David McRaney on the Science Behind Persuasion

all make. But it turns out that David was looking at how people change their minds, how you persuade people, and he thought the answer was found in all of these cognitive errors. And if you could only alert people to the mistakes they were making, whether it be fact checks or just showing them their biases uh and the heuristics they use and the rules of thumb they use that we're wrong, hey would come around and see the light.

And as it turns out, that approach is all wrong, and his mia culpa is essentially this book How Minds Change. It turns out that persuading people about their fundamental beliefs involves a very very specific set of steps, starting with they have to want to change. They have to be willing to change, which only occurs when people come to the realization that they believe something for perhaps reasons that aren't very good, and it's a process, it's an exploration.

It's fascinating the people he's met with and discussed, whether it's deep canvassing or street epistemology, or some of the other methodologies that are used to persuade people that some of their really controversial political beliefs are wrong. He's met with various people from all everything from flat Arthur's to antivactors to the folks who have left the Westboro Baptist Church,

a pretty notorious and controversial institution. I found this conversation really to be tremendous and fascinating, and I think you will also. With no further ado, my interview with David McRaney. Well, I've been a fan of your work and I thought when this book came out it was a great opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with you. Before we get to the book, let's talk a little bit

about your background. You started as a reporter covering everything from Hurricane Katrina, test rockets for NASA, Halfway Home for homeless people with HIV. What led you to becoming focused on behavior in psychology. Well, I thought that's what I was gonna do for a living. I was. I went to school to university to study psychology. I thought it

would be a therapist, got that degree. But then as I was doing that, uh, there was a sign up on campus that said opinionated in big helvetica font and I was like, yeah, I am that would mean that seems what is that? And said, you know, come down to the offices of the student newspaper. I went down there and said, how does this work? They said, just email us stuff. You have an opinions piece you want to do. I'm like m and I I wrote a really like uh sophomore thing about Starbucks on campus because

it was just about to come into campus. And I wrote that and wrote a couple of things. And then there was a study that had just recently come out, and who knows if it's replicated or stood the test of time, but it was when your favorite sports team loses, men's sperm counts go down. And I thought, our team at our school had lost every single game that year so far? What does that mean for the future progeny alumni? That's right? And I thought it would be a great

headline that would be funny. And the headline I wrote was, you know, evidence suggests the sperm counts reach record lows on campus. And uh one of my professors laughed about it and asked the whole class that they had read it, but they didn't know that I was in the class. And I was like, oh, way, this could be fun So I switched to journalism, and you know, went all the way through the student paper and then went into

print journalism and TV journalist. But I once I've reached a certain point in that world, I wasn't able to write anymore. I was doing editing and helping other people, and I just really wanted to write something. And it just happened blogs were becoming very popular that time. Uh my dad says, and uh others that were like, oh, that's way later. I'm thinking back to uh Yahoo's geo cities and ye world. I mean, I'm I'm the o G when it comes to blogging, go way way back.

I just happened to be there when they blew up on the point of like they got book deals and I started a blog called you Were Not So Smart about all the cognitive biases and fallacies and heroistics that I really enjoyed, and I wrote a piece about brand loyalty that went viral and the rest is history. That was asked to write a book about it, and then I was like, oh, I will continue playing in this world. But I started. I started the podcast to promote the

second book because the first book did so well. They said, and do another really quickly, and I did, you are less dumb now? You are now less dumb yet? And I just so happened to start a podcast right when podcasts were becoming a thing. I sent an email to Mark Mayren because he had the number one podcast. I said, how do you do this? And he actually sent me an email with a a point really h like each with links to Amazon items and no kidding, and he

was very nice. And I got all this stuff and started it up, and that has now becomes from the centerpiece, because that's uh, I was there when I got going. My My pitch for this podcast was WTF meets Charlie Rose, and nobody knew what w TF was. I mean, they didn't know the acronym, nor did they know the podcast. Because you know, you have to be a little bit of a comedy junkie to have found that in the

early days. Later on it was ubiquitous. So sticking with journalism when you were still writing, you seem to have covered some really unusual and interesting stories. Tell us about one of the more surprising things that you covered. I always wanted to do feature pieces. That was the world that I loved, and that was always in journalism school and you know, uh, Frank Sinatra has a cold, electricoli

ascid test. I just wanted to write features. I wanted to be there in person and and like tell you explore humanity from the inside out my way and I the Halfway Home for HIV positive men for homeless people in the Deep South. That was a real turning point for me because there's uh. I had to spend about three weeks on that story, and I visited all the different people, went to all the different meetings, and the homelessness is very invisible in the Deep South. They often live,

uh in the woods. You know, they're looking for us and they there's a lot of people in the Deep South. I don't think there is a homeless problem. And that was a really interesting way to break that story into the public. You know, consciousness of no, no, there's a problem here. It's just hidden from you in a very particular way, and a lot of people aren't even wear their organizations that dealt with that, and that really show me this is the world I want to be and

this kind of stuff I want to do. So I'm picking up a theme in both your writing columns and books, which is there's a problem you don't know about it. It's hidden, and here it is. That's the whole thing, Like hidden worlds are it for me? Like I grew up in a trailer in the woods in the Deep South, and as an only child, I was always searching for the others. I didn't know how I was going to get there, and once I got at a hand was extended into this stage. It's all I want to do.

Like I call him taramissoum moments because I remember the first time you had tarremsa I was I went to. It was when I was still in the working for a TV station. We had a little conference where people in my position went and we went there and we got tarmiseu as a dessert and I remember took a bite of it and I was like, oh my god, this is so damn good. What what is this, and everyone there was like, uh, it's Tarmissus, And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, termisous loved the stuff and and but

that's it. That's what I'm pursuing now. I want more of those things. I didn't know. I didn't know. You know, that's really quite interesting. So I guess it's kind of natural that you evolve towards behavior and cognitive issues. I was going to ask you what led to it, but it seems like that's something you've been driving for your

whole career. Yeah, it's a unity through humility. It's it's we're all absolutely stumbling and fumbling in the dark and pretending like we're we know we're up to even here in these fantastic, you know, bloomberg offices, like uh. The thing I want to avoid is the sense that I've got it all figured out. And there are massive domains in psychology, neuroscience, and other social sciences that just start

from that place and then investigate it. And I find that when I discover these things that we all share that should give us a pause, should cause us to feel humility. I feel like I'm in the right spot, and I want to like dig deeper into those places and reveal them so we can all be on the

same page that way. So blind spots, unknown unknowns, things that we are just clearly clueless about, and the biases that they're When I started out, things like confirmation bias, wasn't you know there wasn't as just the tip of the tongue as it is now and survivorship bias, things like that. So I noticed in this book nothing written about Dunning Krueger, nothing about Chaldoni's persuasion. Is that a

different approach to decision making and psychology? Like or because I always assume there would be a little bit of an overlap there, I didn't want to retread anything there. There's some foundational stuff that I do talk about in the book that feel like you can never not talk about, some which go back a century and like the introspection

illusion has to always be uh talked about. We don't know the antecedence to our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, but we are very good at creating narratives to explain ourselves to ourselves. And if you always have to mention that in any book about this topic, as far as concern and so

there's a little bit of that. But like Dunning, Krueger and uh all the other big heavy hitters, I definitely did not want to write How to Win Friends and Influence People, Part Two because I wanted to come from a very different perspective on all this, and I didn't want it to be a book specifically about persuasion, because I don't even start talking about actual persuasion techniques still about page two hundred, Like, I show you people who

are doing things that could be labeled as persuasion techniques, but I don't get into the like the science of it till later. Other you mentioned Dunning Krueger. I I just recently spent some time with Old Dunning, Professor David Dunning he um a former guest on the show. I don't think he's that old. I think, yeah, I say old in the chow me pat you on the back cut of right he Uh. I keep asking to come back on the show, but he's working on a new

project and he's a new book on Dunning Crew. Yeah. Yeah, because you know that a lot of people has been all these people who want to knock it down and and he's there have been attempts, but none have really landed a blow. So we helped him out, or he helped us out. My good friend Johansson has a YouTube channel and uh it does explore different science Stuff's called

be Smart, and we were talking about that recently. There was a story about someone who, uh, the pilot you went unconscious and they've landed the airplane but they got

help from the tower. And we were talking about that and I was like, I feel like I could land an airplane based off all my video game experience, and Joe said he thought he could too, and I said, this has got to be done in Kruger, right, And I said it would be cool if you did a video where you got into like one of those commercial commercial flight simulator and they just said, yeah, I try,

go ahead, land knock yourself. And so he got I get I got him in touch with Dunning, and Dunning was like, I can't wait to be part of this project. So he both interviews back and forth with Dunning before and after, and of course he gets in the simulator and they hand him the controls and they say, okay, landed, and of course he crashed. And you crashed it three times.

That's impressive, you know. Even David Dunning tells a wonderful story about they never expected the research paper Dunning Krueger on metacognition to explode. And he goes, I never thought about trademarking it. He goes, go on, go on Amazon. You'll see Dunning Krueger University shirts, key chains, all sorts of stuff. He goes, there's a million dollars there. I just had no experience in that, and I got a little Dunning crugerd did not did not think about the

commercial side of it. So there's a quote I want to share because it sets up everything. Uh, and I'm I'm sort of cheating. It's from towards the end of the book. We do this because we are social primates who gather information in a bias manner for the purpose of arguing for our individual perspectives in a pooled information environment within a group that deliberates on shared plans of actions towards a collective goal. Kind of sums up everything

we do in a US. That was a lot of work, with years of work within that little little that A

lot of that comes from something that's called the interactions model. Uh. They're sort of a peanut butter and chocolate have come up and in this book because I've spent years talking to people through you are not so smart, and I would argue that we're flawed and irrational, right, And that was there was a big pop psychology movement for that about a decade ago, things like predictably Irrational and uh, even the work of Knomen Diversky, like a lot of

the like interpretation of that was like, oh, look how dumb we are, right, and look how easily fooled we're Look how bad we were probabilities. And one of the incepting moments of this book was I did a lecture and somebody came up to me afterwards. Her father was had slipped into a conspiracy theory, and she asked, what do I do about that? And I told her nothing like but I felt gross saying it. I felt like I was locking my keys in my car. I felt like, I think I know enough to tell you that, but

I know I don't. And also I don't want to be that that pessimistic and centicle. And at the same time, the attitudes and norms on same sex marriage the United States had flipped like very rapidly, We're that. So those two things together I was like, I would I want

to understand this better. So I invited on my podcast Hugo mercy A and he teamed up with Dan Sperber and they created something called the interactions model, which is a model that I only want to talk to them about, you know, changing minds, arguing, and it opened up this whole world and through them, I also met with Tom Stafford, and there's the interactionist model, and there's the truth wind scenario, and those are sort of a peanut butter and chocolate

my come up. And it's because instead of looking at people as being flawed in irrational, alsa is just as biased and lazy, which is different. And what you're just talking about what that paragraph is about the interactionist model, which is uh, A lot of the research that went into all those books from about a decade ago. They were pulling from studies that were done on individuals and isolation.

And then when you pool all of their conclusions together and you treat people as a group of people based off that research, we do look kind of flawed, right, we do look very irrational. But if you take that exact same research and you allow people to do liberating groups, you get much different reactions, much different responses, and that's

been furthered by the work of Tom Stafford. He's been taking some of the old stuff from those old studies and putting them to groups and even creating um social media similarcrooms that work like Twitter and Facebook and stuff, but have a totally different context, allows people to deliberate and argue in different ways and you get much different results.

You get better results were much. A good example of that is like, uh, you take something from the common reflection task or something like a I'll make it real simple so we don't have to like do any weird math in their heads. Like you're running a race and you pass the person in second place, what place you in? And you know the intuitive answer You're start trying to work it out in your head. But the answer one if you like lean back, is well I replaced second place.

I'm in second place. But if you ask people individually you get a pretty high response fade where they get the wrong answer. But if you take that exact same question and you pose it to a group of people and I do some lectures now and you say, Okay, I'm gonna ask this question, keep the answer to yourself. Now, does anyone to have the right answer. You know you have the right answer. Raise your hand. Somebody raised their hand. I say, okay, what's the answer. They give you the answer.

Then you say, explain your reasoning, and then they explain the reasoning. When they give their answer, there will be a grumble on the crowd. When they explain the reasoning behind it, the crowd goes, Okay. Now, if you took everyone's individual answer and pulled it together, you'd be like, wow, this group got their wrong answer. But if you allow that deliberation moment to take place where I explain how reasoning to you, you get a group of people who

would go from eight percent in correct correct. And we really set up for that. And the interactionist model is all about this the work of Humorocity and Dan Spur really have a great book about this, called The Enigma

of Reason. It's a it's not a light read, it's really sort of you know, academic, but it's great because they found, looking through the old research and their own new research, that we have two cognitive systems, one for producing arguments, one for evaluating arguments, and the one that produces arguments does it very lazily and very in a very biased manner. You can think of it like you

ask where do you want to go eat? And you know, I have three or four people after a movie like hanging out in the lobby like I wanna I want to go here, I want to go here, I want to go here, and UH they have biased reasons for that. One person's says, hey, let's go get sushi, and the somebody's like, we're over here and on my ex work there, or or I someone to say I had sushi yesterday,

or I don't like sushi. That you can't predict what are going to be the counter argument, so you to present your most biased and lazy argument up front, and you let the deliberation take place in the pooled UH evaluation process. You all flow the cognitive labor to that we're all familiar with doing that. Everyone has their ideas, You trade back and forth, and we decide on the group goal on the plan, which is what this evolved

to do. But we are also very familiar with the way that plays out on the internet, which is not good for an AUC is removed and you don't get the same social cues coming right, So you get like, let's say, my good friend Alistair Croll, who runs conferences. He put it to me like this. He's like, on the Internet, when you say, uh, I want a grilled cheese sandwich, Uh, it's not an argument for for who wants grilled cheese sandwiches? Should we get grilled cheese sandwiches

anywhere else? Agree with me? On the Internet, on most of the platforms we use today, it's saying I want grilled cheese sandwiches. Who wants to go with me to the grilled cheese sandwich room? And so everyone who agrees with that position and is already like, yeah, that's what I want to they get pulled off into a community of people who want this and then a whole new set of psychological act that was going to play, which is all about being a social primate and being a community.

So there's no iteration, there's no debate, there's no consensus forming as to what the best solution to that problem is. You just have some salient issue and people form of what looks like madness or what looks like some sort of nefarious thing going down. One of the things that the Internet gives us is the ability to group up

very quickly, and we are social prime rates. If we go into a group, we start being worried about motivations like I want to be a good member of my group, I want to be to be considered a trustworthy member of my group, and so on, and you get a lot of weird stuff we see today that that falls into the domain of being polarized or being in a

system where everyone is. If you have in a group people who agree with you in your current position, it's very difficult to argue out of it because I can always fall back to them from back and so that that's some of the stuff that goes into that paragraph, and it gets more complicated from there. But yeah, it's that was very illuminating to me, and a lot of the new material in this book relates back to it.

Not that the earlier books were wrong or incorrect in anyway, but I kind of took this as a little bit of a mia Kalpa in terms of, hey, I was focusing on one area, but really we need to focus on a broader area in terms of not just why we make these cognitive eras, but how you can change somebody's mind who's trapped in some heuristic or other cognitive problem that is leading them the wrong life. I did not intend for this to be like some sort of

marketing phrase or trick, but it's the truth. But I in writing a book of how Minds Change, I changed my mind on a lot of stuff that I was like depending on for like my career, and I'm happy to do that. It feels really great to be on the other side of some of these things and see it more clearly and more, you know, more dimensionality to it. So let's talk a little bit about the blog that led to the books that really put you on the map.

You are not so smart? Um. I love the title of this Why you have too many friends on Facebook? Why your memory is mostly fiction? And forty six other ways you're deluding yourself? Was there were there forty six chapters? Was that just a random No? That was that was exactly how many things are exploring in the book. Yeah, that's that's great. So we already discussed what led you

to this area of research. Why did you decide to go from blogging, which is easy in short form, to writing a book, which anyone who has done it will tell you it can be a bit of a slog It was. Here's how that happened. I was just blogging away back in the early days, and maybe you had a thousand people reading my stuff. And that was back way before medium and Twitter and any other way to get your stuff out there. And when did you launch?

You are not so smart. I got into an argument two of my friends about what was better the PlayStation three of the Xbox three six. We got so mad at each other that it was like I might not be able to like hang out with them. And this isn't a political Trump versus Biden debate. This is yeah, but it's just the same psychology. And I couldn't get over, like, why would I get mad about this? It's just a box of wires and uh. And I, since I had a background in psychology, I went and I had access

to the university library. I was I just was like, there's got to be some material about this. And I found a bunch of material and brand loyalty and identification and group identity, and I wrote a little blog about it, but I framed it as Apple versus PC. That we mean those commercials were oute right there. And at that time the blog Gizmoto had stolen the iPhone prototype. I recall that, and like Steve Jobs, and they didn't steal it.

They found it in a bar. Found they found it in a bar, and uh, Steve Jobs sent them emails says, give me back my iPhone and they just they just went for the hits and they super viral. And I just assumed they had like a Google alert for stuff written about Apple stuff. And I got an email said

can we reblog your blog post on this? And I was like, yeah, sure, And I went from a thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand people, and I was like, oh, I should write a bunch of stuff on And so that week I just started going like things in that sort of area, and I wrote a lot more things about like I learned helplessness and other issues, and I had an audience and it and it was maybe four

months later. An agent reached out who had worked on pre economics and said, I think this could be a book. And she still my age. I actually met with her two days. If I'm in town, I want to always try to meet with because she changed my life. Alan Bar amazing human being. And uh we turned it into a book, and about half of it was already in blog form. I wrote the rest of it for the book and that book just really took off, like it's

still even today. It's like in nineteen different languages. It's something every once in a while to beating number one in a different country. It was recently number one in Vietnam. Well that's how I went from blog to book world. But then they were like, hey, could you write another book? And I said, I sure can, and uh, I wanted to promote it. And at that time, podcasting had just become a thing. I was listening to Radio Lab and This American Life, and uh, I was like you, I

was listening to WTF and I said, I can. I want to do something like that, and I just started up the podcast to promote it. And it just turned out that the podcast was really where I could actually explore this stuff, and I jumped into it. So so there is a quote. I think this might be from the back of the book. So I don't know if this is your words or a Blurbu'm stealing, but quote.

There's a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think that's got the introspecting illusion, and it's been a real centerpiece of my work for

a long time. We don't have access to the antecedents of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but we do have thoughts, feelings of behaviors that requires some kind of explanation, and we are very good at coming up with these post hoc ad hawk rationalizations and justifications for what we're doing, and those eventually become a narrative that we live by. It becomes sort of the character we portray, and we end up being an unreliable narrator in the story of

our own lives. And so the two it's like a one two punch of you're unaware of how unaware you are, and that leads you to being the unreliable narrator in the story of your life. And that's fine, Like this is something that is adaptive in most situations. But there's when we get into some complex stuff like you know, politics, running a business, designing an airplane. You should know about some of these things because they'll get you into some trouble that we never got into, you know, a hundred

thousand years ago. So a lot of this is evolutionary baggage that we carry forward. But you touched on two of my favorite biases. One is the narrative fallacy that we create these stories to explain what we're doing, as well as hindsight bias, where after something happens, of course we that was going to happen, We saw it coming. Tell us about those two dies, well, they're the fallacy. I love this. My good friend Will Store, who writes, um, it's a question I have for you love enemies of science.

I love Will so much. And he has a book not too long ago he came up with the science of storytelling, and uh, I love that domain all the whole hero's journey, the Camp of Campbell. Right. The science side of that is, most storytelling takes place exactly along the same lines as retrospection. So your retrospection, looking back, prospection looking forward. We tend to look back on our

own lives. As you know, we're the hero, were the protagonist, and whatever we're looking at specifically, it's like, Okay, we started out in this space, and then we went on a exploratory journey, and then we eventually came back. Yeah, eventually we came back around with that new knowledge and applied it. Yeah, yeah, you know that we have the the synthesis and the anti thesis and all those things

are how we kind of see ourselves. Is how we make sense of our past because we couldn't remember everything that would be horrible we had, so we edit it to be useful in that way. That's when when you're watching a movie or reading a book and it doesn't seem to be work for you, it's because it's not really playing nice with that retrospective system. But it's also our personal narratives seemed to be very nice and tidy

in that way, and although they never are. If you've ever told a story about something with someone who was also there and they're like, it didn't happen that. My wife says that all the time, I don't know what what experience he had, but I was there, None of that happened. That's right, And you, uh, if without people

to check you, what does that say? It says that a whole lot of you, what you believe is the story of your life is one of those things that if we had a perfect diary of it or a recording of it, or someone who was there who could challenge you, it wasn't exactly the way you think it was. Who was the professor after was it nine eleven or some big events had everybody right down their notes as to what they saw, what they felt, what they were experiencing.

And then I guess these were freshmen and then by the time they become seniors they circle back and asked them, now it's three years later, and not only do they misremember it, but when showing their own notes, they disagree with themselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's been repeated a few times. I'll talk about it and how mind changed. Robert Burton did this experiment after the Challenger incident. That was that was the big one, right, But the one that in

that study was when it's signaling above the noise. And yeah, that's the most amazing part of it. You they have you to write down whatever happened, at what you thought happened. They also do a prospection wise, I think they've done they've done it where you tell me what you think is going to happen, and you put into a Manila envelope, and then the thing happened, you know, whatever event takes place, and then you ask people, what did you what did

you predict? Was going to happen, and they tell you, I predicted exactly what happened. You take it out of the minial envelope and it's not that and they're like, oh, come on, there's no way. But even though that's my handwriting,

I never would have written. And that's the weirdest thing in the in the Challenger study, uh, when he showed people that their memory was absolutely not what they thought it was, their first reaction was to say, you're tricking me, like, like this is you wrote this, like somebody else wrote this. And that seems so similar to something called anasignosia. And anasignosia is the denial of disorder. And you can have like a lesion or a brain injury that it calls

some something that's wrong in your body. But then on top of that, you have this other thing, which is denial of the thing that's wrong your body. So I've seen cases where people have an arm that doesn't function properly, and they'll ask, like, why can't you lift your arm? Why can't you pick up this pencil? And they'll and they'll say, oh, what do you do? And I can pick that up? But what's going on with this arm? Like that's my mom's arm. She's playing a joke on

me right now. Like the split brain patients where they don't understand what they're seeing when they come up with This is the greatest example we've been discussing is if you if you have someone who has a they called split brain patient, the corpus colos and that connects the two hemispheres. They corpus colosomy is often performed when a person has a certain kind of they have seizures that

they don't want a cascade. Um, you end up with basically two brains, and you can use a divider so that one I is going to one hemisphere wives going the other. You can show a person in image. Let's say you show them a terrible carrec mangled bodies, and they feel very sick. But the portion of and you're showing that too, is not the portion that delivers language. So then you ask the person who is feeling sick, why you feel sick right now? What's going on? They say, Oh,

I had something bad at lunch. You have we we will very quickly come up with a narrative and our explanation for what we're experiencing, and we do so believing that narrative, even if that narrative is way far away from what's actually taking place. So let's quickly run through some of our favorite cognitive bias is going to be tested. I hope I remember this. Let's go, um. Well, we'll start with an easy one. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias. When

people write about confirmation bias, they usually get it pretty wrong. Uh, here's the way it confirms. It's a great way to put it. The least sexy term in psychology is that makes sense stopping rule. You think they come up with a better phrase, and that that just means when I go looking for an explanation of something, when when it finally, when it makes sense, I'll stop looking for information. Confirmation bias is what happens. Here's the way I prefer to

frame it. Let's say you're at a tent in the woods. You hear a weird sound and you think, oh, that might be a bear. I should go look. So what you have a negative effect in your body, you have an anxiety. You go out looking for confirmation that that anxiety is just or reasonable because as a social aspect to it at all times, because we can't escape our social selves, and so you're looking and maybe you don't find it, you know, maybe you don't find evidence that

points in that direction. Eventually you you modify your behavior based off what you see with your flash lie. If you do that online though an environment that's an information rich environment. You have some sort of anxiety and you're looking for justification that that anxiety is uh is reasonable. You'll find it. You'll find something right, and that will confirm that you that your search was was good and

justified and reasonable to other human beings. So confirmation bo is very simply is just something happens that doesn't make sense. You want to disambiguate it. It's uncertain. You want to reach some level of certainty. So you look for information that based off your hunch, your hypothesis, and then when you find information that seems to it's like confirm your hunch. You stop looking as if you like, did some something wrong,

as if you solved it. Why don't we as a species, look, we're disconfirming information just to validate in most situations is not adaptive, like confirmation bias is actually the right move in most situations, Like if you're looking for your keys, you know, yeah, you don't go looking for your keys

on Mars. You go looking for them in your kitchen, right, and like it's the faster solution, and most of our most of these biases go back to the adaptive thing is the thing that costs the least calories and and gets you to this solution as quickly as possible, so you can go back to trying to find food not getting eaten. And in this case, most of the time,

most of the time confirmation bias serves as well. It's in those instances where it really doesn't serve as well that we end up with things like you know, climate change or what have you. What about ego depletion, Oh, man, ego depletion is one of the things that boy that it goes back and forth. Uh. The original scientists are still like hardcore into it. I love it. Uh. Whether or not ego depletion is properly like defined or categorized,

the phenomenon does exist. The actual mechanisms of it aren't well understood. But when you have been faced with a lot of cognitive tasks, uh, you start to have a hard time completing more cognitive task and in general, hum as well as issues that require willpower and discipline. Right, So the more you the more you use willpower, the less willpower you have to use. It's finite, not not unended.

And this is not well understood a lot of the like, here's why this is happening, Like haven't I failed to replicate? So we have this phenomenon, but we still don't quite understand what is the mechanism under allowing it. Well, let me do one last one. The Benjamin Franklin And that's my favorite Benjamin Franklin effect goes back to you know, a lot of my new book is is as in this domain of justification and rationalization. Um, Benjamin Franklin had

someone who was opposing him at every turn. I call him a hater in the in the previous book, back when that was a term. Yeah, and uh, he just had this political opponent that he, uh, he knew was going to cause him real problems for the next thing he was going up for. And uh, he also knew that this guy had a really nice book collection. And everybody also knew that Benjamin Franklin had a nice book collection, and so he sent them a letter and said, there's

a book that I've always wanted to read. But I can never find I hear you've got a copy of it. No, the who knows it seems from reading the literature that been Refrancla totally had this book. And uh, but the guy gave him the book as a favor, and he was like very honored that been re Franklin asked for it. I like to think of Benjamin Franklin just like put it on a shelf and then wait, wait, waited a month, and then took it back to him. Um, but he said,

thank you, I'm forever in your debt. You're the best. And from that point forward, that guy never said another negative thing about Benjamin Franklin. So what that comes down to is I just observed my own behavior. I did something that produced cognitive dissonance. I have a negative attitude toward ben or Franklin, but I did something that a person with a positive attitude would do. So I must either think a strange thing about who I am and what I'm doing, or I could just take the easy

rout out and go I like Benjamin Franklin. And that's that I think called that the Benjamin Franklin effect. I find that really just fascinating that there are two phrases that I'm in a note of in one of the books that I have to ask about extinction burst, and I have to ask what is wrong with Catharsis. Catharsis the stincionburst is a real thing that I love. Uh. I see that everywhere I see. I see that all

in society right now in many different ways. That extinction bursts is u when you have a behavior that has been enforced many many times, and you it's your body even expects that you're going to perform this behavior, and you start doing something like say dieting, or you're trying to keep smoking, or you're trying to do you're trying to just extinguish the behavior. Right at the moment before it fully extinguishes, you will have a little hissy fit.

You'll have a as they say back home, um, you'll have a toddler outburst sort of thing where you're all of your systems, cognitive systems are saying, why don't we really really try to do that thing again, because we're about to lose it? And the they call this an extinction bursts. That moment of like if you're watching it on a slope, it's sloping down down, down, down, and there's a huge spike. And that could either be the moment you go back to smoking or relapse, or the fish.

It could be the death rottle. Depends on how you how you deal with your extinction burst. I thought that was fascinating, And then of Tharsis comes up. Why is the concept of that cathartic surrender or finish the things problematic? It's related to the extverse. There's a for a while there this, especially in like nineteen fifties psychology, the idea that like just get it out, you know, like like if you're angry, go beat up a punching bag or yell at people from the safety of your car. Yeah.

There used to be a thing in like the eighties scream therapy. Yeah, I recall the unfortunately primal scream. Yeah. Unfortunately or fortunately. Uh, the evidence, the evidence suggests that what this does is reward you for the behavior, and uh, you maintain that level of anger and anxiety and frustrations. It's self rewarding, yea. And so it's uh, there are ways to have cathartic experiences, but the ones where you reward yourself for being angry tend to keep you angry

that that makes a lot of sense. And last question on you are not so smart? Do we ever really know things or do we just have a feeling of knowing? Is an unanswerable question, thankfully, Uh from from you? No, No, I feel like I feel like I know. That's uh. Here's what's important to know about the Certainty is an emotion. This is something that gets me in trouble. I think in like rationalists and uh, you know, circles. But I

won't get you in trouble here. Well, thank you, because like the the ideas like facts not feelings or your you know, let's not get emotional, let's not make emotional appeals. Uh, there's no dividing emotion from cognition. Emotion is cognition, and certainty is one of those things that lets you bridge the two because certainty is the emergent property of networks waiting something in one direction or another, and you feel like, you know, if you want to do percentage wise, it's

is you can feel it. I ask you percentage wise, like if I ask you did you have eggs last week on Tuesday? And you're like, I think I did, and like, well, like on a scale from one to ten, like on a percentage wise on Saturday morning, I went to the dinner, I had eggs. So that feeling that you're getting, there's something generating that deepeealing, right, So the feeling of knowing is something that's separate from knowing, but

as far as subjectively, it's the exact same thing. We only get to see this objectively in some way, especially in those like open up the middle envelope, let's see what you actually said. So this is a pet peeve of mind because here in finance there is this, for lack of a better phrase, meme that the markets hate uncertainty, and whenever people are talking about what's going to happen in the future, well, it's very uncertain, to which I say, well,

the future is always inherently uncertain. When things are going along fine and the market's going up, we feel okay with our uncertainty, so we can lie to ourselves about it very very easily, exactly. But when everything is terrible, the markets are down, the Feds raising rates, inflation, Oh, the market hates uncertainty. Now at the uncertainty level, you didn't know the future before, you don't know the future now, but you can no longer lie to yourself and you

have a sense of of what's going on. This is, by the way, a very out liar view, because everybody loves the uncertain. So well, I'm happy to sit here, I despise. I'm happy to sit here and surrounded about all these people and take the position of, uh, you're very wrong. Uh, the they are less smart. There is no such thing as certainty. This is, you know, from

the scientific or psychological even philosophical domain. Everything is probabilistic and we can like hedge our bets, but the concept of certainty is way outside the domain of any of these topics. Yeah, and and well, we'll talk about bertrand Russell later. But it's a quote from your book that always makes me think, well, let's let's talk about it now,

because it's such an interesting observation quote. The observer when he seems to himself be observing a stone is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Right, Isn't that awesome? That is right from this book How Minds Change by Day Man Here, it's a good book. The U I got that from interviewing the Lately Ross who created the term naive realism. It's another phrase I love, and this this is a

way to kind of get into naive realism. N I realism is the assumption that you're getting a sort of a video camera view of the world through your eyeballs, and that you're storing your memories and some sort of database like a hard drive and uh, and that when I ask your opinion on say, uh, immigration or gun control, that whatever you tell me came from you went down to the bowels of your castle to your scrolls and pulled out the scrolls by candle light and read them all.

And then one day came up from that and emerged from the staircase and raised your finger and said, ha, this is what I think about gun control. And it minded what what's invisible in the process or what becomes invisible when we're at we're tasked with explaining ourselves. Is that uh, all the rationalization and justification and all the interpretation that you've done, and all the elaboration, these all

these psychological terms, and that you Uh. This concept of nairealism is that you see reality for what it is and other people are mistaken when you get into moments of conflict and the The thing that bergand Russell said is so nice because he is alluding to the fact that all reality's virtual reality, that the subjective experiences is very limited, with the German psychologists called an un velt the thing related to naive realism that was so surprising

in the book. And we keep alluding to evolution in various things. I did not realize that the optic nerve does not perceive the world in three D. It's only two dimensional. And okay, so we have two eyes, so we were able to create an illusion of depth of a third dimension, but the human eye does not see the world in full three Yeah. I just while while I'm in visiting New York, I spent time with Pascal who's in the book, and he's the one who like

ram me through all this. That's amazing, isn't it. It's uh, the retina. I mean, you know, obviously at microscopic levels it's three dimensional, but for the purpose of the vision, it's a two dimensional sheet. And so we create within consciousness the third dimension. But it's an illusion, just like every color is an elite. It's a very realistic illusion, but it's an illusion, right, And and that's why paintings can look nice because you play with the rules of

illusions that to create depth. And even people who who gained vision late in life, the understanding depth and three dimensionality is something that takes a lot of experience. You have to learn how to do it. And they oftentimes they'll in experiments with people who just gained vision late in life, they'll like put a telephone and run like far away from them, and they'll they'll try to reach out to it. It's like thirty ft away because you

have to learn depth. That's something that we learned over time. We you know, we did as children. Who don't you remember, you don't really think about it. So let's talk about how minds change. And I want to start by asking how did a flat earther inspire this book? They actually came in a little later in the process. I was

there was a documentary on Netflix. You may have seen it, Behind the Curve, uh, and the producers of that were ends of my podcast, and then they grabbed a couple of my guests for the show and everything, and I thought it would be you know, I would love to help promote something. I didn't know this, but someone told me I was in the credits and I looked in the credits it was like, you know David, thanks to David McRaney, And I was like, oh wow. So I emailed them and said, hey, you want to come on

my podcast, we'll talk about your documentary. Because if I had gotten a chance to make a Netflix show, it had have been very similar because that's it seems like it's about flat Earth, but it's actually about motivated reasoning and identity and community and things like that, and community community is a huge part of it. Group identity, and um that after that episode, Uh, they a group in Sweden do they put on something like south By Southwest

called the gather Festival. They asked, Hey, we got this crazy idea. What if you go to Sweden and we'll get h Mark Sargent, who was sort of the spokesperson for the flat Earth community, and we'll put you on stage. And I know you're writing a book about how minds change, you can try to try out some of those techniques on them. And I was like, oh, that sounds awesome, So um I did. I went and I met Mark, and uh, I found it very nice, very lovely man.

And I did try something at the point where where I met him. I was about halfway through and that wasn't great at the techniques, but I did an okay job. That's that's towards the end of the book where you actually describe um. He said it was one of the best conversations he ever had. You don't call him an idiot, you know challenges views. You're really asking how did you come to these sorts of perspectives to get him to focus on his own process. That's the whole idea of

the techniques I learned about in the book. Uh, we're writing this book. I met many different organizations. Deeve Campels are street epistemology, people who work in motivational interviewing and therapeutic practices, UH, professional negotiation and conflict resolution. UH people work in those spaces. And what really astounded me was when I would bring the stuff that I was witnessing to scientists or experts. They there was this underlying literature

that made sense. But none of these groups had ever heard of this literature for the most part, and they definitely hadn't heard of each other. But they did a lot of a b testing thousands of conversations throw away. I didn't work keeping what did and they would arrive at this is how you ought to do this, and then would also be similar they had it was in steps,

the steps would be in the same order. And I sorted think of it like, you know, if you wanted to build an airplane, the first airplane ever built, no matter where it was builder who did it, it's gonna look kind of like an airplane. It's gonna have wings, and it's going to be lighter than because you're dealing with the physics that you have to contend with when it comes to the kind of conversation dynamics that actually

persuade people or move people or illuminate them. They have to work with the way brains makes sins of the world and all of the evolutionary path that pressures all of that. And so these independent groups discovered all that independent of each other and of the science that supports them. And Mark Sargeant, like when I first met him, I shook his hand and said, look, I'm not going to like make fun of you or anything. Goes Oh, that's fine,

make fun of me all you want. And he he took out his phone and showed me the commercially've done for LifeLock, whereas like, if I can do it, anybody can do it, and he's totally okay with it. But that's not what I did. And then when I sat down with him, one of the essences, I know we'll get to it, but it's like, you don't want to face off and I need to win, you need to lose. I'm trying. I'm not even to aiding you. What I want to do is get shoulder to shoulder with you

and say, isn't interesting that we disagree? I wonder why you want to pardner up with me and trying to investigate that mystery together. And in so doing I opened up a space to let him meta cognate and run through how did I arrive at this? And that's what I did with him on stage, and you know, we learned all sorts of things, like he he used to be a ringer for a video game company, so that so that's where his conspiratorial stuff first came from. Oh so of course he wasn't just a guy showing these

contests weren't fair. They and it's always a name, they had somebody skewing the outcome. Going through his whole history, it was really clear how he got motivated into this. But the thing that really kicked in was, you know, flat Earth is a pretty big group of people. They have conventions, they have dating apps, and once he became a spokesperson for it, and he's traveling around the world, is going to Sweden, Like now he's not traveling around

the world, he's traveling up across surface. That's right. He is traversing the geography Cartesian plane of planet, that's right. And so that that was a really the sun flat also, that's always my question. If the Earth is flat, is the Sun of sphere, why would some celestial bodies be There are schisms within the flat earth community. There are many different models of flat Earth. The one that Mark Sergeant is part of. They see the Earth that's sort

of it's almost like a snow globe. It's flat, but there's a dome, there's a there's makes perfect sense to and perfectly the Sun and the Moon are are are celestial objects that are orbs. And when you ask my good question was like, okay, well then it seems manufactured. Who made it? God's or aliens? And he goes and I remember leaning in and saying it doesn't matter. Isn't

it the same thing? Well, you know, the Greeks figured out five thousand years ago that the Earth was round by just looking at the shadow of the sun cast at the same time in different cities of different latitudes. But five thousand years of progress, just hold a side. Look, you wouldn't you would believe that the number of ways that that has been explained away in you know, flat earth world, there's a plenty of explanations for why that's,

you know, part of the big conspiracy. My favorite part of the flat earth community was flat Earth Meets done in Krueger with the guy who built a rocket to go up in order to prove that the Earth was flat. We don't know what he saw because he crashed and died. Do you recall this was like remember three summers ago, I can tell I can I know exactly how the response would like see see he took him out and

they took him out. So you mentioned several different groups, The Street Epistemology and the deep canvassers were really fascinating my book. Right, So a quick background, A well funded group in California. We're trying to convince people to support the Marriage Equality Act, which ultimately ends up failing in California by three or four percent, and they had done thousands of home visits, knocked on the door, Hey, we want to talk to you about about this act and

why we think you should support it. And the failure of that was a real moment of clarity, and they said, we have to rejigger everything we doing because this is totally ineffective. And the methodology they came up with that standing shoulders shoulder and let's figure out why we think. Let's explore why we think so differently. You know, in politics and single issues, if you can move somebody a tenth of a percent, it's huge. Their impact is a

hundred times that it's ten. It's astonishing. Tell us a little bit about what this group does that's so effective when they're supporting a specific issue. Yeah, the background you gave exactly what happened. They wanted to understand how they lost, and they went door to door asking They came up

with this idea. This Dave Fleischer, who runs the Leadership Lab U c l A or USC and the LGBT Center of Los Angeles, and they're extremely well funded, millions of millions of dollars and the biggest LGBT organization of its kind in the world, and the Leadership Lab was

their political action wing. And as they were doing this cavasing thing and they lost in Prop eight, he wanted to know, how could that be because this seems to be an area where we would definitely wouldn't lose this, And so he said, what if we just wouldn't ask people?

And so they did the exact same thing again. So this time they knock on doors and say they went to areas they knew that they law that they had lost in help us understand, and if that somebody had voted against it, they asked, why did you vote against it? And they had these listening brigades about fifty seventy five people would go out and knocked or the door, and

to their astonishment, people wanted to talk. When they started asking, like, this is a non adversarial thing, it's just hear them out. And when they did that, these conversations we go to forty minutes and they started thinking, well, we need to record these, and they started recording them, and somewhere along the way, about three or four times people talk themselves out of their position when you just stood there and listened, don't You're not You're not nudging them, and you're not

challenging them, You're just letting them be heard. And so they wanted to know what did we do there, what happened in that conversation that led to that? So they started reviewing that those specific conversations and taking bits and pieces and testing out was that this wasn't that, was that,

this wasn't that. And they eventually when I met them, they had done seventeen thousand of these conversations and recorded on the video and they had a b tested their way to a technique that was so powerful that while I went there several times and went door to door with them everything, but every time I went there would be scientists there, there'd be activists from around the world there because they were like, what have you done? What

have you discovered? And it's very powerful. And over the course of writing the book, the research was done a couple different times on them, and they found the numbers. You're talking about twelve ten or twelve percent success, right, And the method is very similar. You only really know two of the steps, but you know it's about ten steps. If you wanted to do it the full thing The most important aspect of this is non judgmental listening and

non judgmental listening and holding. You're gonna hold space to let the other person explore how they arrived at their current position. In other words, you're going to help them be very self reflective and figure out their thought problems. It's probably good to give you a foundation of what motivational, what motivated reasoning is right here. So you know, when somebody's falling in love with someone and you ask them like why do you like them? Like why you why

are you going to date this person? And they'll say something like the way they talked, the way they walked, where they cut their food, the uh, the music they're introducing me to. When that same person is breaking up with that same person, you ask why you're breaking up with them, they'll say things like, well, the way they talk, the way they walked, where they cut their food, the

dumb music they made me listen to. It. So reasons for what will come, reasons against when the motivation to search for reasons that will I rationalize and justify your position change. As you've said all throughout our conversation, we're often are very unaware of that and if someone comes along and gives you an opportunity to self reflecting a way where you will go through your reasoning process, you will often start to feel moments of dissonance and question yourself.

And as long as the other party isn't is allowing you to save face. And it's just non judgment and listening. That's a big component of this and their technique. They'll open up and say, okay, we're talking about that that same sex marriage or transgender bathroom laws or something. They're very political organizations, so the sort of the topics they cover, they'll ask a person this is this is the biggest part of everything, and this I urge every you wanted

to try this out on yourself and other people. You can just do it on a movie like the last movie that you watch. Let's what's last movie you watched? The Adam Project? Okay, the Adam Project. Did you like it? Yeah? Ryan Reynolds boom. It's so easy to say I liked it. Okay. Now I ask on a scale from zero to ten, like if you're a movie review or what would you give it? Six? Seven? Okay? Why why does six feel like the right number? Um, it's not a great movie.

It's not The Godfather, but it was entertaining and silly and fun. You like The Godfather, you know that's a ten. Yeah, you know what what do you think is the Godfather has that this movie doesn't. It's much more sophisticated. It tells a much more interesting tell. It's the characters are much more fleshed out. They're more interesting. Um, the violence is is gripping, whereas the violence and this is sort of cartoony. So we're gonna step out of that conversation

when we come back to it. But now what this is what I'm doing. I'm listening to you. I'm not judging you, and I'm giving you a chance to actually explore the reasoning and at and and your values are starting to come up and things that are unique to you and things you like about the world are a lot of times this is the first time a person has ever even experienced that. And this is a moment for you to start to understand yourself in a certain way.

And a conversation about a political issue you might start pulling in things about where this actually, you know, the first time you ever heard about this thing, and then will become you see it superceived wisdom or you're being influenced by others, and then all that comes into it's very easy for you to extract that emotion and tell me what you felt. I liked it, I didn't like it. When I ask you to rationalize and justify it for me and come up and go through your own personal

reasoning process, not my reasoning process. This is a unique experience for a lot of people. And then the other thing I can do is say you give it a six? How come not say a four? You know, under five I would think is something I didn't especially like. You know, I smiled and laughed throughout it, and it get me up detained for ninety minutes. That's and my nephews, that's

all I'm looking at, you see. And so we're getting deeper, more and deeper deeper into the things that you you look for entertainment, but we're talking about a political issue. This something comes out of motivation interviewing, and they weren't even aware of this. The deep camps, people therapists who had dealt with people would come in for say alcoholism or drug addiction, and you know, they already are at a state of ambivalence. They want to do it, and

they all and they don't want to do it. That's why they've come for help. But a psychologist would often engage in something called the writing reflect They say, okay, well there's here's what you're doing wrong. Is what you need to do. Here's what you and you you will feel something called reactants, which is that unhand me, you fools, feeling that I'm telling you what to think, I'm shaming you. And when you push away from it, you will start

creating arguments to keep pursuing the thing. And they this was such a debacle that they developed something come motivational interviewing, where I would start, I would start trying to evoke from you counter arguments. And I can do that very simply with the scale, because when I ask you why not a four, the only thing you can really produce for me your reasons why you wouldn't go away from the six, which is also kind of going towards a seven.

And in a political discussion, that's how they'll open it up. They'll say, we're talking about transitor bathroom law. Here's the position that I'm talking about is coming up for a vote. I'm wondering where you're at on that like a scale one was eer to ten. They'll tell them, and then they'll say why that, And this is a moment. We may stay there for twenty minutes, we go through how you arrived at this number. And then in that the deep campras to do something different from the other groups.

They asked the personal if they've had a personal experience with this issue. And on the LGBT same sex marriage issue, what seemed to have come up time and again was hey, is there anybody gain your family? Do you want them to have find love? Do you want them to find happiness? And suddenly when it becomes personal, the political issue gets inverted.

That's right. You start really realizing how much of this is abstraction, how much of this has received wisdom, how much of this is political signaling our group I inter singly, and not every time, but many times people who will have a personal experience related to the issue, and that personal experience really issue will create massive amounts of cognitive dissonance on the position I just gave you. There's a phrase which I was going to mention later, but I

have to share it. Excruciating disequal a brim is that how you ultimately get to a point where either somebody changes their perspective or or something breaks. This is how we change our minds on everything, Like we're always changing your minds at all times, like the everything is provisional until yeah, and we don't we're not always We're totally not aware of it most of the time. But this comes to the work of a lot of psychologists. But I focus in on p J because there's two mechanisms,

assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is uh when something's ambiguous or uncertain you when you interpret in a way that says basically, everything I thought and felt and believed before now I still think, feeling, believe it. This is just a modified

a little bit with you assimilated into your current model reality. Accommodation, on the other hand, is when there's so many anomalies build up or this is so counterattitudinal or counterfactual what you currently have in your model reality are they they had called it a schema, you must accommodate us. You can think of it like a child sees a dog for the first time and they're like, what is that?

You say, it's a dog in their minds? Something categorical, something like it's got four legs, walks on four legs, it's not wearing any clothes, as it's furry as a tail, it's non human dog. And then if they see like a a orange dog or a you know, a speckled dog, they can just say they can assimilate that and different

versions of the thing. I already understand. When they see a horse, they might point at it and go big dog, and they're really is an attempt to assimilate, Like I'm interpreting it and look, it's got four legs, it walks on four legs, it's non human, it's not wearing clothes. What's going on here? And he said, no, no no, no,

that's not a dog, that's a horse. This requires an accommodation moment because you need to create a category that both horses and dogs can fit with it an overarching category. And we're doing that all the time. Like there are

moments where we I think of things like that have happened. Uh, politically, I don't know how politically you want to give a let's like think about the insurrection right the For a lot of people, I have positive attitudes toward a certain political persuasion, and people within that positive attitude space did something I don't like. So I have these two feelings. I'm I feel negatively and I feel positively about what

has happened. You could accommodate and say, well, it looks like people who share my political views sometimes do bad things and I need to like have a more complex view of things. Or you could assimilate, which is often how we get into conspiratorial thinking, and say, well, I'm looking at this. What if they didn't do that at all? What if those were actors? What if those were people who are pretending to be people that agree with me? So how do you explain from that? Here's the fascinating thing.

There was widespread disapproval, especially from Republican leadership, and then very quickly, within a sixty days, maybe even less thirty days, that faded and then it was just a bunch of tourists passing through UH through Congress. So was it just strictly that sort of tribal thing that we needed to to everybody to manage people just reverted back to their tribalism because there was some consensus for a brief period

and then it went straight back to partisan politics. Was that there's a there was a long stretch, and there always is where you're you're being pulled in every direction. Uh, you know, I don't want to make a blanket statement. Most people are pretty rational about what happened there. But there's a certain ports and the population that went very conspiratorial with it, and there is a deep crisis of how to make sense of the world and where should

I put my allegiances and where my values expressed. And what we would rather do is assimilate if we can get away with it, because that allows us to maintain our current model and move forward. And if we can find an elite who says, no, it's okay to think

what you think. In fact, I agree with you. If I can find peers who will who will support me in that, if I can find groups having conversations on the Internet who let me do this, I'll assimilate and I'll stay within it, and as they say in psychology,

my social network will reassert its influence. So one of the interesting things about the shift in UH same sex marriage opinion the US is how sudden it was, and when we compare it to things like abortion rights, Vietnam, race voting, even marijuana, all those things seem to have taken much longer or why is that? That was actually the first question I had. I thought that that's what the book was going to be about. There's a dozen different answers of that question. That was sort of a

confluence of psychological mechanisms. The most influential part of his contact, right. There's an idea in psychology called pluralistic ignorance, where you know, you ask a lot of people have will have a certain feeling inside of them, attitude or value, and they'll feel like that the only person within their community who has that feeling, and unless you surface the norm in some way, they are not They won't be aware that there are so many other people who feel the same

way they feel. Surface the norm, surface the norm, as they put it. When I was asking political scientists about um the shift and attitudes about same sex marriage, they kept telling me this was the fastest recording shifts in public opinion since we've been recording this since the twenties and since then. There was an attitude shift on COVID nineteam, which I put in the book that was a little bit faster, but in this case in which direction towards vaccination.

Vaccination yet which is kind of interesting because there was an anti vaxor movement pre COVID that was really kind fringe, and I went to one of the conventions for the book best not in the book. It was part of the cut material, the Lancet article on what is an m R M or R m R and remember which the Musles rebella MOMPS vaccine, which was substantly completely debunked.

But what ended up happening is that group seems to gain a little bit of momentum, the anti vaxers, and yet even around the world most countries are vaccinated, most wealthy developed countries that with access to the vaccine, the US is a laggered um, less vaccinations, less boosts, and the most per capita deaths of any advanced economy, which kind of raises the question how much of an impact did the anti vaxers have, even though a lot of

people eventually came around and got the vaccine. The reason I like to talk about flat earthers so much is because the same psychological mechanisms are at play and everything else that we like to talk about. But most most people assume they would never be a flat right, But you don't necessarily get that uniformity when it comes to things like same sex matters or or any or any

political issue, that anything becomes charged politically. And I use flat earthers so much because they're pretty much neutral and people can feel like they have some distance from it, and the mechanisms. You can see those mechanisms at play, and then I can say, and that's also in this and you can see how it works the with same sex marriage. That it's almost impossible to believe this as a person talking to a microphone right now, in this

modern moment, like it wasn't very long ago. The people argued about this as vehemently as they argue about like immigration and gun control and everything else that's that's a wedge issue today. And there were articles that would be that would come out, but like this is something we'll

never get over. You should and you shouldn't talk about this and Thanksgiving kind of things, right, And then the course of about twelve years, but very rapidly, of course, with three or four years, we went from more than sixty percent of the country opposed to six in the country in favor and around two thousand twelve ish, and the it seemed like, how could this possibly have happened

where it come from. And I want to understand that too, because I thought if I could take most of the of the country and put them on a time machine and send them back a decade, would they argue with themselves and what happened in between these two moments, and if they were going to change their mind about this, what was preventing them from changing their mind the whole time.

One answer to that is that a lot of things that have changed when it comes to like social issues, people were separate from one another in social contexts, whereas with same sex marriage and other LGBTQ issues, coming out was a very huge part of that. Any movement that urged people to reveal their identities and to live openly allow people the opportunity to go, well, oh my god, I have a family member like this. I have a person who I care about who's being affected by this issue.

I have people who my plumber, my my hairdresser, my brother and my brother, all this whole world, and then that contact was part of that, right, I think that is the key to this being so stealthy. Why nobody saw it Because you go from I know a guy who's gay, or I know a woman who's gay too.

I know lots of people who are gay, and over that ensuing decade and the decade before, at least from my perspective, it felt like lots of people both private and public personas were coming out as getting and you know, you had Ellen come out, which was a big deal, and you had Will and Grace on TV. It seemed like it was just, you know, the momentum was building and it was an exchange like that. And you talked about in the book where where it's the cascade is

waiting for the network to be ready. That's EXAs where I'm headed up. Thanks for kicking me over to The culture is being influenced by the social change, and then the social change in reflection influence of the culture, and this back and forth is what creates a staggered acceleration of the social change. Right, But what's deep within that

is understood a network science as cascades. And the best way I could like quickly explain what a cascade is is, Uh, have you ever been to a party and everything seems to be going up k and then all of a

sudden everybody leaves and you're like, what happened? Especially if with the host, or have you ever like waited to get into a restaurant, or if you remember back in a university setting, you're waiting to get into a classroom and uh, there's just a big line of people, and then the door opens up and you could have gone in at any time. These are examples of cascades, up cascades and down castkades. So in a school setting or

a restaurant setting, you're waiting a line. The first person that shows up, they have an internal signal because they have no information the doors closed. So maybe in the past they tried to go to a classroom and they open the door and everybody turned and looked at them, and they felt real weird about it. Maybe they just have a certain kind of social anxiety. There are all sorts of nature nurture things to give them an internal signal that says I should wait and see what's going on.

So they take out their phone, they're playing with it. The second person that shows up, they don't just have an internal signal. They have one human being who seems to be waiting and maybe they know something I don't, So whatever internal signal they have is magnified by that. They start to wait. Once you show up at a door and there are two people waiting and you don't,

you're you're pretty sure you're gonna wait too. Once there are three people waiting at a door, it's almost inevitable you're gonna get a line of people waiting because they assume they're part of something, and everybody knows something they don't, and you're not with a cascade. The only thing that will break the cascade is new information out of the system. The door opens up and like the professor's like, why

are you waiting? Or somebody who looks at their watch and it's like, I figure we should have been in here by now. Or you could have a real rabble rouse, or you could have a subversive element. Somebody who's a punk. They have a low threshold for conformity, you know, they're they're like, I don't care what people think of me. I'm gonna open the door, and that person will lead everybody in. So what you end up here with our

thresholds of conformity. Uh. Some people need only a few people around them to do something before they do it. Some people need a lot. And any population is going to have a large mix of people who have different

thresholds of conformity. If you think of it like an old chemistry molecule with like balls and sticks connect to it, each person is a node and each node has a different threshold of conformity, and that threshold conformity is influenced by how many people they know, so how many sticks are connected to balls around them, and you end up with clumps and claw sters of people who have different

thresholds as a cluster. Let's say you're at a party and they want to go because you know they're they're tired of being there, they have work in the morning or whatever. But there are other people in the group who are like I would like to go, but like, I can't just be the first person that leaves. So the person who has a reason to leave, or they just don't care what other people think they leave the party. That that encourages the next group of people who needed

one more person to back them up to leave. Now there are people who actually did. They wanted to stay at the party, but hey, if everybody else is leaving but they're threshold conform you just got me out there, like I should probably go. And then now you have the people who are really we're gonna stay all night, and like I guess in the last person here and either they spend the night on your couch or they leave and you're like, oh my god, what happened to

my party? This is cascades. This is a It's a very fascinating part of human psychology because we're talking about massive groups of people, and you have a nation of people, you'll have massive clusters of people that will have different thresholds, and we often will have one in that group, many of them called a percolating local cluster. Anyone listening, who's in this world? I hope you're happy that I found

your stuff. This stuff was totally unfamiliar to me. The stuff goes into like diffusion science and people studying how rocks sink and floating local climate. So here's the here's the best thing, uh, I've ever seen about to explain this, you're driving down this is Duncan Watts. Yes, Duncan Watts, the great sociologist. Everything is he is. He gave this example to me and thank him forever for it. You can imagine a road that people are driving down in

the middle of a forest. There's uh, someone who smokes a cigarette on the way to wherever they're going, and they throw a cigarette out pretty much every time at a certain spot in the forest. And they've been doing this for years and nothing ever happens, and then one day, uh, they tossed that cigarette out and it causes a seven

county fire. Now, if you look at this from a sort of a great Man theory of history, or you're looking for people who are innovators, if you look at the whole old tipping point models and things like that, you're looking for the mavens and the connectors and everything. Well, it turns out the science doesn't really support that very well. Has nothing to do with any individual being more connect that are more powerful or more savvy than anybody else.

What it has to do with is the susceptibility of the system to anybody throwing out a cigarette, meaning how dry or droughts stricken, something happened in that system. What's going on with dry leaves, with just the vulnerability of that the vulnerable that's exactly how they that they're phrasing the youth. The vulnerability of that particular aspect of the network at that particular moment was quite vulnerable to any nudge,

any impact any strike. And the thing that really struck me about his example was it could have been a cigarette he tossed out, it could have been a lightning bolt, it could have been a nuclear bomb. It didn't matter how powerful it was, and it didn't matter how connected the person was. You don't think of it any connection. Uh. In the science of that connectivity everything, it doesn't matter that the cluster was vulnerable at that point. And any complex system is going to be like the surface of

the ocean. There are is constantly moving around. So if you think of that molecule model of human connectivity, it's constantly morphing and changing as people their relationships change and they move from one group to another. So the point that's vulnerable is all is moving. So how do you affect great change like same sex marriage or any other

social issue that we've seen in the past. You have to strike at the system relentlessly, and if you're an individual, you need to get as many people on your your group to strike together, and because eventually you're going to

be the lip match in the dry forest. That's the idea, and you have to let luck be a big part of it, because you're trying to find the percolating local cluster that will create the cascade that will cascade all along the network because you're different, thresholds of conformity are moving in and out of the networks that you're affecting.

If you look through any of the history of people who who have affected great social change, especially history of the United States, UH, they had figured out some system by which to get a lot of people together to strike at the system relentlessly, and they were indefatigable. And that was the most important aspect of the whole thing. And there are all sorts of other ways to nudge and move around, but that seems to be the essence of it. And that example from COVID nineteen, that's what

the fastest social change now ever recorded. They use this. What they did is they it was people who were very hesitant to get vaccinated because it was in the UK. People in certain religious communities were very hesitant because of their past with the you know, the government of the UK, and they didn't want to necessarily allow these government entities they didn't understand very well to take a needle and put something they didn't understand very well in their bodies.

So organizations got together with mosques and said here's the sites where we'll have the vaccinations. And they they got the the elites within that religious community too, to be the first to vaccinate. And so what you end up with is you have this wave effect of the least hesitant among the most hesitants. So these are people with the threshold, the threshold of performity where they will go, well, all I need is one person I trust to do this,

they get vaccinated. Well, that's a new wave of people who are vaccinated. So that next level of hesitancy says, well, this number of people that I trust have been vaccinated, I'll get vaccinated. So now you have that next level of hesitancy that they've been they've been saying, told two friends.

And you eventually wave your way through the cascades so that when you get to that middle hump that's very hard to get over, you have so many people vaccinated around you, it seems kind of weird that you wouldn't be And it's okay. You only some of the holdouts may take forever, the last people to buy the facts

machine or whatever, but they're in a world. But you people that have already, and that's what we're aiming for and so there are ways to UH to catalyze the cascade effects, but you have to you have to think of it in terms of the diffusion model. In this regard is not that old fashioned, the early adopter holdout model. It's it's waves of conformity via the thresholds cafformity, where you want to build up by saying this group influences this group together, they become a new unit, and so

on and so on. Quite quite intriguing. So let's talk a little bit about this evolutionary baggage that we have. It seems that so much of our decision making UH is affected by mechanisms and processes which worked great on the savannah, but in a modern world don't really seem

to help us and sometimes hurt us. Yeah, yeah, the I mean, that's been a big part of all of my work of the all these things are adaptive, as that's the phrase you want to use, like, in all things being equal, this is probably the best thing to do. But we get in certain situations where that are unique to modern life, and it turns out that he can get us in trouble. So that's the the baggage you're talking about. Is one of those things where most of the time it serves as well, but in very specific

situations it goes the other way. Huh. Really intriguing there. There's there is some specific evolutionary or adaptive issues that come up. Why do humans argue? And why is that really a social dynamic that we all do when we all evolved to do? I? You know, this is one of my favorite things that that change the way I see the world. In researching the book The Um, a lot of this also goes back to the interactions model. With that Mercy and Sperber helped put together, UM, why

would we argue? Well, the human beings have this nice, uh, complex and dense communication system that eventually became language, and we depend very much on the signals from other units in our social network to help us understand what's going on, to make plans, to settle on goals, shared goals, to decide to just do stuff, and so we do a

lot of deliberating and arguing that space. The problem is, uh, imagine it like, UM, there are three people, three proto humans are on a hill and they're all looking in different directions, and the none of us can see what the other two can see, so you would benefit from some sort of worldview that is the combination of all three perspectives. So if I do trust these people, I know them pretty well, and we're talking about going to a certain place in the in the forest together or something.

One persons for it, one persons against it, I'll know that the person who's for it is young. It's the first time out. They don't know much about the world. They're eager to show what they can do. That's that's that's why they like that. The other news hesitant. They were in a bear attack two years ago, and they're I don't know if they really are there, maybe a little over scared. This is also I have a pretty good idea of what how to modulate my trust about

when it comes into the deliberation process. The more people involved in that process, the more complex against the more I have to worry about. People could be misleading me. They could be wrong just about about no fault of their own, or they could be purposely misleading me because they want to get an advantage over me. So um they use the phrase we have a built in epistemic vigilance for when people might be misleading us. The and that serves as well too. The only problem is that

can lead to something they call a trust bottleneck. And a trust bottleneck is when someone does actually in our group come up with a very innovative idea. Maybe it's a some sort of invention. They've created some sort of new way of doing something. They have an idea about going to a new territory where they're there's good things for us to go do there. But it's there's a risk and reward in it and this, but this person

really is right. If we get into an argumentation prod yus that's too epistemically vigilant, then we will end up not doing the thing that could benefit the group, And so we have this trust bottleneck that could prevent the calls groups to stagnate. So we developed another evolutionary mechanism to get past trust bottlenecks, and that is arguing itself. The argumentation process is how we get through the trust

bottleneck created by epistemic vigilance and go ahead. Ye, So I was gonna ask, why are we so good at picking other people's arguments apart and so terrible at objectively evaluating all loves so much? There's a uh this it reminds me something the psychology called the Solomon paradox. I think it's in business too, with the we're really good at giving out advice, it's very hard for us to

actually employ in our own lives. Like you, when somebody has a problem, they tell you and you're like, here's what you ought to do, But then when you have

that exact same problem, you don't do that thing. Um. There's some really cool research recently where they have people put on VR headsets and they walk into a room in virtuality and see uh Freud sitting there and uh Freud says, tell me about your problems, and they sit down and they explained the problem they're they're having, and then they run the second time, but the second time, you are Freud and uh you see yourself walk in.

It's all been recorded. They even have an avatar with your face and you hear the audio of yourself telling your telling you as Freud what your problems are. And they have around a sixty eight percent success rate of the person having a breakthrough, Oh I see what I ought to do now that they couldn't do on their own. They need to get into this dynamic that we're talking about meaning looking at it from with through a different path they need to be they had to get that

evaluation phase. So um, we have two cognitive mechanisms to really simplify this. One for the production of arguments, for the production of justifications and rationalizations, reasons why we are doing something. It's important that in psychology reason is not the big our reason of philosophy with propositional logic and all that. It's just coming up for with reasons for what you think totally rationalization, rationalization and justification and in

some cases just explanation and why why do we do this? Well, the the interaccess model is because we're always imagined the audience that's going to be receiving the information. That's why you in your shower you're thinking of how you're gonna really stick it to that person on Reddit that you've been arguing with all day? Right? Why? Because that's the that's how that's how we produce reasons. But we also

do it alone. Like if I'm imagining I want to buy something on Amazon or I want to take a trip somewhere, You'll start rationalizing and justifying it to yourself. And when you when you want a piece of cake, you will come up with with a justification. We're getting the cake right, like I didn't need anything to day, or I did or exercise yesterday, or whatever it is you need to do. You want to do it, but

you need a justification for it. There's a humongous body of evidence that we don't even make the decisions that are best. We only make the decision that's easiest to justify. And um, huge mercy and spurn all these great experiments where they have people um and one of them, they had people they solve these word problems, and then they would mix the answers up and have people evaluate other

people who have been looking at the word problem. But of course the trick is when one of the answers is their own, and they would find that when people were thinking that they were evaluating other people's arguments, they'd find the holes in their own like thinking and their own reasoning, But if they thought they were looking at their own arguments, they'd usually miss it. So it's an

effective trick. Maybe trick is the wrong word, but it's an effective technique to get people to objectively self analyzes, to make them believe they're criticizing someone else's argus right, So the there and what it seems to be the function here. Why this is so adaptive is that under a lot of pressure or doesn't even it doesn't even need to be a group selection process. It's just simply

how the math works out. If you have a lot of different people with a lot of different experiences, and they have a lot of different value sets, and they have a lot of different skill sets, and you're facing a problem, you're trying to come up with a solution to it, or you have a goal you want to reach it, you will be much more effective as a group if everybody presents their biased individual perspective and they don't put a lot of cognitive effort into the production

of it, make it easy, cheap, and bias. Then you offload the cognitive labor to that evaluation process that twelve angry men experience where everyone looks at each other arguments and goes, okay, this that, this, that, this that, and

over time that's developed these two mechanisms we have this. Uh. That's why as individuals, and that's not one of the biggest problems on the Internet is that we we do a lot of our deliberating these days and context that incentivize the production of arguments, but don't really give us much opportunity to go through that evaluation together. There's a phrase you had in the book that that caught my eye.

Debate leads those who are wrong to change their minds, and as a group, you want to get to the best decision, the best outcome. On the Internet, it's not as much a real collaborative discussion argument debate as it is just people yelling past each other. Yeah, but it feels like, you know, it looks like a real debate, but it's not. Yeah, I feel like I'm doing that, you know, I feel like I'm participating in some sort of marketplace of ideas. It seems like I'm doing that.

But the way the platforms are currently set up, for the most part, it's just people yelling people like writing on a piece of paper what they think, feeling believe in, dumping it onto a big pie, and then other people running through the pile and guard like there's it's not

like a twelve angry man. We're not actually sitting in a circle and and or you know, it's not like a dinner party where we're I'm sure you've had dinner parties or had guests over who have really wildly different political views in you and you didn't like get into twitter mind with them. You talked it out in some way. That is that that aspect is something we've yet to tweak the system to allow us in certain contexts. There

was a very amusing cartoon. I don't remember who who's it was, but the line was, what did you do when the United States was overthrown in the early twenty one century? Oh? I tweeted my disapproval for and it just you know what, what is a hundred forty characters? It's just it scrolls by instantly. It's not really that sort of engaged discussion. I don't mean to be like, you know, I don't mean to to poople on social media. It's it's great for what it is. It's just that

it is. But it also is what it is like, it's been a It's a great tool for giving voice to people who haven't been part of the conversation in a long time. It's a great way to gauge what are people thinking and feeling. But if we want to do the deliberation thing, the argumentation thing that moves things around, it's not so great at that yet and the question is will will it ever be? Um? So, so you mentioned twelve angry men. This is a this is a great line in your book. All culture is twelve angry

men at scale. Yeah, go into some detail about you know, as plays right off what we were just discussing, like the the everything we've ever achieved as species of note as came out of a lot of people disagreeing and then like sorting it out and there are um we've been great at creating some some institutions that do this on purpose, like science when it's done well is a group of people debating and argument with the other and

trying to tear each other's ideas. But there's a good faith in signs and elsewhere that you may not get on on Reddit or Twitter. It's so crucial to create creating the rules of the game, and we all play

by it. And you I've that you if I meet you on the street or I meet you on the internet, like we may not be in a good faith environment, we're going to play by those rules that that That's why it was so nice to create these systems of argumentation like law and UH medicine and academia, the and most of the people that we I'm very against the great Man theory of things that where you imagine single inventors coming up with amazing insights like no one ever

does anything in isolation like that. The and a lot of the even the people we've lauded throughout history, they had either someone that they bounced ideas with across and against, or they collaborated with, or they were absolutely assaulted over and over again by people who disagreed with them, and they had to refine their arguments in the presence of all of that. And that's why I talk about culture being twelve agrement scale like once any like society five

figures out a way to institutionalize those things. That's when you get those massive leaps, and both in the social domain and the political domain and the scientific and technological domains. So so, given all of these things we've been talking about, from tribalism to identity, how do we get people to actually change their mind? What are the three key things people need to have happened to them in order to

get a major shift in their position. We know it would be difficult, I think, to pick just three things, but I can think of a couple of things that we fit in here. I think one thing I want people to understand is all persuasion and self persuasion, uh most mostly when it comes to change people's minds, what you're trying to do is alert them the fact that

they could change their mind. So a little bit of socratic process is you you're guiding them to something and if they're not willing, then they're never going to change them. And it's you know, we all we talk a lot about how facts don't seem to work so well. Uh, that's only because the usually when you start arguing somebody over an issue you want to present them, you'll say like, hey, read this book, Hey watch this YouTube video, Hey go to this website, and you're like, that should do it.

But how's that? Has that ever happened to you? Like, never has anyone sent me a YouTube video? And I've been like, oh, okay, I never know it though, change my mind, said nobody. And that's the idea of that

is you there's a reasoning. There's a chain of processing involved in reasoning where you are probably unaware that you went through all this and it landed on a particular conclusion because it made sense to you had matched your values and your attitudes and your beliefs on the matter, and you have to afford the other person the opportunity

to go through that same process. You can't meet them at the level of the conclusion, because what ends up happening you just start tossing these these facts that support your position at each other instead of having a conversation in which we're looking at the issue together. Right. So that's one thing, is like you can't copy and paste your reasoning into another person. And when you're trying to argue just based off facts and links and stuff, that's

really what you're suggesting they ought to do. So all persuasion self persuasion. I have to open up a space for you to explore your own reasoning, and I have to open up a space for you to to entertain different perspectives and to think about where your stuff comes from. Was what we did earlier in the conversation. Secondly, you have to recognize that we're social creatures, so people are influenced by the signaling and the expectations of the people

around them. If you say anything to that person that could be interpreted as you ought to be ashamed for what you think, feeling, believe, conversations over. At that point, no one was willing to be ostracized. The great sociologist Brooke Harrington told me that there was an Eagles mc Square of social science. It would be social death. The fear of social death is greater than the fear of

physical death. Literally a quote I have written down because I thought it was so so, and she ran me through a hundred examples where this is the true, from war to excommunication, to go down the list. It is social. Social death is actual death in most of history. And I don't care who you are, what kind of profession

you're in. You're worried about other people around you, and that profession think about you, and you're modulating your behavior to go with and your modulating your beliefs, attitudes and values. And when it comes down to it, if the situation requires it, you'll put your reputation on the lifeboat and you will let your body sink to the bottom of

the ocean if that's the situation you're put in. And Dueling and all those things we do, I'll talk all about the book Dueling Last a long time was really peculiar, but it was just this system out of ann troll. And if I'm trying to discuss an issue with you and I've put you in that state of mind, you there's no what you're what you're gonna do is react. You're gonna push back against me. Then I'm going to

get feel that feeling. I'm going to push back against you, and then you push back harder, I push back harder, and we end up in that stupid phrase of well, let's agree to disagree. Well, we already agree to disagree. That's how we sat down here, right. We're really saying is stopped talking to me, And that's what that is, is a nice we're agreeing to stop arguing with the data. We're agreeing to to never actually advance this issue and

never talk to each other again. So never open up the conversation with anything that could be interpreted as you ought to be ashamed, even if they should be ashamed of what they're feeling and thinking. If you're hoping to persuade them, you have to not do that. And then the so be aware that they're a social primate. You're a social primate. Never try to copy and paste your reading and the other person and the most important part is that you have to get out of debate frame.

Don't don't create a dynamic work. I want to win, I want you to lose. I want to show that I'm right and you're wrong. This is this is the most crucial thing. If you take nothing else away from it, take this, think of it. We're like hum, I find you a reasonable, rational, interesting human being, and it's ad that I disagree with you on this. I wonder why I disagree with you? Our disagreement is a mystery. What if we teamed up to solve a mystery together why

we disagree? And now we're taking all these things that are adaptive and usually in a way that could actually get us further along and settle. And what might actually happen is we both realized we're both wrong. What we we get to vin diagram ourselves. So you go from face off to shoulder shoulder and this if There are many different ways to go about it, but once you get in that dynamic, you're much more likely to persuade each other of something and move the attitude the room

quite fascinating. So let's jump to our speed round. I'm going to ask all these questions thirty seconds or less. I'm gonna do my best. These are These are what we ask all of our guests, starting with what are you streaming or listening? To? Tell us what what Netflix, Amazon Prime podcasts kept you entertained the past couple of years? Cool very quickly. My favorite podcast has always been are still is Decoder Ring? I recommended to everybody. I love it.

Will A Paskin is amazing best show US stream and recently it's definitely Severance. Everybody should have seen Severance by now. Also the rehearsal. You can see the kind of stuff that I like watch. Someone just recommended the rehearsal and said it reminded them of Severance and how out there? Ye watch that? And then like, I'm among those people

that please video games the highest form of art. You definitely play Death Stranding And I replayed BioShock recently because I interviewed Douglas rush Kof and we were talking about BioShock and it still holds up. Who are some of your mentors who helped you develop your your view of psychology and cognitive issues? And you know, persuasion Gene Edwards my first, like the first psychology professor that took me inside aside and said let's be friends and really talking

about it. I owe a lot to her, you know people who I've met in real life. Whoever. James Burke is the most influential person in my life. I loved his show years ago. I think it was BBC How the Universe Change, How the Universe change? And can actions? And I can Connections only for people listening to this. I worked with Johnson and UH, James Burke all over all throughout COVID to develop a new Connection series really and I can't say anything else about it, but it

will be coming out with in the next year. Very exciting. I love his stuff. What are some of your favorite books? And what are you reading right now? Let me say, as far as authors, I love UH, John Jeremiah Sullivan, UM, Charlie Laduff, Michael Perry, Larry Brown, all these there are either people who are in Southern Gothic literature or or the Southern Gothic literature version of journalism. I can't get

enough of that stuff. Our last two questions, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad who was interested in a career of either journalism or psychology or anything related to to your field. I'll give you. I'll give you two solid pieces of advice that aren't just high minded like that sounds nice, and they can put it on postcard things. This is what you gotta do. Number one, Email the people that you admire or the

people you'd like to interview. I have about a seventy percent success rate of when I was good starting out of people. They will at least email you back and say I can't talk, but you'd be surprised how many people are willing to talk to you. Just do that, and then on this on the back end, make content out of that and give it away for free until

you build up an audience. We now live in an environment we've been living in it for about twenty years now where the people who are going to offer their hand to get you on stage, they care about whether or not you have an audience. Yet you can build that audience without anybody's permission right now, and you can do that by making content on TikTok YouTube, putting it out on a medium wherever you put your stuff. So

do those two things back to back. Email the people you want, and they make content out of those emails and give it away for free into you have an audience, develop your voice. Love that idea. Final question, what do you know about the world of psychology, changing minds and persuasion today that you wish you knew twenty or so years ago when you were first getting started. No one's unreachable,

No one's unpersuadable. There's no such thing. And I think of it more like if you try to reach the moon with a ladder, you'll fail, and if you assume from that that the moon is unreachable, then you really learn nothing right. And that's what I actually had thought for a long time. And it turns out the frustration I was feeling to where other people should have been directed to myself for not trying to understand, well, why is this not working the way I thought it should work.

The assumption that they're stupid or they're misled, are there nefarious in some way? That was a real misconception on my part, the misconception that people are just absolutely unreachable and unpersuadable. I have, through the work of this book changed my mind. Thank you, David for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with David McRaney, the award winning science journalist and author of the book How Minds Change The Surprising science of belief, opinion, and Persuasion.

If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out any of our four hundred previous discussions over the past eight years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you feed your podcast fix. You can sign up from my daily reading list at rittle dot com. Follow me on Twitter at Ridholts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Justin Milner was my audio engineer.

Atico val Bron is my project manager. Paris Wald is my producer. Sean Russo is my head of research. I'm Barry Ridholts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg RADIOA