Camp Gagnon - TRUMP VS. BIDEN: Another Civil War?

Episode Date: June 29, 2024

🏞️ Sign up to Camp for exclusive updates: https://camp.beehiiv.com/Jay Van Bavel is a neuroscientist and psychology professor at NYU! He popped into the tent to discuss how neuroscience affects social networks and how group identities shape our perceptions and actions. If you're sick and tired of politics, this episode is worth the listen. Welcome to camp. 🏕️Edited and Produced by @99OvrAll S/O to our sponsors Morgan & Morgan, Bespoke, Marek Health & Bluechew!!...

Do you feel like the stakes are higher in the United States? Yeah, I mean, the United States is the most powerful, richest country in the world with the biggest military. The stakes are just huge here. The whole world watches and cares what's happening. There was some great studies done where if you give people like this math problem, you know, there's a gun control policy. Did it work or not? And you show people the numbers. And you think people might crunch the numbers and be successful.

Well, if I just give you those exact same math problem, but I say it's like we're going to see if this skin cream reduces skin cancer, people can do the math. You give them the numbers and they can tell you if the skin cream worked effectively or not. But if you give them the exact same numbers and the exact same math problem, but you frame it as like, in this case, the numbers lead to the thought that gun control worked, then all of a sudden, Republicans can't solve the math problem. And if you frame it so that gun control actually failed, Democrats can't solve the math problem.

And so basically what's happening is you are so motivated to find an outcome that aligns with your politics that you start ignoring or misconstruing the math problem. That's like a real problem for society, right? And so it means that they're not actually like paying any attention to the interchange of ideas and policies. It's just they're cheering. It's like watching your favorite football team. We get kind of rabid and we start cheering for our own team

and we're not actually being as rational as we think we are. Are the political differences present in America going to destroy our country and send us into civil war? Oh, God. I mean... Jay. How are you, sir? Good. Dr. Van Bavel.

You call me Dr. J. Dr. J? Dr. J is fire, actually. That's way cool. We're going with Dr. J. For sure. Thank you so much for being here, man. I really appreciate it.

I have one question for you. Okay. Are the political differences present in America going to destroy our country and send us in a civil war? Oh, God. I mean, I don't think so. I think a lot of it's overblown. I mean, it's harsh. I could go on and on about that.

But my thought is it's not going to spill over into civil war or something like that. I mean, it's like everybody's like nightmare fantasy. I don't see it going that way. Okay, good. Now, I don't think it's going to be difficult to do this, but just to bring everyone up to speed, could you give me an example or prove to me that political partisanship exists in America? Okay. I mean, that's easy. I mean, all you've got to do is go to a neighborhood that's like all Republican and tell them how much you love Biden or go to a Trump neighborhood and do that or vice versa. Go to like a Democratic neighborhood with a mega hat on. And you'll see with people's looks and comments and those types of things. is that there is hostility.

And people really buy into those identities. For some people, this is like one of my favorite studies. This back when before X, you know, was Twitter, right? They did an analysis of people's like bios on their social media accounts. And they found over time people were putting like their partisan identity more and more on their bio to like signal out into the world who they were. Because it's becoming more and more of a central part of who people are. And they also, that signaling part.

It makes me think of like Batman, right? Yeah. Like the bat signal goes up and then like Batman comes. It's like you're signaling to people to like, you know, find you. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Do you think that the American partisanship is different than other countries' partisanship?

Yeah. I mean, I'm Canadian. So I'll just tell you. Don't brag about it. Okay. Enough. So in Canada, I moved to Ohio from Toronto when I was in grad school. And the thing about one of the first things I noticed was like the politics was so different here.

It was just like so intense. and it felt like going from the minors to the majors because everything was like so polished and organized and also like a lot of animosity. And this was in, I was living in Columbus, Ohio and it was right before the 2008 presidential election. And at that

point, Ohio was the major swing state. And Columbus was like one of the kind of like key places they were coming to it to try to like swing voters and register voters. And so like the presidential candidates and vice presidential candidates were there like every couple weeks. And so it was just like I got to see that intensity

up front and see it from close up in a way that I'd never seen. And so I felt like an anthropologist going to like another country and like seeing something like these weird rituals. Yeah. And in Canada it's like it feels very rinky dink and it's just not as intense. And part of the reason is I think everything in America is intense. But the other thing is in America is just a two party system. And so it's really us or them.

And you really have the sense that like if your party loses, other parties just going to like take over and do everything they want. And so there's this constant sense of like you're going to fall behind or get dominated. In Canada, there's like five different parties. And so you can switch your vote if your party does something corrupt and still not worry that like the party you don't like is going to win. And so it gives a lot more fluidity and flexibility and you can like hold parties accountable a little bit easier if you're like open-minded.

And people do that. They do strategic voting and things like that in Canada that are unheard of here. What do you mean strategic voting? Well, strategic voting, so I'll give you, like, here's the three main parties in Canada. One is the Conservative Party. So imagine, like, the Republican Party. The other is a liberal party, but they're actually much more centrist. And then there's the NDP party, which is actually pretty far left.

And so people can switch, like, if you're, you know, a liberal voter, you can switch your vote to the conservative or NDP, depending on who you have in your writing or who you like as Prime Minister. And so there's like, you know, ways that people do this that like aren't as, it's not as, there's not as much like connection to your party. And there's not this animosity and hatred for the other party that you see here. That's interesting. Yeah, like I'll give you an example when I was growing up. One of the other parties in Canada that was actually the second biggest in the whole country at one point was the Quebec separatist party. And they just ran on a policy that we want to leave Canada.

Yeah. That was their main thing. And they had more people in the equivalent of. like Congress and Parliament than any other party other than the one that was in power. And their whole point was just like, we want to leave you guys. And so like that's the Canadian system is just like ends up with some weird things like that. That's interesting. So the two party system specifically in America you think really contributes to the partisanship.

Yeah. That it creates an in-group, out-group idea. Whereas if it was more parties, you could kind of share and separate the failure. And eventually like the victory, you can't necessarily dominate quote unquote as people think that they can do. Yeah. Is that fair to say? Yeah.

And in the Canadian system, and it's like a lot of European countries are like this too, that sometimes one party doesn't win the majority. So they can't even take power unless they team up with one or two other parties. Oh, really? And so they actually have to like find compromises

and then build a real coalition that has like a lot of support. So that's the other thing that happens in those types of systems. It's like sometimes there's more cooperation and there's less domination by one party. That's interesting. And do you feel like the stakes are higher

in the United States? Yeah. I mean, the United States is the most powerful, richest country in the world with the biggest military. So the stakes are just huge here. Like every other country watches on American election night to see what happens. Right. You know, no one in America is like losing sleep when Canadian elections happening or the Mexico election is happening, right? Right.

So that's one of the things that people care a lot about. The whole world watches and cares what's happening here. That's interesting. Hey, what's up, guys? Sorry to interrupt this amazing program, but I need a little bit of help. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe. That is the best way to support this show.

Because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations. And it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much. Let's get back to it. And how does this partisanship and this identity that people take on for themselves? I guess I'm also curious, the identity component. Do you feel like the, maybe like erosion of religion in the United States has found people like kind of searching for identity in a new way?

Or maybe, you know, maybe even regional identities kind of getting broken down? Like, was there something that took the place of these identities in the past that now is no longer there, that people are grasping onto these political identities stronger? Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, what you were saying is true, that, you know, people used to care more about their religion or their community. and now the national identity matters so much more. In fact, political scientists see this. So it used to be that you'd go in and vote and you could vote for president

but also like state senator or governor. And people would do what's called vote splitting. So they might vote for like a Republican president but a Democratic governor. That was actually super common for most of American history. And now when people go in, they just vote right down the party line.

It's Republican, Republican, Republican, Republican, Republican, or Democrat, Democrat, Democrat. And so people are just kind of thinking about these identities, is, again, at the national politics. They're not even really thinking differently about the person who's their governor or their mayor or something,

or the dog catcher. They kind of just judge all these people according to what party they're in. And so depending on what party you're in, what identity you hold on to, how does that impact how you see the world and how you navigate through life? Yeah, so that's the part that I find,

I'm a psychologist, so that's the part I think is the most interesting is, you know, the voting stuff we see all the time and that's in some ways not surprising. Makes sense. Yeah. But the stuff, the way that it changes how we think about the world, you know, how we signal our identities on our, like, social media platforms and who we're willing to, be one of the biggest

predictors who we were willing to date or marry is what their party is. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that's on, like, every dating app. Yeah. It's like pretty much standard. Yeah. It's like, a picture yourself, favorite ice cream, like political status. Yeah, I ran this study with W.N.YC., so like the local radio station. It was when Trump got inaugurated and there was also like that woman's rights march in DC like the day before or something like that.

Remember all like the pussy like hats and stuff? And we asked people, you know, they sent a reporter down there and I got to like design the questions and they asked them like, would you be willing to like work with somebody who's different politics and would you be willing to like cooperate with somebody and would you be willing to date somebody? The single biggest thing we found is no one wanted to date someone from the other political party. Interesting. And especially Democrats, at that point, they didn't, like, something like 90% of them refused to date anybody who supported Trump. That makes sense. That's a heightened, uh, political setting. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's as heightened as it gets. But it's also like, again, you know, that's like something that's gotten more or more extreme over time. Like people are more willing to look past that if, like, you're attracted to each other. You had similar interests or hobbies or you shared religion or something like that. You look past that. But now all of those things have started to become the same thing. They call them actually. super identities, where you organize yourself by, like, ethnicity, political preference, religion,

and you try to get all those to line up, or it used to be more common for people to have a whole mix of things, and it became hard to, like, predict your, if I knew your religion, it would have been harder for me to predict your politics. Now, if I know your religion and your ethnicity and those types of things, it's easy for me to predict your politics. Interesting. And what do you contribute that to? Is that just like a social conformity that we're desiring to kind of line up, or is there

something else happening? Yeah, I think it's a conformity. I think it's that there's increasing polarization. And so what that means is a lot of people don't even want to move to a neighborhood with people who are politically different. You find that, like the data supports that. The data is supporting it is, and again, it seems to be getting more and more extreme over time. So where we live, what neighborhood are willing to buy, where we send our kids to school. what what you know if you're if you go to church what church you go to is in part determined by your political preferences yeah and so these things are increasingly determining all these aspects of our life wow and in what way is it determining our view of life like in the way that we're interacting with the actual like you know data i know you referenced in a couple different ted talks like how the way we actually look at what looks like a concrete scientific you know

mathematics or something that's like there's no amount of bias is going to influence mathematics, right? Yeah. That seems pretty, like two plus two is always four. Yeah. But this might not be the case. Yeah, so we think that we like solve problems and look at the world rationally. Most people think we're rational and everybody else

is a little bit crazy. Right. But if you, there was some great studies done where if you give people like this math problem, so you give them like, you know, there's a gun control policy and here's a percentage of people who like actually like were affected by it, did it work or not? and you show people the numbers. And you think people might crunch the numbers and be successful.

Well, if I just give you those exact same math problem, but I say it's like, we're going to see if this skin cream reduces, like, the skin lotion reduces like skin cancer, people can do the math. You give them the numbers and they can tell you if the skin cream worked effectively or not. But if you give them the exact same numbers

and the exact same math problem, but you frame it as like, in this case, the numbers lead to the thought that like gun control worked, then all of a sudden Republicans can't solve the math problem. Wow. And if you frame it so that gun,

control actually failed, then Democrats can't solve the math problem. And so basically what's happening is like you are so motivated to find an outcome that aligns with your politics that you start ignoring or misconstruing the math problem. And so that's like a real problem for society, right? I was telling you before we came on the podcast that we think that like we watch a political debate. The biggest part of like every presidential election or any election in America is like like you get the two candidates on stage and they like go back and forth and argue with each other about their policies. And what we like to think is like most people, Americans are going to like sit down in front

of the TV and watch that and like make their decision based on like those types of policy debates. And it turns out that people, if you ask people who won the debate, something like 90% of Republicans will think whoever the Republican is won. And 90% of Democrats will think that a Democrat won no matter what. And so it means that they're not actually like paying any attention to, you know, the interchange of ideas and policies and all that stuff. It's just they're cheering.

It's like watching your favorite football team or baseball team. You're just sitting there thinking your team's better and you think the refs are always biased against you. And so you're filtering it. The way we talk about in my book is that it's like having a pair of sunglasses. Like you put on the pair of sunglasses and the world is like a little bit different. And that's what our identities do. That's what our political identities do or whether we're religious or we're a sports fan.

We get kind of rabid and we start cheering for our own team. not actually being as rational as we think we are. Do you have other examples of how our bias makes us irrational? Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of examples. So obviously, like watching debates and doing math problems, but there are studies like people won't go to a dentist if they think their dentist has different politics.

Really? Yeah. So if you find out that information, you don't want to, you know, normally you think dental pain says, sucks. And so normally you'd think a rational person will want to go to a dentist who's good who reduces the pain they go through when they're getting like their teeth drilled into or yanked out of their mouth. But it turns out if people know their politics, they'll choose like a dentist over instead of thinking about like their qualifications. They care more

about their political alignment. That's so interesting. Yeah, this idea of rationality is interesting to me because I studied economics in college and they, I had professors that always talked about what they call the rational man. So obviously economics is trying to model society and they're trying to model economies. But it's difficult to create models without predictable rational people. So as a result, they would create a substitute for you and I and say, okay, we're going to have someone that's perfectly rational. But the problem is that humans are not perfectly rational. It's very like clearly illustrated to me when I was in school, like humans are not rational. And one of the equations or one of the examples they always gave that I love is, I forget

the name of it. There's a very clear name. You probably are familiar with this. But let's say there's a hypothetical where someone gives me $10. And I have to split it with you in some way. Yeah, yeah. Have you heard of this? This is like kind of a game theory idea. I have to split it with you a certain amount, a certain amount. And you can either choose to accept it or reject it. If you accept it, then you keep the money that I gave you and I keep the money that I chose to keep for myself. And if you reject it, then we both lose everything. Yeah. So I get $10. If we split it 50-50, I give you $5. I keep $5. You're like that. You're like that. You're like that. You're to say yes.

Now, if I give you $4, you might say yes still. Now, if I give you $3, you're going to be a little bit like, dude, you're going to give you three and you're keeping seven. Now, if I give you $1, if you were truly rational, you would accept it. Because one is greater than zero. Yeah, yeah. But if you give someone $1 in this experiment, almost every single time human being say, no, I'm not accepting.

I'd rather have nothing than for you to get one over on me. Yeah. Which is irrational. Like because ultimately you just need to look at what you have and understand that one is greater than zero. So I see this and it's proof to me that human beings are not acting rationally, but we are acting emotionally. And our emotions are sometimes at odds with our rationality and our logic. So I'm curious if you find through your work and the research that you're doing, like not going to see a dentist that doesn't show your political views, what do you think is happening there on an emotional level? Or what do you think is happening? Obviously, it's an irrational fear.

But what is underpinning that irrationality? Yeah, so a couple things. First of all, the game you talk about is called the ultimatum game. Ultimatum game, yes, that's what it is. Yeah, and if my memory serves me correctly, the economist who came up with that won the Nobel Prize. Yeah, yeah. For in part revealing Richard Thaler for revealing that people are irrational.

And one of the reasons that people turn down an unfair offer is out of spite. They just get pissed off. And so it's like, you know, I'm cutting off my nose in spite of my face. I'm going to like turn down free money just to screw you over because you're not being a good actor, you're not being fair. It's so irrational. Why would someone do that? Yeah.

Well, the reason they do it is to uphold social norms. Is that there should be a norm of fairness that you give me something reasonably fair. And by refusing to accept unfair offers, I create like a reasonably fair environment around me. It also means that I can signal to other people, don't fuck with me because you're going to get screwed over if you do. Right. So it's not actually, it seems irrational in the moment because I'm turning down money. Right. But it has other.

functions that are useful in society. So this is what I'm curious about with the dentist component. Yeah. So like if you were to take a case study of one person from this data set that says, I'm not going to go see a liberal dentist. What is happening there? Yeah. I mean, so part of the problem is that like people are being irrational.

They, they are going with their gut. They despise what that person's politics are. And so they're engaging in spite. You're not going to get my money because I think what you're doing is bad for the country by voting for parties or policies. that I think are destructive. And so that's the same as the ultimatum game, I think. But of course, from economic perspective,

and this has been studied in economic games with politics, is that people, you know, the way they'll engage in economic transactions is not as optimal if they're engaging with somebody who is part of a different party. Because the economic system works best when there's like fairness and trust. But of course, people don't trust people

from other political parties. And so if they know they're from a political party that they don't like, then they're not going to like engage in trust in fair transactions for them. They don't want to be fair to those people. And so the system starts to fall apart. Like you actually, when you don't have trust, you go to other countries that don't have trust.

They don't have institutions. People end up becoming really corrupt because they have to like bribe every police officer they interact with. I have a friend who does research, I think was in the Congo. And he's like, just to get through the airport, you have to know how exactly, bring a bunch of cash and know how much to bribe

each person, each security checkpoint in the airport. No way. To get on your flight because the system's corrupt because no one trusts one another. And so, like, we have to be very careful. I, that's why, you know, these things are really dangerous for all of us. Or, like, you want to buy a house for me. You have to, like, understand that there has to be some reasonable understanding that, like,

I'm going to follow through. I'm going to negotiate in good faith. Or if I hire you for a job, you want to be sure that I'm not, like, going to discriminate against you based on your politics, you know? Yeah, that makes sense. So there's all these types of ways. that can kind of leak into so many things that are important to people. That's interesting.

Yeah, and I think about religion so much because I feel like a lot of this was kind of mitigated through religion in the past. Yeah. Like, I can almost even say from my personal bias, like, if I talk with someone or I do business with someone that is like an evangelical Christian or like a Mormon or something, I kind of give them more leeway where I'm like, yeah, like, I won't like haggle. I'll just kind of be like, yeah, I don't think this person has screamed me over. Yeah.

And that's just from my own bias of like growing up in a Christian environment. being like, yeah, they're probably guilty like me. You know what I mean? Like, they're probably not going to screw me over. But if someone doesn't express some type of religious belief or something, that I might be like, all right, let me just see if I'm getting screwed over. And so I wonder if historically people would just see, like, oh, we're of the same religion. Yeah.

We probably are going to do good business with each other. You're not going to screw over someone that believes in the same God or something like that. Yeah, I mean, my wife, so she grew up in Southern California. Her dad had a small construction company, and he joined the evangelical church in part to do business. Oh, really? I don't even know he was that religious, but he felt like that's where you have to go to, like, make deals because people will trust you. So you get access to that community for, like, basic business purposes. Oh, that's so, damn it.

Yeah, so it's exactly what you said. So people are infiltrating. Yeah, yeah. So people have been doing that all the time, and people do that politically. You know, they go to, like, you know, events with other people who share their politics and cut business deals and this is what lobbyists spend all their time doing. So those types of things happen all the time. They've been happening forever. But again, in other systems where you don't have good institutions or trust, it's even worse because only people you can often trust are your family and your tribe.

And so in those places, people actually discriminate way more because they can't trust anybody like outside their immediate family. And so they engage in all kinds of corruption, like hiring their kids for, you know, for all the jobs and stuff like that. Interesting. Okay. This is a theory that I'm just pulling out right now. No, no, it's totally true. I'm curious if, I'm curious if cultures or maybe even countries that like over-prioritize family, like there's some places where it's like, hey, family is the most important thing. There's nothing more important than family. Is it possible that in those places there is like a little bit of an erosion in like an institutional trust?

Yeah, yeah. Like I wonder if there's like a correlation with that. Yeah, I mean like you look at it. We're in New York, right? Like look at all the people. So I have kids in school. And I can't tell you like how messed up it is all the way the people. parents try to like get their kids into like fancy schools and stuff like that.

And it's like everybody's trying to gain the system and get like special tutors and counselors who make all kinds of money and have connections with the right schools to get their kid in the right school so they can get into a fancy college. And it just is such a corrupt system all the way through. This is why I'm like a big fan of like standardized testing. So you can make it fair for anybody who has potential talent to get in because the way that system is currently designed is all like through connections and stuff like that. Yeah, that's very interesting.

What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because it's 2024. And it's time to talk about something important. When you are seriously hurt, your injury could be worth millions. Yes, that's right. The world is a crazy place. And one person's negligence can result in another's settlement. And that's why I got to talk to you about Morgan and Morgan.

Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. They have over 100 offices nationwide and over 1,000 lawyers. Yes, these are the biggest. big boys. You know them, you see them, you see their billboards all over the world. If you ever drove down I-90 from Florida to New York, I'm telling you, you've seen the billboards, all right? If you ever watched a UFC fight, you've seen them right on the banner. I'm telling you, these are the, these are the biggest guys in the game, all right? With over $20 billion recovered for over 500,000 clients, Morgan and Morgan has a proven track record of fighting to get you full and fair

compensation. The annoying thing with most attorneys is that in order to submit a claim, you've got to call them up, you've got to talk to their people, you got to go back and forth on the emails, you got to hope that they see it. They might charge you just even look at their claim. Here's the cool thing with Morgan and Morgan. With eight clicks or less, you can submit a claim and one of their licensed attorneys will take a look at it and get back to you. It's that easy. It's like ordering something off Amazon. It's just a couple clicks. You can submit your claim very easily and cheap. Yeah, how about zero dollars? That's how much it costs to submit a claim with Morgan and Morgan. Extremely easy. No fee required. So if you are ever injured, you can go check out

Morgan and Morgan. Their fee is free unless they win. That's right. Unless they win for you. Unless they fight and get you compensation, you're not paying a single dollar. That's a pretty good deal. So for more information, go to for the people.com slash gagnon. That's correct. F-O-R-the-people.com slash gagnon or dial pound law. That's pound-529 from your cell phone.

That's for the people, F-O-R-the-people.com slash gagnon, or dial pound law, pound-529 from your cell phone. This is a paid advertisement. Now let's get back to the show. after the short disclaimer. So this kind of makes me sad because I feel like we've illustrated like identity is a major part and like an increasingly important part

in American politics. It's pretty clear that it sort of shrouds and obfuscates our ability to be objective that, you know, two people from different political parties can look at the same data set or look at the same statistics or look at the same math problem and draw different conclusions

seems concerning. Yeah. And if in order for our democracy to work, work, like at best, everyone is acting objectively. But we've kind of indicated that objectivity isn't really reasonable. Yeah. So what do we do? Oh, man.

So this is why I actually, like, think that, you know, my research has led me to the belief that this is why institutions matter. Because if we get rid of them, if we shred it all, if we burn it all down, this is what we'll end up with. We'll end up with just corruption and people helping people they know. So you need some way of ensuring that people are fair. And research has been done on this with economic games. It's that people discriminate, for example,

they're much more likely to engage in things like racial discrimination if there's no institution that will ensure they treat people fair. And they'll just favor people like them. And so it's whether their family or share the same race or share the same politics or share the same religion or whatever, all of those things start to come out more and more the moment that you don't have institutions who are overseeing it to make sure it's fair. That's interesting.

And what would be an example of like a governing body that kind of like checks in on on if someone is operating business fairly or something? Yeah. What's an example of that? So there's all kinds of things. So like for where like near lower Manhattan, which is like Wall Street. And they have like the SEC to make sure that they're not like engaging in insider trading. Right. And so there are that there, I'm not going to say the SEC is perfect.

I actually think all institutions I can think of are pretty corrupt. But that's why you have that. You know, you have legal system where it's supposed to be like blind, you know, justice is blind, because everybody deserves a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. And then they have to meet a legal standard to prove that you're guilty and you're allowed to bring, you know, defense, you have a right to an attorney and all those things to defend you to ensure that you're protected. If you get arrested, the police officers have to read your Miranda rights. So that's an institution we created because before that, it was just complete chaos.

And you had like vigilante killings and stuff, right? Because someone was accused of rape. And so everybody in the village like gets their pitchforks and goes and like kills that person. And so and there are parts of the world where that's still the way like justice is handed out. Yeah. So we, you know, we don't want that. Does it mean that like all the police are fair? No.

But like we're in a much worse world if we don't have police or we don't have a legal system that can defend us. Or we don't have the SEC to make sure that like these financials are. firms aren't screwing us over. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, if there is no SEC, there's, it's almost certainly there will be more insider trading and more fraud and more things connected to, yeah, crime within, yeah, securities, which that makes sense to me. But then I also understand the sentiment where people are like, the institutions are the bastions of corruptions in and of themselves. No, the institutions are corrupt. All of them have problems in it. So the question is, do you burn it down and we go to anarchy? But I'm just telling you, go to some kind of

that have no institutions and live there for a year and see if you can sell your house without getting screwed over. If you can buy a car, if you can, you know, trade stocks or whatever the thing is that you want to do. Go there and try it. How you get through the airport. I already told you an example of what it takes to get through an airport in a place like that. And so the, so the issue for me is like we need to think about like making institutions better and fairer. So they don't screw the little guy over or whatever. Because just you can see. And this is a funny thing, like if you talk to political scientists who actually study, like, other countries, that's like one of the first things they'll tell you that you need to do. Yeah. Because they know

what it looks like without that stuff. So I understand, like, I also am a psychologist, understand like the irritation and frustration if you see a criminal go free or an innocent person arrested and go to jail. Like, it creates a sense of fury. Um, so I, I don't want to like deny how bad that is. Yeah. It's more like, okay, well, what's a solution to that? Yeah. And destroying the institution you don't believe is, is anywhere near a viable. Well, show me a society. So we have like hundreds of other test cases, all kinds of society throughout history. Show me a society that reaches better outcomes without them.

I think that would be my, like, you know, you have the entirety of human history and hundreds of other countries. Like, show me the examples of what that looks like. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, can you steal man that argument? Is there any example of a country that doesn't have like strong institutions that is, you know, livable, I guess? that is operating with a lot of justice and peace?

No, I mean, there's different types of systems of institutions that work. So, like, if you want to look at the places where people live longest and are healthiest and score high on happiness measures, you know, score high in the Human Development Index, have good economies too. Like, there's a couple different examples. So go to Europe. You have, like, the Nordic countries, like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland. You also have, like, a more free market system in, say, like, Switzerland, which is,

like heavily the banking center of Europe. And it's much more like libertarian and laissez-faire. But both of them have really good institutions. And they can reach good outcomes using different types of political systems. So I think you can get different good outcomes with different political systems. I don't think there's like one pathway. But all the places like, again, if you just like get the, all the countries in the world rank ordered by human development index, look at the bottom 10. You're going to see places like Afghanistan and stuff like that who have no institutions.

And it's run by like local warlords and things like that. Yeah. And you saw what happened when they tried to build institutions there. The mayor went over there and it was a complete and utter disaster. Right. So I don't even necessarily think they'd be easy to build when you have a system like that. It's hard. There's so many challenges to it.

But that's what places look like that don't. Or you have places. So we'll go back to talk about Afghanistan. Also, US, remember when they invaded Iraq? They got rid of Saddam Hussein. Well, it's been brutal to build institutions there. But the way they worked was under the tyranny of like a. single dictator.

Saddam Hussein, who terrified everybody. And so, like, that's another system you could have. That system is really unsustainable, prone to deep corruption and violence. And when the dictator dies, the whole system tends to go into chaos. So you have lots of different ways it can go badly, but all the pathways to bad don't have good institutions. And there's lots of ways to be good. And all those different pathways, at least that I see in the world, have good

institutions. And I'm not even here to talk about institutions. I'm just telling you, we're biased, right? Your whole point is we're biased, we're biased politically, religious, racially, all these things. And so, like, how do we get past that? And like, that's it. You wanted me to solve it. That's the only solution I have. Yeah. I mean, the importance of institutions is what you highlighted before. In what way are institutions important for, I guess, kind of ameliorating the political bias that people have? Like, how could an institution help me if I have a political bias? Yeah, so let's say you're going to hire people that you like more. Okay, so first of all, there's some things that are totally fine, right?

Like, you want to invite only Republicans or Democrats onto your podcast. You can do that all day long. You have freedom of association, freedom of speech, all that stuff. And so we allow those types of things, and you can date whoever you want. You can date them based on their political preferences. And I'm not just talking left, right? You can date on all kinds of things, right? And we actually allow people to discriminate in dating.

It's actually the one sphere in life you allow rampant. discrimination. You can date somebody based on their height, weight, race. I mean, families do this. I mean, I'm sure you can think of a lot of different families and cultures where it's like, yeah, you cannot date that person. And they just say it, right? And it's like the stuff is like would be super offensive at a workplace or politically. You could never say it on like social media. But people just like say it in their household. I don't want you to date that person. And people don't want, like you said on the dating websites, just say who they want to date or not. And so I think like those types of things are, there's,

lots of ways in which those, we allow all kinds of political discrimination to happen. I think it's like more of a problem of like you're hiring people to work at a hospital and you're not judging them based on their qualifications, right? Like if you're hiring surgeons, brain surgeons or something like that based on who they voted for and not for like their actual credentials to do brain surgery, you're going to end up with more people dead. You know, like no one wants to live in a world like that. At least I don't want to live in a world like that where I go into, I just want to

the best surgeon. I don't like give a damn who they voted for. I want them to like be able to operate in my brain and save my life or like do a heart transplant for like my father or something like that and I want it to be good. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I feel the same way. I very much am like I lean to the meritocratic side. Like let's get the best and brightest in these roles and lift, you know, let that tide raise all the boats. I think that's the move. But when it comes to institutions, obviously we know there's like this big thing. with DEI, that there is now institutions that are making sure that, like, you know, people are represented.

I'm curious if you have, like, any research or if you've, like, done any work in regards to studying that and, like, how that impacts, you know, how institutions are able to get the best qualified people versus, like, hitting quotas. Yeah, okay, so I'll give you both sides of that argument. What has historically happened in this country for almost its entire history is things like racial discrimination. Right. And so things like DEI were created to make a lot.

it fair for anybody to get a job and not be discriminated against. And so I think historically, and the vision of it, at least by most people doing it, is to create opportunities. And then also to create inclusion, which I think, like, inclusion is something, if you've ever had a job where, like, you don't get invited for lunch and people don't listen to your opinion, it sucks. Yeah. So creating inclusion where everybody gets a voice and stuff, I think those types of principles

are just, like, pretty universal. You should, like, have that at every job. Or you end up with, like, things like group think and stuff like that. Right. Now, I think where people object to it is if someone is unqualified and is getting bumped up because they're getting a massive preference based on like their gender or race or sexual preference or whatever. And I think people object to that because, and it's understandable like most people object to that because they think like the best person, it's not meritocratic. And so, and then there's research on this. Had a colleague who studies this with gender.

She looked, she studied sexism. She was a sexism researcher her whole life. But since she studied what it's called preferential hiring in the research. And then if you hired, you had a man and a woman and they're equally qualified, then it's fine to hire the woman if they're underrepresented in that job because they have the qualifications to do it. And so that's where she finds, her research finds that people accept it and it works out pretty well because you're then getting gender balance in the job.

Or we talked about like it might be good for have more like male teachers. So especially boys who are falling behind in schools have like role models to look up to and stuff. And so if you have an equally qualified male and female like kindergarten teacher, if you have almost no male kindergarten teachers at your school, it might be good to preference a male one. So little boys have someone to look up to, right? And so I think that's where it seems to work out well. And most people, you know, who are surveyed on this, turn out to prefer that. Where it doesn't work out well is, let's say, you have a man and a woman applying for a job. And there's a huge difference in qualifications.

Let's say the man is way more qualified. and you hire a woman ahead of him because you have underrepresentation of women. And then what happens, you put her in a situation where she's not able to do the job. And so it's hugely stressful to her and it puts the risk that she'll end up getting fired eventually.

And also, the other teammates who have to work with her if she can't do her part of the job are going to get irritated or leave. Clients or customers or patients or students struggle. And it's the same thing you go to that elementary school. You're hiring a man for a job just because he's a man and he doesn't have the proper qualification

all the kindergarten kids are going to suffer. And so you have to actually, what's called preferential hiring, if you're going to do that, you have to make sure people have the skill set and then it brings something into the fold. Right. You know, because again,

we can talk about it with both genders in different situations, and you can think, yeah, it might be good to have some male kindergarten teachers and little boys will benefit from that. Maybe that will close some of the gender cap in primary education. So that seems like a good thing, right?

even if there is a affirmative action in that case. And you can imagine it's like useful for, let's go to professors, you know, in physics, you know, a lot of almost all men. If you have a woman who's equally qualified to a man and they're the finalists, it might be nice to have some female physics professors because then female students will have a role model that they can aspire to and it opens up their, you know, aspirations and opportunities. Absolutely. And who knows what they could bring, right? Like, I don't doubt that, you know, men and women might process information differently. They might process data differently. If there's a woman looking at, like, data, she might be able to draw conclusions and further the field in a way that's unique, assuming that, you know, all other things are held equal.

Yeah. And I could see how the DEI example where someone that's unqualified is getting hired to hit a quota could really cause even more problems because it could exacerbate the issue of someone thinking that someone is unqualified, whether, you know, unrightly, through. stereotypes or, you know, something happening in culture, if you don't think a woman is qualified for the job and you hire her regardless, if she's not qualified, then all the other team members that work with her will become, you know, disengaged and frustrated that clients, like you said, would then start to maybe believe the stereotypes that exist. Yeah, yeah, you risk affirming the stereotypes. Yeah, and that creates a lot of, yeah, I could see that being tricky.

But it's like, I'll give you an example where this gender thing is really important. This was, I'm trying to remember the details of this, but they were creating artificial hearts. pretty important technical job, right? We're talking about life and death here for people who have to have a heart transplant. And the heart that the main manufacturer designed, it was all men who designed it. And so guess what? It fits men's bodies, but it doesn't fit women's bodies. Yeah.

And so now all the women who need, like, artificial hearts are at risk of dying because, like, the heart is not designed for a smaller woman's body. If you had a woman in the room, she might have, like, caught that sooner. Or, like, seatbelt design. if it's designed for like the average male body, then it's going to save men's lives dramatically more than it's going to save like the average woman's life. And so like you can start to see why it's really important

to have diversity in the room for making those decisions. Yeah. Because they're going to catch that in a way that like a bunch of men historically aren't going to catch it. And I want to say the table's turned. It might be good to have like enough male teachers in the staff room at a primary school to be like, okay, here's why the boys are struggling. under the way that we've like designed the curriculum.

They're not, they're not able to move around or learn in a way that, like, is optimal for them. And it's going to be an advocate for them or have some solutions because maybe they went through that. And so I think, like, what you want to do is think, like, it's actually really good to have diversity in those rooms. It also avoids group think.

You have people who are just different, and I'm not just talking, like, gender or race, but, like, their perspectives on all kinds of things. You catch your blind spots easier. So that's why, like, the principle behind diversity is really good. And there's tons of research on, and case studies, like the heart and the seatbelt, why it matters. It's just, I think you have to do it well. Yeah, that's interesting.

And if you don't do well, it backfires. There's lots of research on this in companies. When they have DEI and they go in and do it, do it, something like 40% of time it doesn't work or in some cases backfires. And so there was actually a huge paper on this where they analyzed all the DEI interventions. It was, and it was the paper of the years, Harvard Business Review. So got picked as paper of the year and trying to do. remember the details of this came out like six, seven years ago. And they found that DEI works best if you make people feel all positive and give them opportunity, everybody gets an opportunity to contribute to making

the environment better. And so that's kind of the opposite of way that some DEI practitioners have come in and it's like more shame focused. You know, they like try to make people bad and divide them into groups. And those types of things backfire. In fact, they go against pretty much everything we've learned the last 70 years of social psychology that I study about how to create an inclusive environment, but some of those approaches got like super popular and those consultants make 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 dollars to go to a company. And what they do is just absolutely the worst strategy you'd ever design from researchers of what we know is likely to succeed. So that's why people are pissed off. And I get that because if they're at a company, they're forced to sit through this

and it sounds totally insane. Or it's just loaded with stereotypes. There was one that got in the news. I don't want to say the company because I know someone who works there, but they said that, like, men's and women's brains were one was like pancakes and other was like waffles. I'm just saying like that's bad shit insane. But that was like some fancy company giving a diversity like training seminar and getting paid tens of thousands of dollars. And like eventually leaked out to the public and became a national embarrassing news story for this company. But like there's people doing that stuff. And it's so I don't blame people for being like super cynical if they've seen that. That's really, really interesting.

Yeah, the positive way to do it by offering opportunity to share your ideas and share your voice, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I could completely see that. Like if everyone's sitting around and it's like, okay, we're designing Band-Aids, what color should they be? Yeah. In my mind, I'm like, yeah, make them this color. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah, of course. And look at Band-Aids. They all look like white, pinkish. Yeah. Yeah. But I would be helpful if someone could be like, oh, yeah. Yeah, you should make them black too. Yeah, yeah.

But if someone came to me and they were like, oh, you thinking that they should be your skin color is because you're a bad person. And it became a negative shame kind of cycle. I would feel bad and I would get resentful. Even though I'm wrong. Like I should have considered other people's skin color, but I'm dumb. I don't know. I think about myself. Well, it also you have to understand.

This goes back to the first part of our conversation, right? We're all biased to some degree. And so if you have that human perspective that we're all biased, which means we all have blind spots. And if you just come at it from human, like I always. say when I hear these cases, assume the best of somebody, make them aware of it, give them the opportunity to change, and see if they correct themselves first. And then if they correct themselves, it shows that they had a blind spot, but it's not they're doing it not to be malicious or sinister or discriminatory. They just are thinking through their own experiences,

which is just normal and human. Yeah, that's interesting. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you are a man who needs a personal shopper. Yeah, I said it. You need someone that's going to shop for you. Now, here's how you're going to do it. You're going to go check out my good friends over at Bespoke Post. All right, these guys do something absolutely amazing. Okay, they scour the internet, every single corner in recess of the internet, to find the coolest items that you want, that you didn't even know that you needed.

I'm telling you, this stuff is amazing. I went on Bespoke Post. I submitted kind of just like a very, like, regular onboarding quiz. It was like 10 questions or less. It was super easy. And it just asked kind of the things that I like to do. I like to hike. I like to go camping.

I like to have a couple drinks with the boys, you know what I mean? Just kind of what my lifestyle is. And then within a couple days, they sent me this box. I submitted my questionnaire and I got a box of amazing fines. This is an amazing leather wallet. This is like a beautiful wallet that I would actually use. This is a, the name is Swedish for first, which makes a lot of sense because this is a perfect starter wallet. If you're someone that's looking to get into the nice crafted leather wallet game, throw your Velcro nonsense away.

Okay. And with bespoke post, you're going to be getting something delivered directly. to your door that's going to be a great first step into the leather wallet game. But that's not it. I also got this sick multi-tool right here. It's a bottle opener, which is probably what I'll be using it for the most. But then it can do everything. You can do a bunch of stuff.

It can pry stuff. You can cut stuff, cut open packages. I even use this just like in my sock. It's just like walking around the city. You'd never realize how many times you've got to like open a package. You need a screwdriver to screw something in. You need a bottle opener. It's a multi-tool that can do a ton of stuff.

It's made out of stainless steel. It's super nice. It's not going to rust. It's airport safe. Bespoke Post is not going to get you. caught in a jam. And here's what's amazing about it. You only pay for what you keep. So before they even send it to you, they show you everything that's going to be coming in and they say, hey, Mark, we looked at your whole profile, we looked at who you are, we think we know

you better than you know you. And this is what we think you're going to love. Fortunately for me, I loved everything. So I was like, yeah, send me all that looks awesome. I'm going to be using all of this stuff. But if you're not like me and you're like, actually, I don't really drink that much anymore. I'm not going to take the bottle of the burner. They go, hey, that's fine. We'll keep it and we're not going to charge you. So if you were interested in joining one of the coolest membership clubs on the internet having the greatest items across the web delivered directly to your door for an extremely affordable price i want you to check out bespokepost.com that is b-es-p-o-k-e-p-o-k-e-poste.com slash camp-gagnon that's c-a-m-gg-g-n-p, but you already know that bespokepost.com

slash camp-gagnon and if you use the promo code campgagnon you are going to receive 15% off your first monthly shipment just click the link in the description that is bespoke post.com Camp Gagnon. Stop wasting time. You need to get on this right away and get all of your goodies sent directly to your door immediately. Now let's get back to the show. So does this map to politics in any significant way as far as like getting political candidates that are, you know, like the best, like is there a standardization that can go into the political process that would ensure a meritocracy and not just people with identities trying to shout from the rooftops? Yeah. So the worst, two of the worst parts of our system right now, in my opinion, that leads to,

to, these are institutional things that lead to bias. One is we've gotten rid of competitive elections. So it used to be the case that most of the elections in this country were super competitive. Like I'm talking about like the district level or county level or state level. And so what that meant was that the politicians had to actually try to appeal to as many people as possible. They had to come up with policies that made most people happy. What we've got now is through gerrymandering, it's most districts are safe Democrats, safe Republican. And so what that means is you can get the really extreme people who don't try to

make their local constituents happy because they don't have to because they're pretty much guaranteed to win. And so you're selecting for people who are like at the extremes, who have real fringe beliefs. And so you get more and more of those people in, you know, Congress or the Senate. And all of a sudden, those are the people who don't want to cooperate with anybody on the other side of the aisle or even talk to them. And so if you look over time last 60 years, there's a great gift of, like 10 second gift you can see of like used to be people voted together on common bills and found common ground on some things which when they're doing that is because it's in the interest of most people right um they found some compromise it works for 60 70 80 percent of americans but what

you've got is over time it's like two cells pulling apart it's like myosis it's yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like cell splitting and there's almost no people talking to another and they've actually this i mentioned this study my book they did an analysis of just people like sitting in congress and did they actually go and talk, walk over to somebody different than them? And people aren't even walking over and talking to people from the other party as much. And so it's like at every level from where they're talking about where people live in neighborhoods, who they vote for, who they talk to, who you date or marry, it's pulling apart. So I think one of the first things is just like having competitive elections.

Or there's other types of voting. I think this is in California where you rank order your choice. And so even if your first choice person, doesn't win, maybe your second choice person was win, because you can kind of like rank them up. And so turns out like that is another way to get rid of like super polarizing figures. It's just letting people like rank order.

That's interesting. And so, and that ends up selecting for people who are like broadly popular and broadly interesting to people rather than like just giving them the parties pick the most extreme people and then you get stuck with them and then because of gerrymandering,

those are the people who represent us. Wow. And it sucks because yeah, people, people are irritated. people are identifying with their party a little bit less than ever because they're more and more likely to be independent and because they're kind of sick of the system they see people running and they think those people don't represent me

and in fact those people don't try to represent them a lot of times they don't try to have policies that are like broadly popular yeah I mean that's how I feel like I'd mentioned before I feel politically disenfranchised like every election I'm 27 years old every election that I had the opportunity to vote in I felt like was kind of bullshit like since I've been 18 I was like I don't like either of these choices I could kind of go with like the lesser two evils, I guess.

Like, I don't even think my interests are really involved. I think the corporations that are kind of like funding these politicians probably have a bigger say than I do individually. So like I could vote with my dollars. I don't know. I just get kind of overwhelmed and I just sort of say like, fuck all this. This is not for me. And I kind of throw my hands up. I'm like, ugh.

What would be your advice to someone like me that feels disenfranchised? I mean, it sucks because it's the system we're in. so I don't actually blame you. I can't vote because I'm not American citizen. You're lucky. But I think like where it might matter is like doing things at your community level. Like first of all, you can vote in like your local elections. And those people actually like mattered your life.

They matter whether like the streets are clean or there's garbage on the street or, you know. I've actually started looking into this because someone else had mentioned this to me. They were like, yeah, like local elections will be actually what matters. And so I've started like just kind of like Googling like, all right, who's running for like, like district, you know, clerk of courts. I'm like looking around just trying to see what's happening. But I also want to hope that the local election is still competitive. Yeah, yeah.

And so is there a way to tell if my district is gerrymandered? I mean, here's the other thing is you, well, yeah, there are, I don't have that data, but there are websites that present that. But at the local thing, you can actually, like, go and influence. I had a friend who, like, actually swit. He was in a, he was in a, this was in Canada, but he was in a state. or a province that was pure, they'd vote a conservative forever, never, never.

And he's not conservative, but he joined the party so he could vote in the primaries and vote for someone who at least wasn't like extreme. And he signed up other people. And they weren't conservative, but they wanted to say. And so in a gerrymandered place like that, the best way to get involved is like at the party level,

the primary, where you can actually like vote and your vote actually carries more weight because most people don't do that. Interesting. I'm also, I actually, when my book came out, it got picked up by,

in the California governor's office, they have a new minister of like civic service. So I'll tell you about this cool. This is just starting. It's a cool idea. Josh Friday is the guy. He's like the minister. They just created his position.

And he worked, he was in the military. And he was, he wanted something like the Peace Corps, but for American citizens that don't have to go to another country. So they created this for California. So they're giving 10,000 students. like college students, they give them a $10,000 tuition reduction to just help out in their local community, go to soup kitchen, clean the highway, do stuff. And guess what? You end up meeting all kinds of people when you do that. You meet people who, and he's like, we're getting people who come

into this and try it. And they'll meet somebody who has radically different politics for them, but actually see them as a human being and understand them in a more nuanced, complex way. That's interesting. And meanwhile, they're paying, they're helping their tuition, so it's helping them get through college because tuition's insanely expensive now. And it's also like giving them some work experience and it's also cleaning up communities. And so I thought like, and it gives them a sense of civic purpose because they're cleaning up their community. And so I, and his goal is if this works or they reached out to me to like, can we test this? Can he get some bait on this? And so, and I didn't. I'm not paid by them or anything just to be

clear there's no conflict of interest. But the goal he said is to see if it works. And then if can you scale something like that? So like this whole generation of young people, A, you're helping them get through college, which is really expensive. And you're helping clean up communities. And you're also creating an identity. Their goal is to create an identity of them as Californians. So your identity is not Republican or Democrat, but Californian. And so you care about the current and future state of California.

You care about your neighbors. And you want to make it beautiful and safe and healthy. And I thought that was just a really cool vision. I wish we had more stuff like that. Yeah, that's cool. And it was less divisive and more about contact, more about interacting with people, more about like doing something concrete. So the other thing I'll tell you, first tell me what you think about that.

And then I'll go. I think it's interesting, actually. I mean, I've always been fond of the idea of like a national service. Yeah. So like you don't necessarily have to like obviously some countries like national military service, which depending on the country, I actually think is like kind of cool. Like Korea does it, I know that you, I can just see how that it would instill a level of patriotism and desire to support your country.

Because obviously Korea is in kind of like a standing conflict. Yeah. But, you know, none of the guys that I know that I've ever served are actually, like, you know, seeing combat. But you just get a sense of like, oh, I am, this is what it means to be Korean and I, like, serve time for my country. So I actually think that's, like, kind of a cool idea. I don't think it's necessary in America, but the idea of national service, you know, going out and, you know, working in a national park. You know, working even like in a local state park or just some type of, like, you know, cleaning your community, whatever that is for a period of time. I actually think it's a really interesting idea

for giving people a sense of patriotism. I think my friend John... It's a different type of patriotism, right? Because it's not waving a flag. Yeah. It's not symbolic. It's ownership. It's real.

It's on the ground. It's ownership over it. Yeah. Yeah. My friend John Levy always points to... He's sort of like a social psychologist. It's a sociologist. And he pointed out that the greatest way for two people to come together

is to do hard things at the same time. And for their... brains literally diffused. I mean, we see this through wars all over. Like Vietnam, like, did so much for race relations in America because you had different men of different backgrounds doing hard things together. And that bond is so great. So the idea of two people going and cleaning a highway together, I have no doubt, one would kind of unite them to the space that they're physically in, but also to each other. So I actually think that's a cool idea. Yeah, I'll say this. I'm part of this. There's this giant intervention where it's run by researchers at Stanford. And they want to see what

can reduce partisan animosity so people don't hate each other. And they asked researchers and policymakers, practitioners around the world to submit an intervention. 252 teams submitted interventions. And they had a panel of experts to pick the top 25. And then they ran them with 32,000 Americans from every walk of life to see what worked. The number one intervention was basically someone submitted this Heinick and beer commercial. I don't know if you've ever seen this, but it shows people they're put in a bar with a

stranger and they just get a bunch of instructions and there's stuff on the floor. And over like an hour or two, they build a bar. They build like a place a bar and then they drop a beer down for each of them. And they show them a video that they had done on each person so you get to know their background. And they put people in the same room who are politically radically different, like conservative Republican, liberal Democrat. And they see the video about their politics after they've spent like a couple hours like

working with them, building something hard and completing it, being successful. And then they show them these videos and they're just like standing there watching these videos about how different they are. And then they put down that beer and they say, do you want to like talk about it over a beer to see if they leave? And like everybody's like, yeah, I'll talk about it.

I'll sit down like talk to this person because I got to know them and we built something together first. And when people watch that commercial, it like melts a lot of their animosity because they realize, wow, we can do something together and it kind of like shows an example of it. Wow. And that's one of the best things.

This goes back 70 years of research called contact theory. If you're working with somebody, cooperating and you have equal status, and especially if you're successful, whatever you're doing, it builds a connection across all kinds of boundaries, whether this was originally used on things like race, but can be used for politics, too. Is there a way at scale to utilize that understanding? Yeah. I mean, so this is like the type of thing that you have with like these California Peace Corps or National Service. It's like, I think they need to do that. I think you need to, if you could get the incentives right and motivate people to do it.

it, they can understand people as humans. So the other thing that one of the, we did an intervention, my lab, and it was based on our book, so we like, okay, we'll send them our principles and see if we can make this work. Ours was the third best one out of 252. It wasn't as good as a Heineken commercial, but we didn't have like ad dollars to make it slick. But what we did is we reminded people that they actually share a common identity as Americans and they have a set of values and have created and cherished democracy and defended it.

hearing those messages and clearing examples of people from each party who defend it, that was almost as good as this other thing. So you want to remind people they're in it together. They have something in common that's really important. And then one of the other things that tends to work is helping people realize that they don't hate you as much as you think. So people assume, so Democrats walk around assuming all Republicans hate them and Republicans walk around assuming all Democrats hate them. And there is animosity as we talked about, but it's not as bad as what most people think it is. Because they're just hearing the, version of it from social media or on the news. And if you show them what the average person

from the other party thinks, that, and you realize actually it's not as bad as I thought or I've been told, that also makes people way more open-minded and they're willing to engage with people. So a lot of it is like we're being fed this diet of usually what you see on social media is someone, people find the most extreme version of somebody and then they hold it up as if that's representative of everybody in that group. And the media does that. You know, Fox News used to do it. They'd call it campus crazies. And they'd find some crazy students at some university does something insane and they'll like talk about it like these college students these days.

Yeah. But of course, like that was the most extreme thing that happened in the entire country that day. Yeah, there's Twitter accounts that you're sort of dedicated to this that will take like some crazy person off TikTok on either side. Lids of TikTok. That's one of them like like and I think you see it both ways. Oh, you do. There's people, there's people on the left I see who do it.

And it's almost like they can make a living doing that because it generates so much engagement. and then they get like hits on their blog or their newsletter subscribers pick go up or whatever and they're like monetizing just like holding up the most extreme people but what they're doing is it's not technically misinformation but it creates a false belief in people's minds

I think there's also an ignorance that people refuse to believe that those extremes exist within their party so I think one it creates a disproportionate view for people of the other party to say like oh Like everyone in this party is, you know, all conservatives are racist. Or like you'll see one lives a TikTok thing. And it's like, oh, all kids should be transgender.

And it's like, wait, what? But then people will be like, oh, this is what liberals want for the country. And then I do think people should also acknowledge like, oh, that is a part of, that extreme is a part of what people view me as. So I do think it's helpful for people to understand, one, their own bias, but also how other people. people are viewing them through their own, through their bias. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's exactly it. Like, I'll talk to, I don't know, like,

different, like my parents are more conservative, right? Yeah. And I'll talk with them, and they'll get frustrated, and I'll say, like, oh, but you should look at kind of what is being fed to the other side. And kind of recognize that everyone's harboring animosity towards each other based off the media. Yeah. And a lot of it's not really real. If you really just talk to someone, you'll kind of realize, like,

especially if they live in the same neighborhood, like, everyone's pissed off about the roads, people hate the traffic. Like, there's a lot more in common than the thing that you're getting fed. Yeah. I just ran this giant study in climate change. Super polarizing issue. Republicans don't believe in climate change as much as liberals. We found this in 60 countries around the world.

But when it came to actually doing something, planting trees, conservatives and liberals around the whole world were just as likely to make effort to plant trees. And so that was actually the hardest thing to do in our whole study. And we found this around the world. That cut through polarization. is that if you find something that's very constructive, you know, no one wants, everybody loves trees. Everybody wants trees in their neighborhood.

And so there are things that are concrete, and that's not going to solve climate change, but it's the first step, right? You've got to find some things you agree on. And there's a lot of things people agree on that are kind of like hidden because we don't talk about the things we agree on. A lot of times we don't even bother to try.

We don't even want to have that conversation. It's kind of like the DEI thing you brought it before. Like when it's constructive and give people an opportunity, everyone likes it. And when it's destructive and you're saying that people are evil or guilty or shameful, whatever, then people get, you know, they get reserved about it.

But I get, that makes so much sense. Like, climate change, yeah, people can debate the data forever. Like, sure, like, you guys, people can go back and forth, but should companies stop polluting in drinking water? Yeah, like, everybody agrees on that. Right? Like, so I don't get why propositions aren't brought up in that way. And resolutions brought up in a way that would get everyone on board.

Like, what is, what's happening? Is it because it's. So this goes to like lobby groups, right? You talked about lobby groups before and they have so much money and power. I'll give you one. So, and this comes from a conversation I had my brother very different politically from me. One time I went to visit him and he had, he's a huge gun enthusiast and I'm not. And he had this shirt on that said no compromise and it was like a Canadian leaf with a bunch of guns on it.

And we ended up like talking that night and I had a few drinks talked about gun control. And once I got talking to him, he believes that background checks are fine, that you should have like rules about locking up your guns. want guns in the hands of like people of criminal records. And so actually those are things that like something like 80, 90% of people agree on. Yeah. And he's like a hardcore enthusiast. But he, if you actually talk to him and listen to him, you realize actually you agree on a lot more. And there's a lot of things with gun control in the U.S. that are agreed on. But Republicans can't vote on them because like the NRA will like come after them and try to knock them out in the next primary.

And so it's like those are the types. there's like these really aggressive lobby groups or corporations that like stop us from like finding compromise on things that like if 80 to 90% of people agree on those things how is it possible our politicians can't come together solve them? So take me through the schematic of how that works. So you have a politician that gets elected

they are now deliberating over an issue 98% of people agree like hey having sensible gun control and not letting criminals get guns, da-da-da. Yeah. Let's say 98% of people agree on that. Yeah. What is happening logistically that blocks it?

I understand the lobby groups and corporations, but what technically is happening? Well, I mean, I'm not an expert on lobbying, but I'll tell you three or four things that I've read about that seem to happen. One is money. So they can donate money to political action groups or mobilize donors to donate money for certain candidates. And the other thing is, they can put forward. and support other candidates in party primaries

that align with the lobby group better and then try to like send money to them and support them in ways that get people to to vote against the person who didn't support them. I actually think since we're so gerrymandered that's where most of the things happen. It's like you're not,

you hear in Republicans, they're called a rhino, Republican in name only. Like you're not a hardcore Republican enough. Mitt Romney gets called a rhino. Yeah, Mitt Romney is like the classic example but they call all kinds of people rhinos. And in the Democrat kind of party, you have like purity contests too about like where do you stand on whatever issue the day Gaza or something like that. And if you're not hardcore enough on that issue, we're going to like try to rally the base to like knock you out. Right.

Even if you've had, even if you've been a popular member of Congress for like 20 years and done all this stuff for your district or for citizens, we'll try to knock you up because you don't align with whatever the, that activist party or the lobbyist. Tulsi Gabbard gets called a dino often, I feel like. Oh yeah, yeah. There's all kinds of people who do. And so that's the system that we're in, where it's like knocking people out because they're not pure enough. And if those are people in safe districts, what matters is the primary,

because once they win the primary, they're almost guaranteed to win the election. And so they're constantly thinking about making sure they don't get knocked out in the primary by a more extreme person. So they're constantly, like, caving to the whims of whoever are the primary voters, which tend to be the most hardcore extreme, group of party members and lobby groups. That's where they throw their money.

That makes a lot of sense. So it's like deep down in that, you know, it's deep in the muck of how it gets made. It's not like actually probably on like Congress, but then it keeps people in line. It's like conformity. It's like if you vote against us, we'll give you a bad rating and we'll primary you in the next election. Right. And so, and everybody gets scored by all these lobby groups, whether they're an A plus

supporter of the issue or F minus. and so they get kind of pressured constantly into conformity. Like I kind of wonder what would happen. Imagine if we took Congress or a Senate or whatever and didn't allow any cameras in. And no one could know how everybody vote. Imagine every vote was anonymous. Yeah. And they had to build a bar and Heineken sponsored it.

And they were drinking a lot of beer. You know, you might get like different. You wouldn't get them like doing things to signal they're like loyal to these like lobby groups as much about it. Yeah, that's really interesting. Hmm. So the lobby groups can see exactly who's voting and how they're voting. And they're tracking it. They're all tracking it. And I know, you know, I don't want to come down against every lobby group because, like, you know, it's important to, like, hold people accountable and see their record and then communicate that to, like, voting constituencies. Like, I don't even, like, you know, when you think about it, it's like not that evil of a thing.

It's just that it plays out in ways that, like, are not useful to, like, the average person, I think. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's, okay. So you have these politicians. that are getting pressure from their party themselves because extreme people are getting in because the districts, the local districts are already extreme because they're gerrymandered

and the people that are voting are going to be more extreme by nature. So then you have people getting in that are applying pressure to someone that's maybe slightly more centrist. And then you have the lobby group that's also putting money behind the interest that they want to see get pushed forward. Do the lobby groups in your opinion, are they mostly financially

motivated? No, not always. Like you have some that are financially. Those are ones like paid by businesses. And then you have ones that are motivated by like some issue they love. Like let's say like abortion or women's right to choose. You know, those are like religious group. You know, on the right, that's a religious movement. And on the left, it's like very, you know, women's rights activists.

Yeah. And so there, you know, I take both those groups are there because they think it's a really important issue. And they just have different definitions of who's being harmed. But they're really passionate about it. and they're organized and they're lobbying politicians. And there's all kinds of lobby groups like that around all kinds of issues. So it's, I don't even think it like boils down. And I even think like a lot of gun owners, like for them, it's really symbolically important to own a gun.

Like for my brother, he's not like supporting gun rights candidates because of money or anything. He supports them because he really wants to just like recreationally go shoot every couple weeks at like the gun range. And he thinks that's like a really important freedom. for him. So it's like, a lot of these people like genuinely care about these issues for whatever reason. And then they have lobby groups that like represent them. It's just that the lobby groups have become a bit. I'll use the NRA again. I think they're a good example. Like if you look at the cover of NRA magazines over the last 40 years, they used to be like pictures of people going hunting and stuff and outdoors people. And over time now they're like a far extreme

like militant group. Like they're like the covers of the NRA magazine are like super weird and militaristic, whereas they used to be like, you know, like an outdoorsman's kind of like community vibe group. It actually probably, like their cover probably wasn't that different from like the tent in here like 40, 50 years ago. And now it's just like a total different thing. And so like that's also like some of the lobby groups like go down weird rabbit holes. And what causes the lobby group to get more radicalized? I don't know. You get taken over like the leadership gets taken over by someone who's extreme or, you know, slowly they get roped into other different political, they become like a real far political pressure group or something. I don't know.

People are also like social media, I think, makes people more extreme because it amplifies the most extreme voices. You get more money, maybe if you kind of signal different things to different groups. Yeah, everybody's trying to signal something. If the NRA is more militarized, I wonder if they're able to get more donors and get more money. Yeah, or you get a small number of billionaires who throw a lot of money at them, but really want them to take a really extreme stance on something. Like, that's what happens with some candidates now because, like, you can have a small number of really wealthy people who can, like, float their campaign. And so, like, they can go, like, if they are extreme enough on whatever issue, that donor cares

about, they can, like, get a lot of money. That's interesting. So it's like, that's a money issue. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you need to get your labs done. Yes, you know what I'm talking about. Maybe you're 35. you feel your testosterone starting to go down a little bit, you got to get your blood work done, see what's going on inside your body. Maybe you're 25, maybe you're 27 like me and you're like, I don't need to do this. No, no, no, no.

Now is the best time to get your blood work done because now you get a baseline for the rest of your life. Now, here's the problem with getting your blood work done. You've got to go through and find a lab that accepts your insurance. It's a whole big thing. Then you have to find someone to read and interpret your blood work and then give you some type of dietary change that's going to actually improve your labs based off what they find. This is a huge stress and it's a huge problem.

I was bitching about it to a friend of mine. And he was like, dude, why don't you check out Merrick Health? It's from my boy, Derek, for more plates, more dates. And it's absolutely amazing. It saved me so much time and so much energy and money you would not believe. So with Merrick Health, it's super simple. You do one little entry-level questionnaire. It goes through your whole medical history.

It goes through your kind of like routine, what type of fitness you like to do, what your diet is. And then they send you a kit. You send your blood work right back. And then within a couple days, they tell you exactly what's going on with your blood work, whether your levels are amazing, whether they're pretty good, and they can be better, whether they're bad and what you can do to improve them.

If you're someone like me that's interested in fitness, interested in staying healthy for a long period of time, if you like working out, there's no better solution than Merrick Health. So I want you to check them out. They offer a turnkey optimization package designed for those driven to maximize performance and support longevity with the most elaborate testing available on the market.

So I would recommend you check out Merrick Health. If you're interested, listeners of this program will be getting 10% off at checkout if they use the code Gagnon, G. G. N-O-N-O-N at Merrick Health. Again, that's Merrick Health, M-A-R-E-H-E-E-H-E-A-L-T-H-E-H-E-H-E-H-T-H-E-H-T-H-H-T-H-H-T-H-O-T-H-R-T-E-H-R-T-E-H-E-T-E-H-E-H-E-E-C-E-E-R-E-E-H-E-H-E-H-R-E-E-E-H-E-L-E-E-E-H-E-E-R-E-E-E-E-L-E-E-H-E-E-E-R-E-E-E-E-E-E-H-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E issue or that work on this issue? Are there any countries that do this right or that had this problem that solved it? I don't know. Every solution is different tradeoffs. I'll go to like the

Canadian example. And I don't even know if Americans would like this, but they limit, they have like very, at least when I live there, they had very strict limits on campaign contributions. So you can't get like a billionaire floating your campaign in Canada like you can in the US. But they have some weird thing where based on how many votes your party got in the last election, you just get a bunch of money for the next election, like $5 per voter, $10 per vote or something. And so the money you get for your campaign is based on how popular you were, popularly you were with the average citizen. And so it's publicly funded.

And in America, I think that's an option, but most candidates opt out of it because they'd rather get, you know, the money from the donors. So you have like a very like donor system in the U.S. and in Canada it's like more of a seen as a public system, like win a lot of votes, you'll have more funding for your next election, but it's kind of more limited. That's why maybe I said when I, my first comment when I saw American politics, seemed way more professional, so much money in it. And so like that's a way you can do it that like just keeps money, money plays a much smaller role.

Also in Canadian elections, you know, you turn on your TV here and it's just constant political ads, especially around an election. And a lot of them are scare ads. They're meant to like terrify you and keep you in a state of field. year, which is like the worst state we want human brains. Like that shuts off our creativity. It makes us feel terrified of our neighbors. Like it's like a poison into our veins as a society.

Yeah. In Canada, it's just like you see way less of that like political advertising. And it seems to, at least always seem to be way less negative. And so like you have this whole class of people who are like paid money to terrify voters so that they don't go out and vote. Yeah, my personal bias, I hear that. And I'm like, oh, that sounds nice. It sounds nice to not have a bunch of money influencing elections

and billionaires just getting whatever people they want in to give tax loopholes. You know what I mean? I feel like most people will kind of be on board with like, like you always hear like this is kind of like a meme at this point, but like, oh, politicians should have to wear the logo of the brands they give them money. Oh, interesting just to make it supertransparent. Yeah, like NASCAR. Yeah, that'd be interesting.

You got to wear a suit with like British Petroleum and Shell and race. That would be so interesting. And then when you're voting for war, and it's like, well, you have like five, you know, multinational, you know, like military, industrial complex companies on your shirt. Like, we know why. Yeah. But that type of idea, like, yeah, getting money out of it in some way seems like a good move. Now, can you steal man the opposing side? Why would that be bad?

And who would, what is the tradeoff there? Okay. So one obvious tradeoff is like it comes out of your taxes, the Canadian system, right? Because it's coming from the government. So it's coming from people's taxes. You're eventually paying into political campaigning, which you might not want to contribute to that. You might want to minimize that.

I think that to me is like the most obvious one. The other one is like maybe we should have. So I think this was like my understanding of the Citizens United ruling, which like freed up all this cash and the Supreme Court ruling was like these companies or private individuals have freedom. And so respecting that freedom

means respecting their right to like throw money. into campaigns. And so, like, America has, like, a tradition of, like, maximizing individual freedom and unconstraining it. And so that seems like another, you know, value that, like, gets traded off in the Canadian system. There's, like, a little less freedom for individuals and a little more taxes. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah. Citizens United was a – that was basically a ruling. This was, like, 2005, 2006? Oh, yeah. It's like 15, 20 years ago. Something like that. And basically just – Supreme Court ruling.

It basically just allowed any individual to give as much money to a candidate as they want. There's certain constraints on it, and I don't know what they are, but like, yeah, it just freed up the amount of money in politics. Yeah, which seems like it plays a big role because now you can have one billionaire, float someone's whole campaign, push a ton of ads, get them the best, you know, think tanks and, you know, best lobbyists. And basically you could, like, I wonder if you could buy an election. You know what I mean? How much money would it cost? So I do think there's some constraints on it. And I'll say like Donald Trump, I think, proved this in 2016.

When he ran, if I'm remembering the data, he spent about half as much on his campaign as Hillary Clinton did. Wow. She spent like a billion dollars and she spent like half a billion or something in terms of like donors and ads and stuff. Again, don't quote me, but it's something like that. I remember the v-and this is why it's one of the things I study. One of the most interesting things, I think he had interviewed with 60 minutes right after he won. and they're like, how did you win despite this huge disadvantage in cash?

And one of the first things out of his mouth was I won because I leveraged social media. And because if you remember, he had like 88 million followers. And he had a huge, like, people like, he could speak directly to people. Yeah. And 88 million people is a lot.

And when he tweeted, in part because he was so provocative and controversial and offensive, it would also get on the front page of the New York Times or CNN covers is tweet. So much free advertising. And so it just, yeah.

And he was a master of controlling the narrative. He could, if he was bad in the news one day, he would post something crazy the next and that would become the news. Yeah. Because the news, these companies are addicted to clicks and people tuning in and watching and stuff. And so they're addicted to the revenue that he generated. Even though you might think like CNN had all these bad stories about Trump, so they're against him. But in some sense, I think Trump has said this himself, they were addicted to the ratings that he provided for them. Yeah. I mean, am I crazy to think that they would love it if he won again?

There's a perverse incentive. They'll make more money if he wins. And it's kind of funny because probably a lot of people in that newsroom, like people, you know, conservatives are always complaining. Like most of the people in newsrooms are like liberal, liberal leaning. And so they'll complain that they're constantly like going to slant the news against conservatives. But on the other hand, all those companies, that people who oversee all the journalists, you know, the CEOs of these companies and stuff and their shareholders and stuff,

profit immensely from someone like Trump so it's like a really weird like think about how messed up those incentives are for society that's not good for society that you have companies that give you the news that are motivated by money about stuff that just like gets people that worked up or offended or something like that

is there an alternative do you think like state media is obviously something people float but then that doesn't seem like a great alternative I'm curious like what you could do to mitigate money in media, if you've read any research or thought about that. Oh, man. I mean, these are like such hard questions. I don't think I have a solution yet.

Again, I'll just say, like, having lived in Canada, at least I have like an alternative reality, like a thought experiment. We had, we have state media. It's called CBC, Canadian broadcasting. It's pretty boring. And it covers the news pretty straight. And they don't, I don't think, they're not worried as much about like the profit. And you can tune out.

You can tune the news to something else. if we don't like it. In America, I think, like, the closest to does, like, PBS. Yeah. And, like, I almost never watch PBS. I'll watch CNN, right? Or something like that. Right.

Even though I, like, really value what PBS is going to be, like, really boring, you know, sober coverage. But news should be boring. Yeah, but news is boring. I'm kind of on that wave. Yeah, you know, like, I think we're all, like, pretty burned out on the news. And part of, like, here's, I remember seeing this quote somewhere. I thought this was pretty wise.

Is part of living in a. free society is being free from having to think about politics all the time. Not being in a panic, like the world's going to burn down because like something corrupt happened or some politician did something. Like that you should be able to trust your leaders to just kind of take care of things. Kind of like if you trust your accountant to like, you don't want to do your taxes, I'm going to send you all the stuff. You're going to spend like 10 hours like pouring through this and then like submit it for me.

And I'm just going to like trust you, right? Like it's or you take your cardo mechanic. Like I don't want to have to like learn how everything in a car. works, I, like, trust my mechanic to have, like, the skills and, like, be able to change the oil and, like, check and make sure nothing's wrong. And if there's something wrong, I give a few hundred bucks and they fix it. We want a society that's like that. Because guess what?

Then we actually have freedom to think and do other stuff. Yeah. And if you like going under your hood of your car, you can do it. But, like, most of us don't want to. We want to spend our weekends to hang other friends or family or doing whatever, going, partying or reading a book or whatever. Whatever we want to do. We want freedom from those things.

So there is something where it'd be nice to have, like, it's nice to have freedom from worrying about this stuff all the time. Yeah, not being in ideological survival. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That you're at work and someone's like, oh, what did you think of the debate? And you're like, if I say the wrong thing, I'm going to lose my job, I'll lose my friends. Like, it's all so high stakes, so high pressure that you could lose your career by having the wrong opinion at work.

And it's just like, ugh. That stress is awful. Yeah, and you think of people, like, we have huge rates of anxiety and depression. There's a whole new book up by John Haidt. We were talking about John Hyte before, The Anxious Generation about social media phones and how it affects young kids. It's hugely debated.

But it's like I like to think of these things. Like if you're worried that like I have a rule, so I teach introduction to psychology at New York University, like 400 students. I now have a policy on my syllabus that says like what's said in the classroom stays there. You can't like share some other students comment on social media. Because I'm trying to make it a safe place

so other students can say something and be wrong or just share an opinion and not worried about like someone blows them up on like TikTok or something like that. That's cool. Because I think they're all like

those students are so anxious and you're talking about it at work. This is at school. No one wants to be like lose their job or get torched or get blown up on social media for like misstating something.

And then have it up there forever for eternity. Yeah. You know or someone does a Google search on their name 10 years later and it's like the first thing that comes up because if it went viral or something. Yeah.

And it's like, especially young people, like, deserve, like, more space to, like, make mistakes and learn. So we can't, so that's why I have that policy. It's like, I have to think, I have to think about this. If you want a company, like, I, so a lot of, like, this is going to be controversial. A lot of universities get pressure to make statements on political issues. Yeah. You know, Gaza and Israel is the most recent one, but, like, all kinds of issues. And I actually was pretty supportive of that.

Universities, professional societies, companies. I've actually been pretty supportive of that. And I've been like re-questioning it lately and thinking, okay, it often doesn't change anything in the real world. It's just symbolic. B tends to alienate people. See, even when statements come out, the people who wanted the statement aren't often happy that the statement's not as like ideologically pure as they want it. Right. And so like these have all kinds of downsides.

I'm realizing and the downsides actually are pretty big. And the upsides are tiny because almost never, like as I said, actually affects anything. symbolic. So I'm like, so I did a survey on Twitter and I did it on LinkedIn too. And I said like how many people privately anonymous poll so people can be honest? How many people want your leaders of your company or university or whatever to make public statements on political issues? And I said even if it aligns with what you believe. What percentage of people do you think want that versus don't? Even if it aligns with exactly what you believe on an issue. I think 35% of people want that even if they agree. Okay, so 80% want it, don't want it, sorry, don't want it.

80% of people privately anonymously on both my surveys. One was Twitter, one of LinkedIn, so different types audiences, don't want that even if the statement agrees with them. Wow. And so I started asking people like, why don't you want that? And people are like, I just don't want to like think about politics at work. Or I don't like trust my leaders to come up with statements that are going to reflect me anyways. But a lot of it was like, you know, they just don't want those things coming into their work sphere. and they don't want to have to have a relationship with like their boss at work that's around whatever breaking political issue of the day.

And I was like shocked by that. That makes me happy. Okay. Because that's how I feel that like if like I've worked a bunch of different jobs, you know what I mean? And none of the jobs that I've ever worked at was I ever like, oh, I wonder what my boss thinks about Gaza. Like I just I'm not there for that. Like if I worked in like a political institution, then maybe I would want some type of like political statement. Yeah.

But like, I don't know. I'm a stand-a comedian. And comedy, man, this is like, boys in a comedy. I'm like, I would be curious to know what, you know, Dave Chappelle thinks about, like, what joke about this thing. But, like, in general, I'm not, like, seeking some type of, like, moral truth from, like, my boss. You know what I mean?

Like, in any job, like, I worked at a wealth management group for a little bit in college. Like, I don't want any of those people telling me what they think about it. Ukraine. Like, I don't know. Like, we can talk about it, but I'm not like, guys, we need to make a statement. And this happens so much now where private companies are. making social statements. And I'm like,

I guess, like this helps. Like, I'm assuming it helps their bottom line. I can't imagine any of these companies really give a shit. I just always assume they're like, okay,

what side if we support it will make us more money? Yeah. And if they decide like, oh, by making a statement we won't make money, then they just kind of say nothing. But, yeah,

I don't, I just can't imagine that many people are like, I need, I think in a time, I think there was a time where people were, seeking, like, leaders within their space to be moral arbiters.

Yeah. I think that that was useful. I think kind of in the transition point between, like, religion falling out of favor within American society and losing, like, these moral pillars, wanting to replace them with companies and with these sort of, like, new religions that we buy into, you know, a lot of corporations and our communities and things like that. But I think now people are kind of realizing, like, I don't give a shit. Yeah.

Or it went too far and it was alienated. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The other thing companies run into is hypocrisy because they'll say something that we stand for this, you know, let's say something on the environment. And then like a year later, people realize that they're just like in the back door, like doing something terrible for the environment. Or they say I stand against racism.

This was, I actually write about this one of my papers. There's all these companies that came out against racism. And after George Floyd was murdered. And even like, even these like fancy fashion houses, right? Which are often like, I think, no offense to people, fashion, but that's like the most elitist segment of humanity. So there was an analysis of these fashion, like Instagram accounts of these big fashion houses that had come out like in support of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.

And they looked at like the skin tone of the models they showed on their Instagram account. And a lot of them were criticized for being like too white forever and ever. And they were. And then they did a statement. And then briefly some of them had like some black models. And then like, but a year later they're just back to normal. And so they didn't actually change any of their values. They didn't actually do any substantive real difference.

In fact, they just look like hypocrites. And so it's like, I'm a fan of like, A, if you actually stand for this thing and you're going to do something about it that's real, that's like substance, not just like symbolism, then make a statement. I'm not like totally against statements. But the other thing I would say that I care about more, I'm leaning into more is. And I have to write a book about this or something. It's called sphere of influence. if it's something that's within your sphere of influence, then say something. So like, let's say you're going to talk about like how you're going to help your own employees make their lives better.

And something comes up that's relevant to that, speak up about it. But if it's something that has nothing to do with you, it's like halfway around the world or Ukraine or Gaza or whatever, whatever the next thing is, you have no influence over. Then it's just kind of like, it seems very like empty words. And so I'm like, I want people to like companies or whoever, university. societies, put your money where your mouth is. If it's something that you have an influence over and you're going to do something about it, then sure, say something. But, like, otherwise, don't try to get, like, social credit

for doing it. And also, like, it's probably going to backfire in most cases anyways. You don't actually believe in it. Yeah. Yeah, you're just getting information from some other secondary source. Like, it's not, like, you are a research or a scientist, a psychologist that is studying these things specifically. So when I ask you about these things,

I trust that you've done research that can back it up. But if I'm asking you something completely outside of your sphere of influence and like your genius zone, then you're just kind of regurgitating what someone else researched. And then you're trying to align your opinion with theirs and it feels very empty. Yeah. Yeah. And I think companies do it all the time. Or like if some companies like, this is where we stand on this issue?

It's like, where did you get that from? Yeah. Like you sell chips. Like you know what I mean? Yeah. You have chips. You have like a statement or like Putin. Yeah.

It's like you don't know anything about it. Yeah. So I, and I get. people get frustrated, especially when it feels like the, all the statements are going against, like there feels like there's an agenda, you know what I mean? Like I can understand when conservatives are like, oh, well, all of these corporations are making statements against what, like in an agenda or some type of like unified way against what I believe as like a Christian, you know, Republican or whatever it is.

But I think they all should look and be like, they're just doing this for money. It's empty. Like, there's not, like, an attack on your morals or something. They're just also trying to, like, gain as much people and money as they can through the statement. That's how I feel at least. Yeah, like, unless they're actually, like, in the domain of doing whatever the thing. It's like, let's say you're, like, planned parenthood. You make a statement after, like, that Supreme Court ruling about, like, abortion rights.

That makes complete sense. But what are they doing making a statement about, like, some other issue? Yeah. There's a sense that, and there's been more pieces about this, like articles coming out in the news about, like, how often that just tears apart the culture of a place because people are very divided about these other statements. And it can make it very hard to, like, move forward on the actual issue. Let's let's say, like, Planned Parenthood, women's rights, reproductive rights or something. If you're, like, constantly debating, like, Ukraine versus Russia or Black Lives Matter or Gaza or whatever, you know, the climate change or something, when they start making statements like that, they often end up creating huge trauma. while within the people and they often aren't able to actually act on their primary initiative,

which is like reproductive rights or something like that. So you actually have to be careful because if you do that, you run the risk of like undercutting what your core mission is in some of these places. And I think they want to do it in solidarity or it has a political symbolism. In those cases, they don't even think they're doing it for money. But it's it like I'm just seeing more and more downsides to it the more than where we see it and we hear these stories. Yeah, I feel like this happened with Black Lives Matter a little bit, that they had like a lot of public support and then very quickly pivoted to Black Trans Lives Matter, which is a very legitimate cause in its own right. But they became obfuscated. And a lot of my black friends that I talked to were like,

well, this feels like a different movement than what I was originally on board with. And now I got like learn about a whole different movement. What about the original movement? And they kind of got like sort of diluted and co-opted. And as a result, I think it kind of slowly. fell out of favor. And I think they kind of took on too many, I guess, political alignments and intersections. Yeah, it's, it's, I think it's tricky because you don't want to like forget subgroups, but it, you know, the groups who are doing this for a reason, which was like racial discrimination, um, feel like their message is gone, you know, this is a separate movement. Like I used to live in Toronto in the gay, gay rights area, or sorry, like gay rights. I'm sounding stupid.

It was like the gay district of Toronto on Church Street. And at the time, Canada had gay rights before America did this way. And they had a huge gay pride parade, like a million people would come out. And my cousin who helped me find my apartment is gay. And he really resented that he thought gay rights should be inclusive and they should have like the big parade and a million people come out, watch it. But the lesbian community felt like they weren't fairly represented. So the day before gay rights March, they would.

They would have, or gay pride parade, sorry. They would have a dyke march. And it was just women, lesbians who identified as dikes. And he, as a gay man, really deeply resented that he thought they were, like, detracting from the thing, which was to, like, you know, we're a press group. Yeah, we're marginalized forever. We were pushing for our rights together. Yeah. And you're breaking off and trying to do your own thing, like that undercuts us.

You're the beginning of our acronym. Yeah, yeah. You guys are the whole, you're the L. Yeah, L, you're the L and LGBT. And so, a lot of the gay men. man of that community at that time really resented it because of that. And they thought we should all be together on this one big thing. And like, have your own float or whatever.

Like, everybody has to get their own float. Yeah. But he's like, have your own float or floats or whatever. Like, it's all inclusive. But like, we need to like all band together to like push this issue. But you're doing, you decided you're just going to like do your own thing. And it's also hard to compete with the gay pride parade. I mean, that's going to be way more fun.

I know, yeah, it was a big party. No offense, lesbians. But it was a bigger party. Yeah, right? Come on. Just Subaru's and flannel. Come on. No, that's a really interesting thing, keeping the movement focused.

Yeah. And I can see how... It's hard. It fragments all the time. Yeah, and I can see how there's... I mean, look at... I mean, religion is like the... It's fragmented a million times.

Oh, yeah. And that is like the most dogmatic core idea ever. And if that can't stay centered, then it obviously... Yeah, I don't think any political idea can stay centered without fragmentation. Yeah, it's really, really interesting. And it's hard because, like, you have... If the bigger your group, the more diversity... Right? Like think of America. Think of all the identities we have. Regional identities, state

identities, city identities, in addition to like ethnic, gender, racial. And these are important to people. And it's like, but it's still important to have like an overarching identity that we can all rally together and like share a sense of purpose. Even if you have those other identities, you don't want to erase them, but like you don't want them to overshadow like the core thing that you have in common. Yeah, that makes sense. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because we got to talk about your amazing dick game. Yes, you. You right now, listen to my voice, my deep soothing voice.

You have an amazing dick game. Or maybe you know some of an amazing dick game. Maybe you got a boyfriend. Who knows? But if you have an amazing dick game, there's a way that you can make it better. And that's with the good people over at Blue Chew. Blue Chew is an amazing service that basically delivers a chewable tablet

that has the same active ingredients as Viagra, Seattle, all that stuff, but this is the chew. It's at fraction of a cost, and it's never been easier to get your hands on the greatest dick game of your life. Never been easier. I'm telling you, you can go to bluechew.com, and you can submit all your information

to a licensed person, a legit person that will then mail you a discreet, very unassuming, but very, very powerful package. You know what I'm talking about? The powerful package. To your home. That's how easy it is. You don't got to go talk to a doctor

and be like, yeah, you know, I want, No, no, nope, easy. You got to just go on the internet. Yo, bluechew.com, I want to get the best dick given of my life. And that's how you do it. Easy is that. And for the listeners of this show, of this program, you are going to get free first month of bluechow. You were going to be getting Bluetooth for free.

All you got to do is pay $5 ship, and that's a cup of coffee. Black to be delivering that BBC. You know what I'm saying? That's bluechew.com, B-L-U-E-C-H-E-W.com. Use the promo code, Gagnon, G-G-G-N-O-N-A-N-A. and receive your first month for free. That's bluechew.com for more details and important safety information.

And thank you so much, Bluchu. I'm telling you, man, check out this product. Even if you're one of these people that's like, I don't know, I don't really need it, what are you talking about? It could be better. It can always be better.

Let's say you're in the 1% you're about to be in the 0.01% with Blu- and let's get back to the show. I'm curious what you think if there is an antidote, you know, I think that these ideas of compromise and sort of creating like bipartisan agreement, I think is really important, and most people can kind of get on board with.

But I do think that there's some issues within American politics that doesn't seem like there's any compromise. You know what I mean? Like abortion is. Abortion is. Yeah, there's never going to be a complication. Because it's a binary.

It's like, is it a life or not? And when does it start? And no one really has a great answer for when it does or doesn't. So as a result, I don't know if you can really compromise. So I'm curious for that issue or issues like that. Is there a way to kind of create

some sort of cooperation amongst political groups? That one I think there's not. That's where I think like it comes down to classic like political organizing, mobilization, rallying people,

getting people to the polls and in fighting for your rights. I think like, and both sides see it that way. So I think that and I by the way, I think that'll be, you know, we talk about all the other stuff

about this election. That I think will be the single biggest issue come November because people fucking care about that issue and it will mobilize people And everywhere that's been on the ballot, like it turns out that something like 60, 70% of people like support abortion rights to some extent.

You know, not everybody is all the way at any stage. That's, I think, where you get your compromises. Like, are there boundary conditions on what those rights look like? Right. But I think that's going to be my prediction and all the, you know, the by-elections I've seen that looks like that's going to be a big issue. And that one just comes down to like political mobilization. And I think there's some issues like that. There's some things that will just be like political mobilization.

And there's other things that are like compromise. Like what is our tax rate going to be? How are going to get infrastructure bill through? How are going to fix higher education so it's not so expensive. Like those are going to require a nuance. Climate change is going to require kind of compromise. It's not just even within our country. It's going to require cooperation and compromise with all kinds of other countries.

Are you optimistic for the few? for the future of American political cooperation? No. I'm an optimist, but I'm not right now. Just if anything, all the data shows, it's getting worse. Yeah. I told you lots of, there's lots of interventions that work, and there's lots of things we can do to solve it, but like I don't see it getting solved.

If anything, it just, there's less and less cooperation at the political level. Like, it's going to take our leaders to do something. Hmm. And what do you think it happens? Does it just create a political stalemate, or is there some type of, like, falling out point where there's like a national devourable?

divorce? Like, what is the... I mean, what we're getting to is, like, it's going to be state by state. So we talk about the abortion issue. If that doesn't get overturned, it'll be like New York's an abortion state and, like, Alabama's not. And that's just... And then you're going to get even more political sorting.

Like, I would talk about how people are moving to neighborhoods based on their politics. I predict that's going to get even more extreme over time. If there's different rights for people that align with different political parties. Yeah, that makes sense. Because on one hand, I'm kind of like, how bad is it that states have different laws? Because that seems like kind of the whole point.

But then on the other hand, the contact theory, like getting engaged with other people that disagree with you and not seeing them as some type of like alien other. Yeah. And seeing them as like, oh, good people that we disagree on some ideas. Yeah. Is that, you would say, the biggest problem with states being politically divided like that? Yeah, I mean, there is a problem. I saw, like, if you go to the abortion issue.

And I'm not like a hardcore person on this issue, but I think I, you know, I lean more towards like abortion rights for, for, because I think they connect to women's health issues. It's complex, but my wife has explained all this to me in ways that that makes sense to me. But it's like if you want what happens in practice with abortion issues. So in Alabama, rich people will be able to get abortions. So just like drive out of the state. It will all fall disproportionately on poor people that can't afford to leave. And so you're going to end up with like also weird things like that where you're going to get an abortion. tourism and stuff like that.

So that's why I think like some rights are like pretty hard to just do at a state level because you're going to end up with all kinds of weird things like that. But I think a lot of things like, you know, need to be coordinated nationally. It's why we have a national government that there are certain things that should be protected, like voting rights, that you have to make sure that voting rights aren't suppressed in certain states. And that's part of it. That was like classic history of racism.

is like black voters were suppressed, especially in the South. And so the federal government had to go in and like protect them. And so I think like all kinds of you could now you see some gerrymandering is partly a form of suppression. And it's just suppressing the other party. It's trying to minimize the type of groups that are another party from like being able to win. Right. Win elections. So I think like those things are bad.

I think like you need to like protect basic rights. of people and maximize them, but I think you need to move to competitive elections so that the people in power are people who are trying to serve most of us. And until you do that, it's going to be hard to unravel it. And the competitive elections will stem from ungeriamandering. Yeah, yeah. And you're getting some court rulings who are like stopping gerrymandering from happening. But I would love to see like a politician run on like I'm going to like, you know, a bunch of politicians run on like, we're going to get rid of gerrymandering. We're going to make it as competitive as fuck. Just. Yeah. But like, a

But they don't want to do it because guess what? If they won, they're not going to want to invest their social capital in time, making it competitive so that there's a higher probability they lose in. It's like a Kafka trap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like in order to get in, you have to have a gerrymandered. And to un-jerrymandered, you have to get in without one, like, it's... And then being willing to, like, free up all the power you just got. Yeah, undo the thing, which I feel like we know is, like, that is antithetical to, like, the nature of power.

Yeah, yeah, no, it is. It's just not human nature. It's not how political parties normally work. But, like, that would be in the interest of all of us, like stuff like that. That's really interesting. Creating competitive elections. And in order to do that, you need to be someone that makes it more competitive for yourself. Yeah.

Yeah, you've got to be like a pure altruist. That also wants to be a politician. But also remember the issues at stake. We're talking about, like, abortion and gun rights. So you care so much about those that you're going to do everything you can to win the election. Then the moment you get power, you're going to, like, make. it easier for people to beat you. Yeah, it's never going to happen.

And they want the opposite on all these issues that you think are like life and death issues. That's never going to happen. Yeah, so it's just like hard to imagine. Like, you know, what fantasy world is that going to happen in? Yikes. Yeah, I wonder if there's, is there anything that I can do as like a voter, like, to like get more competitive elections? I don't know. I'm actually about to apply for my American citizenship.

And so I'm going to try to vote in all the local elections where it actually matters more. He's immigrants, dude. Coming over. Taking our jobs. Yeah. I'm going to try to, and then I'm going to try to, like, vote for people who support democracy, just like as a principle. Yeah. And, like, I'm more comfortable losing if it's a fair thing. Yeah, of course.

You know, but I want more like fairness. Yeah, absolutely. And you're able to actually see that the politicians are trying to work in the interest of the whole constituency and not just the gerrymandered parts that are going to allow them to become more extreme. Yeah. And I'll say I do this at work. So I'm now, because I'm getting older, I'm a full professor. So I run the social psychology program, which is like 70, 80 people at NYU. And one of the things I've done a ton since I've got power is got rid of my own power.

Really? So I do votes, anonymous votes for almost every decision. And it means I have to be comfortable, like not getting my way. But guess what? Every time we go forward with something, there's huge consensus. So it's actually really easy to get stuff done because whenever I do a vote, people, especially all the professors who vote, A, they feel hurt. B, when I do something, I know I have the overwhelming majority of support because I let them vote and I'm following what they want to do.

And so there's no like distrust of me, like, or there's probably less distrust of me than there would be. Otherwise, if I was just like doing stuff because I wanted it done. And they're like thinking, oh, he's just doing this for his own game. That's interesting. And so I've like, I must have held like 20 votes my first year. Writing the program. Voting on everything. And like it actually was like a super successful year.

And I think like those are the types of things. It's like I would encourage people when we're talking about this. We're talking about like the country or whatever. Well, we have no power over that. Let's be honest. Just like we have no power over what happens in another country. We have even less power there. But we actually like some of us, people on this call listening and me, I have power over like my lab.

I have power over now the social psychology program. So I can like think of like, well, what are these principles that like screw us up in society? And what would my like idealized vision of that be? And then like I can implement that in my own. sphere of influence, right? What I control. And so that's kind of what I do. Like, for example, I study groups. So I try to get rid of group think. Well, one thing I do to get rid of group think in my lab is I like have, I let every other person in lab like speak up and weigh in on like we have a paper we're working on or project. I'll let everybody else weigh in before I share my opinion.

Because I have power. And so if I say I really love it or hate it, other people might just feel pressure to agree with me. But guess what? When I shut my mouth for a little bit, other people all way in and I get to hear all the criticisms and I realized actually had blind spots and like then I take those ideas and make the paper better. And so like there's lots of ways like if you understand how groups work and identity and bias, you can control our own little sphere and make it better. And people love that. Guess what? When you do that, people love it because they love having a voice. And guess what? The low power people in my department, the assistant professors who are worried about tenure, don't have to go face to face against a senior professor who they were going to vote

against their tenure or fire them or something. So they get to actually have just as much power as that person because each vote counts for one. Yeah. And suddenly those people feel really heard and more valued. And guess what? We're making it a better place because a lot of times those younger people have fresh ideas. Yeah, you get the benefit of crowd wisdom.

Yeah, it's classic wisdom of the crowd, yeah. Wow. But it's like you have to create systems. So for me, like this is institutions, right? But we're not talking about like the bank or the SEC or the police. force. We're talking about like my program or my lab, create systems for making decisions. And so I really protect those systems. And then guess what? When I step out of my role and someone else takes power, I don't have to worry if they're like an asshole or they hate me because

they're stuck with all the systems that I created that are democratic. And guess what? It's really hard to get rid of voting once you have it in because people love it. And so it's really hard for them, if there's like a tyrant type person in my department, really hard for them to act like a hire it once this is the way that we do everything. That's really interesting. People could apply that to whatever. If they are in any position of leadership within their own organization, these things can be applied really easily.

Are there any other small practical things people could do to try to mitigate their own biases, whether they're in a leadership position or even just on a personal basis? Yeah, I think on a personal basis, other things I do are like crowdsourcing a lot of stuff. So like when we have someone give like, we're workshopping something in my lab, like someone gives a talk, we normally give them feedback. But other thing I do is I have a shared Google Doc and everybody can give all their criticisms in the document in real time.

And it also means that like some people like talk too much in meetings and other people just don't can't get a word in. And it's often like the younger people or the newcomers to Lab who can't get a word in, right? Because they don't feel like I can speak up. But guess what? You have the Google Doc. They share all their thoughts and everybody's projects get way better that way.

And they feel like they have a voice. And then the person getting the feedback gets this like huge ream of feedback that's super helpful and constructive. And it's also not as performative because they're just like writing their thoughts in the Google Doc. They're not like speaking out in a way

to try to impress me or something like that. Yeah. So like crowdsourcing stuff. It's like I use like all the principles of group psychology and how I run my groups. That's really interesting. I try to create shared identities. So I used to kind of like

mentor each person independently and they did their own project. But one of the worst things that happened like my first or second year as a professor, three students came in my lab and they felt like they're all competing against each other because they felt like they're all doing projects

and who's ever worked out was going to scoop and get more credit than the other people. And I realized, like, I'm doing this wrong. So I started having people more collaborate more and more integrative projects where everybody got credit if it was successful. So, like, I started, like, I had to, like, change my management style to, like, use the research I use. That's interesting. Do you have advice for people that are in groups and they don't want to conform to the ideas of the group because they recognize that the group's ideas are wrong? Yeah.

Like, I'm sure in your research. of groupthink. Yeah. If you're in a system that is wrong, if I'm an individual within the system, you know, is there something that I can do to not be susceptible to group think or to not conform to it? Yeah. So one of the things is most people, when they're going along with something and they don't like it, they know, you know.

What looks like group think often might be people biting their tongue. Just so we're aware. Like even in the classic research on conformity, there's famous studies where people are like estimating lines and they, the ash conformity. studies and they look at lines and they'll literally say in front of a room that one is longer than it is or shorter than it is and everybody can see. And they're like completely bullshit just because the six people beside them who went first said said something wrong and they'll just say the wrong thing to go along. But those same people, all it takes is one to center and then people

feel free to be honest. And so one of my favorite findings in because privately all along they knew that line wasn't that long. They were idiots. They were just saying it because they felt pressure to conform. So one dissenters, as long as one person disagreed with everybody else, then they felt free to be honest. And so what I often say to people is, if you dissent in a group, even if you're wrong, and this is what the research shows, even if when one person descents in a group, even if that dissenter is wrong, the group reaches better decisions. Really? That's like one of the most interesting findings. I'll say it again. Wow. If there's a dissenter in a group, even if the dissenter is wrong, the group reaches better decisions. So why? Well, it's because

if someone dissents other people who had other independent thoughts or criticisms or creative new ideas that weren't otherwise they weren't otherwise comfortable speaking about will start to flow. Information starts to flow. And you break that group think. So be a dissenter because even if you're wrong, you help other people dissent. That's interesting. Yeah. It forces the people that made a decision to question their decision. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It opens up the conversation. The other thing, I gave a talk once with one of the chief financial officer of eBay. In the early days of eBay, they're trying to figure out how to be successful. And they had this thing called the black helmet that they'd bring to their C-suite meetings, all their executive

leaders. And each C-suite meeting, a different person got randomly assigned this black helmet. And if you got assigned a black helmet, your role was to be a dissenter the whole meeting, just to be a total devil's advocate, be a total asshole. And everybody saw you wearing the black helmet so they knew you weren't being a dick to them if you were like criticizing their ideas. But their goal was just to find and poke all the ideas so there's no blind spots and also free up other people to be comfortable speaking up.

Wow. And to signal that they valued dissent. And so like you can create like a little, if you have like a really stifling group, you can create like little things like that. Or you can talk like if you have a boss who doesn't like dissent, but you have two or three people who are comfortable.

If one person says dissent, you can have the other people line up to immediately back them up and like amplify their voice. And then it becomes once two or three people say it's harder to push back on. Oh, that's interesting. So, like, there's lots of ways to do it. But guess what? Here's other, this is my co-author, Dominic, in our book. We write about this in our book because when we were in grad school, he was interested in dissent. He's my office made in grad

school. And what he found actually goes against what most people think of dissent. Most people think that in a group when someone's dissenting, it's because they don't care about the group. This is what actually, like, sociologists have written about this. When someone's dissenting is because they don't value the group. But what his research found is usually when someone's dissenting is because they care a lot about the group. Because guess what? It's really hard to dissent. The reason we have like really mean words like devil's advocate, the heretic, it's because we throughout history of treated dissenters pretty bad. So it's hard to dissent. It's awkward. It's socially awkward. It's stressful, anxiety provoking. Your boss might not like it

because usually it's their idea you're dissenting against. So why do you do it? Well, you only really do it if you really care about the group and you're worried it's going to go wrong. And so we have to understand when people are dissenting. It's not because they don't like the group. Usually it's because they care a lot about it. They're the often somebody who cares the most about it because they're willing to speak up. So if we just had that conversation more as a society and like understood that dissenters were doing it not just to show off or be an asshole, but because they actually cared and they wanted to change things before the group failed or went bad, then I think we'd have like more of a respect. It would easier to send if we had a culture where we understood the people dissenting

are often doing it because they care. Yeah, I mean, I completely feel like that. I don't know. I often try, like, anytime I'm in a group setting and we're doing some type of collaboration, specifically creatively, most of the collaborations I'm in are creative. I try my best to be like, hey, I agree with all these points,

but I could see one negative, you know, one blind spot that we didn't consider could be this worst-case scenario. And I just float it to the group, just to be like, hey, here's what is the worst possible outcome. Just to see what, you know, if anyone else had thought of that if there was any consideration of that.

And I try to force myself to be in that headspace because I really do feel like it makes things better. It does. When everyone just blindly agrees quickly, does everyone like this? Yep, yep, yep. That makes me feel anxious. There's a great quote by, I think it was General Patton, who said if everybody in the group is thinking the same thing,

then no one's thinking. Yeah, yeah. And so like what, especially if you're being creative, oh my goodness. Creativity is fundamentally about like new ideas. You're not going to get those by all agreeing with each other. Or sometimes if I have a creative idea, I'll send it to a few people and I'll say, I know why this idea is awesome. I can tell you a ton of reasons why it's awesome.

I'm super excited. Tell me why it sucks. Yeah, that's great. And just to get like, you know, and if people are like, dude, I'm, to be honest, like this maybe is one reason that sucks. That's what I'm like, oh, there's a great idea. Yeah. But then if I just give people a license, I'm like, hey, you have to tell me why this sucks. Then they'll go in and I'm like, oh, that's actually a good point.

This does suck. But we have to understand that criticism is caring. Yeah. Like, if someone's going to like take your idea. or like someone sends me a paper to read. And I invest like hours of my time going through it. I'm trying to help them. If I didn't, the meanest thing I could do is just ignore it.

And spend the hours doing whatever the heck I want. Yeah. And so we have to also like have a cultural understanding where criticism is like people caring, people investing time to make your stuff better. I'll give you a great example of what you did. Remind me of I just read this story the other day. So Danny Connaman, he won the first Nobel Prize from a psychologist in history. for studying biases and heuristics and how we think.

Thinking fast and slow. It's a great book. New York Times bestseller. And I heard this great story when he wrote this book. And, you know, this book sold millions of over a million copies. Huge, hugely influential. And he was writing it and he didn't know if it was any good. And so he sent it to his colleagues to read, just like you send your ideas.

And he paid them to tell him it was bad. Really? He said, I'm going to give you money to tell me that this book is bad. I'm giving you money to read it. And please tell me if it's bad. so I don't publish it because I don't want to embarrass myself. And they read it and they're like, this is brilliant. You have to publish this.

But he did the opposite of the way most people try to do things, which is they try to, you know, it's called confirmation bias. Most of us want, look for evidence that backs up what we want to do anyways. This is all the problems with politics and partisanship. But Danny Kahneman knew so much about human biases that he was aware of all his own biases. So he wanted, he knew what he needed to do is bend over backwards to correct those. Hmm. That's interesting.

Yeah, I'll just give you another fun example. Please. This is like, okay. I feel this is so applicable. Okay, so here's where it gets real applicable. So I know about this shit. So I started dating. What it was before I started dating my wife.

So we, she got divorced. I was going through one. And we were colleagues in the same department. And she had tenure and I just got tenure. So I thought we both kind of had a sense that before this could be a real disaster. If we started dating and it blows up. So we're stuck offices next to each other. for like the next 30 years.

Yeah, this is an HR violation all over. Yeah, first of all, yeah, first of all, yeah, first of all, blah, blah, blah. And, and it's just gonna be awful, like, so awkward. And so we decided to do the opposite of what people normally do when they're dating. Whereas normally, like, you're,

you go on a date, you're trying to impress somebody. You know, you put your best foot forward. You probably, on your dating profile, say you're taller than you are. If you're a woman, you say, like, you're 10 pounds lighter than you are. That's, by the way, research shows both of those things. And so you, like, you show a picture

that's, like, better than you, it's from five years ago, when you were like better shape. Yeah. And so that's how we present ourselves on the online dating world and on first dates and through the first however many dates, right? We're trying to impress. And we did the opposite.

And so we created a list of 100 questions that were like all the things that matter to us. And it was like everything from like, where do you want to go on vacation to like, do you want to have other kids, to like how much sex do you want to have? And we each answered it without telling the other person of what we thought.

so we could like be honest about what our answers were. So like imagine you're a date and you're saying like, you know, do you want to have kids? You wait for, she says yes and you're like, yeah, me too or whatever, right? Oh, what kind of vacations? You're like, oh, I love beach vacations. And then you say me too, right? Like you try to like match to be impressive. But we did the opposite.

We like honestly gave our answers and then compared answers about what we really wanted to see if we were actually like going to be aligned. And it was also like basic stuff. Like when do you go to sleep? How cold do you want the bed? Because guess what, like in your day-to-day when you're actually in a relationship. Like that's the shit that actually matters for your like happiness. It's like those little day-to-day things like when you wake up, when you go to sleep.

Because if someone like goes to sleep at 10, the other person goes to sleep at 2, first of all, your sex life's going to be terrible. Second of all, you're just going to wake the other person up and they're going to be miserable and sleep deprived. And so like we talked about like all of those basic things before we started dating because we like got them. We were like shocked how much we lined up with each other and our preferences. And it's not to say that.

every disagreement is going to be a deal breaker. No, no, yeah, and you get to decide. Of those hundred questions. Yeah. Like, I definitely want to have kids. You don't. That's probably going to be a deal breaker. But something like, you know, temperature of the room, like, can we find a compromise on it?

Or the sleep time. Maybe you go to bed at, like, midnight. She goes to bed at 11. And maybe you can, like, that's a read. It's close enough. And maybe one person's willing to cop rise. Or maybe both they meet in the middle. Like, you can decide, is that not a big deal for you.

Yeah. But you create a framework for the both of you to be genuinely honest on your own accord and then compare answers. Yeah, and to avoid bias and to avoid, like, trying to impress each other and just like, and to like find out up front if there's going to be deal breakers before we started dating. Because most people like talking about kids, how late in a relationship does that happen? I mean, it's absurd. Like three months in or six months in.

Way too late. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like that shouldn't be like a conversation that you have like six months in that becomes a deal breaker because then maybe you're both really into each other. But like, oh, wait, this is not going to work. And I had this happen to a couple friends of mine who were like married, before they, like, had this conversation. It's crazy. And they were opposite, and it was not a compromisable thing.

And they, like, got divorced. I'm like, how did you not, like, have that conversation, like, three years ago? I knew people that did this on religious grounds where they're like, I won't marry someone that's not Jewish. And I'm like, well, you know the person you're dating is not Jewish. And they're like, yeah, we're going to figure it out. Yeah, yeah. And they dated for, like, three years and then had this awful breakup.

And I was like, what are you doing? Yeah. Like, how did you not see this going? Yeah. And then if you're living with each other or something, like, you know, New York, finding another apartment or whatever? It's a nightmare. Yeah.

Yeah, that's wild. Do you have any other like practical applications to mitigate bias? This is so fun. I'm really enjoying this. This is like the juicy. I'll be talking about institutions for an hour and now we're fun to get into like the useful shit for people. Yeah, I know.

This is fun. I mean, these are like, like I think about psychology. So another one I do is for hiring. So now I have to hire PhD students and postdocs. And the way we normally do hiring in academia is terrible. It's like the worst strategy, which is you bring somebody in, you have an unstructured conversation with them for half an hour, and you kind of try to get the vibe if you like them or not.

And that's probably not a bad thing to figure out, like, are you going to be, like, compatible as, like, friends? But it, like, assesses none of the things that actually matter for your success in PhD school or to hire a professor. And so I have been researching, like, what actually predicts success of people? And it's, like, things like structured interviews, where you ask every candidate, at the exact same like five questions. And so I now do that. And I've been doing that for like eight or nine years. I ask everybody the exact same questions.

And it's amazing once you get those apples to apples comparisons about who stumbles and who doesn't. But if I just, what happens is if you don't have those structured interviews, you end up anchoring on something like, you know, I'm from Canada. If you were from Canada too, you're like, hey, man, I'm from Canada too. You end up talking about that thing you have in comment. And guess what? Then you discriminate by hiring a person from the same country as you or went to the same

college as you or, you know, has the same favorite band as you or whatever the thing is. A bunch of other shit that's a relevant. A shit that has nothing relevant to what you're going to be doing working together for the next six years. And so, and then the other thing I do, which some big companies are doing more and more like Google and stuff is I sort of realized I'm just going to give them once after the structure interview, if they do good, I'll move to the next stage. And I'm going to give them a sample of the work they're going to be doing.

So I gave them a dataset and said, find a hypothesis and test it and analyze it and present me a one slide, you know, summary of what you did. And because guess what? That's what you do in grad school. And if you can already kind of do the basics of it, I can teach you the rest. But if you don't know any of that stuff, you can't generate a hypothesis or like analyze data. Like you should probably like stay in undergrad for another year, like get more research experience

because you're like, you're going to drown in grad school. It's going to suck for you because other people are going to be able to do that. You're not going to be able to keep up, at least in our program, which is like pretty advanced. And so like I just started like having them do the thing that is as close as possible to the thing that they're going to be doing like every day for the next six years, like the simple version, but and then I can like train you up and build all the other skills for you. But if you don't have those basics, it's going to be like really brutal. And so like that was really revealing about what they could do. And I actually didn't care if their hypothesis was right

or wrong. I actually don't care about that because all kinds of hypotheses are wrong. You want to like learn fast. You want to fail fast if an idea is wrong. But that's another thing is like sample the thing that you want to, that's going to be relevant to you. Just like in my relationship, sleeping time is going to be relevant for every single day of your relationship. So get data on that. So you want to think of like what are the things that you can, that are going to actually be important, whether it's like a relationship or an employee you're hiring or colleague, and then find ways to sample that thing as closely and accurately as possible. in a fair way for everybody.

So everybody gets the same opportunity. That's interesting. I wonder if there's a way to do this to like mitigate in arguments. Like do you and your wife ever get in arguments and you try to like use like like a way to like kind of check whatever your biased or emotional feeling is

to try to get to the actual truth of what the argument is? I mean the classic way for that is like you learn this in marital counseling is using like eye language. So if you like hurt my feelings, what I say is I felt really sad when you said that thing or when you didn't show up to meet me, meet my parents, or when you went out Friday with your friends all night and didn't invite me.

And what you're doing there is you're owning your subjective perception, which could be biased. Maybe I'm oversensitive. And then you can, but also it makes you less defensive. Because you realize, okay, now I'm in this, my partner's upset. I did this thing. I'm not, you're not getting blamed. Right.

But if you care about the relationship. then you'll come back and maybe find a way to change or apologize or whatever. Yeah. And so it's like we kind of have to like accept that we're biased and own it. And if we use that language, it shows signals to people that we're owning our own subjective perceptions and biases. And that's like such a healthier way to start a conversation, especially with conflict. And it makes it easier to kind of like rather than what often happens, it up escalates.

So you always go with your friends and leave me behind. What I'm saying there, you know, if I said that to my wife, wife. She's like, well, I have every fucking right to go with my friends. And I deserve some time without you there. You know, I don't have to bring my husband to everything. You don't own me. Like, and then I'm like, well, I'm not saying I own you, but you can at least be

considered. Oh, now you're saying I'm inconsiderate. And you see how that, like, it's so defensive and you retreat to your corners and you don't admit any perceptual biases. Whereas the other way, like, starts from the position that I'm maybe misperceiving it. But it also lets you know how I felt. like you can be empathic or you can be a dick about it. But that's also revealing.

If you feel sad and someone's like, well, fuck you, well, then maybe that's not like the best relationship for lots of reason. It has nothing to do with their friend going out with their friends on Friday night. Right. Just means they don't actually care about how you feel. Right. And you've learned something useful. So the I statement of that would be like,

I feel insignificant when you go out with your friends and you don't include me. Yeah. And then it's like, that has nothing to do with you, really. That all has to do with how I feel. Yeah, yeah. And that's important to know. people have insecurities around all kinds of stuff. Yeah.

You know. And then your wife would be like, look, I did not intend to make you feel that way. Yeah. Or I thought I invited you when I said, what are you doing Friday? And you said, you're watching this show. I assume that that was your plan because you really want. You've been talking about watching Doon 2 for like four months. So like I just like said, then I made plans on my own with my friend.

You know, like, and you can like get quickly to like if there's just like miscommunications or you're on this off the same wavelength. Yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah, our biases and our group think seems like such a... You're literally battling against your brain's evolutionary pattern. Like the elevator test was something they showed us in school. Oh, man, I love that. Like, you walk into an elevator, there's five people facing the wall away from the door,

which is a very unnatural way to be inside an elevator. And then every person that comes in also faces the wall instead of the door. Or like the beep test where everyone's sitting in a room. And every time the beep goes off, they stand up and sit down. And you switch out enough people until eventually everyone's standing up and sitting down and no one knows why. Yeah. The other thing my wife is big on, she studies perception, social perception. She actually was on Hidden Brain on NPR and had the most listened to episode in history.

So you should consider having it on. She's interesting. Oh, that's cool. But one of her main points of that whole episode was that people are really terrible at mind reading. We often think we can read people's minds or we can tell if someone's lying. All the research shows that you can't. So we're stuck in our own hands with our own bias and we also can't really tell what's going on your head. So now you've got two problems.

And so her big thing is like just ask. Always just like get so it's really good for conflict resolution because if I think my, you know, if I think she's ignoring me or did this thing and I went out with her friends on Friday, I can be like, did you know that I wanted to come or did you know that made me feel this way? And then she can be honest about, oh no, I didn't realize that. or you can ask what people think about you. But most people won't ask. Actually, humans are pretty bad at asking questions. We talk a lot, but we don't ask and we don't listen. And so her big thing is like if you actually want to understand that someone's thinking,

the only tried and true method, it was really boring, but it's actually super useful for people, is just start asking. Why did you do that? Why did you go out on Friday night? Why didn't you tell me about it? You know, you get to the bottom of it really quickly. and people are often much more comfortable answering questions than they are responding to allegations.

Because if I say you went out with your friend because you wanted to avoid me because you're mad at me or something like that. First of all, good chance that's wrong. Second of all, yeah, she's like, what the fuck? And now you're really on a bad footing for solving this conflict. So it's like those two things.

Own your biases and your language and ask questions to understand what they're thinking, where they're coming from. Good faith questions. You want to be good faith. I think that needs to be a caveat. out because I could see something. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you could ask questions that are like, yeah, why do you love leaving me behind? Yeah, yeah. Wait, wait a second. Why do you love leaving me behind? That seems like a, not a good question.

That's really, really interesting. Yeah. As far as the research that you're doing, are you conducting a lot of the research? Yeah. And are you, is the whole department, are they all doing research under the same kind of umbrella? Yeah, so one thing about NYU, New York University, it's super research. intensive. I think last year we're in the top 10 in the whole country of how much research funding

we had. And so it's like very research intensive. So we're running big studies all the time. So I already told you about that study we ran in 60 countries looking at climate change and polarization and tree planning. The big one we're going to launch right now. So you can ask me in a year if you want to have me back. Please. We're running, there's big debates as we've talked about with social media. Is it like pulling people apart or is actually like a force for good? is it making people like depressed or anxious. Huge debate over that. So we're going to run a study, hopefully in 60 countries.

We've got a huge grant for this. And we're going to pay people to log off social media for two weeks. And we're going to measure before and after. First of all, we're going to randomly assign people. So we're going to flip a coin, everybody who joins study. And you're going to get money either to just stay on social media or else to log off for two weeks. And we're going to get like screenshots of your phone to see if like you're actually like logging off. And then we're going to measure like how much.

How much hatred do you feel towards Democrats and Republicans? How anxious are you? How depressed are you? And then we're going to be able to see like, because a lot of the social media studies are correlational. You know, people who are more anxious are on social media longer. Well, we don't know if it's because social media is increasing their anxiety or anxious people are constantly checking their social media

to see what's going on or see how people are talking about them or if they like their post or whatever. Right. And so a lot of it is like conflated or conflated or confeder. or confounded like that. And then a lot of the other studies are like very small samples or only let's say Americans. So we don't know if like social media is causing polarization only in America because we already have all this conflict.

So social media just like is pouring gasoline on the fire. But like does it do the same thing in like the UK? Is it doing the same thing in like Japan or something like that? So we're going to like run all these studies and all these other countries see like what is social? Because five billion people are in social media now. We want to see like what are the effects on our brains? like how are they getting rewired?

How is it affecting our relationships? Do you have a hypothesis? So our hypothesis is that social media is like causing division and conflict and stereotypes. Yeah, and that it's increasing anxiety. Yeah. And maybe that's my own personal bias because I certainly feel like an influx and anxiety when I'm using social media more. But I'd be curious to know what the outcome of this study is. Yeah, but we'll also look to be able to see like maybe it's causing anxiety for, say, young people.

But maybe like for old people, it's like the only way they can like get. get social connection because like they're living at home with no kids. It's not like they're going out partying. And it's like their lifeline to like their old friends and stuff like that or their kids or their grandkids who live far away. So it's quite possible that's having like different effects on different people. Like maybe social media here is causing polarization. But I talk to somebody. He he led the uprising in Zimbabwe against the dictator there, Roberto Mugabe. And he did it by Facebook. So he was a pastor and like it was a brutal dictatorship. And he said he created his movement by posting videos on Facebook about how they were all being mistreated. And other people

in the country saw Facebook and they all started immobilize and take to the streets. And that was what pushed out, this dictator. It took social media. These people had no power. They couldn't vote because it's a dictatorship. They have no voice. And so this was the thing that mobilized them, was sharing these videos and stories. And those went viral in Zimbabwe. And so like in those places where you have a dictatorship, man, that's the only thing that can give people voice. Wow. Yeah, that's really interesting. What is the study that you would want to run, but it's too unethical to do it? Oh, God. I mean, this is like getting into my deep, deep psyche. I mean, it'd be fun to like run these, I mean, the great thing to be to like, imagine you two studies we're talking about like people dating and their politics. Imagine you could randomly assign somebody to like marry somebody from the different versus same politics. It'd be interesting to see. how much that mattered for their actual well-being and their relationship quality.

Because I think we all assume I need to have somebody who matches my politics or my attitude towards Gaza or Ukraine or abortion or whatever. But we select on that and so we're dating people like that because we're not even considering the other people who don't agree with us. We won't even go on a first date with them. And so imagine you randomly assigned a bunch of those people to like marry each other. You can never do it, but I'd be curious like how important is that for our happiness in a marriage?

be like the time you go to bed matters more than like the actual politics of the person you're dating. That's interesting. That would like blow people's minds, right? It's like those little dumb things. That's hilarious. And it's not these big abstract symbolic things. It probably is. I mean, it's the same thing with like American politics. Like it's the local elections that matter way more than the big elections. It's like, yeah, it's the little things that happen like, are you, like, do you chew with your mouth open or not? You know what I mean? Like that bothers me way more than like what you think about some, you know, the border. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah. Like those little things matter so much.

Yeah, that's really interesting. That's a fun. That would be fun. Wouldn't that be crazy? And then you can like see how important it is. Like it probably matters. But is it more important than like are you just have good sex life? You know, like something like that might matter like 10.

And actually the place to run. Now I'm, I always thinking like where could I get this data? An interesting place to maybe look at it would be like a place where they have arranged marriages like India where arranged marriages are common and determined by the parents. And it turns out those. my understanding is those marriages are just as successful as oftentimes more successful. But I talked to some colleagues who are from India, and she told me that the reason they're successful

is because there's huge pressure to make it successful. So it might not be successful in like the actual quality of it, but they're together. They stay together longer. And so it's successful in some important metrics. But it would be interesting to see if you can measure those people's politics. I bet you could beforehand.

And then compare, you know, Indian citizens who like got an arranged marriage. versus those that didn't. That's interesting. And then see if that was the type of thing that actually mattered in terms of like their day-to-day relationship quality. I met this couple.

The wife is a classical anthropologist that's worked as an anthropologist at a prestigious university in California for like 30 years. Her husband is a UFO researcher. Oh, wow. And does research on UFOs and aliens and has appeared on ancient aliens many times.

Yeah. And I've, the two, they love each other, they've been married for a very long time. And I asked her, I was like, so what do you think of your husband's work? Like you, like, she's speaking at like the national anthropology panels and like, like, and she goes, eh, I don't believe it. She just lets him do it. I was like, what do you mean? Wait, is this his hobby or is this like his full-time job?

It's like, it's his full-time gig. He, like, writes about this. Like, he's published many books. Like, he worked within. Okay, wow. Yeah, he's like all. He's about it. So she doesn't believe anything that he does.

She thinks he's just like, is it the equivalent of, like, marrying someone who's a fiction writer. Basically. But the problem is he doesn't realize he's a fiction writer. It's like from her perspective. There was something beautiful about it where I was like yeah, she doesn't believe that his life's work is even real. But at the

same time, she still loves him. They're married. They have kids. They have a great life. I bet that guy's like a good husband. I bet he was like all the husband. Yeah. He must do, he's doing something right. Yeah. And the two of them are just living great lives. I'm like, wow, that's how it could be. You know, the thing is she's not only

does she love him, but what she's doing there, and this would be a challenge if you did the unethical experiment, I said, like assigning a Republican to marry a Democrat, is the social pressure. Like, I wonder if she takes him to, like, departmental functions and what her colleagues think, and does she face, like, weird blowback about that? Maybe. And maybe she's just willing to, like, push through that. It doesn't matter. And she doesn't get a shit what they think. Yeah, I have no idea.

Yeah, it must be so interesting to study bias all day. I'm sure you talk to people that say that, you know, how do I live? during some terrible regime, I wouldn't have joined. Oh, yeah, this is just people, people don't know themselves. There's one of my favorite data points on this is it's what's called the bias blind spot. That there's been studies done where measure people's bias, but then how much bias they see in others. And people are really good at detecting bias in others, but most people can't detect it in themselves, even when they have it. Something like one in 600 people are aware of their own bias in this study.

So people have they're able to see bias and others, but not themselves. It's called the bias blind spot. I'm not, I have a blind spot for my own biases. And so that's like, I mean, that sinks in for me. That's like clearly like Danny Coneman got that right. Because that's why he sent his book, paid people to like criticize it. Because he's deeply aware of his biases. I mean, he's a guy who put biases on the map in economics and decision making.

So I think like once you're aware of that stuff and that most of us not only, he and I are aware and others who study this that not only do humans have a lot of biases but we can't see it in ourselves then you become a lot more humble like I share studies and stuff but I'm like man I've changed my mind so much

and I'm always aware that there's like some other data that might be out there that contradicts me and so it like is a real prime for people to have like a sense of intellectual humility about how much they know. And that's like the UFO thing is interesting. Like I think it's bunk. But man, if they released a file that was from the government that was convincing that they had known about a UFOs all along, I would change my beliefs in a heartbeat. Like if it was compelling

information. I'm atheist. Well, actually I was atheist and then I decided like years ago to change myself to agnostic because I'm like, as a scientist, I have to always be agnostic about everything. Like if some religious being appeared next to me, I would have to be willing, you know, when I saw the evidence to change my opinion. Oh, interesting. And so I kind of like try to have that agnostic view about everything. Hmm. That's kind of nice.

Yeah. Like, it leaves you open. But at the same time, does it give you anxiety that any and all things could be? Like, would you feel more comfortable if you could just kind of subscribe to whatever your thing was? Yeah, I don't know. I, at one point probably when I was younger, but I'm at the point where I don't feel anxious about it. It's more like just a worldview. just a worldview of being open-minded that you could be wrong with anything.

I mean, it will suck, right? Because, like, I'm a scientist. My reputation is staked on my publications. And if someone debunks a bunch of them or finds a bunch of errors, it would be publicly humiliating for me. I'll stop getting invited to podcasts like this. You know, but you have to be open to it because, you know, guess what? I am wrong probably what everything. Because people are going to come along and test it in a better way.

and at minimum they're going to like get a little bit closer to the truth than I got because they're going to have better methods and stuff than I have. And so in some sense you're always wrong because you're always kind of like operating with a minimum with a modest amount of information and people are going to come along with better methods and better data and stuff in the future and like at least show something more precisely than the way you understood it or with more nuance or complexity. And so in that sense once you just like accept that you're always wrong, to some extent, then like you're fine.

It's like swallowing that the first time is hard. Once you swallow it, everything else comes easy. I like that perspective a lot. Dr. Jay, this has been absolutely awesome. I really appreciate the perspective, both on partisanship but also just on eliminating my own biases just in my everyday life. This is really, really cool.

I hope you use it. What one thing are you going to use in the real world? That's why push people, anybody listening, pick one of the things you learn to what day and like how are you going to use it? Write it down. I mean, one that I will do, like, it's kind of, this is going to be sounding like a cop-out,

but I'm going to add to it, okay? Sending people things, specifically creative things and asking for negative feedback, I don't do it with everything. I only do it with the things that I'm less emotionally connected to. Yeah, so like...

Because it sucks. Yeah, so like with, you know, like if I'm doing like a thing for like a promo for a tour thing, like, or for a promo for a stand-up show that I'm doing, don't really care as much. Like if someone's like, oh, the color on the poster sucks, I'm like, that has nothing

to do with me. So it's easier for me to take negative feedback. But if it's like my personal stand-up. Because guess what? That's your identity. Now, that's why it's threatening. Anything that touches your identity? Exactly.

And you were talking about your identity as an individual as interwoven with you being a comedian. And that sounds like one of your most important identities. Exactly. And that is the thing where I'm like, yeah, I never even really clicked with me that I wasn't doing that. Yeah. And I should do that. Like if I'm, you know, before I put out like a, a.

stand-up clip or something, sending it to an inner circle that I really trust and saying, tell me what you hate about this joke. What doesn't make sense about this perspective? Like, do these punchlines all really make sense? Or is there one that's kind of just working because my delivery is funny? And getting actual good feedback from the things that I care most about. That's something that I'm going to be trying. I mean, another way to do it in a softer way might be instead of what do you hate about

this, how could I make this better? And then you're still going to get constructive feedback, but probably not framed in a way from them that's going to like cut to your soul. And so that's one way from your side to ask a little bit differently. So it's not as threatening because I'm with you. If your identity's at stake, it sucks. The other thing you can do from the other side, this is again, my wife, Tessa, told me to do this.

Before I give feedback to people, she always says, ask if they're willing to take some feedback. And if you get permission from people to give them feedback, they're already like open up to it and they're already kind of publicly committed to it. And then you can give it to them. But people often don't like unsolicited feedback. Yeah. And so it's like those are the two things you can do on both ends of it to create like a healthy

feedback. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I'm trying to think of anything else that I would apply specifically. I'm not really in like a power role right now. Eventually when I become a Fortune 500 CEO, I'll be able to apply a lot more. You become like Joe Rogan. You have like an media empire. Yeah, exactly.

Then I'll be able to apply some of the hiring practices. But yeah, I think that's probably the biggest thing is. being open and trying to solicit feedback about the things I care the most about. And then trying to have someone else point out my biases in general. Like if I have an opinion about something that I feel really strongly about,

calling someone up being like, am I being biased about this? Yeah. Or what's my blind spots here? Yeah. And even with group think, this is something that I was even thinking about as you were speaking,

is like being aware of what groups that you're in. Understanding that I'm so susceptible to group think, I need to be really considered about what groups I enter into and spend time in. Because I can say like, you know, this is like going about the whole like, you know, show me your friends, I'll show you your future kind of thing. Like you become the people you hang with.

And I think that makes a lot of sense that not only should you be concerned about that because of habits you might pick up, et cetera, but because of the truly the way your brain is working will sync up with the people you're around. And I think that that's important thing to kind of be leery of. And if it's digital, because I think that's another thing that people don't pick up on is people enter into digital spaces without any real thought. And those people that you're interacting with in the comments and the people that you're interacting with on forums and chat rooms

and Discord chats and things like that, that is the group that you're a part of. And they are shaping the way your literal brain is functioning. And so by spending distorted amounts of time and negative spaces, specifically on the internet, I think it can create a cycle of negativity. Oh, yeah. And that can be negativity about yourself,

negativity about other people. And so that's something I'm not. I need to be like deliberate about it. It's like, okay, don't get involved too much in rooms on the internet or spaces on the internet that are going to feed negativity, specifically like comment sections. Yeah, we wrote this piece. We have a newsletter. I'll just say what it is, Power of Us, substack.

And on January 1st, we wrote one about like pursuing news resolutions because that's what everybody's thinking about pursuing their goals. And our main piece of advice, and we cite several studies on this, is join a group. So you want to like lose weight and run more, join a runner's group. research shows that that actually is one of the best predictors of whether you pursue your goals. So what we're thinking of is not just think carefully about joining what group, but join groups that are aspirational for you. Like if you want to like become a better comedy writer, join a comedy writer's team.

Or you want to become an author, join a group where you hang out with authors over a coffee every two weeks or something. Whatever your thing is that you want to get better at, join that group. And it will help you hit your goals and it will shape like you said, your identity. Like I think of when you're talking about like these corners of internet, the metaphor I often think of his diet. Like if I just like eat McDonald's all day, reminds me of this documentary from I watched like 20 years ago, supersized me. Yeah, if you watch supersized me where he goes and eats McDonald's every day, he like puts on like 30 pounds. He's like vomiting the first time he eats it.

And he has to agree every time they said, do you want to supersize it? Just like, yes. And so you can if you just eat McDonald's all day, it will affect your body after like a month or two or three months. And I don't mean to pick on McDonald's. I just mean like any unhealthy diet, right? We all know that. Any idiot knows that, right? But think of it like the information that you're soaking up from the people you hang out with

or who you follow in social media or what podcast you listen to is your information diet. And that's wiring your brain. And so you better think really carefully about what that diet's going to be because five years from now, 10 years from now, you are going to be a product of that information, how you think, how you see the world, how you treat other people is going to be a function. of like where did your brain marinate for the last 10 years. Wow. Yeah, that's profound.

And I think that's, yeah, that's heavy. That's a pitch for good podcasts. Yeah, exactly, right? I might have to just steal that. Okay. No, this was awesome, brother. I really appreciate you coming through and spending time with me and sharing this and answering all my dumb questions.

Okay, thanks. It was a pleasure. Let's do this again soon. Okay, awesome. Thank you.