The Dispatch Podcast - The Treasure of the Scout Mindset

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Are you a “scout” or a “soldier”? What do those terms even mean? In Julia Galef’s new book, The Scout Mindset, she argues the scout mindset is underrepresented in today’s world. “The scout’s role, unlike the soldier, is not to go out and attack or defend,” she says. “It’s to go out, and see what’s really out there as clearly as possible and to put together as accurate a map of the territory or a situation as you can.” Plus, listen closely for Steve’s John McLaughlin impression and why Julia believes bouncing between Airbnbs is way better than signing an actual lease. Show Notes: -“The Scout Mindset” by Julia Galef -Rationally Speaking Podcast -Julia Galef on Twitter -Julia’s TED Talk -The Dispatch Manifesto -Dr. Tom Gilovich -Julia’s Twitter thread about Airbnbs -Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes. This week, we are interviewing Julia Galef. She is the author of The Scout Mindset, Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. She's also the host of the podcast, rationally speaking, exploring the borderlands between reason and nonsense. But today we're going to focus on the book. This is about self-deception. Our desire to be right causes us to be wrong more often than we're we think, she says, it can blind us hurting our judgment and decision making, leaving us vulnerable to risk. If we want to get things right when it matters most, we must train ourselves to have a scout mindset to survey the territory and discover what's actually true. We are just so excited to have you today.

Steve and I just gobbled up this book. Like, it was the tastiest side of vegetables. Because it's not dessert, right? Like, this is good eating. This is vegetables, but it's like, I don't know, it's like broccoli with the best cheese sauce on it or something. That's my favorite compliment that I've gotten in a long time. I want to kind of start actually toward the end of the book

because you talk about ideologies. And I had never really seen someone do such a lovely, a definition that really resonated with me on the definition of an ideology and using Barry Goldwater as the example of someone who then holds their ideology lightly. Can you walk through why Barry Goldwater is your greatest example and what your definition of ideology is?

Sure. So, you know, the book is about all of these different facets of what I'm calling Scout Mindset, which is the motivation to see things as they are and not as you wish they were. And there's different ways that can manifest and you can be good at some aspects of Scout mindset, but less good at others. Like, for example, I think I'm pretty good at interpreting my opponent's arguments charitably. I'm less good at seeking out criticism. So there's, you know, there's different aspects of it. And so that's all lead in to say. that I think, I don't necessarily want to claim that Barry Goldwater is a perfect scout in every way.

But there is one aspect of scout mindset that I do think he was unusually good at, especially for politicians in general, but, you know, just for people as a whole as well. And that aspect is being able to say, you know, yes, I am a Republican. That is literally his identity, the label that applies to him.

But at the same time, I am not, what he put it was, I'm not a me-to Republican. That's literally something he announced at the convention where he was announcing his campaign for Senate that I'm not a me-to Republican. Don't expect me to fall in line

behind the standard Republican party line. I'm going to think for myself and I'm going to just say what I think the right policy is or the right judgment call is. And he really adhered to that campaign promise, that weird campaign promise for his entire career. You know, he would, he called out Nixon

when he thought that Nixon's behavior in the Watergate scandal deserved impeachment, and he stood up for the integrity of the Democratic head of the investigation of Nixon. He called out Reagan when he felt Reagan wasn't being straight with people during the Iran-Contra affair. And then one of my favorite examples is laid in Goldwater's career when Clinton was under fire for – sorry, not Watergate. What was it called? Whitewater. Whitewater, thank you. Thank you. I always forget that word. When Clinton was under fire for Whitewater, Goldwater was an old man at this time. He had a cane and a head of white hair. And he wasn't a fan of Clintons. He'd complained viciously about Clinton in the press. I remember one reporter asked Goldwater something about Clinton's foreign policy.

And Goldwater said, you know, I think I sent a letter to Clinton saying this, but I think he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about and he should shut up. So he was not a fan of Clintons, but he really wanted to examine the allegations against Clinton, the whitewater allegations honestly and objectively. And so he spent a night pouring over the evidence. And then in the morning he held a press conference where he announced, you know, I really don't think that there's anything, I don't think there's much here. I don't, I think that everyone should get off of Clinton's backs because this is not a, these allegations are really not substantive or credible, which of course did not endear him to the Republican Party. And plenty of local talk shows, you know, went on about

how annoying and how disloyal Goldwater was. But he didn't care because he just, he really just cared about figuring out what he thought was true and fair. And if that didn't accord with what the Republican Party line was, then so be it. And so tips to identify what are each of our own ideologies. It's more than just something you happen to agree with or even believe in. but something that is part of your identity. Right. Yeah. So that's really the word that I,

that I, or the concept that I focus on in the book is the idea of beliefs becoming part of your identity. And this, so, you know, the most common examples are politics and religion. And you can tell that those are beliefs that are often part of people's identities

because, you know, we all know the standard advice don't talk about politics or religion on a first date or at a party or to anyone you don't know really well. And that's because they're so often part of our identity. in the sense that, you know, we take pride in our beliefs in those topics. We feel like they define us.

When someone disagrees with them, it feels like we take it personally. It feels like they're, you know, stomping on our country's flag or something. That's the feeling when someone disagrees with beliefs that are part of your identity. And so politics and religion are the most common examples, but really anything can become part of your identity. I spent a number of years living in the San Francisco Bay Area. And so I know well that people's beliefs about which programming languages are superiors. to which others in which particular ways

can definitely become part of people's identities and they can take it very personally and get very heated in those arguments. So my advice in the book is that it's really important to be able to hold those identities lightly. We can never really get rid of our identities. You're a Democrat or you're a Republican,

you're liberal or a libertarian or conservative. You know, there are going to be various causes or movements that you're a part of that you want to support. So that's kind of unavoidable, but given all that, you should still be able to maintain some amount of emotional detachment from those identities, from those ideologies, and to be able to keep separate in your mind, here's what I think is true and here's what the ideology says. And maybe they overlap a lot, but you should still be thinking of those as two separate things so that you can notice the areas where you disagree. And you can notice if potentially

it comes to seem to you at some point that this ideology is actually not mostly true or not net helpful for the world so that you can, you know, part ways with it. Steve, I thought that one of the best lines, especially on this identity thing, but maybe it was one of the best lines of the whole book is when you hold your identity lightly, you can really confound that someone is wrong on the internet impulse. Right. Which means, you know, running to Twitter to argue with someone you don't know, it's an egg or a bot even, and you sit there and spend five hours arguing with that.

person, that's because it's an identity for you and you felt personally attacked. And just the someone is wrong on the internet impulse should be a bumper sticker. I definitely feel like Twitter. I felt prey to that a lot. Yeah. Everyone does at some point. Yeah. Yeah, there was one example I gave where, you know, this impulse to just leap to the defense of some of some ideology or some identity that's being criticized by people you don't know and they're not even talking to you, but you feel such a strong impulse to defend it. A funny way this happened to me recently is that there was a...

I saw a headline for some article criticizing atheists, and I'm an atheist. And the headline was something about atheists aren't as rational as they like to think they are. And so I immediately got defensive and clicked on the headline readying myself to argue in my head with their claims.

And the irony is I've made this exact same point myself. I often find myself pointing out that, yeah, there are a lot of self-identified atheists who think that just the fact that they're atheists means they're perfectly rational about all things. And that's really not true. That's not warranted. And so I've made this point myself, but because it was coming from someone who seemed to be using that point as a weapon against atheists, it raised my hackles and I was ready to argue at this point that I myself have made.

So it really can distort your ability to think clearly about what you honestly believe. Steve, you were the one that recommended this book. What attracted you to it? Yeah, you know, I've actually found it on Twitter. I think it was a tweet from Adam Grant who recommended it or pushed it. And then I started looking into the arguments you were making and into what the book was saying. And I thought in some ways, it's among the most important topics of discussion we can have. And it's, you know, there's a long history of why we started the dispatch, and I think the ways that scout and soldier mindsets apply to journalism, to politics, the way that you've been talking about. And I've got about 180 questions for you.

But before I get to them, maybe it'd be helpful. You gave sort of a partial definition of what you mean by scout mindset. Maybe it'd be helpful to talk about what scout mindset is, talk about what soldier mindset is, and how you came to see these two concepts. the way that you do. Yeah, great. So the, so Scott Mindset is my term for for the motivation to see things as they are and not as you wish they were. And it's part of this framing metaphor of the book in which I say that humans in general were very often by default in what I call soldier mindset, which is my term for the motivation to defend your beliefs or defend what you want to be true against any evidence or arguments that might threaten those beliefs. And the metaphor came out of

the fact, it just came out of the way that we talk about reasoning and arguments and beliefs, which is very militaristic language. So we talk about, you know, strong or well-supported beliefs, the same way we would talk about a strong or well-supported military position that's, you know, hard to penetrate or knock down. We talk about buttressing our arguments, the same way you would buttress a military position. And then when we're talking about contradictory evidence or arguments, we use offensive language. So we'll talk about shooting down an idea or argument or poking holes in someone's logic.

And then when we talk about changing our minds, the language is that of defeat. Like even admitting a point or admitting that someone's right is it's like admitting someone into your fortress. Or conceding a point is that the word there is to cede as in to cede territory. So this idea that the point of reasoning is to use, defend your beliefs against threat is just baked into the English language, into the way we talk about belief and reason. And so that, so yeah, I have this term soldier mindset. And it's, it's not a

new idea. Plenty of people have talked about very related things like motivated reasoning or confirmation bias or wishful thinking or rationalizing. So soldier mindset is just my kind of umbrella term for all of those things. And scout mindset is an alternative to that because the scouts role, unlike the soldier, is not to go out and attack or defend. It's to go out and see what's really out there as clearly as possible and to put together as accurate a map of the territory or a situation as you can. And so the way that I came to think this was an important thing to write a book about was just that I've spent, you know, the last 10, 15 years of my life focused on human reasoning and how it could be improved. And I just felt like,

the discourse around this topic was missing this really important element because it was focused, books and articles about rationality and reasoning tend to be focused on increasing knowledge, like giving people knowledge of here are the cognitive biases or here are logical fallacies. And it's not that that's not important. I think that's valuable. It's just it's not sufficient on its own because intelligence or knowledge are like these tools that you can use in different ways depending on your motivation. So you can, as I'm sure you've seen if you've ever been on Reddit, if you are armed with a list of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, you can use those tools to attack all the arguments of people you don't like. And in fact, that is how many

people use their copious knowledge about biases and fallacies. And so really the motivation, or sorry, the bottleneck to me much more seem to be motivation than knowledge and intelligence. like how are you motivated to use your your cleverness and your knowledge and and and you know how do we shift our motivations towards actually wanting to know what's really true um towards being intellectually honest and curious about what's actually the case instead of using our knowledge and IQ to uh to defend our preexisting beliefs well this i mean there's a sort of an obvious um in your answer unstated presumption in the book, you tease it out, and it's that we instinctively undervalue the truth, which is a

fascinating concept. I mean, the example that struck home most with me was how many people lie to their doctors, which is unbelievable. You stop and think about it. You're like, why would you ever lie to your doctor? The doctor's trying to help you get an accurate picture of your health. What's the incentive to do that? Why is it that we do undervalue, uh, the truth in your view? Yeah, so, you know, scout and soldier mindset each have, they have different dynamics of rewards and consequences. And so the rewards of being in soldier minds,

that the rewards of convincing yourself of things that are convenient, but maybe not necessarily true, those rewards are immediate. So if you convince yourself, you're right about some political issue or you're right about, you know, the fact that you didn't actually make a mistake in that situation at work or with your partner, you feel good immediately. That relief is, is immediate. And the consequences, the downside of deceiving yourself doesn't really come until later on. So the downside might be that you're less likely to notice yourself making that same mistake in the future because you convince yourself it's not really there. Or the downside of deceiving yourself about

political issues is a little less direct because political issues don't have as much impact on our everyday lives, whether you're right or wrong about foreign policy. But you're still reinforcing the habit of deceiving yourself and you're failing to practice the habit or the emotional skill of being willing to notice when you were wrong. That's a very valuable skill. And so you're sacrificing your ability to get better at that. But those consequences don't happen until far down the road. And so my point was that this is just a, this is another example of ways in which the human brain is biased towards choosing things that pay off immediately and ignoring kind of longer term consequences. And I think the longer term consequences of scout mindset are really great,

but they're, they're unfortunately underappreciated by our brains because they take a little longer to pay off. I also really appreciated just as a fault to that point. I don't know that I was totally satisfied by it, but I appreciated your effort to go into the evolutionary biology aspect of why our brains have that immediate reward. We know, for instance, that the reason you have an immediate reward for eating French fries is because they're high fat. It was important for our ancestors to store up fat where possible. And so your brain rewarded you for eating fatty foods. Well, now it's French fries and you have plenty of fatty food. And so unfortunately, we're left with a brain that still rewards us chemically for eating French fries,

even though now in our current world, our brain should reward us for eating broccoli. And it was a very similar description of what it would have looked like in a small hunter-gatherer tribe for tens of thousands of years that you maybe needed soldier mindset. Or, yeah, so, well, first of all, just clarify that the evolutionary argument is more speculative. It's sort of an explanation that seems somewhat compelling to me for why our brains would have turned out this way, for why they would be undervaluing scout mindset, undervaluing the, well, underweighting the value of having an accurate map of yourself and of the world. But I don't actually think the evolutionary argument is essential to the case that I'm making in the book, because the most important fact is just that clearly our brains do work this way.

Clearly, we do undervalue long-term consequences relative to immediate consequences. That's just kind of a fact. And we can speculate about why our brains turned out that way. And I have some ideas that I talk about in the book. But just knowing that that fact is true about our brains, I think points to the conclusion that we're going to undervalue Scout Mindset because its rewards are delayed instead of immediate. And then, yeah, to elaborate on the evolutionary argument itself, now that I've clarified that it's speculative, the argument is that, you know, we have far more choices to make

in our modern lives than our ancestors did many tens of thousands of years ago. You know, we can choose where to live, who to marry, or whether to marry, whether to have kids, where to invest our money, or what medical treatments to try, how to live our lives in order to be happy, which communities to be part of, you know, you can, if you're unhappy in your pre-existing tribe, you know, your community or your town that you grew up in, you have the freedom now to make a change to that, to move somewhere else and find other people whose values and lifestyles you accord with better. And so, you know, the point of having an accurate map of yourself and your strengths and weaknesses and how the world works and how

other people work, the point is to help you navigate the world to make better decisions. And so now that's useful because we have all these decisions to make. But in the past, we just didn't have nearly as many choices or opportunities to fix the things that made us unhappy about our lives. You had, you know, a set role in the tribe. You had a set tribe that you couldn't really leave to go join a different tribe. And group cohesion was so important. Right. That's another element to this is that a lot of the motive to be in soldier mindset unconsciously is to is to, is to, to cohere with your group, to show, yes, I believe all the things you believe. I believe all the

things that make you a virtuous person, according to this group. And that, I'm theorizing, that impulse was especially important in the past where your acceptance by the particular tribe you happened to be born into was crucial to whether you lived or died. And being ostracized socially could just, you know, wreck your life and wreck any chance your genes had of propagating to the next generation because no one would want to mate with you. Right. I mean, we use tribalism as a pejorative. But if you're in a tribe, you might want to be tribalist if you want to stay in that tribe. Absolutely. Yeah. The benefits of tribal cohesion are, you know, were especially real in the past and are real to some extent today. It's just that, you know, I think that that impulse

exerts more power than it should over our ability to think clearly in a world in which now, you know, it's not a life or death situation. You're not going to, for the most part, in most cases, you're not going to get killed if you disagree with your tribe. And we also have the ability to find other tribes over time. And I'm not going to say that's easy or trivial to abandon some of your older friends and get new friends. But it is a thing we can do. And I think a lot of people, a lot of people I know have become much happier and felt much more like they can live their authentic selves by, you know, building new communities over the internet or moving to new cities and finding people with whom they don't have to force themselves to, cohere to the beliefs of that tribe because they already naturally agree more or there's just

much more acceptance of disagreement in the new tribes that they've found for themselves. So I think that's a really valuable thing to be able to do. What I found interesting, again, you don't dive into because you can only do so much in this book. I'm looking forward to book number two. Thanks for recognizing that. That I've already assigned to you. Sorry. There are still benefits to tribalism. as well in modern society. So look back evolutionarily. You're talking about being kicked out of the tribe or not being able to pass on your genes

if you break with the tribe. At the same time, if everyone in the tribe is like, well, actually, Bob, I'm not sure that that's the right way to go. We could also go left and everyone sits there arguing over which direction to go. The whole tribe gets wiped out.

Nobody passes on their genes. And to some extent, even in modern society, there's a lot of stalemate by pluralism going on. Just look at, I mean, you can, Steve and I talk a lot about why Congress is broken, and this is not one of the reasons that we cite the most, but perhaps we should, which is everyone wants to go in their own direction in a different direction, and there isn't that tribalism, there isn't that sense of cohesion, there's too much scout mindset, perhaps.

Uh-huh. Yeah, so I think there's a value to something that at Amazon they call disagree and commit, where you can't argue, in fact, it's good to at least, argue with your fellow team members about which direction to go in. But as you say, at the end of the day, you got to make a decision and go with it and cooperate to achieve it. And so the goal of the disagree and commit philosophy or policy is that you shouldn't have to pretend you agree with everything everyone else is saying because it's good to be aware of the disagreement that exists. But once you've had that argument and the group has decided on something, you should be able to say,

okay, well, I disagree, but I'm committed to trying this and trying to make it work, even if I would have chosen something different. So I think there are strategies that you can use, even if everyone's a scout and everyone's an independent thinker, to work together as a team. But I agree that with everyone being in Scout mindset, it does make the cooperation a little harder than if everyone was already just by default trying to agree with each other about the right policy. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer

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and debates nationally at this point, it seems to me, I mean, I buy a lot of your arguments about why soldier mindset may have been more instinctive, why it may have had its time, why it may have been more valuable in the past. But if you look at the way that, in particular in the frame of politics, you look at the way that we're conducting our debates now, obviously, I mean, there's abundant studies that suggest we're a lot more polarized. It's a lot more tribal, despite the fact that there is more truth available to all of us with the proliferation of information sources, what have you. Why do you think that is, particularly in the realm of politics?

Why are we more polarized now, despite having more access to information? Right. It seems to me we have more soldiers than scouts. in these debates. Yeah, I mean, certainly in the realm of politics, that seems pretty accurate. I don't know if I'd, like, I don't know that I'd sign on to the stronger claim that people are more soldier-like

just in general in all of their lives than they used to be, I think, human nature is what it is, and we've always been pretty soldier-like. Although, to clarify, I definitely don't think that some people are all soldiers and other people are perfect scouts. We're all a mix of both.

And, you know, in some situations, we're going to be more scout-like or more soldier-like. But with respect to politics in particular, you know, I'm not an expert on this, but I have interviewed a bunch of people on my podcast about why, you know, why party alignment has become such a stronger predictor of people's voting choices and why people's news sources have become so divergent from each other, whereas in the past, everyone used to consume pretty similar sources of news that kind of put everyone in the same reality, so to speak. I think there's a lot of social and economic forces that are creating these different realities that I'm definitely not an expert on, but it seems like, you know, the decline of local news

and the ability of the internet to give people access to tons of different divergent sources of news, whereas in the past there were kind of just a few networks. Those seem pretty important to me. Does that match your picture of what's happening? Yeah, it does. I mean, I'm thinking in particular, I mean, I'm thinking in particular of sort of the pull of partisanship, which I think is now as strong as ever. I think partisan as an identity, partisanship as a source of identity is even stronger than ideology. I think in many ways, if you look at what's happened to the Republican Party over the past five plus years, it's much more partisan where it's a red team, red team versus blue team sense. And the beliefs come second, right?

beliefs can change. Look, I mean, the Republican Party didn't have a platform. The Republican Party had no statement of beliefs in 2020 and basically said, yeah, whatever our team wants. That's what we, that's what we believe. So it is really this kind of core tribal pull that seems to dominate. But it's also true, I would say, in the news media. And, you know, your book caused me to think a lot about about this in particular. People are, people have the ability. now to seek out what they already believe. I mean, it's, you know, it's the directly motivated reasoning that you're talking about, the can I versus must I believe this. They can now go and find prepackaged news that corresponds directly, often directly, or close to directly, with what they already believe. And that's how people are choosing to get their information, which suggests to me, at least in sort of news consumption and in political information, people are moving more and more toward a soldier mindset and away from a scout mindset. I'm hoping, I'm asking you this question so that you can tell me I'm wrong and there's reason to hope

and you can actually have rational discourse. Before Julia answers it, I want to add another layer onto this cake made of mud. at the same time, we've seen a dramatic drop-off in people who affiliate with a specific religion. And the two could be, you know, it's correlative, not causal, but boy, it feels a little causal. And if it is causal, does that mean that we so instinctively need to be a part of a tribe, going back to our conversation about evolution, that in fact, we have to have to have to have a soldier mindset about some things. We're just hard, so hardwired that when the rationality of religion somehow intruded and people fell away from religion, that part of their brain

needed some tribe to fight for, to defend, to belong to, and they found partisanship? I have heard this theory, and it's very intriguing. And I'm not sure how confident I am in it, but it's definitely intriguing. And one thing that I think it suggests, is that we should try, for the good of our country and the world, we should try to make sports a much bigger deal. Because if people channel that impulse into sports teams and rooting for those sports teams, it's just a much healthier, less harmful outlet for partisanship, I think.

I mean, I don't love sports myself. I was always the kid picked last for kickball at recess, but I would love that world. See, here's the problem. And I was a scout, unfortunately. I thought I was a soldier about the act. Astros. I grew up with the Astros. And then there was the cheating scandal. My initial instinct was, boy, I hope this isn't true. And then I read all the information. And I have had to publicly shame the

Astros. I have a World Series ball. I'm so angry about it. But you look at the evidence and it is what it is. So I'm not a very good soldier when it comes to sports. Oh, well, there's always room for improvement. You'll get there one day, I'm sure. But that's, I mean, so, Not to take a fun point and make it serious and bring it down. But it's very interesting to me. I mean, speaking more personally than I usually do. I mean, I am totally irrational about sports. I know this about myself.

I am 100% soldier. Every Packers game I watch, the referees are out to get the Packers. And I know that that's not true, right? I mean, I understand that I'm not seeing things rationally, But I believe it throughout the game. And I have a text chain with my friends and we text each other and we work each other up and we are convinced that the referees are out to get the Packers? When the Packers lose, are you in a bad mood for 12 to 24 hours later like my husband is

about Purdue? No, of course not. He's lying. Yes, yes. 100%. I know it ruins it ruins some days. I got that. The good thing is the Packers don't lose very often.

Oh. It's a pretty good, pretty good life for right now. Yeah. Well, I think that brings up an interesting point of what does it actually mean to believe something? Because as you put it so nicely, you 100% believe that, you know, the ref is being unfair. But also you know that's actually not true. Even at the same time, or at least, you know, as soon as the game's over, you kind of are aware that you were deceiving yourself in some way. And so this almost reminds me of the suspension of disbelief that we enter into when we're watching a TV show. something like yes of course we know that what's happening is not real but we're still kind of emotionally taking it for granted as real in order to immerse ourselves in the story and i don't really see that as being in tension with scout mindset it's a spectrum obviously if you you know are always in that mode and almost never stop to reflect on whether or not it's true uh then i guess maybe that could be tending towards self-deception but at least the way you've described it in the way that i see a lot

of people enjoying sports or fiction, it seems like a pretty harmless compartmentalization that gives them a lot of emotional satisfaction. Well, thank you. I feel less crazy. I don't have much of I feel less crazy. Okay, but this brings up an interesting difference as I was reading the book and based on what Steve and I just said, and certainly with my husband and I, but you use Jeff Bezos as an example of someone who influences without overconfidence. Or influences without deception is probably even a more blunt way to put it. When he was pitching people on Amazon, he, I'm reading here from the book, gave himself about a 30% chance of success. He was telling that to investors. He said, just to be clear, I'm probably going to fail. That's fascinating.

Amazing, right? And you immediately understand why that would be incredibly persuasive to potential investors. But, and I felt this throughout the book, If Jeff Bezos were Jennifer Bezos, would that still be nearly as influential? And is there a gender bias in the outwardness of soldier versus scout mindset, are men, do you think, more rewarded for sort of that honesty and humility in a way that if a woman says, gosh, I don't really know the answer to this, but I believe, you know, that if we go this way, here are the things that could happen, that it's like, well, she doesn't know what she's talking about. Hmm. It's an interesting question that I admittedly haven't thought a lot about. One reason it's

interesting is that I sometimes hear the opposite that the reward for a man is for being arrogant and overconfident, whereas a woman is labeled, you know, shrill or a bitch or something if she is, if she displays the exact same signals of arrogance and overconfidence. I don't have a great intuition myself on which way that goes. It could be the case that women can more easily get away with it or that they can less easily get away with it. But I, the particular distinction I want to focus on is between, and I say this in the book, epistemic confidence versus social confidence, where epistemic confidence is how certain you are in the claims that you're making are in your beliefs. So, you know, being 100% sure that your company is going to succeed or, or 100% positive that the

Democrats are going to win. That's very high epistemic confidence. And so Bezos is 30% estimate of Amazon success is relatively low epistemic confidence for a startup founder. And so that's in contrast to social confidence, which is just about how kind of self-assured and charismatic you seem. And the story of Bezos is kind of a case and point of how you can, you do need confidence to influence people and to inspire them, but it's more about social confidence than epistemic confidence. So you can say, as Bezos did, I think there's more likely the not, it's going to fail, and I think our future is very uncertain. But if you're displaying social confidence at the same time, as he does, everyone comments on how high energy he is and how

he speaks with conviction and, you know, with passion about his vision for his company, if you have that social confidence, then that's what makes people see you as a leader and as an expert. And so to get back to your original question, I think the question is more about what reads as social confidence for women versus men? And so there may well be a difference there where, you know, there are different kinds of social confidence that different people respond to in different situations. And one kind of social confidence is this very, very warm, empathetic,

you know, making the person you're talking to feel like, you know, a million bucks thing. That's a kind of charisma. And then a different kind of charisma is the sort of guru-esque, you know, I see myself as the center of the universe, charisma, and that's a different kind that different people respond to. So if I had to guess about the difference, it would not be so much about whether women versus men

are allowed to express different levels of epistemic confidence and more about the strategies that work better for women versus men in coming off as socially confident. Does that make sense? I think that's exactly what, if you were to do real studies on this, I think that's exactly what it would show that women, in order to show epistemic levels, lower levels of confidence,

to get away with it. Yeah, have to find different methods than men just, and doesn't mean they're less successful even, but they are different on the social side of the confidence. Me walking into a room and saying like, listen up, dudes, I've got all this, you know, like, sit down, girl. I try to Steve all the time. I mean, you do that. This is not hypothetical, right?

What's the question here? I think it also depends on what kind of audience you're trying to appeal to. Like there's a kind of, I don't know, when I watch someone like, well, certainly Trump does not seem charismatic to me, but I know people to whom he seems so charismatic, they can't fathom how anyone could not find him charismatic. You know, many people find the kind of nerdy analytical way of talking to be, very convincing and that makes you sound like an expert. And other people find that to be, you know, no, you've got to stand for something. So there's also just a lot of variation in who you're trying to appeal to. Well, it's, you know, it's, first of all, before we move on,

I have a lot I want to say about that. But I know there's another part of the book that I'm sure caught Sarah's attention. You wrote, when a coworker screws up, it's because they're incompetent. But when we screw up, it's because we're under a lot of pressure. Does this have particular relevance to you? Sarah would say when a co-worker screws up, it's because they're incompetent. And mean me, and me. So isn't there, I would add maybe a third category to this. And again, I keep bringing this back to the media because it's what I spent a lot of time thinking about, but performative confidence.

I mean, there's, you know, if you do what we do for a living, you know, I'm still a Fox News contributor. I appear on Fox sometimes. I've been doing television on these things for 20 years. And I remember in my first, I think it was my first sort of major TV appearance was on the McLaughlin Group. And I got this call asking if I could come and be on the McLaughlin Group. And the call came at like 10 o'clock on a Friday and they were taping at 1130. So obviously I was not their first choice. like, hey, we're just looking for a warm body. So they stuck me in the seat. I had forgotten

to ask about what the topics were. Oh, my. Wow. And the topics, you know, it was, this was 2002, as I recall. And the topics were Iraq and taxes and things I knew about, but one of the topics was cloning. And I did not know about, I just didn't know it. I hadn't studied it. I didn't spend much time thinking about it. And of course, as, as the show goes on, we get to the third topic in McLaughlin, and I'll do an impression, but it'll be a poor one. Yes, yes. Says, issue three. What does the organ transplant lobby think of Senator Mary Landrieu?

I ask you, Stephen Hayes. And I'm sitting there like, I have absolutely no idea. I didn't even know there was an organ transplant lobby. But what was my way of handling it? Was not to admit that at the time. I was obviously a lot younger then. But it was to say, I would say with performative confidence, John, I'm very glad you asked that question, you know, with my deep radio voice, sonorous, yeah. I said nothing. I mean, you know, my answer was something to the effect of, you know, people are very concerned about this on both sides of the issue, and it'll be a hot issue on Capitol Hill.

It was totally vapid, but I said it with the confidence of somebody who knew exactly what I made. I had no idea. And it's interesting to look back on that now and think about the way that I treat these same issues today. And my first instinct is to say, I have no idea, to admit it. And I do this on, you know, I'm on the panel with special report with Brett Baer. And, you know, at the end of the show, Brett, or the end of the panel, he'll ask about, you know, what's your confidence level of this or how is this going to turn out? I will often hedge. And it's now like a running joke.

He looks at me like, come on, man, take a stand. But what's been interesting listening to you just over the course of this podcast is the number of times that we've asked you a question and you who have undoubtedly thought about these things and adjacent things far more than we have, have started your answer by saying, I'm not really an expert in that. I don't really know. I've talked to people who know. is that because you are sort of the ultimate scout?

Are you modeling scout behavior for us right on this podcast? Well, I do try to practice what I preach. And it, you know, it's partly just a reaction against, it annoys me so much when people overclaim. And so this is partly a reaction against the thing that I find annoying. But I also, you know, I don't know for sure how that affects, you know, my success in my career or other people's perception of me. But my subjective impression is that for the most part, people are just, you know, they don't care that much whether you say you're

100% confident in your ideas versus whether you say, well, here's an idea that might be true, or here's a theory that I think is compelling or promising, even if I don't know for sure if it's true. They just want to hear the ideas. So it hasn't seemed to me that admitting uncertainty hurts me all that much. I don't know. What's your impression? Do you think that it hurts you? You know, yeah, no, it's interesting. I don't think it does, especially right now, you know, part of part of the reason that we found in the dispatch is because we believe that we're in this kind of crisis of noise where people don't know who to trust, people don't know who to turn to. And there are plenty of places they can go and get that performative confidence and get somebody to tell them exactly what's happening. And after a while, when you have people tell you that, whether you're talking about it in the context of the pandemic or you're talking about the context of, politics, and you see that those people have been wrong again and again and again. At some point, I have to believe it kicks in. These are not people I should probably trust anymore. Now, it may be the case that we are so polarized and so partisan right now that what I believe

should kick in earlier, it's just not kicking in or not kicking in until late. But part of the reason we founded the dispatch was to explore these things from a scout mindset. I mean, we didn't call it a scout mindset, but our opening, you know, manifesto or mission statement says to our readers and our members, we want to challenge your assumptions. We have assumptions. We test them all the time. And when we're wrong, we correct them and we're happy to report it out. This is what we do is why we exist. But we tell our readers, too, we're not going to tell you what you think. This might not be comfortable for you. You might, you know, be confronted by things that contradict long-held beliefs. And that's a good thing. So, yeah, I mean, in a sense,

We've made an institutional bet that people will respond well to that because it will, over time, give us the kind of trust that we think we need to keep people with us and that people don't have in so many other outlets. And thus ends my promo. No, that was just so wonderful to hear. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lot. lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability

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Cancel any time. No long-term obligation. Join us for free without any risk. You can join us and tell Jonah you think his points were unsupported. You can join us and give Sarah a pat on the back for putting David in his place. Let us know what you think about the actual issues we talked about and join the conversation. You can get more from Jonah and his G-file newsletter and from David in his French press newsletter by being a member of the dispatch. And more from me, too, in my weekly campaign-focused newsletter this week. So go to the dispatchpodcast.com and join our conversation. I want to make sure that we talk about persuasion versus journalism.

Let's just do persuasion versus journalism. Because you talk about how to persuade people, because obviously you don't want to have a scout mindset and then just go through the world, never believing anything. You never want to persuade anyone of anything. That's not realistic. And so you have some tools to persuade people that I think are fascinating. I loved the line from Megan McArdle, Iron Law of Commentary, the better you message, yeah, the better your message makes you feel about yourself, the less likely it is that you are

convincing anyone else, and you included that in your book. And it's, I mean, what a wildly true point. But talk a little bit about what you think actually will persuade people to think about your point rather than simply hit them with your point. Right. Right. Yeah. So the, our instinct is just unconsciously is to feel that if we, if we believe something 100%, then that'll make it easier for us to convince other people. If we see the situation in black and white, then we can speak with pure, righteous passion and fervor, you know, of the zealot. And, and what's interesting is that that, that can be effective in some situations where, for example, the audience you're talking to, isn't all that skeptical or critical and or doesn't care all that much about what's actually true, then they just kind of want to sign on to whatever it is you're saying. And I think a large portion of the audience for extremely bombastic soldier mindset style talk shows are like that. They aren't

necessarily going to abandon their pundits who have been provably wrong time and again because they were never in it for truth in the first place. They were in it for, you know, validation or entertainment or some combination of those things. So, so that this, is the strategy that we tend to instinctively reach for, and it's appropriate in those kinds of cases. But anytime you're in a situation where your audience is not already, you know, perfectly happy to be on board with whatever it is you're saying, you know, if they start out with a different perspective or they start out maybe being a little bit skeptical of you, then that black and white bombastic soldier approach to persuasion is just completely backfires, you know. And you can see

this kind of disconnect between the strategies people are using to allegedly try to persuade people and just how ineffective they are in a lot of contexts. One that I talk about in the book is the debate over vaccines and the attempts by many people in the media to persuade their audience that no vaccines don't cause autism. No vaccines are safe. Like you should get vaccinated. And a lot of these attempts, they're clearly coming, they ostensibly are about trying to persuade people, but they're coming from a place of just, you know, wanting to say things that make you the speaker feel good about yourself and how much smarter you are than other people. So there's this one guide to vaccines that some publication put out a few years ago. I forget which one. And the language was just dripping with condescension for the people they were ostensibly trying to persuade.

Like, vaccines are safe. Yes, read it again. They are safe. If you don't vaccinate your kids, you're a shitty parent. The, you know, the CDC has proved that vaccines are safe. So I don't know what the problem is. And not only is that off putting in tone, but it's just missing the point. It's failing to understand what people's concerns or hesitations actually are.

Like, people who think vaccines aren't safe already know that mainstream scientific bodies like the CDC think vaccines are safe. If they know that, they just don't trust those bodies. And so you're just completely talking past people if you try to persuade them by saying, look, the scientists say it's safe. And so I think this is one of the pitfalls of trying to persuade people in soldier mindset. You just, you lack the ability to understand what their concerns actually are. So you can't do a good job of addressing those. It's argument by assertion rather than persuasion.

I mean, that's the problem. And it does feel good, you know. Anytime you find yourself adding a. flourish, like, period, or it's that simple or adding those clapping hands between each one of your words, which annoys me even more than the overclaiming. That's probably a sign you're falling into the chat Megan McArdle is talking about. I want to leave the journalism side to Steve because yeah, he has been in that business for so long. But until quite recently, I was actually on the flak side. I was a press secretary of communications person, a presidential campaign type stuff. And I

find the persuasion side really interesting where you make a point. If you, here are like five topics, can you write out each side for those five topics in a way that I, the reader, would not know which one you truly believe because you understand both sides so well? I think there's a real misunderstanding of the role of a good press secretary or communications director. And you think that that person's job is to come up with the hardest, fastest, bestest, strongest statement in support of your principal, when in fact, you know, press secretaries are a little bit of an iceberg. What you see on TV is like the last thing that they say. But what they do behind the scenes is sit there and their role really in that room, if they're a good press secretary,

is to argue with their principle on all the reasons that their principle is wrong. And have, you know, the senator or the presidential candidate, keep fighting and, you know, trying to persuade you. And so you've got to understand the other side the best. And I think that becomes a little more salient in conservative Republican world because reporters tend to be quite skeptical. Most reporters who I interact with, for instance, wouldn't have ever owned a gun. Well, because of that, they're just going to come in it with, you know, to a second amendment issue with a very different life perspective. So, you know, I'm going to pick on you. You have this section where you have a,

hypothetical press secretary. Uh-huh. I thought, yeah, we might get there. Yes, of course. The press secretary makes claims. The board of directors makes bets. The press secretary isn't thinking about what's true. He's thinking about what he can get away with saying.

What will present the company in the best light while still being at least sort of plausible? Look, that's not totally unfair. I'm not going to say that that's like the opposite. But it doesn't. talk about what the role of the press secretary is in terms of maintaining credibility. And that the press secretary probably of anyone at that company understands the arguments against what they're saying better than anyone else or they should. Because if they say something that is accidentally wrong or isn't that plausible or is provable wrong later, even if it's not

provably wrong now, their credibility shot, they're no longer of use to the company. And so when a press secretary goes out there, they have to have that scout mindset if they want to do that job for more than a year or two. That, it's an excellent point. And it actually, I hadn't been consciously aware of that or paying attention to that. But now that you say it, it reminds me a bit of the role of lawyers, which, you know, people think of being a lawyer as, well, that's clearly soldier mindset. You're just arguing for a side, which in a sense is true, like in the limited, in the limited confines of the courtroom. But the majority of a lawyer's job does require scout mindset

because you have to make all these tough judgment calls about which case to take, which arguments is the jury or the judge going to find plausible. And you do have to really understand all the flaws in your case, all of the best arguments against your own case, because if you are blind to that stuff, because you're so sure that your case is obviously correct,

then that's going to blast you when you're, finally get to the courtroom and you're going to get blindsided. And there is this interesting study that I mentioned in the book of law students in a moot court, which is kind of like a practice case, like a mock trial in law school. And the, so the experimenters, in the moot court, the students are randomly assigned one side of the case to argue, and they have weeks to kind of read the evidence and build up their case and then perform it in the mock, in the moot court. and the experimenters asked students after they were assigned the case, which side of this case do you think is legally in the right, like has the stronger case legally, and which of them

do you think is morally in the right? And there was a very strong correlation between which side the students had been assigned, and what they claimed to think was morally and legally accurate. And these were just things they were saying to the researchers, this wasn't them arguing in front of the judge. So it really seemed like knowing that they were going to have to try to persuade people made them hold those views even more strongly that they're going to have to argue. So even that was interesting on its own, but even more interesting was the fact that the researchers looked at the correlation between how strongly you felt your side that you were randomly assigned just happened to be legally and morally correct, the correlation between that

belief and how well you performed in the moot court. And the correlation was negative. So the people who felt that it just so happened that they happened to be assigned the morally and legally correct side tended to do worse in actually arguing the case. And there are different explanations, of course, you could give for that. But I think one very plausible explanation is that being so confident that your side is right and that everyone else will see it that way, too, makes it just really hard for you to anticipate the potential flaws or the arguments that other people are going to make against you. Also, Julia has outed me as a lawyer. Steve, accidentally. Can you imagine the lawyer and the press secretary? Oh, my God. All in one package? Oops.

receivable. But Steve, the journalism aspect of this is vital right now. I mean, I certainly think so. I mean, again, we're making this pretty big bet that people will want this. And what's kind of striking to me, I mean, you know, I went to grad school in journalism. I worked in journalism for quarter of a century. So I lived most of my professional career around journalists. And you would think going in that journalists would be the ultimate scouts, right? I mean, that's what it's kind of in the job description and theory. Right. And what's been very striking, again, both in through my education and also in my professional experiences, how many journalists are not? They're soldiers and they come and they want to. Do they think of themselves as scouts or do they,

I'm genuinely curious about this. Yes. I think many of them do. I mean, this is a stupid, It's a stupid little detail. But, you know, so I went to Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism graduated in 1999. It's a one-year program. And before you get there, you have, they had a, we didn't know what Facebook was going to be, but we called it a Facebook. And it was literally like this red, bound little booklet, pamphlet, almost that gave you a picture of everybody in your class and details what they had done professionally, where they had gone

to undergrad. And kind of what the, I don't remember how they phrased it, but it was, you know, something like what's, what do you, what do you hope to do when you come to journal school? And the numbers of people in my class, 250 or so, who said, you know, I'm coming to change the world or I'm coming to do this, coming. That would more correspond. I mean, I think they told themselves that they were scouts, but they betrayed. that view by announcing that they were soldiers because they had this specific objective in mind. And my question was, or my answer was, to ask all the questions like in italics. Now, candidly, I would say, you know, in the earlier parts of my career, I didn't do that as much. I was more working at conservative leading publications, you know, freelance writing

for a variety of places. And it's probably much easier to get kind of pressured into whatever the role is that people expect you or want you to play as a young journalist, I would imagine. I think so. I think that's right. And that's definitely part of it. I also think, you know, you come with, you tend to view people who hold your views as more authoritative. If you're doing actual reporting and you're looking to source things, you know, you go to people who you've thought sound really smart about, you know, fill in the blank policy. So some of it's kind of natural and I wouldn't, it's not harmless, but it's understandable. But I think a better approach, of course, is to go way outside of your comfort zone

and have these conversations with people who don't agree with it at all and sit down and listen to them, try to understand. I mean, what I often do, now I'm not doing a ton of reporting these days yet. I'm going to get back to it soon. But what I would often do when I talked to somebody who I didn't, who I knew I was going to disagree with or I thought I was likely to disagree with when I, started a piece, I would say to them, I'd like your participation in this piece because sometimes they're reluctant to do it. If I were calling from the weekly standard and I said,

hey, I want to interview about this. They might be reluctant to take my call, but I would say directly, give me your best argument and either I'll be persuaded by it and I'll include some of it in my own voice because I'm an opinion reporter. I can do that. Or I will use your best argument, that version of your best argument, and then I'll tell people why I don't agree with it. And that's not probably how I started my career reporting, but it's how I'm trying to do it now, again, if I ever get back to reporting. Anyway, I have no idea where I was going with that. That's just babbling for a little bit. Julia, on the journalism side, I want you to explain the can I believe it versus must I believe it? Because again, from someone who was dealing with journalists,

it would often be the case that for things that journalists intuitively believed, and I'm going to use the gun thing as an example, because statistically we know that most journalists did not grow up with guns in their house. They are the can I believe it versus must I believe it becomes really relevant to journalists in a way that is deceptive to them. Like they can think they're being scout mindset about it. And I had a situation where a reporter came, to me when I was at the Department of Justice, and said, hey, we have this fact. We're doing

triple times our homework on it, though, because if we reported, it could help Donald Trump. And so we don't want to do that unless we're really sure that it's true. And this was on a huge... Right. And that probably felt scout-like to them because they're like, well, we're doing your homework. It's just that they wouldn't have done that same amount of homework and checking if it had gone the other way, right? Yeah. Not to cut you off. No, explain the can I believe it versus must I believe it, because I think it's one of the most important tools that I will take away from your book. And before you answer, can I, so you use those phrases in the context of explaining directionally motivated reasoning with that. I would suspect most of our listeners have at least

heard of if they're not deeply familiar with it. But there's a second kind of reasoning that you mention cognitive scientists have written about and talked about. And it's accuracy motivated reasoning. Can you walk people through? those two things in the sort of broader context and then answer serious question about how it relates to journalism? Yeah, I mean, that last part is easy just because directionally motivated reasoning is just the accurate, less catchy term for soldier mindset. And accuracy motivated reasoning is just the official and less catchy term for what I call scout mindset. So I'm, I could have written this book as entitled it, the accuracy motivated reasoning mindset, but I think my publisher

wouldn't have been as happy with that. So, yeah, that's what those two things are. And the can I versus must I believe it, way of thinking that Sarah mentioned is that's a description that I borrowed from a cognitive psychologist named Tom Gilevich. And I loved it. It's the best concise explanation of directionally motivated reasoning or soldier mindset that I've found. And it's just that we use a different standard of evaluating evidence or arguments or depending on whether we want to believe them or not. So when you hear an argument that

confirms what you want to be true or what you already believe, you evaluate it using the standard, can I believe this? So is it, you know, is it at least plausible enough that, yeah, I can accept this. Does it sound right? Are there no completely obvious glaring flaws? Then yes, great, it's true. I believe it. And then when you're hearing an argument or evidence for something you don't want to believe, then you're viewing it through the lens, must I believe this? Like, is there any flaw that I can find if I look really hard that will allow me to reject this argument entirely. And so, you know, when you're in that must I believe it mode, you feel like you're being a really skeptical, critical thinker. And you are in the sense. It's just that

because you're applying that standard of rigor asymmetrically, only on things that you don't want to believe, it ends up giving you a really slanted picture, even though you feel like you're being a good critical thinker. And I think what was also helpful is that you said, it doesn't mean that good scouts don't go in wanting something to be true. We all sort of instinctively will want something to be true. We're not robots. I'm, you know, I'm pumped when I read the, you know, the study that bald eagles are coming back and they're flourishing everywhere. Are they? Yes. Isn't that amazing in the lower 48? That is amazing. But the more you want to believe something, that's where you're, you then have to apply the must I believe it to those things.

You should actually be flipping it, if anything. The must I believe should be on what you want to be true and the can I believe should be on the parts that you want to reject, which that I was like, aha, yes, okay, I can, this is a tool that I can like keep in my little tool shed. And the more I want to believe something, the more I say must I. That's so well put. Thank you. I'm so glad that that was a strong takeaway for you because I do think it's like one of the most important ideas that I try to convey in the book. And I actually ended up using that in a way that changed the book. This is kind of like a self-referential point, but I was, you know, I went through a bunch of studies to see if there are any good ones that I should

that I should talk about in the book, like the one I mentioned about the law students. And I found this one study that claimed to show that soldier mindset makes you successful in life, which is the opposite of what I want to say in the book. And so, of course, you know, immediately my eyes narrowed and I was like, I'm going to scrutinize their methodology and see if it stands up. to my standards. And it didn't. It was actually a pretty badly done study. But then I was like, well, suppose that this study, this exact same study had found the opposite conclusion. Suppose they used the same methodology, but found that, oh, hey, actually soldier mindset makes you

unsuccessful in life. What would my reaction have been in that case? And I realized, oh, in that case, I would have been like, great, let's devote three pages to this study in my book. And that thought experiment caused me to realize that I was, I was, I really needed to up my game for how critical or skeptical I was being of the studies that supported my thesis. And so I went back through a bunch of the studies I had saved to write about in the book and looked at their methodology. And a lot of them were terrible. I just, you know, a lot of social science research just isn't all that great. And so I had to scrap a bunch of sections that I had planned on writing because I no longer really believe they were justified by, by the evidence.

But it's good. It's good that you're, you're actually living your, you're, you're, you're your scout mindset, which leads me directly to my next question. You tweeted last week, my fiance and I have been living out of Airbnbs for the last nine months. And it's just insane how much better it is than renting from a landlord. The obvious question I have is, are you taking this whole scout thing a little too far? Like, are you just moving around all the time to be a scout? Oh, we are moving around all the time. I don't want to, I don't want to take any kind of scout mindset credit for that, though. It's really just...

Yeah, what led to it? I mean, it's fascinating. Yeah, I, this... You know, I really should stop being... I should get better at predicting which tweets are going to be controversial. And this was a surprising to me, controversial tweet. I think a lot of people took from it that I was, you know, boasting that I was able to spend so much money on Airbnbs or something. But we're actually not...

We're spending less money on Airbnb's than we were responsible. spending for our tiny studio apartment in San Francisco. And that's partly because San Francisco is so expensive, but it's also because we're very location flexible. So we move around a lot. We don't have to be in big cities. And we also just look for good deals. So you can get really good discounts. Not to sound like an ad for Airbnb, I'm just trying to justify why I wasn't like, you know, bragging on Twitter. You can find really good deals if you're staying for a month or longer, especially if it's not in a big city. So, yeah, so the tweet was not about how I'm rich because I'm not. But I just, you know, using Airbnb instead of renting

from a landlord in the traditional sense just really drove home to me how terrible the experience of renting is in ways that hadn't been obvious to me in the kind of, you know, when you're a fish, you don't notice the water kind of way. Like I would, the San Francisco market was just crazy. But this is true everywhere to some extent that you don't, you just don't really have a lot of information when you make this huge commitment when you sign a year-long lease. You don't know if there's going to be an infestation in the apartment or you don't know if the landlord's going to ever respond to your calls when like the washer or dryer breaks. And so you just enter into this huge commitment where it's really hard and expensive to get out of it. And so I liked

the flexibility and the transparency of Airbnb. And the, we were talking about doing this even before COVID hit. But COVID was definitely a kick in the pants. because why pay, you know, over $2,000 for a tiny studio in a city where you can't go anywhere or do anything when you could be moving around and living in, you know, bigger places and in areas where you can go out hiking in national parks, which we've been doing a lot lately? And where have you, where all have you gone? We, so we've spent a while in the kind of mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee. We went to the Great Smoky Mountains.

We spent last fall in New England. We were kind of trying to chase peak foliage down New England because we'd never seen it before us. That was great. We went to White Mountains National Park and spent a while on the coast of Maine, which was really lovely. And we are, well, we are getting our vaccines this month,

so we're going to have a little bit more freedom and flexibility and where we go next. But we'll probably spend some time with my parents in the D.C. area. Last question. there's a lot of Star Trek references in this book. Like entire episode codes that you've done, which I assume makes you a Star Trek fan. You're mostly mocking Spock,

but like not in a way of like you've just heard of Spock. Like you are intimate with the full... It's an informed critique, yes. It's an informed critique. So first of all, I find that interesting. I wanted to confirm that you were in fact a fan of Star Trek. I'm not, if you say you're a fan of Star Trek, then you immediately get a million people in your replies

being like, okay, well, you know, recite the transcript for episode three dots. So I definitely don't want to claim I'm a super fan of Star Trek the way many people are. The reason I ended up fixated on Star Trek, aside from just, you know, liking a lot of the episodes, is that because I talk so much publicly about reason and logic and rational thinking, I often get comparisons to Spock, or people will reference Spock

in criticizing rationality, because Spock is actually a terrible example. He's ostensibly this paragon of logic and reason and rationality, but he's actually a terrible example. He's like, he's like a, what's that expression, like a smart, a rich person written as seen by a poor person or a smart person as written by a dumb person. Spock is like a rational person written by people who hate rationality. And so he's like a straw man of rationality, or as some people call it, a straw vulcan, because Spock is a Vulcan. So, you know, he does all of these things that he claims are rational, but are exactly the opposite. Like he continually just expects other people to behave rationally, which of course they don't. And if you're paying any attention to the world,

you already know that. But Spock never updates his model of how people should behave because he's not being rational. Or he might do something like insisting that, uh, You can't make a decision until you have all the facts, which is dumb and would lead to catastrophic decision-making because you never have all the facts. So, you know, one reason I think I fixate on Spock is that I resent him being held up as this example of what rationality is and how it's terrible because I think he's not actually doing rationality. Okay. So given that, who is your best fictional example? Star Trek or otherwise, David French and I are our big Battlestar Galactic of folks. Steve doesn't know what it is. Who's the best scout? Oh man, that's such a great

question. The best fictional scout? Well, I mean, is it to kill a mockingbird? Is it Oh, the actual scout? No, not actual, actually not actual scout. I was thinking of dad. Okay, this might be a bit of a weird niche answer, but I'm going to put in a plug for a fan fiction series called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which was written by Eliezer Yudkowski a number of years ago. And it's kind of an attempt to explicitly address the fact that most fictional heroes don't behave that rationally, and even if they're allegedly supposed to be rational. And so the thing that I liked about the Harry Potter in this alternate universe version of the story is that he's really curious about how magic works.

in the wizarding world. So he's kind of like a scientist about magic. So he'll run tests like, okay, so, you know, in order to, does the spell work if you don't know the meaning of the words? Like, what is the active ingredient that makes the magic work? So he'll test out different versions of spellcasting to try to isolate what is the, you know, what is actually the mechanism underlying magic instead of just taking it for granted as magic. And as a side note, I wrote a blog post praising this aspect of Harry Potter and the methods of rationality years ago. And I had someone in the comment thread

take me to task because they were a huge fan of the original Harry Potter and they were like, how can you praise an alternate version of Harry Potter? And I said, you know, if you read it, you might see what I love about it, maybe give it a chance before you get mad at me. And then I forgot about it

and didn't expect anything to come of that. And then I got a notification in my email weeks later from this person that they had come back and commented again. And in this miracle on the internet, they said, you know what? I went and read Harry Potter in the mess that's rationality.

You were right. It's amazing. I take back my complaints and my gripes. It's actually pretty great. So that was a nice exception to the rule of how the internet works. I love it. And what a great optimistic tone to end on

because as you say, so many people think, wanting to see the world rationally means being less happy, being less optimistic. And in fact, it can make you deeply happy as the person who discovered your Harry Potter fanfic. No doubt it sounds like they were. I like to think so.

Thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a fun, interesting, rewarding conversation. And we so appreciate your book. It's The Scout Mindset, Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Highly recommend it. Thank you guys both. This was just such a pleasure. This episode.

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