Know Thyself - E198 - Dr. Todd Rose: Why Your Desires Aren't Actually Yours (Here's Who Planted Them)

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Join our online community ↓https://www.knowthyselfcollective.comTodd Rose is a Harvard-trained social scientist, former high school dropout with a 0.9 GPA, and co-founder of the think tank Populace. His research centers on the gap between what people privately believe and what they publicly say, and the profound consequences of that gap for individuals and for society. This is one of those conversations that reframes something you thought you understood and doesn't let you go back.What We Dive Into:1. Your brain estimates group consensus using a simple shortcut: the loudest voices repeated most often. On social media, that is 10% of users creating 80% of content.2. Belonging means being accepted for who you actually are. Fitting in means changing who you are to be accepted. 3. Authenticity is not about being perfectly accurate about who you are. It is about making choices you genuinely believe align with who you are right now.✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewidehttps://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfTry LMNT & get a free sample pack ___________00:00 Intro01:27 What Are Collective Illusions?02:05 The Cost of Self-Silencing05:06 How We're Hardwired to Conform07:40 Why the Brain Is Easily Fooled About Group Consensus09:13 Social Media and the Amplification of Fringe Views13:20 What Americans Actually Want in Private21:01 Who Profits from Keeping Us Divided23:52 Foreign Manipulation and AI Bot Farms29:37 The Most Consequential Collective Illusions36:38 What Authenticity Actually Means41:15 The Coming Age of Courage42:14 Belonging vs. Fitting In49:44 René Girard and Mimetic Desire59:43 How Collective Illusions Can Shatter Overnight1:05:58 The Velvet Revolution and the Power of Authenticity1:12:09 How to Build the Muscle of Living in Truth1:20:25 Todd's Personal Collective Illusion: Faith and Identity1:24:34 Spiritual Exploration and Holding Beliefs Lightly1:32:23 Certainty and Knowledge Are Inversely Correlated1:41:42 Fulfillment Over Achievement1:50:31 Small Actions That Raise Collective Consciousness___________✨MORE FROM TODD↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ltoddrose/↳Populace: https://populace.org↳https://www.toddrose.com/📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

About two-thirds of Americans are actually self-silencing and outright lying about things that matter to them. And when enough of us do that, all we hear from is the fringes and the results of collective illusion. Entire groups end up doing something that almost nobody really wanted. Imagine if only 10% of the people around you hold some fringe belief. But you think it's 80%? Your life is just diminished because you're not living authentically.

What was the biggest collective illusion being run on you that shaped who you thought you could become? I was a Harvard professor for a dozen years, but I was also a high school dropout. with the 0.9 GPA. It's really hard to do that poorly. I just assumed there was something wrong with me. If you're acting in ways that you don't believe,

you will not respect yourself. Do I actually believe this? And I realized, I didn't. Your group actually agrees with you, and you just don't know it. There is shared humanity that really is there. And that age of courage that's coming, it's necessary. And you have a world to play.

We have a habit of living in a life. What does that look like on an individual level? If the problem is an illusion, then the answer is. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Know of Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a Harvard-trained social scientists, co-founder of the Think Tank Populous, and one of the world's leading experts on the intersection of individual psychology and collective behavior. Dr. Todrose, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

What are collective illusions, and why should anyone care to listen to this conversation? So collective illusions, it's just a phenomenon where most people in a group end up going along with something they don't privately agree with simply because they incorrectly think that most everybody else agrees with it. So as a result, entire groups end up doing something that almost nobody really wanted. So you can think of it like this. It's like group think, but you're wrong about the group. And why is that such an important thing to reflect on? Like, what are the direct costs of an unexamined group think that is inaccurate to begin with? Yeah, so this is the funny part.

It's like, so we've known about collective illusions in research for about 100 years. Up until the advent of social media, we didn't really think it was something that was such a big phenomenon that it warranted a lot of attention. Because think about you, most of the time you think, you tend to think your biases that other people are just like you. I like this, so everybody likes this. So this is the opposite, right? You believe something and you're just convinced everybody else doesn't. It's like, so it was like, how can we be that wrong about others? And so, but we'll talk about how this happens and you'll see why this is a big problem today.

But here's the cost and why people should care. Group think alone is bad enough, right? So as soon as I just start going along with the crowd, just because that's what they expect, I lose my individuality. I lose my self-determination. That's not controversial. But now imagine that you gave up your own judgment on things you believe in and care about

because you thought that's what your group wanted from you, but your group never did. And so now you conforming to that phantom is actually destroying the very group that you're conforming just to be a part of. And so collective illusions do double damage. they harm the individual because as you start self-silencing, not expressing who you really believe you are,

we know from research there are incredible cardiovascular consequences, there are psychological consequences, you become less trustful of others, more resentful, your life is just diminished because you're not living authentically. But collectively, it starts to tear at the very fabric of what holds us together as a people, right? So this group that I was bound to, and now I'm literally actively working to undermine it, even though I think I'm trying to get closer to it.

And so we're seeing that across the board. So we see at the collective level, plummeting levels of social trust, high levels of resentment, this sense of isolation from other. And we think it's because we just don't have anything in common anymore when the reality is just a social lie. I think this is one of the more exciting conversations that I have been looking forward to on this on this podcast for a while because in the pursuit of knowing who you are, you first start to parse through all of these unconscious previously held beliefs

and paradigms that you were born into for better or worse that become the lens in which you look at reality through and completely limit what you think is possible for your life, the levels of happiness and fulfillment, and all of it. I remember early in the days, like maybe 10 years ago, hearing a quote first from, I think, Earl Nightingale. Most quotes on the Internet are completely unattributable, you know, but that the opposite of courage is not cowardice, but that is conformity. Yeah. And we really do live in this hall of mirrors, you know, I think another great one from Cooley, I'm not who I think I am. I'm not who you think I am.

So maybe you could set the stage for how hardwired we are, like through the lens of evolution. Anthropologically speaking, what is that wiring that has now been enacted? I'll get to that. I want to just circle back to what you just say because I think is really important. You know, you've done a phenomenal job. It's been so fun. So first of all, I almost was embarrassed. I didn't realize this podcast existed.

And as I got to dig out. I was like, how did I not know this? Right. So now I'm like obsessed with it. But you've done a phenomenal job. I mean, know thyself. Easy to say, extremely hard to do, right? Getting us out of these paradigms we've internalized

without even realizing it and trying to live more consciously and intentionally, right? That's hard enough, right? And what we're talking about here is another layer that comes from external, like the social layer, that can also distort our ability, pull us away from truly, knowing ourselves and living authentic lives. So, like, being aware of both of these things is incredibly important. So to your question, though, on the social side of this, so it's fair to ask, like, wait, how could we be so wrong about each other? I mean, and all you have to know is, like, we can talk about this. We do a lot of work where there are now, like, foreign countries

that are actively weaponizing this concept to drive us apart. It's kind of bonkers. But it doesn't really even take a bad actor to have a collective illusion form. And all you have to do is know two things about how your brain works to get this. The first is we do have this bias to belong, right? We do, all that's equal, would prefer to be with our groups, not against our groups. Makes tons of sense from a survival standpoint, right? We're not a lone wolf species, right? But at least my second thing you have to know, if you're going to conform, if you're going to try to go along with your group, you kind of have to know what your group believes, or else what are you conforming to?

And this is where it's hilarious. I mean, my background's in neuroscience, and it's just, this is how your brain estimates group consensus. You would imagine, I would have thought, given how important it is, that you are right about your group, your brain would have super sophisticated,

like, way to calculate, what does my group believe? The shortcut that's evolved is the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority. Crazy. Loudest voices, repeated the most

are the majority. Now, it must have worked to have evolved, right? We must have been like, okay, well,

this worked good enough. But you put it into a social media age, and you can start to see a problem. So if you take just what was Twitter is now X,

but this generally holds for all social media platforms, 80% of all content, is created by only 10% of the users. And that 10%, not remotely representative of just about anybody, they are extreme on almost every social issue.

So imagine if only 10% of the people around you hold some fringe belief, but you think it's 80% unless you're willing to go against your group, then you're more likely just to self-silence, say nothing, or start lying. Say what you know, you need to say to be part of the group. And when enough of us do that, all we hear from is the

fringes and the results of collective illusion. And from our research and others, we found right now today, in the United States, is where we have the data. About two-thirds of Americans are actively self-silencing and outright lying about things that matter to them. It's pretty wild. But I have to say one thing if you don't mind, you can cut me off anytime. Let's go back to that first part of conformity. Yeah. Because it's funny, it's like, when I say we have a hardwired bias to that, it's unbelievably hardwired.

So one of my favorite studies that a colleague of mine did in the Netherlands, because I just can't believe he got money to do it, frankly, he was like, he wanted to know this about a decade ago, like, how far does that conformity bias really go? Right. And so he tried to pick what he thought was the most subjective thing you could imagine. So why would you conform? Which is, who do you think is good looking? So he has this, he does this thing where he gets some people and he puts them in an fMRI scanner.

And he shows them a couple hundred faces, different faces. And your job while you're in the scanner is to just rate them. It's like hot or not. It's like a five point lachard scale. Five, yes. And, you know, one, no thank you. And he's like, I just want to see. Like, really is conformity that deep?

because it's so subjective, right? Beauty's an eye beholder. So the trick was, every time you rated a face, you're like, oh, she's hot, five, right? Immediately after you rate it, a number appears right above the line that's supposed to represent

what the average of everybody who had done the study before, like how did they rate this person? But it was all lie. There was no other group. Instead, what it did was, about a quarter of the time, it was engineered so that whatever you said, your group and you are exactly the same. You said five, group says five. Amazing. And that a quarter of the time,

you say five, the group says as far away from that as possible. So you're just really, really out of step with your group. Meanwhile, we're recording your brain as you're doing this. It's kind of remarkable. On the trials where you're told that your opinion is the same as your group or the group. It triggers a dopamine reward response in your brain. Same brain areas that hard drugs activate, which is what makes them addictive. On the trials where you're off, it triggers what's called an error signal, a cascading signal through your brain using special neurons that basically swamp everything else. They disrupt attention, memory, everything, just saying something's wrong, pay attention. Okay. In this study, so they go through those,

motions, they get those responses, and then at the very end they go, oh, I'm so sorry, your scores weren't recorded for some reason. Can you just do it again real fast? They haven't viewed again, only they don't show them the group scores anymore. Not surprisingly, almost everyone shifted their belief about who was good looking to align with the group, and they didn't believe that they did. They had no idea that they had conformed. So when I say we have that bias, it is deep, right? And it's a survival mechanism. And part of knowing ourselves and the benefits that come from that is in part being able to overcome that bias without giving up our shared humanity. Because again, we've evolved for millennia where our survival is

fundamentally based on our ability to cooperate and be a part of a tribe, right? And so we now live in modern society, not tribal groups, where we still have this tribal wiring, within us. And now in the social media age, it creates all sorts of problems. Especially when you say the minority is the loudest and representative of the extremes on the political spectrum on all sorts of topics. And that creates assumptions about what we think the majority of people out there are, a level of divisiveness and separation that seems to just be the, like, just how things have been and how things are going to be. And it does, doesn't include the nuance, the realization that we actually have way more in common than we have separated.

Exactly right. So at our think tank populace, we're probably most famous now for our work in what's called private opinion research. So because everyone's lying. It's pretty shocking. Like literally every demographic group in the country is outright lying on multiple issues that matter. Different issues, right? Gen Z's lying about different things than millennials and D. But what's interesting is, so we have methods. that get around the social pressure and can get at ground truth about your private views. We didn't invent the methods that they work really well. And we have more private opinion data on the public than any other organization, I'm quite sure of it.

And when you get into that private layer, it is shocking how much we have in common. Like, it is shocking. Like, I mean, we do this for a living, and I'm still surprised by it. Like, you remove, I mean, there's stuff we do, we are, we do disagree on. you know, obviously, but it's a small sliver compared to the stuff that we still have in common. But when you turn it around and ask, okay, but what do you think most people believe?

You get a completely different picture. We are so convinced that most other people don't share our values, our aspirations, our fears. And again, if you wanted to destroy a society, but you couldn't do it militarily or economically, this is very clever. get them to turn on each other by believing that they're no longer we the people. One example of that with your research when pulling or doing the private research

with what we think Americans want, could you shed light on that? Because there's this subconscious race societally what we feel like is towards status and fame and power and money seems like, oh, that's what everyone wants. This is one of the most surprising things because we've done this.

We've studied the kind of country you want to live in, what you want from key institutions, you name it. we've studied it. The most surprising finding that we, from my perspective, has to do with the kind of lives we want to live, right? So we did, we called the success index. We looked at tradeoff priorities, dozens and dozens and dozens of them for what could cost you a good life for you. And the methodology be used is called conjoint, and so it forces tradeoffs.

Because in life, you can't have everything, time and money, right? So what do you really want and what are you willing to sacrifice for it? So this method is, it's the same method that, say, like, Apple uses to figure out the right combination of features and price point in an iPhone. If I asked you, do you want an OLED screen? You'd say, sure, you want that more than a phone jack? You want that more than you want to pay $200 more? That's a different conversation.

So we apply that same methodology to these social issues. And in the success stuff, the good life stuff, it included everything from, you know, being the richest person you know, to having a family and everything in between. okay, well, in private, you get a picture. We look at your tradeoff parties, and then we ask you immediately, well, what do you think other people would say on these things? We believe that most everybody else defines success and a good life,

almost exclusively in terms of status, just like you said. And to put a finer point on it, it is wealth, power. We've done this now several times. The time before we did it, The number one thing we thought everybody wanted was fame. Like, they just want to be famous. In reality, it was dead last in private. And what you look at in private, which becomes really remarkable,

all the status variables are in the bottom quartile, every single one of them. Out of over 70 traits is that right? Yeah, there's like 72 this time. I mean, it was like as comprehensive you could get on every theory of what a good life is. All of our, we did focus groups, you know, all in. What are your tradeoff priorities? You think most everybody else around you want status. They don't.

They don't. And what emerges, what's actually quite heartwarming, frankly, is what we have in common about a good life. The number one tradeoff priority is contribution, that people want to do work that has a positive impact on other people. That's the number one tradeoff priority for the majority of Americans. I was like, that just can't be sure. It doesn't sound anything like what I assume it's like.

And also in the top 10 for every single demographic, including Gen Z, was their view of a good life was being actively involved in their community. Which I definitely was like, there's just no way. Yeah. I mean, because I'm like, well, then just do it. But no. And what's really interesting about that is we also measure achievement on all these attributes, right? These are your priorities? How are you doing on them?

being involved in your community was the lowest level of achievement of any top priority. In fact, in our research, more people reported being debt-free than involved in their community, like the level they want, which is just crazy, right? It's like how, and so we dig in and say, well, what? It seems like you could just do it. So why aren't you doing it? And there's like two obstacles every time. One, the collective illusion.

It's like, I don't think anyone else cares. So why would I go, I'm going to go show up. and clean up the park, I'm going to go show up and help, but no one else wants to do it. Like, just, you know, I'm going against my group. The second is they just didn't know how. We just lost that layer of just, like, get involved and help out. So it's like, it's so interesting because here's the problem with that. You'd say, well, okay, we're fine.

The good news is in private, we've got, we actually want to be decent people. It's about character, growth, spirituality, like, you name it. This is the bundle of things we care about. But the pool of approval from the group, is so powerful. Because, look, I want to be successful. I'm proud of the work that I do. And I wouldn't mind that you recognized it.

Nothing wrong with that. But if you're not careful, it can slip really quickly into, well, wait, if I knew what you thought was successful and praiseworthy and did that, then you'll think I'm successful. So we sort of inadvertently sort of start choosing. It distorts the choices we make to optimize for praise from our group, then aligning to who we believe we really are. And what's interesting is we also study how achievement on your priorities leads to higher life satisfaction or not.

No amount of achieving on what other people think is a good life increases life satisfaction at all. And yet, if we take your private priorities and move you just 20 points, the typical American was like about 50% achievement. Move it to 70, which sounds like a lot, but given that it's like, I want to be a, I want to have a family. I want to be in the community. I want to contribute. You can do that, right? We're not talking about everybody going to yell or something, right? If you just move it that 20 points, it corresponds with an increase in life satisfaction.

That's the equivalent of getting a 50% pay increase. Wow. So that's right there available for us to really improve the quality of our lives. And we just, by these collective illusions, start to really do damage to us personally and then also collectively. So I'm really looking forward to examining some of the most prevalent collective illusions that way we can start to poke holes in them, see them for what they are, put the puzzle pieces out of the box, so to speak, so we can see like the lenses we're looking through. But quickly before we do that, because you mentioned there are institutions, industries, industries that profit on keeping us divided and silent. So what are your thoughts on that? So it's pretty awful.

So let's just be clear. Yeah, there definitely are people. Like, it's sort of the usual suspects, right? If you think about it, like politicians actually benefit enormously from you seeing people who aren't just like you as other. Binary. Out-group. Yeah.

Because, and you see it right now in our system where we have this affective polarization is the term that you. Which is we hate each other and we literally don't even know why. We don't, we're not even arguing about policies anymore. You're just, you're not just wrong, you're bad, right? And it's almost like moral at this point. And so it's like every, they benefit a lot if I can convince you that you have very little in common with the people. And so you stay close to your tribe.

And as me as the leader of it really benefits quite a bit, right? Yeah, bonding the, over the mutual hate of an out group rather than the love of an in group. It's actually incredibly potent because from a neuroscience standpoint, we have a negativity bias, right? Like loss and threat are about three times more powerful in your brain than reward. So the fear and the bonding over the hatred of something is incredibly potent. And this is why you see on social media without these companies, they get a lot of blame, but it's like the algorithms they've developed were not intentional.

They just want to optimize engagement, right? And so anything that just tries to optimize engagement will almost always end. with negativity, outrage. Because people will tell you, oh, no, I want, I don't want, I don't want to be told what I want to hear. I don't want to hear good stuff.

No, you don't. Like, you have to really cultivate that to get it. Most people will fall into that, like, rage scrolling, doom scrolling. You're just like, if you're spending time on it, you just are so, like,

frazzled and frustrated. But what we've seen, and I don't mind sharing this, like, So we're a part of a multi-organizational effort that has been looking at the ways that foreign countries have recognized this and have weaponized social media to be able to generate these collective illusions. So it's now public, but China got hacked on their cognitive warfare division where it got released. This is literally exactly what they're trying to do. They're like, hey, wait, if we just use it.

So like TikTok was a great one because it was, it. If you think about it, it's not who you follow. It's not your friends. It's virality. It's what's pushed to you. It's a great weapon. Yeah, I don't know to what degree. So like the TikTok over there versus here, this is like completely different.

They don't have TikTok, right? It's called something else. And it was like all like science projects. So this was a weapon, which is why it got taken out of their hands. And by their own admission, this is what they were doing. And they're still doing it. And so is Iran. So is Russia.

Venezuela was involved in some of the. before, and that's just public knowledge now. And you think, like, well, why would they spend so much money doing this? Bot farms, these armies of bots, and now with AI bots, it's frightening. So it turns out on social media, if only 5% of the interactions are with bots, the bots can completely determine group consensus. And conservatively, about a quarter of all your interactions are actually with bots, and you don't know it. one-fourth of all interactions on social media are with a bot. Yep, that's not our research.

That's been done by a bunch of other people. It's pretty conservative. And what's crazy is they used to be the dumb bots. You know, they'd have a stupid account with a little egg instead of a profile. You know, you're like, okay. You know, it's crazy. Now with AI, it is frightening. So they'll have these sleeper bots that will go into non-political spaces, non-conferial spaces.

Like, you're in a Reddit forum about football or something. And there's like Steve that I'm. I think I've been interacting with for like three years, and the AI is learning the language of the group. And then when it's time to activate it, it'll slowly start to introduce fringe ideas and amplify. And it's gotten so sophisticated that that's the game now. The game is not disinformation. It's, can I get you to believe that your group believe something that it doesn't? Do you feel like we do have a small window to wake up to what's happening because of the exponential rise of AI and how that's going to get more

more proficient. Yep. This is the urgency of it, which is there's not really a technological solve here, right? It's a human problem. Yeah. It's a personal problem, right? Most of the time with tech, when technologies come into society and they transform those societies, let's take like, for example, all the way back to going from the spoken word

to the written word, right? If you believe Plato, Socrates really, really didn't like that, right? He said, it's going to damage our memory, which if by memory you mean reciting Homer, that's definitely true. But it seemed kind of obvious that if you went from spoken to written, there were some real upsides that you could gain as a society to have stuff written down. One of my favorite aspects of that is like, I mean, Aristotle is one of the first print natives of his time.

The very basis of Western logic emerges once you could actually write stuff down and he could compare, right? When it's linear in your head, it's much harder to be able to. to do that. So even the basis for how we think right now is derived from that technology. But if you think about it, if you're living back then, and it's like, yeah, there should be upside. But that upside was only getable once you acquired a completely artificial skill called literacy. If you can't read, it's definitely not a better deal, because at least we could all gather around the campfire and listen and share in that. And the powers that be sort of recognize that

and hoarded that skill, arguably tell the Reformation. So it took an act of God to democratize that. And until that, it really wasn't a good tradeoff. And so here we are right now. And AI is coming in at a time when the perception of polarization is really high, distrust is high,

resentment is high, and the choices that are being made about the algorithms themselves, we're going to have to live with those consequences for a very long time. And so to me, the real question about AI is not issues of safety, although, look, those are real. We don't want to destroy humanity. I think those things tend to be overblown historically.

It's really what's it for? And unless we get clear about our values and what we want, right, greater understanding of ourselves, the ability to live better lives, these tools will continue to be tools of manipulation and propaganda and fairly dystopian. if we're not careful. Yeah. I think there is this indignation that what you just share can cause, which is actually like really important. I feel that need to have a rebellious spirit

towards the society that wants you to conform to a sort of hypnotic rhythm and a slumber. And so if the opposite, then taking it the other way of conformity is courage, it's taking courage again against a society that, whether it's attributed to malice or just the way things have been, you know, going for a while, to go against the grain.

And quite frankly, to speak plainly, to speak what can seem like common sense, can feel like a rebellious act in a society that is conformed to really shame anything that's outside of the way they've been thinking. And, yeah, it makes me think, you ever see that old video of, like, that one dude who's like out at a dance rave or something.

He's like, he's like the one. On the side of the hill. Yeah, the side of the hill. And you're like, this goofy, what is he doing? He's like, dance around. Like, okay, I'm like, is he on drugs? Is he what's going on? And then one other guy comes over.

And then so now there's two. Is this the way we're talking about? And then all of a sudden, by the end, everybody. And it takes that courage because you look like you are completely out of step. Everyone else just sit on the side of the hill. It was just kind of sun tanning and relaxing. And you're dancing like an idiot, right? And then pretty soon it turns out that's kind of what everyone wanted.

They just didn't have the same courage, right? What do you think are the collective illusions that are most normalized that will look back 100 years from now and just be completely astonished and baffled by? Just much like we would looking back at slavery or, you know, these different. You know, it's right now we've tracked about 100 different collective illusions in our society right now. So they're just all over the place. I think our size, our time is going to be defined. by this very phenomena, like, that, like, this is so ubiquitous that this was the first time

you can never trust your brain again to tell you what your group thinks. Can't. There's just no way, which is okay. Once we accept that, then we have, now there's no other choice but courage, right? Because, again, we could be having this conversation just about group think. Like, so you still should have the courage to be yourself and be authentic, even when your group disagrees with you. this isn't that, right? This is, your group actually agrees with you. And you just don't know it. And so your behavior is actually undermining the group.

And you become proof to everybody else in the group that this is what we believe, right? So it's actually, like, which in some ways should give you more courage, right? If you knew before you self-silenced, before you outright lied to be with what you think your group wants, if you just thought for a second and said, there's a really good chance I'm just wrong, and that most everybody else agrees with me. Like, if you knew that to be true, like, what would you do? I don't think you silence yourself as quickly. It still takes courage, but you've got to know, like, it's a coin toss,

whether you even write about your group at this point. So some of the things I think, we can go through a few of them. A lot of the illusions that are most prominent, not surprisingly end up being political, because most things, when it comes down to some collective decision that we all have to live with, and you have a binary political system It tends to foster these kind of illusions.

But I'll give you a couple of examples. And they're not any one side. They're all over the place. But like, you know, a few years ago, we were able to work directly with the Biden administration and President Biden on one specific ones. So remember the defund the police movement? At its peak, 61% of Democrats publicly said that they supported defunding the police. In private, it was 9%.

There's a big difference. Right. And what's funny is, is most people are like, well, I don't really want to do. I mean, I'd like to reform it. I think they should not violate our rights. But I don't like get rid of police, right? So here's one where, so we get a call and we spent some time with the White House at the time. They're like, well, we read your book. Can you talk us through? What do you think? What are we not seeing? So we give him this data. And they're like, no, we agree with you on most things. This one, though, I think you're wrong. I'm like, oh, how so? Oh, we get calls. Right. Like, from like 20 people over and over again. You know, it's like, yes, loudest voices repeated the most. So we ended up getting one line in the state of the union address at the time, which was when he said, it's not defund the police, it's fun the police. And the reason I bring this one up is if you're not careful, because it can seem like, ah, so what, right? So we don't tell the truth about what we think, you know. But they're going to have pretty rapid consequences, in this case, policies in states, including.

in some parts of California where we implemented policies because we thought that's what people wanted, only to have to walk back those policies because they turned out to be pretty disastrous. So there are real consequences that. So we also saw in our data, and this will speak to another real problem with collective illusions and why you've got to deal with them right now, it's that if you don't shatter the illusion right now, this generation's public lies. these collective illusions tend to become next generation's private opinion. Because kids don't know we're lying, right? They internalize stuff.

I'll give you a pretty rapid example of that. So right after the 2020 election where on the right, it was all like the election was stolen, it was rigged, right? We were tracking a majority of Republicans publicly said the election was stolen. Privately, they did not believe it. It was in like the 20% range. Do you know what I mean? But it's like this, this.

matters, right? Like, suddenly, we think we all don't believe in the integrity of our elections. Right. In a pluralistic democracy, that's super dangerous, right? It's one thing if we really believe it, then let's talk about it. But you're just saying what you think you're supposed to say. And certain people benefit from it. So we do that. I still think when I come back to a couple of things that I think are really important. The stuff we already covered. I actually don't think it sounds almost not that important. What kind of life do I want to live? I actually think it's one of the most consequential ones where we're like, hold on, we all kept chasing this thing that we all knew was a dead end. Like, yes, it's not to say having followers and fame is bad, but it's like

not the ultimate aim, right? But we keep doing it and we keep reinforcing it. And our, you know, we do a lot of work with Hollywood and other, like a creative. who, you know, because it's like, listen, like on this fame one, a good example of this is, do you remember Modern Family? So they actually did a whole episode around the private opinion data and the illusion. It was season 10, episode 13 for anyone that wants to go back and watch it. And it's just like, wait a minute, they realized the showrunners were like, we're under the same illusion. So when we want to write a story about a successful character, we're like, well, we just want it to be relatable.

to our audience. So we think our audience believes fame is, our success is fame and status. So you obviously are going to show someone who has that. Meanwhile, what you're doing is reinforcing the illusion over and over again. And so there's ways that we can use culture, which is really important to shadow the illusions. But the problem is that the culture makers are often under the same illusions. Yeah. Hey fam, a quick share. If you have been feeling sluggish, you might not need more sleep or caffeine. You could just be dehydrated.

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Not to overly romanticize this notion of like, you know, choosing a kind of radical path towards originality and authenticity, but when you think of like the matrix and red pill, blue pill, you know, I'm curious what kind of what through line do you draw there in terms of our own individual life when we start to examine these things and how, what your conception of authenticity and returning back to original thought is as nothing exists in a vacuum and there's always some sort of influence societally. And just in the epochs of time we live in a hundred year segment of slice of humanity,

like there's going to be a certain set of beliefs that we think are even available for offer, let alone. Yeah, so anything come through in terms of like taking the red pill here, what does that look like on an individual level? I think about taking the red pill as, you know, look, as you know, I mean, the expert on this, it's incredibly, at its best, best case, it's still incredibly hard to really know yourself.

And to me, authenticity requires some aspect of that, right? I have a particular definition of authenticity, I think, is important because often we talk about, we think it's like accuracy. And so a lot of, like, I'm a reformed academic, right? It's like a lot of, a lot of academics were like, well, you say you know yourself, and I gave you a test and you were not even close, so you clearly don't know yourself. I'm like, okay, right? But it's really, when you look at authenticity, it's less about accuracy and it's more about am I making choices that I believe align with who I believe I am right now, right? I could be wrong.

I could be completely wrong, but that's not the point. It's who's making the decision. And, you know, when you look at all the benefits of authenticity in terms of a life well lived, in terms of, like personally, interpersonally, and societally, they all accrue from that aspect of it, not necessarily that you were even right. But if you can get on the path of the choices are mine and they align with who I believe I am, accuracy sort of happens over time, right?

If I am free to make a wrong choice and learn from it, I'll figure out pretty quick what I really prefer and don't prefer or value or don't value. And so to me, I would say the time we're in right now And the red pill is just whatever value there was to conformity, that value is largely gone now because of collective illusions. Because the value was largely, you know what, I'm going to give up my own individuality a little bit for what I believe is just cohesion for the group, whatever. You know, there's something, whether you like that or not, there is at least some value you get there, right? Yeah. Go along to get along.

but now that's just not even the case, you're probably wrong to begin with. So there's like very little upside to abandoning your own judgment and basically giving up the responsibility you have for your own life. And so we're at a point where I believe just like literacy was a skill

that you needed for the print technology to actually matter. I actually think this ability to develop the skills to know yourself, not as a time one, I got it, I'm done, but as an ongoing process of authentic living is going to be the new skill that if you can get that right, then these technologies become phenomenal for you. And if you can't, they become the thing that traps you in ways that'll be extremely hard

to get out of. Because in the era we're leaving, the industrial age, it was such brute force, right? You're in these standardized environments, you know they don't fit. You can fill it almost the oppressive sort of nature of it. in an incredibly customized world where everything's personalized, you can be manipulated this way and you'll thank them for it because you'll think it's personalized. Yeah, it makes me think of the, it's not just the things that cause us pain or suffering in life is not just the things we don't know, but the things we think we know that just aren't so. That's right.

Love that quote. Yeah, and it's like, what's interesting is, I really do think when you look at, let's just take it over the next decade, I think you'll see that we're about to enter. We're going to go through some,

it's going to be bumpy for a bit, right? It's pretty normal. I think you're going to see an age of courage emerge. As we realize, like all things we just said, that there's not a there to this other approach. Whatever value conformity brought you, the downsides now are just so profound,

not just for you, but for us, that even if I just wanted group cohesion and the group to function, this conformity basis for it is not a good basis for it, right? Groups that really flourish are groups that enable both cohesion, but also enough deviance in views, right, to actually keep it flourishing. What do you say to those that are listening right now that have gone or are currently going through the period where they start to stop self-silencing,

and they're going against the grain of what their town that they grew up in and the family belief systems, and it can feel quite lonely to stop first self-silencing and discover where your own truths are and what your own opinions are, and be surrounded people that just don't believe it. You feel like you're kind of outcasted from, you know. And that's a real thing, right?

So let's be clear. When you start realizing, I'm going to say, step into courage, it's not all upside all the time, right? There will be some pain. But, you know, I would put it this way. Like, most of us end up conforming because we really want to belong to something. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. But I think we've gotten to the point where we confuse belonging with fitting in. What's the difference? Belonging is, as my co-founder, Bruce Rodion taught me, right? Belonging is I am accepted, valued, and even loved for who I really am.

And fitting in is, I will accept you if. If you hold this belief, if you do this thing, right, then I'll give you all the things that you want. But most, I would argue, most of what we call belonging right now is just fitting in. So we have to give up part of who we are to get that sense of, okay, maybe someone else gives a damn about me. And so, you know how like, you see those documentaries like where I'm going to eat McDonald's every day for, you know, what was it, super size me or whatever? You're like, watch their help just tell off over like two months. And you're like, wow, right? So it's a funny thing, right?

From a standpoint of food, we've evolved to have two mechanisms, right? That sense of satiation, right, that tells us to stop eating. And then there's nutrition. Well, throughout evolution, those things were really related because the things you ate were whole foods and so like that. So you got enough, you're done. Now that we can engineer process foods that are basically addictive, right? Fat, sugar, salt, we'll feel satiated.

So we think we're getting the same thing. And it's only down the road that we realize we weren't getting nutrition and we're profoundly sick and unhealthy. I think the same thing is true in our desire to belong. we're so used to this unhealthy substitute and that we don't realize that it's not really belonging. And I would argue that as you find that courage, I mean, you deserve to belong, right?

It is there for the taking. But part of that step into the courage is there will be people in your life, there will be groups that you are a part of that are just no longer good for you, right? And that's scary, and it can feel lonely. But the other side of that, right? Just recognize right now, you're not happy.

Like there's something wrong in your life or you wouldn't even be thinking about this. And so the status quo isn't good enough. And I would say what's pretty interesting is I think when people step into this courage, they often think that it has to be sort of anti-conformity, anti, like I'm going to go against the group. It's like, don't be the contrarian just for its own sake. They're the most predictable people on the planet. Right, if the group believes, I know you'll believe the opposite, right? Don't do that, right?

It's not about being against the group. If what you believe is aligns the group, great. It's fantastic, right? But it's the courage to follow your own conviction. And what's really remarkable is people tend to think that if I go against the group, I will be ostracized, you know, I'll be kicked out of the group. That can happen. But there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.

So often when we find that courage, we kind of are a little bit like an asshole about it, right? Like we just come out guns ablaze and like, you're an idiot. you're wrong. Let me tell you, I just agree with you. Well, no one wants to be talked to that way. Yeah, when it's coupled with self-righteousness and more superiority. Yes. And then you're like, wow, look at all the grief I just got. Yeah, because you're an asshole. Right. Like, so when you, when you think about the other person and their inherent dignity and you treat them with respect, you're going to be shocked at how receptive people. It doesn't mean they're going to agree with you, but people want to be understood, right? They want to, but when you just come and moralize

to them and tell them how wrong they are and everything they value is just stupid or bad, don't be surprised when they get defensive. But the ability to say, you know, look, I really respect you, but because I respect you, I want to share it, I actually have a different view of this. You know what I mean? You'll be shocked. Lead with respect, and you'll be shocked at how many people will stick with you. Yeah, when you were referring to the substitution of Whole Foods for sort of, you know,

calorie-inflated, uh, highly processed foods and it's not nutritious to us in the same way that we previously have been. And you take that same analogy and take it over to the connection space, right? We have this illusion of connection online,

which of course is a double-sided store. There's so much good that comes from it. But it often does give us this faulty surrogate for real connection. Yeah. And in-person connection. And I'm curious your thoughts. how when you go, for me, I know when I've spent periods alone in silence, I think community is very important. But when you take time away from stimulus, from the people in your life, and from the technology in which people are coming in through into your life,

you can start to disabuse yourself of the deeply held and ingrained beliefs that are societal norms and can start to arrive at whatever degree is your own truth. You know, not that there maybe even is one with the capital T, but in that direction, like you said. What are your thoughts there? Oh, I'm 100%. And I think that the secret in this is the moderation, right? You do want to take the time to get off the technology to separate from, because you made a really good point. Our normal lives are really just stimulus response, stimulus response. And if you just really pay attention to a given day, it's kind of surprising.

You think, was I in charge of my day or was I, like, led around by my nose? You know, and it's like, so in that sort of kind of chaotic environment, it's extremely hard to reflect in any meaningful way. So carving out space for that reflection, the removal for a time, it's not for nothing that most spiritual traditions have some form of that, ritualized. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not Jewish, but my... Shabbat, like, they shut off all technology for day, and it's like, get back to person. You don't get the technology, you don't have to just connect.

And it's like, you don't have to be religious to realize, oh, there's some value to that, because it buys you something. The same way that it doesn't give you... You do need to be in community, too, but you are the best contributor to your groups when you show up as yourself, right? Because think about it.

If a group, if everyone thinks the exact same, you're actually not necessary. You're just like a frontline infantry in the war, right? It's like just put you out there. It's when we show up with respect and belonging and we are bringing different perspectives and different lived truths and things like that to the same kind of problems

that we start to get somewhere. So let's say somebody goes on that journey. I think that it can be an endless rabbit hole to keep examining the ways in which we're programmed, right? You know? And you're familiar? Are you familiar with Renee Gerard's medicine theory? I love you.

If I can wave a magic wand and tell, like, everybody should have to understand René Girard. Mimetic rivalry, Mimetic desire is so profound, right? We imitate as a species and not just behavior, we imitate desire. And, I mean, now I'm just going to say, but the thing that's going to be like, oh, shoot, okay, so I'll just want something because you want it.

And I wouldn't even realize that that was the source of my wanting. And when we converge on something that's shareable, it is perhaps the single most bonding thing we could ever have. So religious experience, spiritual experiences, they have that in common, right? They're shareable. And so we can. The second is not shareable, though, you get the rivalry, right? And pretty soon you will lose.

You won't even remember why you were fighting anymore, right? And then the problem is, as Gerard showed us, is that, like, that cycle, you know, ultimately requires the scapegoat to stop, right? It just descends into all against all. And the only mechanism that decides to figure out, bro, was the actual scape. goat, right? And that always requires violence against them to settle it back down for a while. And, you know, you see other religious traditions would try to do something like substitute animal sacrifice for the human sacrifice, right? That stopped working for a while. And as Renee, who was a convert to

Christianity, right, from atheism, his view was that actually what was interesting about Christianity at its core was that it focused on the scapegoat, right, and made you confront the fact that you were going to destroy an innocent person for your own sins, so to speak, right? And it was like, and the idea that you were given a completely different path. This doesn't work anymore. The ritualistic sacrifice to keep the violence down doesn't, you're going to need a new way of behaving, a new paradigm to see the world.

So a turn-the-other-cheek isn't passivism. it's a, or love thy neighbor as they self, is incredibly hard to say, you have to see the other person as you're equal. Like, so you're offered a different approach to solve this fundamental memesis problem. And of course, we didn't. But I think nowadays it's like, it's funny because it was always a problem. But I think almost ironically, in an age of abundance, material abundance, where it doesn't get us out of social comparison, right? And the sense of unfairness and that I'm being screwed has nothing to do with absolute difference.

It's relative deprivation. So ironically, the more we have as a society, the more opportunities there are from a medic rivalry when you think we go the other way. Now, just to close the loop on this, the way out of that, if you think about it, is even though we can, truma mesas end up desiring the same things. We don't have to. That's not an automatic thing.

The more in touch we are with our own individuality and subjective values, the more we can partake in a society that's pluralistic, right? Like, like, the fact that, you know, I might think this watch is worth a certain amount of money and you're like, who in the world would pay that much money? Well, I would. I like this, right? We value different things. That's not something to look at and go, well, that's weird. I want you to value what I value. No, you don't. you're glad that I'll waste my money on a watch and not want the same thing you do, because then we're going to bid up the price of whatever you want. So the more people live authentically to their own individuality,

the more space we make for all of us to live great lives, and the more we put a dampening on the negative consequences of memetic bribery. So well said, and we could pull countless examples from history where this has driven atrocities throughout time, you know, whether it's something just a little bit more hilarious, like the tulips of, when was that? Yeah. It's like the tulip craze.

Yeah, the tulip craze when they were worth their weight and gold. It was like, it was like, it's the equivalent of like Bitcoin now. Although it probably has something. You've been like doing it's like, oh, we all think we all want this. You're like, yeah, we're literally paying a year's salary for a tulip bulb that a year ago was utterly like worth this. It was like, they were plentiful. And now we're all collecting them like they're the greatest. thing ever. One of my favorite parts about that, though, by the way, is the guy that wrote the book

way back when on the tulip craze. Charles McKay? Yes, exactly right. That's great. Turned out he fell for one, too. Oh, yeah. Like, just a couple of years later. Oh, yeah. The railroad scandal, everyone thought that there was a pump and dump on building railroads all across the colonized part. And he was like, everyone thinks it. So he dumped a bunch of money to it and lost his shirt. So it's like, that was a cautionary tell for me. I'm like, The guy that wrote the book on how we all go crazy collectively, this literally fell for the same thing because everybody else wanted it and he couldn't help but go along. Yeah, no. I mean, so from that through Nazi Germany to slavery, you can see how dangerous group think and this hard wire, this kind of memetic wiring within us can lead to so many like horrible.

atrocities on the planet and has. And I'm curious because you said you refer to like the more that you get clear on the connection with yourself in the face of whatever social norms are present, you can actually have clarity to see them for what they are. And it becomes hard when it's so pervasive, right? It's like when you're in water, it just becomes like fish doesn't really know it's in water. It's just it is what it is. It's in it. And so it's like asking the question is like what is the water if we are the proverbial fish that we're swimming in right now? And we've mentioned a few different collective illusions. There's so many.

But I think it's so important. And what I try to with conversations on this podcast, too, is not to tell people what to believe, but to, like, deconstruct how strongly we hold so many things that we do believe so we can have more of an open, receptive mind towards the different possibilities that are available to us. So, yeah, I love that. Got so juiced up with the memetic stuff and running the chart. What's interesting, too, from this sort of trying to get to the heart of, like, look, most of what you think is just what you've internalized from your society, like I said.

And that's just, and look, there's some upside to that. Like, we learn socially. Like, so we have to make all the same stupid mistakes over and over again, right? It's good to learn from each other. And then we carry that over from generations, and we call it culture, right? There's wisdom and there's norms that that create a pressure on us in what we believe and how we behave. And what's really interesting is I think one of the most important things as a society that we can be doing right now seems so simple that we take it for granted. But if you think about the norms that emerged in pluralistic liberal societies around tolerance, we just take it for granted now and now we're willing to burn that down so our side is right.

to the point where it's like even just associating with someone who disagrees, you disagree with is complicity. That serves some people's purpose really well when they want to control you. But what's important is through these norms of like, what does it mean to be part of this community? It means that I let you hold your opinion. Like that's what it means. So you can literally incentivize our need to belong by ensuring what it means to be part of the group is that we actually live. this way. And so it's like, we take it for granted because we've had generations who have lived with these liberal norms, but they're under attack right now. And it can be so easy in this era of outrage

and tribalism to think that it's worth sacrificing that for the win, for the group. But you're literally burning down the haystack to find the needle, right? It's not worth it. Hey, fam. One thing that brings me a lot of joy is having a warm and nourishing drink to start my day as a part of my morning ritual, but I personally don't drink anything with strong caffeine. I just feel better that way. That's why I love mudwater. You probably heard me share a bunch about their OG blends, which are made with cacao, functional mushrooms, and adaptogenic herbs. So you get natural energy in focus, but without the reckless caffeination of coffee. However, if you're not ready to leave coffee behind entirely, I get it. And that's why they just launched

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You know, when we think about collective illusions, and we talk a little about the problems that they bring for us personally and collectively, there's a flip side of that, which is because they're social lies, they're incredibly fragile. and if you can shatter them, societal change happens very quickly at a scale that you just seem unimaginable any other way, because I'm not having to change your mind, right? I just have to get you to see accurately that other people agree with you. So a modern example that will come back to Velvet Revolution.

If you look at, say, marriage equality in the U.S., fastest change in public opinion ever recorded. 2003, only 30% of Americans agreed with gay marriage. 2017, it was 70%. That exponential change in public even does not happen if people privately disagreed with it. Right. Because the flip side was interracial marriage. If you look at approval for interracial marriage,

it took decades of linear change because people just weren't comfortable with it. So I have to change your mind, but changing your mind doesn't change the next person's mind. mind, right? So it's just that slow process. Under a collective illusion, as more people start speaking up, it creates permission for other people by lowering the cost of courage. And then it just goes. And so in the marriage equality example, in 2003, I believe was the year in Chicago, they had a convening of activists and scholars trying to figure out where do we go from here.

And the consensus was, do not push for marriage. The public's not ready for it. It will backfire. there was a small group of activists who had private opinion data at the time that showed this just wasn't true. That a small majority of people, it was like the love is love crowd and libertarians were like, I don't really care, right? Privately we're like, this is fine, it's fine. But when you ask them, well, what do you think, what do you think your neighbors think? What do you think your fellow church members think?

Your colleagues, oh, no, no, they're not okay with it, right? So recognizing that it was an illusion, they peeled off and went to holidays. Hollywood, instead of trying to persuade anyone, they use a different strategy, which is called social proof. I'm not trying to convince you. I'm just going to show you. I'm going to reveal. So you got Will and Grace.

You got these kind of things, and it wasn't in any phase. It's just like, I'm going to show it to you as if it's not a big deal. Right. And then we internalize it because it's kind of funny. Your brain, as smart as your brain is, it's not that smart. It treats fictional characters that you care about as part of your in-group, even though you know they're fictional. Yeah.

So if I hear it talked about on a show that I like, it has an exponential effect on my perception of what my group believes. Okay. Yeah, it's where music and the entertainment industry plays a huge. So powerful. These are the artifacts that tell us what we believe. Yeah. Right. And so that worked there really well, really well.

The Velvet Revolution is, for me, the single best example at a societal level of what's possible when the problem is a collective illusion. You choose the right strategy. don't persuade. That big end. A big end. And in fact, before we get that, I keep, I keep promising this. It's great for our attention. Just keep on watching, folks.

We'll get to do it at the end. We're about like, right? Because we go off the cliff in the car. Stay tuned next week. When I say the strategy really matters under collective illusions, it's really important that you don't try to persuade because it will actually entrench the illusion. Best example of that there is.

And then we'll get to the Bell Revolution. is, remember the St. Notre Drugs campaign? Yeah, yes. I heard you talk about this. Yeah, I mean, I remember seeing it in school. It was based on a small uptick and first-time drug use for marijuana amongst teens. The government spends about a billion dollars on a massive ad campaign. Everybody remembers.

It's like, it was unbelievable from an advertising standpoint. The typical American teen saw, was it three ads a day for six years? So this was this was strictly American? Or was it, okay. I mean, they might have done it somewhere else, too, but this particular. They're one that... So, yeah. Probably half of our audience maybe isn't as familiar with it.

But like, you get pulled into school. If you Google the Sino Drugs campaign and you'll see these dumb commercials, like, this is your... They crack an egg in the frying pan? Yeah. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions? And I remember, I'm like, wait, how's my brain like an egg? You know, but, well, here's what's funny.

So it turns out that the government was wrong. Private opinion data at the time. So the government thought that the reason kids were trying drugs is they were curious about drugs. they were wrong. Private opinion data existed showing they were skeptical about drugs. What they wanted was to fit in. And they were under,

what I think is a pretty hilarious illusion, most American teens at the time thought that most American teens did drugs. I mean, who else would spend billions of dollars on a marketing campaign if it wasn't the case, right? Exactly. So they were blitzed with a billion dollars of ads trying to scare them straight.

They took from that. This must be what we do, because why would adults try so hard to stop? Get us to stop. In which case, the best majority, I'm part of the majority. So great, now I know what I do. I want to be part of this, right?

So, no kidding. Scholars have pretty conclusively shown that that campaign directly led to an increase in first-time drug use. So we're not doing that, right? What the Velvet Revolution taught us is, if you pursue the social proof strategy, the kind of things that we can do together as a people

that everyday individuals can do is incredible. And here's what that is. The Velvet Revolution is the only example in history that we know of where an authoritarian communist regime was overthrown without anybody losing their life, without a single shot being fired. And at the time, you know, you see it into the 80s and 90s,

you had other Soviet satellite states, Hungary, these other places, like bloody suppression of revolts. Like, I mean, hundreds of thousands of people being just murdered. So this is weird. It had puzzled scholars forever. like, why was this so different? And what was so fascinating

and it is not just that it happened, but who led it, which will give you this secret, this Vossel Pavl, a poet, playwright. No military experience, wasn't a politician at the time. And he had, he was an anti-communist,

but he was obviously a creative, an artist, and he had written a play called The Garden Party, which you can look it up, it's pretty great. It was this subtle satire of communism. It was so subtle that the censors didn't know they were being made fun of. So they let it get put on.

So he puts it on. It becomes a runaway hit. It was literally like the Hamilton of its time. This is communist Chuck islovakia. Yes. And so he, good point. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for really important.

Important point. Do my job. And so he's like, well, okay. he realizes he attends every showing of it, and instead of watching the play, he watches the audience. And he said, they laughed at all the right parts. He said, they laughed at places that you wouldn't find funny

if you really believed in communism. So he realizes that the problem in Czechosfaki is not that everybody believes in communism, it's that everybody believes that everybody believes, and it keeps them living in this lie. And he wrote what is a remarkable manifesto. You can download for free right now. It's called The Power of the Powerless.

It is so worth reading. It's about 80 pages long. You'll think he's writing about today. It's that good. And he writes about how he discovers the illusion at the heart of the problem. And he decides, well, wait, if the problem is an illusion, then the answer is authenticity.

Okay, well, everybody else that's part of the revolutionary crowd's like, are you kidding me? He was mocked. Like, you're so naive. You've, like, they have all the guns. You're going to defeat them with authenticity, right? But so he goes about setting up these, what he called these small works, right? Look, if the problem is people that are so comfortable living in the lie,

we have to build the muscle of living in truth again. And he had the wisdom to realize, you don't go right after politics, right after the, I think, start small. He remembered this story who was told about this old woman next to him. live next to him, who had this small little garden. And when he's, oh, you like garden. No, I don't. I can see the garden right here. No, I don't.

Because in that environment, don't admit anything. Because next thing you know, it can be, all Westerners want you to do gardening, you or whatever. So he sets this up. He starts slowly building the muscle of authenticity. Just getting comfortable. Set up like literary magazines so people could publish poetry, not about politics, just about everyday stuff, things like that.

And he is completely shocked at how fast this happens. Like, nobody sees it coming. Like, the KGB missed the Velvet Revolution entirely. The CIA missed it. Even Havel, just a few months before the student protests that would unleash 12 days and then it's over, he's being interviewed in the international magazine, and he's trying to rally the troops.

And he's given this sort of like, revolutions take time. You just have to be in it. don't expect immediate results. He's like, listen, I am in it. I don't think I'll even live to see the end, but I'm still committed. Three months later, he's the first democratically elected president of a free Czechoslovakia. And so I think about that story a lot because I think, look, if a poet can overthrow communism under a collective illusion, think what we can do it as a people, not just a people in any one country, but as humanity. Right. If we can, if we can recognize that the things that are holding us back right now by and large aren't truth.

They're social lies. We could actually do something about it. And probably the best news of all when it comes to this is that because illusions are created by us, it's the people that uphold them. Only the people can actually shatter them. And so rather than feeling helpless and hopeless, it's like, who am I? What can I do? I'm not famous.

I'm not rich. I'm just an everyday person. Turns out that is the most important role in social proof of all. The person next door to me, who's just like me, has the same constraints. You know, goes the same, takes her kid to tee ball with me. You know, it doesn't a billionaire. Well, suddenly, they start speaking up. I'm like, hold on, right?

You lower the cost of courage for me. And then I speak up. And it lowers the cost of courage for 10 more people. then it changes. So it can feel right now all over the world that feels like the wheels fell off. It just does.

It's like, what happened? It just is like, I thought we, I knew we had trouble and problems. I didn't think we were this divided. I didn't think we, you know, this must hatred. If you know underneath it all is a shared humanity

that really is there, we have so much in common. And that, that age of courage that's coming, it's necessary. and you have a role to play. So empowering, man. Margaret Mead,

I love her quote around, you know, never doubt a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. And the analogy, and the story of the Velvet Revolution, points to the power of what you mentioned earlier,

which is don't convince show, you know, use the arts, use your words, to speak to something essential that we all fundamentally actually know to be true but are too afraid to speak up on. And sometimes we don't even know that we know, right?

And I think that for everybody that's listening right now, we all have different movements and initiatives and things we agree and don't agree with. And I think by applying that lens and the way that you approach something, not just what you do, but the way in which you do it, the consciousness in which you do it,

drastically affects the impact of the successfulness of the outcome of it. It's such a potent reminder. Yeah. And what's so great is, you know, we think to find that courage that we have to necessarily first jump to the most important things in the world. Right. Just settle down. The biggest beast right off the bat.

We'll get there, right? Start small. Like, I'll usually tell people, like, we're so used to self-silencing right now that we do it out of habit. We do it when we don't even need to. It's just become we've been so comfortable living in the lie, as Havel would say. start small. Make one commitment. I am not going to self-science on one thing.

I don't care. Because you know when you're, you know when you're not telling the truth. You know it. You know when you're just like, you know what, I don't agree, but I'm not going to say anything.

I don't want to rock the boat. I don't want to do this, whatever. Or I'm afraid. Just start building that muscle. And you don't have to openly disagree. This is the beautiful thing. If you don't feel comfortable just saying, you know what,

I don't agree. You can, there's two ways that you can really play. in this game and contribute to shattering illusions. One is to, so you tell me something, I want to know whether you really believe it or we're all following for the illusion. Just ask someone why they hold the belief they hold.

Yeah. So you come in, oh, we're all voting for so on and so. Oh, really? Tell me why. Now, first of all, if they've thought it through, they'll give you, they love to give you the reasons. Okay, well, now you know, this is actually what my group believes. Great. Now I can decide whether to conform or not. But if it's devoid of nuance.

They'll be like, everybody knows. Everybody knows. Of course it is. Yeah. So they can't give me an answer. Now, you know, listen, hold on. Before I go ahead and conform, I'm pretty sure there's an illusion here, right? And I'm pretty sure.

And the second thing, which is really powerful, is just inject uncertainty into the conversation. Groups do not punish members for not having made up their mind yet. That's a really important insight. So if you come to me and be like, oh, man, obviously, you know, I'm voting for so-and-so, let's just say. And I'm like, I'm definitely not, but I don't want to be called a racist or a text or whatever. I'd say, oh, I haven't made it my mind. I can, you know, some pros and cons on both sides of, and then they'll talk about it. And what you'll find, though, is it great when there's an illusion is you've just given permission for people to say the same thing.

Yeah, me either, actually, you know? And then we can have an actual conversation. You'll just be shocked. It's like, when you step into that courage, even around the small things, you're so afraid that everyone else is going to disagree and they're going to judge you, isolate you, you'll be more lonely. It is far more likely that they will thank you. that you have created the space for them to be authentic. Right? And then it's suddenly like, oh, thank you.

This is amazing. Now we're having conversations. Then it snowballs. So just that courage, it feels scary, but it's less true than it is. We're just used to it. We have the habit of living in a life. It feels like we all have a great opportunity to find those micro moments in our lives with whatever form of expression. We can start to just honor what our actual impulses, you know?

I think that there's so many things. things from the choices we make, from the clothes we wear, to the things we attend, to the music that we listen to, that is just so because everyone else does, it's like the good thing to do. And I think growing up also in the Midwest, there's, like, there's a lot of that that I recognized in my own childhood of seeing the different ways in which views on entertainment, on masculinity, on all these things. You know, like, being called gay as a kid is like the worst insult ever as a dude, you know? And now it's like, you know, kind of cool.

We went from... It's like men are wearing dresses, you know? Yeah, it's like it went from like literally the worst insult to like, it's kind of cool, you know? But you go to Europe, right? And like there's not the shame around men having affection with their male friends, you know? You can have a hand around on their knee or on their shoulder and it doesn't mean something about their sexuality or something.

There's like so many areas of life we can dissect into all of that. And I feel like, and I'm curious your thoughts on the individual level, to the degree that we can start to crack these previously held notions that are actually confining us because in some way they're defining us, then we can actually get more vitality in life. And life becomes way more joyous when you're actually living life from your own choices. Yeah. And what's interesting is, and it brought up something important. So we can feel the need to conform because our group right now holds a view. you. But the reality is most of the stuff that we feel hemmed in by are actually legacy norms in our society that were beliefs that people may or may not have had generations and generations ago, right? So like your masculinity thing, right? There was a time when that, you know, you think about the 50s and so that it was definitely, I would guess, real private truth.

Men are men, women are women. They're like this. That's not been true in private, even in our data for a really long time. Yeah. And, but the problem with norms is, unless I see other people behaving differently, I just assume they agree with it, right? So I don't dare to put my arm around another guy because I don't want to be called gay or whatever. But then my act of behaving that way reinforces the illusion for everybody else.

We all get stuck living diminished lives. And again, it's, you know, it can feel like, well, what am I supposed to do? It's like, listen, you're going to be shocked. shocked at how easy this actually is, not just that you do it, but how you do it. Again, always lead with respect. And if you can't do that, that's a different problem, right? Like, that's a different problem. If I can't even acknowledge your humanity and the ability for you to hold a view that's different than mine without it being the end of the world, then there's a different problem with me. This isn't a collective illusions problem. But just the ability to just sit here and say,

listen, I respect you, and I want to know, I want to understand where you're coming from, And I want to share with you where I'm coming from. It's shocking how bonding that really is for people. Yeah. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the self-righteousness and morality, high ground that can come with, you know, new decisions and new changes of behavior that can ostracize and create separation when you want to then proselytize that into the environment and peeps. That always creates resistance rather than you showing up authentically.

and people are like attracted. I think I heard the best form of activism is attractivism. Yes. You know, by living in life that with, as an example of these beliefs that you have that exude from you, people will be drawn towards it,

ask you questions, and make changes on their own accord. Again, it's the dancing guy. Yeah, the dancing guy. You didn't try to moralize or tell you what you should do because, you know, shoulds just could with shame. He was just living his best life.

He just live his best life. I don't care. If no one, else dances, don't. But if you want to, come dance, right? And you think about, it's always a dead giveaway. When somebody knows that they don't have people on their side, then they have to resort to that. I need to shut you down. If you thought that most people were on your side, I'd want everyone to speak up. Everybody share their views. It's great. But when I know I have a fringe view and I know that I can't get my way without it, when your whole worldview is,

if only everyone would do exactly what I want them to do, well, they won't, right? Then I have to find ways of controlling you and manipulating you. And the fastest path for that, like in a free society that doesn't, well, in theory, we haven't been able to use the coercive power of the state to make you do something, right? We can't at gunpoint yet. All we have left is social influence. And so it's sort of ironic that the effect of social influence and conformity tends to be higher in free societies because it's the only good.

tool available for manipulation. Yeah. Right. So when someone's trying, they won't even let you voice something different and they immediately tell you you're not just wrong, you're bad. It's a dead giveaway that this is not a widely held view. Like it's just not. If more people believe that, I don't need to do that.

I'm confident in my view and we can have a conversation when I'm not confident and I know that I'm in that 10%, then I need to do things that are more manipulative to get my way. Did you feel like in your life, what was the biggest collective illusion being run on you that kind of shaped who you thought you could become? Yeah. So my life was, I had a crazy background. Like, you know, so I was a Harvard professor for a dozen years and went there for my

doctorate, but I was also a high school dropout with a 0.9 GPA. I always say you have to work really hard to do that poorly, right? But in my case, I think the most profound illusion and something that was holding me back had to do with faith at the time. I was raised in an environment. It was a pretty conservative religious environment that the culture, everybody was that and the culture reinforced that. And so I just assumed it was just truth, right? And it never quite fit for me very well. And I just assumed there was something wrong with me.

And I had to like work harder to be it. Well, after I dropped out of high school, got married when I was 19, had two kids working Minowage jobs for a couple of years. I was working at Circuit City, which is no longer a business now. And on my lunch break, I didn't have any money. So I walked across the street to the Barnes & Noble, and I'd go and peruse the self-help. I knew something was wrong. And I stumbled on a book, which is hilarious, but it was called The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by

Nathaniel Brandon, who was an iron-ran disciple. which is like the only time I probably ever going to say. But it was like, and early on in it, you know, at the time I didn't have a lot of sense of self-worth. And there was something profound that I read. He said, you know, if self-esteem and self-worth is just the alignment between your beliefs and your behavior, if you're acting in ways that you don't believe, you will not respect yourself. And so I was like, oh, so you got to get that into alignment. And then there was this incredible aha for me.

He said, people often assume that their beliefs are correct and it's their behavior that needs to be changed. But it's just as likely that behavior is actually indicator of who you really are and that you don't really believe what you think you believe. And I was like, what? And so it forced me to stop and think, well, wait, do I actually believe this? And I realized, I didn't. I didn't.

And once that's. that's scary, right? And especially when it's something existential, right? The deep tentacles of that and all that. I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend, you know, changing your religious views if you don't have to. It's quite the, I mean, you've been on that journey. Yeah, like, it's a, it's an interesting experience. But it really taught me, and it was funny is, the more I talk to the people around me, kind of whisper it, like, I don't know so sure. It's like, yeah, I'm not so sure either. And you're like, wait, wait, we, we. We're all doing this.

We're all going to church on Sunday. We're all saying we believe these things. And the people that mattered most to me are like, hey, I don't think so either. I'm like, what? So it was, you know, that it was so freeing and scary at the same time. And of course, those always go hand in hand, right? We always want the freedom without the responsibility.

It's like, no, it's scary to take responsibility for your life. But if it weren't for that, for recognizing that, I certainly wouldn't be living the life I am right now. And so sometimes you need those sort of like crucible moments and sort of break open that thing for you and force you to confront this thing that you take for granted as just truth. Yeah. It's just the norms of the society you're in. And it turns out most of them don't even believe it anyway. And here we are.

Yeah. And that it's way more nuanced and people have their doubts that go to church. Maybe it's, you know, fulfilling for them on many different levels for the connection to the. the transcendent, the being around community, all of those things. But I'm curious, so that's fascinating. You had this revelation towards agnosticism or atheism that was the catalyst for these other areas of your life. Yeah. I became a hopeful agnostic. Yeah. I don't know. It'd be kind of cool. Yeah. I feel like, how can you not be also that? You know? What's great about it, what I love about it once you got past the fear of it.

Because I went for about a year of, like, existential dread. Because there's some, even when it's not true, there's something really great about certainty. Right? Where you're like, yeah, I know why we're here. I know what happens when we die. It's going to be amazing. Just do what you're told, and it's awesome. And then you're like, oh, shoot, that's not true.

So then who am I and what kind of life am I going to live? And I remember when I was working at Mass General Hospital when I was going through this, and I had a colleague who was an atheist. And I remember asking her in all sincerity, but wait, if you're not religious, why be a good person? And she went, flip and flip me right on the floor. She was like, what kind of question is that? Like, why be a good person unless you don't want to get punished by God? Right, right.

And I was like, but that, like, it just, I couldn't think. of any other way. So, but what I loved about it is, um, it, once you let go of that false sense of certainty as I perceived it, yeah, and took some responsibility for what I believed in the kind of life I wanted to live, it allowed you to go and explore all the traditions. Like, we decided with our kids, they were little, I said, you know what, we're going to little introduce them to every single religious and spiritual belief in the world. We're just going to system megal, and just tell him, listen, there's all these, you know, William James wrote a whole book on the variety of religious experiences and so I just like, look, and just, you know, just, let's just

expose ourselves to the wisdom of, of, and it was so incredible, right? And I would try things on for a while, you know, Buddhism and you run it down, you're like, you know what, I'm going to take some of this and it doesn't fit me perfectly, you know? I had the, um, uh, really good fortune of getting to spend a decent chunk of time with the Dalai Lama. We had a convening of

neuroscientists and the contemplative scholars and fun. And as luck may have it or I guess probably not for him but like

is so we were at a we had lunch and I was sitting with him at the table four of us so we got to sit with him and someone called in a bomb threat oh boy

and they locked it down for hours. Wow. So we just sat there and talked. It was like and you know I'll never forget, you know, His Holiness said, look, I think this is a complete package. I think it works really well. I think it's a great way to live your life. But you've got to try it on.

He's like, speaking about like Buddhism in general. Yeah, he just said, look, I believe when you try it on, you're going to want all of it. But if you try it on in all sincerity and you think some of it works and some of it doesn't, discard what doesn't work for you. Yeah. And keep what does. I was like, you can do that? Like, you know, because you're so used to thinking there's a whole package. It's all our, nothing. But I think what most people figure out when they take on that courage and the responsibility to live an authentic life, especially in this space of spirituality and that is that the reality is, like, there's a reason why there's a variety of those experiences. And they all have some fundamental things in common, but they also have differences that fit you better or worse. And for me, I just found, you know, you take so much insight from

a wide range of things and internalize that as who am I and what kind of life do I want to live? It goes back to when you were talking about earlier, when you asked people about their political positions and they just say, oh, because obviously that's who should be voted or, you know, same thing. We do that with God. We do that with so many things in culture, you know, I just think it's so healthy, whether it's the variety of religious experiences or reading the contemplative traditions and the Eastern wisdom, which is so beneficial from our life, whether or not you take the reincarnation and some of the afterlife stuff with it

to even just strengthen your own belief and conviction in what you believe. Maybe you change your mind, maybe you, whatever. But that appreciation for complexity and nuance is definitely a sign of the matured intellect. It's definitely a sign of actually arriving with more confidence that you're believing something that you have chosen

and that hasn't just been chosen for you in some context. Yeah. And you know, you think about, I think this is really important because if you find yourself afraid to even ask the question, then that belief system is probably not yours, and it's more normative. It's more the pressure of the group. Because to me, it's like, I'm not interested in what you think is true. I want to know why this other thing isn't true for you.

And if you can't give me that answer, fine, you do you, but this is not you in pursuit of truth, you in pursuit of wisdom, you in pursuit of a better life, this is you living with a paradigm, might be true with a capital T, might not be. You don't know, and you've not really examined it. And I think about, you know, when you think about even the emergence of the concept of, like, human dignity and Emmanuel Kant, who's one of the first in the Western tradition to really elevate that outside of a pure religious, of like, as a humans, we have the ability to, to imagine a future for ourselves, and we can order our behavior to pursue it,

so we should have the right to do that. We can know a right from wrong on our own. We have our own moral judgment, so we don't have to defer to authority. And that became for the Enlightenment, the tagline of Dare to Know. Right? So Dare to Know.

Like, it's okay to explore, even if, as you said, even if it's like, I can tell you why I'm not a Zoroastrian, I can tell you why I'm not, you know, and I can tell you what I value about those things. And I'd say most of the time they end up reinforcing your own convictions. But it deepens this.

And I found that it also, at the same time, deepens your strength of your own convictions, but weirdly has you hold them lightly in a way that before you held them with almost like a death grip. Because if I'm only doing it because I think this is what everybody believes, you not, you seeing the world that I'm seeing and disagreeing, with my belief system is a threat to the whole thing. Right? Like, because unless I've thought it through for myself, it's consensus that has given me this sense of certainty.

Yeah. So one person going against it is why, like, religion historically has uplifted more people and also been the greatest source of evil in human history because it's like, it's very few other things can make good people do really horrific things when it comes to my eternal damnation. Yeah, I mean, I've said this many times.

Hitler in many ways was doing what he thought was God's work, you know? And he has very interesting spiritual religious beliefs about what he was doing, you know. But you look at throughout history and having that level of certainty. And it's why I invite just so many people to examine, not just dare to know, but dare to examine how you think you know, look into epistemics. And at the very least, it will reinforce your certainty for, what you believe, but perhaps you'll arrive at a place that is actually more true to how reality operates. I just, I find, I approach and examine people who are certain about anything with just a lot of like, yeah, maybe. Maybe. Maybe. How do you know? How can you really know? How can you

for a certain. I think one of the truisms for me is like certainty and knowledge are inversely correlated. Yeah. Like the more, one of my favorite philosophers, Carl Popper, who did more for the philosophy of science. He talked about like one of the paradoxes of knowledge is as you expand the radius of knowledge, your perimeter of ignorance grows. Wow, I didn't. I've always said that, but I didn't know somebody else also thought of that.

And his point was, and you never know if you actually have truth. Yeah. So one of the cool things that he discovered was he was trying to figure out what demarcate science from non-science. Because people say, oh, it's data. All the positivists were like, it's data. And he was like, well, astrology and astronomy use the exact same data in some sense. Like one is technically science, one is not, right? So it can't be that.

And he talked about how, and I think this is a good way, how I try to live my life, is he said, look, no. you, it's impossible to positively prove that you have the truth. Like, so imagine I have a theory that's like all sheep or white. Okay, cool. I've seen a thousand sheep and they've all been white. That does not mean it is true. Yeah. It probably increases my feeling of confidence in my belief, this provisional knowledge I have.

But one black sheep falsifies it. And his insight, which I think was so interesting, is we get to truth through the elimination of error, that's it. So as you try stuff on and look to falsify it, get rid of the stuff we know to not be true, you will work your way to truth, even though you don't know what it actually is. And I think that kind of life, and I think it's what you talk about all the time here, right? That kind of examination is like every time you realize something that, oh, wait, that's not my belief or that's not my thing. It almost, we almost mourn it in some way, the loss of certain when it should be celebrated.

That's knowledge, right? The stuff you're holding onto that you think is so true, maybe, maybe, that you know isn't true. And so the more we can live our lives that way and realize we're not trying to find true, you wouldn't know if it slapped you in the face, right?

Just because you're seeing a thousand white sheep does not mean that all sheep are white. So looking for the anomalies, looking for the falsification is hard. It's a different way to think about how you live, but it's the fastest path in my way. mind to getting to real truth. Yeah, I agree fullheartedly. And it's the path to self-discovery as well, you know? It's like, how can you really be certain who or what you actually fundamentally are?

I don't know. I can't really say a whole lot in that regard. I can definitely name you a ton of things that I'm not, that I'm not fundamentally like this hand, because I could chop it off and I still seem to exist. You know, similarly with my name, my cast, my creed, my ethnicity, you know, all of these things aren't actually me in a fundamental essential sense. And so that's the path of self-realization. It is. And one of the things, last thing I'll say about Carl Popper, you know, because obviously we're talking about philosophy of science,

this is what we were doing here. It's what we've veered into. We'll go from memetic desire to conjecture and reputation. He talked about how there's no solo activity. Even reason is not a solo thing. There's no way you could be aware of your blind spots, your own biases. we have embodied cognition, we are a product of our environments.

You just can't reason by yourself. So we talked about that's even a social exercise and that let's reason together because you can actually see the limits of what I think and believe easier than I can and vice versa. So as we are engaging with one another. So even this act of like self-discovery is actually not a very good solo exercise. Yes, you need to go away sometimes, right, and reflect. But building community of fellow seekers and people who want to actually understand in truth and aren't just going to cling to norms and preconceived notions is probably the most important

that you could do in terms of just getting to know yourself better. Yeah, no, in the Vedic traditions, you know, kind of summarizes by saying, like, the one becomes two for the joy of becoming one again. You know, one is differentiates itself into manyness for the experience of itself through reflection of one another. And so it's like, yeah, I can go away in the Himalayan cave. and have some sort of level of self-realization or discovery, but not until I come back into the real, you know, world, so to speak,

and have the reflection of all of these things that I am and that I'm not, that I actually discover more of myself and I can actually see myself. I've always found, I'm not how you think about this, but I've always found that the reflection periods are good at getting me to question things that I don't really believe. Like, I'm better at using that time to be like, wait, I've just been kind of going through the emotion.

Like, why am I doing this? I don't really believe that or I don't really want to do that. And it was almost habit. I found it, maybe I'm doing it wrong, is in terms of discovering new horizons for myself and new parts of myself that I just didn't know existed, I found reflection less valuable than just getting into the world in an intentional way and exposing yourself to the broader range of humanity.

Right? As you point out, it's like, I can, I learn more about myself in encountering you, and the things, you know what I mean, and how I react to those things, than anything else. Yeah, you need friction. You need something to rub against or resistance to actually have some sort of movement of things oftentimes. I feel like for me, I've grown the most emotionally, relationally, when in partnership, when in relationship, because that actually gives you material to bring stuff up to the surface and work with. Otherwise, it's kind of easy to be

solo and single and just chilling on your mountaintop and just kind of be near it, you know, but then you realize, oh, there are actual patterns. underneath the surface that you can gain awareness to once you actually have something that meets with them and see where you're stuck. It's so true. It's funny, we talk about self-discovery and potential and self-actualization. And I think what I think we often underestimate, and I think the humanists got this right too, is that the reality is that all that stuff you want is almost always on the other side of fear or discomfort.

Yeah. Like almost nothing meaningful that you've discovered by yourself has happened in a friction-free environment. And yet we try to avoid, we try to bubble wrap our lives in ways that give us that false sense of certainty and avoid the friction and then our like lack meaning and purpose and wonder why. Yeah. To me, there's a straight through line from breaking down muscle at the gym where you're actually getting weaker to become stronger where we go to the psychological.

lens and by actually feeling like an absolute noob, whether it's learning the piano or exploring a different religion or whatever, you feel dumb, you're actually gaining intelligence, you know? And same with exposing yourself to different paradigms and belief systems. It's it's sharpening your capacity to know. I totally agree. And one of the tricks that I've found useful for myself, and I've done this primarily in my scientific work, but, you know, started applying it in broader life. is when we think about other paradigms, other perspectives, we tend to straw man those in a hurry, right?

It's like, oh, yeah, no, I understand that. I know that's just ridiculous, right? What I found helpful is I'll try to try it on and live it as if I'm a true believer of whatever it is. So, remember when I was in grad school, I'd be like, yeah, behaviors, and that's stupid. And I actually do think it's kind of dumb. But like, I know why I think it's dumb now. But it's like, no, I'm going to literally just assume I'm a behavior. and I'm going to read everything, not from a critical lens.

Because if you're reading it to be critical right off the bat, you're going to find the things you don't like. But what if I'm a true believer? And you run it down until you start to see where it falls apart. Then you can really criticize it in a way that you understand. And then it can be a choice of faith, right? Yes. But there is inherently logical flaws in any religious system that you can poke. And it's okay to then come to faith and arrive.

arrive there, you know, but it's like a, but I agree. I think that's so healthy and needed. It's, it's, I find it thoroughly enjoyable because it's like, you get into this thing where I'm like, okay, I'm just going to run this down. I was like, okay, like, I'm a Buddhist now. You know what I mean? And like, take that seriously, right? And you try it on and give it as if, like, this is the most important thing. And it's like, you give it a fair shake. And even when you realize why you're not that, it's pretty shocking how many things you pull from these different traditions. And I think sometimes I'm actually not even charitable in the way I'm like, oh, I know

where I got that if I'm honest about it, right? Like, oh, I have this value. Like, yeah, dude, you got it from the religion you left. And it's okay to acknowledge that, right? It's okay to say that was really valuable and it's still a part of me, even though I'm not a practicing member of that particular faith. I love the way in which these conversations take different past, you know, tangents. I have a few more questions, but we recently just launched our know-liself collective community.

So it's like our online digital home and I'm very excited. So people are starting to submit questions that I want to start asking on the podcast. So let's see. Arianna Prince asks, what have you normalized in your everyday life that is abnormal and why? So I have a way of approaching how I live my life, which was sort of hard earned. And now it sounds like this is a bit of promotion. As I said in my book before Collected Illusions in Dark Horse, I wrote, which was about like so much of how we pursued is, like, we are going to focus on I'm going to be great at something and then I'll be happy. and we did this massive dark horse project at Harvard

where we studied hundreds of people from all walks of life who came out of nowhere and just crushed it and were just, where did they come from? How are they great? And one of the most important lessons that we learned from that and that wrote about is like, there is a way in which it's really important to think about fulfillment

as the thing you're focused on, finding that fit between your individuality and the environment and the thing that really lights you up. And it seems obvious that when you do that, excellence usually follows. You're passionate about it. You love it. You're going to work harder at it. But we've been sold this bill of goods, right? We live these lives based on other people's expectations and their view of a good life. And we sort of think, yeah, once I get there, it's going to be great. But we all know people who are phenomenally successful and miserable. Yeah. Right?

Like, and so it's one of those things where it's like I try really, really, really hard to just say, look, I get one life so far as I know. And I want to be as fulfilled and happy as possible. And I will prioritize those things and trust that the rest of it follows in terms of you can make enough money to support yourself. You can do these things. And it's actually quite hard. but I've tried to normalize it both with my kids

and everything. And I'll tell you what's really funny is how hard it is to get out of that. There's a way that we're supposed to do, like the straight narrow path, everyone does it, and you're going to come over here and zig when everyone zags, it's hard. My youngest son, he was when I had written Dark Horse and I was a media tour, I was 2018.

I get this text from him. He's in college. And he said, he's back home. And he said, when you get him, at home, we need to talk. And I was like, oh, like, someone's pregnant or, you know, what's going on? Like, I come in and he's got Dark Horse. And it's dog-eared and got these notes. And he sits down and he said, I don't think I can do what I've been going to school to do. He's going to be mechanical engineer. And he said, look, I'm good at it, but I don't love it that way. He's like, I want to work with my

hands. And I kept waiting for it to become more practical. But it just, kept getting more abstract. What I should have said was, great. Let's figure out, and I did eventually. My initial reaction was, well, I meant this for other people's kids. You just finished college. You just do this. We'll work it all the background.

But it's fun to, like, it's hard when you're not doing things the way everybody says they should be done. So you think about right now, the reason I bring that up is we're entering a period of time where the things that you thought were the safe, predictable paths, even if you didn't like it, to a stable, happy life, are falling apart. I think the best example is college. And I say that as someone who did go to college and went to graduate school,

that value is there for some people, but the vast majority of people, it is a very, very bad bet that leaves you in debt and a little resentful of the guy who's, your plumber, who's making really good money and freaking happy, and you're like, what do I do with my degree in grievance studies? So it's like there's never been a more important time for you to both, the superpower in this age is a commitment to knowing yourself and the stuff that you preach.

And the preach. Preach. Preach. And this willingness to apply that to really question. why we're doing the things we're doing, why am I making that choice? Why do I think I have to go to college right now? Why do I think my kid has to go to college?

Why do I need to be in this? Because those things which, at least in the past, might have still led to some stable outcome, you might not have been thrilled, but at least it was predictable. It's not true anymore. Yeah. And so when we're looking in this dramatic sort of chaos,

as we're going through a pretty dramatic paradigm shift right now in society, you've got to find stability someplace else. The institutions don't provide it, the norms of society aren't going to provide it, but you can't find it eternally. The more you, I keep pointing to your sign. It's great.

The more that we lean into the stuff that you're talking about, I think what people, I think, I don't know if you've experienced this, but it's been true for me. It's scary at first because you have to get rid of things that increase uncertainty and sense of chaos. But as you start getting good at that process, it becomes rewarding, it becomes itself a source of stability.

And you develop an incredible inner confidence in your own ability to discover and find it out. And so when you become the source of your own stability, oh man, the world's your oyster. I resonated a lot with that. I was just thinking this morning when I was on a walk, how there's kind of this inverse relationship behind how often the more ideas we are full with in our head, the more empty our life feels and the more empty we are internally, the more full our life feels. And it's not like, I'm a great lover of ideas and philosophy. It doesn't mean to like not have an intellect that's operating.

But to like just allow that that spaciousness, you know, and to like hold things loosely allows you to meet life fully and actually discover something new. Yeah. And I think I totally agree. And I think it's like, if you recognize that your brain doesn't care whether you're happy, your brain's trying to survive, right? So we confuse things like feeling certain, right? Even a false sense of certainty with knowledge.

And they're just not the same thing, right? And it's like being comfortable that you're your own sort of rock. And you have an approach and you can be part of a community of people. that are trying to do the same thing, that I say this because we tend to think if something, the tighter we hold something, the more true it is, I think is the exact opposite. When you feel confident in a truth,

you can hold it lightly, and you can make space for people who disagree. It doesn't threaten you, right? Like, when you have that just core inner confidence in something, it's like your disagreeing doesn't threaten, because my belief isn't based on us agreeing. Yeah, the more you see, life and phenomena around you clearly, the less you need to feel the urge to defend what just is,

just like, you know, and we can have our differences of perception, but like the color that is yellow right there, I see it clearly for what it is. I don't get enraged when you're convinced that it's purple, you know? And I think that also that level of, it just diffuses the tension and conflict that people almost expect when there's a difference of opinions. So, so well said, man. One last one from Benjamin, Benjamin Hogg. What sort of small... These people have incredible names.

Yeah, I know. These are great. This is great. We just launched it like two days ago, so I'm learning all the names. Okay, Benjamin. What sort of small actions can we take in our day-to-day lives to heal and raise the vibration of the collective consciousness? Yeah.

I think that's great, practical kind of... I mean, we've woven a lot throughout this episode, but... I'm going to come back to stuff we've already talked about. I think it's really important. You know, sometimes when we think of the collective, yes, it's bigger than us, but it's still us. And each one of us has a... Like, we can be individuals and part of a collective, right?

This duet, like, somehow it has to be... It's just not true, right? It's an emergent phenomenon, right? Like, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. but it's still emerging from those parts. I would argue that you will do more to raise collective consciences by committing to the things we've talked about in terms of pursuing truth,

living authentically, knowing full well that you're probably wrong half the time, right? It's not trying to prove that you're right, it's process, it's being on that journey. because when you're that way, when you are living authentically, man, first of all, you're so freaking attractive. Like, authentic people are just, I mean, they're just magnets, right? Because we're almost jealous a little, right?

I want to be like, I don't want to be you, I want to be like you. You have that audaciousness or that confidence within yourself. We all wish we could be that. Yeah, yeah. It's so great. But the thing is, is that you're actually showing up as your whole self and contributing what you believe you know

and are good at and can do and like if we're all doing that and we make space for us to do that I actually think that we tend to think as we become more like we discover our own individuality that somehow that removes our humanity but it doesn't right

the things that are most particular reveal the shared humanity right and so I think it sounds straightforward and simple it's not easy but we tend to think of something as big as collective conscience, the vibration of it,

that it must require some Herculean effort. And I think it's that trap that keeps us from doing the small day-to-day things that actually do have the effect. Just like the Velvet Revolution did not require that you take up arms.

It required that you commit to living in truth. So well said, man. I hope this conversation was a little spark of inspiration, for everybody to live in a little bit more truth in their life. And I think you are an incredible catalyst for that and the work that you're doing through all the books that you've written and appearances that you've been on more and more media-wise, man, it's really special.

It's really, really cool work. It's so fascinating. All the private study research. I think all of this information just allows people to hold their own beliefs with a lot more compassion, a lot more loose. and that to me is like no small act. It becomes the starting point for the revolutions that we feel like

we desperately need and we do in this day and age. In the context of this whole conversation, is there anything we haven't touched on that you feel like is important to infuse here? You know, I don't think so. I think what I really, really appreciated and admired in the conversation is, again, the ability to think about

the individual and their journey and their lives not as separate from everything else, but almost in service of it, right? Like, you are the best version of a member of a community when you are pursuing this path. It is not a path of isolation. It's not a path of individualism. The effort of self-discovery, right,

is it's so important that we do it the way you're talking about it. Because what I've really liked about everything I've listened to, is, again, we haven't lost sight of why we do this. You know, so many other movements in the past that begin with this kernel have descended into, like, you know, the human potential movement, these things that just turned into, like, what started as this quest for a better humanity. Very dust. Yeah, and it just turns into this, like, super selfish, drug-addled, like, you know,

navel-gazing thing. Like, yeah, that's not the point, right? The point is not the journey of this. It's not just to go into a cave so you can be in a cave. it's literally to discover so that we can actually live better lives and live well together. And the things that actually harm our ability

to live well together are usually the lies, the illusions, the paradigms we've internalized without thinking about them. It's rarely our intent that actually causes those problems. Well said, man. I am excited for our community

and yeah, for our audience to just get more and more exposed to your world and your work, which will leave your three prior books down in the description. Links to any other stuff you want to remind people to stay connected with you. No, it's just, you know, if you go to populace.org, all of our data's publicly available. You can see if you want to know the unbelievable differences between private opinion and public opinion, it's pretty shocking. And it covers just such a wide range of issues. Amazing.

sweet man I love this conversation thank you so much it was so fun this was incredible all right everybody well thanks for tuning into this wild episode of the know-liself podcast I appreciate you for tuning in and until next time be well thank you dr. Todd Rokes thank you that was awesome dude