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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert.
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I m Dan Ariely, and I m joined by Monica Padman.
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Hi.
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I always say Dan Shepard, and our guest is Dan Ariely.
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Yeah.
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So it just felt right to do it immediately.
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That was easy.
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Dan is a social scientist, best-selling author, and professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University.
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He s written a ton of wonderful books, Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, Dollars and Cents, Payoff, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.
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He has a new book called Misbelief, What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things?
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So we get into the nitty gritty on conspiracy theories, which is really fun.
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It was, and the funnel of misbelief.
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He really breaks that down, which is really interesting.
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Yes.
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and important, I think.
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Really enjoyed this interview so much.
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Me too.
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Yeah.
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Also, we re sick.
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Not in the interview.
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No, we weren t in the interview, but we are in the intro.
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And in the fact check.
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But don t worry, we weren t on the day.
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We re not contagious to you.
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Yeah, you can t catch it right now.
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But we re all dying inside this attic, but that s okay.
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Please enjoy Dan Ariely.
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He s an architect.
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Dan, welcome.
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How are you doing?
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I m very well.
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Oh, we have a visitor.
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Somebody s coming.
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How exciting.
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Oh, I thought you were going to interview me.
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Oh, thank you, buddy.
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You got this for me?
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No, I didn t.
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Oh, my God.
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Thank you.
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Good luck.
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I ll come see you right after, OK?
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That s my best friend, so she had to... I met her when I came earlier.
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Oh, you did, yes.
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She s a special one.
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OK, where were we?
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Pleasantries.
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Pleasantries.
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I m going to ask a really embarrassing question, but what state is Duke in?
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You don t know?
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No.
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North Carolina.
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Oh, that sounds completely right now that I ve heard it and I m embarrassed.
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Well, that s fascinating then because you went to undergrad at Chapel Hill?
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No.
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So first of all, you asked me, how am I doing?
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Yes.
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How are you doing?
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Let s go on over.
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Okay.
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So let s start with that.
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because yesterday was an unbelievable day for me.
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During COVID, I helped a little bit to write a drama series loosely based on my life about the university professor who also helps the FBI solve problems using social science.
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And yesterday, the first episode aired.
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Oh, get out of here.
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Oh, wow.
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So did you go to like a viewing party?
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We had a party and all the writers and some of the actors and all the people working behind the scene.
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Oh my gosh, how fun.
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It was very exciting.
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And to see, you know, it s not me, of course, it s a made up character, but to see somebody playing a version of me on stage with some of my sentences and some of my preferences and so on was delightful.
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Is that your first taste with show business?
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I participate in a couple of documentaries.
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This is like real, real show business.
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Where does it air?
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It s NBC.
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Oh, okay.
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So on one of the three big networks.
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And the show is called The Irrational.
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The Irrational.
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Oh, fun.
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Okay.
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So now back to, of course, undergrad is at University of Tel Aviv.
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My first X years, I go to graduate degree at UNC Chapel Hill.
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Then I also start studying at Duke.
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Then I graduate from UNC, then I graduate from Duke.
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I go for about a decade to MIT.
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98 to 2008.
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A decade.
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A decade, yes.
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And then I moved back to Duke and I ve been there since.
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Okay, now let s go back to first PhD is in psychology.
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Second one is in business at the urging of Daniel Kahneman?
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Yes.
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Okay, we had him on.
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How on earth does Daniel Kahneman encourage you to go learn about business?
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So it s not so much learning about business, but we are dealing with decision-making.
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And decision-making, I think, is a really important field, but the theory is not really very deep.
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We re more interested in changing human behavior than understanding why people behave.
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If you look at the world around and you say, you know, we have poverty and we have procrastination and we have violence and we have all kinds of terrible things.
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My main objective is to change behavior, to see what s wrong and what can we fix.
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And psychology is much more interested in the underlying processes.
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Sometimes it s important and sometimes there s a diversion.
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And at the time, Danny thought that my interests, and I think some of other people in the field as well, would be better served in an applied discipline where we could tackle the problem.
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You know, if you think about this applied field of behavioral science, behavioral economics, behavior change, I m happy to borrow theories from everywhere.
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psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, bring it on.
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If the goal is to change behavior, you re not married to one discipline.
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So from that perspective, I think he gave me very solid advice.
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I m not sure it s true for everybody, but for me, I look at social science as a tool
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to understand and to fix something.
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But I m not happy with just understanding.
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You know, I had the same frustration at the conclusion of my anthropology degree, which is I loved it.
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I loved learning it.
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And then I thought, well, what do we do with this?
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And in 2000, when I graduated, there weren t even really any anthropologists working for companies, even advising.
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That s increased, I guess.
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But I remember thinking, well, great, now we have this great understanding of everything, can we advise anything based on that?
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And really, no was the answer, and I was frustrated by that.
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And you know, for a long time, I think academics had this view that we write a paper, and we have the conclusion, and sometimes we say possible applications.
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And then we said, oh, somebody would read this paper, somebody would look at the possible application, and they would say, oh, let s do that.
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Someone else would try it, not the actual scientist
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But I think that over the years, we ve realized that there s a big gap between the possible application and actually being able to use it.
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And the question is, who is responsible for fixing that gap?
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Or even agreeing on what direction we should be, to use your term, nudging all this behavior.
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Who s to say?
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Yeah, before we talk about the moral issue of who s to say, once you finish a paper, there s still a big gap until it becomes applicable.
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Should academics worry about this gap or should practitioner worry about that gap?
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And I think more and more that there s a place for some academics to worry about that gap and to try and make our findings more easily applicable for the people who want to actually go and do something.
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Yeah.
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Who do you think would ultimately be using what was discovered?
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Business?
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Would it be governmental?
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Everywhere.
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So every time people behave the right way, we leave them alone.
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And every time people misbehave, now we want to change something.
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And it s true for government.
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Think about something like texting and driving.
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If we try to do something about it without a lot of understanding about human nature, we might miss the mark.
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So for example, there was some data
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showing that states that created laws against texting and driving and fines actually had higher rate of accident and mortality because of texting and driving.
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Why?
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Because people, instead of texting over the wheel, they started texting under the wheel.
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So the issue is that governments set up regulations to basically get us to behave in a better way.
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And if they don t understand
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the mechanisms or what s caused us to behave, they might miss the mark.
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The same thing is true for civic organizations.
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So I was just in Brazil the week before last, and I went to visit an organization that is trying to help people get out of poverty in the favelas.
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So favelas are these very poor, illegal living quarters.
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where they build these structures between a road and a factory.
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And there s a wonderful organization that is asking the question of, how do we help these people get out of poverty?
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When you look at the conditions, there s just a lot to improve.
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There s violence, there s domestic violence, there s poverty, there s low education, there s running sewage.
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They do have electricity, but outside of that, they re missing everything.
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And without an infinite amount of money, you say, what is the first step?
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What should we do to get the biggest impact?
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That s right.
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If you have, let s say, $1,000 per family, where would the impact be?
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Not a simple question.
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You probably need a set of different people you give $1,000 in many different ways to and monitor the outcome.
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That s right.
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You don t want to do it randomly.
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You want to have some initial thoughts about what would be helpful.
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And then you want to try different things and see which approaches seems to have the biggest delta and which one depends more on each other.
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So we said, you know, the government needs to think about it.
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Civic organizations also need to think about it because there s lots of things to fix and it s not clear where we need to fix things.
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And the same is also true for businesses.
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Well, some of our best psychological data sets come from like IBM trying to figure out what their employees do and motivates them across the world, right?
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I see this referenced all the time.
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I actually have a lot to say about that topic if you want to.
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Oh, you do?
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Oh, yeah, yeah.
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Let s do it.
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Let s go tangential.
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Because so much is based on that.
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The high disagreeability chart, right?
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That stuff comes from the IBM data.
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Let me just say one more thing before that and then we ll come back to this.
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But just to think about businesses.
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So one of my startups, and I love startups because it s a way to take ideas and implement them, we re trying to figure out how to improve the last chapter of people s lives.
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So think about the chapter between people get a terminal illness diagnosis,
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until the end of life.
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On average, it s slightly longer than five years.
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And now you say, how good are these five years and what s the potential?
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The reality is that we as a society are really missing the opportunity.
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When people get terminal illness diagnosis, they often become patients.
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They stop being people.
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Right.
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Stop pursuing goals, stop setting appointments.
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And we did some research with 30-some death doulas.
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Doulas help usher kids in life, death doulas help usher people out.
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And we asked them, basically, what s a good end of life?
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So not the five years, but the real end.
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The summary of what they said is no pain, no loss in the dignity of the body, feeling surrounded by love and having a legacy.
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Kind of achievable.
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And now say, okay, so if you told that somebody has five years... You re reverse engineering.
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You need a network of people that will surround you with love.
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That s a quick timeline to get a network of people who will love you.
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Well, I ve moved to a new city and had friends by the end of the year.
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Let s say the following.
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It s certainly longer than discovering in the last six weeks and trying to fix it.
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Yeah, that is true.
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But when I talk to palliative care experts, they say that they think that for the majority of the people, if done correctly, the last chapter of their life could be the best one.
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Like imagine this impossible thought experiment.
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Somebody gets a terminal diagnosis.
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You do everything you can for them for the next five years.
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They die.
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You wake them up.
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That s the impossible process.
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And then you say, pick one chapter of your life to repeat.
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How many of them would, under the right circumstances, repeat that last chapter?
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And they think the majority could, under the right circumstances.
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And the reason is that we often live an unexamined life.
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We pursue all kinds of goals and so on.
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And the conditions of a terminal diagnosis actually can, in principle, get people to re-evaluate where they re going.
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fix relationship, think about legacy, do all kinds of things that are actually very, very good for them.
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I often say this is the gift of cancer as opposed to heart disease.
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My father died of cancer.
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We knew it was coming.
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All kinds of time to repair and dedicate that section of time to that.
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Had he gone out in a heart attack, we d be like, well, that would have just happened.
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So in a bizarre way,
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There is some silver lining to that.
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It s complex, but the question is, could we do it without it?
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Imagine everybody who became 60 would say, okay, let me... Yeah, do our five-year-end-of-life plan.
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That s right, but we don t.
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You ve read Atul Gawande s book.
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Yeah, yeah, it s a beautiful, similar exploration.
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So anyway, that was a detour, but now should we talk about human motivation?
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Okay, so I m not going to talk directly about IBM, but I have been researching human motivation for a while.
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I had a chapter of my life where I would do lab experiments, bring people to the lab, do different things and study motivation.
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Then I started working with companies.
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One at a time, I would go to a company, I would change incentives, do all kinds of things.
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And then in this last chapter, about seven years ago, one of my friends came to me.
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And he says, is it possible that some companies understand human capital, understand human motivation better than others?
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I said, absolutely.
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And he said, is it possible that the companies who understand it better will have higher returns in the stock market?
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I said, absolutely.
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So we went on a search for data about how companies treat their employees and how the employees feel.
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Because you only need to put in an incentive for the company to have growth in the stock market to get them to implement some good culture strategies, maybe.
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That s right.
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So that s kind of the objective of that.
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We basically had this observation that every CEO goes on the stage and said, the quality of my people is the best thing I have, and so on.
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But then, do they actually act accordingly?
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But we said, if we find the connection,
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between human motivation and stock market performance, maybe they will not just say it, they will start caring to a high degree.
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So we went on a long search for data.
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And we got data from some proprietary sources like this employee engagement surveys and some public sources like Glassdoor.
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And we had data going back to 2006.
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And we started thinking about what is it about the data from 2006 that could predict the stock market of 2007 returns.
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And from 2007, 2008, and so on.
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And the results were wonderful.
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We could see what kind of things in terms of employee human capital.
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Can I ask what the metrics are for the companies that would report?
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For example, we find that salary doesn t matter, but fairness in salary matters a lot.
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That makes sense.
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This is broken ladder.
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Yeah, yeah.
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We find that feeling appreciated is one of the biggest predictors.
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We find that psychological safety is a big predictor.
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We find that bureaucracy kills motivation.
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Meaning you can t implement an idea because there s so many hurdles.
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Bureaucracy does a few things.
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First of all, it says to the employees, we don t trust you.
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You want to go to lunch, that s fine, but we need 16 receipts and a video of the whole thing.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Then it basically communicates to the employee, we don t care about your time.
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The last thing is what you mentioned, which is to say, we really don t want you to do anything different.
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We figured it out.
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We put it in writing.
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Here s the book, read it.
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Everything that you try to deviate will be really, really difficult and complex to do.
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So we ve proven that sentiment.
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And the people from JPMorgan, JPMorgan, they have a very good group that does quant research.
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We shared with them our data and they verified our results.
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But they said not only that, but it s a separate factor.
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So, you know, in investment, there s all these factors.
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Momentum and large assets, all kinds of things like that.
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And they basically said, this is not captured by these other things.
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Understanding human capital is a separate thing and you need to think about it differently.
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And I ll just tell you two more fun anecdotes about this.
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One is, what do you think happened during COVID to the role that human capital plays in stock market return?
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Did it go up, down, stay the same?
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And the answer is it became more important.
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Think about the kid in seventh grade.
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If the kid is in the classroom, the teacher can have some control.
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Sit straight, don t talk to Johnny, put your phone down.
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When the kid is at home, the power dynamic changes, the kid can turn off the teacher.
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The same thing is true for adults.
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When the cats are away, the mice will play.
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So how many of us during COVID
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have said in a meeting, oh, my internet connection is not that good.
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I m turning off my video.
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So the workplace has a lot of implicit ways to try and get us to be excited and motivated.
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And at home, people need to have more intrinsic motivation when they work at home.
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If you think that the struggle is between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic, COVID made intrinsic motivation stronger.
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And there s another interesting anecdote that came from this.
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There s an index called the SHE index.
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And that index basically says, let s take the companies with the highest proportion of women on the board and on the executive suite.
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And let s invest only in those companies.
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And now the question is, how does that index financially?
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Is this a good approach for investment or not?
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So what do you think?
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I don t think you d be bringing it up if it wasn t positive.
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It better be, yeah.
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I can t imagine you and me out here saying that you shouldn t invest.
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Although this would be the place.
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Those stocks collapsed.
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Bye.
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So that measurement is not a good investment strategy.
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Oh, it s not.
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Oh, you are saying that.
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Okay.
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So I was wrong.
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That s not a good investment strategy.
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The real question is why.
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So I looked at my data.
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And in my data, it s not based on counting women.
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It s based on how people feel.
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Is promotion fair?
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And is salary fair?
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And all of those things.
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And when I do a delta for each company, how well do the men feel in this company versus how do the women feel, that difference is a good predictor of stock market return.
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By the way, it doesn t matter so much if everybody s happy or unhappy, it s the equality that matters.
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Now, why is their data not indicative of good stock market performance and mine is?
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And the reason, and that s the important thing, is that sometimes we measure silly things instead of the important things.
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And sometimes we measure silly things just because it s easy.
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So let s think about counting the number of women.
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Yeah, this is the easiest metric.
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Like, are they happy and satisfied out of 10?
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What the fuck does that mean?
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It s so arbitrary.
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Are they male or females?
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Generally pretty easy.
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SPEAKER_00
That s right.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you say, let s count the numbers, it s easy to count and it gives us a feeling that it s objective.
1
SPEAKER_00
But we can have professions where it s mostly women, like teaching, nursing, and we treat all of them badly.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s not as if as the proportion of women increases, all of a sudden we treat them better.
1
SPEAKER_00
These are two separate issues.
1
SPEAKER_00
Proportion is not the same as treating well.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the second thing, of course, is that treating women at the top of the organization well doesn t mean that we treat all women well.
1
SPEAKER_00
So my data shows that treating women well is incredibly important.
1
SPEAKER_00
Treating everybody fairly is incredibly important.
1
SPEAKER_00
And the problem is that measuring something that is not capturing that can backfire.
1
SPEAKER_00
And my concern is that a lot of times we just do measurements that
1
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sound good.
1
SPEAKER_00
I didn t give you five minutes to think about this measure.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you thought about it for five minutes, you would recognize the shortcomings.
1
SPEAKER_00
But initial thoughts are, hey, sounds reasonable.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let s do it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But too many of our measurements are like that.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they don t actually go a little bit deeper and try to make sure that you tap the psychology of what would actually drive improvement.
2
SPEAKER_01
So women have to feel that they are being treated fairly if we want them to be motivated.
2
SPEAKER_00
Numbers are not fairly.
2
SPEAKER_00
I would also argue you have to be inherently suspicious of any very simple approach to understanding a very complex system.
2
SPEAKER_00
The outcome of a stock market is one of the more complex issues to look at.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are millions of variables.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s supply chain issues.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, you can go through the list.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the notion that we would quite simply boil it down to that
2
SPEAKER_00
you should just innately kind of go, that feels a little too simple.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let s think about something that we find like feeling appreciated.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you say, I take this conclusion that feeling appreciated matters, and I can draw for you a mechanism of how feeling appreciated get people to produce much more at the workplace.
2
SPEAKER_01
And statistically, it would yield better results.
2
SPEAKER_01
Not for every company, not always, not immediately, but statistically, it s the right approach.
2
SPEAKER_01
being treated fairly, absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the real question is, what s the mechanism?
2
SPEAKER_01
How is this actually coming to play in this situation?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, how do you implement that?
2
SPEAKER_01
Do you have the answer?
2
SPEAKER_01
How to implement?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I actually don t want to give an answer for that, and I ll tell you why.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think that every company should find its own answer, for example, to how to get people to feel appreciated.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let s say we came up with a recipe that says, oh, twice a week, say thank you to somebody.
2
SPEAKER_01
First of all, it would not feel genuine.
2
SPEAKER_01
But in the same way that every couple is going to find their way to express romantic love and gratitude and so on, and you don t want a recipe for that.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think that we have this tendency to want to standardize everything and to have a checklist.
2
SPEAKER_01
And here s the legal requirement to how to get people to feel appreciated.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t think it s the right approach.
2
SPEAKER_01
If it s obligatory, it s innately... It becomes an obligation.
2
SPEAKER_01
It makes it feel non-genuine.
2
SPEAKER_01
And companies should figure out what s right for their culture.
2
SPEAKER_00
I would imagine, too, in the soul searching, they re putting skin in the game.
2
SPEAKER_00
Taking the exploration may make you land on a principle or a value that you had maybe missed.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then the other thing is you would hope that companies will keep exploring it and will not stop.
2
SPEAKER_01
The moment you have a checklist,
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, done, done.
2
SPEAKER_01
We ve arrived, we ve said twice a week, thank you, no more need to do anything else.
2
SPEAKER_00
Buckle up for this stock market surge, everybody, go airplane shopping.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s also personal, each individual person feels appreciated differently.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, totally.
2
SPEAKER_01
Also, if you think about this approach in general, it means that we need less command and control.
2
SPEAKER_01
So imagine a big company, and then you have direct managers with five people.
2
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You want to give each one of those direct managers
2
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freedom and autonomy and do the things that rise for them and for their particular employees.
2
SPEAKER_01
But of course, we are running against a very, very strong, I think, societal pressure to try and standardize everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s some legal reasons to do it.
2
SPEAKER_00
For sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
We complied.
2
SPEAKER_00
We gave the sexual harassment video.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we did everything.
2
SPEAKER_00
We re not liable.
2
SPEAKER_01
We have legal, we have bureaucracy, like it s more convenient and everybody has the same, but we re actually having a cost for that.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if you think about the company, just for simplicity, you have a hundred people managing each of them five people.
2
SPEAKER_01
If you give a standard procedure for all of them, it s very unlikely to be the right one for any of them.
2
SPEAKER_01
You might hit some average.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, this is the myth of average.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
But if you give freedom and flexibility and so on, you basically unleash human creativity and motivation and so on, but at the cost for bureaucracy and maybe legal compliance.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s funny, we definitely accept, at least in the Western world, that that was the flaw of communism.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can t have a centralized decision-making to address all the concerns of a market over the span of a country, yet we don t think that applies to an organization.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so your new book, Misbelief, What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, is of great interest to me because we, I don t think to the degree you have, although I don t know, we have some protesters occasionally.
2
SPEAKER_00
Conspiracy theories, which we do a sideshow debunking or exploring conspiracy theories, we re greatly interested in.
2
SPEAKER_00
We ve also had guests on over the years that bring out all the conspiracy theorists.
2
SPEAKER_00
Prime example, Bill Gates, when he was on the comment section was
2
SPEAKER_00
Tens of thousands of people accusing him of having children in his basement.
2
SPEAKER_00
To get a firsthand experience with it, it s one of the more, for me, demoralizing feelings.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s actually, for someone who s not terribly fearful, the notion that the people around me might not be living in the same reality as me is deeply concerning and threatening.
2
SPEAKER_00
And above all other things, I m actually more comfortable with the psychopaths on the street than I am this other thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
You begin this book with a personal experience, which is fucking unbelievable, and I can t wait to have you roll it out.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it starts in COVID, yeah, in July 2020?
2
SPEAKER_01
So I think I ll comfort you a little bit, and I ll worry you a little bit.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, great, great.
2
SPEAKER_01
So COVID starts, and I feel I m at the highlight of my academic career, because people are calling me from everywhere.
2
SPEAKER_01
Governments, companies, what to do?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s obviously a question of a virus, but there s also a lot of social science.
2
SPEAKER_01
What do we do with distant education?
2
SPEAKER_01
What do we do with paying people on furlough?
2
SPEAKER_01
What do we do with domestic violence?
2
SPEAKER_01
How do we motivate people to comply with these?
2
SPEAKER_01
Everything, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I feel amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m with two phones and my computer.
2
SPEAKER_01
Social science, I ve said for a long time, is unbelievably important.
2
SPEAKER_01
And now
2
SPEAKER_01
It s your time to shine.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I feel useful.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we have a few months of this when I feel at the height of my career.
2
SPEAKER_00
And can I quickly ask, because I feel like I was following this closely, were you out in front of cameras and stuff?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, I m just answering questions as fast as I can and talking to everybody in the world who wants to talk to me.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then at some point in July, I get an email from somebody I once helped.
2
SPEAKER_01
And she says, Dan, how have you changed?
2
SPEAKER_01
How you become this person?
2
SPEAKER_01
I answered quickly, what do you mean?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I get a list of links, and I ll describe just one of them.
2
SPEAKER_01
In that link, it has a beautiful video, starting with me in hospital.
2
SPEAKER_01
When you were 17?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was badly burned, 70% of my body, three years in hospital.
2
SPEAKER_01
Three years?
2
SPEAKER_01
Almost three years, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Unreal.
2
SPEAKER_01
Burns are really, really tough, very tough.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you re so what, susceptible to infection?
2
SPEAKER_01
First of all, the body can heal itself better when there s good blood supply.
2
SPEAKER_01
But when you get burned and there s no good blood supply and it s such an extensive part, it takes forever.
2
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, this happened many years ago.
2
SPEAKER_01
This happened when I was 17 and a half.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m 56 now.
2
SPEAKER_01
I still, of course, have pain and difficulty and so on, but I still had surgery a few years ago.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a tough issue.
2
SPEAKER_01
But anyway, this 90 second video shows pictures of me in hospital, tough pictures.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then it described how because of that, I started hating healthy people.
2
SPEAKER_01
I joined the cabal Bill Gates and the Illuminati in an effort to kill as many healthy people as possible, and that s why COVID is there.
2
SPEAKER_01
There was another one that they thought I was the consciousness architect of the COVID plandemic.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, they called it a plandemic?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, wonderful.
2
SPEAKER_01
They really gave me a good role, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, mastermind.
2
SPEAKER_00
Mastermind.
2
SPEAKER_00
Forgetting you re not a biologist.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then I try to argue and I try to explain myself.
2
SPEAKER_00
Can I ask quickly, how ubiquitous was this?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like if we had to put it on a scale, QAnon will say it was a 10, that reached a 10.
2
SPEAKER_00
What is this conspiracy?
2
SPEAKER_00
How many people are engaged in thinking you were this?
2
SPEAKER_00
I know Fauci, I put him at a six, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Or a seven.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, very hard for me to tell.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because you re inside of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
When all this is happening, I m saying to myself, these people are clearly wrong.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if they only knew, they will change their opinions.
2
SPEAKER_01
Probably the illusion that you could correct them.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
2
SPEAKER_01
And to my benefit, I would say I did call some experts to ask them, and they all said, don t engage.
2
SPEAKER_01
I engaged.
2
SPEAKER_01
I couldn t.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was too hard.
2
SPEAKER_01
I was wrong to engage.
2
SPEAKER_01
I engaged for about a month.
2
SPEAKER_01
I called people.
2
SPEAKER_01
I invited a couple of people to my house.
2
SPEAKER_01
I talked to many online.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was terrible.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m a slow learner.
2
SPEAKER_01
Took me a long time to figure out it was a bad strategy.
2
SPEAKER_01
But then what I did is I said, okay, this is a terrible, terrible, terrible situation.
2
SPEAKER_01
Something very strange is happening here.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t understand this.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you know, it s one thing to say people believe in X,
2
SPEAKER_01
But when they believe in X about me, and I can provide them with evidence and nothing changes, that was a very intense realization of the complexity of the situation.
2
SPEAKER_01
So for the next two years, I spend in some of the darkest corners of the internet, and I talk to about 20 misbelievers regularly, and I try to understand their psychology.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, what was very clear from the beginning was that these people should not be discounted.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not that they are different or less something or another.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, it s just people that somehow became like this.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that was the mystery of what got them.
2
SPEAKER_01
And let s say you said, oh, they re less X or less Y. That s a cheap answer, and it doesn t help us.
2
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t respect the complexity of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Also, it denies that we ourselves are also in this.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it doesn t help us fix it.
2
SPEAKER_00
So this book has three components.
3
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story.
3
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Most of the book is about this funnel of misbelief.
3
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It s about the way I characterize this machine
3
SPEAKER_01
that takes people and change them.
3
SPEAKER_01
And as an analogy, if you think about the food machinery in the US, there s too much salt, too much sugar, too much fat, and you say, how is it changing us?
3
SPEAKER_01
In the same way, the funnel of misbelief is the machinery that comes from lots of different direction that attacks our psychology in a way that gets people to change their beliefs in fundamental ways.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the last chapter, I talk about trust and what it means in a broader way.
3
SPEAKER_01
So if you say, we all have these people in our lives that five years ago you said, we re the same.
3
SPEAKER_01
We believe in the same thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
We think in the same way and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
And now you look at them and you say, are we both human?
3
SPEAKER_01
How can it be that we both look at the world and come up to such different conclusions?
3
SPEAKER_01
So you are both human.
3
SPEAKER_01
They just went through the funnel of misbelief and it s important to understand what they went through.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the thing is, it s not just respecting the people, it s realizing that these misbeliefs that people adopt,
3
SPEAKER_01
fulfill a real function in their lives.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not that somebody wakes up one day and says, oh, I really want to believe that Bill Gates is real.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I need a new hobby.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna go shopping for a conspiracy theory.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s worse than that because it s a trivial observation, but took me a while to get to it, is that people who believe in God believe the world is basically a good place with a little bit of devil from time to time.
3
SPEAKER_01
But the people who believe in conspiracies or misbeliefs
3
SPEAKER_01
their lives is actually quite difficult.
3
SPEAKER_01
So misbelief is not just about believing in something wrong, it s about adopting a worldview that the world is out there to get us in some important ways.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you wake up in the morning and you feel that there s an initiative to put G5 into your kids, name whatever, that s a terrible way to live.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was on some radio show the day before yesterday and somebody after that wrote to me about some salmonella poisoning.
3
SPEAKER_01
You and I hear someone ill poisoning, we said, somebody made a mistake.
3
SPEAKER_01
Where did this process work out?
3
SPEAKER_01
What needs to be improved?
3
SPEAKER_01
That person read it as a signal of intentional poisoning.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, they re looking for proof of evil all around them and they re finding it.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just think about how tough it is to live like this.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not a choice.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, if you look at some of the definitions of
3
SPEAKER_00
depression, one of them is having a pessimistic view of the future as opposed to an optimistic, which most people have.
3
SPEAKER_00
And they re stuck in a very pessimistic.
3
SPEAKER_00
Worse than pessimistic.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s an evil intention everywhere and powerful in ways we don t see.
3
SPEAKER_01
And nobody else sees it either.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a very tough thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think they need a lot of empathy.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, when you think about it, it s very tough to give it to them.
3
SPEAKER_00
It is.
3
SPEAKER_00
They are the people that need it the most and they make it the most difficult to embrace them.
3
SPEAKER_00
Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you dare.
3
SPEAKER_00
So you break it down, falling into the funnel into kind of four categories.
3
SPEAKER_00
We have the emotional, the cognitive, the social and the personality.
3
SPEAKER_00
So let s start with the emotional.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I want to give you one fun anecdote that I saw on 60 minutes, maybe 14 years ago.
3
SPEAKER_00
Presumably it was in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was a story on the sovereign citizens.
3
SPEAKER_00
Have you ever heard of the sovereign citizens?
3
SPEAKER_00
No.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re a group of people who deny the role of the government.
3
SPEAKER_00
They won t carry license.
3
SPEAKER_00
They ve been in tons of shootouts with law enforcement.
3
SPEAKER_00
They sue representatives.
3
SPEAKER_00
They have these frivolous lawsuits.
3
SPEAKER_00
They have a whole game plan.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of them.
3
SPEAKER_00
And as they investigated them, what they found that was almost universal among them, which was crazy, is that almost every member had lost a job in the last two years.
3
SPEAKER_00
And not just a job, a career.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think that plays beautifully into what we re about to talk about.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to use the word beautifully.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sadly.
3
SPEAKER_00
OK, sadly and conveniently.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_00
But that principle, I ve witnessed it in friends when they ve
3
SPEAKER_00
at least minimally felt disenfranchised or excluded.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now, if there s a system that you re excluded from and everyone else seems to be included, of course that system has to be broken.
3
SPEAKER_00
How could it be just?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s exactly the starting point.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the starting point is stress.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re not talking about stress of, oh, I m so busy, I don t know how I ll manage to do this.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re talking about
3
SPEAKER_01
Stress where you say, I don t understand the world, and I m not getting my share.
3
SPEAKER_01
Something is very broken, and I m suffering because of that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And now you need a story.
3
SPEAKER_01
And even cognitively, when we deal with uncertainty, we want a story.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a need to explain things.
3
SPEAKER_01
But not only do you want a story, but you want a story with the villain.
3
SPEAKER_01
Of course.
3
SPEAKER_01
That will be somebody else s fault.
3
SPEAKER_01
You don t want the story where it s your fault, you want a story with somebody else s fault.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the final component, which took me a while to figure out, is that you want a complex story.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now usually we think that people like simple stories.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why do you want a complex story?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because that gives you a sense of control.
3
SPEAKER_01
So usually the people who are in that situation feel like underdogs.
3
SPEAKER_01
Other people are more successful and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now you say, it s not me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want a story.
3
SPEAKER_01
It needs to be somebody else.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I want a story that would make me feel superior.
3
SPEAKER_01
I understand something that you don t.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m not the inferior one here, I m actually the only one that knows the truth.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s right, I m the only one, and they use words like, I m the sighted, and you re the sheep, and it s an interesting thing to think about, okay, so we have this need for a complex story with a villain that would give us relief.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, here s the interesting thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, you have this state of stress, you have an urge to find a story with a villain that is complex, you find that story, and it s the moment you feel a relief.
3
SPEAKER_01
you deflected blame, the world is more understandable, you feel in control, but that relief is not long lived.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because now, you ve basically said the world is a worse place, there s evil people out there, they re a little bit like a mosquito bite.
3
SPEAKER_01
You itch it, you get initial relief, but it makes the problem worse.
3
SPEAKER_01
Drug addiction.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and then it gets worse and worse and worse and worse.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s the initial process.
3
SPEAKER_01
By the way, if you see people at that stage, that s a good place to try and stop it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because if you wait too long, it ll be very, very tough.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
I do just want to say that part breaks my heart.
3
SPEAKER_00
Someone, anyone would be feeling that everyone thinks they re stupid and that the notion of, no, I m actually smart is so appealing.
3
SPEAKER_00
That part is very heartbreaking to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
The whole thing is heartbreaking, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
The fact that we are creating the stressful environment that is creating the breeding ground for those beliefs.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
When we leave people behind, this is what happens.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And some of it was done in COVID without paying attention.
3
SPEAKER_01
We didn t say enough, look, we don t really know, but here is what we think right now.
3
SPEAKER_01
Think about what it means to come up.
3
SPEAKER_01
One day you say, oh, surfaces are infected.
3
SPEAKER_00
The other day you say you don t.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was a fertile ground.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we were all stressed, even if you had the best situation.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the best inoculation against stress is resilience.
3
SPEAKER_01
And mostly we get our resilience from social support.
3
SPEAKER_01
We get it from people who love us.
3
SPEAKER_01
And again, COVID made it very, very tough to get any kind of deep social support.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we created these conditions.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you go and look at some of the TV show and the programs that talk to people who are becoming misbelievers, you can see how they re trying to both create stress
3
SPEAKER_01
and then capitalize on that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I make the analogy to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s say I worry about how I look before I go out.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t now, but I used to.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I wash my hands.
3
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t solve the problem, but it gives me a sense of control, some activities, and that reinforces itself, and we have obsessive-compulsive disorder.
3
SPEAKER_01
In the way in which people are looking at
3
SPEAKER_01
videos, let s say, of a villain, it s slightly similar.
3
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It s the same activity every time, but it s also different.
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And it s different because at some point I ll stop washing my hands, but with watching videos, there s no end.
3
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They lead to one another.
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I also don t watch the same video every time.
3
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The way that it works is that my cognitive framework for understanding the evilness of the world is expanding and expanding and expanding, and therefore it becomes much worse.
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And there s even algorithms to assist in that.
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You re getting more and more fundamentalist with each recommendation.
3
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That s right.
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So now we understand the starting point and we have to admit that we as a society contribute to it and that sometimes we as individuals.
3
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Yes.
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And so a normal person is listening to that and they re thinking, well, this couldn t happen to me because I am more logical than that.
3
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Well, we haven t touched logic.
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We ve just touched emotion right now.
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Yes, just emotion.
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But I think a lot of people might go like, oh, I respond to those feelings or I can imagine having those feelings.
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I ve had them in a different way, maybe.
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I think I have the type of brain that would inoculate me from this.
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Yes, so first of all, if you re that kind of person, I hope you ll never find out.
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Right, the hard way.
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There s a concept called scarcity mindset.
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The scarcity mindset is usually thought about with poverty.
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When you say people who are very poor and worry about where the next dollar would come from show as if they have a diminished
3
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cognitive capacity, as if they lose IQ.
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And it s because part of their mind is always occupied.
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Will I be able to pay my bills?
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And will I be able to pay for dinner?
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And what can I do?
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And during that initial period when I was attacked, I got
4
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threats almost daily for the first two years and the last one I got three days ago.
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Still, I admire their stick-to-it-ness.
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I didn t do a test to see how many IQ points I lost, but during the day I would basically manage to work, but part of my mind was occupied the whole time.
4
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Well, we know from neurology, your amygdala was probably far more online than your prefrontal cortex is normally.
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So you re having some actual biometric physiological changes upstairs as a result.
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Every ping, there s a little bit worry.
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Maybe it s the next death threat.
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It s there all the time.
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And some people experience when they worry for a loved one or health or finances.
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But it felt I lost a big component of my intellectual capacity.
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Stress changes us.
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And now comes the cognitive component.
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And broadly speaking, and there s lots of examples, the cognitive component is broken into confirmation bias, which is basically saying there s a huge amount of range of information out there, and we choose to look at the one that conforms to our hypothesis.
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Anyone who s in a relationship, just take two seconds and think about the story you have about your partner.
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They re messy and how all you see is the drawers opened up or the fridge left open or the container on the ground.
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But certainly the partner also put away about a thousand things and you just don t pay attention to those things because it goes against your story that they re messy.
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By the way, you could, in principle, change that in the relationship case.
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Yeah, you tell a different story.
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You could basically say, I m only looking at the positive.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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My partner s conscientious, and you ll start seeing examples of conscientiousness.
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And to say the things that they don t do are charming.
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Right, right, right.
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Anyway, but...
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We have confirmation bias, which is the world of information has a huge range and we look at a small part of it.
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But the second component, which is more worrisome, is that even when we look at information that we disagree with, we have a way to bend it to our will.
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I would imagine when you were responding, this is what was happening immediately.
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That s right.
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They were exposed to information they didn t want, and they were just able to either discount it or ignore it.
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Build a new thing off of it.
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You almost give them fuel.
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Exactly.
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And then there s a third component, the relationship between our confidence and our knowledge.
4
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This is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
4
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That s part of it, exactly.
4
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There s another frame of it called the illusion of explanatory depth.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
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Remember when we had the woman on, and it was like illusions of competency?
4
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Oh.
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Remember that?
4
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We talked about it a lot.
4
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Vaguely.
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So I ll give you an example of how I illustrated it.
4
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So imagine we ask people about the flush toilet and we say, do you understand how a flush toilet works?
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And people say, of course I do.
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It s a flush toilet.
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I pull the handle, the poop goes away.
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The example she gave too is a helicopter.
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You ask people how a helicopter works.
4
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Exactly.
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And then I said to people, okay, wonderful that you understand how it works.
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Luckily, I have all the pieces here.
4
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Could you please assemble a flush toilet?
4
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And nobody in my sample could assemble a flush toilet.
4
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And you go back to them and you say, so?
4
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How much do you understand the flush toilet? 
4
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And they say, not so much.
4
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What s interesting about this, and it s true for helicopters and locks and zippers and you name it, it s true for things that have moving parts like locks and also even more true for things that are invisible, like viruses or how democracy works or voting.
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And the interesting thing about this approach
4
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is that we don t tell people anything.
4
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I don t give you any new information.
4
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I basically say, explain to me what you think you know already.
4
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And all of a sudden, just by the need to provide a detailed explanation, people say, now I admit I don t understand it as well.
4
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As people get ready to Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas and New Year s Eve, we re going to meet people that have very different opinions than us.
4
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One approach to have a discussion is not to attack them, because the moment you attack somebody,
4
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they basically defend themselves.
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And in fact, they defend themselves so well that they don t hear your argument and they re just on the defense.
4
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Again, a different part of their brain is now working.
4
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Completely not paying attention to this, just thinking about what s my defense strategy.
4
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Now,
4
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If I don t attack you, I say, I m with you.
4
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Just help me understand how does this exactly work?
4
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Give me the details.
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By the way, one nice other strategy is to say, what would it take to change your mind?
4
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That s a very lovely phrase that people use.
4
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You would know about these people.
4
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So I interviewed Robert Sapolsky, very intimidating man to interview.
4
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If you have a differing opinion, I certainly don t know what he knows.
4
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And I asked another smart friend, Adam Grant, I m like, I don t really know what to do in this situation.
4
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I know intuitively I disagree with him, but I don t want to get in a battle.
4
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And he said, why don t you ask him if there s any evidence that might change your mind?
4
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It s a frightening thing to ask ourselves.
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Oh, big time.
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So that s the cognitive component.
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And then the other component is basically personality.
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And some people are more likely to go down the funnel of misbelief and some people are less.
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But just because somebody doesn t have the personality traits we ll talk about doesn t make them immune.
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It just makes it slightly more difficult to go down that path.
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So if you re creative, doesn t mean you ll get there.
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And just because you re not creative doesn t mean you re immune, but those things do make a difference.
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Let s think about the process of adopting a misbelief.
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So the first component is basically trusting our intuition to a very high degree.
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This is any belief, right?
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Not just a misbelief.
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Any belief.
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There s a very beautiful question called the bat and the ball that I m sure you ve heard about.
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No, you should explain it, yeah.
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Okay, so the bat and the ball.
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So here s a simple math problem.
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I ll say it, but don t answer.
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Okay.
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A bat and a ball cost together $1.10.
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The bat cost $1 more than the ball.
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And now we ask people, how much is the ball?
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And there are basically two approaches.
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Most people, the first answer that comes to their mind is 10 cents.
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Type number two checks the answer.
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They say, well, it sounds like 10 cents, but let me check it out.
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If it was 10 cents, the ball will be 10 cents and the bat will be a dollar more.
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That s $1.10.
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Together they re $1.20.
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Oh, but he said together they re $1.10.
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It has to be 10 cents less.
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Each of them is 5 cents less.
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Maybe it s 5 cents and $1.05.
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Oh yeah, that works.
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Now we re not talking high math.
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Anybody could do this math.
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The question is whether people check themselves or not.
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And there s some people who just, 10 cents sounds good, let s go with it.
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And some people say, let me check myself.
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When it turns out that the people who trust their intuition
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and follow it are more likely to go to the funnel of misbelief than the people who question themselves.
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And you can imagine how it would work.
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You see a video describing X, Y, or Z. It sounds right.
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People who say, sounds right, and I m adopting that answer are different than the people who say, let me hold that belief for a while.
4
SPEAKER_01
Wait, we got to close that loop.
4
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What would the price of the ball be?
4
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Five cents and $1.05.
4
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OK, thank you.
4
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It s a dollar difference.
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Right, perfect.
4
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And then it s together $1.10.
4
SPEAKER_00
OK, whew.
4
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I was struggling there.
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You got it.
4
SPEAKER_02
No, no, he explained it.
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I explained it a little faster.
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I was the 10 cent person.
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My first thought was that, and then I was like, no, that s 120.
4
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And then I started going backwards into 90 cents.
4
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I m like, well, hold on a second.
4
SPEAKER_02
Well, I was like, oh, it s 10 cents, but we re being tricked.
4
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So I know it s not 10 cents, but I don t know what it is.
4
SPEAKER_00
So 10 cents?
4
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That s right.
4
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That s great.
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And you know, this is not the right condition to be asked math problems.
4
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The second attribute comes from a really interesting research.
4
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So, do you know that some people believe that they were abducted by aliens?
4
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I love this example.
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This is my favorite story about misbelief.
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It turns out, like many misbeliefs, that there s some grain of truth in it.
4
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And in the issue with people who feel like they were abducted by aliens, it turns out that when we have REM sleep, our mind
4
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transmit instructions to the body, save the princess, jump over the thing, slay the dragon, all kinds of things, but we don t move because the mind also paralyzes the body.
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The brain thinks it s sending instructions, but they don t get to fruition.
4
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This is called sleep paralysis.
4
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Sometimes some people wake up before... It s happened to me.
4
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It s happened to you?
4
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You re one of the 8%.
4
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That s scary.
4
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Do you want to describe how it feels to you?
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Yeah, I mean, your brain is awake, you re cognizant of what s going on.
4
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Well, this was my experience, cognizant of what s going on around you, but you can t move.
4
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And you think you ve become paralyzed somehow, I d imagine, right?
4
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Yeah, you re stuck.
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And you re scared.
4
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In your body and you can t say anything.
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You can t wake your body up.
4
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But you know, like I was in college and so my roommate was at her computer and I knew she was at the computer, but I couldn t say, hey, help or do something.
4
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Yeah, it was scary.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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So let s say it happens to about 8% of the people.
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Not all of them say, oh, I was abducted by aliens.
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That s the reason.
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What separates the people who, like you, say something really strange happened to my body from the people who say, oh, I was abducted by aliens?
4
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I ve just been returned.
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I wish I had thought of that.
4
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Thought of that.
4
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Yeah.
4
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That s way cooler.
4
SPEAKER_02
That is cooler.
4
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No.
4
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And one of the differences is that they connect the dots.
4
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in ways that are not supported by the evidence.
4
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So imagine, for example, I read to you a list of 10 types of fruit, and then I say, hey, let me read to you another list of fruit and tell me if they were in the first list or not.
4
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If you confuse new fruit with old fruit.
4
SPEAKER_01
Your example is if you said apples, bananas, oranges, and then in 10 minutes you said, hey, was apricots on that list?
4
SPEAKER_01
There is some group of people that would insert apricots.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
4
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Do we know a percentage of people that think that way, or does everyone do that?
4
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Everybody does it a
5
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a little bit, but the more you do it, so if you have sleep paralysis, you might become an alien abductee.
5
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Because what happened is there is a question of interpretation.
5
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So you wake up, you re paralyzed.
5
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What do you remember?
5
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How do you connect the dots?
5
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Are you adding things that were not there in the picture, but make the picture more complete?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, you re looking for causality.
5
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So you likely start with, or me, I think of myself as highly rational.
5
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I would go like, did I eat something different last night, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, first thing to be like, what anomaly occurred in my life that has resulted in this?
5
SPEAKER_02
You know, it s funny, that s your own experience because you- Have autoimmune?
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and you understand that your body s really sensitive to food, so that s where your brain goes.
5
SPEAKER_02
Everyone s brain just goes by their own history.
5
SPEAKER_01
Other people are more susceptible to alien abduction.
5
SPEAKER_01
I wouldn t have thought that.
5
SPEAKER_02
Well, also if you are into sci-fi, I mean, I wouldn t have even thought about alien abduction.
5
SPEAKER_00
By the way, we didn t go into details of your description, but many people describe lights.
5
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I mean, there s other things that happened as the system changes from REM sleep to awakening.
5
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And if it happens in the middle of a dream, life is much more confusing.
5
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So anyway, this ability to tell a story, thinking that more things happened, they really did, but to complete the story, by the way, could be a really good attribute for an artist.
5
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creative, seeing dots.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, we should have said it much earlier when we were talking about stress.
5
SPEAKER_01
But will you just tell Monica about when people are under high stress and you show them a completely unpatterned random assortment of dots, what happens?
5
SPEAKER_01
Because I think that s really relevant at this moment.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
So we talked about what stress does.
5
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Our system wants to have an answer.
5
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So one way to do it is to show people what we call white noise.
5
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So white noise is sometimes noise like, shh.
5
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But we can also have a picture of white noise.
5
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Think about a page full of black, white, and gray dots, just randomly scattered.
5
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And the question is, do you see patterns?
5
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And it turns out that the more stressed people are, the more they see patterns, including people who go skydiving, and they get extra stressed, and they see more patterns just before jumping.
5
SPEAKER_00
And there are other things like that, like if you think about what kind of superstitions people adopt.
5
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There was a study of some tribes that showed that tribes that fish in deep sea, more uncertainty and so on, adopt more superstitions than tribes that fish in the lake.
5
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Why?
5
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Life is more random, more chaotic, and so on.
5
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We need a sense of control to overcome it.
5
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So we said stress is the breeding ground.
5
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The cognitive component helps a lot.
5
SPEAKER_00
Personality component, some people are more or less able to do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, one other personality trait that surprised me a lot is narcissism.
5
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It turns out that narcissists are more likely to go down the funnel of misbelief.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we re not talking about extreme people.
5
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Just think about your friends and think about the top 20% of them who are slightly more narcissists.
5
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Narcissists love to get positive reinforcement from the world.
5
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And when they don t, they feel deprived.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now think about what happened in a period like COVID or when something bad is happening, they say, what s wrong?
5
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If we think about stress, narcissism basically amplifies stress.
5
SPEAKER_00
You are more expecting good things from the world than other people.
5
SPEAKER_00
So when it s not happening, you re much more likely to look for the villain.
5
SPEAKER_00
By the way, one other random point is that there s a beautiful study that looked at many, many countries.
5
SPEAKER_00
and looked at the percentage of people who believed in conspiracy theories around COVID, and they found that it s highly correlated with violence in that country.
5
SPEAKER_00
Again, why?
5
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What does violence create?
5
SPEAKER_00
Stress.
5
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And it s not as if we can separate stress.
5
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It s not as if we can say, oh, this is stress from my kids and this is stress from work.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, we get this overall stress.
5
SPEAKER_00
It could come from violence in the country.
5
SPEAKER_00
It could come from all kinds of things.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a cortisol dump.
5
SPEAKER_00
didn t really matter why it dumped.
5
SPEAKER_00
The more stress you have now, the more the system needs a story.
5
SPEAKER_00
By the way, if you look at the correlation between violence and stress, the U.S.
5
SPEAKER_00
is kind of above the line in the sense that there s more conspiracy theories than would be explained by the amount of violence in the country.
5
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I have an armchair theory on that, which is I also think our individualistic capitalist society
5
SPEAKER_01
prizes those individual achievements more than other countries.
5
SPEAKER_01
So when you re not achieving and accomplishing the dream, it is more painful than it is in, say, a collectivist society.
5
SPEAKER_00
We can speculate, but I ll give you two other possibilities.
5
SPEAKER_01
OK.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, you gotta vote on that one.
5
SPEAKER_01
Does that sound okay to you?
5
SPEAKER_00
One is that as a country gets a higher rate of inequality, resilience goes down.
5
SPEAKER_00
So if you think that resilience is an antidote to stress, even at the level of a neighborhood, as inequality goes up, people are less likely to go to the neighbor and ask for help.
5
SPEAKER_00
So something about resilience changes.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do you read The Broken Ladder?
5
SPEAKER_01
It s a great book about income inequality.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and it talks about just the perception of being poor as opposed to being quantifiably poor has more disastrous outcomes on educational achievement, health, everything.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then the second explanation could be is that the U.S.
5
SPEAKER_00
has a lot of violence that is not physical.
5
SPEAKER_00
So think about our partisan system.
5
SPEAKER_00
and the aggression that we have on the left and right that wouldn t be quantified as violence, but could have related effects.
5
SPEAKER_00
So we said stress, cognitive personality, and then the thing that kind of seals the deal is the social element.
5
SPEAKER_00
And there s kind of three subcomponents in a social element.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the first one is ostracism.
5
SPEAKER_00
The first guy that started research on ostracism have this beautiful story.
5
SPEAKER_00
He says he goes to the park with his dog and all of a sudden he sees two people playing frisbee.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of them by mistake throw the frisbee and it falls next to his feet.
5
SPEAKER_00
Picks it up, throws to one of them, and to his surprise they throw it back.
5
SPEAKER_00
And for a few minutes, the three of them play and he feels quite happy playing with them.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then they stop throwing the Frisbee to him.
5
SPEAKER_00
And he says, he described how he felt rejected.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then he goes and he says, let me recreate that experience.
5
SPEAKER_00
So let s invite people to the experiment.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then let s have two collaborators, two people who look like participants, but they re not.
5
SPEAKER_00
And let s ask everybody to wait.
5
SPEAKER_00
and have two conditions.
5
SPEAKER_00
Condition one, the three people, the participant and the two collaborators wait outside.
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They have a ball and they start tossing it around between the three of them.
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And they play for 10 minutes and then they bring them in and do the experiment.
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In the second condition, they start playing, the three of them,
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But after five minutes, they do what they did to him in the park.
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They stop tossing it to the participant.
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They just, the two collaborators, play between themselves.
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So now we have a control condition, three people played.
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An orthosism condition, three people played for five minutes, and one person, they stopped throwing it to him.
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How does that person feel?
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And the results are amazing.
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I mean, amazingly bad.
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it affects well-being, it affects optimism, it affects willingness to help other people, it affects dishonesty, it affects donation to charity, it really changes people.
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And we re talking five minutes of being ostracism.
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Now, this is a part where, as I realize that, I have to say that I have
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unintentionally ostracize some people.
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When we are exposed to somebody that s just starting to be a misbeliever, I think the tendency is to crush their misbeliefs.
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But of course, when we try to take this approach, we ostracize them.
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We think, oh, this is just a small comment, and I m saying it partially joking and so on.
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They view it as a real big comment.
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And if we think about how do we help our friends and family?
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So we said, you know, we want to give the feeling of resilience, but we want to stop ostracizing.
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We ve all done it and it s very tempting to do, but we need to hold back on that.
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I would say from the anthropological lens, what you re immediately doing for that person is creating us and them.
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And once you are them,
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We all know we re all capable of all manner of atrocities against them.
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And we have no compassion for them.
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It s one of the strongest things.
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And then ostracizing for 280,000 years we were here meant literal death.
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And we know it.
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We need a tribe.
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If we don t have a tribe, we re not eating, we have no water, we have nothing.
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We know in ourselves that this is life or death.
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Very, very strong.
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And now it leads to the next component.
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So imagine somebody is ostracized and exactly what you said, what would they do now?
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They would go and look for a group that gives them the social support that they need.
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They need so bad community at this point.
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So there was one post, the misbelievers in COVID thought one day there will be Nuremberg 2.0 trials for the crimes against humanity during COVID.
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And this guy wrote a very long post about my specific crimes against humanity.
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And he ended the post questioning whether I should get life in prison or public hanging.
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Those are two options on the table.
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And there were about 1,000 people who responded.
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If you just read the tone of their responses, it would look like these are people that are gathered together to solve poverty and to do something wonderful, maybe plan a party.
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It was all so positive.
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There were so many loves, and people appreciated his writing style and the wisdom.
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If you just look at the amount of support, it was amazing.
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Now, if you look at whatever discussion group of academics, there s no love, and nobody ever
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deserves to win anything.
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In those groups, once a day, somebody deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
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People get all kinds of accolades.
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And again, it s not for nothing.
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They need that, right?
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You see a behavior.
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You don t want to say it s for nothing.
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You say, was it fulfilling?
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And it s fulfilling a deep need to feel connected and loved and appreciated and so on.
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And these groups are presenting it in a very extreme way.
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So the social element starts with some exploration of misbelief.
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then ostracism.
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Then people go to these groups, they get support.
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But now it goes a step further.
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Now you want to basically display your loyalty.
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You want to be above the fold.
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You want to show that you re serious.
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So what do you do?
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You want to express a more extreme opinion.
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The word we use for this is shibboleth.
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The story is a story from the Bible.
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There were two tribes that had a serious fight.
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And at the end of the fight, one settled on one side of the river, one on the other.
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But there were still people roaming around after the fight.
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And when they were trying to figure out who was who, they asked them how they pronounce the word of this plant.
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Because one tribe said it s she-bullet, and one tribe said sea-bullet.
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So now I show you the plant.
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I said, how do you say this?
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If you say it the right way, my way, I say, welcome home.
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If you say it the wrong way, I maybe try to chase you or kill you or do something else.
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When you think about this term, the term is not about that I care about what is this plant called, I care about your identity.
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So we use the term shibboleth now to indicate that a person is basically identifying their identity.
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They re proclaiming their identity.
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With the shared knowledge.
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And it s not about the truth.
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Am I tribe A or tribe B?
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Am I on your team?
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That s right.
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And now think a little bit about this in our current political discourse.
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Sometimes people say crazy things.
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And when they say crazy thing, you say, do they really mean that?
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Or is this shibboleth?
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Oh, this is the great question of the last 10 years.
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Are they in on it or not?
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Especially in the beginning, because later on I think something changed.
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But let s think about the first time somebody says something.
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Are they talking about the truth here and I m telling you a piece of information?
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Or are they saying, you think it s about a piece of information, but I m saying something ridiculous on purpose?
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Because if I say something standard, no issue.
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I need to say something extreme in order to- Proclaim my identity.
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Look how serious I am.
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By the way, it s not political in the sense that
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Only Democrats do it, only Republicans do it.
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It s really across the aisle where we say things that are proclaiming our identity.
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And of course, once people say it once, and maybe they have to defend themselves, and then they say it again, and all of a sudden it can become the accepted truth, even though it was never meant to be that way, and now we can go more and more and more.
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So another very important part of the social process is cognitive dissonance.
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The original story from Festinger is that there was this woman
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who many years ago proclaimed that the earth will be destroyed.
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Only she and her followers will be saved because aliens will come and we take only them and that s it.
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And Festinger was very curious to see her followers, how they would feel the day after when... The proclamation didn t come true.
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That was his assumption.
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Yeah, very arrogant.
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And pre-Festinger, you would say the diehard believers, the one who gave their homes and sold their properties and gave everything to charity and said goodbye to everybody, they would be the most disappointed.
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And the next day when they wake up and the earth is still there and no alien came, they would just say, I am leaving.
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And the people that were on the fence,
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would say they never believed it too much, they wouldn t be too disappointed, maybe they would even stay.
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But Festinger said the thing will happen would be the opposite.
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He said the diehard ones, the one that was supposedly the more disappointed, they are the one that gave up too much.
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And because they gave up too much,
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They can t confront this dissonance.
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They can t say, I gave up so much for a fake guru.
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Yeah, and I was wrong.
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And he said that they would actually strengthen their belief in her.
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And that s what he saw.
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He saw that the people who were on the fence said, not a true guru will go home.
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But the diehard believers actually went out to recruit more people after that.
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Now, if you think about what it means psychologically, it s basically that our actions drive our beliefs.
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We usually think that our beliefs drive our action.
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I m a vegetarian, here is what I do.
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But the reality is that it goes both ways, and sometimes our actions drive our preferences.
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One of our favorite sayings is it s easier to act your way into thinking different than think your way into acting different.
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Yeah, that s the essence of cognitive dissonance, and the bigger the action is, the more it influences.
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The more powerful it is.
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So now think about what it means in terms of our story about misbelievers.
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It means that once people have invested in the social media and demonstrations, whatever it is, how can they go back?
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And indeed, that s what we see.
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We see now COVID is basically over, but what we see is that the action is not diminishing.
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It s moving to questions about the environment.
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It s moving to questions about central currency.
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Yeah.
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Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
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So there s the New York Times Rabbit Hole podcast series.
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I don t know if you ve listened to it, but it s fantastic.
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You see how many people that were QAnon believers started as Occupy Wall Street.
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And then when that ends, they have to land somewhere.
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And so the great question now is like, where d all the QAnon people land?
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Because they didn t, quote, come to their senses after the collapse of that.
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They re just somewhere else and likely probably more extreme.
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Yeah, I ve looked very hard to find people who came back.
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I found very, very few.
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I m hoping that we ll be able to understand it better one day.
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But statistically, when you look at the numbers of people who say, oh, turns out we were wrong.
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Let s go back.
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It s a very, very hard journey.
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So they adopt all kinds of things.
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And the last part of this whole thing is about trust.
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Really, that s the right perspective to view it, the whole thing.
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Because when you say, oh, let s say somebody believes the earth is flat.
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You could say, oh, I don t care so much.
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Let s say you dated somebody who believes there s no COVID and you invited them to meet your parents.
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Maybe there s some risk there.
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If somebody believes the earth is flat, they re not going to change the shape of the earth.
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But of course, it s not just about that belief.
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It s the belief that there s something that s being hidden, that NASA is in on it, that every school is in on it.
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The story is deeper than just the earth is flat versus not.
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And once people adopt the perspective of misbelief,
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and start looking at everything in a negative way and as a confirmation to the fact that they think that the world is an evil place out to get them, it doesn t go away.
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It expands.
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And that s how you can move from one misbelief to another misbelief, why they expand to be more and more.
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And we re just starting a new election season.
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Last election season was not so good in terms of misbelief.
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And the one that we re starting now, we re not starting from zero.
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We re starting from whatever we left last time, maybe even worse.
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Well, let me ask you this.
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This is what I sometimes ruminate on, and I guess it s the only optimism I have.
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Let s take the phenomena that you just laid out, that you have to get more and more extreme.
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It s almost like entropy, right?
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It s going to enter a phase where there s nowhere else to go.
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So kill everybody, everyone sucks, but we get to whatever the nth degree of this is.
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Hang you in public.
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There s not much more to say after that.
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We re going to run out of extreme, right?
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So is there any hope in the notion that people also fatigue?
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When I look at the polarization that has existed over the last 15 years, I guess the only thing that makes me optimistic is I think people are fatiguing of it.
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Just like every other thing that s cyclical and we re passionate about and then it dissipates.
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My only hope is that we do fatigue out of these things.
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I don t see us fatiguing out of this because I think the cognitive emotional shortcut is not to get out of it, but to stay in it.
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Let s say if you look at the percentage of Americans who are okay with their kids marrying somebody from the other side of the political spectrum, these numbers are changing and not for better.
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Do you remember a ballpark of what they are?
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How many people are opposed to that?
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I think it s slightly less than 50%, but close to 50%.
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Now, if you think about that and you say somebody gets fatigued, I think they would just stay with your opinion rather than be open to adopt it.
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So I don t think fatigue is a good mechanism to bring change.
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I ll tell you what I do think.
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So we started with whether this conversation is going to be optimistic or pessimistic.
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So I hope it gave you some optimism in the sense that when you look now at some of your friends or other people, you say they re not different.
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They just had a very unfortunate set of events, and I understand now better how they got there.
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I think the problem is bigger and more complex and more painful than what I thought when I started the book.
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The book proposal had a chapter on solutions.
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I don t have that chapter.
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I have this thing called hopefully helpful throughout the book, but I don t have a solution.
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I think there s lots of things we need to do, but there s lots of them and there s not that much time.
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Minimally, I would say we would have to agree that Upriver is the solution.
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which is as we track, let s say meth addiction, your odds of recovery if you re snorting meth is X percent.
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If you re smoking it, if you re shooting it, you re done.
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It s like a five percent, you know, it s so low that you can t really spend your energy trying to intervene with someone that s shooting it.
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You got to start with someone who s snorting it.
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And I think that has to be the case here is like figuring out how to identify when people feel ostracized, having some kind of system in place
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Yeah, and that s why for me the metaphor of the funnel is very good because you say, okay, catch people early and figure out what we need to do.
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So there are things we could do as individuals, social support, what would it take to change your mind, the illusion of explanatory depth, not ostracize.
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There are things we have to do on the social networks side.
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The fact is that, I don t know about you, but when social networks started, I thought this was an amazing innovation that would propel humanity forward.
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I think I was deeply wrong.
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And maybe there were some turns in the middle that could have been different, but we re in a very different world.
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We need to fix it.
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So I look at this and I say, the optimistic side is if we recognize the size and the complexity and the urgency,
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we can act.
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We just need to decide that this is a priority.
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And I think it is because if you look at every problem in society, I think every one of them is worse because of misbelief.
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Imagine there was COVID-23 that started the day after tomorrow.
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How well are we set to deal with it together as a country?
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Worse.
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Yeah.
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Exactly.
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When COVID started, I called some people that I know in pharmaceutical industry and I said, why don t you start showing the scientists who are working day and night?
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Why don t you start documenting this?
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I said, I hope at some point this will be kind of the shining moment where the pharmaceutical industry could save the world.
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Could be a complete rebranding of big pharma.
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Yeah.
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And of course, everybody was too busy to do anything and the priorities were different and so on, but I think it s a very missed opportunity.
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I think if people had a live camera in many of the labs and they would see the way that people were working tirelessly to try and come up with things and fail.
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And I mean, it s just a heroic story, but it s not the story that is being told.
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SPEAKER_02
The story that is eventually being told has none of the tears and sweat and effort and ingenuity.
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And eventually the story has been taken from them and played out in a very different way.
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Yeah, in a very, very political way.
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Well, it s incredible.
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Now, I need your help.
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I have an inherent problem.
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I love your book.
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I think you re brilliant.
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Anyone who listens who happens to know the history is going to ask why I would believe your book, because obviously you ve had some controversy and some past work.
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And it is my goal to acknowledge that and try to alleviate and or justify why we would take this book serious.
7
SPEAKER_00
I can t not bring that up.
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I am happy to talk about anything.
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SPEAKER_00
Okay.
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So you did a bunch of work on nudging.
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I wouldn t call it nudging, but I did a bunch of work on changing behavior.
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Okay.
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One of them being that if we switch the line you sign at the end of a questionnaire, I promise these were all truthful.
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SPEAKER_00
If you move that to the top of the questionnaire, you ll see that people are more truthful.
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SPEAKER_00
And then a lot of stuff was built on the back of that.
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That s right.
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And so...
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One of the three experiments in particular, and correct me as I go, I m just learning of this, I was bummed to learn this, that s not what I want to learn, was this data that came from a health provider.
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SPEAKER_00
It came from a car insurance company.
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And the thought was, they have to report their odometer readings at some point, and so this is a great opportunity.
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There s going to be 13,000 people asked to do this.
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Half of them will tell them to be truthful at the top, and the other half will be truthful at the bottom.
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It was reported that it was very effective, and
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The insurance provider has come out since and said that wasn t our data.
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SPEAKER_00
We only turned over 3,700 examples, not 13,000.
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The paper was since removed.
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SPEAKER_00
A lot of critics came out.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think, A, I m not a shame monster.
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I m a big addict who s relapsed in public and came out and said it.
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So I m not interested in shame at all.
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I am interested in what the experience is of losing credibility.
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SPEAKER_00
And I m also curious if you think even understanding a lot of these psychological principles that we both understand inoculates you from not doing them as well.
7
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So first of all, let me set the record straight in some important ways.
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There was a paper that I got the data in somewhere around 2007, 2008 that we found out later was falsified.
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We actually found out about it two years ago.
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I acted all along in a very trusting way with the data.
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I shared it with people.
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I noted possible mistakes that happened with it.
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I shared it publicly.
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I did everything a scientist would do, believing that the data was real data.
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It turns out it wasn t.
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Just to be clear, I have never thought, imagined, or acted in any way that is dishonest.
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Just not my interest in any of this.
7
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But a big, terrible mistake happened.
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I certainly think that I have some responsibility.
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Very sad that it happened, but it happened.
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SPEAKER_00
Hold on, though.
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SPEAKER_00
I just got to push back a little bit.
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A mistake is, I accidentally read that wrong.
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SPEAKER_00
I was given this and I should have sussed it out.
7
SPEAKER_00
Claiming you had 13,000 bits of data when there was only 3,000, that doesn t feel like a mistake.
7
SPEAKER_00
My mistake was that I trusted this data.
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SPEAKER_00
But are you claiming you trusted the data that came from the insurance provider or from your team who was analyzing the data?
7
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This is a very strange story, and it s a story about a very long time ago.
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And it s very hard for me.
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I ve been trying for two years to understand what happened.
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SPEAKER_02
But somewhere along the way, by the time I had confidence in this data, some very bad things happened to the data.
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We would agree someone manipulated it.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, absolutely.
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SPEAKER_02
I m saying it was falsified.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_00
Okay, great.
7
SPEAKER_02
The data was falsified.
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SPEAKER_02
There s no question about it.
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SPEAKER_02
There s also, in my mind, no question that I didn t do it.
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But it did happen.
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In retrospect, I can say, oh, you know, I could have been thoughtful here.
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SPEAKER_02
I could have run this analysis there and so on.
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SPEAKER_02
But the reality is I trust lots of people.
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SPEAKER_02
I work with lots of people.
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SPEAKER_02
Also, because of my injury, I can t type.
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There s all kinds of things that s very hard for me to do.
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There s lots of things I don t do myself.
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That you outsource.
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Something very bad happened under my watch.
7
SPEAKER_02
I take responsibility.
7
SPEAKER_02
So the data was falsified.
7
SPEAKER_02
Defining about signature up front and signature in the bottom holds.
7
SPEAKER_02
Since then, for example, we re-ran all kinds of experiments.
7
SPEAKER_02
Anyway, so that s about defining.
7
SPEAKER_02
Something very bad happened.
7
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I deeply regret it.
7
SPEAKER_02
I go back and forth of what could I have done differently.
7
SPEAKER_02
The one thing I could do is replicate the study.
7
SPEAKER_02
Which I read was not achievable.
7
SPEAKER_02
No, no, no, very much achievable.
7
SPEAKER_00
I can send you... There s the example of this scientist that worked with you guys, went to Guatemala to help with the taxes.
7
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_02
So I don t know how much you want to go into this, but that study in Guatemala used a very different approach and a very different method.
7
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And it s true, he didn t find it.
7
SPEAKER_02
But there s lots of nuances about this.
7
SPEAKER_02
But if you look at what the British government did, if you look at what the US government did, there s lots of other things.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I ve also replicated it.
7
SPEAKER_02
The results do work.
7
SPEAKER_02
It s more nuanced as a story, but signing on the top does change honesty.
7
SPEAKER_02
Right.
7
SPEAKER_02
You asked me also, how do I feel about this?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, let s just say that, again, I ve done this.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve errored enormously and come out and dealt with it.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s a very specific experience.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s also a specific experience to, and this happens a lot, I think, for people at the top, the boss, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
You are expected to sometimes remove yourself from the job, to take full responsibility.
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t know all the details, but this happens a lot where you have to leave because of something that happened underneath you because it s expected.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like the Admiral of a ship, you re saying.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and that is ultimately true.
7
SPEAKER_00
That one doesn t interest me, if I m being honest, because then you re not culpable.
7
SPEAKER_00
My hunch is you re culpable in some way.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I want to know what it s like to publicly confront being culpable in something.
7
SPEAKER_00
And if you think in retrospect, oh, I think I know what I came to.
7
SPEAKER_00
I understand how the mind works.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve been studying it forever.
7
SPEAKER_00
What did I do that mirrors what I know?
7
SPEAKER_02
I had the experience of being accused by the misbelievers for a while before this happened.
7
SPEAKER_02
So I had some kind of both extra sensitivity and some inoculations.
7
SPEAKER_02
Because death threats are a different category than angry professors.
7
SPEAKER_02
But of course, one of them is my reference group, the people that I feel belong to.
7
SPEAKER_02
So I would say when I found out about the data falsification before it became public, I was distraught.
7
SPEAKER_02
It was terrible to know that something like this could happen under my watch.
7
SPEAKER_02
I tried as much as I could to understand how it happened, and I basically did not sleep.
7
SPEAKER_02
But my expectation in that period, and I called many of my friends at the time and I said, look, when you get data from postdocs or PhD students or other people that you work with, how often do you run tests on it?
7
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How often do you check that the data was falsified?
7
SPEAKER_02
You know, we run all kinds of tests on the data, but assuming that it was falsified requires very different tests.
7
SPEAKER_02
And everybody said, you know, we actually don t do it very much.
7
SPEAKER_02
The level of trust is incredible.
7
SPEAKER_02
Like, if you think about how much trust is running society, it s everywhere.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh, sure.
7
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
7
SPEAKER_02
And I actually, in my naivete, thought that when this would become public, the field would take a deep look inside and say, this is something we all do.
7
SPEAKER_02
There s a level of trust that we have.
7
SPEAKER_02
And what are some of the mechanisms
8
SPEAKER_00
mechanisms that we should do.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I prepared for that because I talked with my lab, I talked with some people, and I started creating algorithms that would help us do it in a standardized way.
8
SPEAKER_00
Not everybody has to invent the wheels, but we say, okay, if we re now going to basically run some algorithmic checks, let s do it together.
8
SPEAKER_00
But when it came out, that was not the response.
8
SPEAKER_00
The response was very personal and very, very different.
8
SPEAKER_00
I realized that academics are people.
8
SPEAKER_02
Do you think the reaction would have been softer if you hadn t been so celebrated as a behavioral scientist?
8
SPEAKER_02
Of course.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think I saw that last year there were about 2,000 papers that got retracted.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s not that it never happens, and it shouldn t happen.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we should work very hard to do it, but
8
SPEAKER_00
There are also lots of car accidents.
8
SPEAKER_00
Bad things happened, but the personal attacks were very hurtful.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if you realize, but most academics are on the left side of the map, and there s something very cancel culture-like that the left celebrates.
8
SPEAKER_00
Eating our own.
8
SPEAKER_00
We love to eat our own.
8
SPEAKER_00
But then in the same way that when I look at the misbelievers, I don t try to blame them.
8
SPEAKER_00
I look at the system and I look at human nature.
8
SPEAKER_00
I still try to look at it in the same approach.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I say, here s the world they live in.
8
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_02
I guess it would be really tempting for you because in many ways you ve been ostracized in that moment.
8
SPEAKER_02
And we know what happens to people that are ostracized.
8
SPEAKER_02
So how do you combat that?
8
SPEAKER_00
You can think about that this book is my attempt to find the villain.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh, lovely.
8
SPEAKER_00
It took me a long time to get to that.
8
SPEAKER_00
But here I was, villainized, stress, scarcity mindset, death threats.
8
SPEAKER_00
And like everybody else, I need a story.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I need a villain.
8
SPEAKER_00
This book is really my attempt to find the villain.
8
SPEAKER_00
And the villain I found is a combination of human nature and media and some other things in society.
8
SPEAKER_02
The villain s vestigial evolution.
8
SPEAKER_02
I think at all times.
8
SPEAKER_02
It s like designed to live in a way we don t live anymore.
8
SPEAKER_00
So this book really is my complex story about what is happening in the world and why I got to be where I was.
8
SPEAKER_00
And when I look at whatever, academics and so on, I look at it in the same way.
8
SPEAKER_00
I basically distant myself a little bit and I try to understand how this process is working.
8
SPEAKER_00
So it s not that I don t take things personally, but most of the time I look from the side with kind of an amazement and interest.
8
SPEAKER_01
Do you worry?
8
SPEAKER_01
Because when we talked at the very beginning about the end of life and the things that you... Legacy was the fifth thing.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s what I was about to say, that that has had an impact on your legacy.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, I m not worried, and I ll tell you why.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think that it s very easy to make very loud accusations in the short term.
8
SPEAKER_00
but I still believe that in the long term, the right things would come out.
8
SPEAKER_00
So if I was going to end my life in the next week, I would say, okay, maybe things are not balanced the way I want.
8
SPEAKER_00
But if you say I have at least five more years, things have a way to crystallize over the long term.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I feel good about myself because as much as I look back and I try to find out, you know, do I have any
8
SPEAKER_00
memory of ever doing something that I think was ill-intentioned.
8
SPEAKER_00
I have zero memories of things like that.
8
SPEAKER_00
I feel very confident as a positive, contributing human being.
8
SPEAKER_00
I wake up every day with a desire to help.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t doubt myself, and there is this thing that is happening, but I think it has a cycle, it has social media, it has some other things, but I m quite confident that reality would eventually win.
8
SPEAKER_02
This has been lovely.
8
SPEAKER_02
I don t know if you would enjoy this, but when I was going through that, a saying I heard that gave me great comfort was, I did the thing they said I did, I m not the thing they say I am.
8
SPEAKER_02
I really like that.
8
SPEAKER_01
I have a weird though, okay, so we have, I don t want to make this equivalency, and I don t even know if we re allowed to talk about this, but we know someone who s just recently, quote, in trouble, a comedian,
8
SPEAKER_01
who it s like come out that part of his special is made up.
8
SPEAKER_01
Like the stories are made up, but the truths that he s getting at are real.
8
SPEAKER_01
And there s a question of, is it okay for him to have fabricated some stories or pieced together stories?
8
SPEAKER_01
in order for a real truth to be exposed.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think there are people on both sides of that argument, especially in comedy, obviously.
8
SPEAKER_01
Everything s exaggerated, so it s a weirdly specific niche, but I am curious.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think about my role, I m kind of a strange social scientist.
8
SPEAKER_00
I publish paper, I do everything that other people do, but I ve set my own path.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think part of it is because of my injury and my limitation.
8
SPEAKER_00
I can t do what other people do sometimes, so I do what s easier for me.
8
SPEAKER_00
For example, I have a lot of pain in my hands, and when I travel, I type less.
8
SPEAKER_00
So it s easier for me to go and give lectures than to type.
8
SPEAKER_00
I re-engineer my life in a way that works for me.
8
SPEAKER_00
And it s different than what works for other people.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I ve created my own map of what I think I can do in this world in a way that works for me.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s a new path.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t have examples of other people who ve done it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Maybe I ve made some choices that I haven t thought about in our mistakes.
8
SPEAKER_00
What is the role of a social scientist?
8
SPEAKER_00
How much of it is to be an activist and how much is to publish papers?
8
SPEAKER_00
And are general audience books like Misbelief part of what we do or not?
8
SPEAKER_00
What about all the people who write me?
8
SPEAKER_00
and ask me for personal advice.
8
SPEAKER_00
Should I answer them all and say, look, this is not my field, I don t know what to do, or do I have a responsibility?
8
SPEAKER_00
For me, academics, what exactly do we get paid for?
8
SPEAKER_00
What exactly is our profession?
8
SPEAKER_00
I think our profession is not limited to teaching in class.
8
SPEAKER_00
and is not limited to writing papers.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think, for example, I feel an obligation.
8
SPEAKER_00
Somebody wrote me today and asked me a question about their father and hearing aids.
8
SPEAKER_00
Not my area.
8
SPEAKER_00
I know something about it.
8
SPEAKER_00
I thought you were a cochlear implant expert.
8
SPEAKER_00
not my area, but I did read a couple of papers on this topic a few years ago.
8
SPEAKER_00
Do I ignore this email?
8
SPEAKER_00
Do I respond?
8
SPEAKER_00
Where do I stand?
8
SPEAKER_00
And I feel that we have some kind of social obligation.
8
SPEAKER_00
We have some kind of social contract with society.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think academia is a very, very special place.
8
SPEAKER_00
and we get this incredibly interesting job with a lot of freedom and tenure and all kinds of things.
8
SPEAKER_00
But I don t think it s one-sided.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think we owe something to society.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I say yes to every government that wants me to talk.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because I m Jewish and Israeli, I say yes to every Muslim country, with the exception of Iran.
8
SPEAKER_00
But I say yes as much as I can to hospitals because of my history.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I answer people.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what are the rules of engagement.
8
SPEAKER_00
What s the boundary?
8
SPEAKER_00
Nobody s giving me examples, and I try to make it up as I go.
8
SPEAKER_00
And among those are things that annoy other people.
8
SPEAKER_00
But it s okay.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s okay.
8
SPEAKER_02
Well, Dr. Ariely, this has been so fun.
8
SPEAKER_02
I hope everyone gets misbelief.
8
SPEAKER_02
What makes rational people believe irrational things?
8
SPEAKER_02
And then I want to close with this.
8
SPEAKER_02
Sometimes it takes me the whole two hours to figure it out, but I just got it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wow.
8
SPEAKER_01
You ready?
8
SPEAKER_02
I m going to tell you what celebrity you look like.
8
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
8
SPEAKER_02
I m hoping it s been said to you before.
8
SPEAKER_00
No, nobody has ever said I look like a celebrity.
8
SPEAKER_00
Paul McCartney.
8
SPEAKER_02
Wow.
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I could see it.
8
SPEAKER_02
Your fucking eyes are identical.
8
SPEAKER_01
I can see it.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s a good one.
8
SPEAKER_00
That was driving me nuts for two hours.
8
SPEAKER_00
You know what?
8
SPEAKER_00
When I was very young, somebody said it to me.
8
SPEAKER_01
Okay, you did it.
8
SPEAKER_02
Okay, that s a big victory here.
8
SPEAKER_02
That s the high point of this.
8
SPEAKER_02
Dan, this was really a pleasure and I thank you for also adjusting your time.
8
SPEAKER_00
Of course.
8
SPEAKER_02
I was touring to school with my daughter and I knew I wouldn t be back in time.
8
SPEAKER_02
No problem at all.
8
SPEAKER_02
All right, so thank you so much for joining us.
8
SPEAKER_02
Thank you very much.
8
SPEAKER_02
Stay tuned for the fact check so you can hear all the facts that were wrong.
8
SPEAKER_01
You re wearing another Burberry piece for the audience.
8
SPEAKER_02
Yes, the second one I got.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s very nice.
8
SPEAKER_01
And it s very autumnal.
8
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, very autumnal.
8
SPEAKER_02
We re both sick.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I finally got my mom s cold.
8
SPEAKER_01
I got your mom s cold too.
8
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, somehow I got your mom s cold.
8
SPEAKER_02
Or I got what the girls had while I was out of town and there was some residual.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I could ve also got that.
8
SPEAKER_02
So last night, Whiskey, you know, he s so needy, Whiskey.
8
SPEAKER_01
Whiskey the dog.
8
SPEAKER_02
Or three-legged dog, yeah, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_02
He just, I think he just wants to pass.
8
SPEAKER_02
Like, I think he wants to be lying next to me and then just gently pass.
8
SPEAKER_01
No!
8
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
8
SPEAKER_01
You do?
8
SPEAKER_02
I do.
8
SPEAKER_01
He s so young.
8
SPEAKER_02
Well, he is young and I don t want him to pass.
8
SPEAKER_02
Let me be very clear that that s not my agenda for him.
8
SPEAKER_02
Well, let s just say this.
8
SPEAKER_02
He s got the worst depression of any creature I ve ever seen.
8
SPEAKER_02
He spends the entire day in bed.
8
SPEAKER_02
And then, and then at night after he s got to get his TV time with me, like laying in bed next to me while we watch TV.
8
SPEAKER_02
And then I take him out to go pee pee.
8
SPEAKER_02
Then I put him in his house downstairs in the first floor.
8
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_02
So did all that last night, but I hadn t been home very long and he didn t like that.
8
SPEAKER_02
So I put, I took him out to pee, put him in his house and then he started barking in his crate.
8
SPEAKER_01
He didn t get enough TV time.
8
SPEAKER_02
He did not get enough, nor did I even turn it on.
8
SPEAKER_01
He didn t get any TV.
8
SPEAKER_02
None of the cues were there.
8
SPEAKER_02
So anyways, I let him sleep.
9
SPEAKER_01
in my bed last night.
9
SPEAKER_01
He was sleeping on my neck, on my face, on my shoulder.
9
SPEAKER_00
But you let him sleep in the bed?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yes, that s what I ended up doing, because I was exhausted.
9
SPEAKER_00
Who are you?
9
SPEAKER_01
I was cold.
9
SPEAKER_01
Not cold.
9
SPEAKER_01
I have a cold.
9
SPEAKER_01
I wasn t chilly.
9
SPEAKER_01
And he was all over the place.
9
SPEAKER_01
But all that was manageable.
9
SPEAKER_01
And then at 5 a.m., he decided to give himself a full bath.
9
SPEAKER_01
I just wake up to him licking his arms and every part of his body.
9
SPEAKER_01
He s just cleaning, soup to nuts, nose to tail.
9
SPEAKER_01
He s cleaning himself.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it wakes me up.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I can t, there s no way to get him to stop.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I take him finally at 5 a.m.
9
SPEAKER_01
down to his house, put him in there, go back upstairs, try to go back to sleep.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s not going to happen.
9
SPEAKER_01
I decide I m going to go hiking.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I went hiking at 6.45 and I had to really boogie so that I d be back in time to take the kids to school.
9
SPEAKER_01
And then I really was out of time to choose this outfit.
9
SPEAKER_01
That was a long winded way to tell you that I think I probably have a pair of pants that matches better than this.
9
SPEAKER_01
So stay tuned for this piece to get a little more amplified.
9
SPEAKER_00
Do you have black jeans?
9
SPEAKER_01
I just ordered black.
9
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
9
SPEAKER_01
Because of Beckham.
9
SPEAKER_01
Black denim.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, it would go good with that face.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I can t wait to pair it.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Great tip.
9
SPEAKER_00
Thanks for the pro tip.
9
SPEAKER_00
You re welcome.
9
SPEAKER_00
So that story is one of those story, do I have any bugs on my face?
9
SPEAKER_01
No bugs.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_01
If you had a grasshopper on your cheek, that d be great luck.
9
SPEAKER_00
When I walked here, a bug flew in my face.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, really?
9
SPEAKER_00
And it was on my face.
9
SPEAKER_00
So sometimes you don t know when there are bugs on your face.
9
SPEAKER_01
That s true, that s true.
9
SPEAKER_00
I just had to check.
9
SPEAKER_00
Now I feel like it s covered in bugs.
9
SPEAKER_01
Nope, no bugs.
9
SPEAKER_00
The story you told about whiskey is one of those stories that I just find so nice, but I find it unsettling.
9
SPEAKER_01
So nice about what?
9
SPEAKER_00
Are you gonna go nude?
9
SPEAKER_01
No, no, that was an accident.
9
SPEAKER_01
My piece is too hot.
9
SPEAKER_01
As much as I wanna wear my piece, it s too hot with the cold.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay, you were saying the story about whiskey.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s really sweet.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s such a sweet story, but I hate it.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, because it s unsettling, because I feel like I don t know you.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, really, when I do something out of character like that?
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s not terribly out of character, though.
9
SPEAKER_01
You know that when Kristen was out of town, I would be very nice to all the dogs.
9
SPEAKER_00
If someone s around being nice- I would not sleep in your bed.
9
SPEAKER_00
You never do that.
9
SPEAKER_01
No, I don t, but he s, well, he s like negotiating with a terrorist, because he ll bark.
9
SPEAKER_01
He ll just sit down there and bark.
9
SPEAKER_01
If I had all night to play that game, but I wanted to go to bed, I was very, very tired from my cold.
9
SPEAKER_01
Sure.
9
SPEAKER_01
And too busy of a weekend.
9
SPEAKER_01
It was out of my own laziness, I think.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so you re still you, I guess.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
9
SPEAKER_01
That sucks too, that I m still me?
9
SPEAKER_00
No, I want you to be you.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m still very much me.
9
SPEAKER_00
I do have an issue with people making changes.
9
SPEAKER_01
You do, it scares you because you ll think that you won t be a part of whatever new version.
9
SPEAKER_00
I guess so.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you ll be, you will be.
9
SPEAKER_01
Even if I start sleeping with dogs and stuff, we ll still be best friends.
9
SPEAKER_00
Are you sure?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, positive.
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_01
Think how much changing I ve done since I left Michigan and Erin and I are still best friends.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s true.
9
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I got sober.
9
SPEAKER_01
That was a big oopsies.
9
SPEAKER_01
That was a big divergent from the past.
9
SPEAKER_00
But that did cause a bit of a rift for a little bit.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, it really well.
9
SPEAKER_01
It did and it didn t.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like when I went home, I still hung out with him every time I went home.
9
SPEAKER_01
It was harder for him to hang out with me because he had to keep his shit semi under control while I was there.
9
SPEAKER_01
And that was challenging for him.
9
SPEAKER_01
But I didn t, I wasn t really privy to that.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like I would see him, we d go out to lunch and it was lovely.
9
SPEAKER_01
Now, had he been sober, he would have wanted to come visit more.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so sure, it drove a wedge in that way.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if I, I wouldn t blame it on that.
9
SPEAKER_01
I just, I don t think anyone had much time with Aaron when I was walking here.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
I was listening to your favorite podcast.
9
SPEAKER_00
No, new song, new old song.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, Taylor s 1989 came out, Taylor s version.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And there s a re-record of Bad Blood with Kendrick Lamar.
9
SPEAKER_01
No way.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
9
SPEAKER_00
I love that he did that for her.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
So cool.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
And also shows how much respect she has
9
SPEAKER_01
Uh-huh, for sure.
9
SPEAKER_00
In the music industry.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s very cool, and I love him so much.
9
SPEAKER_01
Me too.
9
SPEAKER_00
Ugh, and so when we were walking, I mean, when I was walking, when me and the Bugs were walking.
9
SPEAKER_01
Mm-hmm, you, Taylor, and the Bugs.
9
SPEAKER_00
I was listening to Bad Blood, and it reminded me that I just learned my blood type.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, wonderful, what is it?
9
SPEAKER_00
O positive.
9
SPEAKER_01
Ooh, how does that work?
9
SPEAKER_01
You can receive O negative.
9
SPEAKER_00
Uh-huh, and O positive.
9
SPEAKER_01
And that s it, too.
9
SPEAKER_00
That s it.
9
SPEAKER_01
Now, if you re AB positive, is it universal acceptor?
9
SPEAKER_00
One of the ABs is a universal acceptor.
9
SPEAKER_01
I bet it s AB positive.
9
SPEAKER_00
Is that what you are?
9
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what I am.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, that s what I wanted to know.
9
SPEAKER_01
Do you have any depression attached with the cold?
9
SPEAKER_01
Because I do.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s low energy.
9
SPEAKER_00
Everything s just a bit low energy.
9
SPEAKER_00
Is that what you mean?
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, tipping into depression.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh, no.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Because you can t like, well, you hiked.
9
SPEAKER_01
I did, I forced myself.
9
SPEAKER_01
I ll keep doing stuff.
9
SPEAKER_00
Huh, that s interesting.
9
SPEAKER_00
Do you think it s because you like lay a lot?
9
SPEAKER_00
You know, when you re sick, you have to lay.
9
SPEAKER_01
No, I m pretty exhausted and I don t seem to be able to catch up on my sleep all that well.
9
SPEAKER_01
And then I don t know, just a bit of depression.
9
SPEAKER_01
But you re not having that with your cold.
9
SPEAKER_01
I m just wondering if the cold, the symptoms are depression.
9
SPEAKER_00
No, I don t think so.
9
SPEAKER_00
I don t have depression.
9
SPEAKER_00
I just have exhaustion, but that doesn t mean depression for me.
9
SPEAKER_00
What are your other symptoms?
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, this is very private.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
9
SPEAKER_01
Remember when I was saying, I ve now told the story 25 times, but it was definitely on the episode with Jada Pinkett Smith, which is the time I got in a huge fight with somebody and then hung up the phone.
9
SPEAKER_01
I was very horny.
9
SPEAKER_00
Oh.
9
SPEAKER_01
Remember that story?
9
SPEAKER_01
I remember that story.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, everyone does.
9
SPEAKER_00
You ve told it a lot, actually.
9
SPEAKER_01
I know, I admitted to that, as is at least three or four.
9
SPEAKER_01
Everyone will be familiar with that story.
9
SPEAKER_00
Right.
9
SPEAKER_01
So I think when I m so uncomfortable and depressed, I have had a lot of horniness associated.
9
SPEAKER_01
It s like a swirling with grumpiness and agitatedness and then horniness.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh my God, what a- Can anyone relate to that?
9
SPEAKER_01
Rob, do you get horny when you re sick?
9
SPEAKER_01
No, not really.
9
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, my brain is just like, you need relief.
9
SPEAKER_01
I also thought,
9
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I resist saying this because I don t want people to be scared, but I also even thought like, oh, I need opiates to get through this, you know, which of course I m not in search of nor, but it crossed my mind.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like I need relief.
9
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
So the horniness I think is just the one of these other techniques my brain uses to get me out of the discomfort.
9
SPEAKER_01
If I m going to go to the doctor and I m going to say, I think I have a cold.
9
SPEAKER_01
And they ll say, what s your symptoms?
9
SPEAKER_01
I ll say, depressed and horny.
9
SPEAKER_01
And he ll probably or she ll probably say, that doesn t sound like a cold.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s right.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, definitely doesn t.
9
SPEAKER_00
I was going to say something important.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it looks like you got.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Matthew Perry.
9
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
9
SPEAKER_01
Oh, because I said opiates.
9
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s really sad.
9
SPEAKER_01
It is.
9
SPEAKER_01
It is.
9
SPEAKER_00
It just feels like this mortal life is too hard for some people.
9
SPEAKER_00
And that s so heartbreaking.
9
SPEAKER_01
It is.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think if people have sober people in their life, they ll, they ll have some experience with this.
9
SPEAKER_01
I think us folks in recovery can seem a little crass during these moments or insensitive.
9
SPEAKER_01
insensitive, there s something that I know from all of my sober friends, the news carrying through that circle, and then my other non-sober friends.
9
SPEAKER_01
And on the surface, it s really ironic because we have been the recipients of great compassion and forgiveness, and you would think we would be that much more poised.
9
SPEAKER_01
But there is something weird that happens when,
9
SPEAKER_01
you re trying your hardest not to do something.
9
SPEAKER_01
And then when someone goes and does the thing we re not supposed to do and they die, in some bizarre way, it recommits you.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so like you immediately use it to fuel your own recovery.
9
SPEAKER_01
And so I just noticed we always seem to have a different reaction.
9
SPEAKER_00
Well, of course.
9
SPEAKER_01
And I would, I guess I would, I would just, I would really parallel it with like the dudes that are in Afghanistan.
9
SPEAKER_01
Like they have a certain reaction to their fellows getting killed in that situation.
9
SPEAKER_01
And there s, it s not the same reaction that people that are.
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
9
SPEAKER_01
Because it happens all the time, you know?
9
SPEAKER_01
It happens all the time.
9
SPEAKER_01
And it is such a bummer.
9
SPEAKER_01
But you know what it is?
10
SPEAKER_01
For the civilian, it goes straight to just heartbreak, which is super appropriate.
10
SPEAKER_01
It is heartbreaking.
10
SPEAKER_01
But I think for us, this is just because this is how we got to talk to ourselves.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like you got to fucking show up and you got to do the shit or that s what happens to you.
10
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s, it s, it s, I don t know.
10
SPEAKER_00
But it s still heartbreaking that not everyone s in that position.
10
SPEAKER_00
Not everyone is struggling minute by minute to not do something.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no, I agree.
10
SPEAKER_00
And so it s so sad that some people are afflicted in that way.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think what s interesting is having sober people in my life, you and others, has done the opposite.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s given me so much more compassion and so much more understanding that that wasn t a choice.
10
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you this, this might be, I m also curious about this.
10
SPEAKER_01
When you saw him out and about promoting the book recently, what feelings did you have during that?
10
SPEAKER_01
Because my feelings were, he s in very bad shape and he s not gonna make it.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, my feelings were he s in bad shape.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I really hope, I really hope he can get it together.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, as I too really desperately wanted that for him.
10
SPEAKER_01
I knew him on his sober times.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s the other thing that s pretty maddening.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s all anger at yourself if you re an addict.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s like, I knew him.
10
SPEAKER_01
in his sober periods, and he was a happy person.
10
SPEAKER_01
He was like a thriving, happy person with lots of friends, and it worked.
10
SPEAKER_01
Sobriety worked big time.
10
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, I think when that happens, there s like this, maybe just this projection of anger, like reverse projection, like, fuck, yeah, goddamn it, what the fuck?
10
SPEAKER_01
Like, I don t know, it s very curious, but this isn t the first time I ve noticed it.
10
SPEAKER_01
It probably makes me feel safer to think I know that it was heading in that direction.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
You know?
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, it protects yourself from when it happens.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s like, oh yeah, yep, I knew that was coming, and I m not in that position, so it won t happen to me.
10
SPEAKER_01
Look, in AA, we say, you know, regularly, but for the grace of God, there go I. Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
So like in these situation, I think there s a lot of, but for the grace of God, there go I moments.
10
SPEAKER_01
So it s like, for us, it s a tragedy, yet it s also met with like gratitude that- It s not you.
10
SPEAKER_00
But for the grace of God, there go I. Yeah, I feel that.
10
SPEAKER_01
Who was saying, someone was saying this.
10
SPEAKER_01
about war.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, this is so weird.
10
SPEAKER_01
Can t believe I remembered it.
10
SPEAKER_01
Paul Scheer on the episode he did about platoon, he interviewed the guy who trains all the actors for war.
10
SPEAKER_01
And he himself had been in many times in war.
10
SPEAKER_01
And he does this kind of workshop at the beginning.
10
SPEAKER_01
And he says, what do you assume your feeling is when the guy next to you gets shot?
10
SPEAKER_01
And everyone had a guess and blah, blah, blah.
10
SPEAKER_01
And he said, well, what I felt and what many other soldiers I m friends with have felt is immediate gratitude.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like, oh my God, oh my God, that wasn t me.
10
SPEAKER_01
Like elation, holy fuck, that could have been me.
10
SPEAKER_01
I feel guilty admitting all this, but this is kind of- It s good to say it.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s always a weird thing.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s like, I m very sad and also, wasn t me, that could be me.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s so selfish to say, but.
10
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, I mean, I think it s good if you have reminders.
10
SPEAKER_01
You re seeing the reality of the danger.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I agree.
10
SPEAKER_00
I mean, a lot, which this was very cute.
10
SPEAKER_00
I got so many texts, right, because of my connection.
10
SPEAKER_00
I don t know him for real.
10
SPEAKER_02
Right, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
But for me, the first reaction I had, we were all together, we were at a party.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we were at a pumpkin carving party.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes, we were at a pumpkin carving.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and it just like all of a sudden people were like, oh my God, oh my God, Matthew Perry died.
10
SPEAKER_00
My first thought was also some sort of mixture of first, just like shock, it s just crazy when you hear someone has died.
10
SPEAKER_00
A young successful person.
10
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, a 54 year old person.
10
SPEAKER_00
followed very quickly with just so much fear around addiction.
10
SPEAKER_00
The disease, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yes, also relief, like you and our another sober friend was there.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
And it s a constant, you guys are a constant.
10
SPEAKER_01
Bummer.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
You make me scared a lot.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s my work, but still.
10
SPEAKER_01
Does it make you mad at me for a second?
10
SPEAKER_00
No.
10
SPEAKER_01
Oh, okay.
10
SPEAKER_00
It just, it makes me so scared.
10
SPEAKER_02
Right, that that could happen.
10
SPEAKER_00
For me, like for me losing you.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
It could be, it could be at any minute one of these people who I love.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
I just hate it.
10
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
I remember one time you said, this was a long time ago, really long time ago,
10
SPEAKER_00
We were at the old house.
10
SPEAKER_00
I forget what happens.
10
SPEAKER_00
Maybe I said something like, don t relapse, like as a joke.
10
SPEAKER_00
And you were like, I will.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I was like, and you re like, no, I will.
10
SPEAKER_01
In life?
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I hated that.
10
SPEAKER_00
I was like, no, you won t.
10
SPEAKER_01
So were people listening and going, oh, that s why you relaxed?
10
SPEAKER_00
No!
10
SPEAKER_00
Or maybe they would, but it s also an acknowledgement that it s not just like, I m making this decision today and now it s over.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s over for good, yeah, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s not.
10
SPEAKER_02
Right.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I didn t believe you, but then when it happened, it was like, oh, God.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, it might have been foreshadowing, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think, look, I think I ve had a similar opinion about sobriety that I had when Bree and I fell in love at 20 and 19 years old and we met cheating on our partners.
10
SPEAKER_01
I thought the odds of us getting long-term through all this with never cheating again seems low to me.
10
SPEAKER_01
I wanna be realistic about that.
10
SPEAKER_01
And so I think some part of me is like, I don t know, let s get realistic about that this isn t, that you can t fix it and I m gonna work at it all the time, but also life s long and I don t know.
10
SPEAKER_01
You re like, I don t know, I just, I don t know.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s probably, I m really worried I m triggering a bunch of sober people who are, you re pretty much not allowed to think like that.
10
SPEAKER_01
That would be like where the group think would be mad at me, yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, I shouldn t even be evaluating whether I m going to do it for the rest of my life.
10
SPEAKER_01
I am only supposed to be evaluating today.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
So it s like rule number one violated.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
And then rule number two would just be they would say, well, you were pre-planning a relapse if you were talking like that, which maybe they would be right.
10
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
10
SPEAKER_00
I just also think if you have people in your life who are sober or in recovery, that it s also really important for you to remember that that s not a one and done thing and to be cognizant of that when you re moving through life.
10
SPEAKER_00
And I don t know.
10
SPEAKER_01
I think it was my attempt to admit like I m always vulnerable to it.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but I didn t believe you.
10
SPEAKER_00
You had been sober for a long time.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_00
As someone who doesn t have that, to me, it was like, that was old.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
10
SPEAKER_01
You know the one that did break my heart?
10
SPEAKER_01
The one that pierced that kind of recovery bubble?
10
SPEAKER_01
was AM, DJ AM, because that one felt like kinda not his fault.
10
SPEAKER_01
And that one really stung.
10
SPEAKER_00
Was it anyone s fault?
10
SPEAKER_00
It s not.
10
SPEAKER_00
No, no.
10
SPEAKER_00
It s not.
10
SPEAKER_01
I know, but what I m saying is, here s a dude who loved the program, sponsored so many people.
10
SPEAKER_01
It was such a huge, wonderful part of his life.
10
SPEAKER_01
He was such an example.
10
SPEAKER_01
And then he gets in this fiery plane accident.
10
SPEAKER_01
That just,
10
SPEAKER_01
circumstance set him on a course, and I hate that.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s so tenuous.
10
SPEAKER_01
That s what s sad.
10
SPEAKER_01
It s such a tenuous grasp.
10
SPEAKER_00
The whole thing is.
10
SPEAKER_00
Whoever relapses or dies from this, it s always something like that.
10
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it s not as profound as a fiery
10
SPEAKER_00
plane crash, or it s not as dramatic as that, but something small, normally, I think it s almost sadder when it s something small, that shows how fragile.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I just feel like some people are just too sensitive for this world.
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I very much felt that way about Heath.
10
SPEAKER_01
There s been a few people I felt that way about.
10
SPEAKER_00
This really is really sad and scary.
10
SPEAKER_01
You re not ready for anything remotely funny about it, are you?
10
SPEAKER_00
Probably not.
10
SPEAKER_01
This isn t really funny, it s just... The game lesson?
10
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so Rob and I were at the football game last night, and Charlie, and Ryan, and Demar.
10
SPEAKER_01
Some lawyer s commercial came on mid-game, it s a
11
SPEAKER_02
personal injury attorney, and clearly this had been planned a year ago, and he had licensed the Friends theme song.
11
SPEAKER_02
And it was blasting in this arena with 75,000 people.
11
SPEAKER_02
We were like, oh my God, this is the worst possible timing for this song to be played.
11
SPEAKER_01
Because the song s so happy.
11
SPEAKER_01
And you could feel the wave, like 75,000 people all realizing like, oh, this is not.
11
SPEAKER_02
And it was, there s something about the juxtaposition of the happiness of that song versus the tragedy that just happened.
11
SPEAKER_02
And almost like,
11
SPEAKER_02
confronting reality.
11
SPEAKER_02
Like, yeah, that song doesn t really exist in that, you know, it s like a burst, the bubble of the whole thing.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_02
Also that lawyer that is such a good idea.
11
SPEAKER_00
People should have been like, uh,
11
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it just somehow slipped through.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like the programming couldn t.
11
SPEAKER_01
God.
11
SPEAKER_02
Or they underestimated the reaction in the, I wonder if that was on the, no, no, that wouldn t have been on the telecast.
11
SPEAKER_02
There would have been a commercial for that.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
That was just a collective like grimace as it was happening.
11
SPEAKER_01
Sucks.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
Anyway.
11
SPEAKER_02
I feel like I want to apologize on his behalf.
11
SPEAKER_02
It was a haddock present.
11
SPEAKER_02
I m sorry.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s not how that works.
11
SPEAKER_02
I m sorry we put everyone through all this.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s not your fault.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s no one.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s the saddest part.
11
SPEAKER_02
Not my fault, but my responsibility.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
I will say the theme of this show is extremely highlighted with him, that money and fame do not do it.
11
SPEAKER_02
No, no.
11
SPEAKER_00
He had friends  money.
11
SPEAKER_00
There s really no beating that.
11
SPEAKER_00
No.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okie doke.
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, this is for Dan Ariely.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so the woman we had on who talked about illusions of competency.
11
SPEAKER_02
Yes.
11
SPEAKER_00
That was Woo Kyung Ahn.
11
SPEAKER_02
Ah.
11
SPEAKER_00
Remember how much we loved her?
11
SPEAKER_02
We loved her.
11
SPEAKER_02
And I love, I don t know why, I love finding out ways that we don t think logically, because we think we re so logical.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
11
SPEAKER_02
I really like that.
11
SPEAKER_00
Woo Kyung Ahn, she is a professor at Yale.
11
SPEAKER_02
Oh, very trusted.
11
SPEAKER_00
Let s go back and listen to that episode if you haven t listened.
11
SPEAKER_00
How many sovereign citizens are there?
11
SPEAKER_00
I have two... Different reports?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_00
In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated approximately 100,000 Americans were, quote, hardcore sovereign believers, with another 200,000 just starting out by testing sovereign techniques for resisting everything from speeding tickets to drug charges.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then the other one is from the dallasnews.com, Dallas Morning News.
11
SPEAKER_00
And that number, it s all speculative, of course.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, think about it.
11
SPEAKER_02
They re sovereign citizens.
11
SPEAKER_02
They re not filing out a survey.
11
SPEAKER_02
They won t even carry a license.
11
SPEAKER_00
I know.
11
SPEAKER_00
At first, I really couldn t find anything, and I was getting annoyed, but then I found these.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay, estimates put their numbers at between 300,000 and 500,000.
11
SPEAKER_00
But the movement has no leadership hierarchy or organizational structure.
11
SPEAKER_00
Okay, percentage of people who are okay with kids marrying on the other side of the political spectrum.
11
SPEAKER_00
In 2014, it said most Americans are comfortable, but this is early days, most Americans are comfortable with political diversity in their households.
11
SPEAKER_00
Just 9% of the public say they would be unhappy if an immediate family member were to marry a Republican, and about the same percentage, eight, would be unhappy about the prospect of a Democrat marrying into their immediate family.
11
SPEAKER_00
Roughly equal percentages of Democrats, 15%, and Republicans, 17%, say they would be unhappy welcoming someone from the other party into their family.
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SPEAKER_00
Okay, now another site.
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SPEAKER_00
I m doing multiple sites now.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I like this.
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SPEAKER_02
I like this approach.
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SPEAKER_00
Trends going back to earlier years are not available, but other sources indicate that we have become less tolerant toward interpolitical marriages.
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SPEAKER_00
When Gallup asked in 1958, if you had a daughter of marriageable age, would you prefer she marry a Democrat or a Republican?
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All of the things being equal.
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SPEAKER_00
The results, 18% of Americans said they would prefer their daughter to marry a Democrat, 10% preferred a Republican, and the majority didn t care.
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SPEAKER_00
However, in 2016, 28% of respondents said they prefer their child to marry a Democrat, and 27% a Republican, and the share who didn t care has shrunk significantly, according to Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, ding, ding, ding.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that went from 72% approval to 40-something percent.
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SPEAKER_00
Which is what he said.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
I was just thinking about this lying in bed last night, weirdly.
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SPEAKER_02
I was thinking that for many people I know, to say they re a Republican is an insult.
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SPEAKER_02
It s like saying they re an asshole.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, he s a Republican.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s tricky.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I can t speak for the right.
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SPEAKER_02
I don t know what they re saying, but the left in general Republican, it means you don t like, like you immediately don t like them.
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SPEAKER_00
If you re on the right, being a liberal is an insult too.
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SPEAKER_02
Sure, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s the same.
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SPEAKER_00
It s just what you re not.
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SPEAKER_02
I m just not over there.
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SPEAKER_02
I m curious like when they say he s, yeah, I guess.
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SPEAKER_00
Crackpot liberal.
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SPEAKER_00
He s a liberal, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
I ve heard it a lot.
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SPEAKER_02
Right.
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SPEAKER_02
I mean, certainly when you add those things like libtard, they like to call us snowflake and stuff.
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SPEAKER_02
It s very clear.
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SPEAKER_02
But I wonder if they re just saying she s a Democrat.
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SPEAKER_02
Does that mean an asshole?
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SPEAKER_00
It means has crazy socialist ideas.
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SPEAKER_02
Mm-hmm.
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SPEAKER_00
I also just, again, not to be paint with such a wide brush, but we re mostly not gonna be using names.
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SPEAKER_00
We re just saying the thing and we don t like it, but we re not gonna make it.
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SPEAKER_00
some sort of play on words, you know what I mean?
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SPEAKER_00
Like libtard.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I m trying to think if we have any that we say.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, the deplorables thing was the thing that imploded.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that backfired.
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SPEAKER_02
That backfired greatly.
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SPEAKER_00
So we don t really do that.
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SPEAKER_02
We learned our lesson.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
But when I was laying in bed, I was thinking, you know, for so many people just say Republican, that s there d be a pass.
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SPEAKER_02
They re out.
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SPEAKER_02
And then I was just thinking of Ted Olson.
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SPEAKER_02
I was thinking of this like legendary Republican lawyer who proved DOMA was unconstitutional.
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SPEAKER_02
So then there s that.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, when I hear it about people, I need more information.
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SPEAKER_02
OK.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not like, oh, that s great.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Because to me, that comes with a lot of problematic stuff.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
But I want to know more.
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SPEAKER_00
OK, so do they vote for Trump?
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SPEAKER_00
Are there fiscally conservative?
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SPEAKER_00
I want more information.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and I think that s where the benefit of the doubt has disappeared.
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SPEAKER_02
So I think if you re on the right and you re a Democrat, you go to they re a socialist.
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SPEAKER_02
Well, certainly there are socialists in the Democratic Party, but it s got to be under 10%.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
I don t know any Democrats that are actually socialists.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, agreed.
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SPEAKER_02
And then likewise, you know, are they into putting kids in cages and anti-abortion?
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, the national data would say they re not anti-abortion in majority.
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SPEAKER_02
They re not.
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SPEAKER_02
So I think there used to be a benefit of the doubt where you would just go, oh, they re they re fiscally conservative.
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SPEAKER_02
I get that.
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SPEAKER_02
They don t they want a small government that doesn t spend a lot of money.
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SPEAKER_02
And then the other side would say, like, they think the government can solve everything.
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SPEAKER_02
Very benefit of the doubt.
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SPEAKER_02
You re not going to fight over that.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
And I think that s what s eroded.
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SPEAKER_02
And I don t know that it s all our fault just because the knuckleheads are the ones getting all the goddamn attention.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, especially in the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement.
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SPEAKER_00
fucked that party in such a major way, creating a crazy extreme that now some people are aligning themselves with.
11
SPEAKER_00
And then in order to get that base, they have to do things like say they re against abortion, even though even a lot of the policy makers aren t, but they have to say it in order to get those votes.
11
SPEAKER_00
Like it s crazy over there.
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SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
But I think on our side, the equivalent of that is, is every one of our debates
11
SPEAKER_02
centers around generally the lowest percentage numbers of people in the country.
11
SPEAKER_00
Sort of like I mean, a lot of what Biden s done and talks about his jobs and infrastructure and things like that, like that s affects most people.
11
SPEAKER_02
But what we will see and well, there won t be any Democratic debates, but in the next cycle, yeah, it ll be.
11
SPEAKER_02
Well, at least it was last time.
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SPEAKER_02
These are the issues on the left that somehow take up the most of it, as opposed to policy on jobs or foreign policy.
11
SPEAKER_02
And I think the people on the right watch that and they re like, they re not really concerned about the country per se.
11
SPEAKER_02
They re concerned about these handful of groups of people.
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SPEAKER_02
That s what all of their energy and resources.
11
SPEAKER_02
But I don t think that s true about Democrats.
11
SPEAKER_02
I think Democrats, they seem very unpragmatic.
11
SPEAKER_02
That s what it is.
11
SPEAKER_02
And I do think Democrats are ultimately very pragmatic.
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SPEAKER_02
And I think it s a very small percentage of
12
SPEAKER_00
of the Democratic Party that is completely not pragmatic.
12
SPEAKER_00
You know, like no cops, let s get rid of cops.
12
SPEAKER_00
Like it is insanity.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think that takes up a lot of space in the debate.
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SPEAKER_01
Conversation.
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SPEAKER_01
But part of that, when I was home, like we were watching Fox News.
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SPEAKER_01
My parents watch all of it.
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SPEAKER_01
They try to hear all of the stuff.
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SPEAKER_01
And a lot of it is Republicans are watching
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SPEAKER_01
not all Republicans, but definitely the base is watching a program that is feeding that and saying, this is all they care about.
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SPEAKER_01
This is what they re doing.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s fucked up.
12
SPEAKER_00
They want every city to be full of homeless people.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and it was funny because my dad was saying, so one of the Republicans running is this Indian man, Vivek Ramaswamy.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
And he s an idiot.
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SPEAKER_01
He s a full-blown idiot.
12
SPEAKER_00
He s not even liked in the Republican Party, right?
12
SPEAKER_01
No, he s like third right now.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh, he is?
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
And that s a problem, right?
12
SPEAKER_01
Because then also there s this like, yeah, we do like minorities, but because he s
12
SPEAKER_01
in white face.
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SPEAKER_01
I can say that as someone who tried to live like that for a long time.
12
SPEAKER_00
Ooh, that s a new expression.
12
SPEAKER_00
I like that.
12
SPEAKER_00
I made it up.
12
SPEAKER_00
White face.
12
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, so he was on Bill Maher, I guess, or on his podcast or something, something my dad was listening to.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
My dad said that it was
12
SPEAKER_01
crazy because he straight up lied about nuclear energy.
12
SPEAKER_01
And he was saying, we haven t had any nuclear advancements or buildings or anything since the 80s.
12
SPEAKER_01
And my dad was like, that s literally not true because his company just
12
SPEAKER_00
Bill won?
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
12
SPEAKER_01
And Bill Maher s like, oh yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like people just believe it.
12
SPEAKER_01
And my dad was saying- This is the model minority, because we think Indians are so smart.
12
SPEAKER_00
I know.
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SPEAKER_00
We re like, yeah, whatever he said must be the truth.
12
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
12
SPEAKER_01
And my dad made a good point.
12
SPEAKER_01
He was like, he just says it with such confidence.
12
SPEAKER_01
that if you don t know, you just assume he s right.
12
SPEAKER_01
I just happen to know this one thing, but then he makes you realize, oh, probably everything he s saying is just that exact same thing with this confidence, but it s all just made up.
12
SPEAKER_01
And we could only get glimpses if we have the truth and the facts, what barely any of us do.
12
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, but it was a good reminder that we just listen and nod along because we don t really know for ourselves.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, back to this.
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SPEAKER_01
Oh, IBM.
12
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned the disagreeability chart comes from IBM.
12
SPEAKER_01
They have done like a lot of personality insights and stuff.
12
SPEAKER_00
Uh-huh.
12
SPEAKER_01
So there s a lot on that.
12
SPEAKER_01
But I just also remember we had the woman who wrote Culture Map.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_01
Erin Meyer.
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SPEAKER_01
And that was a great episode.
12
SPEAKER_00
Really good.
12
SPEAKER_00
I love all those cross-cultural comparisons.
12
SPEAKER_00
They re so fascinating.
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that is it.
12
SPEAKER_00
I don t like that it s it.
12
SPEAKER_01
I know.
12
SPEAKER_00
Just do this all day.
12
SPEAKER_01
It is fun.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s fun.
12
SPEAKER_01
I hope it got you out of your cold depression.
12
SPEAKER_00
It did.
12
SPEAKER_01
Good.
12
SPEAKER_00
All right.
12
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
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SPEAKER_00
I love you.
12
SPEAKER_01
Love you.