Ask Dr. Drew - Uvalde & Sandy Hook: Hoax Conspiracy Theories & Why People Believe Them w/ David McRaney – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 93

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Many people believe that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged by actors; that the Uvalde and Buffalo shooters were CIA assets; that vaccines contain tracking microchips. When a conspiracy theorist clings tightly to a belief that can be easily refuted with evidence, how can their minds be changed? How can someone help a friend or family member who doesn't even realize they are trapped in an echo chamber bubble – if they refuse to trust any evidence that proves them wrong? [Originally broadcast on June 8, 2022. Watch at https://go.drdrew.com/3NjKieI] David McRaney is a science journalist fascinated with brains, minds, and culture. In his new book "How Minds Change" he examines the psychology behind groupthink and how to guide the lost minds of loved ones to the truth. Learn more about David at https://DavidMcRaney.com  "How Minds Change" by David McRaney is available for preorder now at https://www.amazon.com/How-Minds-Change-Surprising-Persuasion/dp/0593190297?tag=drdrewtv-20  SPONSORED BY • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 And today is another one of those days where I have a lot more to say.

So thank you for being here. We appreciate it very, very much. Susan, you're giggling already. So we appreciate you on Restream. We're watching over on Rumble as well. And again, we are out on Clubhouse. And if you raise your hand there, I will bring you up to ask questions of my guest or myself.

And if you come up to the podium to ask questions, you'll be agreeing to stream out on multiple platforms, including Twitch. I think we're even on Twitter yet again. Rumble, Facebook, YouTube, you name it, we're out there we on twitter yet again rumble facebook youtube you name it we're out there we are broadcasting as it were uh susan you good today busy busy okay good so you're all ready for this show as well um my guest today he has um i became aware of david mccraney from his podcast you are not so smart It's one of my very favorite podcasts.

I don't remember how I found it, but I was on it like white on rice immediately and have listened to really every episode since he – Do people still say that, white on rice? Pig and shit. How about that? We'll just say that. Like a pig on shit. White on rice is your saying, Susan.

That's why I thought you might like it. I know, but it's an old saying. I know, but I thought I'd resurrect it for you. In any event, he has been essentially, well, he'll tell you what he's been exploring, but it is the world of cognitive science, essentially. It's sort of how our brain works, how our brain changes, how our opinions work persuasion i i come from a area of sort of almost mathematics and so when persuasion started becoming more of a significant issue in our culture i got very fascinated with it and dave mccraney was one of the people i fell upon so it's you are not so smart available at you are not so smart.com he also has a spin-off podcast called exploring genius at himalaya.com i was also has a spinoff podcast called Exploring Genius at

himalaya.com. I was not aware of that, but I will get on that immediately. And he's here promoting his upcoming book, How Minds Change, which is out on June 21st. There it is. And full disclosure, I'm about halfway through it, and it's a great book. It's a wonderful window into what David has been thinking about and the people he'd been interviewing for the last, frankly, about three years. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopaths start this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous.

I'm a doctor for f*** sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. So let's please welcome Dave McCraney. Oh, wow. Oh my God. Thank you so much for that introduction.

Does that about summarize it? Is it, is it's at least three to five years of your thinking writing that book right you yeah i mean i got started i think the i i knew i wanted to write a book about this about five six years ago but the the hardcore research when i started coming up against things that i really needed some experts to help me with uh i started putting some of them on the podcast letting you see the process of me figuring all this out and getting it ready for a book so yeah it's it's many years in the making Yeah, I recognized some of the material in the book. I'd heard it on the podcast. And so I was like, oh yeah, I remember when he was talking about that. But it's nice that, but in the book, it has the context of a developed, I don't want to say necessarily an argument, but a point of view. It's developed and you're moving the reader towards a

deeper understanding and it was interesting to me the the choice that you started with the idea of deep canvassing tell me about that choice yeah the i i knew that's when i knew i wanted it to be a book i i think the the sort of inciting moment of all this was i had i did a lecture at some point and someone asked me how they could talk to their father about believing in a conspiracy theory about Barack Obama at the time. It was sort of an offshoot of birtherism. And I remember telling that person in the audience, you can't change their mind. And I felt really bad about it. I never really fully believed that that was true and I wondered about my own cynicism. Around that same time, the United States changed its overall public opinion about same-sex marriage to the

point that the laws were changed. I started seeing more evidence that people can change their minds and maybe we're just not doing a very good job of it. Maybe the context in which we're having the conversations alter the way we have those conversations. And I came across the work of the LGBT Center of Los Angeles, who were using a technique called deep canvassing. And I read an article about them and I asked them, can I come out there and do that with you? I think there's a book here. And so I went out to Los Angeles and trained in their technique, went with them door to door for several visits, and then spent lots of time with them in their training and outside their training and talking to them individually. Deep canvassing is a technique that developed around Prop 8 and then just became AB tested to the point that it became more and more robust and to the point that scientists went out to see how it worked and why it was working. It's a method in which canvassers go

door to door and it could be on any issue. They've expanded it to many different issues at this point where you go to the doors of people who probably based off of polling are opposed to that issue that you want to persuade them about and you knock on their door and you go through a series of questions in a particular order using a particular technique. And when it works and it has a pretty high success rate, you can get someone to flip their opinion on a wedge issue or at least move somewhere along the attitude scale on a wedge issue within 20 minutes. And it's very counterintuitive from the way we usually argue with people. And it was so impressive that a number of research papers have been written about it. And I was astonished that it worked, not just because it worked, but that the people who created it did it through

A-B testing of thousands and thousands of conversations that they had recorded, going more in the direction of what works and away from the direction of things that didn't until they honed in on something. And they weren't aware of the science behind what they were doing. They weren't aware that there was a science behind what they were doing. But when I took what they were doing to experts and people who work in therapeutic frameworks, there were a lot of things from the literature they were pulling out and showing me, things that I'm sure you're very aware of like motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral therapy and even things like the Socratic method.

There were all sorts of elements of this. And when I started telling people about this, other people in other communities around the world who were also getting success using similar techniques but were not aware of deep canvassing reached out to me and ended up visiting all of those people. And I discovered there was this sort of new wave of reaching out and having conversations with people who disagree with you on these difficult topics. And these communities were doing things that were very similar to one another, but they weren't aware of each other. And it started to look to me something like when they

were trying to invent the airplane and wherever they were getting success in that, the airplanes all look the same because physics is the same. where if you try to make an airplane on the planet persuasion techniques that work tend to look similar because brains tend to work in a very similar way when you engage with them in these processes i'm going to interrupt so it starts i'm going to interrupt and one of the reasons that jumped out at me one of the reasons it jumped out at me is when you're dealing you know i deal with many many thousands of addicts and alcoholics who are very rigid and unable to adjust. They're in what we commonly call denial, which is close to delusional inability to see what's happening to them. It's very, very close to being biological.

But they're in a very rigid state of thinking, of disturbed thinking, problematic thinking that keeps them in their illness of addiction and it all sounded very familiar to me in terms of the techniques i use to get people into the process of recovery which is essentially i mean it's funny we were talking about this yesterday on this on this very program probably because i just was reading your book and full disclosure i've not completed it yet but i can't wait to finish it. But I can encourage all of you. It reads fast. It's great. But there are so many different fields, including psychoanalysis, that use this same phenomenon of relational, motivational change. And really, it's sort of holding people in a—it's really, to me, and you tell me if it sort of became anything like this for you as you continue to discuss this with all the different sources, it becomes just holding people in a trusted frame.

It's getting them into this frame of trust. And not trust in what I'm saying, but just trust in the closeness of another human being. That they can be, that it can be okay that you won't abuse, you won't manipulate, you'll just be there. And it's difficult for people to do that. You have to have very clear boundaries about what's going on in your own body brain, so to speak. But done properly, it's very effective. It's incredibly effective. In the book, I don't just go through the models, I also try to talk to people who are in other academic silos like from anthropology to sociology to cognitive neuroscience to try to understand what's going on here. I think the reason that

trusting is so important, I guess the easiest way to describe it quickly is the work of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber was vital to all of this. They're cognitive neuroscientists who study argumentation and deliberation and debate. And they go all the way down to neurons and go through an evolutionary framework and all the other things, and they do their own research into this. And they've developed this great model called the interactionist model in which they posit there are two systems by which we produce arguments for the sake of talking to each other and creating goals and plans and working out what is and isn't so, and trying to understand things that are uncertain or ambiguous.

And one is for producing arguments and reasons and justifications, and one is for evaluating them. And the way I've had it described to me is you can imagine three people, proto-humans on a hill, three people looking in three different directions and you hear something weird or you see the bushes shake or something. And each person is getting a different slice of the entire worldview and you need to depend on the trust of the other people around you and sort of an understanding of how they see the world, things they've experienced so that you can vet what they're going to contribute to the argumentation pool in that moment so that you can collectively kind of come to an agreement. And none of that can even start without there being this trust, this nonjudgmental, compassionate

listening to one another and allowing those arguments to pool into the space between you. And these persuasion techniques that work, some of them accidentally and some of them on purpose discovered that you have to open with that rapport building stage. And therapeutic models, you're aware of therapeutic models that they call going from pre-contemplation to contemplation. You have to establish, okay, we're both good here. I'm not here to threaten your agency. I'm not here to shame you. I'm not here to threaten you in a way that you might be ostracized by your community. I'm truly interested in your reasoning process so that we can together figure out if we do disagree, why do we disagree? Which is a much

different framing than saying, I'm right, you're wrong, let's debate until one of us wins. It's very different. And if you enter that framework, you can then flow through a sort of a flow chart of argumentation that is much more likely to get a person to adjust their sense of certainty or their attitude or even their value structure. It's very successful when done well. I would argue it's not even argumentation they're pulling them through. They're just pulling them through just a series of reflective function. This is all so basic in

human psychology and treatment and stuff. And again, part of the reason it's kind of interesting to me is that we live in a country that has been rife with childhood trauma. So just the ability to enter a frame with another person is a very threatening environment so you have to be extremely skilled at getting somebody in there and once they're in they're they're not comfortable uh and you have to be very respectful of of what they're experiencing their experience including their thoughts and what this really is doing is just just reflecting their thoughts it's called reflective function peter fonagy it's all in the psychoanalytic literature it's all there already and it's just it's just yeah it's all that process of just going i hear you saying fill in the blank

or i'm wondering what you mean when you say fill in the blank and getting the person to reflect with this interactive component upon their thinking. It's literally putting them outside of themselves and seeing themselves and their thoughts through a new pair of glasses. This is the magic of humanity. We have not emphasized this enough in terms of how human social connectedness, why things are better, because why we survive as a human population is because of these mechanisms. This is literally the foundation of our success as a species. And the closer we get to delusionality, meaning rigid, unyielding thinking that can't be adjusted, the more it is in the world of

psychopathology and trauma and probably maybe really truly thought disorders, I'm shocked how many people are sort of drifted in that direction in recent years. But it's frustrating to me because I don't deal well with that population. I've never done well with schizophrenics because they don't respond to what we're talking about. They don't respond to it at all. Well, not at all. A little bit over time with certain kinds of cognitive behavioral therapy but because their delusions are so biological they don't respond and i find it so frustrating i find it so frustrating and and so when non-pathological

humans non-sick humans start engaging in my mind to similar conspiratorial thinking and sort of rigid thinking about the universe, I withdraw. I get very anxious about it and frustrated. I mean, to me, and I know you did a lot of work on this, so let's bring it to the fore here. To me, the group that is sort of the model of this for my frustration is the flat earth group. I always think about, God, how would I deal with that group? How would I interact with them? And how could I keep that verisimilitude going and be trusting and open and give them a safe environment

when they're saying these things? And then squirt through, I think you did a pod on this where they squirt, every time you could show them, they would agree that if you could show me this gyroscope goes off by four degrees, I will agree the world is round. Then you show them, well, it's off by four degrees. They go, well, the gyroscope must be broken,

which is exactly how delusional thinking works. It's just, there's always a reason and excuse for everything. So go ahead, you talk about it. No, I like talking about the flat earth thing because what is true there and what works there is also what's true and what works in all the other conspiratorial frameworks that a lot of us probably have family members who are dealing with this right now.

We probably have difficult conversations across the board, often on social media and so on. It's entered politics because it turns out you can use conspiratorial communities to shore up your base if you want to go that way in politics. And so that's now part of our lives as well. Not that it hasn't always been, but it's particularly something of our current era. One of the things you're mentioning there is trying to do that sort of fact check whack-a-mole thing and it doesn't work. I talk about this a lot in the book, this frustration we have about trying to persuade people with facts alone, the information deficit hypothesis as they call it. If you just give people enough facts,

if you just show them the facts that persuade you, the facts that seem true to you, and you just send them enough links and show them enough YouTube videos, that should be enough, right? And then you get frustrated when it's not. And of course, they might also be doing the same thing. They're dumping facts on you and you just have this battle of hyperlinks and YouTube videos. And the reason it doesn't work, there's a million reasons why it doesn't work, but it's because you're starting at the end of a processing chain. You're starting at the conclusions and you're trying to work your way from the conclusions back. And it doesn't work because there's a reason why you find those things convincing. There's a reason why your certainty goes up or down when you look at some things and their reasoning

process works differently than yours because of all the priors they're bringing to it, all the experiences they're bringing to it, all the motivations they're bringing to it. When it comes to Flat Earth, what the motivation and all these persuasion techniques work this way. We're trying to get to the person's motivations for why they're reasoning in a particular way. And reasoning in a psychological sense would be just coming up with reasons for why you think, feel, and believe that are reasonable to your trusted peers that they would consider that's a reasonable explanation. But you are in a different trust community and so you don't find it reasonable and it starts this battle. The motivation often there, it feels like they might defend their belief or their attitude with this fact or this thing they've seen or this particular aspect of a flat earth model.

But what's the root of all that usually is a deep distrust of institutions, a deep distrust of government, a deep distrust of the military and industrial complex as they framed it. And then sometimes looping in things like NASA or the United States military as all being part of some sort of cabal which comes together as a collective them, a threatening them that is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. And that is in conspiracy theory research, they call that a motivational allure. The allure is usually in the direction of, do you want to establish a new identity or do you want to shore up the identity you already have? But once you find your way into a collective that shares your anxieties, you start switching over into the tribal signaling

motivations. And now you have two motivations working at the same time that are difficult to parse. One of the ways you can look at this is like, let's say you're in a tent in the woods and you hear a weird sound and you think you get really scared viscerally. You have an emotion in your body, you have fear, it's a negative affect, and you want to check to see if that's a reasonable thing to feel. And there's a mechanism that's at play here because you're thinking about presenting this argument to your peers as, I think there might be something wrong here and I'm looking for a justification for the feeling I'm having. And I want to justify that the anxiety I feel is reasonable. And you go looking for evidence with maybe a flashlight for that to see if whether or not the sound you hear is a bear,

because you think it might be a bear and you're scared. And that's when you put on the confirmation bias goggles because you're looking for confirmation that your fears are justified this is that's what's the first cognitive bias that's a common first either reasoning from conclusion or confirmation bias those are right those are writ large in these in this kind of thinking right so you can imagine you can we can talk about you can think of any conspiracy theory community that exists. This is usually the first step in the process of your onboarding. You're going, but with flat earth, let's say you have this anxiety about some sort of government entity that seems to be taking away your agency or threatening your agency. You've got some sort of sneaky suspicion. There may be other conspiracies that you've already looked at that give you a little bit of anxiety already, whether it's like

JFK or moon landing or something like that. And so you go looking for confirmation that your anxiety is justified. And when you go online to do that, it's very easy to find that confirmation. There's always someone out there who's providing some sort of evidence that seems to justify the way you're feeling. This is something we've always done, we've always had the ability to do, going back to libraries and scrolls and VHS tapes. But what's new now is how quickly we can form a community around a shared anxiety. And the internet offers that, that we can form a community very quickly. In the book, I talk about the dress as a way to sort of keep this apolitical, but you can see where you go online and you look for other people who share these anxieties, you find them, you see their arguments, they seem reasonable to you and you move into that community.

And now you're more, although your original motivations were on this sort of processing chain, once you're in a community and you start trading back and forth messages with them and you start rising in that community and your status starts going up and you start signaling that you're a good member for all these different reasons and holding all these beliefs, then you get locked into all the motivations humans carry as ultra social primates to stay good members of the community that you now identify with it. And that's when it becomes really difficult to pull somebody out. But all these persuasion techniques, the reason they work is because I'm going toward that. And I'm hoping through our conversation that you recognize the

source of your reasoning process. And I'm getting you there through a sort of guided metacognition instead of me saying all this straight to you. Because I'm sure you're aware of like when they, when they attempted with before the COVID anti-vaccine stuff, when it was just MMR anti-vaccine stuff, it was always, uh, the, the CDC tried all these techniques with, uh, fact-based approaches and they, they weren't, they didn't do a great job. In fact, they would oftentimes you'd show somebody all this information and they would

be even more, I mean, or even less likely to vaccinate or more against vaccinating well i learned i learned from you from the guys you talked to on your podcast and there was a little controversy about the doubling down effect i understand but the best reading of the literature i got was you could convince somebody that say the measles vaccines is safe and effective and important but if you convince them of such they were likely to double down more on the rest of vaccine therapies yeah they'll take the measles vaccine and then close out everything else what's that because because

you're because what you're doing is you're effectively changing their belief in a fact but you're not affecting the attitude that drove them to look for a fact to justify the way they feel. And that's a really common thing when we try to change people's minds, we often think we're trying to change their beliefs, but we're really trying to change their attitudes, or at least we're trying to respect their attitudes and give them an opportunity to still have a reasonable fear or anxiety of something, but take that and process it using epistemological framework that's more likely to find fact-based things to assuage that anxiety. That's why that almost never works. And the double down, the backfire effect,

I think the mistake a lot of people have made was thinking that it was a backfire of belief or certainty in a fact but it was really about the the attitude had never been addressed and that's what we often call the backfire yeah and uh you know when i think about uh you know contemplate trying to talk to a flat earther i i started i sort of i always think i fantasize that i would have to say something like well i understand that with your world view that would feel this way, but you already made a mistake. Can you appreciate how, already tell me, tell me. With your worldview, it sounds like I've immediately put you in a them frame and me in an us frame. And I'm saying like, I ain't like you, I'm not you.

So, uh, okay. So, so I understand your worldview, something like that. Would it be okay to say, I understand your worldview, but I'm having a a problem here which is that with that worldview my understanding of trigonometry and calculus would cease to function there suddenly those those things that i know to be true which are mathematical would would somehow fly into me you know they just suddenly wouldn't i couldn't trust them or something. Help me with that. That's sort of where I would go. And I don't think it would get very far. I don't think I would get very far.

It would not. It would not, because there's always a way to say, no, I'm not debating, the other side would say something, I'm not debating trigonometry or math here. I'm saying that you can use the same trigonometry and math and come to a different conclusion. And so, because your opening volley should be with someone in a conspiratorial framework.

You want to ask, first of all, you need to build strong rapport. And that may take more than one conversation. You may not be able to enter into persuasion until you've established that rapport. But once you've done that, you cannot communicate anything that is, you should be ashamed for what you think, feel, or believe. If that no, no, no. Yeah. If that comes across and it may not be your intention, it may just be a mistake you make. But if that comes across, if it's interpreted that way, then you're kind of out of the loop. But yeah, your opening volley should just be-

Force fields up. That's right. That's right. But your opening volley should just be, ask for a very specific claim within the whole thing. If you're going for fact-based stuff. If you're going for attitudes, we can tweak it a little bit. But ask for a very specific claim and then ask them to articulate it and then try to repeat it back so that you really demonstrate you're listening. And you're only asking questions,

you're not offering anything from your side of the reasoning process. Ask for their definitions because you want to make sure that you use their definitions and not yours. Don't redefine it in your own words. And then the crucial element in all of these techniques is ask for, definitions because you want to make sure they use their definitions and not yours. Don't redefine it in your own words. And then the crucial element in all of these techniques is ask for, and this is something from motivational interviewing, street epistemology, deep canvassing, smart politics, cognitive behavioral therapy. Every model uses this next thing for different reasons and with different benefits. But you ask for a measurement of their confidence. Or you ask for a measurement of their attitude. It can be one to 10, one to a hundred or something, but you want to say like,

if, you know, on a scale from one to 10, where do you put yourself as your confidence in this claim? Or if it's an attitude-based thing where you're like, this is good or bad, like how strongly is that in the direction of good or bad? And once you have that number, you can then start to enter into metacognition with the other party because you can say something to the effect of if it's a one or a 10, you know they're still in pre-contemplation because they're still in black and white thinking. But to not belabor it and get into what we could do there, let's assume they do a number somewhere between. You can ask, why not lower or why not higher? And that starts a different kind of conversation because you want them to feel this maybe for the first time that

there is a level of certainty and it's not at 100% or 1%, but there must be a reason for that. And then when you start that conversation, you can actually ask things like, what reasons do you have to hold that level of confidence at that point? And then once you're in that conversation, you can start asking, well, what do you feel justifies that? What methods are you using to determine that that's a good reason for feeling that way? And just having that conversation without there being any more bullet points in here, just having that sort of conversation usually moves people a little bit. And just having that kind of conversation, just giving somebody sort of space to have that sort of introspective, contemplative,

metacognitive sort of exploration of their own process often gets people thinking completely differently. And it's not like having a debate. It's not like having a fact it's not like having a uh a fact battle it's it's it's an attempt for for you and the other person to explore sort of solving a mystery of like why would why would both of us have the same evidence in front of us but have different conclusions because of it and this is sort of the this is this goes back to what we evolved to do when we have these kind of conversations and that's the that's the nut of that's the root that's sort of the foundation of how these things work. In the treatment world, we call, or at least some of this is called therapeutic wonderment.

Therapeutic wonderment. I'm wondering, how is this? How could it be? It's a great term. Yeah, I'm wondering why you're not. Yeah, therapeutic wonderment. I'm wondering why it's not 100%. Yes, please do. It's a great technique.

Because even if people know you're using it, they succumb to it. And you just go, I'm wondering why it's not 100%. Why you're using it, they can't, they, they succumb to it. And, and they will just, you just go, I'm wondering why it's not a hundred percent and why you're not a hundred percent confident, or I'm wondering why it's, you know, and it's just lots of wonder, wonder, wonder that that word wonder is, uh, I'm wondering, or I've, I've thought I'm just all that kind of, Hmm. It's like being an attorney, leading the witness, you know, the answers to all things there. And, uh, but, but again, you ask're asking them to... And in a therapeutic setting, you're looking for emotional insight or self-insight or behavioral insights, not cognitive insights so much, although there's certainly cognitive insights can be useful as well. So it's just interesting to me that these

worlds overlap. Caleb, I'm wondering, I would think this would be interesting to you. Do you have any questions about this? Caleb is our producer? Oh, yes. Yes, I actually do. I figured you did. I figured you did. Lots of questions here. Hold on, let me get myself up here on camera. And before you ask the question, I want to point out that in the book, the book is really on the ground. Because I go to Westboro Baptist Church.

I go to spend time with 9-11 truthers and, and, uh, people in conspiratorial communities. So the, then the reason for that is when I started out the book, I did not know what questions to ask. And I just figured it would be best to jump into places where people were either locked in or people who had recently left and then bring that to experts and say, why is this person locked in? Why did this person leave? And that's how it unfolds in the text. But yeah, let me hear some questions. Yes. So I'm not an anti-church person at all. I've had lots of positive experiences. I grew up in a very, very super traditional Catholic childhood. And then I actually loved my, I spent three years as a very devout Mormon at a time in my early 20s. And all those, they were all mostly good people. But then as I, you know, the next Siri, they're spying on me. I got some,

and she's like, Oh, they're, they're pointing me out now. I, something that I've noticed is that I've seen a massive increase of people who are falling down rabbit holes. And it's kind of made me wonder with my experiences of like growing up in such a religious household and all of my other experiences, that if teaching such large masses of people from birth into adulthood to accept things that are based on faith, if it leaves them more vulnerable to believing other that are entirely non-religious things and then not requiring evidence, because that's almost like what their brains have been programmed to do. So is there any pattern that you've seen in your studies of like... I have definitely seen, Caleb, Caleb, I've definitely seen a pattern of never having been

exposed to or really understanding how to make your brain engage in rigorous analytical thought. There is a deficit generally in this country, but that's not enough i'm sure david will tell you but go ahead right yeah i could believe me i could commiserate i grew up uh in a southern baptist household uh and in community and in the deep south and i remember when i went to westboro baptist church one of the things that in the that i say in the book is that the thing that was most unsettling was that it was uh familiar that was the thing i didn't i was like oh this is just like every other Baptist church I've been to. They just have a really good gimmick that they're using. And the people who were locked into it didn't seem different from people who were locked into those faiths that I grew up in. And also the way people got out of

those faiths didn't seem different from the way that people I know got out of it as well. What's similar here, to address your question directly is that everything we do cognitively is motivated. We're motivated thinkers. We often use the word term motivated reasoning, but that's just one of the motivation. Everything we do is motivated by something. We often, in the West, we're very individualistic and we like the idea of rugged individualism even more so in the United States.

And we don't like the idea that what we're doing is motivated, especially not socially motivated, but it is. It's just how we're social primates. And if you want a piece of chocolate cake, you can find a reason to get the chocolate cake, right? You can say, well, I did pushups today, or I've been keeping to my diet, or tomorrow I'll work out. What you want is the cake and you will find a reason to do it. In a conspiratorial community, in any community of any kind, there's a culture that forms that has all these badges of loyalty and marks of shame that come out where you can signal that you're a good or bad member of the group for different reasons.

And that's all very useful. That's how we are able to talk over the internet the way we're doing right now, because we're really good at group-based reasoning and that requires having a format that we can rise up and down through status using all these signals. What I have seen many times in any community, whether it's a deeply religious or conspiratorial community, is oftentimes the culture has its own values and its own norms. And then the text that they use as sort of the binding thing is the authoritative voice. You just cherry pick through the text for things that justify that your norms and your values are good norms and values. They're just, they're reasonable. And with a conspiratorial community, they will usually form some sort of authoritative thing that you will use to do that. And that is a – we had to invent the scientific method to stop

doing that so much when it comes down to it. Start with a hypothesis and then have a bunch of different hypotheses that compete against each other and the ones that have the most evidence that you've tried to disprove and they've survived disproving the hypotheses. You go in that direction to try to figure out what is and is not so about the world. Even with moral and ethical issues, it's the same idea. We'll try a bunch of different things and the ones that seem to be causing the least harm, we'll go with those. If you grow up in a community where the other way of going about things seems to be the way to think, which is you start with the way you feel, you start with the norms that are in place, you start with the value propositions that give you social capital and avoid social sanction,

and then you go to whatever is the authority in that community, and you cherry pick it for bits and pieces that justify and support that this is the actual proper way of doing things, you get into that frame and you get really used to it, you can definitely apply that to other issues for the rest of your life. And it's an onboarding process into a certain conspiratorial framework. Yeah, I agree. I think it's interesting to me. It's very interesting to me how I was able, you know, looking back in my history, how I was able to go from, you know, 20-something years growing up in a very, very traditional Catholic household to going to college and then pretty much seeing a completely different world, wiping that slate clean, and then spending three or four years

being a part of the Latter-day Saints church. It was easy for me to go from Catholicism to believing almost nothing, then to believing that I was going to get married and have multiple wives and planets and all of these interesting things, because I was just like, well, I love the people that are here. I love the fact that I just moved to California and I have what felt like a new family. And I was like, well, if I'm going to believe something, why not believe that when I die, I'm going to get a planet? Like, why not? Why couldn't, if nothing was too crazy from what I was growing up, even though I was, I was, I, in, in the back of my mind, I always thought, you know, this could just, I don't know. I don't see any evidence of this, but if I accepted it for 20

years, why can't I accept something else? You could see how a conversation though, where say David applied some of these techniques would get you outside of it pretty quickly to be able to start to look at it. One of the things I'm reminded of assimilation and accommodation, we can get into it later, but I was reminded of assimilation and accommodation. Forgive me for jumping in there, but those two terms excite me to no end. It goes back to Piaget and it's... The reason the book's called How Minds Change and not How to Change Minds is because I really wanted the reader to understand how this actually happens inside the brain. And then you can apply your understanding using techniques. One of the fundamental things to understand about how a mind changes, how the thing that

brains that emerges from the neural network of the brain, we call a mind, the way it changes is through broadly speaking assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is taking novel and ambiguous information and making it, disambiguating it using your prior understanding of the world so that it fits right in there. And accommodation is expanding the way you understand the world to accommodate information that doesn't seem to be, you can't seem to disambiguate it without adding something to it. The easiest way to describe that would be like when a child sees a dog for the first

time and they say, what is that? it. The easiest way to describe that would be like when a child sees a dog for the first time and they say, what is that? You say, that's a dog. In their mind, there's some sort of categorical thing that takes place where they're thinking this is a furry non-human, walks on four legs, has a tail dog. And then later on, they see a horse and they point at it and say, dog. And you say, no, no, no, that's not a dog. That's a horse. The attempt to call it a dog is assimilation because it's non-human, furry, four legs, tail. And you try to fit it into your existing category.

And that's assimilation. When you say, no, that's a horse, they have to accommodate. And that's literally expanding your mind because you have to create a new category in which both things fit. So, animals can now be dogs or horses and that requires a whole new level of abstraction. When you were talking about easily going into a different church, that's assimilation. You already had all these frameworks set. All you had to do was plug it into them. You didn't have to do anything broadly accommodative. You didn't have to do anything broadly accommodative. You didn't have to broadly accommodate to make that fit in.

And it reminds me of that. Right, right. And it was difficult. I could never find anything. I couldn't get myself to say, well, all of these people believing this stuff that doesn't make 100% of sense in kind of a concrete evidence-based world, they're not harming anybody at all. There's no harm of them believing this stuff until you cross over into the point whenever you start believing conspiracy theories, until the framework that's set up that is positive

gets exploited by grifters who are selling conspiracy products and things like that. Right, and that's sort of what's disturbing me these days is that there is a, you know, a aspect to this phenomenon that exists in almost every community. I think about medicine, for instance, the way we treat, the way we train doctors is extremely indoctrinary. And it's, and you're either all in or all out and you're having to believe all these things

that the authorities are telling you. And for the most part, they have an obligation to give you an evidence basis for it. But there is a lot of similar stuff in many, many communities. And the fact that it's bleeding into politics to this degree today where you're either in a group, a tribe, and signaling. That is new stuff to me, that it's always operating. Well, it seems to be always operating. I don't know if that's social media or the media generally or just the winds that are blowing in the present time politically, but how people are so prone to being so rigid and so unable to step outside of themselves and kind of look at things. That's really very disturbing are you are you concerned that's what got me interested in your podcast frankly are you

are you worried about that i think about this i'm obsessed with it uh but oddly i feel like i've taken a sort of punk attitude here where like i'm extremely optimistic um i i feel like this happens in every technological revolution that causes a disruption to the epistemological framework of how we trade information back and forth. And we always get through it, I mean, not without a lot of problems and not without a lot of suffering oftentimes. So I'm not saying that it's not going to be really bad in a lot of places and it sucks in so many different ways, but I am optimistic that we'll figure it out. But to figure it out, we have to create, we have to develop a new literacy for these things.

Tom Stafford recently told me that he thinks of it more like germs. He thinks of it like germs were always a problem, but it wasn't until we had cities that we had to worry about sanitation and teach people to wash their hands and that sort of thing. And misinformation, disinformation has always been a problem, always. Trust has always been difficult to establish, easy to lose, and there have always been grifters. But it wasn't until we had the massive information environment we have now, which is similar to cities, social media platforms, and the ability for each one of us to join in conversations, which is something we've never had before. We'd have to develop the informational equivalent of sanitation and learning how to wash our hands. And I think that's a phase we have to go through. And unfortunately, many of us are

going to have to get to live through sort of a four-generation spread of going through that phase together. But I do think that we're doing the work and there's many organizations working on it, and there are many scientists working on it, and there are many programs like this where we are talking about it. So we'll have to figure it out, but I think we will. Is that in the book? Because I love that idea. It's in there.

I've always been trying to place the present. Okay, good. I can't wait to get to it because I've always been trying to place the present moment in historical sweep. And it does feel like the Gutenberg Bible or something like that has arrived and we're struggling with it. So it is, I am persuaded by your optimism. Good. Yeah, yeah. The book goes in sort of three stages.

Like it starts out with how do minds make sense of anything and how does that change through just experience and learning and everything. And then we go into persuasion and conspiratorial thinking and then the sort of like minds working together one-on-one and in groups and small groups. And then toward the end of the book, I get into social change and how that takes place and all the elements that go into it. Yeah. Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. I'm, I'm, I'm digging in. Uh, I, I'm gonna take a little break here right now. Uh, but when we get back, I want to talk about the wisdom of crowds versus the madness of crowds and any theories you have about that do you know who rob henderson is the the uh social social psychologist he's a phd student in oxford

he's very active in social media you would you would like him you ought to follow him on twitter uh he's i think i do follow him on twitter uh but i'm not familiar with exactly what he's done and what his work is though well he he was a he was a kid in trouble, broken homes, adoptions, all kinds of crazy stuff. He's writing a book about it right now. I've read it. It's phenomenal. And ended up getting in the military and then got on a military program

that got him into Yale and then went from Yale to Oxford and is now a PhD candidate in social psychology and has wonderful insights, very good thinker. Comes from, you know because of his experience he's thinking things from a different perspective than many of his academic peers but it's just really really great stuff he's into everybody rob henderson he's been on this show many times you guys have seen him here but but we'll talk about he said something to me about wisdom the crowd versus madness of crowds that was in the literature and it was kind of

interesting to me but before we do we're going to take a minute and talk about our friends at genucell who make it possible for us to do this show again the three of us susan caleb me we're all very big fans so uh here we go hear from them don't know where to start on your skincare journey either we all have that something we'd like to take care of for me it's the under eye bags and puffiness when i don't get enough sleep and the dryness here thankfully i discovered genucell i started with their's the under eye bags and puffiness when I don't get enough sleep and the dryness here. Thankfully, I discovered GenuCell. I started with their serum for under eye puffiness and then found their GenuCell XV Moisturizer, which dramatically changed my face's texture. After only a few uses, for Susan, she hates the annoying area under her nose during allergy season.

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That's G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com and code DREW for 10% off. And just to put a little code on that, for Caleb and I, it's the Shamanix Redness Repair. For my daughter, it's the Eyelash Enhancing Serum. For Susan, what is it for you? I see you leaning in. The cream for my allergic nose peelies. Right, your nose peelies.

I also love the Vitamin C Oil Serum, and then underneath the product, it's awesome. Okay. So there you go. Please support them. Support us. We are back with Dave McCraney. You can find him on YouAreNotSoSmart, YouAreNotSoSmart.com. Also exploring genius at Himalaya.com.

The book is How Minds Change, available in just a couple weeks. Please pre-order now. It'll come right to your doorstep, of course, or during Amazon or wherever you get your books. I'm watching your guys' commentary on Rumble, for instance. Susan, I know you're jumping in there. Anything going on over there? Seems like there's a lot of vaccine questions. Maybe we'll get to that in a minute.

And then over on Restream, you guys are behaving yourselves. I don't see anything quite active going on there, any specific questions. I'm watching you guys. But David, let's talk about this wisdom of crowds, madness of crowds thing. I think most people are aware that large numbers of people are better able to arrive at a good decision than an individual decision maker. Would that be about the way to say that? Or is it actually arrive at the truth or something approximating the truth?

We're very good at consensus, yes.'s how we escape with yeah but with consensus we get a better a better decision so to speak over time yeah i mean uh there are all sorts of things that can make it better or worse depending on uh what we're trying to figure out and there are large uh pockets of our history in which we got things wrong for long periods of time. But yeah, you put a group of people together and we, natural selection created within us the ability to deliberate in a way that we will eventually arrive at better answers and better solutions to things than if we worked individually. And I know it's one of those things that doesn't feel true to a lot of people, but the evidence does bear this out and the research bears it out as well. Except when we go crazy. Except when madness comes up.

And Rob told me, he goes, I go, what is that? Why is it, you know, so to speak, in private, the group tends to get to the right place. But when you're in a social context, that's when you get whipped by the social winds and you can get sort of caught up and go crazy, which is an observation. Yeah, I understand that. It's all about motivation again, right? Like if you prime a group of people to pursue accuracy goals, it tends to work pretty well. If you ask people to work together to determine what is and isn't so about

something, the fact-based approach, people do pretty well. But oftentimes people are not motivated by that. They're motivated by something completely different. Either they're motivated by the fact that they want to be good members of their group, or they are motivated by they want to demonstrate that they're better members of the group than their peers. And that puts you on the track to a radicalized opinion or to an extreme position. The law of group dynamics, it's strangely algorithmic. You compare yourself when people start putting forth what their opinions are on something,

you're talking about attitudes, how strongly they feel about something. If you feel internally that you are in the middle and you want to stay in the middle. You're a centrist of some kind. And you realize after a bunch of people produce their internal thoughts on something, they tell you how they feel about it and you start feeling like, oh, wow, there's a lot of people in this group that are more centrist than I am and there are a lot of people on this side and on this side. You'll move to try to get back to the middle position. And for some topics, moving to the middle position and for some topics moving to the middle position means moving more toward the extreme uh than where you thought you

were and then and as soon as you do that the people around you who felt like they were somewhere on the scale will have to move in relation to where you've moved and it starts a cascading process where the whole group becomes more extreme in its opinion over time. And that can definitely happen. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah. It's one of the, you know, I, for years was saying that not enough is made of human motivation. I'm so glad to see that you're, you know, people are looking, thinking, and talking about the underpinning of motivation. It's one of the reasons I loved working with addicts and alcoholics aside from many reasons, but one of the really interesting aspects of it is you're looking at people whose brains have broken pathological motivation. All usual motivational

phenomenon completely are wiped aside by one motivation, which is use. Use that drug. Use, use, use, use. So survival, family, work, whatever other motivation, whatever other motivation it is, even feeling good. Feeling good gets superseded by use. And it's incredible to watch all the other systems serving that broken motivation, that false god, so to speak. It's amazing how thinking becomes so distorted and screwed up and emotional states become completely disorganized. It really is quite an insight.

I think you'd be interested in it given what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Send me everything you have. I'm really obsessed with this in a different way. I think that for a long time I was the proselytizer of we're flawed and irrational. And I don't believe that anymore. My mind changed in writing a book about how minds change, which is I see us as biased and lazy reasoners who contribute the easiest argument we can come up with to a pool and we expect to offload the labor

to the group. That's not flawed or irrational. That works exactly how it ought to work. And it's a very rational way to go about making sense of the world. But you put it into a different context or you throw a new kind of motivation on top of it and you can get some really strange outcomes, which we're all witnessing and living through right now. And you're talking about motivation. Give me an example. Give me an example of what you're talking about. What are you thinking of?

Well, I mean, the easiest example I can pull out is how very quickly people became anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers in a situation where we were trying to save the lives of millions of people. And it was for some people who've been studying this and writing about it and talking about it, there was like, oh yeah, I knew that's how people work. And for a lot of people, it was so shocking to see their country and their friends and peers divide into camps over something that seemed like it was just a matter of do you or do you not want to get this illness, right? But it wasn't ever about that. It very quickly became a politicized issue. And anything politicized is going to pull into the oldest parts of our psychology, which is

social primate motivations to be a good member of your group or to signal to other people that you are a good member of your group. We're ultra social primates. We are very worried about our identity, which is what identifies us as being in one group or another. And at some point it became a demonstration of whether or not you were in one tribe or another to get the vaccine or not. And we have plenty of literature describing how that happens and how to avoid allowing that to happen whenever we introduce something new into the world that requires vetting and trust and authority and disambiguation and uncertainty and all these things. And there are good ways of doing that and bad ways of doing it. And in some places they did it really poorly.

And the outcome, you have to have cognitive empathy for people who became deeply opposed to these things. You have to have cognitive empathy for anybody on any side of any issue. What do we do to them? What do we do to them? Look, we've scared the shit out of them. We made them, you know, we pushed them into those camps. Look, from the beginning, it's why we have doctors and it's why we closed the door. And so we can sit there and reason with you and help give you the evidence and help make the decision with you, alongside of you.

So it's just you and me making this decision what's best for you. That's it. And that got left behind in this pandemic completely, which is really one of the great tragedies, in my opinion, that the physicians stopped doing their job, froze, got scared, were unwilling to do anything that they normally do. Thankfully, that's been restored now. And guess what? When I advise a patient to take a vaccine or a booster, I don't get any resistance because we sit and talk about it. We think about it. We make the best choice for that patient. I take into account their point of view, their age. Let's talk about it. We make a

decision. That's it. That's how medicine is practiced. It didn't need to be more complicated than that. And even the mask wearing, do you want to protect yourself? Then you better get the N95 mask because the other ones don't really work. So let's talk about what the risk to you are if you don't protect yourself. Not that you're going to protect anybody else. What does it mean for you? And what are we together going to make that decision on your behalf? So I don't know. It's just, it breaks my heart that we went through all this. I got to tell you.

Yeah. And it'll happen again. This is our nature. And we should, I hope we learn from it. Gross. Disgusting. I hope we learn from it. Disgusting.

I really do. I feel you. I feel you. I feel you too. Terrible. And you have to also understand, don't shame people for being hesitant to get vaccinated. There's a reason why.

No, never. I never do it. And the reason why. I look for solutions. I look for solutions. I look for solutions. My thing is, what is it that bothers you? Well, what you really find out is that I don't like that it's a new platform and there's not enough study.

I don't feel comfortable. Do you know how many times people have told me that about medication in my career? A thousand times, 10,000 times. And I didn't shame them for that. I said, well, okay, you're right. We don't have that big a track record. I feel it's safe, but okay. And then I thought, okay, well, Novavax is a traditional

platform that should do away with the vaccine hesitancy. And it's working. If the government would have gotten the Novavax out quicker, we would have gotten more people vaccinated because it's just a protein platform. And people who are really concerned about the new technology, no concern. So proceed. And they generally say they will. Yeah. And you have to ask yourself in like, like the way you're talking about it right now, like there's all this expertise you have, all this experience you have, uh, for people who like yourself, I can understand why you would trust it for, there are other people though, in my life who, who were in myself included,

were ready to get vaccinated very quickly, but there's an introspection opportunity here. Ask yourself, why were you so quick to get vaccinated? Why did you not have that same hesitation? Why do you trust these sources in a way that they do not? You know why? Because two reasons. First of all, I have an optimism bias. I'm very aware of it.

Some people have a pessimism bias. My optimism bias causes me to take greater risk. And I wanted to get through this. I didn't want to get COVID. So I was willing to take that. I understood the risk. There's real risk. It was not zero.

It's anything. I need a surgery soon. It's going to be real risky. I'm willing to take it. I have clarity about it. But again, I have the context. So people don't have the context. That's why we're talking about monkeypox now.

One case out of 80 million. If you want to talk about all the illnesses of infectious diseases that are one per 80 million, I could give you 30. And why aren't we worrying about those? And why are we worrying about monkeypox? It's like people don't have the context, and the people that should be providing the context aren't providing it. They're just providing the fear and the anxiety because it captures eyes and blah, blah, blah. It's this system that you say it's going to take four generations to work through. I don't know if we have four generations, but- It's going to take a bit.

But go ahead. Take a bit. I'm with you. I'm persuaded. I'm persuaded. It's okay. I mean, in the book I talk about, there's a thing that happens here in social systems that's very similar to punctuated equilibrium in biology, where you have long periods of stasis, and then it seems like overnight, everybody changes their mind about something at large scales. We saw this with same-sex marriage. We've seen it with smoking norms. We've seen it with marijuana laws. We've seen it with civil rights struggles. There's many examples from American history in which there were long periods of what seemed like stagnation in the status quo. And then within 12 years or so, things

change rapidly. And there's a great science behind explaining how that takes place. And I'll talk all about this book. I don't know if we have time for it, but it's Thresholds of Conformity is what it comes down to. Every node in the network of human interaction is connected to other nodes, other people. But each person has an individual threshold of conformity that if you look across the entire population, you can see that there are people who are slow to change, faster change, and so on. You have these pools, these communities that will form in a moment of uncertainty. With vaccine hesitancy, it's very similar. There are people who were most hesitant, least hesitant, and there are many gradations along that. If you've ever been to a party where it seems like

everybody was having a good time and then everybody leaves in the course of like 15 minutes, and you're like, what happened? That's an example of this process taking place at a smaller scale. What usually happens is there are people who they're ready to leave and there are people who are not, but everybody's paying attention to what each other person is doing. And the people who they're ready to leave and there are people who are not, but everybody's paying attention to what each other person is doing. And the people who are kind of on the cusp of, I need a couple other people to go before I'm willing to go because I don't want to look like I'm one of those people. So the early adopters will leave right off the bat, I'm ready to go by. Well, then that gives the next pool of people a chance to go, okay, then I'm going to go.

But those people now create a larger number of people a chance to go, okay, then I'm going to go. But those people now create a larger number of people who have left. So there are people who have a higher threshold of conformity that have met their threshold thanks to them. You get a cascade where everybody empties out. There's a way to apply that to something like this, where you direct your messaging to large groups of people to the least hesitant. And then that creates a larger pool of people who become examples for other people to follow. And that's one way that these things happen. Oftentimes it happens randomly and by chance, and you get these massive changes in public opinion that it seems like no one

was really directing. But you also can apply activism and all sorts of other communication tools to try to catalyze that, to create it more readily. So I know I said it was across many generations, but there are levers that we can use to increase the rate of change in certain domains. Especially if you have to determine what is harmful, what is important, what ought to be changed, and you can apply these techniques to those things. I think I'm going to have to bank you into interpersonal neurobiology i think i think that's the next logical place for you to land there's a whole field out there that i'm going to bring you

on into guys like peter foneghi and alan shore s-e-h-o-r-e and steven porges p-o-r-g-e-s so it's a little it's a little off of where you are. Yeah, it's a little off, but it is a world that's trying to, I know you're interested in the brain part, really look at how brains affect other brains and really, really nail it down. I'm so fascinated with it right now, so much. Yeah, yeah.

And it's actually- Go ahead, go ahead. Go ahead. It's actually, it's sort of a psychoanalytic field, but it is a neurobiology field, really ahead. Go ahead. It's sort of a psychoanalytic field, but it is a neurobiology field, really, at its core. And guys like Porges, you'll probably light up with that stuff, I think.

How we create these units of exchange. In other words, all these things you're talking about, how does that happen? How is it communicated? I know. Well, it turns out, there's a whole socio-emotional exchange system embedded in the vagus nerve and in the brachial pouches when we evolve that reflect on our face on our voice in our ears and how we attune to each other there's a whole system

goes back brachial pouches brachial brachial pouch. And it goes all the way back to how we get our needs met as babies when we don't have anything else at our disposal. You know, there's a whole mechanism there that operates early but then, of course, you know, still have vestiges later that becomes the socio-emotional exchange system of the social animal, the human being. And it's getting worked out. I tell you, there's the cognitive side, which you have a deep grasp of, but there's a socio-emotional, motivational side that is a little more squishy. And it's- I like the squishy.

I think you'd like it. Yeah, yeah. I'm super fascinated with it. It's sort of your- I talk in the book, you probably read the part about the dress. And that to me was like, oh wow, this is a Rosetta Stone for a lot of things that I've wanted to understand forever

about how people work. And there's a neuroscience in it about why people saw that dress differently. But then there's the other side of it, which is why did we so vehemently argue about it in a way that broke the internet for a minute? And that's the avenue that I'm very excited about right now is understanding what happens when we pool our ideas together yeah and also we we particularly i think it's i think there's a bit of an american phenomenon too we we don't like we we because we're so pragmatic and because we're so interested in being free and free will we don't like the idea that our perceptions might be distorted or

might be effective or not might not be accurate we really resist that very hard i mean look look at the world of just memory function we know that memory is a highly distorted phenomenon and that it changes over time that that is a categorical fact not in this country everyone wants to believe their memories are just screen, just play the movie back, everybody. We know exactly what happened there. No, no, you don't. No, you don't.

Some people do. Mary Lou Henner does, and she has hyperthymesia. It's a problem. It's actually a disorder. But the average person, you didn't know that? She can play back any day of her life and tell you what she had for lunch and what she ate and how she dressed. And I've actually, I had an experience with her. I'd mentioned this yesterday where hyperthymesia it's called, where she,

I saw her in 1979 on a late, on a tonight show broadcast where David Letterman was sitting in for Johnny Carson and she goes, Oh yeah, I was wearing my white dress and my, I remember it vividly. I remember what Dave said to me and I remember what I had for dinner that day and what was in my dressing room. It was just a random day in 1979 where I happened to see her on television. I brought it up. Yeah, it's really a wild thing to come in contact with.

But most people have – there are varying degrees of how our memories function, but most of us are reconstructing things, and it's very accurate. There it is. Caleb put hyperthymesia, a condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. And I had a bit of it when I was younger. I had a bit of it. And one of my sons has it too because when we talk about their childhood or what happened on certain days, we'll just go, Hey, Jordan, play the tape back.

And interestingly, his tape will be exactly what my tape is oftentimes. So we sort of have a similar thing. It's gotten much weaker as I've gotten older, I must tell you. And mom has a tendency to reconstruct. You have to be careful what you say in front of them. That's right. Oh, yeah, you'll remember it. Well, David, I actually, I could talk all day about this stuff.

I want to bring you back and do more. I want to keep promoting the book. I think this book is so important for people to read. I can't say it strongly enough. You need to be familiar with this material. You need to understand how your mind works and how it changes. How Minds Change, June 21st. Order it immediately.

You can find out more about David at davidmcraney.com. There is the book. I'm very excited by it. I can't wait to get into the historical sweet part as well. And keep doing the good work. Anything coming up on your pod that you can kind of tease so we can tell people? Oh, yeah. I got an interview with the great Terry Crews coming up. We spent a whole episode talking about what I'm going to start calling probiotic masculinity, which is the opposite of toxic masculinity. I'm going to try to coin that term. It's not mine. Somebody else told me that, but I love that term. And yeah, I have a number of episodes coming up about different organizations that are trying to create better context for us to argue and deliberate or to take the places we're

already doing it like twitter and facebook and tiktok and apply a lot of the science we already put down in the record to improve the dialogue there i've got episodes about all that coming up soon great that is you are not so smart check it out wherever you watch the podcast and david thank you for joining us and we will see you very soon. You bet. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. Of course. My pleasure. And everybody, we will be back again tomorrow. Let's see.

It's three o'clock tomorrow. It's tomorrow, Thursday. That's right. Three o'clock tomorrow. The guest is Robbie Ludwig. She was covering the Amber Heard trial. I want to pick her brain a little bit about what she thought she saw there. She is a psychologist.

I've known her for many years. And it should be an interesting conversation about memories and character pathology. This is sort of what we're going to get into here. And addiction. Of course, they were all three on wide display. And I keep saying that they may have done a public service by sort of exposing the public to what these phenomenon are. I hope you'll tune in and listen so we make sense of it for you so you can learn a little more deeply about what it was that was on display there.

Susan, something to add? No. I see you leaning into your mic. No. Okay. What was you tomorrow at three o'clock? Oh, if you have a second, I wanted to show you something that literally just happened as a part of the conversation in the comments here. And it's an example of what we've just been talking about. So I'm going to show you on the screen. So someone posted this in the comments right here, and they were talking about how unfair it is to put flat earth people along with big pharma, because they said that they've seen all this basically like paying out billions to children or parents who took Advil or Tylenol. Right. Wow. So then that just, again, there's three very widely disconnected thoughts, but interesting. Okay. Right. So, but look here. So then I again, there's three very widely disconnected thoughts, but interesting.

OK, right. So but look here. So then I replied and I asked them, I asked her, do you have any documentation? Do you have anything like I want to read about this? Can you show me? And I tried to follow almost like what he had said. It's like I'm wondering where I can read more. Yeah. Then the response, the follow up was, I keep getting lawyer ads on Facebook, but I haven't seen anything else. Okay, so... That's the evidence. Someone has, they're sharing this type of stuff.

But the important thing, but the important thing is for Beckett to stand back and think, hmm, I wonder how sure I am of this thing. That's what I hope happens there. That's what I'm hoping. I hope. But does nobody's what I'm hoping. I hope. But does nobody ask for evidence when you start to believe like these things that,

I mean, that you're someone claiming that's like very strongly. And they're also trying to like get it, your character as if, Oh, you're hosting this stuff and you're not facing the truth about what all these other companies are doing. And then they don't have a single thing to follow up.

Not one answer for some of the first person, me who asked the question. I had another person tweet me. So this is an episode of all things you believe in, Dr. Conspiracy. And I was like, oh, I think, you know, I love your dog. I started trying to make a rapport. Your dog is so cute.

I think you got me wrong. You're believing social media. And then that person just went silent. So it, you know, we don't have a perfect way of dealing with this yet. Like you said, at the end, David was saying, we're trying to figure out ways to do this in the context of social media.

So we, this exchange can be a little more productive so people can move. I mean, what, you know, what do you care what Beckett believes? It's whatever. Right.

Exactly. I feel bad for people like that. I feel bad. I think it's a shame that he has to, or he or she has to. So Facebook ads, those can be like. Anyone can make those.

Anyone can make a Facebook ad. Who knows? And I couldn't find anything. And I just wanted any article that I could read about this. I couldn't find anything. And the person who's proclaiming it also doesn't have anything except, oh, I saw some Facebook ads about it. How many other millions of people are out there? Well, so is Advil.

That's all different. But drug companies, there's no way for a drug company to kick back or to pay people for doing things. It just doesn't exist. There's just no way to do it. So just look at the evidence. I'm not saying that they don't have other things that they're quite guilty of, quite, in terms of their advertising.

I mean, it's good for your kids if you have a fever. Yeah, all kinds of things that they should be held accountable for, but not what you think, unfortunately. So just get the facts right. And again, but getting the facts right is never enough, as we found out talking to David. We'll bring him back. We'll bring David back. We'll talk more about this.

I do have to run. I'll see you tomorrow at three o'clock. Good booking, Drew. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here.

Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me, call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.