The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It by Alex Edmans

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It by Alex Edmans https://amzn.to/3V02O31 How our biases cause us to fall for misinformation—and how to combat it. Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, executives, and authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions. In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colorful examples—from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death—Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof. Armed with the knowledge of what to guard against, he then provides a practical guide to combat this tide of misinformation. Going beyond simply checking the facts and explaining individual statistics, Edmans explores the relationships between statistics—the science of cause and effect—ultimately training us to think smarter, sharper, and more critically. May Contain Lies is an essential read for anyone who wants to make better sense of the world and better About the author Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Alex has a PhD from MIT as a Fulbright Scholar, and was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given the TED talk “What to Trust in a Post-Truth World” and the TEDx talks “The Pie-Growing Mindset” and “The Social Responsibility of Business” with a combined 2.8 million views. He serves as non-executive director of the Investor Forum, on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Responsible Investing, and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. Alex’s book, “Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit”, was a Financial Times Book of the Year for 2020 and has been translated into nine languages, and he is a co-author of “Principles of Corporate Finance” (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). He has won 25 teaching awards at Wharton and LBS and was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021. His latest book, "May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It" will be published by Penguin Random House in April 2024.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.

Come on. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. There, ladies and gentlemen. That makes it official. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate it. As always, we have the most smartest minds on the shows. The brilliant authors, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the CEOs, the billionaires, you name it.

All the smartest people on this show, and they bring you their stories of life and journey. And as we always say, stories are the owner's manual to life. They help us learn. They help us be better. They'll improve the quality of our life. If you're listening to Chris Voss' show and your life hasn't gotten better, you better go back and listen to all the shows. I learned, you know, we've done 2,000 shows over 16 years. I've learned more from our guests than probably any sort of college I could learn in a lifetime, especially across the broad spectrum of everything that is in regards to life.

So it's not even a specialized field so like i'm i'm a master of everything basically at this point or a layman i don't know a novice we have an amazing author on the show with his newest book that just came out april in 25 i'm sorry did wait did i read that right april 25th it comes out? April 25th in the UK, yeah. 14th of May in the US. Not April 2025, otherwise you'd be way ahead of your time. I'm on the University of California press site,

and we just pulled that as your book site, and I always tell the dates because people watch our videos 10 to 15 years from now. So if I go, if it's a new book, they make ugly comments like you're stupid i'm like dude see when the video's made it came out may what was it again it was april the 25th with penguin in the uk okay there you go so april 25th and other people are gonna have to wait till next year because that's just how they're rolling the book is entitled i set up the suspense for it is entitled may contain lies how stories

statistics and studies exploit our biases and what we can do about it so it's a roadmap of in and out alex edmonds joins us on the show with us today you've heard a little bit from him and he's going to be talking to us about his book and his insights and of course some of you may have to wait till next year alex is a professor of finance at london business school his ted talk what to trust in a post-truth world has been viewed two million times he's spoken at the world economic forum davos in the uk parliament in 2013 he was awarded tenure at the wharten school and in 2021 he was named mba professor of the year by poets and quants edmunds writes regularly for the wall street journal the financial times the harvard business view i love that his first book grow the pie was a financial times book of the year and he's a fellow of the academy of social sciences see we bring all the

smart people on the show welcome to the show a you? Great, thanks. Thanks so much for having me on. Thanks for coming as well. I pulled the University of California press site and I guess I pulled the, maybe I pulled the English version. Give us a.coms. Where can people find you on the interwebs? So my main website is alexedmonds.com, but I'm also on X and LinkedIn under A Edmonds. And so they'll post research, academic research, but always with a practitioner bent. So what my passion is, is to use research to affect the way people do business and live their lives. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside this new book.

So this new book is about misinformation, but it's with a twist. So we often think that misinformation is about checking the facts of's with a twist. So we often think that misinformation is about checking the facts. So if somebody claims that Barack Obama is not a natural born US citizen, you can pull out his birth certificate and that will confirm it. Ah, it should at least. Or at least should if you're listening to the data. But what I'm highlighting is it's more than just checking the facts. So even if the facts are 100% accurate, they could still be misleading inferences. So let's give an example. So there's the famous

book Start With Why about having a why, having a passion, having a purpose leads to success. And the evidence for that is Apple started with why, and Apple is hugely successful. That is a fact. Nobody can dispute Apple's success. But that is only one cherry-picked example. There could be hundreds of other cases where companies started with Y and failed, but you never hear them because the author doesn't want to give the exceptions that actually don't fit his story.

So even if something is true, it could be misleading if we over-extrapolate from it. Ah, there you go. And there's a lot of disinformation in the world right now. I mean, when you say the air of distrust, what is behind that? Is it the death of experts? Is it that everyone got a blog and can post their opinions and flood out true speaking news and facts? I think it's a couple of things. So let's start with the consumer side, the people who receive misinformation. We suffer from confirmation bias and we, that includes me. So confirmation bias is we've got a certain view of the world.

And if we see something that conforms to that view, we lap it up uncritically without questioning. And in contrast, if we see something which contradicts our worldview, we will not believe it, we will just rubbish it and try and tear it apart. And so what the producers of misinformation is that if you have a platform, and as you say, Chris, this could even just be a blog or a LinkedIn or Twitter feed. If you say something that people want to be true, then it might might go viral even if the evidence behind it is pretty flimsy there you go it's it's it's definitely something everyone has had a challenge with especially and it might get worse with ai what are your thoughts on that is ai gonna make

you know we're seeing now people and i'm seeing this from friends about i think a figure i heard kicked around was 46 percent of people cannot discern from from really bad ai renditions of human beings you know you can still sell it tell the eyes and fingers are up they can't tell from fake ai photos and and deep fakes at all and right now the technology is really bad. It's really obvious, but they can't tell. Maybe it's because they're looking at a tiny phone. What do you think about AI? What sort of impact is that going to have on disinformation? So it could be positive and it could be negative, like most things.

So on the positive side, AI can hopefully highlight if something is incorrect. So let's say you latch on to the study by Andrew Wakefield that vaccination leads to autism. What AI can do is to look at the scientific consensus, look at other papers, and they find that this Wakefield paper is just unusual. But on the flip side, people can use AI to generate misinformation. So before the age of AI, you already have the problem that people attribute quotes to Albert Einstein or Mark Twain that were never said. Similarly with AI, and if you use it in a smart way, somebody could ask AI to write something in the tone of a famous author or a famous scientist, and people don't know that he or she never actually said or wrote it.

Wow. Yeah. And like I say, I mean, some of the AI that's out there, it's really cool. It's inventive. It's imaginary. But I can tell at this point, for the most part, I don't think I've seen too many images that I can't figure out are AI generated. You can tell most times. And a lot of it's really easy to do. The fingers are fucked up. The eyeballs are usually not right there's different like a lot of ai images the more you look at them and the more you kind of blow them up a little bit you can you can just tell yeah i mean i can pick up on most of it right away i'm like that's a little too fantastical but i think you're right for images yeah but i think the more complex thing where i can get a bit clever is tech so if they were to come up with a quote in the style of a person or they could write a big report and say this report was done by these famous scientists and that's that's the concern because you're absolutely right with images they're not yet there but with text it's it's easier to get away with that yeah and it'll be interesting to see how ai affects the upcoming

election you know i mean you could you can make deep fake videos now it looks like you know famous politician has evolved in some sort of porno you could you know there was actually there was a recent thing where a guy who i think he was a coach at a school he didn't like his principal for writing him up for some disappropriation of funds he made he faked an ai call that sounded like the principal's voice saying a bunch of racist stuff and got the principal you know they automatically suspend you or you know look into your what you're doing but the police thankfully were savvy enough to figure out that this was a fake ai call and they found who who'd created it and but this this is going to get out of hand of people at the lowest

levels this is i can see people doing this a political level or, you know, if you're trying to, I don't know, extort Elon Musk maybe, but if you, if we're all just going to start throwing away AI fakes at each other, it's going to get really quick. Let's round, we'll round back to the book, but our people like to know about the author. Tell us a little bit about you. What grew you up? What got you into being a journalist or talking about these things, writing, et cetera, et cetera, and in some of these subjects? Yeah. So I grew up in the UK, which will not surprise you given my accent. And in the UK,

the school system's unusual. You have to specialize very early. So when you finish high school, you might do three or four subjects only. And so some people do like maths physics chemistry just sciences others will do history english german some arts i did a mixture and that that's useful sort of my background i did both english and german but also economics and maths and so that's how i ended up in social sciences so being a professor of economics and finance you do have some theories so it's not completely subjective but unlike physics and chemistry these are not set in stone so you can have different viewpoints so chris you and i could see the same data on the economy i might think taxes should be higher you might think taxes should be lower

we can respectfully have a discussion about that and no person is clearly right or wrong so i ended up doing economics and then i actually had a proper job for a while. I was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley for a couple of years, but then I wanted to become a professor. I did a PhD at MIT in the US, was a professor at Wharton, now moved back home to London Business School. And so why did I leave the well-paid job of investment banking for the poorly paid job of academia? I think the bandwidth of your impact is high. So if you write a book or even go on a podcast, that's something that thousands of people, tens of thousands of people can listen to. It can also be timeless, whereas as a banker, you're solving one company's problems at that one time. So I think the impact that you can have is potentially large.

There you go. There you go. And as you wrote the book prior, and I don't have it before me, what was the title of the book you had prior? Grow the Pie, How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit. Yeah. Great book. People loved it. There you go. Yeah. And so what that book is about is social responsibility, the idea that companies can contribute towards wider society, and this is not at the expense of profit so there is the ESG culture wars in the US where some people say woke capitalism this is just misguided you're just losing money but what I'm trying to highlight is that if companies treat

their employees well treat their customers well invest in reducing their environmental impact those are things that don't give pie to the wider society. They grow the pie, and therefore shareholders are better off as a result. There you go. Yeah, the rising tide lifts all boats, as they say. So now, what motivated you on to write this book? What was it that drove you? So as a professor, I'm quite unusual.

So rather than just doing academic research just to be read by other academics and sit in the library, as I mentioned at the start, I really like to use this to speak to practitioners. This could be policymakers, managers, investors, journalists, podcast hosts. But sometimes what I found was how people responded to the research, this would be based on whether they liked what it said rather than its actual accuracy. So if they liked the conclusion, they thought it was the world's best paper. And if it was an uncomfortable, inconvenient truth, they would say this is just some academic stuff. It's got no relation to the real world. So I thought if I spent the rest of my career just writing more and more academic papers,

this is pointless because whether it actually cuts through will be based on whether people like its findings. So I wanted to speak about how we should respond to evidence in general, to highlight the biases, like confirmation bias, that cause us to be uncritical on the one hand with some things and hypercritical on the other hand with things that we don't like, and also to give the reader simple tips, even if you're time-pressed, even if you don't have a PhD in statistics, to figure out whether or not I can trust a particular study or conclusion. There you go. And we need to realize that we have confirmation bias. How do we, you know, there's something, do you talk about the Dunning-Kruger disease by chance in the book? Not explicitly, but there is the theme throughout

that sometimes people are just overconfident about their abilities. And actually, this idea of misinformation, it is actually smarter people who suffer more from misinformation. Oh, really? You might actually think it's the opposite. The smarter you are,

then the more likely you are to spot deep fakes. So I'm pretty dumb then because I can identify deep fakes. Is that what you're saying no i think it might be it's more in terms of the data and the information rather than the images but why might you have this counterintuitive result with with the data and evidence is if you're really smart if you see something you don't like you can come up with a whole ton of excuses as to why this is wrong and you can ignore it but you don't apply

the same critical thinking faculties when there's something you do so let's give an example with silicon valley bank they had models which predicted that if interest rates rose they would go bust those seemingly smart executives came up with some reasons as to why the model's assumption should be changed to give the result that they wanted and as a result the bank blew up oh wow yeah it's the confirmation bias you know we've we've run into these two camps and politics we have the same thing there are certain people that watch one channel which sadly feeds them a lot of sort of pr material i in fact news channel is probably the wrong word to use, news. And then there's other news channels and there's variances of bias,

but people tend to find what they, you know, what's fed to them is what they believe. And they just end with that confirmation bias. How do people recognize that they're doing that? If I'm sitting at home listening to this going, I wonder if I have any, you know, confirmation biases or i'm i'm you know doing what i do how do how can people maybe recognize that come to come to some some a workout or work around so i think one thing is just to see where you're getting your information what are your sources and so if you're only

watching fox news that could be an issue but then to apply this to myself because the danger of writing a book like this is you need to be held up to your own standards. A few years ago there was the referendum on whether the UK should leave the EU and I was a strong Remainer and all my friends were and everybody in my network was. But then I deliberately tried to go to some talks by Brexiters. Now, I used to think these people are uninformed, they're xenophobic. But when I went to these talks, I realized that they had some good arguments. So I might not have always agreed with the conclusion, but I still saw there was logic behind them.

So I tried to go out of my way to see the opposite viewpoint. Yeah. There's a, there's a, I think it was Abraham Lincoln who did a quote and I might butcher it. So just ride with me folks in the audience. But I think it says something about how he, he was, I think he was referring to a fellow politician or someone he didn't know. And he said, I don't like that man. I should get to know him better something along those lines and in that quote what what he recognized was that if you don't if you don't like someone sometimes you just maybe don't know them better maybe you've made you've jumped to assumptions or conclusions about them and and you know i i've done that with people across my life and then when i've gotten to know them better,

you know, I have more empathy, I have more rapport with them, I understand maybe where they come from. Sometimes they're still disagreeable sort of people because they have some sort of childhood traumas or issues from trauma that they haven't reconciled, and so they're acting out in that way, but at least when I get to know them better, I can understand why they're doing that and i can be okay this person definitely has some issues and most of my audience does that like this chris foss guy he has a lot of issues but i'm

working on the folks give me time it's been 20 years of therapy selling heart stern you know this is one of those things but you know being able to recognize you know the one thing you know about dunning-kruger is you kind of recognize that you know you're not as smart as you are but it's interesting what you said that the smartest people seem to be the people that don't recognize they're they're having confirmation bias is that because let me ask you that this is that because usually people that we perceive are very smart are very particulate in their line of expertise or work? If I'm a scientist, I'm really focused in on maybe one scientific study or one sort of scientific fact maybe. Maybe that's my PhD or something. Imagine smart people and they're looking at certain things specifically.

They're so focused in on that. They can't maybe see the world outside them or something. Is that a factor? I certainly think it can be because you have to become very specialist. And if you become very specialist, then you don't appreciate other types of opinions on the particular topic. And also, if you're really smart, you think your confirmation bias might be even stronger, because you think I've got a view of the world, because I'm really smart, my view of the world is the right one, other views of the world are going to

be wrong, because they're not as smart as me. And so you become particularly entrenched. And one example in the book, The Big Short by Michael Lewis, he covers this guy howie hubler who was the head of proprietary credit at morgan stanley where if you told him there was an issue with his trades he would say get the hell out of my office why he was such a star trader and then he put on some trades which allegedly lost nine billion dollars that is a lot of money to lose and there were a lot of people allegedly either trying to tell him or just afraid of telling him they self-censored because they knew there was no point because he wouldn't listen to them he was so smart he would dismiss what you're saying wow yeah well that'll that'll bite you

in the butt every time really it's it's really interesting that people focus on stuff you know i've i've met a lot of phds and god bless them they're wonderful people they they they're specialized in what they do but i i've met a lot of phds that other than the field of focus that they did on a phd they couldn't punch their way out of paper bag in life not all of them but but many of them i'm just like you're really bad at everything else except for what you focus on and sometimes they're not great on what they focus on you you just sometimes they focus on such a narrow niche of that's so isolated from everything else you're just like you know like one thing in life and that's about it yes and they view it from one particular lens and it can be just a very academic lens and this is particularly interesting in my field which is being a business school professor is that there are many business school professors who've never worked for a company in

their life and we're trying to teach people on how to run companies but without that perspective if you've always been in academia that might be somewhat different now there are some great business school professors who have only gone in academia but i think there are many who might benefit from a couple of years in the real world because that would give them a different perspective. Yeah, most definitely. It's really interesting how that whole thing plays out and works because you're just like, how do you so bad at all of this? And people in psychiatry, I've met people in psychiatry that are just awful psychiatrists. I'm like, do you have a mirror?

Like, you need more help than maybe some of your clients do. But a lot of people go into psychiatry because they have childhood trauma or damage. And my thinking is that basically they go into psychiatry because it's cheaper to do that and fix it, fix the childhood trauma trauma than it is to pay somebody to do it usually usually when i meet people that go into psychiatry especially women early on i ask them what happened to you as a child and 99.9 percent of the time there's something it happened tragically and they're going into psychiatry to fix it i haven't met everybody who went to psychiatry but the numbers seem to be there it's it's like a lot of times people get kind of drawn to that group because those are their issues. What are some other aspects of the book that we haven't talked about?

I think one is the difference between correlation and causation, which make people know in the cold light of day. But when your biases are taking over, then you might get some basic things wrong. And let me again give an example for me getting something wrong. So before I had my child, we took a course on parenting. And a lot of it was really important things like how to change a nappy and what to do when your baby is sick. But there were courses on breastfeeding. And they said breastfeeding is the only thing you should give to your kid the world health organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding no water no formula for the first six months people say breast is best i'm still getting breastfeeding i'm still getting well that's what leads to high success that's consistent with all the studies which claim

breastfeeding is good for iq it's good for health it's good for maternal kid bonding but then actually when you look into the data this is a correlation that's not causation so it's true that breastfed kids have say higher iq than bottle fed kids but who is it who gets breastfed so breastfeeding is really tough so it may well be that mothers with a more supportive home environment are able to breastfeed because it's challenging. And it could be that home environment which leads to the better outcomes. And so actually, when you control for the mother's home environment, for the maternal income, the maternal education i.e you strip out all of the effects of those factors on iq or health you actually find very little effect of breastfeeding and so why i think that's so

striking is that we tell mothers you have to breastfeed they feel guilty if they want to reach for the bottle but because breastfeeding is tough this leads to bleary-eyed mothers feeling they have to breastfeed even if they want to break and this black and white idea that you should only breastfeed your kid this is not supported by the evidence wow you know i didn't really think about that because we always have these studies that say you know if you do this one thing everything will be fine if you drink three cups of coffee a day i'm just making an example up here people people write me if you drink three cups of coffee a day i'm just making an example of a pair of people people write me if you drink three cups of coffee a day you won't get liver disease you know something

stupid like that and and so we are like oh let's drink three cups of coffee and you know as you said there are mitigating factors around that that maybe they had really good genetics maybe sample i mean usually when they do their sample size groups they're supposed to have some variant but but maybe there were other mitigating factors that that did that maybe it was maybe it was the sugar in their coffee that made no i'm just kidding don't do that you know but you're quite right chris yeah because so who is it who can drink three cups of coffees a day this is not random so i don't know what coffees are costing like now in the u.s i've not been in the u.s i lived there 10 years ago but in the uk three cups of coffee a day. This is not random. So I don't know what coffees are costing like now in the US. I've not

been in the US. I lived there 10 years ago. But in the UK, three cups of coffee a day might cost you like 10 pounds. And so that's not small if you have it every day. So the people who are able to afford three coffees a day might be wealthier people to begin with. And it could be their wealth, which is leading to all of the positive outcomes, not the coffee drinking. Ah, there you go. Yeah, you see people, they always tell you different things. Bob lived to 100 because he didn't smoke. And then you see, I forget who the famous vaudeville actor was back in the day, George Burns.

He smoked until he was like 100, 102. He's like, 32 seconds a day. And a lot of it seems to come down to genetics more than anything else is, is the, I don't know. I could be biased. I couldn't have information bias. You know, now I'm going to start having to disclose that every now and then. I could be information biased, but this is my opinion.

But, you know, you, you look at some things and some of the things they tell you, you know, and I think that's where people get really confused, too, is that specialized sort of thing. You know, it's like we used to say, hey, if you eat lots of grains and bread and butter, you'll be fine. And then they went, hey, you need to eat margin with that bread. And they went back to butter. And, you know, it's it's it's where the world we live in. But, yeah, now now I look at facts from here on out. When you tell me stuff, I'm going to think of mitigating circumstances.

I might even look at political polls that way. Because you know how political polls have been wrong in the last, I think since what, 2015, 16? Part of it's the questioning and what they set up, but a lot of it seems to be mitigating factors. They say, would you vote for Bob if he supported abortion? Oh yeah. factors if they say would you vote for bob if he supported abortion oh yeah but you know bob meanwhile is a is a i don't know he's an awful person and doing illegal things or something and you would vote for bob if he supported that you know there might be other reasons why you will not vote for him i think we saw that in 2020 and hopefully we see that in the future

i mean just because someone supports them doesn't mean you should vote for the worst person in the world. And also, you wonder who gets to respond to these polls, because in the past, if the polls were done by telephone, then people typically had your home telephone number, not your work number. And so who were the people at home? These be people who who are out of a job and so you're you are polling an unrepresentative selection of the population or sometimes maybe if now the polls on the internet then maybe you're polling people who have got smartphones and got greater access so whenever you have a poll it might not be truly random and so the results that

you have might be due to the sample and that's why as you say chris a lot of recent polls have been incorrect yeah people that will actually answer the phone i won't answer my phone unless i know exactly who it is because i get i still to this day get these illegal spam calls i got two yesterday and i actually picked them up thinking it's it must be a friend of mine and and you could hear right away it was like some call from some call center and you know it does the whole biz line thing and so yeah it's it's i never really thought about i think i thought about it once but yeah i mean people's maybe you know whoever's picking up call it's kind of like that joke about about jury duty the only people who seem to go into jury duty are people who don't read the news and don't have a fucking idea what's going on you know they always ask him have you been reading about this in the news oh no i haven't okay you

could be on the jury do you read about anything else in the news like you're not watching tv in the news do you even know what's going on in the fucking world or what's happening what year is it you know but let's put you on a jury and that's how OJ got off, folks. This is very insightful. I'm hoping a book like yours can help people overcome their confirmation bias. Sad part is, do a lot of people with confirmation bias read? I think they do, but they read things that they think they will like. And so what I tried to do here is to highlight that these issues of biases and information, these are actually quite simple issues. There's not a single equation in the entire book.

What I'm trying to highlight here is that it's often common sense. So just the arguments that you make, Chris, as to who is it who responds to polls, who is it that serves on a jury, those are the same common sense arguments that I'm trying to initiate within the reader whenever you see a study that you want to be true. And also my goal is to make it as engaging and entertaining and fun as possible. So my hope is that by reading the book, you don't only feel smarter at the end of it, but you also feel entertained and it is fun. So I put a lot of effort into trying to make the writing flow and to be quite engaging. There you go. I'm going to read it.

And then that way I won't have any confirmation bias and I can go around and tell everybody how it is. I'll just be the smartest person on the planet. But no, we need to focus on this. I, I, I, you know, I've been guilty in my past for watching news channels that I thought were fairly open MSNBC. And then realizing later they were fairly biased. And while I love the open, MSNBC, and then realizing later they were fairly biased. And while I love the people at MSNBC,

we've had some people recently on the show, I had to go, okay, I need to stick with CNN. And there's so much of it that's out there that you go down the line from. And I think part of it is, I meet people now that they don't know the difference between the news page of the Washington from and i think part of it is you know like i meet people now that they don't know the difference between the news page of the washington post and the opinion page and like they'll argue some maybe political point with you and they'll say you know that isn't true this is

what the news is and i'm like where are you quoting them from and they're quoting from the opinion page and actually on that point this is really important because what was the biggest piece of evidence used to support the prescription of opioids in the u.s it was an article in the new england journal of medicine which was entitled addiction rare in patients treated with narcotics you think it's the new england journal of medicine this is a scientific study it was a letter to the editor so it was the New England Journal of Medicine. This is a scientific study. It was a letter to the editor. So it was the equivalent of the opinion page rather than the news page. So over 1,600 articles have cited this letter as evidence that opioids don't lead to addiction.

When it was never a study, it was just somebody's opinion. And so we've seen some serious consequences of that, obviously. Wow. that's just it's extraordinary so this is a book everyone should turn read maybe we can put this in schools force people to read it and stuff like that because it's just it seems like it seems like we should be it seems like we should be teaching this at a very early age or we need to teach especially with ai as how do people recognize disinformation? How can they analyze and understand information that's presented to them?

It's so freaking important. It's not even funny. There you go. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Alex? Thanks very much, Chris.

Really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortuneschrisfoss linkedin.com fortuneschrisfoss youtube.com fortuneschrisfoss and all those crazy places on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe we'll see you next time

and that should have