The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 295: Todd Rose—We're Still We the People

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Todd Rose, CEO of Populace, recounts his journey from 0.9 GPA high school dropout to Harvard professor and provides empirical evidence that Americans suffer from collective illusions about what we believe, why we believe it, and how we came to be so divided.  Spoiler Alerts: No one is average, and we're not as divided as we think we are.  

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Chuck, first things first. You know, I've said this before, and it just sounds so stupid to say again, but I don't remember a better conversation. Yeah, and we've had a lot of really great ones. But Todd Rose, he's the founder of Populus. He's the president of Populus. I don't even know. Populus is a think tank, Populus.comulus.org. up in Massachusetts, and Todd is a guy who basically dropped out of high school, vis-a-vis getting thrown out, courtesy of a 0.9 GPA, wound up becoming a Harvard professor. And along the way, wrote some extraordinary books, Dark Horse, End of Average, and his most recent is called Collective Illusions, which Chuck and I have both read.

You were almost more excited about this conversation than I was, and I was excited. I was super excited because first of all, this book is great, collective illusions. And that's not all we talked about, but I found this book to be really amazing, informative, and told me a lot about everybody in this country, everybody in the world, that we think a lot of things that just aren't true. And we're full of crap a lot. Well, it's hopeful because what you'll hear in this conversation are many, many examples that bear this one thing out.

we don't tell the truth about a lot of the things we believe publicly. And what we think we know about the beliefs that are widely held turn out to be almost completely erroneous. And we're going to learn some things about the most recent research. He's a scientist. He's a social scientist. He's like Malcolm Gladwell on steroids, in my view, anyway, with respect to Malcolm. just a super smart guy who's been in this space for a long, long time and has some really

passionate ideas about what we're getting wrong with education, about the traps we fall into with our relationship with the average thing, whatever that might be, the dangers of cookie cutter approaches to both work and education. But really, to your point, Chuck, it's the things we think we know that we're just flat out wrong about. And, you know, it's not just anecdotal. It's not just rooted in belief and suspicion. It's rooted in science. And there are about 50 occasions in this conversation where you're going to want to write something down because I wrote down a lot. You wrote down a lot, including like dozens of different titles, just so you know, we're waffling between we're still,

we the people. And one that I kind of. like a little bit more, which is the enema demands a verdict. And I, you know, I don't know, man. These titles, they kind of have to live out there for a long time, you know. You know, it's crazy about like debating the title right here in the preamble, Mike, is that people will already know the title before they've clicked listen. Oh, that's a, you know what? You make a fairly good point. But as content goes, you have to admit, it's kind of interesting. Wow. I mean, listen, I thought Beware of Dicks with Good Intentions was a good title as well.

That was a good title, and that comes out as well. You know what? Obviously, since you've already looked at the title, you know, I'm going to call it, we're still, we the people, because we are. And as divided as things seem nowadays, you'll find a ton of hope in this conversation. And you're going to like Todd Rose, in the words of the men's warehouse guy. You're going to like the things you hear. I guarantee it. It's a great conversation. I can't recommend his books enough. Collective illusions in particular is awesome. This is Todd Rose, and you'll hear us refer to stand together. This is an organization that supports both the MicroWorks Foundation and Populist.org and a lot of other groups

who are committed to bottom-up solutions, suspicious of top-down solutions, people who loathe cookie-cutter advice. I'm part of this organization now, and I'm going to spend more of my time this year highlighting people like Todd who really and truly are moving the needle in ways that I think are important. Episode 295, we're still, we the people. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Roe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues.

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advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. All right. Well, let's officially begin. Man, it is so nice to see you. Again, you've been the topic of conversation between me and Chuck and me and Mary, who says hello, by the way. we've all like taken a deep dive into your books and I'm actually a little worried Todd because you know have you ever read so much so quickly that all of a sudden it's like a it feels like a fire hose they're like so many things I want to discuss with you I scarcely know where to begin so let's start with hello again nice to see you you too thanks for having me I think Chuck knows the story but just to repeat it I ran into Todd at a stand together event what was it, four months ago maybe, five? Yep. And I had a speech to give.

Todd was doing his thing, and we were just sitting kind of in a backroom, sort of backstage, getting to know each other. And one of the main guys was in the room. And Todd and I started talking. We talked for about 40 minutes. And to the point where we were each late, officially, to get to wherever it was we were supposed to go.

And Brennan, the guy in the room, pulled me aside after you left Todd. And he said, Mike, if there's a way to have that conversation again and share it with the world, I think we can save the republic. All right. Well, that's a good high bar. Yeah. No pressure. You know what? Let's just start with what I first heard about you. You basically flunked out of high school, 0.9 GPA. And you somehow wound up to be a professor. at Harvard. I want to talk to you about education. I want to talk to you about how that happened, you know, logical fallacies, collective illusions, all of it. But let's just start with the personal. What the hell, man. Sure. Right. So yeah, look, I mean, it was interesting. I grew up in

rural America and, you know, in a town had a lot of things going for it, but it prized conformity above almost everything else, and that was never going to fit with my personality. And I just had a really, really tough time. And as it usually happens in school, if you do poorly in one year, you're probably going to do poorly in the next year. And it snowballed and I stopped caring and come early my senior year. I'd like to say we mutually decided that I wouldn't come to school anymore, but the truth was they just said you can't come anymore because it was 0.9 GPA and there's no chance of graduating and you're disrupting everybody else's learning. And so I dropped out. The fun part is shortly thereafter, my girlfriend, who's still my wife today, almost our 29th anniversary

in a week, found out she was pregnant. So here I am in rural America without a high school diploma and a pregnant girlfriend. And, you know, that didn't go over too well. And, you know, I was pretty naive about it all. I was, okay, fine, here we go. We'll get married and things will work out. And I started trying to get a job and the kind of jobs you can get without a high school diploma and I just kept bouncing around jobs. I would do these not great jobs and get bored and

try something else. And people were really frustrated with me and I was frustrated with myself. What people? Family, I assume. Family, yeah. Well, in this case, the general term people probably covers it. But, you know, I get to give everyone who wasn't, but my in-laws in particular. And I actually really don't blame them for this. Could you imagine you've just married your daughter to this bum, right, who can't even hold a job. And I was like, what's wrong with you? I'm great, right? You know, but my father-in-law had landed on the idea that he actually told me,

he said, I realized the problem is just you're lazy. And I thought, huh, okay, that might be true. That's one explanation. And luckily my dad, who was the first high school graduate and first college graduate in our family, pulled me aside and said, you know, I don't think that you're lazy. I think that you have to be motivated all the time. and he said, I think there's a path for you where you could do work you really care about and get paid pretty well, but you can't get there from where you are. You've got to do something. Sidebar. What kinds of jobs were you doing at that point in your life where you're clearly not going to go far down the academic road?

You're obviously just another horny teenager out in the country somewhere getting his girlfriend pregnant. I mean, what are you doing to pay whatever bills you have? Well, this is the homage to dirty jobs because I think I can top almost everybody's. So I bounce around the usual things. I sold chain link fence. I worked in an electronic store. That's a usual thing? Yeah, you know that old story, Chuck. I'm in the chain link fence business.

Yeah, I had some of that screw you chain link money, right? But I will say, if I had to go back to any job that I couldn't do what I do now, I loved selling. But that's a difference. Hey, man. Good fences. make good neighbors, right? And if we're talking barbed wire, we're probably talking one of the least understood influential inventions of all time. Barbed wire changes the world. But chain link. I really never heard anybody lean in to chain link before. It was great. It was great because I didn't

have to hard sell people. They would call in for bids and you'd go around, drive around. You got to control your schedule and you got to meet amazing people. And in this case, we had a better product, and I felt like I was doing right by them. But here's the thing. So I left that job. because it didn't pay very well. And we were on welfare, which was its own experience and stuck with me to today. And I left the job. The last job I had before I decided to go to college at night,

I was giving enemas to people. That was my job. I went and got certified as a nurse assistant, and I was making a dollar or so more an hour if I was willing to drive to people's homes and give them enemas. And this is no kidding. This is no kidding. My boss said, you should invest in longer gloves. And I said, I don't know what you mean.

And they said, the gloves that they supply you are not going to be long enough. And it only took me like half a day to realize how true her wisdom was. That's a lesson you learn quick, right? Oh, my goodness. And look, it's honest work, right? I'm glad somebody does it. But that was not something I was going to make a career out of. And so. Well, Todd, this is not on my official list of things to talk about, but I can't gloss over it because when I was, When I was in the Boy Scouts, I think I was maybe 16 when this happened, my scoutmaster told me about a woman who lived just a couple of miles from where the troop met. And he said, she needs some help. She's an elderly woman, and she needs some help. And I told her I'd send somebody over who was both discreet, trustworthy. And he kind of buttered me up.

I honestly thought I'd be raking leaves. I thought maybe I'd change some light bulbs. The woman needed an enema. Oh, no. and she explained precisely what I needed to do to help effectuate the process. And honestly, I developed a facial tick. It stuck for like a week. So what was it like for you?

Like, we have a ridiculous question, but your very first enemy, if you'd be so kind. Walk me through it. Sure. Listen, they can't prepare you for it, as you well know, right? And the problem is these really kind, they're people who are bedridden or home ridden at least. And they've got challenges. And they don't really want you there either, right? The last thing they want is somebody else giving them an enema.

And so no one's happy with the situation. But the trick is, is you really have to figure out how to insert the thing, right? Yes. And you don't really have eyes on the solution. So you're really honestly, like, I would say groping your way around, which is quite literally true. Until you figure out, like this. And then they do teach you that besides having plenty of. lubrication that there's an initial resistance to it and you literally have to just push through.

So this is training and it's, again, they're not happy and then you know it's working when the water goes up and then other stuff comes down and you just have to sit there with your hand and essentially the toilet on, you know, more or less and wait for it to stop and then take the thing out and I still remember very clearly how you pulled one glove off and folded into the other glove so that you're really not touching anything. And then, you know, you try not to look him in the eye and you say goodbye. You know what? You have to laugh about this, right? Because if you don't, then I can't imagine what you'll do. But when you think about the jobs that exist today that are going to require that set of not actual physical skills, but

the ability to put your mind in a place where you can not only do the job, but where you can have a human moment with the person afterwards. It's like, I felt the same way. I didn't want to look at her because I felt embarrassed for her, but I also maybe felt a little embarrassed for me, and I just wasn't quite sure. So I went up looking over my shoulder for the camera that I was sure my friends had placed in the room, like in some early episode of punked. But I guess my question is today, look at what's happening in health care. I mean, the number of people who are going to be required and asked to do the very thing that we're talking about right now, multiple times a day, day after day, week after week, month after month, those people need to remain sane and we need to

have them. We need to welcome them into the workforce. Absolutely. And, you know, honestly, like, for me, I thought about it. These are people who are in this situation. They need help. There are real serious consequences to not helping and somebody has to do it and you tried to do it in all seriousness with as much dignity both your own but also respecting theirs knowing that it could easily be the other way around and like I said it gave me a lot of respect for folks in the healthcare industry and look it also made me appreciate the next steps in my journey all the more and that was basically you know that that was not sustainable job and you know you You know, my dad had told me, he said, look, you could either start a business or you could go to college.

And I had like $13 in my bank account and still to the day would not be a very good businessman. And so I decided, well, I'll just go to college. And I was really lucky because, again, I had the example of my father who was a mechanic for most of his life, came home when I was in grade school, said, I think there's something more for me. And he became a mechanical engineer going to school at night and spent a career inventing. new airbags. And that was his job. Saved a lot of lives. And so I watched his journey change our life and life circumstances and thought, okay, I'm going to do that. So I got my GED and I went to Weber State University in Ogden Utah. It was, yep, go Wildcats. And first they would only let me

take night classes off campus. It was open enrollment so anyone can go, but they're like, but you can't come here, right? And it was for funny the very first class, first of all, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just knew I had to do something, especially I had two kids at that point. And there's something I'll tell you. It's one thing to screw up your own life, but for me, the animating idea was these kids didn't ask to be born. And I knew enough to know that my choices now had pretty profound consequences on the kind of lives that they were going to live. And so that was a big motivation for me. And so I went out of desperation. And, you know, the first

course I took I did okay in next I did okay and I started learning a little bit about myself I knew that just following the way everybody else did it wasn't going to work because it didn't work before and I had a probably the most profound moment of my life in terms of just life altering happened if you don't mind if you don't mind me riffing here please so and we just talked about animus Todd yeah pretty sure the door is wide open I'm trying to class up the joint now so I'm sitting in a big auditorium in a history class with my buddy Steve, and this was a class I couldn't get out of, but I knew it wasn't good for me, big lecture hall.

It just doesn't keep my attention. Class is ending. I complained to Steve. I said, this is just terrible. And he says, oh, no, no, no, this is nothing compared to what I've got myself into in the honors program. Now, for me, I thought honors was the same stuff, only more work, which seemed like a sucker's bet. Like, who would do that?

No, no, no, no, he disabused me of that. He said, no, no, no. He's like, there are no lectures. They're just these small groups of, like, 10 to 12 people. And he said, there are no tests. You just write stuff. And he said, I'm not even sure there are right answers. All we do is argue. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You could learn by just arguing. That's like, that's like Sunday night at the Rose House, right? Like, this sounds awesome. And so I just got super impulsive. And I was like, man, I got to be in this thing. And so I skip my next class. I go right up to the top of the hill. The honors program had its own floor in the library at the top of the hills.

And I charge right in. And I go up to the secretary, a woman named Marilyn Diamond, who's my favorite person in the world. I said, I want to be in the honors program. And she said, well, that's great. Let's get you in to see the director. We're always looking for new people. I get right in. I go into his office and I start explaining to him.

I want to be in the honors program. And he's excited and he's proud of what they've built. He said, well, I just have a couple of questions. questions, let's just get this application out of the way. He's like, you know, what was your high school GPA? Whoops. And this is no kidding.

You know, I said, 0.9. And I tried to put like this, you know, try not to make it a thing. And this is no kidding. His response was, what point nine? As if I left off the most important number. 0.0.0. So then I'm like,

0.9. And he just looked at me, he was really nice about it. He said, you can't be in the honors program. And, you know, he didn't say it, but I felt like he said, you know, we have standards, right? So I was so embarrassed. I grabbed my stuff. I, you know, thank you so much for your time. Sorry to Bobby got up and just wanted to get out of the room.

And as I'm going out of the room, Marilyn Diamond, the secretary, her desk was right by the door. As I was rushing out, she reached out and she grabbed my arm. And she said, hey, look, I overheard the conversation. If you want this, don't take no for an answer. I didn't know you could do that, right? And she said, just sit on the couch and don't leave until he let you in. So I sat and I'm more of my people please. Like, I'm not someone who's just going to like, to heck with everyone.

I'm just going to sit here. But here I am sitting there. It felt like forever. It was probably only a few hours. He had come and gone a couple of times, kept looking at me funny. After quite a while, he finally sticks his head out. He says, Todd, come in here. He said, look, why do you want to be in the honors program?

because on paper it doesn't make any sense. I don't get it. So I explained him what I've learned about myself in the year and a half I'd been on campus and why I thought this was a perfect fit for me and my own individuality. And he decided to let me in on a provisional basis. I chose one course.

And then if I did well, I could take another. And fast forward, I ended up graduating as the Honor Student of the Year with a 3.97 GPA in psych and on my way to Harvard for my doctorate, And I tell that story for two reasons. One, it's pretty clear looking back for me that would inform a lot of my work on understanding individuality and human potential and the profound role of a good fit in that.

Because I think we internalize, like, if it doesn't work in the standardized system, I must be dumb. Second, for me, it reminds me, you know, I'm proud of what I do now and how I got here and how hard I worked. But the truth is, is my story is just littered with examples of Marilyn Diamonds. You know, these people who take a moment to impart some wisdom or give advice, they intervene your life and it has these profound consequences. And I have to say, I was just back, not too long ago, we were getting an award that I was really proud of, you know, as an alum. And Marilyn was retiring. And I thought, so she was there. I thought, what a great opportunity to just really say thank you and tell everybody what she'd done for me. So I tell some version of the story I'm telling

you right now. And they ask Marilyn to come up. She comes up, gives me a hug, good to see you. She gets to the mic and she goes, well, thank you for that, Todd. I mean, I don't remember that. I thought she was saying that I was a liar, right? And I was like, no, no, no, but it happened. And then she's like, I'm sure it happened. I just don't remember it. And it turned out that everybody had a Maryland story. Yeah. She was just that kind of person.

And so I've never really forgot that. In life, like being able to live this kind of my version of the American dream, it's both equally my responsibility and also it matters the way we help each other. But it's just so poignant and apocryphal. You have no idea what your books have done for hundreds of thousands. the people who you're never going to meet, right? You put it out there. I don't know what Dirty Jobs has done for a lot of people. I'm never going to meet and so forth and so on. The thing about Maryland is it's not just what she said, and it's not just that she happened to be there. She

physically touched you. She reached out and she grabbed you like a drowning man. Right? Maybe she didn't see you as a drowning man, but you saw yourself that way. And that's so interesting because that's the second time you've done that in this conversation. The first time you said, my kid saved me, and the second time Marilyn Diamond saved me, and each time it feels like you were a product of a conspicuous lack of motivation. It had to be provided by some external source, your wife vis-a-vis your kids,

the secretary of the man you went to see. These tertiary satellite things reach out and touch you and sort of course correct. That's the conversation, Chuck, that we had, Todd and I, the first time we met. I didn't remember Marilyn's name, but I talked about Fred King, a teacher, who literally took us by the scruff of the neck, right, and said, not this way, this way. You can do that, but try this. Sit on the couch for a couple hours, see what happens, and so forth and so on.

So, you know, I don't want to turn this completely into a, you know, biographical retrospective, but it's important, I think, for people to know that you're 20 years old, you've flunked out of high school, you got your girlfriend pregnant, you're selling chain link fences, you're giving enemas, right? Now you're a professor at Harvard. You've written a bunch of books, and in every book, and I've read them, it's a version of saying, maybe not this way, maybe this way. Maybe that one-size-fits-all thing isn't really going to cut it. And not to paint with too broad a brush, but isn't that the big enemy in your life? Cookie cutter advice?

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Get good ranchers now. That's it. And at the end of the day, you know, from my experience, you know, we built these big industrial systems. And they bought us something in terms of efficiency and things like that. But I believe it cost us a lot in terms of we've standardized everything, including what it means to live a good life. What kind of jobs are valued, you know, what we should aspire to, and then also how we do it. And look, we're all born into this. And so we think it's just true. Or at least somebody smarter than we are figured it out and it must be the best way.

And so for me, as a scientist, it's been crystal clear that it's not true. In fact, it's just absolutely spectacularly wrong. People's individuality is not selfishness, and it's not something to ignore. That distinctiveness is everything. And, you know, where we're going as a country, like, we can get somewhere really fantastic if we recognize that fact again, that, look, people are different. those differences really are valuable and it's time to make them productive again. And so for me, I feel like I have at least some authority to speak to this, right? This is my area of research.

And so I felt like an obligation to use books and other things like that to give other people permission, right, to pursue the kind of lives they want to live, not the lives people want them to live. That's such a great way to put it, permission. So let's just step up. that permission has been granted and talk about, like, for me, I want to get to work. I want to get to what's changed at on the job vis-a-vis post-pandemic. I'm going to dig into all that stuff. But I just, I don't think we can do it until we sort of peel back a few layers on the education side because it's all connected, clearly.

And if you would, can you talk about, because I think we get fooled, sometimes the production line works. Mass production is a great thing, the Model T, right? But people aren't cars. Right. And so how in the world did we turn our public education system into this thing that just reeks of all of the factory protocols that I've ever seen? Yeah, listen, we have one guy to think for this, and it's a guy named Frederick Taylor. He invented a thing called scientific management, and most people have never heard of him, but we're all living in his shadow, and it sucks. And he believed that for everything,

there was one right answer. And so he went about saying, hey, we're wildly inefficient at work. And to your point, 100%, look, there are efficiencies and benefits to standardizing products for sure. He takes it and invents a thing called human resources and decides that we're going to treat people

as interchangeable. In fact, he's got one of the worst quotes, I'll paraphrase a little bit, but in a democracy, it was widely understood that institutions serve people, right? What's the point of education? Well, what do people want it to be? That's what it should be, right? He actually flat out says, so at least he wasn't trying to hide it. He said, in the past, people were first. In the future, the system has to be first. And he went about saying, the quiet part out loud. He did. And he said, look, these institutions are too big, these systems, these industrial things, They're not flexible. We've got to adapt people to these things.

And so he sets out figuring out, he said, look, every single job, there should be one right way to do it. And we're going to measure that way. We're going to figure it out. We're going to use stopwatches to time everybody. He invented the concept of a manager that didn't exist. And he creates this layer of people who plan and people who do. He hated the people that did, right? He had such a low esteem for them, for people that worked with their hands.

He just didn't respect it at all. And so he says, he actually flat out told people when they'd give advice. He said, I don't want your initiative. I don't want your advice. I want you to do the thing we're telling you and do it quickly. That's your job. And so that was so foreign to Americans at the time. You know, this was 1930s.

But suddenly we get this rush of standardization of products. We're benefiting from that. And we just start to take for granted that this was an okay way to think about how you run work. then not surprisingly, once you start applying it to work, you got a cottage industry of people saying, well, wait a minute, what about the institution that supplies work, education? And so we're like rushing to standardize that, and that's where we get like the bells that say it's time to move on to the next class.

Yes. Right. And again, it was like trying to scale something, okay, fine, whatever, but they denigrated individuality. People are interchangeable parts. That's the point. And that actually seeped, that idea that you can ignore individuals seeped into the way we even do science.

So that was part of the science that I've been able to participate in, which is we finally realized if you want to know individuals, you have to study individuals, you can't just study groups and pretend that you understand something. So we've lived with that for quite a while, you know, close to 100 years. We've gotten a lot of efficiency out of it. We've got a lot of material abundance. But it has cost us our soul, right?

It's cost us the psychological side, the flourishing, right? And we're left to this place now where kids go through the same factory-based education system that has a singular goal at this point, which is prepare kids for college. And we can talk about we've got some private opinion research hot off the press that comes out tomorrow about what's going on with that. But this is what we've become. And so we don't care what kids care about. We don't care about teaching people the value of hard work.

right, that people have dignity and people derive some sense of fulfillment from doing work that's meaningful and we're paying a price for it. That's the bad news. Good news is we know how to get out of it. Why do we constantly fall into the same trap when it comes to persuasion and PR? When I think about the need for better PR around higher education that seemed clear and present in the 50s, 60s and 70s, And in our attempts to make a more persuasive case for a university experience, I think we did instead a fair number of wise things. But why do we always go beyond it and say to the masses in a super cookie cutter way, not just, hey, this is a good and viable and important path you ought to consider it to if you don't go down this path, you're screwed. you're going to be stuck turning a wrench or selling chain link fence or administering enumas or doing any number of other things that actually have to be done.

Why do we always go a bridge too far? Well, look, I think there's a two-part explanation here. One is most of these problems always come because somebody on the top down thinks they're smarter than everyone else and thinks they can orchestrate society that they know best. They've got a plan for all our lives. okay so they're like look and rightly at the time you're talking about we definitely there were plenty of jobs that required more education than people were getting so it was a viable opportunity for some people for sure but to your point okay so let's say we need that and we say oh i'm i'm the boss i understand what we need how do i get people to hurry into those jobs well if you just know anything about the human brain we all have what's called the negativity bias so no matter how good the upside is the negative is at a minimum, like three times more powerful. So if I want to move a bunch of people into the college track

who were thinking about being like plumbers and other things, and I think, oh, where you got enough plumbers? Then I'm going to make this status quo, the plumbing, as undesirable as possible, right? I'm going to tell you all that bad stuff that's going to happen to you. And all, you know, there's good stuff if you come over here. And I'm also going to make it look like, think about how all your peers will think about you, right?

And we're going to just make the other things so unattractive and so risky and threatening both physically and socially that we'll move a lot more people that way. And we did. And then it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where, you know, where I grew up, we took a great pride in the fact that we worked with our hands. In fact, I would even say almost too much pride. Like we ignored that there's intellectual work and that's equally valuable. We were proud of the fact that we didn't. Of course. And to be fair, I wasn't meaning to suggest it only goes.

one way. You can find that same kind of bias in a lot of trade unions. You can find it in a lot of communities where, you know, the fat part of the bat is self-evident to people and everything else is either a vocational consolation prize or something subordinate. It truly cuts both ways. Absolutely. And so, you know, if we can get back to this point, and we're seeing this a lot in our private opinion data, which is coming out of the pandemic, people have refocused on meaning and purpose in life. It matters a lot. And you can derive a lot of meaning and purpose from the work you do. But what we see over and over again is the best predictor of whether you will find work meaningful is the extent to which it, two things, one, extent to which it fits with your individuality. That's an

ideal, right? Great. Like you care about X, Y, and Z. Go do that and do it well. The second, thing is that you put your all into it. Because not every job has to be a perfect fit, but that doesn't mean you don't show up and give it your all. And the actual effort and commitment to any work that you do pays off in terms of greater sense of meaning and purpose. But isn't it interesting, Todd, that like the assumption is these things are baked in to us. And if we, you know, the unexamined life, right, Kierkegaard, not worth living. So we have to look inside. We have to find that thing. it's going to make us happy. I get all that. But I wonder, even in the context of this conversation,

what were the proximate causes of your exit from the world you were in? It doesn't sound like they were internal. They were external. They were Maryland diamonds. They were kids. They were things that happened to you to make you go, no, wait, wait. Maybe the answer isn't like in me. Maybe it's around me. Right. And I think that, you know, not surprisingly, it's a mix. But, I would say, you know, as a reformed academic who's since left Harvard for greener pastures, I actually think most of the self-discovery is in the real world. It's in the doing of things. And so you can spend forever navel gazing taking a bunch of tests. That doesn't hold a candle to just jump in and do something. And, you know, look, you might find out like I did,

there are certain things you really hate. That's actually really good, right? Do a good job at it. You learn about yourself based on what you like and don't like, and you work your way toward a better and better fit, right? Is one of the great lessons, and I'm probably projecting here, I remember very clearly the moments in my life when I realized that just because you loved something doesn't mean you're not capable of sucking at it. And just because you're not particularly enamored of a thing doesn't mean you might not have a great facility for it. And so it seems like, I mean, if there's truth in that, then part of the role of a good educator must be to challenge every damn thing the kid thinks he or she believes, right? And just kind of coming at it through, look, your passion is important, but maybe you don't follow it. Maybe this thing that you believe you were put on the earth to do doesn't line up with your gifts or vice versa. First of all, I agree with that.

The second, I'd say, we live in a time in human history where there's such a range of jobs that exist and that can be created. That I would say, and I wrote about this in Dark Horse, that I agree, passion is tricky, right? Because passion is a passion for something. And so if I chase that, first of all, that can end. I can be like not passionate for it anymore, even just by accomplishing the thing. But second, it can be taken from me. So if I'm like, oh, I have a passion for football, which I do, like, that has a shelf life, right? And so advising people to look a little deeper, which is your underlying motives, right, not just passion.

There are certain things that just motivate you. And if you can get in touch with those things through trial and error, there are so many combinations of jobs that can activate those motives, right? So I tried to lay that out in the book and how people do that because I do think it matters. Like in an ideal scenario, what do we want? We want people doing work that they're good at and that they care about. If you had both of those things, watch out, right? Because this is where it becomes truly mutually beneficial. People are deriving not only a paycheck, right, but they are getting personal fulfillment

out of it. And when people are highly engaged like that, they tend to be more productive, more creative, more innovative. So we all benefit. I still think the North Star is striving for that where people are doing stuff that they're good at and care about. But that doesn't mean we all sit back and say, well, listen, I'm going to wait for a management position because that's what I care about. Now, get in the arena, start doing work, figure it out, and you'll be unbelievably surprised that the stuff that matters most to you in the long run. You had no idea about none.

Don't the best managers come from the workforce into the people who've actually done it before? you said something about a lot of people like Frederick Taylor, they're always thinking top down, top down, you know, whereas the real innovation comes on the factory floor from the people who are doing it. Isn't that correct? Absolutely. In my first book, The End of Average,

I profiled a bunch of companies who had done this really well and include like, say, Morning Star tomato company, which has no managers. It's this industrial tomato. Like, I mean, I visit, I wrote about it. I still can't believe it works. That's how indoctrated we are into the Tayloristic kind of things. Like, we don't need managers.

You empower people to make decisions from themselves and hold them accountable to the people who are affected by their decisions, and you can get a really a long way. Surprise, surprise, right? Taylor thought, no, this, we don't need it. We don't need you to have any experience. Management, he called it a science, right? Like scientific management. No, we're going to train him.

By the way, not surprisingly, then off of scientific management, we created the business. school, right? Harvard Business School came about for this. Taylor lectured there. And it was all about, no, no, no, no, no, you don't need to do the work. There's other chumps that do the work. You're going to manage people. And so, I'm sorry, but is, I mean, you kind of glossed over it before when you were talking about, you know, some other entity at the top of the top-down approach. I mean, is it always some dick, right? Like Frederick, is it always just like one person with a really bad idea, but who is either imbued with enough persuasive qualities or elevated to some position of authority so that the dictates and the mandates and the edicts start to flow. I'm thinking

of like every fishing boat I've ever been on. Every boat, in fact, has a captain. And without a captain, that boat is in terrible, terrible trouble. But if you have a captain, especially on a workboat who didn't do his or her time on the deck, then you have a recipe. for an unmitigated disaster. Why in the world would we think that metaphor doesn't hold up for every single job in this country? Right. Because once you create an idea of a manager

and you make it really fancy and you get paid better and you do the same thing we talked about earlier, Frederick Taylor just dismissed any manual labor. I mean, he gave it sort of like, oh, no, you're important to. But then when he talked about the workers themselves, he literally talked about them as animals.

It was unbelievable. Wow. And one of the first studies he did was on pig iron in Pennsylvania. And he said, listen, you need a manager because the person who's perfectly physiologically able to move pig iron was too stupid to understand these insights that I've come up with. He actually said this. So he had this paternalistic view of everybody else. And I think this is where all the problems start, right? this idea that somehow you can abstract away from the work itself, dismiss experience, and intuition that comes from that experience is, I think, 80% of our problem right now.

I mean, it's the color of collars. It's the classic binary trap, blue or white. You must choose. Well, I mean, I'd say this all the time, but even on Let's Make a Deal, right, they had three doors. but somehow or another, we're living in this world now where it's this or that, good, bad, right, wrong, left, right, you know, blue-collar, white guy. He sounds like one of the true culprits for really putting that false choice in front of us. Yeah, I don't really like to say there's bad people, but he was a bad guy.

And what's really funny, here's my favorite part about Freddie Taylor for people that don't know. So he had no problem bossing the hell out of everybody. I mean, like, don't tell, don't say anything, do what you're told. He wants the whole world running this way and this very hierarchical, standardized thing, and we should all be grateful. Except for every time someone tried to do that to him, he blew a gasket. Like he would actually, was known for throwing fits when anyone tried to hem him in. So he's just a hypocrite. And, you know, so we're living under that shadow. We're trying to get out

from underneath it. It's antithetical to almost all of our values as a people historically. look, habits are hard, right? Habits are hard to get rid of. And so I think this is one of the things we're living through right now is we know that this doesn't work and we're just not used to what comes next. Wow. Well, everything in me wants to ask you what comes next right now. I'm not going to do it because I know you don't have a crystal ball, but Jesus, not to belabor this, but when you think about the sameness of a guy like Taylor, when you think about the degree to which conformity and binary choices are applied and inform everything he does. And then you look at things today like, oh, God, I didn't want to go here, but mandates, right, any kind of cookie cutter advice,

no matter how well intended. I mean, is it fair to say there's always going to be some kind of a backlash and that we really have no idea how profound that backlash will be? But it could lead to things like, you know, all kinds of reforms on a positive side and revolutions on the not so positive side. Yeah, look, I think we're living in a time, like we'll talk about this later, but we have more what we call private opinion data on the American public than probably anybody. So we think we have a good understanding of where people are at right now. The thing I can tell you for sure is it's the end of compliance culture. Like that's not just a center right thing. It's a center of people are done being told what to do. Now, that can be.

unbelievably constructive if we actually lean into it and think about it as self-determination, right? People wanting more control over their own lives. If the powers that be try to grasp onto this unearned authority that they've taken over our lives, this is not going to end well, because you are not putting that toothpaste back in the tube. And so we're seeing it right now manifesting in kind of destructive ways. But this kind of idea that we've just lost faith in each other and trust in each other, particularly our benevolent overlords, right? And I agree, look, some of them are just dicks. Some of them really do have good intention, and those are the worst ones, right?

Because you can justify all kinds of things when you truly believe that you have everybody's best interest in mind. So when I hear that someone's got a plan for my life, that's the scariest thing I've ever heard. And it's like, listen, and you're talking about like mandates. Look, I am quadruple vaccinated, but I believe it was. a choice. And I believe that we circumvented the conversation about a new vaccine that nobody knows what the long-term consequences are, but we each got to weigh a decision about the risk-reward.

And I feel like by just mandating and disrespecting people by not having a conversation, I think you actually provoked a backlash against something. I think you had so many more people willingly lining up to do this. But they rightly got skittish when you, You've got your benevolent overlord saying, shut up and just take the jab. There is, we used the word permission before, and there's a time in everybody's life where your parents genuinely have permission to say things like, because I said so, or go to your room, right? I mean, we all go through that period. As grown-ups, we're not in that period. But we will still give a certain amount of permission because we do believe our overlords are benevolent.

And we do believe that there are times when we have to come together for the good of polite society to adhere to some kind of benchmark, some kind of standard. And so we get into this weird place where it's like, okay, we'll do this for a while. That's really what two weeks to flatten the curve and then two months was. And that was the Charlie Brown and the football and the slow unraveling of trust, right? So, sorry, not to filibuster because I do want you to speak to that. but earlier you used a couple pronouns, you know, we've got new research. You are populace, right? So make sure people understand what this think tank does, how it came about, and why it's moving the needle in all of these different categories.

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It's my favorite way to support MicroWorks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com, k-no-b-e-l-spirits.com. May the nobleman come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Yeah. So first of all, my favorite thing, if you can ever tell people exactly what I do, I'm failing. Because I like the collective, but my kids always just tell their friends to check the Wikipedia page if they want to know, which is great. That's a good answer.

Well, okay, so I was at Harvard for a long time, love the people. but the world that I want to live in and when I said I think we have an idea what could come next, I do have a good idea of what I think should come next and we can talk about that, but I'm sitting there and I've reached arguably like the pinnacle

intellectual society, you know, it's pretty great. And that was kind of like, hey, I'm going to be a professor. And here I am and I was directing the Mind Brain Education program, very proud of the work, proud of my colleagues.

But if I was honest, I increasingly felt like a hypocrite. because the world I want to live in does not define excellence or quality based on false scarcity. It doesn't say this is a good institution because of how few people it lets in. Something's wrong with that view. And that's not a Harvard problem. That's a societal problem that creates a game that Harvard's winning at. And I felt like this is kind of funny.

You know, here I'm writing all these books and saying all these things. And I try not to pull punches. I mean, I'm going to say what I believe, but I kept telling myself, I'm still going to stay at Harvard because I can use this to advance the ideas, right? Because I will say, boy, when you have that as part of your identity, it is some easy sledding. It doesn't matter where you go in the world, it doesn't matter how dumb your ideas, people think you're smart. Like, you can get away with a lot of bad ideas if you're a professor at Harvard. Where did Frederick Taylor study, by the way? He actually had an vision problem, so he was supposed to go.

to Harvard, actually, he worked for the family business. His family was pretty wealthy. So he did the quick Jared Kushner kind of, you know, path to whatever. But minus the thought. He had a vision problem. Boy, that's a mouthful. I wish he wouldn't have, right?

It would have been a lot better. But so I felt like I was increasingly justifying for my own benefit, this thing. And it started bothering me. So my colleague, Prisa Rahani, who's fantastic, We were at Harvard, we had this lab, and we thought, you know what? Like, all the things we care about are all in the real world, and they blend together thinking and actually doing, right? Getting your hands dirty and trying to change things.

And so we decided to spin out our lab and go on our own, and we phased out of Harvard slowly, and we were out for good right for the pandemic hit. And it's been just fantastic. It's sort of a practice what you preach kind of thing. And so populace, I don't know what to call it other than the think tank. I just doesn't really fit any categories. But here's what I'm obsessed about. And this is what I think comes next. The industrial paradigm that we've used to get to where we are the last 100 years clearly doesn't work.

It clearly no longer has the support of the people. So the ideas we're comfortable with don't work. But the ideas that work we're not really familiar with yet. And so we exist to try to help shift this whole thing to a different worldview about what's really possible in a free society. And it's this in a nutshell. And this is my one, again, I'm a reformed academic. So this is my one wonky answer. We behave in society as if the world's zero sum right now.

This much success for you, this much success for me. Means somebody's got to lose if you win a little. And if you think about the miracle of free markets is, and this goes all the way back to Adam Smith, that's the central insight in wealth of nations is this whole idea of an economy as zero sum is silly. And yet we had done that forever and everybody was poor. And once you realize that it didn't have to be zero sum, that you could actually have an abundant economy where you produce positive sum outcomes. Like you've seen the hockey stick change in GDP.

We're all living with the benefit of this. Okay, fine. So we've proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you can create material abundance. But what's the point of materialism, if not psychological abundance, if not happiness and flourishing and fulfillment? And it's there, weirdly, that we keep structuring our institutions and our cultural norms as if somebody has to lose. So again, I'll go back to education.

It is absurd that we say Harvard is great because of how few people they let in. you're sitting on tens of billions of dollars and you don't add a single seat in decades because if you did, you'd fall in the rankings of US News and World Report and people wouldn't think you're that great. Something's really wrong with that. And so for me, I look at this and think, we know exactly what the conditions are that have to be in place

to get both material and psychological abundance. And you can only do that in a free society. authoritarian regimes could never do it because it requires a commitment to individuality and a deep belief and trust in individuals working together to address our challenges. That's not possible in those top-down societies, but we can do that here. So with respect to cognitive dissonance, you're an egalitarian at heart who found himself in the belly of one of the most elite institutions on the planet. Do you remember the moment when you awakened and just went, oh, crap, I can't sell this anymore? I can't live with this anymore. I'm just too far out of sync to function. Yeah. So, first of all, again, I'll just echo as much as I dislike the structure of our system

and the game that has to be played, there were really amazing people that I worked with. I really still appreciate that. Yeah, look, it was, I had, You know, I'd written end of average. I had written Dark Horse. Both those are clearly, clearly poking the bear a little bit. And in Dark Horse, I went even further. I thought the whole idea of the way we do admissions was silly and that they should just name their standards and then lottery in if you're going to make it scarce.

But it seems like an obvious thing to me. But it was actually a conversation with my son, which I think you'll get a kick out of this. You know, I try to tell them, do your thing, right? So getting a degree in higher education was good for me. but I don't want them following a path. My oldest son does cybersecurity for Amazon now. He's living his best life. My youngest son, he's in college,

becoming a mechanical engineer when Dark Horse is out, 2018, 2019, and I'm on tour and I'm telling everyone. So first I get a text, and I'm out of the country on the book tour. And he said, listen, when you get home, we need to talk. I was like, uh-oh. I'm thinking, okay, who got pregnant?

You know, okay, here's how I'm going to deal with it. Well, you would think that. Right, right? I mean, luckily that wasn't the case. So I get home and he's got dark horse, dog-eared, marked up, ziggas, and he's like, I'm about to graduate with this degree in mechanical engineering and I think I've made a mistake. And I want to do something different. And so I'm asking him and he said, and he does, he just loves the practical, he loves working with his hands. I mean, he's such a brilliant human being.

And he said, I kept waiting for it to get practical. And it just kept getting more abstract. And he's good at it. I mean, this is a funny thing. I mean, he's good as anybody at the abstract. He's like, but then I thought, well, we've invested all the money. He's like, but in the book, my first reaction, this is no kidding. I hate to say too much about myself.

My initial reaction was, no, no, no, no, no. I meant that for other people's kids. Yeah, right. Not you. You just go get a job. in the thing you got your education for and suck it up, right? Like, so we laid it out and I said, okay, let's talk about what it means to be responsible here. And, you know, and he's just living his best life.

He's got this eclectic mix of projects, everything from woodwork up to like literally game design. And he's doing all these things. And it's just his own, like, you couldn't put a name on it. So that was the first thing, which was kind of fun to lean into that. But then in our conversations, he was like very nice about it. You know, not like, Dad, you're an idiot, right? You hypocrite. But he was like, so how do you feel, given what you're writing about and what I know you believe in and what you do for a living?

Like, how does that work, you know? Go to your room. Yeah, exactly. I was like, because I said so. That's not the right answer to that. I'm like, you don't understand. I'm just, you know, and I thought, you know what, it's really right. And I realized that the justification that I could do more good.

with the power of this symbol felt a lot like or adjacent to listen i'm going to take control from everyone i'm going to tell you what to do for your own good because i really do have your own good in like it's not the benevolent dictator yeah it's sort of like no i want you all to move on but i still want the benefits of the hierarchy and things like that and i realized that it was actually more that I got caught up in the identity of it. And I started thinking, well, who am I, if I'm not this? That was scary, actually. Scary that I even got there.

And so I knew that if I was making a decision based on the work I want to do and the kind of impact I believe I could have, it was best done outside of the academy. If I was making a bet on what was comfortable and didn't challenge me at all and allowed me to feel like I was this smart person with nothing to prove, that I would stay exactly where I was at. But once again, it's the kid who calls you on your bullshit, right? It's the external force that goes, hey, not for nothing, but, I mean, it's just such a great gut check.

Okay, I got to get into the... By the way, I commuted his sentence. He was only grounded for two months instead of three. It has a good ending. You really are kind. He's thriving in the chain link world right now. It's absolutely not going out of the park. Okay, so back to populace.

the recent research, what have you learned post-pandemic? And we kind of talked around this a little bit, but it's not work, Todd. It's meaningful work. I mean, let's assume when we say work that we all want to feel like we're moving the needle in some way, shape, or form, whether we're in a blue collar, white collar,

small office, big factory floor, whatever it is. What did we think we knew? and what have you learned that we just simply got wrong? I guess maybe what illusions collectively are really at work in the workplace? Yeah, so just as a little bit of a setup, I think that we're known for it, Populos, which is just incidental. It's stuff we needed is to get to the world we want. We need a drop-dead accurate understanding of what people really think

and what they want out of our institutions. And unfortunately, this won't be surprising to anyone. And right now in American society, there is enormous amount of social pressure to say the right thing. We are not tolerating dissent. We're not even tolerating pluralism in our ideas. It's a battle to control society by a very vocal fringe. So we realized that actually we couldn't trust traditional ways of polling and things like that. I mean, they're good.

It's good polling. It's just if some people aren't telling the truth, it doesn't matter how good your methods are. And so we ended up dusting off a bunch of methods that we knew. We didn't invent, but knew from research did a good job. They're just more expensive and time consuming. Getting around things like social pressure and so like that. And historically are good at being very accurate. And so we've deployed that for the last four years on a whole bunch of topics that matter to us.

So we looked at what people mean by a successful life, which is fascinating. We've got the second version of that coming in a couple of months to see what COVID did to the lives we want to live. We've done it on our aspirations for the country. Like, what do you want to be as Americans? Where do I go? And then we do this when we look at all our key institutions. So in the last year or so, we've done this applied to work itself, which we can talk about

now, but also education. And they kind of go hand in hand, as we talked about early. And there's some crazy stuff has changed about these things. So with respect to work, what's the most fascinating thing is that we're looking at what people's tradeoff priorities are for the jobs they do, right? And you would have imagined a lot of the typical stuff like a prestigious title, you know, getting paid the most out of people, like working for a big name company, all these things, which historically have actually been markers of success and people have actually prioritized. those things have plummeted and what we're looking at now is what people want not surprising they want to get paid okay right people need to be able to make enough money to live they want benefits those are traditional things but what has risen now is this pursuit of meaning and purpose at work the ability to actually show up as themselves like actually this is what people and this idea that we want to be respected in the work that we do which is kind of sad if you think about it, that should be table stakes, right? That shouldn't be something that we have to aspire to.

But I think it's part of this denigrating of so much of work that we feel like we're not even respected in the things we do. But here's what's really fascinating. So in this work on work, we also measured people's life satisfaction and wanted to know if there's any relationship between how they do at work and how they feel about life. And here's what we found. You have a strong correlation. between the extent to which you're achieving on your priorities at work and how satisfied you are with life, not just your job, which I think is kind of promising, right?

As we look to optimize, like, what is that you're trying to get out of work? And if we can help you get that, not only are you a better employee, which plenty of research shows that to be true, but that it actually has the spillover effect in actually making you happier with life. And what's really important about that is we know from other research that the higher levels of life satisfaction you have, the happier you are, that actually spreads to people around you for free. Like actually within three degrees in your network, an increase in your happiness is likely to increase other people's happiness for free. So I do think we're on to something as we start to think about and prioritize meaningful work. And here's my favorite part of all about this.

because what people often say when we talk about this is, but not everyone can do stuff that's meaningful. Someone's got to do, and then they name the job that they hate, right? Well, we've done some fun work, and we're doing a bigger study of this year, where you list out all the jobs that you can possibly imagine, right? And you ask people, would this be fulfilling to you? Would this be a take it or leave it? And like, never in a million years would I want to do this, right?

And then you ask people like, what do you? think everybody else is going to say, well, we all assume that everybody wants the jobs I want, and everybody hates the jobs I hate, and so in your mind, you're like, this doesn't work. We all can't do what I do, right? But in reality, every job gets covered. Every job. It's crazy. They're just people's individuality ladders up to combinations of things where they're like, that seems like a great idea. I told you at the beginning of this conversation, And if I lose this job and I have to go back selling chain link fence, I mean, I'd like to make a little more. But I actually really enjoyed that work.

And I think plenty of people are like, are you kidding me? Chain link fence seems about on par with giving him. Right. So. Well, look, the reason Dirty Jobs was such a tough sell is because nobody at the network believe that anybody would want to watch portrayals of what felt like drudgery. and their minds eye. The reason it's still in production 20 years later is that the cognitive dissonance has become simply unavoidable. That show, through humor, portrays hard work and confirms all of the difficulties and challenges you would associate with it, but it sprinkles over

the top a patina of dignity, humor, a band of brothers mentality, And in many cases, a level of prestige to your point and prosperity that you wouldn't expect to find. How do you square multimillionaires cleaning septic tanks? Well, you can't, at least not easily. So it forces you to at least have a conversation, right? That's why I'm so interested in your research. I take it to the extreme on my show because I can just visually say, hey, get a load of that and people's brains do the rest. you have to do research.

So back to a couple of, like, key things that you really learned that surprised you. That's what I want to hear about. And, God, forgive me again, I'm sorry. I know I'm free associating, but have you read everybody lies? Yes. And here's the thing. It's 100% true. Yes.

Like, that methodology, like, that guy relied on Google searches to come to his conclusions. And those conclusions are so fundamentally at odds. with the conclusions that come from surveys and polls? Speak to that. So we just did a thing called Private Opinion in America. This was last year. And 100% right, informed by this, knowing that everyone's filling social pressure.

So there's really interesting methodologies that can get around when people are just lying. We can actually estimate how much are people lying and what are they lying about. And it's the same methods like the IRS uses to figure out who cheats on their taxes. Because the only people who are saying yes to that in public are people who are in jail or don't mind going to jail, right? So the method is, I'll skip, I can tell you more about it, but it's very good. It's proven to get it private views, especially for things people want to tell you, but don't think they can. Yeah.

So we actually deployed that, and it's on our website, and looked at 25 very sensitive issues in society today. It is things that you could imagine, things like transgender issues, abortion, race relations, other kinds of things that we knew there was some social pressure around. Deployed these methods and to look at private views versus what people are, the same people are saying publicly, right? Here's the crazy thing. No kidding. It's really worth reading the report for people.

Everybody's lying. Everybody. Every single demographic, no matter how you cut the data, is lying about multiple issues. They're just lying about different issues. And the thing that's very terrifying about this is, is how does a free society function when we can't even be honest with each other about the things that matter to us most? By the way, a vocal fringe really benefits from this, right?

And it drives what we call collective illusions, you kind of mentioned earlier, which is the last book I just wrote, which is this weird phenomenon where... Todd, I'm sorry, but I got to tell you, man, it's important. It's a really good book. I liked your first two a lot. And the truth is, end of average probably has more to do with my own foundation. And we should say, full disclosure, our foundations, our efforts are supported by the same organization, stand together.

Absolutely. And this bottom up approach, this commitment to openness and some kind of transparency, man, how do we get there? And again, I don't want to get bogged down in the weeds with the methodology. I'm just so interested in how you get at the trance. truth to determine that things like prestige, no one really cares, but everybody thinks everybody cares, except them, but everybody's wrong. Yeah.

So let's do a little like a wonky methods thing that you can edit out later. So in the one where everybody's lying, there's different methods we use, right? The one that's asking with tradeoffs, it's really clever. All we do is for education. There's like 57 things education could focus on outcomes, processes, rather than just asking you. Do you want college prep to be important? We actually put it in the methods called conjoint. It's the same method Apple uses to decide what combination of features and price in an iPhone.

Because if I say, do you want an OLED screen? Everyone's going to say yes, but that's not the right question. The question is, what are you willing to trade off for it? Right? Because you want that, but you want $200 higher price point, or do you want more memory? So we deployed that methodology for issues of social, like public opinion. And what's really great about it is you can't game it. So instead of asking you point blank, let's use education.

We'll take those 57 attributes. And when you're taking this survey, all you see is we're asking you like, what's your ideal education or what school would you choose if you were choosing a school right now? And what you do is here's school A and it randomly grabs five or six attributes from the pool versus school B, five or six different attributes. And that's all you see. And you're like, well, this one focuses on mastery learning, but this one actually, prepares kids for careers that they care about. I'll choose school B. Okay, great.

You do it again and again and again until you've essentially compared every attribute against every other attribute. So sometimes, like the idea of prestige when we did it with success, oh, I want to be famous or whatever. Well, you know that's not the right answer, but sometimes being famous as an attribute

will be in there with like being a generous person, having a family, and sometimes it'll be in there with being wealthy. You can't just game it, right? You have to start picking. and then what it gives us is I would be able to get the Mike profile for you of your trade-off priorities

for these things. And then what we do is at the same time, you're answering it, we say, what do you think most people would say? So we can build up what they think other people think. Okay, that's the one for like trade-off priorities for like institutions and stuff like that. When we're flat out lying, we have to use a method called

item count technique or list experiment. It's another term for it. And it works like this. there's these sensitive items like, you know, abortion should be illegal or whatever. Okay. Clearly, people have strong opinions and, you know, depending on your political persuasion, you know there's a right answer. So we will ask one random sample of people, just ask those questions, right? So do you agree with this statement or no?

So you get what people will say out loud. And then what you do is you get this, to get a private opinion, we create what's called a control condition. So we come up with a bunch of other statements that aren't controversial, but people have different views. So like recessions are part of an economy. I mean, people have different views, but I don't think they're fighting over it, right? So, and we know that, so then if you're in the control condition,

we give you four of those. And we say, how many of these four do you agree with? You say three of them. Okay, great. And you go through that a bunch of times. in the experimental condition, we take those four and we add in the sensitive one.

And so if you're in the experiment one, we say, how many of these five do you agree with? Well, it's been engineered so that no one ever agrees with all four or all five. So you're going to be like two, three, four. So you feel very comfortable that there's no way that I know what your view is on any particular thing, but we can actually compare those to

and extract an exact estimation of people's opinions. And it turns out that research has shown that method is very, very good at getting to private views. One of my favorite examples of that is they peppered in, for a sample of people, questions about you've been convicted of a felony. But they included people that they knew had been in jail and convicted of a felony, but those people didn't know that they knew.

And then looked at the public opinion, which only about 20% of them were honest about it. And this other method for which you, were within margin of error. So we've got those things. So we can get at that. So that's fine, but that's a temporary sort of band-aid for the problem, right? The solution is cultural. The solution is getting back to a healthy respect for the dignity and worth of other people and a tolerance for different views. And I will say, just to keep rambling, you know, because it's my show. This is a problem, because we're just scratching the surface and we've been at it an hour

and 15 minutes, God help. That's why this is one of the first 10 together, right? Isn't that one? It was like the contract? Careful what you wish for, man. Right, right. Here's the thing. The reason I wrote collective illusions is that this idea, and it's basically defined as

a phenomenon where most people in a group or a society end up going along with something they don't privately agree with just because they incorrectly think that everybody else agrees with it. Do do, do, do do do do do. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965,

and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders.

In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement, explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skills usa.org slash mike. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. Skills USA.

USA. And so as a result, entire societies end up doing something that almost nobody wants. Now, we've known about that phenomenon for over 100 years in terms of research. Up until the last decade or so, it was such a rare. that we didn't bother to really think much about it. It is exploded now. And the reason it is, like, you name the thing that matters in society as a listener right now. Whatever you're thinking, I promise you, it's a coin toss whether you're even right about what the majority in this country thinks.

And here's why it happens, and if I can just, rip just a little longer here. So you get to this place, not because there's bad actors or whatever, although I'm sure there's some of that. It's just how our brains are wired. Basically, our brains have a conformity bias. All that's equal, we prefer to be with our groups, not against our groups. And that's okay. That's good.

But we are absolutely terrible at estimating what our groups think. Because your brain uses a shortcut, which must have been good at some point, but is really bad now. No kidding. Your brain thinks that the loudest voices repeated the most are the majority. Okay. It's never really true. It must have been a decent workaround. Put yourself now in an age of social.

media. On Twitter alone, 80% of all content is created by 10% of the users. And we know from Pew, their research, that 10% isn't remotely representative of the rest of the public. But you can sort of see the problem, right? Like, if only 10% of people hold a view, but you think it's 80%, your brain is going to be like, that's the majority. And unless I'm willing to go against my group, I'm going to say nothing, right? I'm in a self-silence, or I'm just going to literally say what you want me to say

so I don't get kicked out of the club. And the result is these massive collective illusions. So that's where we're at today. And frankly, free society doesn't hold. It doesn't hold when we're this wrong about each other. And I will say,

one of the things that's been so fascinating about doing all this private opinion research, and I don't mean to make this a good news story because if it wasn't, I wouldn't say it. But for all the perception, of this deep polarization in our society. The truth is, is in almost every aspect of life that matters most, we have so much in common in private.

It's unbelievable. There are a few areas like immigration and things like that where we really are divided privately, but those tend to be along political lines and they are few and far between. And they're process problems, right? I mean, the people with whom I disagree most, vociferously on all these hot-button topics, by and large, we don't disagree on outcome. We kind of want the same thing, not always, but in many, many, many cases. What we disagree on is process.

And then, you know, I remember reading, as I'm sure you must have, the madness of crowds. Yes. Right? Which, you know, it was years before your book and probably not read by enough people, but there's no need to read it now because you've done it in a way that, Frank, frankly, is so much more accessible. And we've been talking about these methodologies, and these are in regard to the populace insights that have come about through.

Is it the workforce index, the education index that comes out tomorrow? Four years of trade-off data on what the American public wants out of K-12 education. We started before the pandemic, luckily, and we've tracked it all the way through. I may tell you one quick finding about this. is going to blow your mind. Yeah. 57 trade-off priorities. In 2019, preparing for college was a top 10 priority for every demographic in the country, right?

This is what we want education to be. It is plummeted, plummeted. The pandemic has completely reshaped this. It is now 47th out of 57 possible priorities for K-12. Wow. in its place, in the top 10 is a commitment to preparing kids for careers and preparing them to do work that's meaningful and fulfilling. That's for other people's kids. That's what we want now.

Now, here's the problem when it comes to collective illusions. Preparing for college, again, is 47. It doesn't get much worse than that in terms of how actively we are deprioritizing this outcome. do you know what we think it is? What we think most people would say? We think most people would say it is the third most important priority. I was going to say top five.

Top five. But it's not. There's no other outcome. Amazing. So here we are. Here we are. We all want this thing. We are sick and tired

of having this one-size-fits-all system funneling every kid to college on their dime, right? Just to have the privilege of being able to pay to be able to get a career that didn't require a college diploma in the first place. And we have a new expectation for our education system for K-12. We want it to be focused on careers and meaningful work.

We want it to be focused on more individualized education. Every single individualized attribute ranks higher than every single standardized attribute now for the first time ever. Okay. And here's what's really fascinating. All we hear in public is this. debate about indoctrinating our kids, and it comes from both sides. This is not just a left thing. The right just wants to do it their way. They're just mad that they're not the ones indoctrining our kids. Okay, well, what does the American public think? Guess what? Every indoctrinating

attribute is a bottom 25%. And you know what? The only attribute, the number three attribute in the entire index, and the only attribute for which every demographic has it in their top three, is that kids learn to think for themselves. So there's such a disconnect, such a disconnect. And by the way, the top thing is they want kids to have practical skills. It is the number one thing. Like, there's such a disconnect, okay? So, and here's the thing.

I care a lot about public education, right? We do. What a great achievement in a society to mass educate people to such a level. But we are at risk of losing public. support for this because it is no longer about doing better. It's about doing different. And if you don't recognize that fact that we have to transform this institution and force it to deliver on the priorities and outcomes that the American public wants, not the ones that our benevolent overlords want us to want, if we figure that out and realize that we are together on that, we can transform

this thing tomorrow. And if we don't, if we keep realizing that we're the only ones, we think, nobody everybody still wants college prep or bust the system will stay as it is and people will flee and the only people left will be poor kids like me growing up right who couldn't afford a different option so for me there's a lot at stake here and people listening just look you're probably one of those people who are like yeah that's exactly what i want you need to realize you are not alone this is what we the people want and the more that we are vocal about it the more we can shatter these illusions and lead the kind of change that we want and deserve as a people. Part of the reason I wanted you on here, Todd, is selfish. I love it when the headlines

catch up to my shows and make them relevant in ways that no one thought they were going to be, but I especially love it when the science catches up to my bull crap claims, and I can suddenly point to something and say, hey, look at that. I mean, I've been beating this drum for 15 years. and there's a title to another interesting book that I bet you haven't read. It's a religious book. It's written by a guy named Josh McDowell, and it's called The Evidence Demands a Verdict. I have actually read it. You're kidding me.

Nope. Well, of course you have. 100% correct, right? The evidence demands a verdict. You were in the middle of an enema, I'm sure, selling fences and said, hey, chapter five. But look, that's what this is. Post-enema book, I have to be honest. The Enema demands a verdict.

There's our title, Chuck. No, it's like, you know, this research is really important to me because it's founded on methodologies that it doesn't matter if people lie instinctively or intuitively or reflexively. It doesn't matter. You've gotten past that to the truth in the way that this other book, everybody lies it. I just thought using Google searches as, you know,

a body of work was just so much more interesting. This is that on steroids. The evidence is out. Anybody can go read it right now. And it's important, dude, because if people don't feel like they're alone in their convictions around the idea that shop class should be back in high schools and that our workforce can't be divided against itself, it's two sides of the same coin. All of this just makes so much sense.

and it's so gratifying to be able to now direct people to a place, which is populace.com, and they follow the links, and then they'll be smart, and the scales will be lifted from their eyes, like what's his name on the road to Tarsus? That's right. And, you know, now you're on to something. And by the way, it's populace.org, but we did finally get populace.com. I just got to have our IT people forward it.

So eventually that would work. Yeah, yeah, you've got to get all that stuff covered. Because people, studies show people are stupid, Todd. They're not going to be able. In private and in public, right? But they think everybody else is smart. They think everybody else is smart. When obviously only Harvard professors are smart.

Obviously. But you're on to something, which is the dirty secret for all of Poplos's work, is we're just doing cleanup for a micro. Like, what were you saying 15 years ago? Let's just go make, let's bolster that. It's been a good career move for us. Well, look, I mean, final question. I want to be respectful. Geez, it was an hour and a half.

I told Chuck we were going to keep it to an hour, and he just laughed, and he said, you know, not with Todd, no way, no how. There's a lot. There's a lot. But look, I did something last week, and I want you to tell me if I'm part of the solution or part of the problem with this, because I'm really not sure. There were videos going around, and there still are. They're everywhere. There are people making videos of themselves at Twitter and Facebook and various Silicon Valley companies. And it's like a day in the life had my job. And it's just filled with things that make a lot of people just shake their head and go, what, how is this even possible?

Right? Meditation booths, aromatherapy candles, bonsai gardens, they can walk around. Like, nothing that looks like work seems to be happening. And so I shared some links to these videos. And then next to them, I posted some links to some recent dirty jobs just to say, look, in a world where people are trying to figure out the definition of a good job, and we're looking for examples of what work is, okay, if you're going to look at that, at least look at this. Did I make it worse?

Am I perpetuating a collective illusion? Or am I just trying to keep the conversation lively on the Facebooks? Look, I was really hoping I was going to get a slap your wrist. So maybe we'll have to try other examples. In this case, you're spot on and here's why. So there's a massive collective illusion right now in the Workforce Priorities Index we found, which is all the stuff you named, all. the goodies, all the free food and swag and meditation booths and so like this, all of those

fall in the bottom, the lowest priorities you could possibly have for the kind of work you want to do. However, massive collective illusion, we think everybody cares about these things, right? So you show more examples of that and people are like, yeah, this is definitely what we all care about, right? Because look, we keep seeing it. And it starts to warp what it is they pursue, right? Because if we all want to belong, it's like, okay, just like if we think success is about being famous, even if we don't care about it, which is definitely true, we're like, well, how do I show people I'm successful? Well, I'm going to try to be famous. And then they'll see me as successful. So the same thing here. We start to advocate for things that we don't really want. And unless you see some counter programming, right? Unless you

see some alternatives. This is why for me, selfishly, the reason I wrote the book Collective Illusions is nobody knows about that phenomenon. So if you don't even know that it's possible that you can't trust your brain to tell you what most people think, why would you think you're wrong? Right? So I'm hoping that by people understanding that phenomenon, they can stop and say, you know what, there's no more point anymore to just blindly going along with what I think everybody thinks because I'm probably wrong. And so if that's true, if odds are I'm wrong to begin with, then conforming to that belief is not even doing what the group wants me to do. In fact, I'm more likely to destroy the very group that matters to me. I just wanted to say that underneath

all of this is such a recurring theme of humility. I mean, we're also told to trust our gut constantly. And I look at the occasions when I have, and I say, okay, look at you. You were right there. You were right there. And I conveniently forget about all the ones I was wrong about, right? There's just so much humility in this. And in terms of the group dynamic, and now I'm talking to guys, you know, in my generation, who are getting cranky and starting to feel like, you know what, this whole Gen Z thing, it's starting to rot us from the inside out. And if we have an entire population of people who actually value these one-dimensional, incredibly superfluous, irrelevant things, God, we must be doomed.

But what the research is saying is, it only feels that way because everybody thinks that's what everybody is doing. And when you drill down, Gen Z doesn't want this shit. They don't want it. They want meaningful work. They want to move the needle. They want to make a difference. They are lying about just about everything.

It's unbelievable. Because, again, this is a generation that was. born and raised on our social technologies, right? The ability to amplify a vocal fringe without us understanding what that does to us and how our brains process that. They're the first to live through that completely. So it's not surprising that they are the most susceptible to these illusions right now. So that's the bad news because if you don't do anything about illusions, they tend to become private opinion over time. And then reality. Yes. So we've got to deal with them. The good news, best news of all, I will say, is kind of twofold. One, if everyone listening realizes that the people

around them that look different than they do, that do different jobs than they do, actually hold a lot of the values you hold as well, right? The things that matter most, we are still, we, the people, we really are, it just doesn't feel like it. That's the first step. If you knew that, if you knew that to be true, how do you think you respond in the next conversation with the people around you. Because when you think everybody's against you, when you think the world's gone crazy, you think everybody else is on the other side, you tend to interpret every ambiguous interaction as a threat, right? And you double down on your side and you just make it worse. So the first step is, think about how you behave if we really are living in an era of collective illusions. Okay.

Second, the good news about collective illusions is they're disastrous when they're in force, but they are fragile because they are lies. And history has shown. when we shatter them, you can unlock social change at a pace and scale that would be unimaginable otherwise. And the best news of all is nobody else can do this.

It's we the people that have succumbed to these illusions and only we the people can shatter them. I will just say, this is my wonky ending, and I did this in the book. The best example of this ever

is the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in the 80s. We overthrew communism without a scene. person losing their life. That Velvet Revolution was led by a poet and a playwright, Voslav Havel, had no military experience, was never a politician before, never formed a political party after, and he had written this satire of communism called the Garden Party. And it was so subtle that the censors didn't even know they were being made fun of. And it was the Hamilton of its time.

Everybody came for years, and he said, look, they laughed at all the right parts. They laughed at things they would not find funny if they really believed in communism. So he realized that the problem was not private agreement with communism, but a collective illusion. And he was so brilliant. He wrote a thing called Power of the Powerless. It's free online. If you've never read it, it is unbelievable. 80 pages, it'll sound like he's speaking to us today.

He realizes that the future is not military. It's not force. It's not even persuasion. It's social proof. It is getting people comfortable. with having personal responsibility and authenticity again. So he builds this whole approach called small works, just getting them back to the habit of being congruent as a human being.

He was made fun of, he was mocked mercilessly, of like, this is so naive, nope, you've got to intervene. Okay, so even he doesn't realize what he's unleashed because a few months before the first student revolts went on that would unlock it all, he's interviewed an international magazine and he says listen I believe in the revolution

I'm in it for the long haul but I don't think I'll live to see the end right it just takes time three months later he was the first democratically elected president of a free Czechoslovakia so the moral of the story is not that change can happen

but it can happen like that I mean not to bookend it prematurely but if there's an asshole like a Frederick Taylor at the top of... I believe we called him a dick. Sorry. You got to be accurate, Mike. With respect to dicks and assholes combined.

Forgive me. Those are different. Trust me. But in the same way. Same street, different house. To bring it back to Enemus, we've been there. We've done that. Yes. The idea that if you walk it back, if you walk a bad idea back,

you really can almost find its progenitor. And if you walk a courageous truth forward, you can almost find the kid in the crowd in Hans Christian Anderson's story saying, hey, is it just me or is that emperor naked? And once that happens, right, whether it's hovel, whether it's a fictitious kid in a parade, it's extraordinary how the rest of us fall in line. It is. And here's my promise. And promises, especially out the future, are scary.

but this is what I'll stake my reputation on. Given what we know about our commonality, despite our differences in the American public, and given what we know about the massive illusions at the heart of almost every social problem we face right now, and given what we know about the fragility of those illusions, we can get somewhere unbelievably remarkable in America, in a hurry, and all it takes, as simple as this sounds, is forever. everyone listening, not to write their congressperson, not to protest, but to speak up in their neighborhoods, with their families, in their churches, respectfully, humbly, you might not be right. Just because you have an opinion doesn't mean you're right.

But you owe it to your fellow citizens to respectfully give your opinion. If you do that, if you take that small act of courage, you'll be part of the. of something that history will look back on as ushering in an incredible new era of American prosperity, not just materially, but psychologically. That's what's available to us right now. It feels like the days are dark. They're not. They're not.

And we have a role to play. The single most hopeful thing ever said on this podcast. And since you put it in the context of a promise, I'll leave our listeners with Robert's timeless observation. A promise made is a debt unpaid. and I'm in yours, Todd. Thank you for being so generous with your time. Populist.org is where you'll find the latest research,

confirming all that is optimistic and hopeful in these troubled times. Can't recommend enough, Dark Horse, End of Average, and in my own bias view, Chuck, tell me if you disagree. But collective illusions is a book, and if it's not at the top of your reading list, then your list is crap. It should be, and you can find all of those books at todrose. I just want to say that you said a word earlier that I wanted you to unpack more, but you do it so brilliantly in your book, and that is congruent. And what I thought you were going to say is what we

all can do is to live congruent lives. And you kind of said that by speaking up. It's like by espousing the things we actually believe, we will live a congruent life and change the collective illusion. In fact, his book is dedicated to the most congruent person you know. And who is My co-founder, Priser O'Hani, which I aspire to be as congruent as she is. I'm still too much of a people-pleaser. I still get pulled him. I don't know anybody better at just saying what they think and respectfully doing so than she does. Well, here's to Marilyn Diamond.

May we all have one in our lives. And Todd, I will see you at the next Stand Together event, unless you come back on here next week to pick up where we left off. Because people are going to demand it. Thank you again for your time. Thank you. If you dig the podcast. that we do won't you leave a quick five star review I really hate to ask much more of you but please subscribe oh please subscribe oh we need a five little lousy stars tell us what

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