Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Jay Van Bavel on Why You Are the Architect of Your Identity EP 265

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

On the Passion Struck podcast, I have the pleasure of hosting Jay Van Bavel, the Director of the Social Identity & Morality Lab, Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University, and an affiliate at the Stern School of Business in Management and Organizations. During the episode, we delve into his insights in his book "The Power of Us," which explores the potential of shared identities to enhance performance, encourage collaboration, and facilitate social unity. In This Episode, Jay Van Bavel And I Discuss His Book "The Power of Us." According to Jay Van Bavel, my guest today, many people believe that their identity remains static. However, he argues that the opposite is true. Your identity continuously evolves, frequently beyond your conscious awareness and occasionally against your will, to align with the interests of the groups you associate with. Consequently, it is not unusual for beliefs to persist even after they have been refuted. By comprehending how identity functions, you can seize control and progress from questioning, "Who am I?" to asking, "Who do I aspire to become?" Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/jay-van-bavel-you-are-architect-of-your-identity/  Brought to you by Green Chef. Use code passionstruck60 to get $60 off, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/0-qXpH4tTg4  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struct podcast. Every voice is not being heard. A small number of people are disproportionately dominating the conversation. Imagine being at a dinner party where just one person talked the whole time and other eight people had to kind of silently sit there as they were,

they got kind of yelled at and lectured and talked over. That's the dynamic of social media in practice. Not in theory, in theory, everybody gets to talk. It's the ultimate democratizing technology, right? But in practice, that's not what happens. Welcome to Passion Struct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and

those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 265 of PassionStruck, recently ranked by FeedSpot as one of the top 40 most inspirational podcasts of 2022.

And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly. But listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we now have episode starter packs which are collections of our fans, favorite episodes that gives any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do there on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. And in case you missed it, I interviewed former fighter pilot

and retired Air Force Colonel, him Campbell. And we discussed her brand new book, Flying in the Face of Fear, a fighter pilot's lessons on leading with courage. I also had my friend Bill Potts join me to discuss his book Up for the Fight, How to Advocate for Yourself as you battle cancer. Please check them both out in case you miss them.

I also wanted to say thank you so much for your ratings and reviews. They go such a long way in helping us improve the popularity of the podcast, but more importantly bringing more people into the Passion Star community, where we can give them weekly doses of inspiration, meaning, hope, and so much more. Now let's talk about today's episode. If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity never changes, but the opposite is actually true. It turns out our identity is constantly changing, often outside your conscious awareness, and sometimes even against your wishes, to reflect the interest of the groups that you belong

to. This is why it is so common for beliefs to persist, even after they've been disproven. By understanding how identity works, it allows you to take control, moving beyond wondering, who am I, who instead, who do I want to be? In my interview today, Dr. J. Van Babel and I discuss his book, The Power of Us. Harnessing are shared identities, who improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. J. is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University,

an affiliate at the Stern School of Business, in management and organizations, and director of the social identity and morality lab. Jay's study explores how collective concerns, group identities, moral principles, and political beliefs shape the mind, the brain, and behavior from neurons to social networks. In his writing, he discusses topics such as social media, unconscious prejudice, implicit group identity, and social drive. Using neuroimaging, social cognition, behavioral economics, international surveys, and computational

social science, he researches these problems. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am so excited to welcome Jay Van Bavill to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome Jay. Hi, John. It's pleasure to be here. Well, I am so excited to have you.

I am a huge fan of behavioral science and behavioral economics. And I saw that you were connected with the behavioral change for good initiative that Katie Milkman and Angela Duckworth co-lead. What made you want to join that? And what do you think is the significance of what they're doing? I mean, tell you to be honest, I think that what they're doing is one of the very best ways of doing science.

I think they're at the absolute cutting edge, they're real pioneers in bringing together the world's eating minds and different topics, getting all their ideas and then testing them in kind of formal tournaments to see what is the best idea and how effective are they? And so I've been doing similar types of research out of my lab at New York University and a lot of it aligns exactly with theirs. I think

this is the absolute best way to do behavioral science right now and there to the smartest people around doing it. Well, I know academia because of the grants and other things can be competitive. So I just love that these mega studies are being done because the results end up helping every single person who's involved. So I agree with you. And it's one of the big reasons I'm supporting what they're doing as well.

Because I think behavioral science more than anything can influence someone's life in the short term. The other thing is that it's using the very best methods possible. So there's a lot of behavioral science. It's interesting, but really small samples or only tests one idea, and it doesn't really compare to other ideas to see what's better. And so I think what you're

really seeing now in the last four or five years, really, it's emerging. And there's only a small number of groups doing it. Are these massive studies, which are using huge samples that are more diverse on topics that we actually care about where they're trying to make a difference in the real world and in ways that compare different theories. And so it's kind of combining in my view the best of all possible worlds. And I'll say like 10 years ago these did not exist. These are a new thing. That's why I think they're really innovative and it's really the best way to go forward. I also think it gives the best insights that people in the real world can actually use because they can actually trust the data and then learn what works best. If they

want to apply it to their own life, that's the best evidence that they can use. Well, I think that's great. And I did want to ask you about a recent study that you did. I saw on your Twitter page and you're very active on there. So I love how much you're sharing about behavioral science so if anyone who's listening to this wants to check out a great Twitter feed about this I would highly recommend yours. You can find me. But I saw yesterday that you posted on Twitter a new paper you did assessing 742 paper you did assessing 742 scientific articles around human behavior from COVID. And I wanted to ask you about that and maybe have you explain it, but what some of the surprising findings your team uncovered? Yeah, so maybe I'll go back two and a half years. So right before the United States started

locking down in COVID. so early March 2020, where there's a small number of cases of COVID, I, along with Rob Willer, who's a sociologist at Stanford, organized a team of 41 experts. And we try to figure out, based on the last 50 years of social and behavioral science, what is the best possible advice that we could give to people who are developing policy or running studies during the pandemic. And so we published this paper, we wrote it in like two weeks with all these people, all these experts, and then I got published by April of 2020.

And so during that time, cities and countries started locking down. So it came out right at the beginning of the pandemic. It was kind of the first big paper on the pandemic from people like us. And our paper to our surprise generated a lot of controversy. Some people thought, well, social and behavioral scientists really don't have anything to add here. They should just shut up and let the politicians do the speaking. Some people were like, well, maybe your advice is gonna backfire

or won't work. And so there's a lot of kind of like speculation about how good social and behavioral science was. At the same hand, so that was like one group of critics. But on the other hand, our paper exploded in popularity. I think it's been read over half a million times. Robin, I were invited to give talks to Congress, to senatorial committees, to the World Health Organization, consult with the United Nations. So meanwhile, all these people were taking it seriously, but at the same time, we were like, okay, well, we should take the critics seriously,

and see how accurately we work. And so we teamed up with Kai Rajari, he's a public health professor at Columbia University. And we said, Kai, we're going to let you analyze all this data. We're going to help you. But you're going to be the final person who's going to see all the analysis. We're going to take the original group of authors. We're going to go through all the papers

that have been published on COVID and social behavioral science in the last two and a half years. And then you need to create another team that's also going to read all those same things and rate them in a formal way. And we'll see if our ratings are the same and we're going to see if our predictions came true. If the ideas and proposals we had in our paper at the beginning of the pandemic actually predicted how real people behaved during the pandemic. And so I'll tell you as a scientist, this is kind of like a pulse racing exercise because you're letting someone else evaluate your ideas and you don't know if they're gonna be good or bad or backfire. And so Kai did this he organized it, he kept us blind from the other team so that we couldn't

influence them or be influenced by them. We all rated these 740 articles and then he texted me and he said, I've got the results. We're ready to write the paper. And so I said, okay, what are the results? How accurate were we? And he said, you were accurate on 16 of the 18 claims where we had data. So 89% accuracy of our predictions from our paper.

And the other two claims were just kind of like null. They weren't, but nothing backfired, which was kind of the fear that somebody had, nothing backfired at all. And almost 90% of the time we were precise in predicting what would generate real human behavior at scale during a pandemic. This was one of the most impressive, rigorous analyses that I've ever done or seen in my history of being in the field for 20 years is probably the best.

And I only played a small role in it. Kai was led the team of votes, 76 scholars who did all these analyses. And so it's just a real affirmation of the value of social behavioral science during the biggest crisis, the biggest experiment and behavior change in my lifetime, probably in the last 100 years. And so I mean, I'm really pleased by it. And I think it says something really important that we can actually, the science that we have, the best of it can tell us important things.

Well, speaking of Twitter, I know you like to examine the impacts of different social media and what it's having on people. And I have an episode I did on digital addiction and how it's impacting human connection, but you look at it through the lens of polarization. And I was hoping you could discuss some of the work that you're doing and the results that are coming out of it. Yeah, so I would say about seven or eight years ago I started becoming interested in social media and how it's changing our behavior,

how we thought about things, how we could engage with other people. And I will say at first I was a huge advocate for social media. I was on Facebook early on. It was an early adopter of that. I was on Twitter pretty early. And I'm on LinkedIn and I have Instagram accounts and all these things. So I use it pretty frequently as you pointed out a few minutes ago. But I start to realize there might be a downside to it. I noticed even when scientists were debate things, they would start to get moralistic and polarized. And so you take an issue where you talk to people privately and they would say, um, if you, but you'd watch them on Twitter

and they'd be like a flame-throher and super partisan about some boring methods issue, where normally at the old days of just going the conference, you would see like very reasoned nuance discussions. And so I started to think, well, maybe it's changing how we interact with one another and think. And so I had this a couple amazing PhD students, Julian Willes, who went to work at Facebook

after he did his PhD, and Billy Brady, who's now a professor at Northwestern. And we decided they were interested in like more reality and emotions. And so I said, let's test this on Twitter. And so what we found in our very first research, we analyzed over 500,000 tweets on hot button political topics, and what we found is when people

use a moral emotional word, like disgusting, or it fills me with contempt, that it would be about 15% to 20% more likely to be retweeted. And so you could load up your messages with two or three or four or five of those words, and it would dramatically increase the likelihood that was spread or went viral. So that is what you're doing when you're like using language, you're looking to see what spreads, you might be using that language more in the future. You find that like language like moral motions or moral outrage is more likely to resonate with people, builds you followers, it gets you clout. But on the other side, what we found when we looked at who was

retweeting it was that if you were sharing this position using this language, it was only getting shared by people who already like you. So it created the appearance of what looked like echo chambers, with people on the right only sharing moral emotional messages from other people on the right, of people on the left, only sharing moral emotional messages from people on the left. And so it seems like a double edged sword. You can use this messaging to spread your message,

but it kind of comes at the cost of alienating people you might be trying to persuade. So it seems like a really good rhetoric for mobilizing people, but also at the consequence of alienating people. Well, I'm glad you brought up the whole topic of echo chambers because it's something I wanted to cover. And we're going to jump into now discussing your book, The Power of Us, which, although it released in September 2021, it has had a remarkably positive following. So congratulations on that. I think it was chapter four that you discuss echo chambers and media playing both sides and doing these information campaigns or if you want to call them disinformation campaigns How do things like that become bias creating and

Create these echo chambers and what are the ramifications on us that this is happening? Yeah, I mean I've been increasingly concerned about misinformation and fake news and conspiracy theories and how those spread on social media. There were some research that kind of triggered all of this on social media and they found that stories that had been fact checked. They found that the ones that were wrong were spreading faster and further on social media, especially on Twitter. And it was really the stories that were about politics and had emotion embedded in them. So moreality and emotion identity, those types of messages are the things that kind of seem to mobilize misinformation spreading.

People aren't spreading misinformation about like cats and dogs. They're spreading misinformation about their political opponents. And so a small number of people are generating this misinformation, but once it gets spread on social media, a lot of people see it and it could potentially impact a lot of people. And it's often very divisive information. And so what we've been finding, I'll just tell you with this new paper where we just submitted it a couple of days ago,

where we did a survey of all Americans, representative survey, Republicans, Democrats, and dependents. And what we found is that people think that divisive, hateful misinformation is going to be amplified by these social media platforms, and they hate it. They don't like it. They wish that information that was true,

that was more positive, that was more factual, and more accurate, was actually being amplified on social media platforms. And these effects were whopping, and they were totally bipartisan, is that you see this almost identical patterns where Republicans and Democrats. And so there is a sense that kind of we're all being sucked

into this matrix of divisive content and misinformation. And people don't like it, but they're kind of all part of it because that's, as I said already, that's kind of what gets rewarded, that's what gets shared, that's what gets you likes, that's what gets you followers in some of these communities. And we're all trying to like shout louder because everybody else is shouting.

Think of social media a little bit like when I go for dinner in New York where I live. It's like they crank up the music and you're trying to have a conversation at your table. And all of a sudden you can't really hear the person seem to talk louder, you start shouting. And then the people at the table next to you suddenly can't hear theirself.

So they have to shout louder, which means you have to shout louder. And eventually everybody's yelling and you can't hear anything. And it just really makes for an awful experience, everybody. But you're all kind of sucked into this because that's the environment that's been created. And I feel like that's a little bit what's happened on social media.

The term is attention economy. So you have four billion people on social media now, around the world. The average social media users on there for almost three hours a day. And if you have a smartphone, which almost all of us do now, the average person scrolls through 300 feet. So 600 swipes of their social media news feed a day, that's the height of the statuality. So we don't have time to read it or think about it deeply,

try to understand it, look at the context, read articles. We're really reacting to things that are triggering us, that are attention grabbing, that are kind of outrageous. It's for driving down the freeway, and you see a car and a car crash. You stop and stare at it because it's interesting, but no one wants to live in a world where there's just car crashes all the way down the freeway. That's a pretty scary, dangerous, awful world

to live in, but that's a little bit kind of what the vibe is, I think, on some social media platforms now. Yeah, for the research I did on my article, I found that the average person touches their phone. It was 3,216 times a day. What? 3,016? Wait, say it again.

It was 3,216 times was the research I found, which just seems impossible. I mean, I surely don't touch mine that much, but I know that's like blows my mind, but yet I believe it if we're scrolling through 300 feet. That means we're probably touching it at least 600 times, if not many more. Well, there usage data coincided with yours. I think they were at three hours, 21 minutes, something like that. So very... It makes a big sense.

Very similar. Well, what are your thoughts about Elon Musk entering this social domain? Do you think he's going to keep these algorithms the same at Twitter? Or do you think we're going to see them change pretty drastically? Okay, so let me tell you where I agree and disagree with Elon. I'm not one of those people who's pro-Elon or anti-Elon. I actually think he has some terrible ideas and some great ideas. Like most human beings, we have some great ideas of bad ideas. One thing that he wants to do that we found is totally consistent with our survey of Americans was that he wanted to make the algorithm

transparent and that was something that a huge majority, I think like 80% to 90% of Americans thought was a good idea. And again, that's across age groups and whether you're Democrat or Republican, that seems like something people like that, they want more transparency, and they also want more control over their algorithm.

If he did, that would be great. I think one thing that he proposed doing is kind of having like a rampant free speech model, which anybody can go on there and say anything, harass anybody, spread any kind of misinformation. I think that's bad. And there's lots of research on this with content platforms where there's, when you have moderators who are making sure there's not like harassment and hate,

people will stay on longer because they don't want to be in a really toxic environment. If you allow the environment to co-complete the toxic and you don't manage these types of threats and harassment and misinformation, people disengage or leave the platform or just creates more conflict. And our data overwhelmingly, and again, this is not just my opinion, this is a data of a representative sample of Americans from both parties. People don't like misinformation or divisive content or outrage or hate spewing at the nonstop from their social media. And so my prediction would be that people from again, across the political spectrum, if they were actually subjected to more of that on viewing at the nonstop from their social media. And so my prediction would be that people from again, across a political spectrum,

if they were actually subjected to more of that on Twitter would disengage more and move to other platforms. Yes, I think it's gonna be an interesting change one way or the other, but it's interesting. I'm not sure if Douglas Rushkopf, he used to teach at NYU, he's now at CUNY Queens, but he has a new book out now called Survival of the Richest, and we were talking about some of these social platforms and how the technology is being

used. And I do think he has a point that technology was supposed to be an enabler. It was supposed to build community yet the way that these companies are generating their profits is through individuals. And so they are really driving us into individualism in many ways based on these platforms and away from community. Do you see that as well as you look at this through the lens of identity? Yeah, I mean, that's a great comment. I actually think it's pretty complex, which I think about most issues, as you could tell, that I was excited about these platforms

because of that exact same reason. But let me explain how it's tricky to build community. So one thing that Facebook decided, this is from talking to a lot of staffers at Facebook and reading news stories. I learned that a few years ago, they made a decision to move away from amplifying content that's shared news,

and they wanted to be more a place where you spend talking to people you care about, maximize social connection and community. They allegedly changed the algorithm to amplify engaging content. When they did that, rather than new stories. That had some consequences of down-rating the number of news, or news sites that you saw in your feed. Famous one was goodness. There was a very viral website that was supposed to share positive

news, but it had tons of clickbait and eventually people got sick of the clickbait. So they wanted different people to talk about like life events, but what they found is and print comment and share thoughts in the in the sections of when people shared something about their life. So they tried to change the algorithm to amplify that, but it had an unintended consequence of amplifying conflict because it just led to people yelling at each other instead of like your family Thanksgiving dinner. It was like on social media, arguing about politics, or sharing hateful content that really triggered people to comment on it. And so it had an unintended consequence that they didn't really foresee. And so even with the best of intentions, sometimes you can get these unintended consequences.

If you don't anticipate kind of the political environment that you're doing it in. And so I do think that like social media can be good for bringing people together. But as I said, it's often comes with a double edge sort of alienating people and creating conflicts. So I think a lot more like thought needs to go into how to create these virtual spaces to make them better I would say that I'm not like a techno flow I don't think that these things are gonna go away as I said four billion people are online and it's growing So I think the real mission for us a scientist as a society is to figure out how do we want to make this healthier?

So our relationships our damage our community doesn't generate more conflict or tip into civil war How do we make it healthy and safe for our kids? Like my kids who are pretty young, open their own like Snapchat and TikTok accounts. And so it's like I have to have conversations with them about how to use those in healthy ways. But I also hope that these platforms are having like, I know many of them are trying to figure out how to make them healthier. So I think this is one of the kind of big challenges for our society in and our generation is we have this new technology just like we have regulations around what can go on TV and what can be said and what can be shown during certain times of the day. We had this debate you know almost a hundred years

ago with newspapers in the early days of yellow journalism which was a lot like misinformation and propaganda. We changed the norms in the training and professionalism of journalism. We should be having these conversations right now for social media. And they should just be like a small number of people. It should really be society. Every voice deserves to be heard on this because it really I think affects all of us. Yes, and when I think of technology and that's where I spent a great percentage of my career was as a chief information officer, chief information security officer, software company CEO. I look at a lot of the technology that's being built right now, and sometimes we as boards, we as leaders, we as entrepreneurs don't think through the ramifications because oftentimes

we're not looking through it through the lens of what an adversary or a bad actor would look at it through. And an example of that is I can't remember what to watch it was, but US military members were having this for GPS and the soldiers were deploying, but a foreign government was actually hacking into it and they were able to read the data on it, something that I think it was fit bit, never thought in a million years would happen. I am sure when they designed that technology. So I think the same thing is happening with different things that are coming out of these social companies and other technologies around community and other things that are happening now. So it's gonna be interesting in the years to come,

how we do what you're just saying and start policing this more by trying to envision what the potential uses of the technology could be outside of their intended use. Yeah, I say there's a couple of points at make about that. One is that the conversation, as I said, is driven by the people at the extremes. So even if you go onto social media, the vast majority of comments on any topic, but especially

like on politics, are driven by people who are at the extremes. They're online the most, they're sharing the most content, they're dominating the conversation, they more easily build huge followings, and that ends up leaving out 80% of the population from the conversation. They just get drowned out or they don't want to stick their neck out and get, have it get chopped off. And so you're not really having a democratic conversation. Every voice is not being heard. A small number of people are being disproportionately dominating

the conversation. Imagine being at a dinner party where just one person talked the whole time and the other eight people had to kind of silently sit there as they would yell that and lecture to talk over. That's the dynamic of social media and in practice. Not in theory, in theory everybody gets to talk. It's the ultimate democratizing technology, right?

But in practice, that's not what happens. That's why I'm doing these representative samples to see what the average person thinks, right? Not just the people who are dominating the conversation online. The second piece of it, and this is what you were hinting at, is that we should be thinking about unintended consequences and externalities. Unintended consequences are like what I just described at Facebook or what you just described

in the military. When you change technology, especially an algorithm, right? If you're Facebook and you have two billion people using your platform, you need to think not only about what your goal is when you change something in the newsfeed algorithm, but you need to think carefully about like about what are the unintended consequences? What how can bad actors use this or weaponize it or exploit it? And you better have thought through those and ensure that the trade-offs are still in favor of the change you made.

And then you should obviously collect data and see if it's working or not. The second thing is externalities. And this is a little bit of the move fast and break things, motto that dominates Silicon Valley and, particularly Facebook, is they're like the move fast and break things motto that dominates Silicon Valley and Particularly Facebook is they're just constantly moving fast and breaking things That's how they be innovative and disrupt other industries and that's just the ethos and we'll worry about the consequences But what if the thing they're breaking is democracy? What if the thing they're doing is driving people to part?

What if they do the thing that doing is fostering conflict in families and in societies and in communities? What if it tips over into things like violence or genocide? Those are pretty dramatic harms. When you're breaking things at that level or when you're spreading misinformation about the global pandemic and it leads people to die at this level of millions, that's a level of breaking things that we don't accept in society. And so we should be thinking about what are the unintended consequences? Who might be harmed by this? And not just think about how to maximize the profits for our company because guess what if you

burn down society and democracies eventually you might harm your technology and this has happened to Facebook when these things go badly they get in the news and their their valuation drops by billions of dollars because it's not good and people disengage from the platform young people are using Facebook less and less. And so having a long-term view rather than just kind of like maximizing your quarterly profits by moving fast and breaking things and caring about like the society and community you live in would be something that would be good to like ingrain in the mindset of these organizations because I think it's definitely been lacking up until recently. these organizations because I think it's definitely been lacking up until recently.

It's interesting that maybe outside of agriculture and farming, I think this tech lobbying is probably the largest lobbying that's going on in our government right now. And so it's always funny for me to see them bring up these CEOs from these four or five companies when they've been lobbied to for the past 20 years and buying into what they're saying. And I'm like, your chance to stop this was a long time ago before you allowed them a lobby as many changes as they've done over the past two decades. But what you talk about is almost like what you think about when you think of like all those congressional hearings on like Big Tobacco. It's like they had been giving so much money and then eventually and then covering up their harms for a long time.

And then you bring them all in Congress and it's a scandal that's like so laid and then the costs are so steep to society. Well, I'm going to back us up a little bit because I really want the audience to understand some of the science that you uncovered in this book and explain because this whole podcast is really about teaching people how do you live with intention and our identities are so tied to that in every way possible. And one of the things I thought was interesting is through the book, you explore that people believe that they have a core self.

But the fact is, each of us contains multiple identities. And in your words, you say they come in and out of focus at different times. Meaning who I am at work is going to be different than who I am as a parent or as a sports fan. How are those different identities influenced by groups and how much do the groups that we belong to influence those identities? I mean, that's the core of our book. We're really trying to challenge this notion in our society that you have one self. You have a true self buried deep down in there and that guides everything.

What we find over and over again with the research shows is we have multiple selves. I'll just volunteer myself, but I encourage people to do what we call the IM task. Complete the sentence, I am blank, and do that ten times. When I did that, it comes up with things like, I am a father. I am a professor. I am a Canadian. I'm a professor, I am a Canadian, I'm a New Yorker, I am a hockey goalie. And you start to realize you actually have a lot

of different identities that are determined by your groups or your roles in groups. And now here's how my day goes. This morning I wake up and first thing in the morning, I got to get my kids ready and get them to school. And I'm not thinking about work at all. I'm thinking about how I can get them breakfast, get them fed, get them dressed, get them out the door to go to school.

And then, once I've done that, my identity pivot. And I start thinking about myself as professor. I do like, log into my email, check my responses. Suddenly, I have to be more professional. If I log into a call, I have to be dressed professional. I don't get to dress like I do and I'm at home as a dad. I start to change the way I think. I'm not thinking in the same way as I do with my kids. I have to be dressed. Professional, I don't get to dress like I do, and I'm at home as a dad. I start to change the way I think.

I'm not thinking in the same way as I do with my kids. I'm not as paternalistic. I'm more like thinking like a scientist. And then my identity changes again when I come back home at the end of the night. And I like turn on the TV and I watch the hockey game. I'm a genoiler span. When that's on, I'm just like yelling in my living room, acting a little bit unhinged compared to my work self

or even my parents self. And so even in a day you go through three or four or five or six of these identities. And the group that you're part of changes who you are, the situation you're in, changes who you are, changes how you think, changes what you value, changes how you dress, changes how you act. And so what we say is, first of all, you have to understand that.

And I would say for people, come to grips with it. And then the next thing is, since you have a lot of identities, you can actually be like kind of the architect of another title we had for a book that are published and in like was architect of identities. You get to be the architect that shapes and lives with a sense of purpose about what identities do you want to have? Do I want to prioritize my father or parenting identity? How about my husband identity? Should I prioritize my work identity or my teacher identity? Where I think more about how I'm going to be great in the classroom and connect with my students? We only have so much time in our life and in our day.

So we have to think about what identities we prioritize and also how we want to act in those identities. And then the second piece of it, which we really encourage people to do is, okay, so you have these identities, these are parts of yourself that you value that our groups you belong to, think about how you can change those groups for the better. So my professor identity, what can I do to be change the environment around me with other professors and students we deal with to make their life's more fulfilling, to make their education better, to make them feel valued as a part of our community, to create our community groups. We often think of them as a bunch of mindless conformists, but you can change the norms to be the

opposite of that. So can I change the norms where people are comfortable dissenting with me, and spreading, creating new and innovative ideas in my research team? And if I do that, then I'm going to get better. Our work's going to get better. People are going to enjoy it more. And so you get to create the norms and communities that you're part of and shape them in all kinds of ways that can make those things better. And so that's really the core of our book is giving people the tools to understand how identity works, giving them the insight to be more deliberative about cultivating identities that they care about and prioritizing them.

And then the next thing is, how can you be a leader in the identity groups that you belong to to help other people around you? And so it's kind of like those that I think are the three key take-hums from our book. Okay, and I have to tell you, it makes me think of a question that I hate to get, which is, what do you do?

Because I think it really is an identity question. But I remember hearing a podcast with Hillary Swink one time and she said oftentimes she gets that and she's like, well, I'm a partner, I'm a director, I'm a producer, I'm an actor, I'm a mother, I'm a daughter. She said I was getting so sick and tired of it. I just tell them I'm a storyteller. But how do you suggest when people get that question that they consider answering it? Because it really is someone's asking your identity and I think most of the time we say I'm VP of this or I'm a professor of that or what have you. Yeah, so I think that again depends on the contact.

If I'm at an academic conference in psychology, people will ask who I am, and I might say I'm an NYU professor. So now I'm telling them I've met New York University, which is signals to them who I work with, and what type of stuff I do. If I am meeting with my students, and they ask me who I am, I might just say I'm a social psychologist, because now I'm communicating to them the kind of the area of psychology I study.

If I'm talking on a podcast, I might talk about myself as an author, I have a book, I identify it also as an author and that comes with a different set of assumptions. So I think you have to get comfortable that you can be a lot of different things. All of these things don't aren't necessarily in conflict and you can have all of these things. We use a quote by the poet Walt Whitman where he says he contains multitudes. We contain multitudes and these things aren't necessarily consistent and it doesn't make us a hypocrite. It just means that we are have multiple identities and these can live in some kind of like harmony within us and it allows

us big actually identities give us great power because it means I can move from situation to situation and fit in. I'm a small town kid. I can go back to Fox Creek, Alberta, where I'm from in Northern Canada and fit in. I know what the norms are there. I can walk around and live in my community in lower Manhattan, which is like pretty much the exact opposite type of community. It's like one of those denser, but environments in the whole continent. And I come from the smallest town to the biggest city. And there's different norms and expectations and ways of dressing and talking and different cultural practices but I am all of those things I can blend in and fit and respect the people and connect with them in both of those environments.

There should be less pressure on people to have kind of one overarching thing. I'm a storyteller and we should have a little bit more comfort and maybe an understanding that we are all of those things. I would say one other thing that might often help full with this is a lot of times we spend, there's a lot of podcasts on self-help and stuff and a lot of the focus on the question of how do I get better. I think what we should ask ourselves is why do you care about this thing? Why am I a professor? Okay, well it's because I love teaching and doing research. Well, why do I value those things? Well, I care about being like a good citizen and making a contribution society. Well, why do I care about that?

And now I start to see like I have values of being a human being that's going to make a positive impact in the world. So once you ask why, you start to move up levels and think about your actual purpose. If you're always just asking how, you're never kind of questioning why you're doing something and sometimes you forget what your goals are,

what your vision is, what your purpose is, and you're always just focusing on like your tactics, not kind of your strategy in life, what your real values are. So that's kind of the other thing that identities get you to do is sometimes they get you to think a little bit more about the why, why am I here, why do I care? Yeah, I last year I did a number of solo episodes on the topic of humility, ego, and tact. It's interesting because even now, there's some of the most downloaded ones I've done, which tells me that they're hot topics for people.

But I wanted to ask, how does our intellectual humility, and on the other side of that, ego affect where people's identities lie. That's a great question. I'm actually doing a huge project on intellectual humility with philosopher and australia mark alfano. What we're trying to do is first of all understand what is intellectual humility, what are the pieces of it? I'm interested in creating groups that have a sense of intellectual humility. A sense of intellectual humility means that you might have a lot of thoughts that are based on evidence and knowledge, but you're always aware that they're probably not perfect and that you're

always open-minded to updating them based on newer and better evidence and insights. And that's how we get smarter. That's how we become better is we accept that we don't know it all and we're always open-minded and ready to learn. But in a healthy way, right? We're not open-minded to any crazy idea. We wanna be open-minded to high-quality ideas that are based on evidence and experience. The goal for mine is to become better. At that, become more comfortable getting constructive feedback

and criticism. Find ways, actually. This is something that's a big part of how I work and run my lab is to not only wait for people to give you feedback to create situations where it naturally happens. So for example when I run my research lab meetings it's about 15 or 20 really smart people, students and postdocs. And if we're working on a paper and I share it and everybody reads it, I don't tell them what I think about that paper first. Because I'm in a position of power and advice have a strong opinion,

they might just try to find ways to agree with me. So I prefer to like be silent and ask them what they think and let them go around the room and share all their positions. And they might actually have all kinds of ideas that would disagree with me or insights that I never would have thought of. And by the time I get to weigh in, I've actually updated my thinking almost every time about something, because they've covered for my blindots, they've caught things that I missed, and I allow myself to be, update my thinking and have a sense of intellectual humility. But it requires me to create a situation where they feel,

the term is psychological safety, where they feel safe expressing their view and opinion and criticism. And so I try to constantly think of ways to create that for them so that they can speak up. And that allows me to update my beliefs. If I created a situation where they can feel comfortable speaking up, I would never get negative feedback. And even if I said I had intellectual humility, if no one said anything, I'd create a situation where people are comfortable saying anything to me, I'd never be able to update my thinking on these topics.

Well, it's interesting that you're doing that because I think it is something that needs to be studied a lot that because I think it is something that needs to be studied a lot more to understand how it is impacting our behaviors. So I can't wait to see what that research is going to show. Well, Jay, one of the things I loved about the way you guys wrote the book, and I think books that do this make their point so much more compelling is that you interweave stories into each one of the chapters. And in chapter two, you have two different ones that I really loved. One was a 1966 World Cup match between England and Germany. And the other was a Swiss chocolate example. I'll let you

pick which one you use. But I was hoping you could go through one of those examples and highlight. How those circumstances impacted identity. Yeah, so first of all, yeah, I swear to Sam glad you love the stories one of the ways we tried to write our whole book was. Every story would teach you something that was backed up by the science because a lot of scientists write books and it's like, would teach you something that was backed up by the science. Because a lot of scientists write books, and it's like, they present us a bunch of science, and then they try to find some stories that confirm it or something.

We try to lead at the stories, to make people interested and make them care and remember it. And so one of the big ideas was captured in this very famous World Cup final match between Germany and England. And I think it was in the overtime of the game, or extra minutes. This English striker shot it, and it looked like it might've

been a goal, but it wasn't clear because they hit the top crossbar and bounced right down right near the goal line and then bounced out. And it was arguably one of the most controversial goals in the entire history of the World Cup. And I think there was about 400 million people watching that game at the time. So the whole world was watching.

And so what ended up happening is the English players all celebrated, they thought it was in. And the German players didn't think so. And they thought it was out. And to this day, in fact, here's a funny story about this. We talked about how this is motivated by people's goals. They want to believe and see things that confirm what they want to believe. And so the term for this in psychology is sometimes confirmation bias. But what we argue is that this is determined by our identity. So if ever you're at a sporting event, you filter the game through the lens of what you want to believe. You think that your player is safe when they slide into second base, even though the umpire calls them out. Or you think a goal goes into a net when the ref says no, it didn't cross the line.

And so people are perennially angry at the umpires and the referees. But a lot of that is in the bias of the eyes of the fans, because they're so motivated to see things in certain way, that they misinterpret what's going on. And so we wrote this book. We actually have a publisher in England or a book published in the UK.

And that may also have published in the United States. And so the publishing United States read through it to fact check it and make sure there's nothing that was going to get us sued. And they had no problem with that story. That was great. They made some other changes and we publish it. We had a separate publisher in the UK who read it. And they did not like that story. And because it made it seem like maybe the English fans were biased.

And they thought that might be like a legal problem. We had a lawyer from... They are biased. Actually, we got to go through and fact check it a second time because they were really not convinced. We were like, there was literally a study at Oxford University where they broke down the video I got up the video of the goal and watched it like ten times and paused it to make sure exactly what was happening It's almost like a religious belief they have in England about this famous goal I think was the last time England actually won the World Cup So it's like a very cherished moment. And so this is something that is like so

sacri-saint and they believe it so much that implying that it wasn't true would be something that could potentially get a suit there. And so this is one of the, it was like really funny to see just how an American audience and a UK audience saw that, that thing today like 50, 55 years later. And so we just want to like drive home that you have to be a little bit careful when you have a really strong identity because it can bias the way you're interpreting reality in ways that can lead you astray and very rigid in your thinking. And so that's kind of we talk about the upside of identity, but we also talk about some of the downsides so people can avoid them. Well, you definitely have to watch the laws in England because it's kind of 180 degrees different than it is over here. And I recently watched a movie where a Penguin Random House author was sued by someone because she wrote a book about the atrocities of World War II and what happened in the war camps,

but more importantly, what happened in the war camps, but more importantly, what happened in the Jewish camps. And an Englishman challenged her that those atrocities never happened. And so she had to go and prove that Oswitch actually occurred, which she was able to do. It's interesting, even something as black and white as that would come up. Tell you, I met her, that's Deborah Lipstad,

who's... Yes, it is. Yeah. So I watched that movie Denial. It was an amazing movie. And then I was invited to give a talk at a TEDx conference at Oxford. And the whole theme was about truth. And she was the speaker who went right after me.

And so I talked all about identity and misinformation and conspiracy. And she went right after me and gave a talk on this thing. It was one of the best talks I've ever seen in my life. She was so passionate about this. Like you said, I had to go to trial to prove that the holocaust actually happened, which sounds insane. But yeah, it was a real serious thing. Yes, unbelievable. Well, I'm going to jump from there to chapter three because you talk about something here that I had lived and that was Enron. And you discuss the realities around corporate cults and you used Enron and also Bay of Pigs as examples.

So I was working for Arthur Anderson at the time, and I have to say I'm lucky because in a 2,400 person give or take office, I would say 70% of the employees worked at one time or another on Enron, but we had many other energy clients and other clients. So you couldn't have everyone on there because you needed independence. You bring up this corporate culture there

and some of the younger listeners may not understand on there because you needed independence. You bring up this corporate culture there and some of the younger listeners may not understand and run those. My age or age would definitely understand it, but I knew so many of the people who worked at NRON and who worked on that account from Anderson who were so proud of the company. I mean, when you worked there, you were taught to believe that you were the elite of the elite, and if you were servicing them, you had the best client in the entire world. How was it possible that Kenneth Lay

and then his predecessor, or then his person who took over from him, were able to create this over a decade-long period. Yeah, I mean, that's an amazing story. So yeah, we have a whole chapter on how identity shapes beliefs and can lead to cults and conspiracies and organizations that that are disastrous. And Enron is the example because we found a paper that talked about the cult psychology that was at Enron and it almost exactly mapped on to the other psychology studies that we were presenting on cults. And so basically,

what happened is there is a enormous amount of building people up to feel like they were uniquely special, which is also what cults do, almost like they're the chosen people, almost like a religion. Of course, N1 was one of the biggest, almost powerful corporations in the country. It's actually, I think in history, probably the biggest corporate disaster in American history. And there was also thing that article gets at is that they made people feel there, like they were above the law. And the leaders also had kind of a very cult-like mentality, the way they talked, the way they acted, the way their homes were decorated, the language that they used, and the other thing they did, which was key, I already talked

you about the value of intellectual humility and dissent, they had none of that. They were had more arrogance and hubris and pride, like you just described, it hurts her 100%, and they did not brook any dissent. If you were dissent or you didn't 100% support the culture, like a cult follower, you were sent hiking. And so we wrote this chapter on this and I'm like, okay, this is like based on my reading of cult psychology and the research I do. And it was also based on this paper that like analyzed the cult psychology of Enron. Then about a couple months ago, I was at a play date with my stepson and he's playing with other kid and we were hanging out and it turned

out that the dad worked at NRON. He was in the background of the TV conference I think that happened right around the time that this handle broke. And he thought that they were gonna be fine. Like he went out for drinks with the CFO at the time and they're like, I think he told them like Warren Buffett or Warren's gonna come in and save us.

And so right up until the very last moment, they had so much arrogance that they thought they were gonna survive this scandal. And so it up until the very last moment, they had so much arrogance that they thought they were gonna survive this scandal. And so it was completely crushing because the people who had bought into it so much and relied too so much, didn't even after all the scandal broke, thought they were fine.

He said, the way he described it, almost mapped out perfectly onto my chapter and he had a behind-the-scenes look at everything that went on there. And their relationships, I think with George Bush and prominent people, especially in Houston, they dominated Houston, he said at the time, I think it's like something where we need to have lessons right, because when we talk about cult psychology, there are these cults that happen. And we have a study that we present on one of them. But what I care about more is when

similar types of mentalities and ways of creating identities happen in groups that we care about in our community, in our work. And so we need to understand that so we can root those out so we can develop different norms and procedures and actions that ensure that we don't get caught up in this because they almost always end in disaster. And even when they're ending in disaster, most people who are true believers don't give up on that belief.

They'll think to it to the very end. And so the user recall that has a bad connotation because it's a bad thing. It doesn't usually end well. And everyone's not the only cult. I could go on about other corporations that I think are recent cults. I think I'll just give you two. Another one is Thierry Nose operated a lot like a cult in my opinion. And that was a billion dollar disaster. And then another one was works. We work is still around, but I think Adam Newman, there's a whole book on him called We Cult. And he created a very like, they had like, group chance and retreats.

And he created a cult like environment too, which was an utter disaster. And of course, he got incredibly rich off it and escaped as the company crashed. But this is not something that's going away. These are very recent cases. And so organizations that don't look for the signs of this or investors are very likely to head down to disaster's path.

Yeah, so I just can't believe that investors are again giving him money, given how badly he misled everyone. That's a disaster. This guy is like a cult leader, even how he runs his organization. Giving him money is like, my guess, like you may as well just throw it in your fireplace. Give it to people who need it. You can donate it to people who can actually use it. Well, I'm going to jump to chapter six, which is about overcoming biases.

I recently interviewed Dolly Chug, your period at NYU, and we talked a lot about biases, but I wanted to ask you this, you write in the book this question of whether implicit biases make you racist or sexist or agist or biased against any particular group, and it's not answered by whether you have bias, but what you do with the information once you know it. Why is that

the case? This is partly a philosophical issue, but a lot of people will reveal some bias on an implicit bias test, but won't act on it in their life. And so, is that bias if they score that on a test, but they don't mistreat or treat people differently in their real life? So, I think like we have this notion, a very common thing in America, like, I don't have a racist bone in my body. What that person is trying to say is like, deep down, I'm not racist or sexist or ageist. But then they'll do racist things in their real life. And so to me, what matters is kind of like how you act. And that's why I think like social norms matter so much. In fact, the thing, and I wish we had put this study in our book, it's one of my biggest regrets, is one of the single biggest predictors

of your expressions of prejudice, is what you think the norms are about other people in your group and their prejudices. And so if you think that it's okay to say negative things about a group, then you, it's almost perfectly predicts whether you'll say them. And it doesn't matter if you have animosity towards a group,

as long as you're engaging in prejudice, expressions and behavior, you may as well be prejudiced. And I think that's the thing that we should probably care about a lot more. And also, it turns out that's actually an easier thing to change. I did research on this. One of my very earliest studies,

my first ever author paper in grad school is on changing implicit bias using shared identities. Turns out there's a huge replication, they found the exact same thing. But when you're changing implicit bias, if you don't keep it up within a day It starts to go back to what it was before unless you keep that identity that the new identity They have kind of active in their mind. They kind of old ones get triggered and old behaviors get triggered

And so there's a huge amount of money I think that's been wasted on implicit bias training and organizations trying to rewire people's biases What the research shows is far more effective is changing the culture, changing the norms, because even if people don't change their underlying associations towards groups, their behavior will change, and they can become more inclusive and embrace diversity and become less discriminatory. And so I think like you want to build shared identities,

but you also want those identities to have norms of inclusion. And that seems to unlock not only the best, the least discriminatory behavior by groups, but also other research has found since our book came out. There's a really cool new study that finds, if you do this, for example, on college campuses, that the minority students actually perform better.

All they need to know is that the norms are inclusive and then their grades go up, and their likelihood to stick in their classes goes up. And this is important, I'll tell you why. First of all, because we don't want to waste money on things that don't work, we should actually use the science. Here's the second reason you should care about this and the norm approach. The second reason you should care is because we do the opposite a lot. We talk constantly about norms of discrimination, a lot of people are racist or biased.

What that does is it signals to people who might not be biased that they should express some bias. And it also signals to people who might not be biased that they should express some bias. And it also signals to people who are the victims of those targeted bias that this is a non-safespace for them. And they're less likely to persist and more likely to disengage from the environment and their marks go down. Grades if they're in school or the performance decreases. And so you really want to find out if people actually share a belief of inclusion, you want to surface it so everybody knows about it, and then you'll find other people will join in on it, and it makes minority group members feel welcome.

So I think like the way that we've been approaching it, I think this is now at Radrecyl app, maybe a $66 billion industry is based on not only bad science, but I think the opposite of what science would suggest in some organizations is happening. And so I worry about that a lot, because I care about these issues, and I care about getting them right. Yes, well, thank you for explaining that because I think it's a very important topic. And

I did want to tell the listeners, we don't have time to cover every chapter in your book. I am going to give them a few highlights because I want them to go out and buy it. In chapter five, you discuss underdogs and why do people want to do more than simply support underdogs. In chapter seven, you write about Sylvia Rosalie Jacobson, who is a social scientist, who is part of a hijacking, and you talk about how trauma affects shared identities. In chapter eight, you go into the Vietnam war

and the May-Lye massacre and why people often dissent to the people who are exposing the truth and what we can learn from that. In chapter nine, you kind of build upon what we discussed with Enron about leading effectively, which is another great chapter. But I wanted to end on chapter 10, which is the future of identity. And I recently interviewed Seth Godin, and I interviewed him about climate change, and I cannot tell you the visceral response I got

from both sides on this. And I do have to give Seth a lot of credit in that he's not coming at this from any party affiliation. He's trying to be as independent as he possibly can, and he's trying to just lay out the facts as they are on what it is and why we need to act, which I think is admirable, but it's amazing that we are so caught up, I think, in the far extremities and arguing that instead of looking at the big Harry Beast,

that staring us right in the eye and doing something about it. But you also mentioned climate change in the book, and I thought it was a good thing to end on. How do our national identities impact how we collectively deal with something? It could be climate change, it could be COVID, but let's just use it through the lens of climate change. Yeah, so I tend to think that our national identities,

they actually get a lot of slack, because we're worried about nationalism, and we've had a couple of world wars in the last hundred years that were really deadly. But national identities can also be opportunities to bring a broad community together to act on something. And so I think that we need to think about these big challenges and how we're going to tackle them. And they're often aren't easy to tackle with just individual actions.

We need those, but that's not enough. And so we're going to tackle something like a pandemic or a climate change or even bigger problem. We need to mobilize a huge group of people. And so I'll say this, we ran a study in 67 countries around the world. And one of the predictors we found of people willing to follow public health guidelines during the pandemic was how much they identified with their country. And we found this trend in almost every single country around the world with every single measure of behavior. There is variation between some countries and others, but on the trend was universal. And so that suggests that

identities can be mobilized for good. And so you can think about this for the pandemic or start with climate change. Now the problem with climate change is it's polarized in the US. And so this is why you got all this pushback and Seth Gohan did. But if you look around the world, it's actually not polarized in most countries around the world. Conservatives and liberals equally support, believe the climate change is happening, that is caused by humans and are interested in doing something about it. It's polarized in the US because we've made it a party-based issue. And so that's part of the dynamics of the US.

It doesn't need to be like that. It's not something that conservatives around the world actually deny. It's very much an American issue, and I think a little bit in the Australia and maybe the UK, too. But almost every other country I've seen the date on, it conservatives and liberals actually agree on it. And so why do American conservatives not agree of it? And first of all, I'm gonna say that's something interesting there.

I just saw a talk on this last month by study whose studies climate change. Turns out that actually most Republicans believe that climate change is happening. And so actually there is bipartisan support and belief in the issue of climate change. The problem is that there are also a lot of Republicans who don't think it's happening or are in denial about it or disagree.

And so they're very vocal and loud. And so they kind of drown out the majority of voices on the right who actually do take it seriously. So when we have these conversations, we need to be nuanced because although there is polarization, there actually is bipartisan consensus about the seriousness of the issue and the reality of the issue. And so you don't want to stereotype an entire group as holding these beliefs when actually there's a lot of diversity within these. It's the same with you look at vaccine attitudes in the US. Most of the people who resisted are Republican, but the majority of Republicans have been vaccinated,

and a lot of them got vaccinated very early and wanted to. And so there actually is, and a lot of them got vaccinated very early and wanted to. And so there actually is, and a lot of times, and I have friends who are Republican and Republican communities, they feel like they can't talk about it, or they'll get socially ostracized or criticized on social media. And so we have to understand the dynamics

that happen within group that make it hard to mobilize action and express the norms that are often in their real behavior that are happening behind closed doors. I think that adds some important nuance about it, but I do think you need national leaders from both parties to mobilize people to make change. Otherwise, it becomes very hard. Okay. Well, and Jay, if someone wants to learn more about you, what are some ways that they can do that? Great question. So obviously, I think the best thing I'd recommend for anybody if you're interested in these things is buy our book, The Power of Us. But we also have a free newsletter at Substack,

Power of Us at Substack. And I read with my call out through Dominic Packer, and we publish something about once a month, sometimes once a week if we have a lot of time. And we talk about all these issues, and we talk about new studies and new findings. We've created some videos that people can watch to learn about these things.

We're always kind of sharing the latest evidence on identity and how it works and how it can be used for good. And then finally, if you want to learn more, you can go to Power of Ops, which is our website, which has reviews and summaries and linked to the newsletter and also links to my personal websites and social media as well. Okay, well, Jay, thank you so much for taking the time

to be here on the show. It was truly an honor to have you. Thanks for having me. Great discussion, great questions. And I really appreciate you're just like thinking deeply and engaging with these issues. Hi, Thurley. Enjoy that interview with Jay Van Babel. And I wanted to thank Jay, the behavioral change for good initiative, Little Brown Spark, and Heshette Books, for giving us the honor of interviewing him. Links to all things Jay will be in the show notes at

passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. I'll proceed to go to supporting the show. Videos are on YouTube at both John R. Miles and Passionstruck Clips. I advertise their deals and discount codes in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please support those who support the show. I'm on LinkedIn and you can also find me on Twitter and Instagram at John R. Miles. And please check it out because I provide daily doses of inspiration in addition to the podcast episodes on all those channels. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview

that I did with Charlotte Burgess Auburn, who has been the director of community at the Stanford D-School since 2005, where she also teaches classes on self-awareness and creativity and design. She's the author of the new book, You Need a Manifesto. Had a craft your convictions and put them to work. Part of the reason why it is a multi-tool is because it's not so much the end object that is the most important part of a personal manifesto. It's the process of making it and remaking it.

The process of beginning it is a process of poking away your self-awareness, right? Right? And the more that you continue to work on it in a variety of different ways, the more you begin to know about yourself. The fee for the show is that you share it with family and friends when you find something

useful or interesting. If you know someone who's really interested in the science of identity, morality, and all things like that, then please share today's episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life and Shenzhara. you