groups,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: you get much different reactions, much different responses, and that's
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: been furthered by the work of Tom Stafford. He's been
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: taking some of the old stuff from those old studies
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: and putting them to groups and even creating um social
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  Speaker 1: media similarcrooms that work like Twitter and Facebook and stuff,
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  Speaker 1: but have a totally different context, allows people to deliberate
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: and argue in different ways and you get much different results.
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  Speaker 1: You get better results were much. A good example of
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: that is like, uh, you take something from the common
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  Speaker 1: reflection task or something like a I'll make it real
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: simple so we don't have to like do any weird
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: math in their heads. Like you're running a race and
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: you pass the person in second place, what place you in?
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: And you know the intuitive answer You're start trying to
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: work it out in your head. But the answer one
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: if you like lean back, is well I replaced second place.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: I'm in second place. But if you ask people individually
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: you get a pretty high response fade where they get
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: the wrong answer. But if you take that exact same
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: question and you pose it to a group of people
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: and I do some lectures now and you say, Okay,
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  Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask this question, keep the answer to yourself. Now,
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: does anyone to have the right answer. You know you
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: have the right answer. Raise your hand. Somebody raised their hand.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: I say, okay, what's the answer. They give you the answer.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Then you say, explain your reasoning, and then they explain
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: the reasoning. When they give their answer, there will be
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: a grumble on the crowd. When they explain the reasoning
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: behind it, the crowd goes, Okay. Now, if you took
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: everyone's individual answer and pulled it together, you'd be like, wow,
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: this group got their wrong answer. But if you allow
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: that deliberation moment to take place where I explain how
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: reasoning to you, you get a group of people who
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: would go from eight percent in correct correct. And we
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: really set up for that. And the interactionist model is
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: all about this the work of Humorocity and Dan Spur
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: really have a great book about this, called The Enigma
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: of Reason. It's a it's not a light read, it's
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: really sort of you know, academic, but it's great because
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: they found, looking through the old research and their own
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: new research, that we have two cognitive systems, one for
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: producing arguments, one for evaluating arguments, and the one that
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: produces arguments does it very lazily and very in a
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: very biased manner. You can think of it like you
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: ask where do you want to go eat? And you know,
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: I have three or four people after a movie like
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: hanging out in the lobby like I wanna I want
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: to go here, I want to go here, I want
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: to go here, and UH they have biased reasons for that.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: One person's says, hey, let's go get sushi, and the
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: somebody's like, we're over here and on my ex work there,
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: or or I someone to say I had sushi yesterday,
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: or I don't like sushi. That you can't predict what
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: are going to be the counter argument, so you to
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: present your most biased and lazy argument up front, and
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: you let the deliberation take place in the pooled UH
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: evaluation process. You all flow the cognitive labor to that
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: we're all familiar with doing that. Everyone has their ideas,
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: You trade back and forth, and we decide on the
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: group goal on the plan, which is what this evolved
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: to do. But we are also very familiar with the
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: way that plays out on the internet, which is not
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: good for an AUC is removed and you don't get
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: the same social cues coming right, So you get like,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: let's say, my good friend Alistair Croll, who runs conferences.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: He put it to me like this. He's like, on
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: the Internet, when you say, uh, I want a grilled
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: cheese sandwich, Uh, it's not an argument for for who
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: wants grilled cheese sandwiches? Should we get grilled cheese sandwiches
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: anywhere else? Agree with me? On the Internet, on most
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: of the platforms we use today, it's saying I want
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: grilled cheese sandwiches. Who wants to go with me to
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: the grilled cheese sandwich room? And so everyone who agrees
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: with that position and is already like, yeah, that's what
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: I want to they get pulled off into a community
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: of people who want this and then a whole new
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: set of psychological act that was going to play, which
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: is all about being a social primate and being a community.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: So there's no iteration, there's no debate, there's no consensus
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: forming as to what the best solution to that problem is.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: You just have some salient issue and people form of
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: what looks like madness or what looks like some sort
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: of nefarious thing going down. One of the things that
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: the Internet gives us is the ability to group up
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: very quickly, and we are social prime rates. If we
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: go into a group, we start being worried about motivations
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: like I want to be a good member of my group,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: I want to be to be considered a trustworthy member
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: of my group, and so on, and you get a
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: lot of weird stuff we see today that that falls
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: into the domain of being polarized or being in a
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: system where everyone is. If you have in a group
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: people who agree with you in your current position, it's
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: very difficult to argue out of it because I can
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: always fall back to them from back and so that
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: that's some of the stuff that goes into that paragraph,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: and it gets more complicated from there. But yeah, it's
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: that was very illuminating to me, and a lot of
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: the new material in this book relates back to it.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: Not that the earlier books were wrong or incorrect in anyway,
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: but I kind of took this as a little bit
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: of a mia Kalpa in terms of, hey, I was
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: focusing on one area, but really we need to focus
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: on a broader area in terms of not just why
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: we make these cognitive eras, but how you can change
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: somebody's mind who's trapped in some heuristic or other cognitive
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: problem that is leading them the wrong life. I did
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: not intend for this to be like some sort of
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: marketing phrase or trick, but it's the truth. But I
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: in writing a book of how Minds Change, I changed
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: my mind on a lot of stuff that I was
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: like depending on for like my career, and I'm happy
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: to do that. It feels really great to be on
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: the other side of some of these things and see
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: it more clearly and more, you know, more dimensionality to it.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about the blog that
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: led to the books that really put you on the map.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: You are not so smart? Um. I love the title
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: of this Why you have too many friends on Facebook?
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: Why your memory is mostly fiction? And forty six other
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: ways you're deluding yourself? Was there were there forty six chapters?
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Was that just a random No? That was that was
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: exactly how many things are exploring in the book. Yeah,
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: that's that's great. So we already discussed what led you
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: to this area of research. Why did you decide to
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: go from blogging, which is easy in short form, to
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: writing a book, which anyone who has done it will
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: tell you it can be a bit of a slog
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: It was. Here's how that happened. I was just blogging
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: away back in the early days, and maybe you had
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: a thousand people reading my stuff. And that was back
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: way before medium and Twitter and any other way to
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: get your stuff out there. And when did you launch?
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: You are not so smart. I got into an argument
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: two of my friends about what was better the PlayStation
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: three of the Xbox three six. We got so mad
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: at each other that it was like I might not
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: be able to like hang out with them. And this
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: isn't a political Trump versus Biden debate. This is yeah,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: but it's just the same psychology. And I couldn't get over, like,
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: why would I get mad about this? It's just a
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: box of wires and uh. And I, since I had
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: a background in psychology, I went and I had access
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: to the university library. I was I just was like,
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: there's got to be some material about this. And I
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: found a bunch of material and brand loyalty and identification
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: and group identity, and I wrote a little blog about it,
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: but I framed it as Apple versus PC. That we
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: mean those commercials were oute right there. And at that
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: time the blog Gizmoto had stolen the iPhone prototype. I
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: recall that, and like Steve Jobs, and they didn't steal it.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: They found it in a bar. Found they found it
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: in a bar, and uh, Steve Jobs sent them emails says,
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: give me back my iPhone and they just they just
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: went for the hits and they super viral. And I
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: just assumed they had like a Google alert for stuff
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: written about Apple stuff. And I got an email said
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: can we reblog your blog post on this? And I
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: was like, yeah, sure, And I went from a thousand
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: to two hundred and fifty thousand people, and I was like, oh,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: I should write a bunch of stuff on And so
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: that week I just started going like things in that
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: sort of area, and I wrote a lot more things
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: about like I learned helplessness and other issues, and I
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: had an audience and it and it was maybe four
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: months later. An agent reached out who had worked on
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: pre economics and said, I think this could be a book.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: And she still my age. I actually met with her
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: two days. If I'm in town, I want to always
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: try to meet with because she changed my life. Alan
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: Bar amazing human being. And uh we turned it into
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: a book, and about half of it was already in
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: blog form. I wrote the rest of it for the
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: book and that book just really took off, like it's
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: still even today. It's like in nineteen different languages. It's
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: something every once in a while to beating number one
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: in a different country. It was recently number one in Vietnam.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Well that's how I went from blog to book world.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: But then they were like, hey, could you write another book?
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: And I said, I sure can, and uh, I wanted
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: to promote it. And at that time, podcasting had just
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: become a thing. I was listening to Radio Lab and
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: This American Life, and uh, I was like you, I
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: was listening to WTF and I said, I can. I
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: want to do something like that, and I just started
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: up the podcast to promote it. And it just turned
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: out that the podcast was really where I could actually
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: explore this stuff, and I jumped into it. So so
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: there is a quote. I think this might be from
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: the back of the book. So I don't know if
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: this is your words or a Blurbu'm stealing, but quote.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: There's a growing body of work coming out of psychology
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: and cognitive science that says you have no clue why
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: you act the way you do, choose the things you choose,
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: or think the thoughts you think that's got the introspecting illusion,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: and it's been a real centerpiece of my work for
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: a long time. We don't have access to the antecedents
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but we do have thoughts,
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: feelings of behaviors that requires some kind of explanation, and
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: we are very good at coming up with these post
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: hoc ad hawk rationalizations and justifications for what we're doing,
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: and those eventually become a narrative that we live by.
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: It becomes sort of the character we portray, and we
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: end up being an unreliable narrator in the story of
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: our own lives. And so the two it's like a
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: one two punch of you're unaware of how unaware you are,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: and that leads you to being the unreliable narrator in
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: the story of your life. And that's fine, Like this
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: is something that is adaptive in most situations. But there's
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: when we get into some complex stuff like you know, politics,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: running a business, designing an airplane. You should know about
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: some of these things because they'll get you into some
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: trouble that we never got into, you know, a hundred
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: thousand years ago. So a lot of this is evolutionary
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: baggage that we carry forward. But you touched on two
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: of my favorite biases. One is the narrative fallacy that
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: we create these stories to explain what we're doing, as
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: well as hindsight bias, where after something happens, of course
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: we that was going to happen, We saw it coming.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Tell us about those two dies, well, they're the fallacy.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: I love this. My good friend Will Store, who writes, um,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: it's a question I have for you love enemies of science.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: I love Will so much. And he has a book
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: not too long ago he came up with the science
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: of storytelling, and uh, I love that domain all the
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: whole hero's journey, the Camp of Campbell. Right. The science
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: side of that is, most storytelling takes place exactly along
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: the same lines as retrospection. So your retrospection, looking back,
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: prospection looking forward. We tend to look back on our
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: own lives. As you know, we're the hero, were the protagonist,
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: and whatever we're looking at specifically, it's like, Okay, we
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: started out in this space, and then we went on
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: a exploratory journey, and then we eventually came back. Yeah,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: eventually we came back around with that new knowledge and
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: applied it. Yeah, yeah, you know that we have the
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: the synthesis and the anti thesis and all those things
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: are how we kind of see ourselves. Is how we
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: make sense of our past because we couldn't remember everything
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: that would be horrible we had, so we edit it
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: to be useful in that way. That's when when you're
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: watching a movie or reading a book and it doesn't
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: seem to be work for you, it's because it's not
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: really playing nice with that retrospective system. But it's also
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: our personal narratives seemed to be very nice and tidy
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: in that way, and although they never are. If you've
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: ever told a story about something with someone who was
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: also there and they're like, it didn't happen that. My
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: wife says that all the time, I don't know what
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: what experience he had, but I was there, None of
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: that happened. That's right, And you, uh, if without people
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: to check you, what does that say? It says that
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: a whole lot of you, what you believe is the
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: story of your life is one of those things that
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: if we had a perfect diary of it or a
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: recording of it, or someone who was there who could
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: challenge you, it wasn't exactly the way you think it was.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Who was the professor after was it nine eleven or
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: some big events had everybody right down their notes as
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: to what they saw, what they felt, what they were experiencing.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: And then I guess these were freshmen and then by
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: the time they become seniors they circle back and asked them,
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: now it's three years later, and not only do they
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: misremember it, but when showing their own notes, they disagree
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: with themselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's been repeated a few times.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: I'll talk about it and how mind changed. Robert Burton
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: did this experiment after the Challenger incident. That was that
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: was the big one, right, But the one that in
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: that study was when it's signaling above the noise. And yeah,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: that's the most amazing part of it. You they have
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: you to write down whatever happened, at what you thought happened.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: They also do a prospection wise, I think they've done
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: they've done it where you tell me what you think
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: is going to happen, and you put into a Manila envelope,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: and then the thing happened, you know, whatever event takes place,
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: and then you ask people, what did you what did
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: you predict? Was going to happen, and they tell you,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: I predicted exactly what happened. You take it out of
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: the minial envelope and it's not that and they're like, oh,
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: come on, there's no way. But even though that's my handwriting,
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: I never would have written. And that's the weirdest thing
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: in the in the Challenger study, uh, when he showed
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: people that their memory was absolutely not what they thought
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: it was, their first reaction was to say, you're tricking me, like,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: like this is you wrote this, like somebody else wrote this.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: And that seems so similar to something called anasignosia. And
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: anasignosia is the denial of disorder. And you can have
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: like a lesion or a brain injury that it calls
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: some something that's wrong in your body. But then on
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: top of that, you have this other thing, which is
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: denial of the thing that's wrong your body. So I've
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: seen cases where people have an arm that doesn't function properly,
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: and they'll ask, like, why can't you lift your arm?
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: Why can't you pick up this pencil? And they'll and
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: they'll say, oh, what do you do? And I can
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: pick that up? But what's going on with this arm?
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: Like that's my mom's arm. She's playing a joke on
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: me right now. Like the split brain patients where they
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: don't understand what they're seeing when they come up with
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: This is the greatest example we've been discussing is if
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: you if you have someone who has a they called
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: split brain patient, the corpus colos and that connects the
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: two hemispheres. They corpus colosomy is often performed when a
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: person has a certain kind of they have seizures that
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: they don't want a cascade. Um, you end up with
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: basically two brains, and you can use a divider so
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: that one I is going to one hemisphere wives going
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: the other. You can show a person in image. Let's
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: say you show them a terrible carrec mangled bodies, and
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: they feel very sick. But the portion of and you're
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: showing that too, is not the portion that delivers language.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: So then you ask the person who is feeling sick,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: why you feel sick right now? What's going on? They say, Oh,
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: I had something bad at lunch. You have we we
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: will very quickly come up with a narrative and our
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: explanation for what we're experiencing, and we do so believing
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: that narrative, even if that narrative is way far away
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: from what's actually taking place. So let's quickly run through
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: some of our favorite cognitive bias is going to be tested.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: I hope I remember this. Let's go, um. Well, we'll
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: start with an easy one. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias. When
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: people write about confirmation bias, they usually get it pretty wrong. Uh,
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: here's the way it confirms. It's a great way to
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: put it. The least sexy term in psychology is that
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: makes sense stopping rule. You think they come up with
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: a better phrase, and that that just means when I
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: go looking for an explanation of something, when when it finally,
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: when it makes sense, I'll stop looking for information. Confirmation
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: bias is what happens. Here's the way I prefer to
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: frame it. Let's say you're at a tent in the woods.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: You hear a weird sound and you think, oh, that
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: might be a bear. I should go look. So what
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: you have a negative effect in your body, you have
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: an anxiety. You go out looking for confirmation that that
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: anxiety is just or reasonable because as a social aspect
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: to it at all times, because we can't escape our
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: social selves, and so you're looking and maybe you don't
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: find it, you know, maybe you don't find evidence that
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: points in that direction. Eventually you you modify your behavior
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: based off what you see with your flash lie. If
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: you do that online though an environment that's an information
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: rich environment. You have some sort of anxiety and you're
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: looking for justification that that anxiety is uh is reasonable.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: You'll find it. You'll find something right, and that will
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: confirm that you that your search was was good and
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: justified and reasonable to other human beings. So confirmation bo
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: is very simply is just something happens that doesn't make sense.
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: You want to disambiguate it. It's uncertain. You want to
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: reach some level of certainty. So you look for information
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: that based off your hunch, your hypothesis, and then when
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: you find information that seems to it's like confirm your hunch.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: You stop looking as if you like, did some something wrong,
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: as if you solved it. Why don't we as a species, look,
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: we're disconfirming information just to validate in most situations is
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: not adaptive, like confirmation bias is actually the right move
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: in most situations, Like if you're looking for your keys,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: you know, yeah, you don't go looking for your keys
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: on Mars. You go looking for them in your kitchen, right,
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: and like it's the faster solution, and most of our
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: most of these biases go back to the adaptive thing
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: is the thing that costs the least calories and and
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: gets you to this solution as quickly as possible, so
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: you can go back to trying to find food not
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: getting eaten. And in this case, most of the time,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: most of the time confirmation bias serves as well. It's
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: in those instances where it really doesn't serve as well
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: that we end up with things like you know, climate
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: change or what have you. What about ego depletion, Oh, man,
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: ego depletion is one of the things that boy that
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: it goes back and forth. Uh. The original scientists are
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: still like hardcore into it. I love it. Uh. Whether
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: or not ego depletion is properly like defined or categorized,
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: the phenomenon does exist. The actual mechanisms of it aren't
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: well understood. But when you have been faced with a
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: lot of cognitive tasks, uh, you start to have a
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: hard time completing more cognitive task and in general, hum
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: as well as issues that require willpower and discipline. Right,
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: So the more you the more you use willpower, the
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: less willpower you have to use. It's finite, not not unended.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: And this is not well understood a lot of the like,
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: here's why this is happening, Like haven't I failed to replicate?
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: So we have this phenomenon, but we still don't quite
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: understand what is the mechanism under allowing it. Well, let
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: me do one last one. The Benjamin Franklin And that's
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: my favorite Benjamin Franklin effect goes back to you know,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: a lot of my new book is is as in
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: this domain of justification and rationalization. Um, Benjamin Franklin had
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: someone who was opposing him at every turn. I call
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: him a hater in the in the previous book, back
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: when that was a term. Yeah, and uh, he just
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: had this political opponent that he, uh, he knew was
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: going to cause him real problems for the next thing
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: he was going up for. And uh, he also knew
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: that this guy had a really nice book collection. And
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: everybody also knew that Benjamin Franklin had a nice book collection,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: and so he sent them a letter and said, there's
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: a book that I've always wanted to read. But I
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: can never find I hear you've got a copy of it. No,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: the who knows it seems from reading the literature that
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: been Refrancla totally had this book. And uh, but the
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: guy gave him the book as a favor, and he
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: was like very honored that been re Franklin asked for it.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: I like to think of Benjamin Franklin just like put
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: it on a shelf and then wait, wait, waited a month,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: and then took it back to him. Um, but he said,
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: thank you, I'm forever in your debt. You're the best.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: And from that point forward, that guy never said another
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: negative thing about Benjamin Franklin. So what that comes down
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: to is I just observed my own behavior. I did
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: something that produced cognitive dissonance. I have a negative attitude
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: toward ben or Franklin, but I did something that a
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: person with a positive attitude would do. So I must
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: either think a strange thing about who I am and
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: what I'm doing, or I could just take the easy
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: rout out and go I like Benjamin Franklin. And that's
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: that I think called that the Benjamin Franklin effect. I
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: find that really just fascinating that there are two phrases
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: that I'm in a note of in one of the
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: books that I have to ask about extinction burst, and
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: I have to ask what is wrong with Catharsis. Catharsis
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: the stincionburst is a real thing that I love. Uh.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: I see that everywhere I see. I see that all
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: in society right now in many different ways. That extinction
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: bursts is u when you have a behavior that has
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: been enforced many many times, and you it's your body
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: even expects that you're going to perform this behavior, and
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: you start doing something like say dieting, or you're trying
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: to keep smoking, or you're trying to do you're trying
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: to just extinguish the behavior. Right at the moment before
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: it fully extinguishes, you will have a little hissy fit.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: You'll have a as they say back home, um, you'll
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: have a toddler outburst sort of thing where you're all
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: of your systems, cognitive systems are saying, why don't we
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: really really try to do that thing again, because we're
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: about to lose it? And the they call this an
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: extinction bursts. That moment of like if you're watching it
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: on a slope, it's sloping down down, down, down, and
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: there's a huge spike. And that could either be the
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: moment you go back to smoking or relapse, or the fish.
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: It could be the death rottle. Depends on how you
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: how you deal with your extinction burst. I thought that
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: was fascinating, And then of Tharsis comes up. Why is
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: the concept of that cathartic surrender or finish the things problematic?
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: It's related to the extverse. There's a for a while
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: there this, especially in like nineteen fifties psychology, the idea
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: that like just get it out, you know, like like
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: if you're angry, go beat up a punching bag or
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: yell at people from the safety of your car. Yeah.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: There used to be a thing in like the eighties
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: scream therapy. Yeah, I recall the unfortunately primal scream. Yeah.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately or fortunately. Uh, the evidence, the evidence suggests that
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: what this does is reward you for the behavior, and uh,
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: you maintain that level of anger and anxiety and frustrations.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: It's self rewarding, yea. And so it's uh, there are
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: ways to have cathartic experiences, but the ones where you
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: reward yourself for being angry tend to keep you angry
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: that that makes a lot of sense. And last question
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: on you are not so smart? Do we ever really
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: know things or do we just have a feeling of knowing?
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: Is an unanswerable question, thankfully, Uh from from you? No, No,
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: I feel like I feel like I know. That's uh.
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: Here's what's important to know about the Certainty is an emotion.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: This is something that gets me in trouble. I think
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: in like rationalists and uh, you know, circles. But I
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: won't get you in trouble here. Well, thank you, because
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: like the the ideas like facts not feelings or your
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: you know, let's not get emotional, let's not make emotional appeals. Uh,
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: there's no dividing emotion from cognition. Emotion is cognition, and
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: certainty is one of those things that lets you bridge
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: the two because certainty is the emergent property of networks
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: waiting something in one direction or another, and you feel like,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: you know, if you want to do percentage wise, it's
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: is you can feel it. I ask you percentage wise,
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: like if I ask you did you have eggs last
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: week on Tuesday? And you're like, I think I did,
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: and like, well, like on a scale from one to ten,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: like on a percentage wise on Saturday morning, I went
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: to the dinner, I had eggs. So that feeling that
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: you're getting, there's something generating that deepeealing, right, So the
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: feeling of knowing is something that's separate from knowing, but
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: as far as subjectively, it's the exact same thing. We
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: only get to see this objectively in some way, especially
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: in those like open up the middle envelope, let's see
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: what you actually said. So this is a pet peeve
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: of mind because here in finance there is this, for
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: lack of a better phrase, meme that the markets hate uncertainty,
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: and whenever people are talking about what's going to happen
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: in the future, well, it's very uncertain, to which I say, well,
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: the future is always inherently uncertain. When things are going
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: along fine and the market's going up, we feel okay
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: with our uncertainty, so we can lie to ourselves about
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: it very very easily, exactly. But when everything is terrible,
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: the markets are down, the Feds raising rates, inflation, Oh,
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: the market hates uncertainty. Now at the uncertainty level, you
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: didn't know the future before, you don't know the future now,
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: but you can no longer lie to yourself and you
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: have a sense of of what's going on. This is,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: by the way, a very out liar view, because everybody
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: loves the uncertain. So well, I'm happy to sit here,
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: I despise. I'm happy to sit here and surrounded about
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: all these people and take the position of, uh, you're
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: very wrong. Uh, the they are less smart. There is
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: no such thing as certainty. This is, you know, from
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: the scientific or psychological even philosophical domain. Everything is probabilistic
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: and we can like hedge our bets, but the concept
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: of certainty is way outside the domain of any of
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: these topics. Yeah, and and well, we'll talk about bertrand
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: Russell later. But it's a quote from your book that
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: always makes me think, well, let's let's talk about it now,
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: because it's such an interesting observation quote. The observer when
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: he seems to himself be observing a stone is really,
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: the stone upon himself. Right, Isn't that awesome? That is
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: right from this book How Minds Change by Day Man Here,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: it's a good book. The U I got that from
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: interviewing the Lately Ross who created the term naive realism.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: It's another phrase I love, and this this is a
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: way to kind of get into naive realism. N I
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: realism is the assumption that you're getting a sort of
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: a video camera view of the world through your eyeballs,
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: and that you're storing your memories and some sort of
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: database like a hard drive and uh, and that when
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: I ask your opinion on say, uh, immigration or gun control,
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: that whatever you tell me came from you went down
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: to the bowels of your castle to your scrolls and
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: pulled out the scrolls by candle light and read them all.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: And then one day came up from that and emerged
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: from the staircase and raised your finger and said, ha,
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: this is what I think about gun control. And it
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: minded what what's invisible in the process or what becomes
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: invisible when we're at we're tasked with explaining ourselves. Is
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: that uh, all the rationalization and justification and all the
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: interpretation that you've done, and all the elaboration, these all
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: these psychological terms, and that you Uh. This concept of
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: nairealism is that you see reality for what it is
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: and other people are mistaken when you get into moments
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: of conflict and the The thing that bergand Russell said
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: is so nice because he is alluding to the fact
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: that all reality's virtual reality, that the subjective experiences is
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: very limited, with the German psychologists called an un velt
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: the thing related to naive realism that was so surprising
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: in the book. And we keep alluding to evolution in
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: various things. I did not realize that the optic nerve
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: does not perceive the world in three D. It's only
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: two dimensional. And okay, so we have two eyes, so
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: we were able to create an illusion of depth of
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: a third dimension, but the human eye does not see
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: the world in full three Yeah. I just while while
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: I'm in visiting New York, I spent time with Pascal
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: who's in the book, and he's the one who like
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: ram me through all this. That's amazing, isn't it. It's uh,
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: the retina. I mean, you know, obviously at microscopic levels
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: it's three dimensional, but for the purpose of the vision,
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: it's a two dimensional sheet. And so we create within
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: consciousness the third dimension. But it's an illusion, just like
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: every color is an elite. It's a very realistic illusion,
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: but it's an illusion, right, And and that's why paintings
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: can look nice because you play with the rules of
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: illusions that to create depth. And even people who who
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: gained vision late in life, the understanding depth and three
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: dimensionality is something that takes a lot of experience. You
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: have to learn how to do it. And they oftentimes
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: they'll in experiments with people who just gained vision late
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: in life, they'll like put a telephone and run like
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: far away from them, and they'll they'll try to reach
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: out to it. It's like thirty ft away because you
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: have to learn depth. That's something that we learned over time.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: We you know, we did as children. Who don't you remember,
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: you don't really think about it. So let's talk about
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: how minds change. And I want to start by asking
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: how did a flat earther inspire this book? They actually
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: came in a little later in the process. I was
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: there was a documentary on Netflix. You may have seen it,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: Behind the Curve, uh, and the producers of that were
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: ends of my podcast, and then they grabbed a couple
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: of my guests for the show and everything, and I
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: thought it would be you know, I would love to
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: help promote something. I didn't know this, but someone told
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: me I was in the credits and I looked in
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: the credits it was like, you know David, thanks to
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: David McRaney, And I was like, oh wow. So I
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: emailed them and said, hey, you want to come on
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: my podcast, we'll talk about your documentary. Because if I
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: had gotten a chance to make a Netflix show, it
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: had have been very similar because that's it seems like
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: it's about flat Earth, but it's actually about motivated reasoning
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: and identity and community and things like that, and community
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: community is a huge part of it. Group identity, and
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: um that after that episode, Uh, they a group in
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: Sweden do they put on something like south By Southwest
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: called the gather Festival. They asked, Hey, we got this
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: crazy idea. What if you go to Sweden and we'll
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: get h Mark Sargent, who was sort of the spokesperson
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: for the flat Earth community, and we'll put you on stage.
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: And I know you're writing a book about how minds change,
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: you can try to try out some of those techniques
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: on them. And I was like, oh, that sounds awesome,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: So um I did. I went and I met Mark,
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: and uh, I found it very nice, very lovely man.
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: And I did try something at the point where where
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: I met him. I was about halfway through and that
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: wasn't great at the techniques, but I did an okay job.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: That's that's towards the end of the book where you
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: actually describe um. He said it was one of the
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: best conversations he ever had. You don't call him an idiot,
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: you know challenges views. You're really asking how did you
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: come to these sorts of perspectives to get him to
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: focus on his own process. That's the whole idea of
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: the techniques I learned about in the book. Uh, we're
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: writing this book. I met many different organizations. Deeve Campels
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: are street epistemology, people who work in motivational interviewing and
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: therapeutic practices, UH, professional negotiation and conflict resolution. UH people
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: work in those spaces. And what really astounded me was
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: when I would bring the stuff that I was witnessing
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: to scientists or experts. They there was this underlying literature
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: that made sense. But none of these groups had ever
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: heard of this literature for the most part, and they
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: definitely hadn't heard of each other. But they did a
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: lot of a b testing thousands of conversations throw away.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: I didn't work keeping what did and they would arrive
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: at this is how you ought to do this, and
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: then would also be similar they had it was in steps,
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: the steps would be in the same order. And I
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: sorted think of it like, you know, if you wanted
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: to build an airplane, the first airplane ever built, no
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: matter where it was builder who did it, it's gonna
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: look kind of like an airplane. It's gonna have wings,
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: and it's going to be lighter than because you're dealing
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: with the physics that you have to contend with when
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: it comes to the kind of conversation dynamics that actually
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: persuade people or move people or illuminate them. They have
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: to work with the way brains makes sins of the
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: world and all of the evolutionary path that pressures all
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: of that. And so these independent groups discovered all that
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: independent of each other and of the science that supports them.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: And Mark Sargeant, like when I first met him, I
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: shook his hand and said, look, I'm not going to
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: like make fun of you or anything. Goes Oh, that's fine,
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: make fun of me all you want. And he he
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: took out his phone and showed me the commercially've done
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: for LifeLock, whereas like, if I can do it, anybody
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: can do it, and he's totally okay with it. But
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: that's not what I did. And then when I sat
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: down with him, one of the essences, I know we'll
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: get to it, but it's like, you don't want to
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: face off and I need to win, you need to lose.
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: I'm trying. I'm not even to aiding you. What I
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: want to do is get shoulder to shoulder with you
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: and say, isn't interesting that we disagree? I wonder why
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: you want to pardner up with me and trying to
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: investigate that mystery together. And in so doing I opened
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: up a space to let him meta cognate and run
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: through how did I arrive at this? And that's what
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: I did with him on stage, and you know, we
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: learned all sorts of things, like he he used to
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: be a ringer for a video game company, so that
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: so that's where his conspiratorial stuff first came from. Oh
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: so of course he wasn't just a guy showing these
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: contests weren't fair. They and it's always a name, they
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: had somebody skewing the outcome. Going through his whole history,
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: it was really clear how he got motivated into this.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: But the thing that really kicked in was, you know,
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: flat Earth is a pretty big group of people. They
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: have conventions, they have dating apps, and once he became
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: a spokesperson for it, and he's traveling around the world,
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: is going to Sweden, Like now he's not traveling around
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: the world, he's traveling up across surface. That's right. He
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: is traversing the geography Cartesian plane of planet, that's right.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: And so that that was a really the sun flat also,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: that's always my question. If the Earth is flat, is
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: the Sun of sphere, why would some celestial bodies be
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: There are schisms within the flat earth community. There are
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: many different models of flat Earth. The one that Mark
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: Sergeant is part of. They see the Earth that's sort
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: of it's almost like a snow globe. It's flat, but
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: there's a dome, there's a there's makes perfect sense to
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: and perfectly the Sun and the Moon are are are
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: celestial objects that are orbs. And when you ask my
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: good question was like, okay, well then it seems manufactured.
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: Who made it? God's or aliens? And he goes and
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: I remember leaning in and saying it doesn't matter. Isn't
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: it the same thing? Well, you know, the Greeks figured
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: out five thousand years ago that the Earth was round
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: by just looking at the shadow of the sun cast
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: at the same time in different cities of different latitudes.
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: But five thousand years of progress, just hold a side. Look,
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't you would believe that the number of ways
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: that that has been explained away in you know, flat
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: earth world, there's a plenty of explanations for why that's,
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: you know, part of the big conspiracy. My favorite part
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: of the flat earth community was flat Earth Meets done
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: in Krueger with the guy who built a rocket to
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: go up in order to prove that the Earth was flat.
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: We don't know what he saw because he crashed and died.
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: Do you recall this was like remember three summers ago,
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: I can tell I can I know exactly how the
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: response would like see see he took him out and
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: they took him out. So you mentioned several different groups,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: The Street Epistemology and the deep canvassers were really fascinating
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: my book. Right, So a quick background, A well funded
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: group in California. We're trying to convince people to support
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: the Marriage Equality Act, which ultimately ends up failing in
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: California by three or four percent, and they had done
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: thousands of home visits, knocked on the door, Hey, we
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: want to talk to you about about this act and
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: why we think you should support it. And the failure
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: of that was a real moment of clarity, and they said,
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: we have to rejigger everything we doing because this is
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: totally ineffective. And the methodology they came up with that
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: standing shoulders shoulder and let's figure out why we think.
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: Let's explore why we think so differently. You know, in
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: politics and single issues, if you can move somebody a
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: tenth of a percent, it's huge. Their impact is a
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: hundred times that it's ten. It's astonishing. Tell us a
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: little bit about what this group does that's so effective
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: when they're supporting a specific issue. Yeah, the background you
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: gave exactly what happened. They wanted to understand how they lost,
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: and they went door to door asking They came up
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: with this idea. This Dave Fleischer, who runs the Leadership
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: Lab U c l A or USC and the LGBT
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: Center of Los Angeles, and they're extremely well funded, millions
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: of millions of dollars and the biggest LGBT organization of
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: its kind in the world, and the Leadership Lab was
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: their political action wing. And as they were doing this
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: cavasing thing and they lost in Prop eight, he wanted
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: to know, how could that be because this seems to
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: be an area where we would definitely wouldn't lose this,
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: And so he said, what if we just wouldn't ask people?
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: And so they did the exact same thing again. So
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: this time they knock on doors and say they went
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: to areas they knew that they law that they had
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: lost in help us understand, and if that somebody had
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: voted against it, they asked, why did you vote against it?
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: And they had these listening brigades about fifty seventy five
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: people would go out and knocked or the door, and
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: to their astonishment, people wanted to talk. When they started asking, like,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: this is a non adversarial thing, it's just hear them out.
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: And when they did that, these conversations we go to
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: forty minutes and they started thinking, well, we need to
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: record these, and they started recording them, and somewhere along
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: the way, about three or four times people talk themselves
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: out of their position when you just stood there and listened,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: don't You're not You're not nudging them, and you're not
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: challenging them, You're just letting them be heard. And so
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: they wanted to know what did we do there, what
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: happened in that conversation that led to that? So they
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: started reviewing that those specific conversations and taking bits and
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: pieces and testing out was that this wasn't that, was that,
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: this wasn't that. And they eventually when I met them,
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: they had done seventeen thousand of these conversations and recorded
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: on the video and they had a b tested their
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: way to a technique that was so powerful that while
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: I went there several times and went door to door
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: with them everything, but every time I went there would
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: be scientists there, there'd be activists from around the world
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: there because they were like, what have you done? What
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: have you discovered? And it's very powerful. And over the
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: course of writing the book, the research was done a
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: couple different times on them, and they found the numbers.
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: You're talking about twelve ten or twelve percent success, right,
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: And the method is very similar. You only really know
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: two of the steps, but you know it's about ten steps.
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: If you wanted to do it the full thing The
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: most important aspect of this is non judgmental listening and
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: non judgmental listening and holding. You're gonna hold space to
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: let the other person explore how they arrived at their
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: current position. In other words, you're going to help them
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: be very self reflective and figure out their thought problems.
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: It's probably good to give you a foundation of what motivational,
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: what motivated reasoning is right here. So you know, when
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: somebody's falling in love with someone and you ask them
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: like why do you like them? Like why you why
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: are you going to date this person? And they'll say
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: something like the way they talked, the way they walked,
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: where they cut their food, the uh, the music they're
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: introducing me to. When that same person is breaking up
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: with that same person, you ask why you're breaking up
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: with them, they'll say things like, well, the way they talk,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: the way they walked, where they cut their food, the
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: dumb music they made me listen to. It. So reasons
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: for what will come, reasons against when the motivation to
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: search for reasons that will I rationalize and justify your
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: position change. As you've said all throughout our conversation, we're
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: often are very unaware of that and if someone comes
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: along and gives you an opportunity to self reflecting a
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: way where you will go through your reasoning process, you
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: will often start to feel moments of dissonance and question yourself.
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: And as long as the other party isn't is allowing
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: you to save face. And it's just non judgment and listening.
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: That's a big component of this and their technique. They'll
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: open up and say, okay, we're talking about that that
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: same sex marriage or transgender bathroom laws or something. They're
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: very political organizations, so the sort of the topics they cover,
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: they'll ask a person this is this is the biggest
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: part of everything, and this I urge every you wanted
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: to try this out on yourself and other people. You
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: can just do it on a movie like the last
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: movie that you watch. Let's what's last movie you watched?
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: The Adam Project? Okay, the Adam Project. Did you like it? Yeah?
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: Ryan Reynolds boom. It's so easy to say I liked it. Okay.
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: Now I ask on a scale from zero to ten,
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: like if you're a movie review or what would you
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: give it? Six? Seven? Okay? Why why does six feel
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: like the right number? Um, it's not a great movie.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: It's not The Godfather, but it was entertaining and silly
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: and fun. You like The Godfather, you know that's a ten. Yeah,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: you know what what do you think is the Godfather
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: has that this movie doesn't. It's much more sophisticated. It
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: tells a much more interesting tell. It's the characters are
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: much more fleshed out. They're more interesting. Um, the violence
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: is is gripping, whereas the violence and this is sort
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: of cartoony. So we're gonna step out of that conversation
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: when we come back to it. But now what this
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: is what I'm doing. I'm listening to you. I'm not
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: judging you, and I'm giving you a chance to actually
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: explore the reasoning and at and and your values are
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: starting to come up and things that are unique to
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: you and things you like about the world are a
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: lot of times this is the first time a person
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: has ever even experienced that. And this is a moment
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: for you to start to understand yourself in a certain way.
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: And a conversation about a political issue you might start
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: pulling in things about where this actually, you know, the
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: first time you ever heard about this thing, and then
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: will become you see it superceived wisdom or you're being
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: influenced by others, and then all that comes into it's
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: very easy for you to extract that emotion and tell
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: me what you felt. I liked it, I didn't like it.
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: When I ask you to rationalize and justify it for
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: me and come up and go through your own personal
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: reasoning process, not my reasoning process. This is a unique
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: experience for a lot of people. And then the other
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: thing I can do is say you give it a six?
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: How come not say a four? You know, under five
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: I would think is something I didn't especially like. You know,
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: I smiled and laughed throughout it, and it get me
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: up detained for ninety minutes. That's and my nephews, that's
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: all I'm looking at, you see. And so we're getting deeper,
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: more and deeper deeper into the things that you you
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: look for entertainment, but we're talking about a political issue.
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: This something comes out of motivation interviewing, and they weren't
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: even aware of this. The deep camps, people therapists who
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: had dealt with people would come in for say alcoholism
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: or drug addiction, and you know, they already are at
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: a state of ambivalence. They want to do it, and
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: they all and they don't want to do it. That's
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: why they've come for help. But a psychologist would often
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: engage in something called the writing reflect They say, okay,
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: well there's here's what you're doing wrong. Is what you
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: need to do. Here's what you and you you will
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: feel something called reactants, which is that unhand me, you fools,
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: feeling that I'm telling you what to think, I'm shaming you.
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: And when you push away from it, you will start
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: creating arguments to keep pursuing the thing. And they this
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: was such a debacle that they developed something come motivational interviewing,
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: where I would start, I would start trying to evoke
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: from you counter arguments. And I can do that very
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: simply with the scale, because when I ask you why
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: not a four, the only thing you can really produce
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: for me your reasons why you wouldn't go away from
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: the six, which is also kind of going towards a seven.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: And in a political discussion, that's how they'll open it up.
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: They'll say, we're talking about transitor bathroom law. Here's the
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: position that I'm talking about is coming up for a vote.
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: I'm wondering where you're at on that like a scale
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: one was eer to ten. They'll tell them, and then
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: they'll say why that, And this is a moment. We
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: may stay there for twenty minutes, we go through how
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: you arrived at this number. And then in that the
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: deep campras to do something different from the other groups.
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: They asked the personal if they've had a personal experience
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: with this issue. And on the LGBT same sex marriage issue,
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: what seemed to have come up time and again was hey,
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: is there anybody gain your family? Do you want them
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: to have find love? Do you want them to find happiness?
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: And suddenly when it becomes personal, the political issue gets inverted.
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: That's right. You start really realizing how much of this
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: is abstraction, how much of this has received wisdom, how
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: much of this is political signaling our group I inter singly,
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: and not every time, but many times people who will
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: have a personal experience related to the issue, and that
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: personal experience really issue will create massive amounts of cognitive
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: dissonance on the position I just gave you. There's a
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: phrase which I was going to mention later, but I
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: have to share it. Excruciating disequal a brim is that
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: how you ultimately get to a point where either somebody
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: changes their perspective or or something breaks. This is how
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: we change our minds on everything, Like we're always changing
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: your minds at all times, like the everything is provisional
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: until yeah, and we don't we're not always We're totally
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: not aware of it most of the time. But this
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: comes to the work of a lot of psychologists. But
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: I focus in on p J because there's two mechanisms,
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is uh when something's ambiguous or
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: uncertain you when you interpret in a way that says basically,
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: everything I thought and felt and believed before now I
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: still think, feeling, believe it. This is just a modified
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: a little bit with you assimilated into your current model reality. Accommodation,
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: on the other hand, is when there's so many anomalies
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: build up or this is so counterattitudinal or counterfactual what
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: you currently have in your model reality are they they
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: had called it a schema, you must accommodate us. You
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: can think of it like a child sees a dog
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: for the first time and they're like, what is that?
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: You say, it's a dog in their minds? Something categorical,
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: something like it's got four legs, walks on four legs,
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: it's not wearing any clothes, as it's furry as a tail,
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: it's non human dog. And then if they see like
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: a a orange dog or a you know, a speckled dog,
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: they can just say they can assimilate that and different
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: versions of the thing. I already understand. When they see
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: a horse, they might point at it and go big dog,
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: and they're really is an attempt to assimilate, Like I'm
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: interpreting it and look, it's got four legs, it walks
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: on four legs, it's non human, it's not wearing clothes.
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: What's going on here? And he said, no, no no, no,
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: that's not a dog, that's a horse. This requires an
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: accommodation moment because you need to create a category that
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: both horses and dogs can fit with it an overarching category.
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: And we're doing that all the time. Like there are
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: moments where we I think of things like that have happened. Uh, politically,
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: I don't know how politically you want to give a
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: let's like think about the insurrection right the For a
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: lot of people, I have positive attitudes toward a certain
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: political persuasion, and people within that positive attitude space did
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: something I don't like. So I have these two feelings.
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: I'm I feel negatively and I feel positively about what
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: has happened. You could accommodate and say, well, it looks
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: like people who share my political views sometimes do bad
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: things and I need to like have a more complex
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: view of things. Or you could assimilate, which is often
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: how we get into conspiratorial thinking, and say, well, I'm
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: looking at this. What if they didn't do that at all?
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: What if those were actors? What if those were people
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: who are pretending to be people that agree with me?
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: So how do you explain from that? Here's the fascinating thing.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: There was widespread disapproval, especially from Republican leadership, and then
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: very quickly, within a sixty days, maybe even less thirty days,
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: that faded and then it was just a bunch of
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: tourists passing through UH through Congress. So was it just
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: strictly that sort of tribal thing that we needed to
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: to everybody to manage people just reverted back to their
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: tribalism because there was some consensus for a brief period
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: and then it went straight back to partisan politics. Was
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: that there's a there was a long stretch, and there
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: always is where you're you're being pulled in every direction. Uh,
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to make a blanket statement.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: Most people are pretty rational about what happened there. But
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: there's a certain ports and the population that went very
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: conspiratorial with it, and there is a deep crisis of
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: how to make sense of the world and where should
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: I put my allegiances and where my values expressed. And
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: what we would rather do is assimilate if we can
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: get away with it, because that allows us to maintain
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: our current model and move forward. And if we can
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: find an elite who says, no, it's okay to think
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: what you think. In fact, I agree with you. If
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: I can find peers who will who will support me
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: in that, if I can find groups having conversations on
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: the Internet who let me do this, I'll assimilate and
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: I'll stay within it, and as they say in psychology,
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: my social network will reassert its influence. So one of
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: the interesting things about the shift in UH same sex
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: marriage opinion the US is how sudden it was, and
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: when we compare it to things like abortion rights, Vietnam,
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: race voting, even marijuana, all those things seem to have
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: taken much longer or why is that? That was actually
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: the first question I had. I thought that that's what
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: the book was going to be about. There's a dozen
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: different answers of that question. That was sort of a
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: confluence of psychological mechanisms. The most influential part of his contact, right.
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: There's an idea in psychology called pluralistic ignorance, where you know,
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: you ask a lot of people have will have a
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: certain feeling inside of them, attitude or value, and they'll
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: feel like that the only person within their community who
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: has that feeling, and unless you surface the norm in
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: some way, they are not They won't be aware that
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: there are so many other people who feel the same
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: way they feel. Surface the norm, surface the norm, as
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: they put it. When I was asking political scientists about
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: um the shift and attitudes about same sex marriage, they
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: kept telling me this was the fastest recording shifts in
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: public opinion since we've been recording this since the twenties
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: and since then. There was an attitude shift on COVID nineteam,
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: which I put in the book that was a little
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: bit faster, but in this case in which direction towards vaccination.
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: Vaccination yet which is kind of interesting because there was
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: an anti vaxor movement pre COVID that was really kind fringe,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: and I went to one of the conventions for the
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: book best not in the book. It was part of
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: the cut material, the Lancet article on what is an
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: m R M or R m R and remember which
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: the Musles rebella MOMPS vaccine, which was substantly completely debunked.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: But what ended up happening is that group seems to
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: gain a little bit of momentum, the anti vaxers, and
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: yet even around the world most countries are vaccinated, most
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: wealthy developed countries that with access to the vaccine, the
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: US is a laggered um, less vaccinations, less boosts, and
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: the most per capita deaths of any advanced economy, which
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: kind of raises the question how much of an impact
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: did the anti vaxers have, even though a lot of
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: people eventually came around and got the vaccine. The reason
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: I like to talk about flat earthers so much is
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: because the same psychological mechanisms are at play and everything
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: else that we like to talk about. But most most
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: people assume they would never be a flat right, But
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: you don't necessarily get that uniformity when it comes to
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: things like same sex matters or or any or any
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: political issue, that anything becomes charged politically. And I use
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: flat earthers so much because they're pretty much neutral and
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: people can feel like they have some distance from it,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: and the mechanisms. You can see those mechanisms at play,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: and then I can say, and that's also in this
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: and you can see how it works the with same
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: sex marriage. That it's almost impossible to believe this as
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: a person talking to a microphone right now, in this
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: modern moment, like it wasn't very long ago. The people
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: argued about this as vehemently as they argue about like
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: immigration and gun control and everything else that's that's a
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: wedge issue today. And there were articles that would be
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: that would come out, but like this is something we'll
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: never get over. You should and you shouldn't talk about
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: this and Thanksgiving kind of things, right, And then the
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: course of about twelve years, but very rapidly, of course,
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: with three or four years, we went from more than
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: sixty percent of the country opposed to six in the
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: country in favor and around two thousand twelve ish, and
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: the it seemed like, how could this possibly have happened
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: where it come from. And I want to understand that too,
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: because I thought if I could take most of the
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: of the country and put them on a time machine
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: and send them back a decade, would they argue with
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: themselves and what happened in between these two moments, and
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: if they were going to change their mind about this,
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: what was preventing them from changing their mind the whole time.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: One answer to that is that a lot of things
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: that have changed when it comes to like social issues,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: people were separate from one another in social contexts, whereas
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: with same sex marriage and other LGBTQ issues, coming out
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: was a very huge part of that. Any movement that
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: urged people to reveal their identities and to live openly
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: allow people the opportunity to go, well, oh my god,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: I have a family member like this. I have a
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: person who I care about who's being affected by this issue.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: I have people who my plumber, my my hairdresser, my
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: brother and my brother, all this whole world, and then
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: that contact was part of that, right, I think that
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: is the key to this being so stealthy. Why nobody
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: saw it Because you go from I know a guy
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: who's gay, or I know a woman who's gay too.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: I know lots of people who are gay, and over
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: that ensuing decade and the decade before, at least from
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: my perspective, it felt like lots of people both private
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: and public personas were coming out as getting and you know,
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: you had Ellen come out, which was a big deal,
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: and you had Will and Grace on TV. It seemed
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: like it was just, you know, the momentum was building
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: and it was an exchange like that. And you talked
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: about in the book where where it's the cascade is
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: waiting for the network to be ready. That's EXAs where
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: I'm headed up. Thanks for kicking me over to The
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: culture is being influenced by the social change, and then
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: the social change in reflection influence of the culture, and
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: this back and forth is what creates a staggered acceleration
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: of the social change. Right, But what's deep within that
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: is understood a network science as cascades. And the best
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: way I could like quickly explain what a cascade is is, Uh,
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: have you ever been to a party and everything seems
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: to be going up k and then all of a
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: sudden everybody leaves and you're like, what happened? Especially if
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: with the host, or have you ever like waited to
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: get into a restaurant, or if you remember back in
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: a university setting, you're waiting to get into a classroom
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: and uh, there's just a big line of people, and
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: then the door opens up and you could have gone
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: in at any time. These are examples of cascades, up
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: cascades and down castkades. So in a school setting or
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: a restaurant setting, you're waiting a line. The first person
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: that shows up, they have an internal signal because they
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: have no information the doors closed. So maybe in the
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: past they tried to go to a classroom and they
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: open the door and everybody turned and looked at them,
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: and they felt real weird about it. Maybe they just
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: have a certain kind of social anxiety. There are all
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: sorts of nature nurture things to give them an internal
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: signal that says I should wait and see what's going on.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: So they take out their phone, they're playing with it.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: The second person that shows up, they don't just have
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: an internal signal. They have one human being who seems
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: to be waiting and maybe they know something I don't,
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: So whatever internal signal they have is magnified by that.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: They start to wait. Once you show up at a
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: door and there are two people waiting and you don't,
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: you're you're pretty sure you're gonna wait too. Once there
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: are three people waiting at a door, it's almost inevitable
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: you're gonna get a line of people waiting because they
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: assume they're part of something, and everybody knows something they don't,
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: and you're not with a cascade. The only thing that
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: will break the cascade is new information out of the system.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: The door opens up and like the professor's like, why
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: are you waiting? Or somebody who looks at their watch
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: and it's like, I figure we should have been in
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: here by now. Or you could have a real rabble rouse,
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: or you could have a subversive element. Somebody who's a punk.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: They have a low threshold for conformity, you know, they're
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: they're like, I don't care what people think of me.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna open the door, and that person will lead
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: everybody in. So what you end up here with our
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: thresholds of conformity. Uh. Some people need only a few
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: people around them to do something before they do it.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: Some people need a lot. And any population is going
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: to have a large mix of people who have different
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: thresholds of conformity. If you think of it like an
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: old chemistry molecule with like balls and sticks connect to it,
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: each person is a node and each node has a
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: different threshold of conformity, and that threshold conformity is influenced
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: by how many people they know, so how many sticks
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: are connected to balls around them, and you end up
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: with clumps and claw sters of people who have different
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: thresholds as a cluster. Let's say you're at a party
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: and they want to go because you know they're they're
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: tired of being there, they have work in the morning
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: or whatever. But there are other people in the group
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: who are like I would like to go, but like,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: I can't just be the first person that leaves. So
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: the person who has a reason to leave, or they
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: just don't care what other people think they leave the party.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: That that encourages the next group of people who needed
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: one more person to back them up to leave. Now
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: there are people who actually did. They wanted to stay
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: at the party, but hey, if everybody else is leaving
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: but they're threshold conform you just got me out there,
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: like I should probably go. And then now you have
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: the people who are really we're gonna stay all night,
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: and like I guess in the last person here and
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: either they spend the night on your couch or they
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: leave and you're like, oh my god, what happened to
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: my party? This is cascades. This is a It's a
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: very fascinating part of human psychology because we're talking about
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: massive groups of people, and you have a nation of people,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: you'll have massive clusters of people that will have different thresholds,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: and we often will have one in that group, many
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: of them called a percolating local cluster. Anyone listening, who's
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: in this world? I hope you're happy that I found
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: your stuff. This stuff was totally unfamiliar to me. The
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: stuff goes into like diffusion science and people studying how
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: rocks sink and floating local climate. So here's the here's
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: the best thing, uh, I've ever seen about to explain this,
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: you're driving down this is Duncan Watts. Yes, Duncan Watts,
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: the great sociologist. Everything is he is. He gave this
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: example to me and thank him forever for it. You
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: can imagine a road that people are driving down in
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: the middle of a forest. There's uh, someone who smokes
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: a cigarette on the way to wherever they're going, and
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: they throw a cigarette out pretty much every time at
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: a certain spot in the forest. And they've been doing
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: this for years and nothing ever happens, and then one day, uh,
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: they tossed that cigarette out and it causes a seven
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: county fire. Now, if you look at this from a
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: sort of a great Man theory of history, or you're
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: looking for people who are innovators, if you look at
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: the whole old tipping point models and things like that,
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: you're looking for the mavens and the connectors and everything. Well,
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: it turns out the science doesn't really support that very well.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: Has nothing to do with any individual being more connect
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: that are more powerful or more savvy than anybody else.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: What it has to do with is the susceptibility of
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: the system to anybody throwing out a cigarette, meaning how
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: dry or droughts stricken, something happened in that system. What's
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: going on with dry leaves, with just the vulnerability of
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: that the vulnerable that's exactly how they that they're phrasing
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: the youth. The vulnerability of that particular aspect of the
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: network at that particular moment was quite vulnerable to any nudge,
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: any impact any strike. And the thing that really struck
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: me about his example was it could have been a
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: cigarette he tossed out, it could have been a lightning bolt,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: it could have been a nuclear bomb. It didn't matter
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: how powerful it was, and it didn't matter how connected
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: the person was. You don't think of it any connection. Uh.
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: In the science of that connectivity everything, it doesn't matter
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: that the cluster was vulnerable at that point. And any
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: complex system is going to be like the surface of
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: the ocean. There are is constantly moving around. So if
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: you think of that molecule model of human connectivity, it's
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: constantly morphing and changing as people their relationships change and
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: they move from one group to another. So the point
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: that's vulnerable is all is moving. So how do you
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: affect great change like same sex marriage or any other
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: social issue that we've seen in the past. You have
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: to strike at the system relentlessly, and if you're an individual,
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: you need to get as many people on your your
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: group to strike together, and because eventually you're going to
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: be the lip match in the dry forest. That's the idea,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: and you have to let luck be a big part
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: of it, because you're trying to find the percolating local
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: cluster that will create the cascade that will cascade all
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: along the network because you're different, thresholds of conformity are
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: moving in and out of the networks that you're affecting.
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: If you look through any of the history of people
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: who who have affected great social change, especially history of
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: the United States, UH, they had figured out some system
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: by which to get a lot of people together to
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: strike at the system relentlessly, and they were indefatigable. And
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: that was the most important aspect of the whole thing.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: And there are all sorts of other ways to nudge
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: and move around, but that seems to be the essence
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: of it. And that example from COVID nineteen, that's what
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: the fastest social change now ever recorded. They use this.
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: What they did is they it was people who were
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: very hesitant to get vaccinated because it was in the UK.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: People in certain religious communities were very hesitant because of
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: their past with the you know, the government of the UK,
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: and they didn't want to necessarily allow these government entities
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: they didn't understand very well to take a needle and
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: put something they didn't understand very well in their bodies.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: So organizations got together with mosques and said here's the
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: sites where we'll have the vaccinations. And they they got
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: the the elites within that religious community too, to be
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: the first to vaccinate. And so what you end up
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: with is you have this wave effect of the least
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: hesitant among the most hesitants. So these are people with
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: the threshold, the threshold of performity where they will go, well,
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: all I need is one person I trust to do this,
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: they get vaccinated. Well, that's a new wave of people
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: who are vaccinated. So that next level of hesitancy says, well,
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: this number of people that I trust have been vaccinated,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: I'll get vaccinated. So now you have that next level
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: of hesitancy that they've been they've been saying, told two friends.
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: And you eventually wave your way through the cascades so
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: that when you get to that middle hump that's very
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: hard to get over, you have so many people vaccinated
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: around you, it seems kind of weird that you wouldn't
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: be And it's okay. You only some of the holdouts
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: may take forever, the last people to buy the facts
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: machine or whatever, but they're in a world. But you
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: people that have already, and that's what we're aiming for
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: and so there are ways to UH to catalyze the
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: cascade effects, but you have to you have to think
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: of it in terms of the diffusion model. In this
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: regard is not that old fashioned, the early adopter holdout model.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: It's it's waves of conformity via the thresholds cafformity, where
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: you want to build up by saying this group influences
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: this group together, they become a new unit, and so
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: on and so on. Quite quite intriguing. So let's talk
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: a little bit about this evolutionary baggage that we have.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: It seems that so much of our decision making UH
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: is affected by mechanisms and processes which worked great on
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: the savannah, but in a modern world don't really seem
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: to help us and sometimes hurt us. Yeah, yeah, the
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's been a big part of all of
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: my work of the all these things are adaptive, as
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: that's the phrase you want to use, like, in all
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: things being equal, this is probably the best thing to do.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: But we get in certain situations where that are unique
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: to modern life, and it turns out that he can
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: get us in trouble. So that's the the baggage you're
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: talking about. Is one of those things where most of
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: the time it serves as well, but in very specific
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: situations it goes the other way. Huh. Really intriguing there.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: There's there is some specific evolutionary or adaptive issues that
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: come up. Why do humans argue? And why is that
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: really a social dynamic that we all do when we
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: all evolved to do? I? You know, this is one
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: of my favorite things that that change the way I
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: see the world. In researching the book The Um, a
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: lot of this also goes back to the interactions model.
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: With that Mercy and Sperber helped put together, UM, why
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: would we argue? Well, the human beings have this nice, uh,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: complex and dense communication system that eventually became language, and
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: we depend very much on the signals from other units
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: in our social network to help us understand what's going on,
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: to make plans, to settle on goals, shared goals, to
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: decide to just do stuff, and so we do a
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: lot of deliberating and arguing that space. The problem is, uh,
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: imagine it like, UM, there are three people, three proto
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: humans are on a hill and they're all looking in
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: different directions, and the none of us can see what
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: the other two can see, so you would benefit from
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: some sort of worldview that is the combination of all
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: three perspectives. So if I do trust these people, I
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: know them pretty well, and we're talking about going to
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: a certain place in the in the forest together or something.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: One persons for it, one persons against it, I'll know
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: that the person who's for it is young. It's the
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: first time out. They don't know much about the world.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: They're eager to show what they can do. That's that's
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: that's why they like that. The other news hesitant. They
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: were in a bear attack two years ago, and they're
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: I don't know if they really are there, maybe a
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: little over scared. This is also I have a pretty
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: good idea of what how to modulate my trust about
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: when it comes into the deliberation process. The more people
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: involved in that process, the more complex against the more
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: I have to worry about. People could be misleading me.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: They could be wrong just about about no fault of
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: their own, or they could be purposely misleading me because
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: they want to get an advantage over me. So um
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: they use the phrase we have a built in epistemic
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: vigilance for when people might be misleading us. The and
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: that serves as well too. The only problem is that
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: can lead to something they call a trust bottleneck. And
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: a trust bottleneck is when someone does actually in our
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: group come up with a very innovative idea. Maybe it's
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: a some sort of invention. They've created some sort of
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: new way of doing something. They have an idea about
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: going to a new territory where they're there's good things
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: for us to go do there. But it's there's a
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: risk and reward in it and this, but this person
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: really is right. If we get into an argumentation prod
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: yus that's too epistemically vigilant, then we will end up
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: not doing the thing that could benefit the group, And
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: so we have this trust bottleneck that could prevent the
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: calls groups to stagnate. So we developed another evolutionary mechanism
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: to get past trust bottlenecks, and that is arguing itself.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: The argumentation process is how we get through the trust
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: bottleneck created by epistemic vigilance and go ahead. Ye, So
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: I was gonna ask, why are we so good at
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: picking other people's arguments apart and so terrible at objectively
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: evaluating all loves so much? There's a uh this it
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: reminds me something the psychology called the Solomon paradox. I
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: think it's in business too, with the we're really good
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: at giving out advice, it's very hard for us to
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: actually employ in our own lives. Like you, when somebody
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: has a problem, they tell you and you're like, here's
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: what you ought to do, But then when you have
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: that exact same problem, you don't do that thing. Um.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: There's some really cool research recently where they have people
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: put on VR headsets and they walk into a room
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: in virtuality and see uh Freud sitting there and uh
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: Freud says, tell me about your problems, and they sit
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: down and they explained the problem they're they're having, and
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: then they run the second time, but the second time,
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: you are Freud and uh you see yourself walk in.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: It's all been recorded. They even have an avatar with
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: your face and you hear the audio of yourself telling
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: your telling you as Freud what your problems are. And
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: they have around a sixty eight percent success rate of
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: the person having a breakthrough, Oh I see what I
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: ought to do now that they couldn't do on their own.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: They need to get into this dynamic that we're talking
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: about meaning looking at it from with through a different
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: path they need to be they had to get that
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: evaluation phase. So um, we have two cognitive mechanisms to
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: really simplify this. One for the production of arguments, for
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: the production of justifications and rationalizations, reasons why we are
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: doing something. It's important that in psychology reason is not
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: the big our reason of philosophy with propositional logic and
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: all that. It's just coming up for with reasons for
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: what you think totally rationalization, rationalization and justification and in
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: some cases just explanation and why why do we do this? Well,
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: the the interaccess model is because we're always imagined the
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: audience that's going to be receiving the information. That's why
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: you in your shower you're thinking of how you're gonna
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: really stick it to that person on Reddit that you've
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: been arguing with all day? Right? Why? Because that's the
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: that's how that's how we produce reasons. But we also
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: do it alone. Like if I'm imagining I want to
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: buy something on Amazon or I want to take a
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: trip somewhere, You'll start rationalizing and justifying it to yourself.
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: And when you when you want a piece of cake,
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: you will come up with with a justification. We're getting
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: the cake right, like I didn't need anything to day,
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: or I did or exercise yesterday, or whatever it is
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: you need to do. You want to do it, but
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: you need a justification for it. There's a humongous body
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: of evidence that we don't even make the decisions that
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: are best. We only make the decision that's easiest to justify.
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: And um, huge mercy and spurn all these great experiments
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: where they have people um and one of them, they
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: had people they solve these word problems, and then they
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: would mix the answers up and have people evaluate other
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: people who have been looking at the word problem. But
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: of course the trick is when one of the answers
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: is their own, and they would find that when people
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: were thinking that they were evaluating other people's arguments, they'd
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: find the holes in their own like thinking and their
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: own reasoning, But if they thought they were looking at
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: their own arguments, they'd usually miss it. So it's an
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: effective trick. Maybe trick is the wrong word, but it's
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: an effective technique to get people to objectively self analyzes,
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: to make them believe they're criticizing someone else's argus right,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: So the there and what it seems to be the
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: function here. Why this is so adaptive is that under
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: a lot of pressure or doesn't even it doesn't even
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: need to be a group selection process. It's just simply
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: how the math works out. If you have a lot
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: of different people with a lot of different experiences, and
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: they have a lot of different value sets, and they
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: have a lot of different skill sets, and you're facing
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: a problem, you're trying to come up with a solution
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: to it, or you have a goal you want to
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: reach it, you will be much more effective as a
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: group if everybody presents their biased individual perspective and they
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: don't put a lot of cognitive effort into the production
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: of it, make it easy, cheap, and bias. Then you
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: offload the cognitive labor to that evaluation process that twelve
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: angry men experience where everyone looks at each other arguments
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: and goes, okay, this that, this, that, this that, and
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: over time that's developed these two mechanisms we have this. Uh.
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: That's why as individuals, and that's not one of the
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: biggest problems on the Internet is that we we do
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: a lot of our deliberating these days and context that
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: incentivize the production of arguments, but don't really give us
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: much opportunity to go through that evaluation together. There's a
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: phrase you had in the book that that caught my eye.
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: Debate leads those who are wrong to change their minds,
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: and as a group, you want to get to the
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: best decision, the best outcome. On the Internet, it's not
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: as much a real collaborative discussion argument debate as it
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: is just people yelling past each other. Yeah, but it
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: feels like, you know, it looks like a real debate,
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: but it's not. Yeah, I feel like I'm doing that,
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: you know, I feel like I'm participating in some sort
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: of marketplace of ideas. It seems like I'm doing that.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: But the way the platforms are currently set up, for
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: the most part, it's just people yelling people like writing
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: on a piece of paper what they think, feeling believe in,
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: dumping it onto a big pie, and then other people
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: running through the pile and guard like there's it's not
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: like a twelve angry man. We're not actually sitting in
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: a circle and and or you know, it's not like
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: a dinner party where we're I'm sure you've had dinner
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: parties or had guests over who have really wildly different
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: political views in you and you didn't like get into
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: twitter mind with them. You talked it out in some way.
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: That is that that aspect is something we've yet to
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: tweak the system to allow us in certain contexts. There
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: was a very amusing cartoon. I don't remember who who's
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: it was, but the line was, what did you do
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: when the United States was overthrown in the early twenty
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: one century? Oh? I tweeted my disapproval for and it
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: just you know what, what is a hundred forty characters?
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: It's just it scrolls by instantly. It's not really that
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: sort of engaged discussion. I don't mean to be like,
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: you know, I don't mean to to poople on social media.
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: It's it's great for what it is. It's just that
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: it is. But it also is what it is like,
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: it's been a It's a great tool for giving voice
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: to people who haven't been part of the conversation in
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: a long time. It's a great way to gauge what
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: are people thinking and feeling. But if we want to
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: do the deliberation thing, the argumentation thing that moves things around,
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: it's not so great at that yet and the question
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: is will will it ever be? Um? So, so you
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: mentioned twelve angry men. This is a this is a
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: great line in your book. All culture is twelve angry
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: men at scale. Yeah, go into some detail about you know,
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: as plays right off what we were just discussing, like
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: the the everything we've ever achieved as species of note
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: as came out of a lot of people disagreeing and
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: then like sorting it out and there are um we've
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: been great at creating some some institutions that do this
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: on purpose, like science when it's done well is a
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: group of people debating and argument with the other and
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: trying to tear each other's ideas. But there's a good
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: faith in signs and elsewhere that you may not get
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: on on Reddit or Twitter. It's so crucial to create
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: creating the rules of the game, and we all play
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: by it. And you I've that you if I meet
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: you on the street or I meet you on the internet,
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: like we may not be in a good faith environment,
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: we're going to play by those rules that that That's
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: why it was so nice to create these systems of
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: argumentation like law and UH medicine and academia, the and
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: most of the people that we I'm very against the
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: great Man theory of things that where you imagine single
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: inventors coming up with amazing insights like no one ever
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: does anything in isolation like that. The and a lot
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: of the even the people we've lauded throughout history, they
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: had either someone that they bounced ideas with across and against,
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: or they collaborated with, or they were absolutely assaulted over
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: and over again by people who disagreed with them, and
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: they had to refine their arguments in the presence of
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: all of that. And that's why I talk about culture
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: being twelve agrement scale like once any like society five
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: figures out a way to institutionalize those things. That's when
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: you get those massive leaps, and both in the social
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: domain and the political domain and the scientific and technological domains.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: So so, given all of these things we've been talking about,
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: from tribalism to identity, how do we get people to
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: actually change their mind? What are the three key things
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: people need to have happened to them in order to
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: get a major shift in their position. We know it
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: would be difficult, I think, to pick just three things,
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: but I can think of a couple of things that
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: we fit in here. I think one thing I want
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: people to understand is all persuasion and self persuasion, uh
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: most mostly when it comes to change people's minds, what
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: you're trying to do is alert them the fact that
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: they could change their mind. So a little bit of
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: socratic process is you you're guiding them to something and
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: if they're not willing, then they're never going to change them.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: And it's you know, we all we talk a lot
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: about how facts don't seem to work so well. Uh,
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: that's only because the usually when you start arguing somebody
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: over an issue you want to present them, you'll say like, hey,
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: read this book, Hey watch this YouTube video, Hey go
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: to this website, and you're like, that should do it.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: But how's that? Has that ever happened to you? Like,
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: never has anyone sent me a YouTube video? And I've
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: been like, oh, okay, I never know it though, change
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: my mind, said nobody. And that's the idea of that
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: is you there's a reasoning. There's a chain of processing
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: involved in reasoning where you are probably unaware that you
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: went through all this and it landed on a particular
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: conclusion because it made sense to you had matched your
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: values and your attitudes and your beliefs on the matter,
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: and you have to afford the other person the opportunity
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: to go through that same process. You can't meet them
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: at the level of the conclusion, because what ends up
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: happening you just start tossing these these facts that support
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: your position at each other instead of having a conversation
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: in which we're looking at the issue together. Right. So
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: that's one thing, is like you can't copy and paste
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: your reasoning into another person. And when you're trying to
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: argue just based off facts and links and stuff, that's
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: really what you're suggesting they ought to do. So all
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: persuasion self persuasion. I have to open up a space
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: for you to explore your own reasoning, and I have
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: to open up a space for you to to entertain
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: different perspectives and to think about where your stuff comes from.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: Was what we did earlier in the conversation. Secondly, you
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: have to recognize that we're social creatures, so people are
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: influenced by the signaling and the expectations of the people
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: around them. If you say anything to that person that
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: could be interpreted as you ought to be ashamed for
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: what you think, feeling, believe, conversations over. At that point,
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: no one was willing to be ostracized. The great sociologist
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: Brooke Harrington told me that there was an Eagles mc
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: Square of social science. It would be social death. The
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: fear of social death is greater than the fear of
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: physical death. Literally a quote I have written down because
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: I thought it was so so, and she ran me
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: through a hundred examples where this is the true, from
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: war to excommunication, to go down the list. It is social.
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: Social death is actual death in most of history. And
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: I don't care who you are, what kind of profession
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: you're in. You're worried about other people around you, and
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: that profession think about you, and you're modulating your behavior
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: to go with and your modulating your beliefs, attitudes and values.
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: And when it comes down to it, if the situation
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: requires it, you'll put your reputation on the lifeboat and
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: you will let your body sink to the bottom of
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: the ocean if that's the situation you're put in. And
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: Dueling and all those things we do, I'll talk all
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: about the book Dueling Last a long time was really peculiar,
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: but it was just this system out of ann troll.
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: And if I'm trying to discuss an issue with you
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: and I've put you in that state of mind, you
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: there's no what you're what you're gonna do is react.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: You're gonna push back against me. Then I'm going to
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: get feel that feeling. I'm going to push back against you,
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: and then you push back harder, I push back harder,
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: and we end up in that stupid phrase of well,
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: let's agree to disagree. Well, we already agree to disagree.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: That's how we sat down here, right. We're really saying
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: is stopped talking to me, And that's what that is,
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: is a nice we're agreeing to stop arguing with the data.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: We're agreeing to to never actually advance this issue and
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: never talk to each other again. So never open up
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: the conversation with anything that could be interpreted as you
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: ought to be ashamed, even if they should be ashamed
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: of what they're feeling and thinking. If you're hoping to
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: persuade them, you have to not do that. And then
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: the so be aware that they're a social primate. You're
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: a social primate. Never try to copy and paste your
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: reading and the other person and the most important part
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: is that you have to get out of debate frame.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: Don't don't create a dynamic work. I want to win,
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: I want you to lose. I want to show that
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: I'm right and you're wrong. This is this is the
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: most crucial thing. If you take nothing else away from it,
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: take this, think of it. We're like hum, I find
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: you a reasonable, rational, interesting human being, and it's ad
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: that I disagree with you on this. I wonder why
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: I disagree with you? Our disagreement is a mystery. What
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: if we teamed up to solve a mystery together why
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: we disagree? And now we're taking all these things that
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: are adaptive and usually in a way that could actually
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: get us further along and settle. And what might actually
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: happen is we both realized we're both wrong. What we
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: we get to vin diagram ourselves. So you go from
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: face off to shoulder shoulder and this if There are
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: many different ways to go about it, but once you
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: get in that dynamic, you're much more likely to persuade
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: each other of something and move the attitude the room
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: quite fascinating. So let's jump to our speed round. I'm
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: going to ask all these questions thirty seconds or less.
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna do my best. These are These are what
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: we ask all of our guests, starting with what are
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: you streaming or listening? To? Tell us what what Netflix,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: Amazon Prime podcasts kept you entertained the past couple of years?
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: Cool very quickly. My favorite podcast has always been are
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: still is Decoder Ring? I recommended to everybody. I love it.
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: Will A Paskin is amazing best show US stream and
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: recently it's definitely Severance. Everybody should have seen Severance by now.
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: Also the rehearsal. You can see the kind of stuff
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: that I like watch. Someone just recommended the rehearsal and
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: said it reminded them of Severance and how out there?
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: Ye watch that? And then like, I'm among those people
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: that please video games the highest form of art. You
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: definitely play Death Stranding And I replayed BioShock recently because
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: I interviewed Douglas rush Kof and we were talking about
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: BioShock and it still holds up. Who are some of
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: your mentors who helped you develop your your view of
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: psychology and cognitive issues? And you know, persuasion Gene Edwards
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: my first, like the first psychology professor that took me
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: inside aside and said let's be friends and really talking
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: about it. I owe a lot to her, you know
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: people who I've met in real life. Whoever. James Burke
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: is the most influential person in my life. I loved
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: his show years ago. I think it was BBC How
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: the Universe Change, How the Universe change? And can actions?
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: And I can Connections only for people listening to this.
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: I worked with Johnson and UH, James Burke all over
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: all throughout COVID to develop a new Connection series really
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: and I can't say anything else about it, but it
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: will be coming out with in the next year. Very exciting.
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: I love his stuff. What are some of your favorite books?
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: And what are you reading right now? Let me say,
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: as far as authors, I love UH, John Jeremiah Sullivan, UM,
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: Charlie Laduff, Michael Perry, Larry Brown, all these there are
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: either people who are in Southern Gothic literature or or
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: the Southern Gothic literature version of journalism. I can't get
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: enough of that stuff. Our last two questions, what sort
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: of advice would you give to a recent college grad
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: who was interested in a career of either journalism or
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: psychology or anything related to to your field. I'll give you.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: I'll give you two solid pieces of advice that aren't
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: just high minded like that sounds nice, and they can
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: put it on postcard things. This is what you gotta do.
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: Number one, Email the people that you admire or the
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: people you'd like to interview. I have about a seventy
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: percent success rate of when I was good starting out
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: of people. They will at least email you back and
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: say I can't talk, but you'd be surprised how many
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: people are willing to talk to you. Just do that,
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: and then on this on the back end, make content
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: out of that and give it away for free until
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: you build up an audience. We now live in an
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: environment we've been living in it for about twenty years
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: now where the people who are going to offer their
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: hand to get you on stage, they care about whether
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: or not you have an audience. Yet you can build
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: that audience without anybody's permission right now, and you can
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: do that by making content on TikTok YouTube, putting it
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: out on a medium wherever you put your stuff. So
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: do those two things back to back. Email the people
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: you want, and they make content out of those emails
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: and give it away for free into you have an audience,
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: develop your voice. Love that idea. Final question, what do
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: you know about the world of psychology, changing minds and
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: persuasion today that you wish you knew twenty or so
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: years ago when you were first getting started. No one's unreachable,
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: No one's unpersuadable. There's no such thing. And I think
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: of it more like if you try to reach the
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: moon with a ladder, you'll fail, and if you assume
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: from that that the moon is unreachable, then you really
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: learn nothing right. And that's what I actually had thought
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: for a long time. And it turns out the frustration
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: I was feeling to where other people should have been
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: directed to myself for not trying to understand, well, why
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: is this not working the way I thought it should work.
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: The assumption that they're stupid or they're misled, are there
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: nefarious in some way? That was a real misconception on
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: my part, the misconception that people are just absolutely unreachable
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: and unpersuadable. I have, through the work of this book
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: changed my mind. Thank you, David for being so generous
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: with your time. We have been speaking with David McRaney,
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: the award winning science journalist and author of the book
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: How Minds Change The Surprising science of belief, opinion, and Persuasion.
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: any of our four hundred previous discussions over the past
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: eight years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube,
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: wherever you feed your podcast fix. You can sign up
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: from my daily reading list at rittle dot com. Follow
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Ridholts. I would be remiss if
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: I did not thank the crack team that helps put
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: these conversations together each week. Justin Milner was my audio engineer.
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: Atico val Bron is my project manager. Paris Wald is
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: my producer. Sean Russo is my head of research. I'm
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: Barry Ridholts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: Bloomberg RADIOA